cried out at the mongrel urban things. One took hold with autumn-gutter fingers of the closest attacker and bit exactly as a rooftop bites. He screamed, but it sucked him, so he kicked as he was emptied. His colleague ran. Somewhere.
Both the shot Londonmancers were dead. Saira clenched her teeth. The predator city bits came toward her. “Quick,” Billy shouted, but she clicked her fingers as if at dogs.
“It’s alright,” she said. “They’re London’s antibodies. They know me.”
The immune system trilled and clattered. Another young Londonmancer joined Saira, and she did not look up. When Dane and Billy approached, the defence-things reared in complex ways, displayed cityness in weapons. Saira clucked and they calmed.
Inside the sports shop was a rubble of smashed fittings and bodies. Not all the Londonmancers left were quite dead. Most were, with bullet wounds in their heads and chests. Saira went from survivor to survivor.
“Ben,” she said. “What happened?”
“Men,” he said. His teeth chattered. He stared at his blood-sodden thigh.
The dark-suited men had entered. They had shot anyone who opposed them, with ferocious, astonishing guns. Of those left alive they had demanded, repeatedly, “Where’s the kraken?” They had heard the police come, but the police, following no-entry protocol, had sealed the attackers and attacked in together.
“We have to hurry,” Billy said to Dane. He waited, bided, as best he could, but he had to tell Saira to hurry too. She stared at him expressionless.
The attackers knew the secret Fitch and Saira and their treacherous comrades kept. But the rest of the Londonmancers they had come to butcher did not, had been the out-of-the-loop, the hard core of excluded, an unwitting camouflage left in place to pretend all was as it should be. Some were aware that they were being kept in a cloud of unknowing, but they had no knowledge of what that secret knowledge was. They did not understand the gunfarmers’ question. Which surely must be provoking to a killer. Some frantic seers had managed to provoke the antibodies into appearance, a little late.
“We were trying to keep them safe,” Saira said. “That’s why we didn’t tell them anything.” With a clatter of wood-bits and kicked-away plaster, Fitch arrived at the threshold. He looked in and simply wailed. He gripped the entrance.
“We have to go,” Billy said. “Saira, I’m sorry. The cops’ll come in any minute. And the bastards who did this know we’ve got the kraken.”
Dane put Billy’s hand to a dead woman’s wound. In the Londonmancer’s cooling flesh was a warmth. “Incubation,” Dane said. “Gunfarmers.” In the dead the bullets were eggs. Guns would grow and hatch, and perhaps one or two little pistols might muster the strength to emerge, call for their parents.
“We can’t take them,” Billy whispered.
“We can’t take them,” Saira said, dead-voiced, seeing Dane’s action.
The last of the Londonmancers and the London antibodies went with their leader, if that’s what Fitch still was, down those attention-drawing urban kinkways back to their lorry. “We’re the Londonmancers,” Fitch kept saying, and moaning. “Who would do this?” You broke neutrality first, Billy did not say.
“It’s new rules,” Dane said. “Everything’s up for grabs. This is just nuts. They didn’t care they’d be seen.” Like they wanted it. That’s how terror works. They stared at Paul.
“Not this one,” he said. Jerked his head at his own back. “Nazis and fists and Boba Fetts, but not gunfarmers.”
Blood puddled. Those Londonmancers who had survived stared at the kraken sloshing in its tank. “But why is it …?” they said. “What’s it doing here? What’s going on?” Fitch did not answer. Saira looked away. Paul watched them all. Billy felt as if the kraken were staring at him with its missing eyes.
Chapter Sixty-Six
“MARGE AIN’T HOME. AND SHE AIN’T PICKING UP HER MESSAGES. And I don’t know what she was doing there at the double-team. So what do you want us to do?” Collingswood reeled from a wave of the balefulness she had once called Panda. The nickname did not hold in her head, these worse days. “Was all a bit of a fucking balls-up, eh, boss? What now?”
Containment was all they could hope for on a night like this, with so many little wars under way. They could only intervene where possible, stand in the way of some carnages, patch up whatever aftermaths. The madness of, what—some kraken’s pain, perhaps?—seemed to have infected everything. The city was hacking itself.
So Collingswood asked the question not for elucidation—stepping into the ruins of the housing of the London Stone, the