not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”
Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.
“DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.
If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.
“What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.
No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.
“There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us … and it’s not just us who’ll die.”
They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.
“What did we say in front of him?” someone said.
“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”
“Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”
“Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could only keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”
Chapter Seventy
PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?
She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.
She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”
They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”
“Where are we going?”
“There’s places it’s hard to find us.”
He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.
Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.
“Where are we?”
“Hoxton.”
“I don’t even know what to ask you …” she said. “I don’t know what to—”
“Me too.”
“Who are you? What’s your story?”
“I got away.”
Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.
“Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”
“I know a friend of yours, I think …”
“Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon …”
“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.
“Billy?”
“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”
“Did he send you?”
“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.
“Tell me.”
“Let’s both.”
Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that