made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.
“Why did you find me?”
“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”
“You want me to be a go-between?”
“Yeah. I got access to … It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve got access to some … powers that they want. But I need protection. From them. And other stuff too. I can make them a deal. But they might think they’ve got reason not to trust me. I’ve not been myself. I’m being chased.”
“You’re the one that knows where they are, I don’t have any idea, I told you, they haven’t contacted me, even though they’ve got my number …”
“Billy was trying to protect you. Don’t think too hard of him. But you can still get a message to him. Like I say he’ll trust you.” He met her eye, looked around.
“How? Got a number?”
“Hardly. I mean through the city. The Londonmancers’ll get that.”
“… I got a message through the city myself, once.” He looked closely at her when she said that. “From Billy.”
“Is it?” he said quietly. “Did you? Noise? Light? Brick Braille?”
“Light.” He smiled quickly and rather beautifully at that.
“Light? Did he? Yeah. Perfect, then, light.” He stepped out of the car and Marge followed. “Already a little connection then, between you. Makes this easier.” He peered toward the bins, toward the shadows, then pointed—“Look”—at a fluttering bulb in the concrete roof, one among several, but one about to fail. “Give you an idea the way it comes on and off?”
“Oh,” Marge said. She almost whispered. “That’s how this all started.”
He smiled tightly again. “Don’t need to know where Billy is. By now, I got no idea. But the Londonmancers always listen to it. The city’ll pass a message to them. Yeah, I know Morse Code. I learned all kinds of things these past few years. All kinds of useful things. Do you trust me?” He stood in full view, put his arms a tiny bit out, to show her he held nothing. “I can do him a deal. We can help each other. And he wants to see you. You can ask him to come to you.”
• • •
BILLY, SHE WROTE, IT’S MARGE MEET ME.
“He’ll think it’s a trap,” she said. Paul shook his head.
“Maybe. He might have a pootle around to check if it’s you.” A momentarily humorous saint. “Maybe he’ll just come. He’s worried about you.” Is he? she thought. “Tell him something secret if you want. So he knows it’s you.” She wrote Leon’s middle name. She wrote the address of the carpark where they were. Paul translated it into the longs and shorts of Morse and transcribed dots and dashes under the letters. She was the one getting Billy a message, he told her. It was her message, he told her, to her friend, her way.
If Paul was out to kill her, she thought, this was the longest way around to do it. She stood on her bonnet as her companion crooned, done have to be rich la la to be my girl. She untwisted the fluorescent bulb enough to break the connection.
Paul said, “Dash dot dot dot,” and so on. Screwing and unscrewing the bulb, she shed its light and darkness in a not-very-expert, she hoped legible, coded message, for the city to pass on, tap-tapping London, entrusting the metropolis with her information like a vast concrete-and-brick telegraph machine.
You never know, she thought. Worked before.
DANE WOULD NOT LET LONDONMANCERS REENTER THE RUINED rooms of the kraken church to which he returned. They were not sure of their relationship to him nor he of his to them anymore—were they allies, still? Wati, traumatised and almost unconscious, could not breach the still-extant barriers. Only Billy came with Dane. When they descended, there were others there, though. The last scattered