“This doll … used it so much it’s like a chair shaped to my bum.”
“Wati, what happened?”
There was silence. “I thought I was dead. I thought your friend Marge was … It was Goss and Subby.” Billy waited. “I can feel her. Still. Now. I can feel her because she’s got the dust of my old body all over her hands. I can sniff that.”
“She was in Hoxton.”
“… She must have … she got away from Goss and Subby.” Even exhausted, Wati’s voice was awed.
“Can you get to her?”
“That body’s gone.”
“She wears one.” Billy grabbed the front of his shirt where a pendant would be. “Can you use the dust to find her? Can you try?”
“Where’s Dane?”
The fighting continued, the noise of arcane murder. “They killed him, Wati,” Billy said.
At last, Wati said, “What’s the message?”
Saira whispered things into London’s ears, cajoled and begged it, even aghast as it must be that night, to pass a message to her onetime teacher in the lorry. “All we’ve got is speed,” Billy said to her, and told her where to send them. She moulded the wall and made a patch of it an urban hedge, through which she pushed, out into the street.
Billy took some seconds of solitude, as alone as he could be in the dregs of that fighting and that noise. He stared back at the building where his friend had died. Billy wished he knew how to make whatever tentacle-imitating sign wished a killed soldier of the krakens peace. Billy shut his eyes tight and swallowed and said Dane’s name and kept his eyes closed. That was the ceremony he invented.
Chapter Seventy-Five
HOW COULD YOU KEEP SOMETHING THE SIZE OF A LORRY HIDDEN from the skies? Fitch’s indecision protected him awhile: unable either to commit to his fighting sisters and brothers or to desert them, he had stayed less than a mile away and ordered the vehicle into a tunnel, and there in the orange striplight under the pavement had put on the hazard lights as if stalled. And waited, while refugees from that night surged past in their cars. When Saira sent her message, it, London, did not have far to go to pass it on.
While over their head scudded the inked scout selves of Grisamentum, she and Billy ran toward the vehicle’s hide, past birdlime streaks and posters for albums and exhibitions. Come meet us, she had said. We need you. Shamed, Fitch had the engine gun and the lorry lurch out of its burrow into the surveilled streets.
The paper helixed plughole out of the dark sky and mobbed the lorry. It pushed through them. They were sentient, but the papers had the feeding-frenzy throng of multitude predators, mothlike butting themselves against the windscreen. When it met Saira, Billy and the few Londonmancers and squidly loping krakenbit who had been able to run, the vehicle was thronged with excited paper.
Dear God, Billy thought, at the thought of what the appalled locals must think they saw from behind their curtains. Close to him were two Londonmancers and two krakenbit still morphing into teuthic midway forms. They whipped their limbs and sprayed the last of their bleach. Fitch threw open the back and yelled at them to enter. With the unity of a school of fish, the papers gusted back toward the factory.
“They’re going to get Byrne and the rest of himself,” Billy said. “They’re going to come for us now they know where we are. We have to go.”
“But where?” Fitch said.
“Drive,” said Billy. “We’re meeting someone.”
“SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID TO HER COMMANDEERED assistant.
“About what?” he said. They were the same rank. He did not call her ma’am. But he went where she told him to and did as she said.
“What now? Got any burglaries?” She laughed. They drove through a little rain, through sliding, dark and lit-up streets where people still lounged by twenty-four-hour shops while others ran from unholy gang fights.
“Don’t know,” he said.
“Let’s just get back to the bloody office.”
Marge felt safe in the car. She watched Paul. His face was anguished but resigned. He did not speak. His tattoo spoke. Marge could hear its smothered rage, its terror, in wordless growling from under his shirt.
“It’ll be alright,” she said to him foolishly.
She heard another tiny mumbling. She looked about. The words came from her neck.
Marge blinked. She looked at Collingswood, who continued to tease