moving in the dregs of its preserver, slathering itself with its prehensile undead arms, pining for the ullage.
“It ain’t finished,” Collingswood said, in a dead voice.
“Look,” Billy said to the Architeuthis. It wriggled its wrist-thick arms. “You sorted it. Made us safe.”
A squelch answered him. Collingswood was breathing deep and looking at him with some kind of ragged expression. Saira was frowning. Billy heard the wet sound again.
It was the fattest pile of fish-flesh he had noticed. He saw its glowering eyes. Something switched one side to the other. It was a ceratioid enormity, a huge anglerfish beached and collapsing under its own weight. It struggled to open the snaggled split of its mouth. It watched him come and swung again the organic spit before it—its lure, a still-glowing snare on a limb-long spur from its forehead. It wagged it side to side. Was it trying to fool him into its mouth, even now as it drowned in air?
No. The motion of its bait-flesh had none of the fitful jerk of little swimming life that it would mimic to hunt. It tick-tocked the lure in what was not a fish motion at all, but a human one. Speaking his language. The motion of its lure was the wag of a correcting finger. He had said to the Architeuthis specimen, You made us safe, and the sea said no, no, no, no, no.
“What the hell?” Billy whispered.
“What does it mean?” Saira said. “What’s happening?”
“It is not finished,” Collingswood said. “Oh shitting fuck.” She was bleeding. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. She spat the cigarette and blood away. “It just got a bloodyfuck sight closer.”
Billy closed his eyes. He was trembling, a preemptive allergy to whatever was to happen.
“It’s still …” he said. To his shock, he felt his hands yanked behind him. Baron had cuffed him. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s all about to burn.”
“Shut your cakehole, you,” Baron said. He indicated one of his men to cuff Saira too.
“Oh, something’s very fucking up,” Collingswood said. “Boss, don’t be a prick.” Sensitives all across the heresiopolis must be praying to be wrong, for something other than the burnt nothing they felt fast coming.
“Let me go,” Billy said.
“Baron, wait,” Collingswood said.
“It never made any sense,” Saira said to Billy. They stared at each other. “No matter how powerful kraken ink is, there was no way it could have … let him end everything. In fire. Even if he wanted to, which why …?”
“Boss,” said Collingswood. “Give them a second.”
“What makes everything stop?” Saira said. “Fire, the squid, the …”
Billy stared, and thought, and remembered. Things he had heard and seen, moments, from weeks and weeks before.
“You end to start again,” he said. “From the beginning. So you burn backward. This isn’t an end … This is a rebooting.”
“Get out,” Baron said. “Shift, Harrow.”
“How?” said Saira to Billy.
“Burn out whatever set us in the wrong direction. If you want to run a different program. Oh my God, this was never about the poor squid … it was a bystander. We started this. You did. Fitch kept saying it got closer, the harder you lot tried to protect it. You brought it to attention.” There was a straining sound. Everyone looked up. That was the sky stretching, ready to break into flames.
“How far to the Darwin Centre?” Billy said. “How far to the museum?”
“Four, five miles,” Collingswood said.
“Get out,” Baron, uselessly, said.
“It’s too far … Baron, can you send a message to … You need to get someone …”
“Shut up or I will pepper-spray you,” Baron said. “I’m sick of this.”
“Boss, shut up,” Collingswood said. She shook her head. Pointed, and Baron blinked in outrage, suddenly unable to speak. “What you saying, Harrow?”
Something new had walked when the Londonmancers had learnt of Grisamentum’s plan, when Al Adler had indulged the traditions and respect his boss had taught him and gone for a supposedly useless reading. The new thing had grown stronger into itself when the kraken was taken and the alternatives narrowed. But it was after that that the memory angels had gone for it, that its sentience, its meta-selfhood, had become great enough.
“Why’s the angel of memory not here?” Billy said. “It’s supposed to be my guardian angel, right? It wants to protect me, right, and to beat this bloody prophecy, right? So why isn’t it here? What’s it got to do that’s more important?”
Billy knew exactly where he had been when that last phase had begun, and