he was far too far away.
“No!” Billy wheezed, bleeding.
The shadows shed by fire danced over labels handwritten by Charles Darwin. Billy sprawled flat like a mudfish. With a bark of religious joy, Vardy threw the time-flaming missile.
• • •
IT FLEW AND TURNED AS IT FLEW. BILLY’S ARMS WERE TRAPPED. BUT there were other arms aplenty in that room.
The undead specimen Architeuthis shot out its long hunting limbs all the way across the room, from far away. A last predation. It caught the bottle. Took it from the air.
Vardy stared. Vardy screamed in rage.
The time-fire was touching the Architeuthis’s skin, and was burning. The zombie squid’s second hunting arm whipped Formalin-heavy up, around Vardy’s waist with a thwack. It coiled him in. It whipped the bottle toward its mouth. Vardy howled as its shorter arms spread to receive him.
Vardy screamed. The time-fire was roaring, and spreading. The squid was shrinking. Vardy’s arms and legs were shortening.
The squid looked at Billy. He could never put into precise words what it was in that gaze, those sudden eyes, what the bottled specimen communicated to him, but it was a fellowship. Not servility. It did not obey. But it did what it did deliberately, offered it up and looked at him in good-bye.
The time-fire shrank it further, cleared the deadness from its skin, made it smooth. A selfless selfishness. Without evolution, what would it and its siblings be? The deep gods were not this thing’s siblings: it let itself be taken for the sake not of kraken but of the exemplae, all these specimens around them, of all shapes, these bottled science gods.
The tank was roaring with fire. The flesh was burning younger. There was a last flurry of combat. Silhouetted in the glow, Billy saw a baby screaming adult fury at the little arm-length squid that encoiled it. Both were on fire. Then both, still wrestling, were hot embryos, that intertwined and stilled in grotesque protoplasmic détente, and were burning gone.
The sides of the tank fell in, into smouldering crystals of ore and chemical and then atoms before they could even shatter.
Chapter Eighty-One
THE LAST OF THE BURNING EBBED AWAY. THE LIGHT OF FIRE WAS gone. Only the glow of fluorescent bulbs.
Something a little rucked
singed and melted
and
There was an inrush growth rejig. An imperfect healing but healing. A huge, epochal sealing. London reskinned. Fire scorched and then went out.
And there was Billy in the new skin, there in time. There was a Billy. Billy breathing out from something, and he breathed in, shook with release. He was in a room.
DARWIN’S SPECIMENS WERE SAFE. BILLY TOUCHED THEM, ONE BY one, stretching out his tethered hands behind him. He ran his fingers along the steel surface where no Architeuthis had ever been. The tiny mnemophylax watched from under its bell jar. Its bone head tracked his movements.
Nothing had gone. Billy thought that very exactly.
Billy knew with a strange precision that in all his recent adventures, the specificities of which were slightly vague, no giant cryptid animal had ever been here in this room. The angel of memory rolled on its tiny base and shook its skull head. Billy laughed and was not sure why. There was a pyromancer who was alive and waiting for his daughter, because there was no one nor had there ever been who could have blackmailed him with her. Time felt a little raw. The threat that Billy had defeated in this room, and it had been baleful, had neither involved anyone, nor existed. He laughed.
The sky was different. Billy could feel it beyond the roof. Different from how it had not been. The strain was gone. The end of the world, a true finish, was only one very unlikely possibility among many.
There were details missing. Billy was canny enough by now, after everything, to know what that might mean. There was a burn scar in history. There was still a smell of burning. Billy was definitely descended from simians and ultimately from fish in the sea.
He met the gaze of the mnemophylax across the room, eye socket to eye. Though it had no face to crease he would have said it smiled back. It wriggled and wrote with its tiny fingers on the inside of its glass—he could not tell what. It opened and closed its mouth. It was memory. It shook its head. It put its hair’s-breadth fingerbone to its nonexistent lips. Its tiny bones fell, its skull settled into nothing, it became a test tube and some specimen rubbish.
Billy