sat on the steel where no great mollusc had been. He sat as if he were a specimen. He wondered what searing thing had not been overcome. He waited for whatever would happen, whoever would find him.
It was Baron and Collingswood who came, at last, into the room. They were not missing any colleague, Billy thought, carefully. They’d never had a third in their crew, though they stood often a little close together, a little close to a wall, as if they would be framed with another presence. They recalled enough, and they knew that something had happened, had finished.
Billy stood and waved with his handcuffed arms. The cops picked over the ruins of glass, spilt preservative, scattered specimen remains, scattered by no one.
“Billy,” Baron said.
“It’s okay now, I think,” Billy said. They stared at each other a while. “Where’s Simon?”
“He went,” Collingswood said.
Baron and Collingswood muttered together. “Fuck this,” Collingswood said. She undid Billy’s locks.
“What’s the crime?” Baron said to Billy. “You nearly came to work for me. What animal?” he said. “There’s never been one here.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “Piss off,” he said, not unfriendly.
Billy smiled slowly. “I wouldn’t have been—,” he started to say. Collingswood interrupted.
“Please,” she said. “Please just sod off. You were offered a job a while back and you said no.”
“Whatever the circumstances,” Baron said.
“We may be a man down,” Collingswood said, “but we were always a man down.” She sniffed. Looked at him thoughtfully. “Burns don’t heal pretty,” she said. “Always a little melty-looking scar. You can’t fuss about that sort of shit, Billy.”
Billy held out his hand. Baron raised an eyebrow and shook it. Billy turned and looked at Collingswood, standing at the edge of the room. She waved at him.
“Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy,” she said. She smiled and winked at him. “You and me, eh? What didn’t we do?” She blew him a quick kiss. “See you around,” she said. “Till next apocalypse, eh. I know your bloody type, Billy. Be seeing you.” She nodded farewell. He did not disobey.
BILLY WALKED THE CORRIDORS, ROUTES HE KNEW INTIMATELY, THAT he had not walked for weeks. He mooched. He left the Darwin Centre and reentered a night still frenetic with fights, thefts and heretic prophecies, but increasingly, epically sheepish, uncertain of its own anxieties, unsure as to why it felt like a final night, when clearly it was not and never had been.
In the tank room, Baron was scribbling in his notebook.
“Right,” he said. “Honest to bloody blimey I’ve got no idea how we’re going to write this up,” he said. “Shall we, Collingswood?” He spoke briskly and did not meet her eye.
She paused before she answered him.
“I’m putting in for a transfer,” she said. She met his shocked eyes. “Time there was another FSRC cell, ‘boss. Boss.’” She air-quoted. “I’m going for promotion.” Collingswood smiled.
PART SEVEN
HERO = BOTTLE
Chapter Eighty-Two
IN A QUIET PLACE, BY THE RAILWAY LINES IN A CUT IN THE CITY, discarded statues edged the stays. In a long-term moment of urban sentimentality, they were a line of retirement for no-longer revered nor desired mementos. In them Wati slept. Only his friends knew this.
He had crept over from Marge’s crucifix after the end of the uncertain catastrophe that had not happened. He slept like one defeated. London was saved from whatever danger it was he had helped save it from, had there been such a thing, but his union had lost its fight, and the new contracts were punitive, feudal. Billy was glad for him that Wati could sleep through the worst of this, though he would excoriate himself for it when he woke, and would start the task of rebuilding the movement again.
“Are you sad?” Saira said. She sat opposite him. They were together in his flat. After all that night, after all the everything, he had found her. He had needed to be with someone who had seen whatever it was he had seen.
He had called Collingswood first. “Fuck off, Harrow,” she had said, friendly enough. He had heard a squeal of static like the enthusiastic voice of a pig, and she had broken the connection. When he had tried to redial, his phone had become a toaster.
“Alright, alright,” he had said. He had bought a new telephone and not called her again, but had tracked down Saira instead. It had not been hard. She retained the expertise she had learned, but she was not a Londonmancer anymore. Mostly she used her hungover knack to