meta.
“Cheers, Perky,” she said. She unstoppered the container and flicked it so the invisible contents sprayed out of the protected circle. The pig went racing around, licking and champing and slobbering in dimensions where, happily, Collingswood did not have to clean up.
Now she knew it was only Perky the cautions were overkill, and she stepped out of the angles of electrostatic protection and switched them off. “Have fun,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mess shit up too much, and don’t nick anything when you go.”
kay kollywood byby thans for num.
Collingswood ran her hands through her hair, put on a minimum of makeup, her roughed-up uniform, and went through the deeply threatening city. “Broomstick’s at the garage,” she said to herself more than once. The joke was so old, so flat as to be meaningless. Saying it as if everything was all normal was a very slight comfort.
“You can’t smoke in here,” the taxi driver told her, and she stared at him, but couldn’t even muster enough to wither him. She put the cigarette out. She did not light up again until she was in the FSRC wings of the Neasden Police Station.
You would have had to be a more adept adept than Collingswood to have even approximated some sight of what was going on, loomingly, totally, above everything. Various long-snoozing London gods had been woken up by the clamour, were stretching and trying to assert pomp and authority. They had not yet realised that no Londoners gave two shits about them anymore. The thunder that night was dramatic, but it was just the grump of past-it deities, a heavenly “What the bloody hell’s all this noise?”
The real business was going on in the streets, on another scale. Few of the guards, earthly or unearthly, in any of London’s museums, could have said why they suddenly felt so extremely afraid. It was because their memory palaces were unprotected. Their angels walked. The guardians of all the living museums came together, bar one still rogue on its own mission. The angels hunted the incoming end, that closed-down future. If they tracked it down they intended to mash it up.
VARDY WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICES. COLLINGSWOOD THOUGHT HE looked unruffled by the night, no blearier or more rushed than he ever did. She hung from the doorframe. She was slightly taken aback by the, if anything, even more unwelcome than usual look that he gave her.
“Fucking hell, rudeboy,” she said. “What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”
“I’m not sure what this is,” he said, scrolling through some website. “But it’s not apocalypse yet. Of that I’m fairly certain.”
“Just a manner of speaking.”
“Oh, I think it’s more than that. I think the word to keep in mind here is ‘yet.’ What brings you here?”
“What do you fucking think? The not-yet apocalypse, squire. You know what’s going on? The memory guards are out looking to smack someone up. Those fuckers ain’t supposed to leave the museums. I want to see if I can work out what’s going on. Whatever just changed. What do you reckon?”
“Why not?”
“Fuck, you know, sometimes, seriously, sometimes you just wish you lived in a city where it wasn’t all this craziness and this and that. I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end. In London. It does, though. Every, single, time. And that, man, what are you going to say.” Collingswood shook her head. “Fucking mad weak shit. Arks and dinosaurs and virgins, fuck knows. Give me a robbery, man. Except they do, innit?”
“‘Mad weak shit?’” Vardy swung back his chair and looked at her with some queasy combine of dislike, admiration and curiosity. “Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”
Collingswood cocked her head. Are you talking to me like that, bro? She couldn’t read his head-texts, of course, not those of a specialist like Vardy.
“Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See, that’s why you’ll never bloody be good enough at this job, Collingswood.” He waited as if he’d said too much, but she waved her hand, Oh do please carry the fuck on. “Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking