in.” The belt felt hard across my chest, stiff, and a little bit too slippery.
“Why?”
I pointed at a sign. It said, “Passengers Must Wear Seat Belts At All Times”.
“Is this . . .”
“Do it.”
She looked at us, saw through the dirt and grime and knew better than to argue. She strapped herself in. Kemsley was something from the butcher’s yard that had been left out in the rain and the sun for too many weeks, and by this process acquired a twisted mimicry of life. The driver said, “So where can I take you?”
His voice was a muffled crackle over the intercom, the red LED on the door a little bit too bright, the windows between us and him a little too dark. All I could see was smog in the bright headlights of the cab. I leant forward and said, “The City. Corporation of London. The Thames.”
“That’s three places.”
“Are we caring if the Alderman dies?” asked Oda carefully.
I looked at her, saw a face hacked by stone out of an iceberg, looked at Kemsley. It occurred to us, for a moment, that we didn’t care. Not our problem. I said, “Damn. Damn damn damn. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women, Euston Road.”
“Righto.”
I could see the red lights of the tariff metre in the front of the cab. They were clocking up numbers and letters as we drove, but not by any mathematics I knew.
“You want to go to an abandoned hospital?” asked Oda. She was getting her breath back, wiping dirt from her eyes with hands dirtier than her face: instinct, not practicality.
We turned sharply to her. “If the Order raids it, when this is done, if they attack the hospital, if they dare go after the healers, we swear, we swear we will bring you and them down.”
She just smiled. “Right,” she said. “More magic.”
“Sure, because black cabs just happen to drive into magical war zones on a regular basis,” I snapped.
“I am serene, am I not?”
“Getting used to it?”
Her face darkened, but she said nothing. The head of our driver was just a black outline peeking out from behind the slab of his headrest, lit up only by the reflected glow of his headlights and the dull red illumination from the tariff metre. I looked across at Oda and said, “You carry much cash?”
“No. Why?”
“Cab rides are always expensive.”
Especially this one.
“You’re worried about the fare?”
“I thought you’d be pleased with me. A good, noble, avoiding-whichever-sin-it-is sentiment.”
“He sees your heart, not your smile,” she intoned.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that twenty quid slipped to a cabby can’t redeem your soul.”
“That’s a ‘no’ on the fare, then?”
“Yes, that’s a no.”
“Fine.” I turned away, and our eyes passed over Kemsley. He was leaning forward against his seat belt and wheezing. I could see the veins pumping through the remnants of the skin on his neck, jerking in and out like some obscene production line in a food factory, filling with thick blue blood and then deflating to a bruised tube among the ruined mess of his skin. We looked away. Outside, the smog seemed to be lifting, streetlights flashing between the sickly mist, reflected orange stains moving from back to front across the ceiling of the cab, too fast and too erratic to pick out any shapes or shadows. I thought about Anissina. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket for Nair’s phone, thumbed through the address file, found her right near the top, dialled.
“Who are you—” began Oda.
“Anissina.”
“Why?”
“She might still be lost.”
“We can’t do anything for her, even if it should be done,” replied Oda primly. “She falls or she fights. That’s how it is.”
A phone rang on the other end of the line, and kept on ringing. There was no reply. It went to answerphone. We hung up. We knew better than to leave our voice floating as electricity in the wire. Outside the window, the smog was almost entirely gone, just a few loose traceries being washed away by falling rain, that slipped sideways like tiny transparent snakes across the taxi’s window. I could see flashes of houses, but that’s all they were - shadows that came and went in some impossible, too-far-off distance, perspective playing tricks, architecture playing tricks as terraced house melted into flashy apartment melted into rickety shed melted into bungalow. It gave us a headache to look at it, would have set an epileptic screaming. Oda had noticed too, a warning was in her voice: “Sorcerer?”