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The first dream was not too disturbing, because it had Mr. Punch in, and I expected that.
I was in that fight I wasn’t looking forward to, chasing Lesley somewhere, and it was very confused, and I stepped in a puddle of blood, and fell through, just like if Alice was going to get to Wonderland by falling through a puddle of blood, which would probably happen if there was some parallel universe where Lewis Carroll does math tutorials at Oxford wearing all black, some facial hardware, and a lot of eyeliner.
I didn’t fall very long, or very far, and I was still running when it stopped, and I was back in the deep-stone London Molly had sent me to, except that now I was chasing Lesley instead of Punch, and the edges of everything were too clear and sharp—I was afraid with every step that I would give myself a massive paper cut just looking at things.
Lesley beat me to the bridge by about twenty meters. The place was entirely deserted except for Punch, who was still stuck where I’d impaled him. He was laughing, in great gloating screams that broke off and resumed every time she slammed her fist into his face.
I skidded to a stop and tried to gasp out Lesley’s name.
She glared at me briefly, her face a shattered mirror of the one she’d been beating in, landed one more bone-crushing hit, and then left off to tug urgently at the spear that pinned Punch down.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m going to stab him again,” she said. She was crying, but it wasn’t slowing her down, as if anything could. “Properly this time,” and she glared at me again before hauling mightily at the haft.
“Wait,” I said, “I don’t think that’s such a good i—”
The spear came free abruptly, with Punch still on it like a puppet kebab, and Lesley staggered backward, and they all went over the side of the bridge into the Thames.
I ran forward and dived in after them, because that, as they say, is how I roll. The Thames was cold, and clear, and tasted like salt and sweet together, like blood if blood were sweet seawater, or seawater if it were cold blood.
I swam blindly until I ran into a human figure in the current and clutched it round the waist. I’d know Lesley’s sturdy dynamism anywhere. She struggled against me, and then with me, and then we both fetched up against something iron-hard and fought upright. I got my head above the surface and saw what had broken our momentum—it was the tail-end of a Spitfire that had gone down nose-first into the Thames.
I half-thrashed, half-fell my way onto the bank, dragging Lesley with me. She collapsed to her hands and knees in the shallows, coughing wetly, and I fell down next to her on one elbow.
“Just what,” I panted, blowing drops of the Thames off my lips, “was supposed to be the point of that?”
It took her a bit more choking to get her voice back—when she did, she said hoarsely, “I told you, you have to do it properly.”
Then she rolled onto her back next to me. Her wet hair fell away and I saw that her face had been restored. And that was when I knew this was a dream.
She smiled at me. “Peter,” she said, “you really have no fucking sense of self-preservation,” and I woke up.
*
Like I said, this wasn’t really that disturbing a dream. Obvious wish-fulfillment, etc., though I wasn’t sure where the Spitfire fit into things—or more precisely, didn’t fit, unless you wanted to take the phrase “bombed back to the Stone Age” literally, and let’s not.
I didn’t feel any compulsion to discuss the dream at breakfast the next morning, and in fact I would have forgotten it altogether, if I hadn’t got blindsided the very next night by something infinitely worse.
I was chasing Lesley again, this time through the Folly, which had a lot more in the way of corridors and staircases than usual, though it didn’t seem odd to me at the moment that the House of Isaac should have suddenly turned into Hogwarts Castle. I had just caught sight of her, running steadily and half-reflected in the polished parquet, when an impello palma struck me so hard that for a second I blacked out.
When I came to I was lying under the debris of the main staircase. There were cracks under the house’s foundation that were pulling the room apart in motion so slow it was invisible to my eye, and the only sound was the faint creak of the floor in some responsive rhythm. Then I heard the staccato footsteps, passing me through the shadows at a slow inexorable pace.
Then Nightingale’s voice, quiet and emotionless in the dusty silence.
“I haven’t killed him,” he said evenly. “I’ve just knocked him out. I think we’d both rather he didn’t see this, don’t you?”
I couldn’t see where Lesley was, but I got the sense she was standing exposed somewhere out of my line of sight. “By all means,” she said, “let’s spare him. The Folly still needs its proper apprentice. Is this your idea of a caution, Nightingale?”
“You know the caution better than I do,” Nightingale answered. His voice was utterly calm and filled me with terror. “And it’s a bit too late for that.”
“You never approved of me, did you?” she said shakily. Nightingale’s footsteps kept on coming. “I’m more of an insult to the tradition than even Peter is.”
I begged in my mind for that to make him angry, but, “It’s waste I don’t approve of,” Nightingale said calmly.
“And we know where waste goes, don’t we?” said Lesley.
Grunting, I dragged my way out from under the fallen beam that had sheltered me from most of the debris-slide and levered myself aching to my feet. I was covered in dust and spicules of wood, which was familiar, and even more so when Nightingale said, “I have to admit, it had been a long time since I felt the way I did hearing the sound of his voice when he told me what you’d done to him.”
It was as if no time at all had passed between that moment and this. As if no time ever could pass between them.
Nightingale had stopped a few meters away from where Lesley stood disheveled and weakly braced, easy striking distance for a fire-bullet.
And what good is a fucking sense of self-preservation if you can’t spend it to buy back the ones you love?
So I limped across the cracked floor and put myself between Lesley and Nightingale’s poised staff.
His face was blank and cold, pitiless. I locked eyes with him and we did wordless battle with our gazes.
“Peter,” Lesley said behind me, very gently. “Peter, don’t. I’d rather go out in a proper battle.”
I felt the touch of her hand, very light, a caress in the same place she’d tasered me. Then she stepped out from behind me into the line of fire.
“I’m ready,” she said. And then the Folly crumbled down around us.
*
I thrashed myself awake. My blankets slithered to the floor almost taking me tangled with them, and I hung half off my bed gasping for air and sweet reality.
My bed. My room. Sturdy uncracked walls. Rising sunlight. Fuck, fuck, fuck me.
I got up and took a very hot bath, shaved and dressed and went downstairs. But something inside me stayed cold and shivering, and didn’t warm up either with target practice or a heavy dose of coffee at breakfast.
“Are you quite all right, Peter?” Nightingale inquired over his cup. “You look—” he paused; pale was not going to be the right word— “a bit drained.”
I had a whole crop of new questions, ones I wasn’t sure I really wanted answered. Do you hate her? I thought. Would it matter if you did? Have you ever had to play the hangman? Would you do it now? Do you really think the time you put in with her was a waste? Would you hate me if I didn’t?
I said instead: “Is oneiromancy really a thing?”
He raised one eyebrow. Real-life Nightingale at least still had his sense of humor. After a moment’s silence, he drew breath and spoke in an incantatory voice that meant he was quoting something.
“To communicate with Mars,” he said, “converse with spirits,
To report the behavior of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into preconscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.”
“So, that’s a no,” I said. “What the hell was that?”
“T. S. Eliot,” said Nightingale. “Poet of the Blitz.”
I remembered the Spitfire nose-down in the old Thames. “Just how many near misses did the Folly have?” I asked. “Did you shelter in the basement?”
I could sidetrack myself, but not Nightingale. “Have you been having disturbing dreams?”
“They’re much less disturbing if they don’t tell the future,” I said.
“The only truth a dream can tell you is a truth you already know,” said Nightingale, which I’m sure he meant to be comforting. “The future—isn’t true.”
Yet, I thought.
*
We were all in the observation room looking at Lesley on the CCTV screen—she was sitting with her hands calm and quiet on the interview table, waiting.
“Give her to me,” I said, interrupting the argument over strategy going on behind me.
Seawoll and Nightingale both went quiet. I turned around.
“No offense, Peter,” Seawoll said, “but we actually want to get some actionable intelligence out of her. Sometime this century. Or yesterday, if it’s really kicking off.”
“She learned interviewing from you,” I said. “She’ll be braced for anything you come at her with.”
“And that doesn’t equally apply to you how?” Seawoll said dryly. For some reason he was wearing a 1940s uniform with bright-polished buttons, complete with the helmet; it seemed only polite to ignore this.
I shrugged. “I’ve had some new training since,” I said, which wasn’t the argument I’d have used with Nightingale, but fortunately Nightingale was already on my wavelength.
“What’s your idea, Peter?” he said.
“First,” I said, looking back at Lesley where she sat in perfect comfort, “let’s get rid of the table.”
It took a few minutes to set up one of the interview rooms according to the specs I’d picked up from Dominic and install Lesley in it. I waited a bit before going in, to let the unfamiliarity bite deep.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Nightingale said quietly at my shoulder.
I was already structuring the decision tree of her reactions. If she looked relieved, or even indifferent, to see me come in, I’d know she was pursuing her own agenda. If she was afraid—well, that wasn’t good news for AB nick, never mind me.
“Has to be done, sir,” I said.
“Quite,” he said, and pausing only to lay a brief hand on my shoulder, he went back to the observation room.
I opened the door of the interview room and went in.
Her first reaction was a tiny apprehensive flash, which was bad, followed by the faintest change of her posture to braced engagement, which was slightly less bad but still worrying. I sat down in the chair across from her, laid my empty hands on my knees, and looked her steadily in the face.
They’d put her in suspect’s togs and taken away everything else, including the necklace that had carried the glamor she’d used as a disguise. Her face was still ruined, but at this point that was a relief to me. What would happen if the Lesley I knew was buried forever behind a falseness I couldn’t get through?
She was waiting for me to do anything, even to start the recorder sitting on the folding tray to the side, but I didn’t move my hands from my knees or my eyes from her face. She had too much clever self-control to react right away, though. I sat there and let the silence go on.
Finally she lost patience, as I knew she would.
“What kind of fucking interview strategy is this supposed to be, Peter?” she said. “Just sit there and stare at me till I come across with it?”
“That assumes you have something to come across with,” I said. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
“I’m here because you arrested me,” she said flatly.
“Suspiciously easily,” I said.
“So then you tell me,” she said. “Why am I here?”
“You’re here to get them to remand you to the custody of the Folly,” I said. “Which isn’t going to happen, so somebody’s grand plan is getting buggered, I guess.”
“You’re still very good at being wrong,” she said.
I shrugged. “I have several theories. Fortunately all I have to do to narrow them down is sit here a few hours and see where the shitfall starts.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “Leave it to you to find the worst possible strategy and ram it in to the hilt.”
“Okay. But why do you care?”
She stared at me, and I said, “No, but really. Why do you care if I stay clear of the shit?”
She was very quiet, and then she said, “The fact that I would even have to explain it to you is the last fucking insult.”
“Oh,” I said, “like when you shut the door in my face and then opened a different one to him instead?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ve heard him argue before. I can imagine what he’d say. The demi-monde is essentially an amoral place,” I said, putting on the posh accent. “And there’s no going back now. Why would you stick with an outmoded institution that doesn’t even want you? They think you’re an accident, a wreck they have to make the best of. Is that anything to keep an oath to?”
She sucked away all expression till her eyes were cold and sullen, which was a revelation in itself.
“The Folly is what, now?” I went on, in the same vein. “Nothing but a dried-up fop and a feckless mongrel. You could cut your losses, but it wouldn’t be much loss, would it?”
“Stop it, Peter,” Lesley whispered.
“You must have felt so superior,” I said, reverting to my own voice. “Playing both ends against the middle like that. Almost from the start, wasn’t it? You got me very neatly out of the room so you could talk to Woodville-Gentle. Peter Grant, playing the stupid bugger for this and every film. You could probably have pulled the wool over even if I hadn’t trusted you implicitly. But it made it that much easier, didn’t it? So tell me, why do you care if I get caught in your crossfire?”
“Just stop it,” she hissed out. She was crying. I realized suddenly I was too. There was a sound in my head like what a headache would be if it were a siren.
The door opened suddenly, and Seawoll’s breadth filled the frame. The siren was louder in the corridor, and I recognized the devil’s tri-tone just before Seawoll spoke.
“This interview is suspended,” he said, “on account of the air raid.”
*
The next morning Nightingale fixed me with such a shrewd look I wished I’d skipped breakfast altogether.
“So are they heavy on the symbolism,” he said, “or more realistic?”
“Keeps switching on me.” I gritted my teeth. Last night’s had been more realistic, but that could change at a moment’s notice.
“Any recurring themes?” he asked.
Not unless you counted the Spitfire and the sense of impending doom. I looked away. After a long moment I said, “I was right there. I almost had her. And then Seawoll came out of nowhere and knocked me out.”
Nightingale’s voice softened. “And you’ve been reliving that moment in these dreams?”
“Not in so many images, no,” I said. But yeah.
“Peter.” His tone forced me to look back at him. “Have you been holding yourself responsible for all of this?”
I met his eyes and held them. “No,” I said. “People keep getting in between me and her.”
I hadn’t told Nightingale about his other night’s role as summary executioner, but he understood the challenge anyway. He met my look with the unflappable frankness I remembered from the dream, but I also saw the warmth and compassion in his eyes that had so terrified me with its absence. Was that compassion only for me? I hoped not.
He said gently: “I’ve seen things happen to people, Peter, that twist them from the inside. You can only do so much. Have you faced the possibility that you just can’t save her?”
“It’s not a possibility,” I said. “It’s a fact. The ball is totally in her court.”
“To save herself?” Nightingale lifted his coffee cup in sardonic comment. “Or you?”
*
I was on fire, a fever like a torched oilslick on water. My bones are burning, I thought, and then realized the pain wasn’t really coming from there, not that that was a relief, because the whole conflagration was spiraling from my gut outward, setting off brushfires in every muscle-fiber, blinding me as if by smoke. I was lying down on something awkwardly buoyant that refused to embrace me like the Thames would. I tried to swim, but the fever was swimming me instead.
“But I can’t fly a Spitfire,” I said, or tried to; it came out a mumble.
“Shh,” said Lesley.
Maybe I could fly a Spitfire. It was just the sort of thing that would suddenly happen.
It was dark in the place where I was awkwardly bobbing, except for a small magnesium-bright werelight fixed over me at waist-level. Lesley was bent over me, doing something I couldn’t see; her hair was damp-wet and stuck to her temples, dark threads in the high-contrast light. Her cratered face glistened with sweat.
I thought I’d better get perpendicular before the water got too high, or else I’d wind up talking to Sir Tyburn again, and never wake up. I wished Lesley would stop muttering and help me.
Instead she put out a hand and held me down. “Keep still!”
She went back to muttering. She was doing magic, I realized suddenly, and shut my eyes to listen for the formae .
“Is that scindere ?” I murmured, but only got another shush for my pains.
This was another hallucination, had to be. In reality I was somewhere else, somewhere even worse, and Lesley was only here because I wanted her to be.
Presently she stopped muttering and sat back on her heels, swiping the back of her wrist across her forehead. Then she rummaged in a dark bag on her other side and brought out—bandages, I thought. Then a rattling plastic box with three syringes standing up in it like soldiers.
“It should have been me,” I told her as she bent to work on me again. Her touches hurt, and I resisted the urge to push her hands away.
“It should have been me,” I said again, trying not to slur. “You should be Detective Inspector Lesley May. I should be the one out here in the demi-monde scrabbling around without a face.”
She looked up then—the werelight pricked out heavy glints in her shadowed eyes. “Don’t be so stupid,” she said harshly. “You couldn’t last an hour in my place.”
“Probably,” I agreed. I could feel my consciousness ebbing out, like a swell and fall of darkness on darkness. “But the right cop would be on the job at least.”
“Oh, Peter.” Her voice broke. “Shut up, can’t you?”
The darkness rolled in. When it rolled back out again, I expected to be somewhere different, but I wasn’t. I found myself with my eyes open contemplating a concrete ceiling fretted with pipes and a cold-looking steel air return. I mustered the energy to turn my head; there was a sodium light burning over a battered blue-painted metal door, a rickety pedestal sink with a tiny enamel-topped table next to it for a counter, a folding chair and card-table, the opening to an alcove I couldn’t see, and me. Lying in my underwear on a half-deflated camp bed with an army blanket scratching at my skin except for where I was bandaged.
It felt like I was in an oversharpened digital photograph. Industrial still life with wounded magician, coming to you on Instagram. I tried to shovel my brains together. Whatever this place was, it was bone-dead quiet, away from either the safety or danger of surrounding nightlife.
It was time to see what moving was going to be like. I tried an experimental shift, which caused me to slip on the air beneath me and woke about ten different shooting pains. My elbow went through the deflated air in the mattress’s edge, and nearly dumped me onto the concrete floor.
I had to know if Lesley had really been there, or if some even more dubious benefactor had stashed me here. Shutting my eyes, I flattened my hand on the cool floor and tried to summon a clear focus. A swift tangle of background impressions and then—there it was. A whisper of rip-stop nylon. A sensation of licking salt from the lips. A reflection of light off water, gyrating on the shadowed underside of a pier on a hot, idle summer day. All overlaid with a familiar click of steel on steel. My dry lips cracked into a grin—it was like coming home where the door was thrown open, like a breath of reality in a nightmare. I’d got a bead on Lesley’s signare , and the vestigia was as good as a fingerprint.
That, and the note she’d left me on the breakfast tray by the bed.
It was stuck to the face of a wind-up analog alarm, and it said: DO NOT RUN WATER OUTSIDE OF BUSINESS HOURS. Slowly, gut throbbing, I worked my way onto my knees and lifted the note to read the clock—5:43. The good news was that if this clock was right, it was unambiguously outside business hours. The bad news was that if this clock was right, it was unambiguously outside business hours. And I was dying of thirst. And needed to pee.
I wound up the clock—it only needed a few turns—and gathered my strength for an attempt at standing up.
As I’d expected, the alcove held a toilet and another sink that looked like it’d been harvested from the washroom of a 1970s DC7—no mirror. There was another note on the closed toilet lid.
I MEAN IT, it said.
I had to sit down to pee. When I managed, sweating, to lever myself to my feet again, I really wished I could flush—I’d passed blood with the urine.
With the support of the walls I got out to the “kitchen” sink and counter, hoping for coffee, but no such luck. Instead I found a stack of snack-size cups with foil seals—orange jelly—and a single plastic spoon. They were obviously for me, so I took the spoon and a cup and crept back to bed.
My strength lasted about long enough to eat half the jelly, and then I had to let the spoon fall and black out again.
Some interminable time later I found myself aware that Lesley was back. My eyes were still closed, but I could feel her warmth and scent overshadowing me. She was doing something to the bandage at my waist. Then she left off and pulled the scratchy blanket back up over my chest, tucking it in gently. I expected her to move away then, but she stayed close, as if scrutinizing my face; there was a tiny stir of her breath on my cheek, then another close up, and a light brushing touch.
Was that a kiss? That couldn’t be good. I was dreaming again, or—
“Is it Ragnarok then?” I murmured without opening my eyes.
She didn’t pull away. “Ragna-what? What are you on about?”
“You know, the end of the world. The apocalypse. Gotterdammerung. The honest-to-god-holy-shit-seventh-seal-rain-of-frogs extravaganza.”
“Peter,” she said, “do you really think the world has to end just because you’re out of commission for a couple of days?”
“Can’t think of any other reason why you’d kiss me. Am I the last man on earth?”
She gave me a nudge-not-a-slap on the forehead that disturbed the sinking air bed beneath me. “No.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound propitious,” I said. “I was hoping to get a shag in before it all goes dark.”
That’s when she got up. “It’s not the end of the world, you’re not getting a shag, and if you’re not hungry I’ll eat this takeaway myself.”
I opened my eyes. “I could murder a kebab.”
“Well you’ll have to settle for murdering a miso soup instead. You were stabbed, you know. You’ve got a perforated intestine and a bruised kidney. And your pancreas was nicked too.”
I couldn’t remember any of that. “I hope you got the thieving miscreant,” I said.
She paused in pulling the container out of its carrier bag to give me a long look. “I barely got you ,” she said. “I hope you were quiet while I was gone.”
“As a churchmouse,” I said.
“Here, you’ll need to sit up to eat.” She put the soup down on the tray by the clock and braced me so I could squirm up painfully.
“Can’t you feed it to me spoon by spoon?” I grunted. “I was hoping you’d keep this—” I edited out Florence Nightingale — “Clara Barton thing going a little longer.”
She gave me another look, but I thought she was amused. “Am I disappointing your expectations, Peter?”
“Not at all. If I were in hospital you’d be scoffing all my grapes.”
“If you were in hospital,” she said, “you’d be dead.”
That chill I felt wasn’t just the dead air in the mattress. “What’s going on out there.”
“Eat your soup.”
“Lesley.”
“Soup first,” she said evenly. “Then we can talk.”
I could tell she was hoping I’d tire out again. And her nefarious plan was going to work, too—I could feel it. I managed to down two thirds of the soup, and when she took the container away, I struggled against the urge to sink back down into the squishing air bed. But I was losing.
“It’s all part of my master strategy,” I told her as she tucked me in again. “Muahaha. If you have to take care of me you can’t be getting into trouble elsewhere.”
She gave a little sigh and her eyes on mine were worried. “You need to catch up with me a lot faster than you’re doing,” she said. “Or else start heading in the opposite direction.”
“I’m with the bomb squad,” I said, reminded of the old joke. “If you see me running try to keep up.”
“ Toward the bomb, right?” Her sarcasm was a caress, or maybe that was just her hand on my brow.
“What else do you expect of a copper?” I said, as my eyes fell shut and the darkness closed in.
*
“Can you really hold the lips of a wound closed with scindere ?” I asked Nightingale.
Nightingale, about to fork up a bite of kedgeree, dropped his hand. “Good lord, Peter. Another one?”
“Really fucking vivid, too,” I muttered, rubbing at my side. On waking I’d been shocked to find my skin unmarked and smooth.
Nightingale was watching me. “Whose wound was it?”
“Mine. So can you?”
“I should think it’d be jolly awkward,” he said thoughtfully. “Magic doesn’t lend itself well to medical application, for reasons we’ve discussed. I have found that you can use scindere to keep a compression bandage fastened securely, however.”
“Field medicine?” I said shrewdly. He looked away.
The truths I wanted from Nightingale were always the ones I had to get by hints and guesses. He was a lot like Lesley that way, actually. Like it would be so much skin off their nose to just give a straight fucking answer. I sighed.
“I do hope you’re not planning any experiments in that vein,” Nightingale said, shooting me a suspicious look over his kedgeree. At his feet Toby shifted on his haunches and licked his chops.
“No,” I said, discontentedly taking a sausage from my plate and offering it at his level, withdrawing my fingers quickly to avoid getting nipped by Toby’s teeth. “It’s back to the ounce of shag and the Bathrobe of Deduction.”
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” Nightingale quoted. I was pretty sure he had picked that up from back issues of the original Strand magazine and not, for example, Star Trek VI .
“It’s just that eliminating the impossible takes a long fucking time,” I said. “I’d be terrible on the bomb squad, really.”
Nightingale mercifully refrained from comment, but I was obscurely relieved to see him swallow a smile.
*
In the last dream, I was hauling it down the stairwell of a covered parking garage, jumping some steps and using the rail to keep momentum at every turn. The concrete punished the soles of my Docs and multiplied the echoes of my progress—too slow, too slow.
I shot out the bottom, sprinted along the shining length of dark cars—hearses, they all looked like—and out into the open night air.
London was burning: I smelled magic and smoke, and it was far, far too late, probably by hundreds of years, because the vestigia of the city was shouting in unison with all the chaos I was failing to stop. But I only felt it without seeing, because the ground-level car park I was running through was silent as a walled garden just before moonrise.
When I saw Lesley I desperately curbed my pace and skidded to a halt, panting.
She was facing me, but I couldn’t see her properly, not enough to know if it was really her. This was the part of the story where I went forward and got slammed from the side, or else went forward only to be shot down cold by a Lesley twisted out of all recognition. She was braced and ready: if I came any closer it would be easy for her to get off a good killing spell. Try as I might, I couldn’t see her face.
Eliminate the impossible? It all looked impossible.
I caught my breath and shut my eyes. With my eyes closed I could feel where I was—a perfectly ordinary car park on an ordinary London night. I wondered if there were any dead kings under it; they’d dug up old Richard III in Leicester from under one, and it was a good thing he wasn’t currently haunting anybody because it’d be a fuck sight harder to get at his bones through the security he was in now. An ordinary car park, renewing its metaphorical epidermis through the years of air-raids and overdevelopment, leaded petrol and shoe leather.
I stepped forward and started walking.
I sensed no movement from her, no impending fireballs, not even a shield. When I was almost close enough to touch her, she finally spoke.
“Peter—what are you doing?—”
I closed the distance and lifted my hands. I could find her without looking—the crown of her head, the soft disheveled hair, the curve of her ear. She jerked, but I didn’t pull back, and neither did she.
Her mutilated face was still intact, and I almost sank to the ground with gratitude—it was the real Lesley, she was really solidly absolutely bloody there. I let my hands shape themselves to her knobbled shape, and she shook under my touch. Down to her shoulders, her arms, and then I pulled her in and held her wrapped close.
We didn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything but breathe and make little moaning sounds. I could feel her shaking in convulsive shudders, as if she were cold, though the night was warm. Eventually all of that passed. Then Lesley stirred and moved her head; when she spoke I felt as much as heard her voice, brittle-dry and desperate.
“Aren’t you afraid I might stab you or something, at this range?”
“Be my guest,” I said, with my eyes still closed.
There was a stillness. Then she wrangled enough distance to slam a closed fist against my shoulder—again, and again.
“Damn you, Peter,” she choked. “Damn you, damn you, you fucking, useless, lazy, arse . What does it take? What the fuck does it take to get you to pull your head out of wherever you fucking keep it and do something?”
So I kissed her. With prejudice.
Now normally I’m not a fan of the John Wayne approach to gender relations crisis management, partly because I have no desire to go through life continually sporting two black eyes, and partly because if you have to rely on such deeply embedded social conditioning, you’re already cheating. But this was the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh fucking hour, and I’d been scraping the bottom clear off the bloody barrel, and still Lesley was yelling at me to fucking do something, and this was all that was left, despite being more or less the first thing on my original agenda re: Lesley which was—and she was right as usual—not so much ironic as pathetic.
So I set about to thoroughly earn those two black eyes.
She didn’t hit me, at least not right then. What she did was make a starved little noise in her throat and join the kiss. No hesitation, no reserve, no quarter. I was at least as startled as I was warmed, so I half-pulled back. “Oh,” I said, in stupid wonder.
She pounded me again, twice, in bruising comment, and pulled me back in.
Well, all right then. If that’s how it is, I thought, and undid every hasp, every hook and eye and button and portcullis and airlock blast door, and even so never did manage to overwhelm her.
We broke apart to catch our breath. “Do we have time for this?” she gasped.
“You tell me,” I said hoarsely.
She smiled, and she was beautiful then, beautiful like the city the morning after an air raid, defiant through the smoke.
We were about to rejoin battle when I paused. “You didn’t by chance get one of those vagina dentata things installed, did you?” and an instant later realized that was not the thing to say, but that’s what happens when you pop all the locks.
“Peter—” her voice started out deadly cordial and escalated from there— “why would I wait to bite your dick off when I can punch your face in right now?”
“Good point,” I said, and angled her a seductive smirk. “Do I tempt you?”
“Constantly,” said Lesley.
The growl in her voice was well appetizing, but appetite had to make way for the laugh that was bubbling up from the deepest spring in me. I let the laugh out into the night air, and drew her in again, not to kiss this time but to hold close, with all the knots untied.
She made one last feeble grab for the comfort of despair. “I wonder will I last as long as your other girlfriends,” she said, “before you get distracted.”
I held her away to look her in the face. There was no glamor at all now, nothing between her and me.
“I’m not distracted,” I said. “And you’re not my girlfriend.”
You’re my partner, I didn’t have to say.
And I was a prince of the city, with kings under my feet and Spitfires over my head, and you could burn London down ten times over and it wouldn’t matter because this was a bell you couldn’t unring, reverberating down and up and down again the wells of time.
“I could murder a kebab,” Lesley said.
“I think we can put that on the action list,” I said.
So me and Lesley walked together out of the car park to action a couple of kebabs. First.
*
When I woke up from that one I turned over with my face in the pillow and cried for a while, until I was fully awake and in possession of my faculties, contemplating a really improbable truth.
I ran a bath and settled into it to contemplate some more. A truth you already know, I thought. However improbable, I thought.
I was hoping that the bathtub would do for me what it did for Archimedes, but so far I wasn’t having much luck. All he had to do was figure out if the king’s crown was gold or alloy. I had to go by extrapolation too, but I didn’t think duck-the-hedge-witch-in-the-water was going to be the solution here. Oneiromancy wasn’t real, and my dreams couldn’t tell me anything outside of my own head, and even what was in my own head was about 80 percent terrifying. There was nobody I could ask about this. Not Nightingale, who would scald me with compassion, and Dr. Walid ditto. And not Beverley, unless I wanted to option the other surefire way of earning two black eyes.
The person I really wanted to ask, wasn’t fucking here.
I stood up, water streaming noisily from my body. The level in the tub sank a couple of inches. Displacement, I thought. You could measure a force by what rushed into the gap when it was removed. She had shut the door, and I had accepted it, and stood guard in front of it for her, and it had all seemed so livable, until she was gone. And maybe she had wanted something else from me but I didn’t know what else I could have done. And now I couldn’t catch up with her. Or run the other way, either.
Kings under my feet; Spitfires over my head.
Still wrestling with the problem, I got dressed and went down to breakfast.
I had thought I’d done my grieving quietly, but I suspected Molly had heard me after all, because there was an unaccustomed basket sitting next to my plate. Nightingale was eyeing it speculatively between sips of coffee. I folded back a corner of the linen and drew out a scone dusted with glittering sugar. There were dark bits in it that I took for currants till I looked closer and sniffed.
“Chocolate,” I said in surprise.
Nightingale paused mid-chew. “Molly made you chocolate scones?”
His speculative eye lifted to mine and held there. With the scone in my hand, my psyche blurred through a wheel of options including Cry some more , Test Nightingale’s speed at conjuring an anti-scone-projectile force shield , and Feed them all to Toby before the needle finally stopped at Just eat the bloody thing .
I sat down belatedly, and took a bite. It was still warm, and perfectly crumbly, and every scone ought to have chocolate in, I decided.
That was the other thing about displacement. No matter what the weight of the body, the force that met it would always distribute itself evenly. There never are just two things—it’s always everything. Or just one thing. The problem suddenly reformulated itself in my mind, reproportioned and keyed to the present, where I was sitting with a basket of chocolate scones and a collection of painful truths I already knew.
I couldn’t tell Nightingale my griefs, and he couldn’t tell me his. But I could give him a scone.
I handed the basket over. “I’m sure Molly won’t mind if I share,” I said. “You’re her favorite, after all.”
He took one. I polished off the first one and took another.
“You’re going to be all right, then?” he asked, breaking off the tip of his to pop in his mouth.
I took another bite.
“Eureka,” I said.
*
fin