I opened my eyes.

This was an error.

Bakker was sat at the side of the black couch.

He was wearing a striped suit and a grey tie.

He was smiling.

Dead Mr Bakker.

I closed my eyes. I said, “Dees?”

A voice said, almost kindly, “Matthew?”

“Dees—the guy who killed me and who I killed in return is sat next to me and did you try to throttle me?”

There was a brief pause, that might have been something nearing consternation. Then, “No… and no. You started screaming.”

I opened my eyes again.

Bakker was still there. He leant forward, putting his chin on the top of his upturned hand. “Interesting,” he said.

I half turned my head, and there was Dees, sat near the other side of the couch, face pinched tight with weariness and doubt. I had never seen doubt in her before, but the universe had managed to pull a number even on Leslie Dees, Alderman and financial adviser to the ridiculously wealthy. “Bakker says ‘interesting,’ ” I wheezed.

“You are aware,” she began, “that he is both dead and not real?”

“The dead aren’t real?”

“I meant… in a strictly practical sense.”

On the other side, Bakker said, “She’s absolutely right, you know. What you are experiencing is arguably no more than a metamagical manifestation shaped by a mystic echo highlighted by my own death—which don’t think we’re not going to discuss, by the by—rather than any sort of profound theological or philosophical experience.” I turned back to him. He beamed. “There’s no point attempting to construct this event as anything other than what it is. Although make no mistake: the fact that you are seeing me so strongly, so promptly, and your reaction to inhaling, if you don’t mind the concept, my dead breath, suggest that the near future will be… all things considered…” His lips puckered in concentration as he tried to find the words. His skin was too pale, thin and translucent. “… I believe the vernacular term which I shall deploy in the interest of being both brisk and to the point—is shit.”

I looked back at Dees. “I want that drink now.”

Wordlessly she handed me a stainless-steel flask. I sat up slowly, angling myself so my back was to the place where Bakker, or not-Bakker, or the thing that was most definitely and absolutely not Bakker’s ghost, was sitting. I unscrewed the lid, saw milk. Dees held up a Kit Kat. “Cup of cold milk,” she said, “and chocolate. The milk should be in a glass, really, but wonders do not universally abound.”

I took the Kit Kat, ripped open the package with my teeth, broke off a stick of chocolate, ate slowly, drowned it with a gulp of milk. When this was done I said, “You still not seeing any ghosts of sorcerers past?”

She shook her head, smiling apologetically.

“Where’s Penny?”

“At a hotel; sleeping.”

“How long was I…?”

“Screaming, howling, foaming at the mouth?”

“Yeah, all of that.”

“Only a few minutes. Then you…” Her lips thinned. “I believe the term is ‘passed out.’ As would anyone, under the circumstances.”

I put the flask of milk to one side, felt my throat, rubbed my knees and elbows, checking for injuries. Every part ached, but nothing more than the usual background throb of sleepless beaten-up fatigue.

I had another stick of chocolate.

Dees watched.

I had another slurp of milk.

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

I started on my third line of chocolate.

Dees said, “How exactly does this work?”

“How does what work?” I asked through a mouthful of biscuit.

“How does Bakker’s knowledge work relative to your consciousness?”

I hesitated. “Dunno,” I said. “Try me.”

She shifted her weight on the stool where she sat, leaning forward with elbows on her knees. “All right,” she said. “How do we destroy Blackout?”

Bakker was standing just behind her. He hadn’t been at the beginning of the sentence, and there had been no word at which he appeared; just a breath and there he was, a faintly appreciative expression on his face. I screwed up my eyes tight and thought. “No idea,” I said finally. “Sorry. Not a clue.”

“She’s very to the point, isn’t she?” said Bakker, craning over her shoulder. “A woman who knows what she wants, what she needs, and intends that nothing prevents her from acquiring both these things. She likes you, you know.”

I bit my lip, felt heat rise somewhere.

“Not,” he added quickly, “in any sexual way. No more than is the usual chemical response of a pair of XX chromosomes to the presence of an XY combination. Not sex. But she likes you.” He leant down close, until his lips nearly brushed her face, and she didn’t move, didn’t twitch as the non-air of his non-breath ran over her skin. “Not that she will ever admit it. Far too dangerous to grow close to someone who spends as much time in danger as you do. Decisions could be flawed. Emotions could be damaged. Careers compromised. You’ll never get an invite to watch the kids play hockey from this one, I’m afraid.”

“Mr Mayor? You look… distracted,” said Dees.

“Uh… just appreciating a surreal and psychologically traumatic experience here,” I whimpered, gesturing vaguely in reply.

“These two though,” went on Bakker, straightening up and turning a stern gaze onto the Aldermen, “these two would kill you, if they weren’t afraid that they’d miss. They have it in their eyes: that voice saying do it do it do it do it kill him; but there it is… just on the edge, in the hollow of the tear duct, that other voice saying he’ll kill me he’ll kill me he’ll kill me if I try. You’ve done well, Matthew. While resembling a chewed-up rodent you’ve still managed to make them afraid. Then again, I imagine your blue blood helps.”

For a second, there was a flicker of something else in Bakker, something that sank his cheeks into bone, turned teeth yellow and lined like ancient rotting bone, made scraggly his hair, black his fingers, nails turned to claws, just a flash, just a flicker, bursting out of the suit and, for just a moment, Robert Bakker cast no shadow. Then it was gone, and he was ambling round the room, trailing his finger along the black couch, turning his head this way and that to examine every detail of his surroundings.

“Oh, look!” he said idly. “You have an apprentice.” My throat tightened, I could feel every lump of phlegm there and every drop of saliva in my mouth. “Fascinating, the inside of your brain, Matthew. An apprentice who you would fight for, die for and, of course, kill for. A sorceress who nearly destroyed the city and you took one look at her and thought ‘she’s a train wreck on legs, a liability and a danger to all around her, let’s take her in because she’ll make excellent company.’ I always wondered what made you pick the fights you did, Matthew. Maybe the Alderman is right. Maybe you do need therapy. Post-traumatic stress. Your blood tasted good, when you died.”

I became aware of something slippery under my fingers. The chocolate of my last stick of Kit Kat was melting beneath my touch. I rubbed my fingers clean on my sleeve, all the while hypnotised by Bakker’s slow wander round the room.

“I knew the last Midnight Mayor, of course,” he went on. “He was more imaginative than anyone ever suspected. Making you his successor, of all people! I underestimated him. Not that this knowledge does me any good now, since I am, of course, nothing more than a projection of some traumatic echo of consciousness given shape by my dust, your magic and… of course… your overly stimulated and somewhat disturbed brain.”

“How long is this going to last?” I asked Dees, and was surprised at how dry my voice was.

“It varies. There’s nothing set. But the longest… was no more than a few days.”

“Even when the sun isn’t rising?” asked Bakker, sitting down next to me so close I could almost feel the not-heat from his not-body. “Difficult, defining ‘day’ when there is no daylight. The Norwegians probably have a trick to it. Very underestimated people, the Norwegians.”

I kept my head locked dead ahead, not looking at him. Dees said, “Mr Mayor? What exactly are you experiencing?”

“All sorts of weird bad shit. If I start talking to myself, you won’t call the guys in white coats, will you?”

“I think we’re all past that, don’t you? Is there… do you have any further thoughts on… Blackout?” she ventured.

“You could ask,” suggested Bakker, examining his nails.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom now,” I said, easing myself off the couch. “Where the hell is it?”

Bakker wandered with me down the corridor, examining everything.

The bathroom was made of dull beige tiles and smelt of cheap dull air freshener. There were cubicles down one side, and mirrors down the other.

There was an Alderman there washing his hands.

I said, “You—out!”

He took one look at our face and left.

I waited for the door to close, did a quick scan round the edges of the ceiling for CCTV cameras, and turned on Bakker. He was leaning against the wall by the hot air puffers, casually running his hand underneath them to see if they’d work. They didn’t. He looked up as I turned, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

“Right!” I said. “A few ground rules! You’re dead, which means the you I’m seeing right now is entirely dependent on my brain as the living bit of the equation. Therefore, no playing silly buggers! I say jump, you jump, savvy?”

He sighed, scratched his chin. “That’s all very easy to say,” he sighed, “but, alas, current evidence suggests that this relationship may not be so straightforward.”

“Uh-uh,” I snapped, wagging a finger at him. “No complicated shit we’re doing this for a very simple reason. Oda is possessed by Blackout; you killed Blackout; you tell me how to do a repeat number. That simple, end of story, we all get to go home.”

“I take it you’re choosing to ignore the fact that by now the Neon Court will have concluded you are not going to honour your alliance and will be sending people to kill you, and the Tribe will have by now decided that they just don’t trust you and will equally be preparing reprisals? All very tactfully of course—no one will be admitting to it, but so it goes.”

“Yep!” My voice was rising towards a shrill. “Yep, totally choosing to ignore that. Totally, utterly, totally, because you know what, civil war has nothing on the sun not coming up or my having to share my brain with your ghost.”

“And we’re not going to handle this slight conflict of interest?”

“Slight conflict of interest?” I echoed, ready to shout.

“Naturally,” he replied, detaching himself from the wall. “I mean, my dying breath was collected, by definition, as I was dying, capturing my very last thoughts, state of mind and being. Needless to say, your having just pushed me off the thirty-sixth floor left me in a rather absolute frame of mind regarding my relationship with you.”

“Let’s not get schoolkid about this,” I replied with a scowl. “You killed me, I killed you, you started it, boo sucks boo, end of rant.”

He was walking towards me. I stood my ground, clenching my fingers to stop them shaking, looking at a point just between his eyes and hoping he’d mistake my glare for the real thing. “It’s hardly going to be that easy,” he said, stopping within throttling distance in front of me. “Issues all round, and we do know how difficult issues are in sorcerers. Your apprentice had issues and the city was nearly destroyed. I had issues and… well…”

He waggled his eyebrows towards the mirror behind me.

Instinct turned me where sense would have made me stand my ground.

There was a man in the mirror.

His hair was a few stray strands of wilting grey, his skin was stained with liver death, his teeth were yellow, his eyes were watery grey, he wore a coat—a familiar coat—stained with blood—familiar blood. He grinned, revealing a black gullet to a bottomless belly, and as he did so, he leant straight out of the mirror, dragging the glass with him, the glass bending like water trapped behind a rubber bubble, leant right out, his fingers stretching towards me, nails black cracked bone, mouth opening wider and wider and as he came he screamed, “I’m HUNGRY!!”

I fell back, lost my footing, landed on my wrist on the floor, covered my head instinctively, electricity rising to our fingertips. The light flickered and hummed, sound of an angry wasp nest poked with a stick, and death, in the form of two sets of claws dragged from a reflection that shouldn’t have been there, failed to come.

I risked peeking.

The mirror was empty.

Bakker’s foot tapped, bored, on the tiles of the washroom floor. If a ghost taps its foot unseen in the forest, does the foot tap? Discuss.

I uncoiled, picked myself back up, forcing down long slow breaths, feeling the pain in my chest where once those claws had done their work, many, many nights ago, focusing on the ends of my shaking fingers, numbing them one at a time, until I felt strong enough to raise my head, look Bakker in the eye and say, “Very funny.”

He shrugged.

“I see death doesn’t lead to repentance,” I added with a scowl.

“Matthew, we could stand here all day—well, maybe not that—debating the ethics of guilt and innocence.”

“Let’s not.”

“If you insist.”

“What we need,” I added, forcing the words out one at a time, “is, in fact, to get over the whole cock-up that is my current meta-magical, post-psychological, moderately psychical…”

“You’re misusing the word.”

“What?”

“You’re misusing ‘psychical.’ ”

“Yet you are in my head and you knew exactly what I mean and do you really feel it’s necessary to correct my usage, that being the case?”

Bakker sighed. “Do go on.”

“What we need—leaving aside the current psychic baggage—is a plan.”

“I would say that was a reasonable position.”

I waited.

He waited.

I said, “Well go on then, Mr Bakker. You’ve stopped Blackout before. Gimme a plan.”

He examined the ends of his nails. “It’s a pity you never shared my taste for the fine things in life, Matthew. A gourmet meal and a glass of Sauvignon does wonders for the intellectual processes.”

“How about a kebab and a Ribena?” I snapped. “It’s bad enough having to share my brain with you, I’m not about to throw in the digestive system as a job lot.”

“Matthew…” he began again, in that special voice reserved for the particularly foolish pupil who is quite deliberately refusing to understand the matter at hand.

The toilet door opened.

It was Dees.

I said, “This is the men’s and I’m having a moment.”

She looked slowly round at the empty bathroom. “You know,” she said finally, “this is the first time I’ve been in a men’s toilet and I can honestly say it fails my expectations.”

“Dees! There are social norms and I’m still having a moment!”

“It’s Lady Neon,” she replied. “Without wishing to alarm you, she’s here. Now.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. The pain had enough rivals for attention across my body that it didn’t really make much difference. “Would you describe her current position as volcanic?”

“Krakatoa,” she replied.

“I’m guessing that the Neon Court are pretty pissed, huh?”

“The ground beneath their feet clatters with the broken glass of metaphorical vodka bottles.”

I waggled a finger at where Bakker was perched casually on top of a curved bin. “To be continued.” I caught the flicker in Dees’ eyes as I turned back. “Yes, my imaginary friend,” I snapped, “keep it to yourself, OK?”

We went upstairs.

The foyer of the British Library was indeed occupied.

Two dozen men and women in various states of leather-clad skimpiness, ozone dying around their sprayed hair and skin gleaming with sweat, sweat substitute, and make-up to make the sweat seem sensuous instead of sticky, were arrayed throughout the broad, complex indoor space, with various weapons pointedly unsheathed. I saw glass blades, nasty stabbing things that reminded me of the smell of smoke and the look of surprise in the burning eyes of Minjae San the night he died. Even when armed for war, the Neon Court managed to make itself look like something out of a fashion shoot, beautiful people preparing for an ugly thing like it was ballet, not death. Their magic was a sticky perfume on the air. We could feel it as a fuzziness behind our eyes, a woolliness in the head. It made us angry. The anger made it easier to fight.

The Aldermen were arrayed at the top of the wide stairs, black silent shapes in long black coats. They weren’t beautiful people, and they never intended to be. When you died by their hand, and die you likely would, it would be a cold and quiet death.

No one seemed to have anything to say.

Lady Neon stood in the middle of them all. Even when the sun failed to rise, she found time to change. She wore pristine white, unaffected by dirt, dust or the rain, thick swaths of silk that clung to every surface of her body so that while next to no skin was revealed, they still managed to leave very little to the imagination. Her face was covered by a gauzy veil that obscured the details of her features, and she stood small and still, a spider guessing—no, knowing—that it is faster than the snake.

She said nothing, but we could feel her eyes on us. Her gaze made our head hot and fuzzy, set off a tingling in the pit of our stomach, made every cell of our blood feel too thick for our veins to hold it. Her magic—it was overwhelming, all-encompassing, like trying to find a grain of salt in a dish of chillis, and left no room for clear thought. Then a man stepped forward. He wore a floor-length red coat, trousers that could have been engineered to taut perfection by a team from NASA, and was apart from that bare-chested, not a hair on him, just oiled, polished skin. His complexion was pale almond, his eyes narrow, flecked with street-lamp yellow, his skull perfectly shaven. We imagined that he was what the times called beautiful, a work of art, not a human at all, assuming there was anything of the human left in him. He looked young; far too young for the glare of contempt he now gave us.

We stopped, Dees and I, near the bottom of the stairs, and waited.

He said, “Are you ready for war?”

“I’m guessing that was a rhetorical question,” I said, as our fingers itched to strike.

“We gave you time. More time than you asked for. You haven’t found her. You haven’t found the chosen one. You have consorted with the Tribe. If we didn’t hold you in such high regard, we would have destroyed you for all this.”

I sighed. “Thanks for that. I feel all fluffy inside.” We looked straight past him, to Lady Neon. “Sun’s not coming up, my lady.”

Silence.

“And the city is folding in on itself. You got a way out? You got an escape plan?”

“War!” barked the man in red. “Betrayal, then war!”

“There’s a creature called Blackout doing the rounds,” I added, ignoring him entirely. “The thing that crawled out of the shadows at the end of the alley, creature of night. Got pissed off when the street lamps were turned on, when the night grew that little bit less scary. Got banished after, may I say, a disastrous attempt by the Neon Court and Midnight Mayor to push it back, that ended in blood all around. That thing. Blackout. Back, right here, right now. It’s waiting for you.”

“Your lies are…”

Lady Neon raised one hand. The man in red fell silent. She took one delicate step forward. She didn’t raise her veil or her voice, but her words carried like a breeze from an open summer sky. “Do you think they are not related?” she asked softly. “Do you believe all this can happen by pure chance, together, tonight; this endless night?”

Our mouth was dry at the sound of her voice. We struggled in vain to speak.

“The last time Blackout came to this city, the Court allied with the Mayor,” she went on. “The Tribe attack us. We cannot help you, unless you help us. If you wish your city to be consumed in darkness, your memory lost to all time, then continue on the path you have chosen. Our price… is not as high as that we usually charge for such services.”

“This is hardly the time to consider the smaller picture,” blurted Dees.

Lady Neon’s head turned a fraction, and I felt Dees, Leslie Dees who never shied back from anything, rock on her heels as if blasted from an open furnace door. The look in her eye wasn’t fear, but an all-purpose sensory overload.

“You think your city matters? You think the world will care when you are destroyed? I am Lady Neon. I have no need for just one city.”

Bakker was at the bottom of the stairs, circling Lady Neon slow and steady, head tilted on one side. “Fascinating specimen,” he offered. “And entirely sincere, I believe, in her intention to exploit this situation for her own gain. She really doesn’t care what happens to you and yours. You’re just not… interesting enough. That must be a rather humiliating consideration for a man of your ego, Matthew.”

Dees whispered, “War with the Court…”

“It won’t come to that,” I replied.

“This chosen one is…”

“Relevant,” snapped Bakker. He had one hand on Lady Neon’s shoulder, like a possessive lover. “Perhaps not in the way anyone expects, but you know, and therefore I am entirely free to say it, that Lady Neon is correct in one sense. You do not get coincidences like this in politics or magic. The idea may turn your stomach, but that’s the truth of it.”

“Fine,” I said. And then louder, for her, “Have it your way.”

“You will swear,” Lady Neon insisted, “to seek the chosen one immediately.”

“I swear,” I replied.

One hand reached towards mine, slender pale fingers uncurling. “You will swear,” she added softly, “to bring her straight to me.”

I was aware of every ridge in my mouth, the lingering taste of blood on my tongue. “What will you…”

“You will swear!”

“Careful,” warned Bakker. “Careful.”

“The Tribe have never been our allies, Mr Mayor,” whispered Dees. “The Court have.”

“Fine,” I breathed. “Fine. I’ll… do as you ask.”

“Swear it.”

“I swear.”

She smiled.

We felt a sickness inside, a fist in our belly, a more-than-words pressure in our throat.

Her hand relaxed and she turned away. Immediately her followers, thralls and servants, began to bustle towards the door, moving as one, ants serving their queen. Umbrellas were raised as she stepped outside, gate opened, stretched cars standing with their doors ready to receive, and as quickly as she had arrived, Lady Neon and all of hers were gone.

Bakker said, his voice low and dark, “Words are power, power is magic.”

I bit my lip hard enough to taste the blood.

The man in the red coat was still standing in front of us.

He said, “I’m coming with you.”

“You’re what?” I blurted.

“Sir,” interjected Dees smoothly, “the Midnight Mayor is quite suitably protected by the Aldermen, and while we appreciate your offer of assistance…”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Mate,” I said, “it’s pissing it down out there and you aren’t even wearing a T-shirt.”

“You have not proven reliable, Mr Mayor,” he snapped. “I am here to guarantee reliability.”

Bakker said, “Take him.” My eyes flicked uncontrollably to him. “The man is clearly an assassin, but an assassin for hire. He will attempt to manipulate and use you, but you are aware of this fact and can play the game better. No—not true. I can play the game better. Take him with you. If nothing else, he will provide useful distraction should you need someone to put between yourself and Oda.”

I looked back at the man in the red coat. “You’ve got a name, mate?”

“Theydon.”

I raised my eyebrows. “As in…?”

“Just Theydon.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough, sunshine jimbo. I should warn you that in the course of the last however many hours it’s been, I’ve been chased, burnt, blinded, dropped from great heights, threatened with all manner of weapons ranging from the magical to the mundane, tied up, beaten up, chatted with a giant rat and shared my consciousness with the ghost of a sorcerer renowned for the systematic murder of all his kin.”

“Systematic is a curious choice of word,” offered Bakker. “But I sense now is not the time.”

My smile grew a little thinner. “So sure: you want to come along for the ride, come along. It’s up to you.”

His knuckles looked like they were about to pop out from under his skin. But all he said was “I’ll make the arrangements.”

I took Dees to one side.

“Bakker’s not being cooperative.”

“That’s hardly fair!” exclaimed Bakker, flicking his fingertips idly at the drooping leaf of a potted palm tree and sighing as it failed to stir at his incorporeal touch.

“Having no better plan for the moment,” I went on through gritted teeth, “I’m going after this JG person.”

“JG?” echoed Dees.

“The chosen one.”

“Because of the Court?”

“Because of the Court, the Tribe, O’Rourke, the prophecy, because all this can’t be a coincidence, and the fact that Oda said ‘Where’s the girl?’ And because, at the end of the day, Dees, Lady Neon was right—it’s all gotta be connected somehow.”

“ ‘Where’s the girl?’ ” Dees’ voice was the hollow emptiness of someone who has opened the fridge on a hungry night and found nothing left but a lump of rotting cheese and half a lemon: resigned to what must be.

“You want to have the Court and the Tribe and Oda on your back all at the same time?”

“Not especially.”

“Well, then.”

“Are you sure this is…” She gestured uneasily. “… the most prudent course?”

“You have a better one?”

She thought about it. “If I suggested a meeting, you would make an inappropriate sound, possibly coupled with derogatory remarks?”

“Yep.”

“I thought so. And how exactly do you propose finding this chosen one?”

“Start where it all began: Sidcup.”

Silence. Dees studied her shoes. I waited. When I could wait no more I blurted, “All right, come on! What’s wrong with this otherwise flawless scheme?”

“Sidcup,” she echoed.

“Yes, Sidcup, the place of the fire, the place where Court and Tribe went looking for her, the place where Oda was stabbed and I was summoned: Sidcup, oh, Sidcup, yes?”

Dees coughed politely to cut me off before I could embark on my ode to irritation. “Sidcup,” she said gently, “vanished from the pages of the A–Z about forty-five minutes ago.”

Silence.

When the silence was reaching critical mass, Bakker added, “Oh dear.”

“Define… ‘vanished.’ ”

“There are empty pages where Sidcup should be. It has become like Cockfosters: a memory of a name without a geographical reference point.”

“I imagine that makes it… difficult to get to?” I hazarded.

“All roads are cut off, all maps are blank, no train nor bus will go to it,” she intoned.

A thought slipped through the dull fog of my brain and waltzed all the way to the tip of my tongue. Before it could be stopped, I’d blurted, “Your family live south of the river.”

Dees’ eyes flashed, a moment of something bright and fierce and dangerous in her face. Then, very quietly, “Yes. They do. In Croydon, to be exact.”

“And Croydon is…”

“It was one of the first boroughs to vanish from the map. No trains reach it, no bus, no car. The roundabouts send traffic back the way it came, brick walls block the cycle paths, ancient paint on the stones declaring ‘end of the line’ or ‘wrong way’ or ‘no way out.’ Croydon, to all intents and purposes, no longer exists, if it ever did.”

“Your family…”

“Both mobile and landline numbers are no longer recognised.” She didn’t look at me as she spoke, but stared at some distant thing out of reach and out of sight, for her eyes only.

I said, “Sorry.”

“We know what this is,” she replied. “It has been remedied before. It will be so again.” Dees looked smaller, all the same, than I had ever seen her. The bruised weariness of her eyes was too deep and dark for her subtle make-up to disguise.

Theydon called out: “I’m ready.”

Dees said, “So, Mr Mayor, can you think of a way to get to a place where no one else can?”

I heard a chuckle next to me. “Oh, yes,” said Bakker. “Of course you can.”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I can think of a way.”

There was something I had to do, before going back to Sidcup.

Penny found me sat by a bank of indoor plants, flicking through my battered and much loved copy of the A–Z London street map. Dozens of pages were empty, nothing but a number in a corner to indicate that anything had been there to begin with.

Penny sat down next to me, said, “Well, I’ve had a lovely snooze and a cup of coffee. How about you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nah,” she agreed. “Didn’t think your day was getting better. What now, Mr Man?”

I closed the A–Z, dropped the little book back into my bag. “I’m going back to Sidcup in the company of an assassin from the Neon Court to find a chosen one who may or may not be responsible for either a war or the end of daylight.”

“Yep,” sighed Penny, “as ideas go, it’s another fucking winner.”

“I don’t have a choice any more. This chosen one—JG—is all I’ve got left to go on.”

“I heard on the grapevine that Sidcup has vanished.”

“Along with most of suburban London,” I added with a scowl. “The city’s contracting in on itself, throwing up walls; and on the other side…”

Bakker said, “And on the other side, you can be assured, there is nothing good.”

Penny spoke over him, unaware there was a third party to our conversation: “What do you want me to do?”

“The way the city is shrinking—edges first—suggests that central London will be the last place to get swallowed up by whatever this is. So find somewhere bang smack in the middle.”

“Hide?” she echoed. “Is that it?”

“Not this time, no.” I glanced left, I glanced right, saw no one within ready earshot, lowered my voice for luck and leant close to her. “You remember how to do a recorded delivery?”

Her lips tightened, muscles moved in her throat. But she nodded and said, “Sure, yeah, I remember.”

“I may need one in the next few hours. Me at the very least, possibly one, maybe two others. I may need a very fast rescue—faster than your car can get from Lewisham to Mile End—and that takes planning. Can you do it?”

A flicker of hesitation, a moment of indrawn breath. Then she nodded, all stubborn chin and unwavering eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure. I can do it. Hey—you expecting this assassin fucker to try and pop you?”

“I’m expecting everyone to try,” I replied, trying to rub some of the weariness out of my eyes.

“And you think you aren’t psychologically damaged!” offered Bakker.

“Besides,” I added through gritted teeth, “the sun not rising, the city shrinking, Oda going psycho-shit, Sidcup, the burning tower—dig that connection.”

Penny raised her eyebrows. “You think Oda’s still gunning for you?”

“Of course she is,” sighed Bakker.

“Probably,” I added.

“All this,” Bakker went on, “every single part of it, they’re all tied up together, strings in the hand of a puppet master. Your apprentice is terrified, Matthew.”

Our eyes went to Penny’s face. Her lower lip was curled in, as if she was trying hard not to bite it. She caught our look and flashed an uneasy smile. “Gotcha,” she said brightly. “OK. One fucking recorded delivery coming right up. I’ll charge my phone and everything.”

“Terrified,” added Bakker, leaning in until his mouth almost brushed her cheek. Then he drew back again with the slight hiss of a satisfied conclusion. “But not of you. I sometimes saw this look in Dana too, before she died.”

My head snapped round, the words were past my lips before I could stop them. “Don’t you dare talk about…” I bit back on the rest of the sentence, but too late.

Penny said, “Uh—what the fuck?”

I half closed my eyes, tried to shake free of the anger. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Trouble with the staff.”

She hesitated, then a strange smile spread over her face. “Hey,” she said, “you know, you don’t have to do the hero business alone.”

“I know.”

“Sure you do. Sure. You going to kill this Oda?”

“I—” I began, then faltered. “I don’t know.”

“Of course you are,” said Bakker easily. “I mean, are we even pretending you aren’t?”

“She helped me in the past,” I said, finding myself unable to meet Penny’s eye and unwilling to meet Bakker’s. “She wasn’t… not a friend… but when you do all that together, then… but she is the cause, the reason why the sun doesn’t rise. If I can get this Blackout creature out of her I will.”

“You can’t,” said Bakker.

“And if you can’t?” asked Penny.

“We’ll see how busy the waters are below that particular bridge when we come to it.”

She looked up, met my eye. There was something there that was almost concern. Almost something more. “You be OK, OK?” she said.

“That’s my big party trick,” I sighed, stretching. “Everyone’s gotta have a talent.”

It was raining outside.

It seemed to have been raining for a very long time.

“Yes,” said Bakker, head tilted upwards to study the orange-black-sodium sky. “That happened last time too.”

Nearby stood a hotel of white walls and glass, windows lit up in the reception area. The lift stood still, a little box of light in a tube of darkness. In the restaurant a waiter had fallen asleep over a half-cleared table of picked bones and smeared sauces. A pile of suitcases, off the train from Paris, filled a tall gold trolley, which showed no sign of moving. Outside in the street, the traffic lights were set to red. The buses queued four to a bus stop, no one waiting to board. In the second-hand bookshop opposite someone had stuck up a sheet of paper with words written in felt-tip pen—NO ONE HOME NOTHING TO SEE—as a substitute for the “closed” sign. One couple ate pizza in the restaurant next door, four waiters gathered round one table, not sure if they were coming or going.

I mumbled, “What time is it?”

Dees instinctively moved to check her watch, then hesitated. “Does it matter?”

The man called Theydon, his coat forming a peculiar shape about his hips where it just clipped the edge of the two hidden blades strapped to his back, gave a little half-shrug. Muscles bunched and unbunched; here was a man who wanted you to know that he could carry a mammoth on his back, without the crude embarrassment of actually telling you. Our dislike deepened.

“Well?” said Dees, and it took me a moment to realise she was talking to me. “I gather an official car is out of the question, so just how are you planning on us getting to Sidcup?”

“Night bus,” I replied.

Silence.

I outwaited Dees by a microsecond.

“Well, we’re all quivering, Mr Mayor,” she blurted. “Enlighten us. Exactly how does a night bus break down the magical walls currently closing in on this city, where all other means of transport fail?”

“Ah-ha!” I intoned.

Bakker said, “Was I as insufferable as you when imparting the ancient mysteries of our craft?”

“First thing you need to do,” I went on, “is get very, very uncomfortable.”

It took twenty minutes.

I walked up Grays Inn Road, shoes tied together and slung round my neck, socks saturated black from soaking through in a heartbeat, sleeves rolled up, head bare, flesh goosebumped, eyes stinging from the rain. Behind me came Theydon, coat pulled off, feet bare on the rain-reflective paving stones, looking, to our intense annoyance, as bedraggled as a superstar in the movies. Behind him walked Dees. She had arguably got the worst deal of us all, since we had discovered on leaving the British Library that one of the receptionists had a similar (yet not quite right) shoe size, and was, praise be, wearing particularly silly shoes. They were red, with a high heel that should have been outlawed along with landmines and mustard gas. Dees was limping. Her suit jacket was open, and her shirt was wet enough to sag. Her skin had turned a chicken-flesh colour, with hints of blue about the lips, and in her eye was the look of someone who, having knowingly committed to the most inane plan in the world, would stay committed to the death.

Behind her was Bakker.

Dry as dust and ashes.

His shadow was not his own. His shadow had claws.

Grays Inn Road was not, by any standards, a beautiful road. A one-way system led to the kind of junction where anyone lied who told you it was quicker to stay on the bus till the next stop. Victorian terraced shops still carried half-visible daubs of faded paint advertising penny cures and machine weights, but their windows offered suspicious fruit, lipsticks, tights, milk and half-price telephone calls to Somalia. A shop selling office furniture declared “closing down—everything must go!” and had done so for five years. The lights were down inside sandwich bars and little greasy cafés, bicycle repair shops and chemists offering free Botox consultation. I could feel the city below my feet, tunnels and pipes and gleaming tracks; there was more than just the Underground happening beneath Grays Inn Road.

We halted some hundred yards short of a bus stop. It had no shelter, but was just a stand with a sign. Dees made an instinctive beeline for a doorway, but I caught her and said, “Uh-uh! We gotta get as cold and miserable as possible!”

Dees staggered obediently back into the middle of the pavement. A van swooshed by, sending up a sheet of water that fell across our feet.

“This may just be a failure of imagination on my part.” I could hear Dees’ teeth knocking as she spoke. “But I can’t conceive of getting much more cold or miserable than I currently am!”

Theydon said nothing, but his knuckles were white and his face was drawn.

“Good!” I exclaimed, running my hands through my hair and releasing a small waterfall down the back of my neck. I flinched: a curve of my back had evidently been dry, and was no longer so. “That means it’s nearly time!”

An estate car, its back seats ripped out to make way for speakers, thundered by to a boom boom boom of bass beat. In the distance I saw it rounding a corner, the lights turning red behind it. The road fell silent: the thick, silken, sudden silence of engines stopping, of blood pumping in your ears, the sound you were born with and hadn’t known you were hearing.

Dees felt it.

Then Theydon too.

I looked back the way we’d come, wiggled my numb toes in my soaking socks, breathed, “It won’t stay long; we get one chance.” I looked at Dees and added, “You may want to lose those shoes.”

She pulled them off gratefully.

Nothing moved.

Not a car, not a bike, not a soul stirred.

Then I heard it: an engine coming up to speed on the straight after rounding the corner; then I saw it, a pair of bright headlights in the distance, obscuring whatever the thing was behind it; but I knew, didn’t need to see.

I said, “Run!” and turned and belted for the bus stop as fast as my slipping frozen feet would carry me.

Theydon was by me in a second; then overtook. I risked glancing over my shoulder: Dees was right behind me. And there was something else, flickering in and out of the reflections from the shop windows: a grinning shadow, yellow teeth, grey eyes, loose tangles of hair, keeping pace with us, a thing that should be dead. I strained to look further behind, saw the lights, heard the engine, the swoosh of the windscreen wipers, saw a tall dark shape behind the light, hurtling towards us with the reckless abandon of a boy racer; the night-bus drivers of London had always enjoyed putting their foot down. The bus stop was ahead, Theydon nearly there, then the bus, a double-decker, the redness of its paint so deep and thick it was almost that blood black of a dried scab; brakes screeching, it slid by, steam bursting from the grating at the back of the engine, and stopped, its front door dead level with the bus stop. Its windows were yellow-grey from internal light diffused through thick condensation; impossible to see more than shadows inside. On the back, in tatty yellow-on-black, was the number N1. The rear doors opened with a hiss and a snap. A single woman got off. She was old, face like a roast pumpkin, a mass of hair sticking out from an ancient velvet hat. A huge purple coat, folded down over a stumpy pair of legs, that might at some point hide knees. In one hand she pulled a small shopping bag on wheels. In the other she held a walking stick of black wood. She looked us straight in the eye, and knew us, then turned away with a little humph of contempt and started rattling towards the traffic lights.

The door at the front of the bus opened. Theydon reached it first, got one hand inside the frame, then stopped so suddenly I nearly ran into him. I looked past him to where the driver sat. With skin the colour of dirty bath water, he sat bolt upright in his seat, head turned stiffly forward, more robot than man. He wore a little black cap, and every time he breathed there was the rattle of broken pipes inside his chest. There were chains on his wrists, at his throat, around his middle. Big, black iron chains, bolted into the bus itself. Theydon opened his mouth to say something and I heard the warning beep of the door about to close. I shoved him hard in the middle of the back, pushing him inside, grabbed the panting Dees by the wrist and dragged her up onto the deck as with a hiss of steam and whine of ancient pistons, the door slammed shut with enough force to break bones. The driver’s head didn’t turn. He didn’t move. I reached down and found my fingers shaking from cold and something else besides, and touched my travelcard to the reader. Dees followed suit.

Theydon said, “I don’t…”

The driver’s head snapped round, metal clanking, and a pair of eyes glazed over with silver-purple cataract stared straight at him. Dees fished in her pocket, produced a couple of pound coins, dropped them into the small dish between driver and passenger. Slowly, the driver’s head returned to normal position. The ticket machine beeped and rattled. The bus began to accelerate away from the stop. I pulled free the ticket that the machine had produced and looked down at it.

It said:

Single.

Stage 1 to 387

Valid once.

Terms and conditions apply.

Have a pleasant journey.

I looked on the back.

In tiny letters, someone had printed over and over again,

nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run nowhere to run

I handed the ticket to Theydon. “Next time you decide to join the let’s-save-the-city club,” I growled, “buy a bloody travelcard.”

He took the ticket, his face halfway between a sneer of contempt and a shudder of shame.

We staggered, dripping and shivering, inside the bus.

We were not the only ones riding the night bus.

Sprawled across most of the back seats above the engine, the warmest and most shaken part of the bus, was a man with a tatty beard stained with tomato ketchup, a broken red nose and a face that had gone straight through ripe and out the other side. He was snoring loudly. A single empty beer bottle rolled downhill between the seats as we decelerated, and back the other way as we accelerated, bumping and banging with a regular tonk tonk.

A child sat next to the door. She looked about five years old. She wore a black and grey school uniform, including a felt bowler hat with a grey ribbon round the base. Her eyes were old. Her teeth were too small and sharp. She looked at me, she looked at Dees, and her lips parted in hate. “Upstairs,” she said, voice small and high. “Your kind isn’t wanted down here.”

I shrugged and headed upstairs, Theydon following. But Dees paused at the foot of the stairs, then turned and looked the child straight in the eye. “You got a licence, little girl?”

The child’s scowl deepened. “No rules on the night bus.”

“When you get off, if you get off, call us,” replied the soaked, bedraggled Alderman, and from somewhere inside her suit produced a creased, damp business card. The child took it reluctantly, cowed by the force of Dees’ glare. We went upstairs.

On the top deck there sat just one Chinese woman. She was tiny, from her tiny straight black hair to her tiny shoes, from her hands, almost too tiny to grasp the rail on the seat in front of her, to her tiny brown eyes in a tiny oval face. The only big thing about her was the cream lace collar that stuck out from her tiny grey jacket. She had no baggage, but sat leaning forward in her seat as if any moment she expected the bus to crash and everyone to die except her, who had taken the precaution of clinging on. Her smile was friendly enough.

I sat down. The condensation on the windows was too thick for us to see anything outside other than splodges of street light. Blobs of sodium pink, flares of brilliant white, on-off flashes of red and blue circled round us like flies to blood. The heat was the jungle heat of suspended moisture with a hint of suffocating humanity. On the cold window panes, smiling faces had been traced, doodles, messages in a dozen languages.

Super mouse!!

GET OFF THE BUS

Left at Dulwich

wasnt me lik they said it was

Dees sat down and examined her feet. The shoes I’d forced her to wear up the length of Grays Inn Road had bitten into her heels. Theydon’s nose wrinkled in distaste as he examined the tatty blue-and-red coverings on the seats, before perching on the edge of one he judged the least grimy. I rummaged in my satchel and produced a small towel. It was little more than a grey furry tissue, wrapped round the toothbrush and toothpaste that were the sum of my domestic property. I handed it to Dees. She looked at it longer than was necessary, then cold overcame all other senses and she took it from me and started vigorously rubbing at her arms, her feet, her face, her hair, as much trying to warm with friction as dry herself off. Theydon looked at her, looked at me, then turned away from us. He covered his features with his hands and I half wondered if he was about to cry. Then he swept his hands back from his head and I tasted, just for a moment, the sugar-tingle touch of magic on the tip of my tongue. He looked back, and what had been before a man soaked in rain and prickled with cold was now Alpha Male, Natural Man, every bit the hunter-gatherer who could stand before the elements and proclaim ‘the tempest holds no fear for me.’ His physical appearance hadn’t particularly changed, but now it was as if the elements had become just another coat he had decided to wear, and there was defiance in his eye, and pride, the cocksure pride of a man who knows that yes, he does look that good. We scowled.

“Cheap tricks,” we said.

“Rich enough for the company I’m in,” he replied.

“I’m guessing you won’t want the towel, then?”

In answer, he stretched himself out further over the seat, achieving that posture seen on any form of public transport whereby one man and his testicles, by the simple act of sitting back and spreading his knees, can occupy enough space for five.

Dees finished with the towel and passed the soggy rag back to me. There was a sharpness in her eye that, to my surprise, fixed on Theydon.

“You—Neon Court man—let’s establish a few essential rules,” she barked. “While in the company of the Midnight Mayor you will address him as ‘Mr Mayor,’ and if you are extremely lucky he might deign to reply. When the Mayor tells you to do something, you will do it immediately, and without question. This is not merely because you are a stranger in our affairs; it will be for your own survival. Do you understand?”

Silence.

I waited for the knives to come.

“Do you understand?” Dees’ voice was ice, but there was fire in her eyes, a red tint around the iris, a touch of the madness that you could see in the image of the dragon that guarded the gates of London, and her fingernails were tinted silver, and just a little bit too long. I’d seen the Aldermen fight, seen the changes that came over them when they did; but I had never associated Dees with that power, until now.

Theydon considered being an idiot.

Then he changed his mind.

“Yes,” he said, voice dead and flat.

“You understand?” snapped Dees.

“Yes,” he repeated. “I understand.”

She smiled, and I could smell metal magic shimmering off her as she relaxed. “Good,” she breathed. “I’m sure we’ll all find this relationship mutually beneficial.”

She sat down. Bakker was next to her, sat with his chin resting on the palms of his hands, leaning forward like a child towards the front window of the bus. I hadn’t seen him get on, but then again, he didn’t need to.

“I hope you know where this bus is going, Matthew,” he said.

In vain I tried drying myself off with the tatty towel. Outside, flares of colour flashed and danced like oil being burnt in the desert. Theydon raised a languid finger to the condensation, thought about writing something in it, changed his mind. Dees said, “You could have told us, Mr Mayor, that you were planning on catching this night bus.”

“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “But then you might have refused.”

“What is this thing?” demanded Theydon, looking around. We were surprised he bothered to ask.

“This is the night bus,” I replied. “It has all the characteristics of any night bus in London. It drives far too fast down roads where during the day there is usually clogged traffic; it misses half the stops where you’d expect it to pull up; its inhabitants are usually less than salubrious; it only runs after midnight; and it gets you into places where nothing else can go.”

“For example…?” said Dees.

“Sidcup. The night bus is one of the big unstoppables of London magic. There’s no wall I know of can stop it getting where it’s going to go.”

“And the driver?” prompted Theydon. “He was…”

“Chained, yes,” offered Bakker, a finger trying to draw in the condensation and leaving no mark. “Condemned, quite literally, to perpetual night.”

“They say there’s a curse,” I answered. “It binds its victims to service on the bus for twelve years. No rest, no food, no drink, just the night and the driving.”

“It’s a rumour,” added Dees. “The Aldermen have seen no proof of such an accord.”

“It’s real,” said Theydon, utter certainty in his voice. “I have seen things like it before.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really? I had heard that the Neon Court wasn’t exactly employer of the month, but…”

His eyes flashed. “You know nothing about us.”

“I know,” I replied, “that when you grow too old or ugly or tired or unwilling, you are thrown out. Not the nice-pension-with-benefits thrown out. The Neon Court is everything to those in it, life and bread and universe. Thrown out is on-the-streets-without-a-toothbrush thrown out. It is old age—very briefly—without friends. And that’s just what happens if Lady Neon is bored with you. Christ knows what happens when she’s angry.”

“And what about the Midnight Mayor?” he replied. “I don’t hear about many of your kind living to collect benefits.”

“You’ll watch your tongue,” sighed Dees, as light as a summer spring, “if you hope to keep it attached to your gullet.”

Sulky silence resumed.

Bakker said, “He makes a valid point, Matthew. You are already aware that you are going to die in this service. Five years? Ten perhaps, if you are lucky? Of course, your life expectancy would be hugely increased if you were capable of a few essential management skills. If you were able, for example, to put your faith in other people, delegate! But then, how you would moan when others died the death that had been waiting for you. Your level, Matthew, is perpetual NCO.”

Theydon said, “Do we have a plan to find the chosen one? Besides, I mean, attempting to cross into a part of the city judged to be either non-existent or utterly inaccessible?”

“Mr Mayor?” prompted Dees.

“Yeah,” I lied. “There’s a plan.”

“Care to share?” suggested Theydon.

“No.”

“Of course”—Bakker again—“if there really was a chosen one, then she’d probably stand out like a bonfire in Antarctica. But there isn’t, is there? After all, chosen one equals a god doing the choosing equals a higher power equals a plan equals a purpose equals a point to this universe, which of course there isn’t. Can’t be. For if it were, then you and I would both be utterly damned.”

“Why these shoes?” asked Dees suddenly. She was wearing a politely quizzical look and holding up the pair of ridiculous red shoes in which she’d limped down Grays Inn Road.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” I said. “The night bus—this night bus—obeys the rules of its more mundane counterparts in one other way.”

“Being…?”

“It’ll only ever come when it’s absolutely pissing down, you’re freezing cold, soaking wet, and horribly uncomfortable and frankly you’ve given up on the bus ever coming and just decided to walk home while wearing the world’s worst shoes. And even then, it’ll only come when you’re a good hundred yards off the nearest bus stop and you’re going to have to belt it to reach the stop in time.”

“The spell to summon the night bus is based on pain?” asked Theydon.

“No no no no no!” I replied. “You’ve missed the point. The night bus is about alleviation of pain, it is the revelation, the relief, that thing that comes when nothing else is running and when you’ve reached the absolute depths of misery, the thing that saves you! Unfortunately, of course, you have to be at the depths of misery already, in order to be plucked out of them. Sorry about that.”

Sulky silence all around.

Then the woman, the little Chinese woman with the friendly smile, leant forward and said, “Excuse me?”

We all turned. She nodded politely to each of us and then, her smile not even wavering, nodded to where Bakker sat and said, “Good evening, I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

“It’s the night bus,” I replied with a shrug. “It’s a great place for social weird.”

“I couldn’t help overhearing you talk; am I right in thinking, ma’am, that you’re an Alderman?”

“Yes,” replied Dees carefully. “May I be of assistance?”

“Such an honour to meet you!” exclaimed the lady. “You know, I’ve admired your work for nearly two hundred years.”

“Oh… well, I’d love to take credit for all that,” mumbled Dees. “But, alas, you know how linear temporal mechanics generally relate to the human lifespan…”

“And you!” added the lady, cheerfully turning her attention to Theydon. “May I say that you look fabulous for your age. If Mr Wong and I didn’t have such fantastic sex, I would, I must admit, find your glamour irresistible, your charm utterly tempting. What do you put in your eye cream? Newborn babe’s blood, or something a bit richer?”

Theydon blurted, “Who the hell are you?”

Her face crinkled, disappointed at his rudeness. “Oh dear,” she sighed. “Only a little time now until her ladyship grows bored of you, and then they’ll laugh. Drip drip drip goes the cistern and knock knock knock no one to answer the door. So sad. But! Can’t be helped, really, can it?”

Finally she turned to me, and her beam was a lighthouse on a foggy night. “And you!” she exclaimed. “All three of you, busy busy busy!”

“Hi,” I said. “And… hi and hi,” I added helpfully.

“Two corpses and an angel, bless, all wearing one face, and it a sad one.”

Bakker leant in suddenly, held out his hand to the little woman. “A pleasure to meet you, ma’am; may I say, as one dimensionally challenged soul to another, it is an honour.”

She attempted to shake his hand, but her fingers just passed through thin air. “Whoops,” she chuckled. “Difficult difficult difficult, isn’t it?”

Theydon breathed, “The woman is mad.”

Dees’ face was tight, every part of her scrunched in concentration. “No,” she murmured. “Not mad. Not that.”

“You fine people wouldn’t be adventuring to battle unspeakable evil, would you?”

“Oh, no evil is unspeakable!” replied Bakker. “How may you fight a thing if you will not name it?”

“True, so true,” sighed the woman. “First time on the night bus?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“No,” added Bakker.

“Well, for those of you who do have corporeal frames which may sustain injury,” she said cheerfully, “may I advise holding on tight to something?”

Dees opened her mouth to put a question.

I held on.

Something in the engine beneath us went clunk.

Something bright and sodium flared in the condensation on the glass.

Then the fist of a giant curled round the shell of the bus, picked us up in all defiance of gravity’s whims, and shook. We were snowflakes in a glassy globe. My feet hit the ceiling and my head found itself staring down at the floor as the bus lurched out from underneath me, knuckles white on the cold metal of the handrail on the back of the bench. My stomach had just about managed to catch up when the entire contraption tilted onto one side and the grip I had with one hand failed, swinging me round like a pendulum. I caught the upright bar of a handhold in passing, hooked my elbow into it; and someone had tied stones to my legs, was trying to drag the entire bus sideways with the inexorable slide of lead weights. The lights inside were flashing with an epilepsy-provoking pulse, and as I tried to crawl my way upwards, one inch at a time, wrapping myself round the bar I’d found, I could see the words dancing in the condensation on the window glass, changing with every lightning strike of fluorescent flashing white

Did not…

Have not…

Meant to…

Been there…

Saw that…

Theydon was sprawled across the back window, pinned like a butterfly, his spreading coat a pair of glorious red wings. He’d drawn one of his short stabbing glass swords, beer-bottle green, but had nothing to strike at, and each time he tried to raise his head he fell back, crushed beneath an invisible mass. The little Chinese lady sat as calmly as before, her body at ninety degrees to the angle at which I dangled, so it appeared to me for all the world as if she protruded from the wall. She was smiling away with a hint of regret, as if apologising for her lack of team spirit in not getting involved. Of Bakker and Dees I could see no sign.

Then the bus lurched again, flinging us back to something resembling an upright position. My knees slammed against the floor, my head bounced against the back of a bench, my grasp loosened and I dropped down, dazed. The lights inside the bus were out, but cold grey light from outside diffused through the mist on the glass and, by its glow, I could see that the bus was now packed. Dozens, hundreds of people, maybe more, pressed in on top of each other, inside each other, folded out and over and around each other, one seat carrying five people whose shadowy forms had blended into one, and who were only distinguishable by here the move of three arms not two, or there the nod of another head emerging from the first. So many were crushed together that there was no one clear feature or face in the entire pile, but rather formless ridges and dunes of grey skin. I was trapped in a maze of pale legs, bumped and bustled all around; and this in silence. Not a voice, not a breath, not an engine stirred. I eased my way up, found that the figures around me were just a whisper cooler than room temperature, and at my passage they parted easier than air. The little Chinese woman was gone, but there was, perhaps, a shadow that might have been like her, sitting in a medley of shadows on the bench where she had been. I could partly see Theydon, his arm lying limp, the fingers bent and loose. Gravity’s resumption of normal service had dumped him at the foot of the stairs. I made my way through the shadows, until I reached the front of the bus. There was no indication of anything else alive. I went to wipe away the mist from the window and look outside, and hesitated.

Below the palm of my hand, dribbling water, someone had, once upon a time, written these words:

We be light, we be life, we be fire!

We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!

Come be me and be free!

We be blue electric angels.

We drew our hand back, watched the drops of water running down from the letters distort the characters below.

A hand fell on our shoulder. It was cold; colder by far than the grey ghosts packed a hundred to a dozen into the seats of the bus. Its nails were cracked and thick, stained sickly yellow. Its fingers were long, ridged skin over thin bone. It gripped hard, tight, deep. I looked up and saw the reflection of its owner’s face in the glass. Thin. Grey. Withered. Teeth rotting. Hair falling out. Eyes a familiar watery grey. The face grinned. Those rotting teeth were still sharp, a dark tongue passing behind their battlements.

The voice said, “Hungry!!”

I tried to turn and push him away but he already had his mouth at my throat, his fingers in my spine. I felt hot pain break out in the soft hollow between my shoulder and my neck, tasted phlegm and blood and bile thick enough to suffocate, screamed and scrabbled at his face, tried to bury our fingers in his eyes. We found something that yielded in his features, and the hot pain became cold as, with a shriek of rage, Hunger, Bakker’s shadow, the thing that had come alive as he started to die, resisted. Still trying to turn, we found electric flame flickering unbidden to our fingertips, hairs standing up on end, the smell of gas in our nose and taste of dust on our tongue; but his hands curled like a vice around our skull and slammed us temple first into the thick glass of the window. Static burst across my vision and for a moment I saw out of the corner of my eye

STOP! CHILDREN CROSSING!

and heard

engines rumbling louder than cracking earth

and saw

headlights swerving to avoid the outline of a child

too late

and then the floor was there, I was landing on the floor, breath knocked out of me. We tried to force ourself up, but the frame of flesh that we were trapped in, sluggish and mortal and sick and slow, wasn’t obeying our commands. Hunger’s hands caught us by the throat, pulled us round so he could see into our eyes. His face filled our world, his breath was rotting stomach-sick, and he said, “More fire?”

I closed my eyes.

He shook us, and we could feel blood swerve and dribble down the side of our head.

“More fire?” he breathed.

Hard to think through pain.

We reached inside ourself, caught a fistful of sickness, found the needle-sharp point of pain at the front of our skull, focused on it until it became a throbbing, a burning, a raging pinpoint of flame.

“Beautiful blue angels,” whimpered Hunger. “Just want to live, is that so bad? Just want to live…”

We opened our eyes.

Sapphire brilliance across our vision, and we could see him clearly now, the thing that was Bakker-Hunger, could see straight through him, dust and shadow, right out the other side and we laughed, and the engine of the bus roared with our laughter, shook and hummed and spat back into life, and the mist of the windows of the bus dribbled and flowed downhill, sweeping the glass clean to reveal a giddy chaos of light outside that bore no relation to geography, space, time, or any of those piddling mortal considerations that humans liked to wrap themselves in.

We found our hands free to move, reached up and grabbed Hunger by the throat, saw his eyes flicker and widen in fear; and our fingers were on fire, blue electric fire that spun and twisted down the length of our arm, made our spine hum like cables in a storm, sent sparks flickering off us with each move we made, filled the air around us with the snapping of electric flame, made the air freeze with each breath we took. Hunger scrabbled at us, trying to pull himself free, but we held on, clung to his ghostly neck as his fingers of nothing scratched and clawed, picked ourself up, pulled him up until his feet no longer touched the ground, and the air around us bent and shimmered with the flame, we could feel it burning across our back, and for a moment, in the reflection from the window

I saw a creature that wasn’t human

Beautiful

Burning blue fire

Laughing as it throttled a shadow

Pair of angel wings in blue electric flame

Not human

Not me

And the creature in our grasp had Robert Bakker’s face, and Robert Bakker’s weak withered old arms were scrabbling at ours, and his old face was turning beetroot purple, then dry-ice blue: his lips, then the hollows of his eyes, then the rest of his skin, and he wheezed, “Matthew! Please!”

We just laughed, and squeezed a little harder, felt his not-flesh collapse beneath our grasp.

Then something moved at the back of the bus.

It picked itself up, stretched.

It had metal skin, silver-steel metal skin, laced with veins of red. Its breath was thick black smoke, its tongue was lizard-licking, its hair metal strands that stood up like poisoned spines, its eyes burning red madness. It said, in a voice that rattled like a misfiring engine in the night, “Mr Mayor?”

We were aware of pain in the palm of our right hand.

Curious, we looked at it.

A pair of twin red crosses, carved into skin.

They ached.

“Mr Mayor?” repeated the creature of metal skin. The light was bending around it, too frightened to come any nearer than it had to, and in the shadows that formed at its feet, things tried to crawl their way out of the darkness.

I opened our fingers.

Bakker/Hunger collapsed backwards, wheezing, clawing at his throat, gasping for air.

I stared at the crosses in the palm of my hand, then at the thing, not exactly human, not exactly dragon, stuck somewhere in between, that stood at the back of the bus. I whispered, “Dees?”

The blue electric fires began to go out.

The lights outside began to fade, until all that remained was the blue electric glow that rose off our skin.

“Dees?” I added, and there was just a shadow at the end of the bus, still and dark, no red fire in it any more. “I hit my head,” I complained.

And then, even the blue fires went out, plunging the bus into the dark.

There was a sign outside the window.

It was the first thing I saw.

It said:

Halal

Open 24/7

Next to it, picked out in little blue and green LEDs was the picture of a happy smiling man eating a hot dog over and over and over again.

Then it passed in the night.

The lights, yellow anonymous lights, flickered back on, one at a time, running up the length of the bus. Theydon was crawling to his feet in the stairwell. He looked breathless, ragged. His hair had fallen free from its perfect slicked-back shape and there were long dark streaks of dye running down his face like blood from a scalp wound. As we looked, we saw traces of grey in the edges of his hair, thin traces of pallor in the former perfection of his looks. He met our eyes, and quickly looked away, sweeping his hands back and over his face: and that was it, all streaks of dye and hints of grey immediately gone, banished as he restored his perfect mask of youth. But we had seen, and he knew it.

Dees said, “Well… that was informative.” She was sat by the stairwell, doing up the buttons on her sleeve, as normal-looking as a woman with no shoes can ever be on a bus in the middle of the night. She said, “Injuries? Anyone?”

Theydon deposited himself on a seat opposite her and said, “No.”

She looked at me. I mumbled, “Fine.”

“You appear to be bleeding, Mr Mayor,” she replied.

I felt my neck. The blood was already sticky, like half-dried glue. I felt a little lower. The skin felt hot, burnt. I wiped my hands clean on my trousers, tried to pull my coat a little tighter around my neck. “I’ll live,” I said.

“Of course you will, Mr Mayor,” replied Dees. “You’re very good at that.”

I looked round for Bakker.

Not there.

Theydon said, “Is that going to happen again?”

I saw that there was a pair of handprints pressed onto the glass, fingers too long, glass scratched by the too-long nails. I could just hear, over the sound of the engine, the pattering of falling rain, see water being dragged backwards along the glass by the pull of the wind. I took a deep breath, and swept the condensation clear from the glass, obliterating the marks as I went.

Theydon and Dees moved closer, pressing up against the glass to see the world outside.

Rain.

Hard to see for all the rain.

The drains had given up long ago, water pooling in dirty lakes, spilling across the pavements, pushing against doors, ankle-deep. Dead leaves spun and twisted as we swished along roads where the street lamps had forgotten to burn, just a dull wire-thin glow of lingering red within each light. Behind the windows of the houses there was no sign of life. Not a pedestrian walked in the streets. Not a car moved, but sat like crocodiles in deep mud. The only light came from the bus headlamps, slicing out two cones of white in the dark, and from the occasional shop sign. Nothing moved except us, not a man, woman, rat nor fox.

I breathed, “We’re here,” and rang the bell.

There was a bus shelter.

On the roof of the shelter someone had thrown a child’s toy, a bright blue rattle, that sat in a black-encrusted dirty pool of water which had overspilt the roof and was now running in waterfalls all around the shelter.

Inside the shelter the light had gone out.

The light had gone out everywhere.

And as the night bus pulled away, its windows the only brightness in this place, even that light faded.

I closed my fingers into a fist, put what little warmth I had into the hollow of my hand, opened it out. Pink-sodium light bloomed, rose up from my fingers, hovered at head height, snapping and fizzing with every drop of water that splattered across its surface. When I moved, it moved, providing a small circle of illumination around me. I could see the timetables and local maps fixed to the inside of the shelter. Their paper was thin and grey, curling up where the rain had got in. Across the timetable, someone had stuck a yellow piece of paper proclaiming:

NO BUSES TODAY.

NO BUSES EVER.

I heard Theydon’s sigh.

I glanced at him, and saw that, even though he wasn’t inside my bubble of light, he still had about him a glow, no source, no colour, but he was still clearly visible as if what little light there was had decided to be his friend, let the rest of the world suffer. My eyes moved to Dees, and her eyes, when she tilted her head to one side, flashed bright like a cat’s in the night, though I had seen no cat’s eyes ever flicker that shade of red.

I looked back at one of the maps on the wall.

Sidcup.

In all the excitement, I hadn’t really noticed us arrive.

“Where now, Mr Mayor?” asked Dees.

“Back to where it all began,” I sighed. “Back to the tower block.”

Our footsteps were too loud.

There is no silence as dead as the sound of the engine stopping, no silence so complete as the city when the traffic stops moving. For chirruping country insects the city made human voices constant in the night; for the rustle of leaves and wind there were air vents in the sides of buildings; for the sound of mud underfoot, the clip clip clip of hard soles on tarmac. There should always be something, somewhere, making noise in the city.

Just not tonight.

We didn’t talk as we walked.

We were all too busy minding the sound of our feet, contemplating the simple fact that our light was probably the brightest thing in this black landscape, a beacon to all the nasties that weren’t making themselves known in the dark.

We walked down the middle of the road, following the broken white line, in a place where traffic should have been. The rain was unstoppable. It gurgled and splattered in the gutters, dug momentary craters in the puddles, dripped off rooftops and pooled in abandoned half-dug-out holes in the road. Our wandering light passed over dead curling posters offering beer, six cans for £4, wine, £3.99 a bottle, advertising wholesalers of wigs, makers of bead jewellery, packagers of Chinese rice crackers, purveyors of Turkish olive oil by the gallon, launderettes and chippies, hairdressers showing the same photo of the same bright-eyed man with the same charismatic-yet-domestic haircut beaming out of the window; and local stores where you can top up your mobile phone, your Oyster card, pay your gas bill, call New Zealand and get a special offer on fabric conditioner too.

I took out my A–Z guide to London and turned to Sidcup.

The page, which had been blank, was now full, drawn in black dribbling ink, as if the map itself was turning to liquid.

“It’s fine,” I announced. “Burnt-out remains of a tower block, one of three, near a motorway. Dead easy to find.”

We kept on walking.

After a while Dees said, “Where are the people?”

I shrugged.

We walked a little further.

Then Theydon added, “We’re being watched.”

No one broke stride.

The road was tending downhill; by my pink travelling light I found a large reflective board declaring that this was the way to Rochester, Dover, Folkestone and the Channel Tunnel, please drive carefully. As we passed the shuttered door of a pub, Dees made a little sound, and we stopped.

There was a figure curled up in the doorway, a sodden sleeping bag drawn up around its shoulders. A thin pale face, lined with thinner blue veins, was visible underneath a stained woolly hat. The eyes were closed, but the woman was still breathing.

“Wake her?” asked Dees.

“If you can,” I replied.

She knelt by the woman, brushed her shoulder, shook her gently. No reaction. She touched the woman’s cheek, leant in, whispered, “Excuse me?” Raised her voice. “Miss? Miss?”

Nothing.

Theydon said, “Let me try.”

Doubtfully, Dees stood back. The man in the red coat knelt down by the woman’s side, considered her face, then leant down and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

Nothing.

“It won’t work, you know.”

Bakker was standing next to her in the doorway, nonchalant as anything, not a hair out of place. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small orange bottle, thumbed the lid off, and tipped a couple of triangular white pills into his palm. Theydon straightened up, a look of confusion passing over his face at his failure to wake the woman. Bakker downed the pills with the ease of habit.

“You can’t wake them up. This is Blackout’s territory now,” explained Bakker. “Endless night. This is what you find on the other side of the wall, this is what the city will be, when the sun doesn’t come up. Sleeping until the rain washes away the streets, the city, and them.”

“It should have…” mumbled Theydon.

“The rules are different here” was the nearest to comfort that Dees could manage.

“You’re all going to drown, Matthew,” explained Bakker as we turned away from the still-sleeping woman. “That’s how it ends, for this city, you know. The lights will go out, the river will rise and wash away the last trace of sleepy mankind, and you’ll all drown.”

“Bakker’s back,” I growled out of the corner of my mouth as we walked on.

“Who?” demanded Theydon.

“He left?” added Dees.

“Is there someone else…?” Theydon tried again.

“Never mind.”

“And when you—if you—find this chosen one?” asked Bakker, falling into step beside me. “You know,” he went on, when I didn’t reply, “the whole silent treatment is going to get you nowhere. I understand that you’re not in a hurry for our esteemed colleague”—a nod to Theydon—“to appreciate just how mentally unstable you are right now, or indeed, how unstable in every possible way, but this is hardly a profitable attitude to our relationship.” His footsteps did nothing to disturb the surface of the puddles; he was the driest thing in South London.

We kept on walking.

“Murderer,” said Bakker, not unkindly.

Walking.

“Hypocrite,” he added.

Still walking here.

“Inhuman in human skin.”

My fists clenched.

“Human with inhuman thoughts.”

We looked at him then, straight in the eye, and he was grinning, knowing how we’d react, watching it, waiting for us; we could feel the electricity trying to get out of our skin, burn and rage.

“Not coping very well with mortality, are you? And, heaven help you, all the things that come with it! All these feelings, all that pain, skin, flesh—saliva. How does a creature as glorious as the blue electric angels deal with the fact that its body is constantly secreting substances: sweat, saliva, piss, tears, snot, puke; it’s utterly repulsive, when you consider it. Which I imagine you don’t. Not if you can help it.”

We dragged our gaze away, focused on each step in front of us.

“Farting is a particularly gross physical reaction,” added Bakker. “I don’t know why people find it funny. Every decent society since time began has been rightly ashamed of the urge to fart. So many bodily reactions we can’t control! I mean look at the pair of us. You and I, Matthew, could, if we chose, in our lifetimes have set the sky on fire. We can stop the hearts of our enemies, fill the streets with electric flame, summon barbed wire and boiling water from the pipes below us, clad our skins in concrete and still breathe, inhale exhaust off the back of the buses and with it brew a potion of sizzling oil that could power a plane from here to Shanghai and back again. And can we stop a simple little fart? Can we nothing.”

The sole of my left foot itched, an insufferable, impossible itch. In the window of a Chinese takeaway, the outline of a cat’s paw bobbed up and down in a perpetual Nazi salute, promising good luck, or many riches, or a decent dish of sweet and sour, or maybe none of the above. In the back seat of a Fiat parked on the side of the road, a mother lay asleep, child bundled in her arms, uncomfortable posture promising the pins and needles of a lifetime when she woke, if she woke. An opening up of the darkness ahead revealed a sad patch of grass. Wet litter blew through thick mud dotted with thin tufts of green. We could smell an old dead smell on the air, black and dry, cutting through even the wash of the rain. I threw my light up higher, bigger, until it cast a circus-sized tent of light across the ground around us. The shadows didn’t cave away. They scuttled, catching hints of giddy shapes at the edge of the light that bore no relation to nature. The rain stung my eyes.

There was a fence. It was covered with sagging posters for bands, comics, faiths and politics, the inks dissolving one into the other.

If you don’t vote

… for DJ Sax And His Sexy Babes…

… what is the meaning of…

twice winner of…

… entry £6 before midnight, £10 after…

There was a hole in the fence, cracked wood. I crawled through. Concrete on the other side, broken by the odd feeble tuft of grass, drowning in oil-slick thick rain. My light hit an obstacle, and spread upwards.

The obstacle was grey, stained black, its walls embedded with grit plastered over, as if the architect had decided that here was a building destined for cracks and unevenness, so why not embrace the idea at an early stage and make it an effect of art, not time? The ground-floor windows were covered over with thick, lightless metal grilles. The door had at some point been covered with plywood, which had then been ripped off in recent times and thrown to one side. A chain had been smashed off by repeated blows and left to hang from the metal door handles of the main entrance. Nothing to steal, go ahead and try. I looked up. Somehow, the tower, square and squat, had seemed a lot taller when I was jumping off it. From the fourth floor up, the windows were burnt black, like ash lips around a surprised square.

Theydon said, “Minjae San died here.”

I thought of the sound the glass blade had made as it entered Minjae’s back.

“She wouldn’t have been able to kill him without you, you know,” offered Bakker, casually leaning up against the wall by the door.

“Sure,” I muttered. “The Court and the Tribe, both summoned to this place by a phone call about the ‘chosen one’; and like monkeys you both come and whaddayouknow, some idiot’s brought petrol.”

“The Tribe attacked us.”

“Sure. They said to themselves, ‘Hey, that looks like a harmless bunch of sword-carrying wankers, let’s go banzai on their asses.’ ”

“Arses,” corrected Bakker. “We are not Americans, Matthew, regardless of the TV we watch.”

“You prefer the Tribe’s ugliness? Their destruction, loathing, self-contempt?”

“Gentlemen,” interjected Dees, “considering that we are, at this exact moment in time, trapped in an endless night outside the laws of geography, could we save this diplomatic discussion for another time?”

“Pragmatism pragmatism pragmatism,” I grumbled, marching up to the door and kicking it open. Broken glass swept back before it: glass from the door itself, glass from the lights that had popped, and tumbled from the ceiling beyond. The water had got in here too, dirty water full of wriggling dirt that twisted like worms with each drop from a torn pipe or cracked ceiling. The doors to a lift, coffin-sized, stood half-open, revealing a black fall with a short stop below, cables hanging limp and crooked. Thin brown mould had worked its way into every contour of every dirty tile on the dirty floor, but still there was the lingering smell of burnt metal and carbon, drying out the mouth even as the water drip drip dripped onto the floor. I tried the stairs cautiously, and felt only solid concrete beneath my feet. There was a slow hiss behind me. Theydon had drawn his short stabbing swords, one of green glass, one of brown. The air had the common sense to run away from the edge of their blades. In the gloom, his eyes clearly reflected with a lilac tint. The claws were back on Dees’ fingers too, no doubting it now, nails turned to thick black bone, sharpened to a point, skin on the top of her hand half mortal, half metal, eyes flecked with mad dragon red, thin black smoke turning on the air every time she exhaled, like she’d not just smoked the cigarette but swallowed it too. She was between me and Theydon. I wondered if even a daimyo’s glass blade could penetrate the metal back of an Alderman.

We climbed.

On the second floor, in the middle of the landing, was a dark eaten-out patch of concrete, seared deep and black. The smell of petrol was still strong here, and something else, a lingering trace of something just on the edge of sense, a taste of magic. I glanced at Theydon. “Your lot regularly use petrol to start fires?” I asked.

“The Tribe do,” he replied.

I grunted in reply, kept on climbing. The metal handrails of the stair had been twisted by the heat, warped out of shape. A plastic bag had caught itself on a broken shard of glass in the window. Water ran down the inside walls.

A sound, one floor above; probably no louder than a cup falling on carpet, and to us, in that place, the sound of thunder. Our heart started running for the exit, leaving us behind; I heard Dees’ breath, Theydon’s coat move as every muscle tightened.

“Rat?” asked Dees when no more noise came.

“No,” I answered softly. “They’re sleeping too.”

A sound.

This one, unlike the other, had meaning.

It went

Clop. Clop clop. Clop.

We stood. We listened.

It seemed to listen back.

Then it moved again.

Hard and sharp on concrete. Black dust trickled from a crack in the ceiling above us.

Footsteps.

Walking overhead.

Theydon said, “The chosen one?”

“You wish,” I growled.

“Then who?”

“If you see a woman with a hole in her heart, try not to look her in the eyes, OK?”

“You talk in riddles,” he snapped.

“See this serious face?” I asked. He looked. He saw. Something crawled away behind his eyes. “Don’t look,” we repeated. “You’ll die if you do.”

Footsteps.

Not overhead.

They’d moved without seeming to move. Beneath us now. A door banged back and forth on its shattered hinges.

Stopped.

Then again, just one set of feet, somewhere in the distance, now, far off, but not getting any further away.

I found that our hand was itching with electric energy. I squatted down and ran my hand over the black dirt of the stairs, rubbing it between my fingers, scratching under my nails with the dry sound of thick chalk on an old board. I licked my fingertips and for a moment tasted

heat

back blister heat flesh crinkle and curl

fire

too bright

smoke

Help me?

black dropping ash tongue to ash skin to ash

carbon in the lungs too tight to breathe every breath hurts

Kill me?

feet running in the dark help me?

grey eyes

eyes turned to blood

grey eyes

paint on the wall, letters running in the blaze

JG WOZ ERE

I straightened, wiped my fingers on my trousers. “Your Minjae San—he got a tip-off sending him here?”

“Yes.”

“And the Tribe were already here?”

“Yes.”

“And that didn’t strike you as odd?” I sighed.

“Mr Mayor,” interjected Dees before Theydon could get into a proper fume. “Your meaning?”

“JG woz ere,” I repeated. “I saw it on the walls. The girl was here. Oda said ‘Where’s the girl?’, but none of the bodies brought out of the fire were hers. She was alive when the tower burnt, she was alive when it finished burning. I think I can find her.”

Footsteps. Scuttling, running overhead, picking up speed and stopping as quickly as they’d begun.

“Do we need to be here for you to do that?” murmured Dees.

“This building is the only connection I have to your damned chosen one,” I replied. “It’s the only link I can use. Ignore the footsteps. Oda seems to be on a slow-killing bent these days.”

I started to climb, but Theydon’s arm reached up and caught mine, a grip that went straight down to the bone. “Wait. This… Oda… is the creature Blackout?”

“Yeah.”

“And what do you mean, she asked you ‘Where’s the girl?’ ”

My eyes flickered to Dees, for just a moment, and she half shook her head. We looked back at Theydon, straight in the eye, and his grip slackened. “Your life will be easier and simpler,” we answered, “if you just stick with the war.” We pulled our arm free, and I started to climb before he could object at our empty half-words delivered in the dark.

No footsteps.

Another floor up.

Nothing but falling rain tapping in through broken windows across burnt-out floors.

On the next stairway up, Bakker stood, leaning out of the shattered, scorched remains of a window, one hand turned up to the sky, trying to catch the rain. He blocked the stair. We walked straight through him.

“Rude,” he remarked as we passed by.

Next floor.

I stopped, hesitated.

“It all looks so different when not actually in flame, doesn’t it?” remarked Bakker, coming up beside me. Everything that had once been wood, door or frame, was now a black tooth, sliced to scraggly spikes. Everything that had once been metal, handle or wire, was withered out of shape. Everything that had once been clean, or cleanish, was now black, eating up the thin light my bubble of illumination cast. I started walking down the corridor, past doors to flats long since cleaned out, shattered remnants of gone lives, TV glass smashed out, sofa of burnt springs, glass melted from an empty picture frame.

Footsteps ran beneath us.

I thought I heard a woman laugh, or maybe cry, or maybe neither.

I pushed back what remained of a door. It creaked like the granite eyelids of a mountain opening after a long sleep. Dust and flakes of powdered wood trickled between my fingers.

The fire had burnt away the last trace of Oda’s blood, but we knew this was the room.

Beneath us, a door slammed.

Dees said, “Something’s coming.”

I knelt on the burnt floor, scorched down to tortured concrete. It shifted beneath my weight, a stiff stone mattress feeling its age. I ran my hand over it.

“How do we kill it?” asked Theydon. “The thing outside?”

I looked around for Bakker. He wasn’t there.

“Sorcerer!” A note of frightened urgency in his voice. “How do we kill it?”

“Her,” I replied softly. “How do we kill her.”

Our fingers running along the floor brushed a place rougher than the rest. There was power, thick, hot power, a sauna without the moisture, burning without light. It made it hard to breathe. My hand hurt. Right hand, where the scars were. I pulled off my glove. The thin scars, twin crosses of the Midnight Mayor, were filling with tiny lines of blood.

Outside, there was the sound of something whispering. Not a voice. Not dust falling. But something somewhere in between. I glanced over my shoulder. Theydon stood by the door, shoulders hunched like an animal. Dees’ skin had a silver sheen to it, her features distorted, bones too sharp, nails too black, eyes too red. Aldermen, when trying to scare, took on some of the aspects of the city’s dragon, that old symbol meant to guard the gates. It hadn’t occurred to us that Aldermen would do the same when they were afraid.

I ran my hand along the floor, feeling in a wide arc around me.

The sound of whispering was now something more, not feathered wings, not wind full of snow, not quite human, but alive, and coming closer.

My fingers brushed something sticky. I pulled them closer to my face, examining the substance by the thin light. It looked almost black, was tough, barely liquid at all, and stuck to itself like dried glue. I looked closer. Flecks of red shimmered, caught the light, seemed to wriggle, writhe, try to burst out of each other like a living thing and flicker a dull electric blue. I looked down at the ground. Something was moving beneath me, trying to crawl off the floor, surfacing and falling like the back of a maggoty whale. I pressed my hand into it and it responded, a sudden flare of brightness, brilliant red, writhing crimson, spread out beneath my fingers and traced across the blackness, the raggedy outline of twin crosses, drawn in blood.

A foot moved next to me. A pair of suit trousers, knee bent, as Bakker squatted down on the other side of the cross. We saw how he pulled his trousers smartly up around his ankles, keeping everything neat and creased. “Fascinating,” he murmured, as the blood of the twin crosses wriggled and wormed to life beneath my fingers. “You know, it occurs to me, Matthew, that the power of the Midnight Mayor is one whose potential you’ve never fully grasped.”

I could taste dust on my lips, feel a wind, hotter and faster than the one that came with the rain, coming our way, and now the sound was a whooshing, a rush of something fast and dense moving on the wind, trying to push and pull all at once. The blood on the floor was moving too, spilling out of its ridged shape, flowing like water downhill, but there was no down to encourage it, sending out little tendrils of liquid like a nervous lake that wishes it had managed to do the river thing. Dees hissed, “Matthew!”

“Nearly there,” I replied.

“Matthew!”

I heard her moving, felt the heat now, like the touch of moonlight, only the moon had got envious of its bigger brother and was doing the thermal thing with a vengeance.

A tendril of rolling red blood reached a crack in the concrete, slim and black, a fault line, paused, pooled, reached critical mass, and went, drip. I bent down until my nose almost touched the floor, peering into that crack.

Drip.

Another little red bead fell away. I could feel Bakker beside me, watching, and as I closed one eye tight and scrunched down right below, I saw that drop of blood fall, and keep on falling, down and down and down into a blackness further and darker and deeper than the tower block itself, before the distance travelled blotted out its light.

I breathed, “Damn.”

Then Dees’ hand was on my shoulder, yanking me up and there was a roaring in the corridor outside and heat that made my skin try to shrink in on itself and Theydon was yelling, or had perhaps been yelling all along and there was smoke pouring in through the door and a shaking underfoot and above and dust falling all around and Dees screamed, “There’s something…”

Then it was in the doorway, moving so fast and so hot it blasted the hinges off the door frame, smoke and dust and dirt and ash that bloomed hot red before folding in on itself. I curled up tight, and our hands were in front of our face, throwing up a wall of thick colder air against the blast. It was like trying to stop a lorry with tissue paper. I rocked back as the blast hit, filling my world with smoke, above and on all sides, blotting out the rest of the world, pushing in at the little bubble I’d thrown up and the fire in the blood on the floor was blotted out and our hand hurt, it hurt so much and we could hardly breathe, not enough air in our bubble, a few lungfuls at best, and we were breathing too fast, unable to stop ourselves. The moisture in our bubble turned to steam and curled around our face, stung our eyes, burnt our skin. I could see the cracks in the floor spreading, breaking out and expanding beneath my feet and a few more seconds of this and we’d have to breathe again, and when we did the magic at our fingers would fail and we’d breathe fire and smoke and die burnt from the inside out. I couldn’t see Theydon or Dees, couldn’t see anything beyond my own hands, curled in around my face, not an inch of air left between them and the fire. We shuddered and tried to force our bubble of air wider, give ourself more space to move, but the air was already burning out and we felt a rush like petrol sucked from the engine as the breath was sucked from our lungs with the effort. We screamed our rage, pushed harder, saw the ash buckle and burst around us, pushed again, saw it retreat a few precious inches, raised our head and roared sapphire fury, and without so much as a sigh it split, burst and rolled around us, spat out of the shattered windows and tumbled away into the night, leaving nothing more than sickly brown curling hot vapours rolling over the floor.

We slumped forward, the sweat that had been too hot to prickle before bursting out on our skin. The floor was too hot for skin to touch; it stung through our trousers, made the soles of our shoes sticky. We staggered, coughing and gasping in the sickly-tasting air, looking for the others. Something moved in a corner. A thing half woman, half something else entirely, the clothes on its back barely clinging black rags, its silver skin covered in ash and dirt, its hair stiff metal, its eyes mad red, its fingers adorned with black claws. The bones of its spine stood up like shark teeth, and its knees were bent back the wrong way. It watched us, and there was animal madness in its eye, every part of it quivering with power and rage.

I breathed, “Dees?” and took an uneasy step forward.

A lizard tongue, blood red, licked the air. A voice, human only in that it used the language, hissed, “Only just.” Her head moved, sharp and fast, like an animal hearing a thing beyond human sense. One finger, a joint too many set in the bones, unrolled towards a shape in the corner. I crawled towards it, a smell on our senses that we did not choose to name. A red coat, burnt almost to nothing. Knees tucked up to chin, arms wrapped around face like a child afraid of the dark. Still breathing. Just. I knelt down by it, reached out uneasily, rolled one arm back. It resisted. I hissed, “Theydon! Theydon look at me!”

If anything, the limbs locked tighter.

“Look at us!” we snarled.

An arm moved aside. The head turned. There was a hole in his face. It started just below his left eye, where his cheekbone was clearly visible, whiteness protruding between pink tendon and red blood, and ran, criss-crossed only by a few shreds of muscle, to the bottom of his teeth, revealing gum and bone beneath. His left eye was closed, twice the size it should have been, the eyebrow seared away from above it, and his ears seemed to have tried to melt into the flesh around them. I could see the whiteness of three ribs in his chest, and one arm hung crooked, that of a puppet badly strung. He pushed me back, then hunched over himself, hands pressed again to his face. A sound, a moan, came from him. It was the sound of a hurt animal, that rose and rose, until the room was just that wordless mewl. He rocked back and forth, magic blooming and flickering out around him, like a match guttering in the wind. Still the sound kept on, until breathless sobbing changed one sound of pain into stop-start gasps. I crawled back towards him, saw the magic bloom again at his fingers, saw him try to wash his face in it, sweep power over his features, trying to work the glamour. It ran over his skin, settled into the cracks, seemed to linger, and then washed off again like water on oil. I tried to touch him and he swatted my hand away.

“Theydon?”

“Can’t look can’t look can’t look can’t look…” The chant came, low, tumbling out between each ragged gasp.

“Theydon?”

“Can’t look can’t look can’t look can’t see can’t see can’t see…”

“Let me help you.”

“See look see look see look see look…”

“You need a doctor.”

“So bright so bright so bright so bright so bright…”

“You’ll die here. Come on…”

Again I tried to pull him up, again he shook off my hand.

Then Dees was beside me. “Leave him,” she said, her voice the inhuman rattle of the silver-skinned dragon. “He knew the dangers.”

“He’ll die…”

“Yes,” she replied flatly. “It was always likely to be the case.”

We hesitated. Somewhere nearby, we thought we heard a woman laugh. Or maybe cry. Hard to tell. We looked towards the door. I looked back. “Arseholes to that,” I breathed. “I’ve got enough bad karma without adding this.”

She grabbed my arm as I reached forward, and this time her fingers didn’t release me, and her grip was metal, ticking hot metal still adjusting to the changing temperatures around and within it, and her claws bit down into our skin. “Leave him!” she snarled. “Or we will both die here too.”

I looked down at Theydon, still rocking, still sweeping his hands over his face. For a moment, a hint of skin where there was none, a suggestion of wholeness. Then it slipped away, and he was smaller than I had thought him, a little hunched man on the edge of becoming old, rocking, still whispering,

“See look look look look see do you see look look look at me see see see see can’t you see look look!”

We looked away.

We turned our back.

Dees relaxed.

We took a step towards the doorway.

There was a woman standing in it. Her hair was burnt, her skin was cracked, and there was a bloodstain in the middle of her T-shirt, right above her heart. She stammered, “M-Matthew?”

I heard the little hiss of breath as Dees’ back arched to strike. I stepped between them, turning my eyes down to the floor. “Oda?” I breathed, shuffling another step closer, shoulder first.

“Mr Mayor!” snapped Dees, edging after me.

I waved her back. Oda didn’t move, just stood there, bewildered in the sodium light, face turned away from it as if it hurt. Her eyes, we had almost forgotten the black churned-up ruin that was her eyes. One look and we could feel our own begin to burn, so we looked away. Bakker stood by her now, peering intently at her face.

“Oda? Oda, do you know what’s happening?”

“Careful,” breathed Bakker. “Very careful.”

Our hands were nearly touching hers. “Oda? Do you understand? Do you see what’s happening?”

She glanced up, and again our eyes met, and again our eyes burnt, and we flinched away.

“Matthew?” she whimpered. “Can you hear it? Can you hear?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

“Hear it! Can you hear?” She pressed her hands to the sides of her head like she was trying to keep her brain from bursting out. “Listen! All the things that happened in the dark, all the dirty little things, can’t you hear here, hear, here, there hear, listen!”

“Oda, I…”

She grabbed our hands suddenly, pulled us close to her. We couldn’t feel her breath, her skin was clammy cold, we had to close our eyes and look away. I heard Dees start behind me, ready to attack, tasted her smoky breath on the air, laced with deep-down city magic. “Listen! All the things humans do when the lights go out. Can’t you hear them? The dirty, disgusting things, the shameful things, because when the lights go out no one will see you do it, do you see? Sweat and lies and… and… I can’t make it stop, Matthew, I can’t make it stop, hear, do you hear, hear it?”

I shook my head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, Oda, I can’t. Oda, there’s a thing…”

“Why can’t you hear it?” she pleaded, her nails biting into skin as her hands tightened around mine. “Why can’t you hear?”

“Oda, there’s something happening here. There’s a creature, a… a thing called Blackout, it possesses people, takes over their thoughts, their bodies, it’s…”

“Why don’t you ever listen?!” she screamed, and suddenly let go of our hands and slammed her own, palms first, into our chest. I felt the floor go out from beneath my feet, the breath expelled from my lungs, as a force, more than just muscle, slammed into our middle and threw us backwards, landing us with a crunch on the black cracked floor in the middle of the room. I saw something bright and fast move by me and Dees leapt, fingers stretched for Oda, the sound of a thousand burglar alarms at bat-slaughtering frequencies coming from her throat. Oda fell back beneath the weight of her, and for a moment all I could see was fists and claws struggling at each other’s face, a flash of blood and I couldn’t tell whose, spilling out across the floor. I crawled to my feet in time for something dark and hot to bloom between the two women, pick Dees up by the scruff of the neck, throw her against the ceiling, then down onto the floor, then throw her up again like a yo-yo. I shouted, “Oda! Stop it!” and as she staggered back to her feet we gathered electricity to our fingertips, crackling walls of it, and hurled it at her.

It would have set an ordinary human on fire. It slammed into the middle of Oda’s chest and she staggered backwards, blinking and shaking her head, clearing it of sparks. Dees dropped to the floor, smoke pouring out of every metal joint. Oda looked down at Dees, head on one side, curious, then bent down and with one easy fist picked Dees up by the throat and held her, toes barely scraping the ground. “Alderman,” she said, and her voice wasn’t her own. “We remember the Aldermen. They lit lamps to drive us away, thought that was all it would take, just a twist in the angles of the shadows in the dark. Little scuttling mortals who can’t understand that they made us stronger when they grew afraid.”

Dees wheezed, claws scrabbling at Oda’s arms. I saw Oda’s blood seeping from her, but she didn’t flinch, didn’t move. I gathered more electricity about myself, letting the scent of gas fill my nose and the feeling of flame ignite in my belly.

“Oda,” I whispered, “put her down. Put her down now!”

Oda looked past Dees at me, and smiled. Her fingers opened and Dees flopped to the floor, gasping for breath. I realised that my eyes were on hers, felt blood burn in the corners of my eyes, looked away, watching her feet, power dancing off my skin. “Oda,” I breathed. “You know that there’s something inside of you. You know it’s magic, you know it’s bad. There’s still time.”

“Time?” she asked, stepping over the fallen form of Dees and moving towards me. “Time for what? Time to change, time to grow, time to burn, time to brighten, time for day, time for night, time for darkness, time for this, time for there, time for here, time for now, time for us, time for you, time for them…”

“Stop it.”

“Big time little time passing time time standing still time racing time rushing and we never change! All that time! We’ve been waiting for so much time. Do you know what we are?”

She was right in front of us now. The room flickered crazy blue-white with the power running over our skin, ready to strike.

“You’re Blackout,” I breathed. “You’re the thing at the end of the alley.”

“But what does it mean?” she asked.

“The thing that comes with the night.” To my surprise, it wasn’t Oda, or me who had spoken. Bakker stood just behind her, his eyes holding mine, keeping mine away from hers. “Blackout isn’t just the fear of the dark. No one fears the dark. You fear the things that happen in it.”

I felt Oda’s—or the thing that was not Oda’s—fingers run down my arm, exploring it, every dent and line.

“You tell me,” I gasped between breath.

A little sound, almost a croon, a whine, passed between her lips. “I didn’t mean to,” she moaned. “Didn’t mean to it seemed all right at the time, so sorry, so sorry, won’t tell, it wasn’t my fault, wasn’t my fault, no one need ever know what happened here just you and me just you and me and it’s not like anyone cares not here not now we can do anything because no one will ever know anything at all what can you imagine anything at all it doesn’t matter no one will see no one will judge us now the sun’s gone down it wasn’t me wasn’t mine didn’t see isn’t yours hasn’t come didn’t mean couldn’t stop didn’t care mustn’t tell hasn’t heard didn’t didn’t didn’t didn’t didn’t…” She stopped. Her voice was an animal whine. “Do you understand yet? Can you look us in the eye?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I know what you are.”

Her fingers jerked shut around my wrists, shaking now.

“Matthew?” she whimpered. “Do you know how to kill me?”

Sparks snapped from my skin to hers. I could see the clothes on her arm singe and burn where they struck, see little yellow blisters bursting out on the palms of her hands where she touched the fire wrapped round me, and she didn’t seem to care.

Bakker stood behind her, saying nothing.

I looked at him. “Help me?” I asked.

He didn’t move. Didn’t frown, didn’t smile, just stood there.

I looked at Oda. Blood was running down in little tears from the corners of her eyes. I tasted salt on my lips, and realised the same was happening to me. “Can’t,” I whispered. “Can’t. Sorry.”

Her face darkened, drawing tight. Her fingers bit so hard and deep into my skin that I gasped. “Then what use are you?” she snarled, and I couldn’t look away, I tried but I couldn’t, tried to turn my head but there was just mad blood-red blackness and burning and no way out, nothing to hold on to, a great big drop into a great big nothing and we tried to burn and tried to scream and perhaps these things happened, somewhere a long way off, but she didn’t let go, and we kept falling and there was blood on our face and on our lips and then

then a thing with a hole in its face, screaming rage, caught Oda, or the thing that had been Oda, by the throat with one hand and with the other rammed a short glass stabbing blade up to the hilt into her belly.

Her eyes went to it.

I staggered away, covering my face with my hands, wiping blood clear from my burning eyes, ears ringing, the sensation of glass bottles exploding above the bridge of my nose. I heard Oda make a little “uh” sound and glanced back. Theydon was there, her blood soaking his hands, the only thing holding her upright, blade buried so far in you could see the end poking out the other side. She stared at it, then, slowly, looked up and met his eyes. He stared back, face twisted into a grin of tooth and gum, even as his eyes started to bleed. She reached up slowly, put both hands around his face, like a mother holding a child. The grin on his face faded. He began to shake, quiver like paper in a gale, then he closed his eyes—much too late—and screamed, and there was blood running down from his eyes, his nose, his ears, and he screamed and screamed and then just stopped, head on one side, every contorted muscle locked, as if the body didn’t even have the strength to relax, and flopped in her grasp. She let him go and he hit the floor with the final thump of a creature fated not to rise again. Then Oda looked down at the sword rammed through her middle. Carefully, she closed both hands around the hilt and, without a word, drew the blade out. Blood stretched and slid along it. There was the sound of things parting. It came free. She held it up, examining it, running her finger along the edge, testing it. It cut the end of her finger, a thin little slice, and she examined that too.

Bakker said, “Run.”

I didn’t move, couldn’t move.

She sliced it a few times through the air, more curious than anything else, testing its weight.

“Matthew, run!”

She inclined her neck to examine the stab wound in herself, probing it as someone might see how bad a moth hole is in a bit of reasonably regarded clothing.

Bakker was right by me, trying to shake me and making no touch. “Matthew, I am trying to help you; if you want to live, run!”

She pulled her jacket tight around the wound, and looked up.

At us.

At me.

We ran.

Dees was in the corridor outside, half staggering, half crawling, fingers still around her throat. I grabbed her by the armpit and pulled her up; she wheezed as she came, hissed, “Matthew?”

“So much shit as you would not believe!” I sung out, hauling her towards the stairs. “Bloody hell you’re heavy when you’re doing the dragon thing.”

“Blackout…” she stuttered.

“Yeah, about that. She’s got a stab wound to the heart and another to the stomach now and is still doing fine. We’ve got to go now.”

I reached the stairs, started dragging her up.

“Where are we going?”

“Roof.”

“Why?”

“I know where the chosen one is.”

“Lovely.”

Behind us I heard footsteps in the corridor, the buzzing of flies, the sound of steam, the whisper of voices, the…

“Come on, come on!” I snarled, as Dees clung to the twisted handrail and hauled herself upwards.

“She’s coming for us,” she replied.

I glanced back over my shoulder, and there was for a moment in the shadows a woman moving, a child running, a trolley rattling, a door slamming, a TV crackling, a…

“Ignore them, Matthew!” snapped Bakker; he was above us, looking down from the next landing. “They’re just the things you fear; just fear, nothing more!”

Next flight of stairs and here the sound of a woman, an old, old woman, slippers shuffling, someone crying in the night, a child’s voice raised, something falling on the floor above, the sound of a radio out of tune…

“What’s happening?” I demanded.

“You asking me?” replied Dees.

“Things that happen in the night.” Bakker right by me now, head half turned back down the stairwell from where we’d come. “All the things that happen in the night, the things we don’t talk about, this is where they happen, this place, Blackout’s place, all the shameful, guilty, despised things that people do, this is their place that you’ve walked into. You have to keep going upwards.”

A door ahead.

A familiar door, burst open, twisted to one side, rainwater pouring in under it, forming a flood that flowed around and over our feet as we climbed, and outside, a wide unlit darkness of twisted scorched TV aerials and pools of water. I half fell through the door, Dees slipping from my grasp onto the ground, gasping for breath. The water sloshed around my wrists, cold and black, and now I could hear them, crawling out of the walls, feel sweat on my back and excitement in my belly and fear in my heart and hear

did not

go on

just this once

who knows

never need know

won’t tell

you a coward

try it

go on

go on

go on

no one will ever find out what you did

My fingers in the dark pool of water brushed something. It was small and hard and gleaming. I pulled it out. A small length of golden chain, the ends shattered and twisted out of shape. I thought of Minjae San, the chains he had worn, and the look on his face when he’d died. Then a hand fell on my shoulder and Dees was by me, gasping for breath, eyes somewhere halfway between human and animal.

“She’s coming,” she breathed. “What now?”

I staggered to my feet, every muscle objecting, every nerve sulky to respond. I dragged myself to the centre of the roof, keeping my little bundle of light down low, searching through the pools of water; and there it was. A crack, wide and deep enough that the water flowed into it, tumbling down, almost fat enough to squeeze a child’s finger into. I knelt by it, sweeping the water with my hands. Dees flopped down beside me.

“I know where the chosen one is,” I stammered.

“Well?”

“You heard of people falling between the cracks?”

“Yes…”

“This place, this building, all cracks, all broken, all old. Very easy to fall through the cracks. I saw it happen to the blood, my blood, Oda’s blood, whatever, the blood that drew the symbol of the Midnight Mayor; it fell between the cracks, and not just… not just physically, I mean…”

“Mystically?” growled Dees. “I know what it means.”

“That’s where she is. JG, the chosen one. She’s fallen between the cracks.”

A sound on the stairs, more human, louder, than the constant whispering of the dark. Dees’ head snapped towards it, then she looked away. “Fine,” she said. “Three questions—can you get us in there?”

I nodded dumbly.

“Can Blackout follow us?”

I looked to Bakker, who shrugged.

“Don’t know.”

Dees’ scowl deepened. “Can you get us out, if we go in?”

I dug at the crack, felt dust mingling with water beneath my fingers. “I think so,” I said. “Yes,” we added.

I felt Dees’ hand close around my own. “Fine,” she breathed. “Do it.”

There was a footstep on the top of the stair. I glanced up. A woman in the doorway, darker than the darkness, a bloody sword in one hand; and all around, other things moved, and I tasted sweat and blood and salt and smoke and ash and…

“Do it now!” roared Dees.

I looked down at the crack in the roof, dug my fingers deeper, forced it further apart, until it was now a hole, a torn fissure, a slice through the earth, a fault line, no bottom, no depth, no walls, just an endless fall beneath us growing wider and wider and wider and as Oda screamed with a sound that wasn’t human any more and ran towards us, blood running off her skin, I felt Dees’ hand in mine and threw us both, head first, into the darkness.