Mary MacCandless came up from the underground station, turned left onto Bayswater Road, crossed the busy junction with Park Lane, and stopped to admire the glass and chrome skull rack on Tyburn.
It was a rainy day in mid-December, and a chilly breeze rattled the gibbet cages at each corner of the structure. The construction scaffolding had only just come down, revealing the gleaming tzompantli. It wrapped around Marble Arch, embraced and extending it in the instantly recognizable style of one of the most famous British architects of the twentieth century. Most of the niches on the rack were still empty, but several lonely heads stared eyelessly down from the top row.
“Read all abah’t the crims ’oo went up last week!” shouted a street hawker, selling glossy, printed commemorative magazines wrapped in a plastic caul: “Read all abah’t their evil deeds an’ sad’n’pathetic last moments! Free DVD with every copy! Virtual reality view of every execution! Only twelve pounds fifty, collect ’em all!”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Mary smiled saucily and handed the fellow a dodgy twenty-pound note. He didn’t check it before he made change: more fool him. “Cheery-bye!” she called as she stuffed the purchase in her messenger bag and sashayed off towards her job interview, richer by seven pounds fifty.
Central London was the stomping ground of nobs and toffs these days. Only the obscenely wealthy could afford to live here, much less own a house big enough to accommodate a live-in nanny. That, in Mary’s opinion, made any such employers fair game. Admittedly the Mr. and Mrs. Richy McRichface she was here to fleece lived in a tied house that came with their job-share, but it was the principle that mattered. Anyway, they were both on the same pay scale as a Deputy Chief Constable, which meant they had to be loaded or at least well-insured. The Boss had given Mary a fat dossier on her targets, and Mary had done due diligence. Never take a job at face value without checking the Information was her watchword, and to date it had kept her from dancing the Tyburn tango. As far as she could tell the Boss’s briefing was accurate. But then, he hadn’t taken over London’s supernatural underground by leaving anything to chance.
The wind had strengthened to something between a brisk breeze and an all-out blow by the time Mary opened the gate, marched up the short path to Number Seventeen, and rang the doorbell. She waited and waited, and waited some more: and while she waited she got herself into character. She was about to push the bell for a second time when the porch door opened.
“I’ve got it!” the big, red-faced bloke in sweatpants and polo shirt holding the door shouted over his shoulder. He turned to face Mary without really seeing her: “Just a mo!” he said, and pushed the inner door half-shut—“Need to get the rabble under control—”
A scream and a crash of breaking crockery echoed through the house, followed by a rising and falling wail of tantrum tears. “Right!” shouted a woman. “That’s it! Robert, Lyssa, your father will—no dear, come here, Mummy’s going to kiss it better, and you can just sit there in the naughty corner so I can keep an eye on you, young man no stop that—”
A Supermarine Spitfire the size of Mary’s hand zoomed towards her face, buzzing like a rabid hornet. Without thinking, she plucked it out of the air. For a moment the buzzing rose to a febrile howl: tiny sparks erupted from its gun ports, stinging her palm. “Horrid thing!” She crushed it like a wasp, then brushed the smoking remains into her bag, ignoring the blood leaking from under the shattered cockpit canopy. Straightening up, she confronted Mr. Banks. “I can see I’m just in time! The agency were absolutely right to call me.”
Mr. Banks opened the door a fraction wider. A harried eye scanned her up and down with a policeman’s assessing gaze. “Who are you?”
“Mary Drop at your service!” She held out her hand. “From the nanny agency,” she added, in case it wasn’t entirely obvious that nannying was the name of her game. (It never paid to assume the mark was on the ball.) “I gather you have a number of small problems…?”
“Yes, four of them.” Mr. Banks’s shoulders relaxed slightly as he pulled the door open: “Come in, come right in, you’re just in the nick of time!”
Mary’s experienced eye took in the four suitcases lined up inside the door, the carry-on with passports and boarding passes in an unzipped outer pocket, and the high-pitched wails emanating from the kitchen door. “You’re going away right now?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Business conference,” Mr. Banks said grimly. “Unfortunately Sylvia waited until this morning to inform us that she’d had enough of our shit and we were fired.” His finger-quotes made clear his disbelief that a professional nanny could use such uncouth language in front of her charges. “She had her bag packed before I put the morning coffee on. Didn’t even wait for breakfast. I’m so glad you were available at short notice—”
“Yes, well, they sent me because this sort of situation is exactly my speciality.” Which was perfectly true, although the they in question weren’t the nanny agency Mr. and Mrs. Banks used. “It’s just lucky I’m available at short notice, isn’t it?” Mary smirked. She recognized the Boss’s hand at work in the sudden departure of her predecessor. “All’s well that ends well, I always say, so if you’d show me inside and introduce me to your wife and the little ones I’ll just get settled in, shall I?”
“Yes, indeed.” Mr. Banks paused and looked at her messenger bag curiously. “Is that all you’re bringing?”
“I left my suitcase with the Left Luggage company in Paddington. I can pick it up later, once you’re on your way.” She raised her hat and fanned her face with it. The house felt overheated after the chill of the pre-Christmas rain, and her coat was buttoned to her chin. “Going somewhere nice, I hope?”
“A conference in Hawaii—it’s a business trip. Our flight leaves in four hours: we should be back a week on Wednesday.” A shadow crossed Mr. Banks’s face. “Trudy?”
“Coming, dear!” Mrs. Banks swayed into the hall, thrown off-balance by the toddler she was carrying on one hip. Mr. and Mrs. Banks were both in their early forties, tall and well-toned from the gym. Trudy Banks wore a worried expression, and the grooves worn in her forehead suggested it was a perpetual state of existence for her. The little girl’s face was buried against the side of her neck like an infant vampire, but her quivering shoulders signalled manipulative sobbing rather than sanguinary suckling. Long blonde hair, party dress, mismatched socks: Mary could tell at a glance she was going to be a handful. “I take it Sylvia didn’t dress them before she left?” Mary unslung her bag and offered her arms.
Trudy gratefully handed over her daughter. “This is Emily,” she introduced. “Emily, this is—I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name?”
“I’m Mary Drop,” said Mary. She addressed Emily directly: “And I’m going to take really good care of you while Mummy and Daddy are away!” Emily emitted an overblown thespian sob and met Mary’s gaze with a coldly assessing stare. Mary smiled—not her real smile, the one that scared crocodiles, but the child-friendly version—and pulled Emily closer. “The usual agency terms and conditions apply,” she told the little girl’s parents out of the corner of her mouth. “But I’m definitely not going anywhere for at least two weeks. Hopefully longer.” In her inside pocket, the charmed amulet the Boss had loaned her grew warm as it worked extra-hard to reinforce the Bankses’ belief in her bona fides, pushing the message: no need for references, nothing to see here, move along now.
“We’re sorted, then,” said Trudy, her gratitude palpable. “I’ve left a to-do list with the Amazon and Waitrose delivery service passwords on the kitchen table, along with a spare set of keys. There’s a folder labelled NANNY for you to read. Let me introduce you to Elissa—she answers to Lyssa—Ethan, and Robert—who doesn’t answer to Bob—then we’ve really got to go, our Uber is on its way.” She was already pulling on an overcoat better suited to a rainy winter in St John’s Wood than an international summit meeting of state-licensed superheroes in Hawaii. “You’ll call us if there are any problems, won’t you? Any problems at all, any time of day or night. Oh, and Robert sleepwalks sometimes, just so you know.”
Mary smiled and nodded, her grin as fixed as any of the death masks fronting the skulls on the Marble Arch Tzompantli. Emily clung to her like grim death: the little girl had fallen silent, as though she realized that the bogeywoman was no longer hiding under the bed but had come out to play in broad daylight. “You have absolutely nothing to be concerned about!” she assured Nigel and Trudy Banks, Captain Colossal and the Blue Queen, senior line superheroes by appointment of the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s office. “I’ll take good care of them, you’ll see!”
And because she told them no lies, Mr. and Mrs. Banks lapped it up.
Easy as stealing candy from a baby, Mary MacCandless told herself, and her smile was almost sincere.
Nearly a week had passed since Rupert’s premature death had deprived Eve of one of her long-anticipated life goals—his murder. By stealing a cursed magical tome, her scumbag boss had discovered a new and entirely original way to commit suicide. Admittedly Eve had helped him along the way by not pointing out the consequences of his reckless greed and stupidity, but Rupert was, well, Rupert. If he hadn’t been a self-entitled wanker who treated his employees as serfs and sex toys she might have made a token attempt to stop him: but then again, pigs might fly.
Meanwhile, the cuckoo clock in Rupert’s office was striking thirteen, and Eve was thoroughly perturbed.
One benefit of having spent years planning his murder was that Eve knew exactly what to do afterwards. She was in theory employed as Rupert de Montfort Bigge’s executive assistant. But within the organization, especially during his frequent unexplained absences, she spoke with his voice: everybody was used to seeing her hand on the tiller. It wasn’t as if she was underqualified. She had degrees in business and economics, was licensed to trade on the London Stock Exchange, and had much the same responsibilities as a corporate vice president. She was also a highly competent sorceress. Only a man as arrogant and self-entitled as Rupert would dream of introducing her to his cronies as his secretary, much less impose on someone so dangerous for personal services of a degrading and humiliating nature.
Rupert was fabulously corrupt and equally fabulously wealthy, and the Bigge Organization was essentially a gigantic wealth management/private equity front he’d created to manage the fortunes he’d stolen. He still contributed to the bottom line by means of certain disgusting occult practices, but he was increasingly distant from the day-to-day running of his corporation these days, leaving it to Head Office to coordinate operations and manage his investments. Which, in practice, meant Eve.
While Rupert was out of the picture, Eve kept the Bigge Organization ticking over smoothly. And the week after his “departure” she cultivated the office grapevine even more assiduously than usual. There were the usual rumors about depraved parties in the castle on Skaro (a small channel island which he had purchased along with its feudal lordship), and Eve encouraged these. There was also discreet speculation about Rupe being in rehab again. Eve nodded sagaciously, then changed the subject in an implicitly confirmatory manner. Snooping on the coffee station at HQ—she’d taken personal control over Rupe’s workplace spy cameras and microphones—she very carefully determined that there were no rumors about a missing concordance to the Necronomicon, a disappearing hitman, or the shenanigans of several second-tier supervillains. It appeared her veil of operational security was intact. So the morning after his demise she activated her coverup plan.
Eve reported his disappearance to the authorities. She’d been obliging but unhelpful to the officers from New Scotland Yard, giving them plenty of inconclusive leads to investigate. They were looking for bloated bodies off the coast of Guernsey: but also asking about new inpatients at a small and very exclusive clinic in Bulgaria, not to mention considering the possibility that a certain former US Navy SEAL turned mercenary had gone rogue and disposed of his boss. (The mercenary in question was known to have a James Bond fixation, going so far as to ape the fictional spy’s taste in tailoring and borrow Rupe’s Aston-Martin.) It was all quite perplexing, and the detectives had thanked her and gone on their way nursing the missing-billionaire-sized headaches she’d laid in their minds like the confabulated eggs of a parasitic wasp of the imagination.
As the executive assistant of a billionaire, Eve expected and got the kid-glove treatment. Nobody so much as hinted that she herself might be under suspicion. So, two days later, Eve set in motion the legal machinery to have Rupert declared missing; and today, at noon precisely, in custody of the access codes he’d left copies of in the Chief Legal Counsel’s safe, she entered his office without an invitation for the very first time.
The cuckoo clock was getting on her nerves.
Rupert’s den was deceptively airy and open in feel despite being part of a London town house. From the thick, hand-woven carpet to the polished oak of his eighteenth-century admiralty desk, everything about the room was coded for ostentatious luxury. Portraits of Messrs. and Ladies de Montfort and Bigge from centuries past adorned the walls—one of them, if Eve’s eyes weren’t deceiving her, was a John Singer Sargent. There was nothing so gauche as an in tray or a computer terminal on the desk. Rupe’s sole concessions to modernity were his smartphone (lost in Neverland, along with its owner) and a 72-inch curved monitor bolted to the wall above a transplanted and entirely nonfunctional Adam fireplace, the better to spy on his minions.
All of which made the presence of a prime-number-tweeting Black Forest souvenir even more incongruous. Not only was it committing an offense against timekeeping, it was out of place in Rupert’s personal space. Rupert’s taste in decor was unrelentingly bad, but it wasn’t that kind of bad. And Eve couldn’t abide inconsistencies: they made her itch.
“Reception? Put me through to Facilities,” she announced.
“You called, Miss?” Her bluetooth headset was all but surgically grafted to her ear: she wore it from rising to bed, and the rotating team of receptionists upstairs were trained to respond to her instantly.
“I’m in Rupert’s office. There’s a cuckoo clock in here. Email me its inventory record, please, I want to know where it came from.” It was probably a present from one of his drinking buddies, but you never knew with Rupert. It might be evidence of some sort of ghastly crime, publicly displayed in mockery of the police. “That’s all for now.” She ended the call, then glanced at her watch. She had eight minutes until an upcoming conference call with Acquisitions and Mergers. She was due to take it in her own office, a small, austere cell buried in the subbasement beneath Rupert’s expansive den. She glowered at the clock as she stalked towards the door. “I’ll deal with you later,” she warned it repressively as she gazed around the room, searching for overlooked hiding places. And a moment later, she forgot all about the clock.
One of Rupert’s nastier hobbies was collecting documentary evidence of other people’s misdeeds. They were papers so weighty that they bent light around them, like the gravity well of a black hole. They had to be somewhere, and knowing Rupe—no one knew him better than she—he’d have stashed them in a secret place only he could get at. But—again, knowing Rupert—they’d be close to hand. So Eve had wasted almost an entire hour of her incredibly valuable time hunting for the private safe she knew had to be somewhere in here.
It wasn’t on any of the architectural drawings she had access to. She’d never seen it, never even been told as a certainty that it existed—she’d simply inferred its existence by the absence of certain files from the main office vault. Eve surmised that he’d hired an expert craftsman to install a hidden safe in his office, then, like a jealous Pharaoh guarding his inner tomb, murdered them to ensure they took the secret to their grave.
Rupert’s personal safe was full of secrets, secrets that could kill. But Rupert had gone to his grave without telling Eve where it was, and she wouldn’t be entirely happy until she had them under her own lock and key.
Amy from Human Resources started her Monday morning expecting the week ahead to be at least as bad as the curdled dregs at the bottom of the mug of coffee-like liquid beside her laptop. For one thing, she hated Monday mornings. For another, she worked in HR for the most aggressively downmarket regional supermarket chain in London, which a modern Dante might quite accurately characterize as the tenth circle of hell. And finally, she had a disciplinary hearing coming up in half an hour, and she hated disciplinaries with a passion.
Disciplinary proceedings invariably reminded Amy of the weakness of her own white-knuckle grip on the swaying rope ladder dangling below the zeppelin of corporate management, cruising high above the corpse-strewn wasteland of the economy. Amy was not under any illusions that she was suited to a high-flying career—but to lose her grip would doom her to a catastrophic fall into the hideous depths. Also, when she had these thoughts she got airsick, even though both her feet were planted on terra firma, and right now her stomach was roiling. (It was probably the bad break-room coffee.)
“Who is it, sweetie?” Jennifer, her boss—never a mere Jenny, much less a diminutive Jenn—leaned over the back of Amy’s chair, startling her into a guilty pelvic floor spasm. Jennifer was pretty much Amy’s antithesis, not to say her nemesis: a natural straight-haired blonde, ten centimeters taller in flats than Amy in heels, who wore her charcoal suit and cream silk blouse as if it was a fashion statement rather than a uniform. She was two years younger and skinnier than Amy, her jackets didn’t gape, and when she wore a skirt it didn’t ride up and wrinkle; her unpaid overtime hours and general glow of self-confidence bespoke the certainty that she was on her way to a seat in the FlavrsMart C-suite.
Unlike Amy, she didn’t feel the need to assert her self-worth and individuality by dyeing her fringe green, pursuing unauthorized hobbies, or having a life beyond her job. Amy knew she was supposed to envy Jennifer: but the truth of the matter was that she would rather die than swap her life for her boss’s. And this awareness of her own thoughtcrime made her feel worse than actual green-eyed envy ever could. It meant she was a loser, doomed to be ground to paste between the gears of the corporate machinery she was paid to maintain. It was only a matter of time before she lost her grip and fell to her doom.
Amy and Jennifer shared a cramped office in the management suite of Branch 322, a FlavrsMart supermarket—FlavrsMart, Where Everything Tastes Better!—deep in the wilderness of suburban northeast London. In theory they hot-desked with Tara, Kirsten, and Barry. But Kirsten was on maternity leave, Tara telecommuted from Branch 219 most of the time, and Barry haunted the front-line trenches down in Receiving because he was terrified of Jennifer—not because of anything she’d done, but because of what she might do. So for the time being they had the HR office to themselves.
“It’s Adrian Hewitt in Textured Deli Goods again.” Amy sighed noisily. “Looks like he didn’t get the memo when I verballed him last week.”
“Oh dear, I told him—” Jennifer peered over Amy’s shoulder at her laptop screen. “I suppose you’d better show me what you’ve got.”
Amy brought up the file that Security had forwarded to her—a compilation of video clips from the supermarket surveillance network. Candid Camera had gone on a blind date with Jeremy Bentham behind the meat counter: FlavrsMart employees all wore uniforms with name badges and RFID location transponders, so the store cameras knew exactly where to point, all the time. This was not a secret from the staff—quite the opposite—but it never ceased to amaze Amy how many of her fellow employees seemed to forget that everything they did on the shop floor was recorded.
To Amy’s way of thinking, disciplinary hearings seldom achieved anything beyond highlighting what Jennifer called the Banality of Fuck-Uppery: the utter inability of petty workplace rebels to make their career-limiting moves count for something. Usually they were the result of a ploddingly mundane display of incompetence on the job, like an inability to stack shelves or operate a vacuum cleaner. Less frequently it was for harassment or disreputable conduct: a circulating photo of a set of sad-sack genitals might warrant a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger suggestion that their owner take it to the dole office, or maybe the department of urogenital medicine. Occasionally a customer would complain about a slight lack of obsequious servility, and once in a blue moon it turned out that they weren’t entirely exaggerating: that was embarrassing, and FlavrsMart would be compelled to take action to protect its corporate reputation. Finally, petty pilfering would result in a blue-suiter escorting the perp from the premises, or even arresting them and taking them down to the local nick to await the tender mercies of the hanging magistrates.
But regardless of the cause, disciplinary cases generated stacks of paperwork and hours of camera footage that needed to be combed through and preserved, just to ensure that FlavrsMart was in no way exposed to litigation. And because Amy was the HR ugly duckling, forever trailing forlornly behind Jennifer’s immaculate swan, the paperwork always landed on her shoulders.
Amy flicked through the video montage of butchers behaving badly until she got to the coup de disgrace: the sequence which had finally forced her to take action. Behind her, Jennifer watched intently. She didn’t sound happy. “Look at that—bleep—thing. Artistic statement. Extrusion.” (She actually said bleep.) “What is it?”
“Grounds for dismissal.” Amy bit her tongue. Though this was the Human Resources department, they were no more immune to the gaze of the corporate panopticon than anyone on the shop floor. The verbal bleep was Jennifer’s way of acknowledging this fact, with a tug of the forelock to the Company Code of Conduct (which forbade swearing or other expressions that might be offensive or intimidating). It was a placeholder that discreetly signified the possibility of less temperate language, circumstances permitting. Amy, however, while not bleeping, was veering dangerously close to irony, if not outright sarcasm.1
Jennifer winced. “Can you see an angle? Any way to constructively reframe it as something less offensive? Mr. Hewitt is in a high-skill role: replacing him will be difficult.”
“I don’t see what we can do about this. Other than the obvious, I mean?”
“Bleep. I suppose you’re right: too late to sweep it under the rug. We’re going to have to rightsize him. Bleep it.”
It was unlike Jennifer to be so squeamish. Amy tried to reassure her: “I’ll pull his job description, see if we’ve got any applicants on file who have matching experience.”
Jennifer sighed again and stared at Amy’s laptop. “Bleep. Bleep-bleepity bleep. Thank you, Ade, thanks for nothing.”
Amy blinked. It sounded as if Jennifer was taking it personally. Did she have a relationship with the offensive Mr. Hewitt outside the workplace? That would be problematic.
“Boss.” (It was clearly time to break out the soft soap.) “We can’t keep him if he’s in the habit of sexually abusing the printer during stock-taking hours. I mean, it’s on video. How can I phrase this? No. Not if he’s going to put stuff like this on the deli counter without taking precautions. At least using a condom.”
“Cr—bleep.” Jennifer rolled her eyes and huffed. “He was only using leftovers that were going in the recycling skip!” She’d moved from denial to irritation in seconds. Amy just had to hope she’d skip hostility completely and go straight to bargaining and acceptance: otherwise, Amy herself was in the firing line. “Bleep the video, why couldn’t that camera be out of service?”
“Imagine what could have happened if he got called away and it was still there the next morning? Someone with delicate sensibilities might be offended. A wean might complain. Worse, they might Instagram it.” (Instagram was the hot new photo-sharing app with the kids these days, wasn’t it?)
“Sigh, you’re right. It’d be all over the internet before you could snap your fingers. The Food Standards Agency would ram-raid us with an armored car full of inspectors. The New Management might take an interest.” Jennifer invoked the government with the kind of uneasy, admiring relish usually associated with eyewitness accounts of public executions. (Which had become a Thing again, especially on Instagram, thanks to the New Management’s firm approach to crime and punishment.)
“Okay.” Amy relaxed infinitesimally, now that her boss was in agreement. “I’ll take him to the interview room when he shows.” A chime from her desk phone warned her that the miscreant was on his way up, escorted by his team leader. Amy rose, picked up her laptop and notepad, and gave Jennifer a pleading look. “Are you sure you don’t want to handle this?” As he’s your friend, she added silently, knowing better than to voice such a sentiment.
Jennifer smiled vindictively. “I know it sucks, sweetie, but this is your call. I’d have to self-disclose: I’m not impartial. Also, you’ve got to stop being so squeamish about this aspect of the job. Try and see it as a challenge, just for me? I want to see you step up and handle this yourself. You’ve got an appraisal coming up: I’ll be watching.”
Oh crap, Amy thought dismally. Why can’t this just go away? But she’d maneuvered herself into a corner all on her own before she knew Jennifer had an interest, and now the spot directly between her shoulder blades was itching furiously.
A slim-fingered hand with nails painted the color of fresh blood squeezed Amy’s arm: “We can discuss his replacement after lunch.…”
Meanwhile, in a house on a deceptively posh street in Kensington:
“Fucksake, bro, give me that!”
Game Boy made an abortive jump for the cartridge Imp held out of reach. He squealed with frustration and landed heavily on Imp’s toe. Imp stumbled: “Ouch! Hey, watch where you’re—”
“Mine! My high score! Give that back, you brute!” Game Boy lunged and grabbed hold of Imp’s arm, dragging him down by sheer weight. Not that Game Boy was particularly heavy—at one-fifty centimeters and fifty kilograms he was a skinny Southeast Asian kid, just under five feet tall in old units—but Imp, the Impresario, wasn’t exactly ripped either. He was just tall, intense, and long-haired: like an adult Peter Pan who’d burned through a casual heroin habit and come out the other side barely intact.
Imp’s arm drooped under Game Boy’s weight until his feet touched the floor. He made a wild one-handed grab for the 3DS cartridge, which slipped through Imp’s fingers and fell into his open palm. Game Boy fell back across the carnivorous sofa, glaring angrily and clutching the game with its precious high score to his chest.
“Dude, what the fuck are you playing at?”
Doc Depression glowered at Imp from the doorway. A shopping bag dangled from one hand. Tall and thin to the point of cadaverous, with a face that might have been fashionable on a racehorse, he wore a brown tweed suit whose previous owner had donated it to a charity store a couple of decades earlier: his version of hipster chic.
“We were just arseing around,” Imp said defensively: “all in fun—”
“Asshole!” squeaked Game Boy. He whistled for breath again.
“But you’re so cute when you beg—”
“The fuck.” Doc shook his head in disgust, then looked around, taking in the living room anew. “You’re arseing about while the place is a dump.”
“This place is still a dump, you mean.” They’d swept away the broken glass and gas grenades, boarded up the shattered windows, and repaired the worst of the damage inflicted when a crack team of Transnistrian mafia loss adjusters stormed the house in pursuit of Rupert de Montfort Bigge’s pet assassin. (The mafiya hitmen had been followed in turn by Imp’s terrifying elder sister Eve and her bodyguard, then Rupert himself, Eve’s monstrous employer.) Having chucked the broken furniture out the back door and bought a new computer desk or three, the Lost Boys were working on repairing the bedrooms, including the top floor with its eldritch attic extension. Game Boy had even—reluctantly—reactivated the external CCTV system, once Wendy had assured them nobody ever watched it. “These things take time to fix,” said Imp.
“When are we getting paid? I had to buy a new mattress after someone trashed the old one,” Doc complained.
“Eve asked me to visit her tomorrow,” Imp replied. “What’s the big deal with that cartridge anyway, GeeBee?”
Game Boy kept his death grip on the game. “It may not look like much to you, but it’s got my Final Fantasy Explorers save file.” His handheld console had been another of the casualties on the night of the home invasion: it had taken a size thirteen army boot to the hinge. Luckily the cartridge had popped free and been kicked under the sofa. “A lot of work went into that!” He glared furiously at Imp. “Going to need a new 3DS,” he grumped, “assuming it’s not corrupted. I was trying to overflow the score table because there’s supposed to be an Easter egg…”
“Here: catch.” Doc had reached into his carrier bag and tossed a box towards the sofa. It tumbled in midair, twisted weirdly, and landed in Game Boy’s open hand. Game Boy took one look at it and squealed loud enough to scratch glass. “Thankyouthankyou- thankyou!” He leapt off the sofa, rushed up to Doc, and hugged him, cartridge in one hand and shiny new 3DS in the other.
“Aw, it’s so cute.” Imp was unable to suppress a smile.
“I paid for it fair and square. FlavrsMart were having a special on electronics: call it your replacement Christmas present. Hey, Boy, you can let go now,” Doc told him. “Imp? About your sister—”
“—Yeah?”
“Have you run it past Del, yet? Or her girlfriend?” Del—the Deliverator—was a part-time cycle courier and their getaway driver. She’d been absent for most of the past week, spending time with her new girlfriend, Wendy. About whom the rest of the household were extremely conflicted, because Wendy was a semiprofessional thief-taker and the Lost Boys were semiprofessional thieves.
Imp rolled his eyes. “That’s what tomorrow’s about,” he explained. “Invoice time.” Eve owed him for services rendered, and he intended to collect. “Also to talk about the future.”
Eve had bought out Wendy’s contract for them. Unlike real cops, thief-takers worked for the highest bidder. Wendy’s boss had been happy to blow off a cheapskate insurance underwriter when Eve dangled a juicy backhander under his nose, but now that the Boys’ faces were on the radar, continuing in their previous line of work was inadvisable.
“I want to see if I can get her to put us on retainer. Not,” he added, “for that kind of job. I’m talking about low-risk stuff. But there’s got to be something we can do.” Something that doesn’t put us at risk of dangling from a gibbet.
“O-kaay.” Doc sounded unenthusiastic. But then, Doc always poured cold water on Imp’s ideas, for no reason that Imp understood: they were good plans, none of his plans were remotely half-assed or impractical! “Just promise me you won’t agree to rob any more banks, especially ones we did over the previous month.”
Imp winced. “No banks, real or imaginary, are going to be robbed on my watch, going forward! Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Please don’t,” said Doc.
“You don’t have a heart!” Game Boy commented snidely as he tiptoed out the door, clutching his new console to his chest. The Xbox, PS4, and his PCs had all taken a battering during the night of the stompy boots; replacing them was definitely going to have to wait until they got paid.
Imp flopped on the shapeless sofa and patted the seat. Doc settled companionably beside him. “Are you still mad at me?” Imp asked.
“I haven’t decided yet.” Doc’s lanky frame overtopped Imp by a few centimeters. He looked down at his partner through luxuriant eyelashes. “Got a smoke?”
“Sure. I mean, I’m sure I have one somewhere.” Imp patted his pockets, then pulled out a tobacco tin that bore the dents and scratches of tough love. “Thought I’d rolled one … yeah, I did.” He pulled out a skinny joint, raised it to his lips, and inhaled: it sparked into life spontaneously.
“Neat trick.”
“Runs in the family. Remind me to teach you how to do it.” Imp filled his lungs, then passed the roll-up to Doc. Shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, they sat in peaceable silence for about ten minutes, passing the joint back and forth as smoke dragons coiled towards the ceiling. Eventually Imp stubbed it out on the lid of his tin. “Better,” he said.
“Tell me about your sister,” said Doc, rubbing up against him sleepily.
“Don’t wanna.”
“Tell me about your sister or no nookie.”
“Don’t—” He stopped as Doc ran his thumb along Imp’s lower lip—“mm-hmm.”
“Tell me. What’s so bad about her? I mean, beside the obvious, being Chief Minion to an evil hedge fund billionaire—”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Oh, it’s embarrassing is it, having an elder sister? Oh woe, oh misery—”
“Shut up.” Running out of options, Imp turned to face Doc and kissed him deeply.
“Not gonna shut up.”
“Stop your finger-wagging.” Imp drew breath. “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you, if I remembered afterwards. I dunno, I think I need to be drunk first. I mean, as well.”
“Wait here,” Doc said gently, then stood up and shuffled unsteadily out towards the kitchen. Imp waited somnolently until he returned, clutching two tumblers and a bottle of whiskey. “Lagavulin Sixteen.”
“Hey, that’s my personal stash!”
“Fell off the back of a lorry? Like I care, we’re drinking it anyway.” Doc sloshed liquid into a glass, then handed it to Imp, who took a reflective sip while Doc attended to his own tipple. “Now talk.”
“I dunno. Like, I’ve seen more of Eve in the past month than in the previous five years, you know? Since Dad died and Mum got—ill. We used to be close when we were kids, but I was going through a bad patch. Then shit happened, and she got very distant after she took the Chief Minion job.”
He took another sip of whiskey.
“And?”
Imp stared into his glass for almost a minute. Then, very quietly, he added, “I’m afraid I might have fucked things up for her.”
Monday morning found Wendy Deere perched on the edge of a transparent Louis Ghost chair in the HiveCo Security office basement, sweating bullets despite the air conditioning. She’d arrived before her manager, Mr. Gibson, who had called the meeting: and now she was regretting it.
The designer of Secure Briefing Room C had a Moon Nazi Gestapo fetish. Wendy hated it: it gave her the cold shudders, even though as an employee she got to sit on the right side of the table. The chairs were Philippe Starck Louis Ghosts, Perspex knockoffs of a classic Louis XVI armchair. The table was similarly made of clear plastic. Indeed, the briefing room itself was a glass cube suspended by wires inside a windowless concrete cavity. The transparent aircon ducts were tuned to warble at human speech frequencies to defeat listening devices. UV spotlights bolted to the floor and ceiling reflected purple highlights off the furniture—a vampire firewall. Arcane summoning grids on the cement walls were scribed to block demonic intrusions just as the wire mesh embedded in the walls took care of radio signals. There was a computer in the room—a Microsoft Surface running on battery power—but all it did was deliver canned content on secure memory sticks. For really secure meetings it was removed entirely, while the participants stripped to their skin and wore disposable paper overalls.
This was not one of those sessions, for which Wendy was grateful. But the impulse to fidget, to straighten the lapels of her jacket and side-eye her own reflection in the walls, was difficult to resist. How much longer is he going to be? she wondered nervously.
The door in the outer wall opened and Gibson entered a short air-lock tunnel that reminded Wendy of a very expensive rodent habitat. The outer door closed, and a moment later the inner door unlatched. “Deere.” He dipped his chin as he entered. “Morning.”
“Morning, Mr. Gibson, sir.” She stood automatically. Something in Gibson’s bearing spoke of years spent in officer country before he switched to the private sector. Wendy hadn’t even taken her sergeant’s exams before she’d been given a choice between resigning from the Met or being kicked out—it had been Superintendent Barrett’s word against hers—but she knew their kind. Gibson was one of the decent ones. “Had a good weekend?”
“I’ve had better. Won’t you sit down?” Gibson took the other chair.
Here it comes … Wendy tensed as she sat. “Is this about the Pennine Bank job, sir? Because I can explain—”
Gibson waved it off. “You don’t need to. We got paid off very nicely, the client who preempted was happy with your work, the file’s closed.” He looked at her silently for a few seconds, with the stony expression of someone who was trying to work out what he could—and couldn’t—say. “I’m aware of some irregularities. I’m also aware that I probably don’t want to look too closely at them. I gather you’ve filed a claim for a recruitment bonus?” She nodded. “And the candidate may have been at the scene? Well, then, I don’t need the details. In fact, you should write them up in the secure notes app so I can log it as done and seal the record. That way we’re covered if anything blows up later.”
He was talking about Wendy’s maybe-girlfriend Rebecca: also known as the Deliverator, a supernaturally fast bicycle courier who also happened to be the getaway driver for Imp’s gang. Gibson was running a pilot project within HiveCo Security to provide superpowered thief-takers to the Home Office under a Public-Private Partnership. The regular Police weren’t up to dealing with an ongoing superpowered crime wave during a time of spending cuts. Wendy was Gibson’s #1 test subject, an ex-detective constable with the London Met who had developed a transhuman talent after she left. Employable superhumans were thin on the ground, and recruiting thief-takers was proving to be difficult.
Back in the eighteenth century—the last era when thief-takers had been a part of law enforcement, before the reforms of the nineteenth century and the professionalization of the police rendered them obsolete—there’d been a revolving door between the London underworld and the thief-takers: “set a thief to catch a thief” wasn’t just a figure of speech. But modern legal constraints made it difficult for Gibson to hire supervillains with a record. Far better if he could find individuals who were clean enough to pass a criminal background check, even if they were less powerful. As Del had never been arrested while driving a stolen car—she always got away—she’d do. Gibson presumably could find some work for a supernaturally talented pursuit and evasion driver. And if it got Del a real job that paid the bills and kept her head off a spike, Wendy would sleep easier.
Wendy pulled the tablet across the table and unfolded the keyboard cover. “Is there anything in particular you need from me, sir?”
“Yes.” He reached across and flipped the cover shut again. “Aside from your write-up, you should know that I’m still waiting for HR to get back to me with the framework and monitoring requirements for the training program. Because there’s no formal structure in place yet, if Ms. McKee”—Rebecca—“signs on we’ll have to apprentice her to you for the time being so you can show her the ropes and keep an eye on her. But that’s not going to happen for a while. In the meantime a couple of new jobs have come in, and one of them in particular is right up your street.…”
Amy already knew she hated the soon-to-be-unemployed Mr. Hewitt even before she’d met him. Her hatred was very abstract, almost dry: if distilled, it might be bottled and sold as eau de resentment, a scent that came on with a rapid burst of spleen, peaked with a high note of self-loathing, and faded out in a slow haze of whining self-pity. She hated him because she hated firing people. And she hated him because Jennifer had sentenced her to swing the headswoman’s axe, a chore she detested.
She waited for Mr. Hewitt in the meeting room, a beige-walled prison cell furnished with hard conference chairs and a desk where the confessions of the guilty were to be signed. She made herself uncomfortable behind the desk, erecting her laptop before her like a GM’s screen in a game of Cubicles and Corporations. Then she doodled on her yellow legal pad as she waited for the outer door to open, distracting herself from the coming distastefulness.
She kept the pad under the table, concealed from the unblinking gaze of the cameras. She could be accused of misusing corporate resources if anybody saw what she was doing. Rather than writing case notes, she was sketching an angry buzzing fantasy: violently swarming corporate worker bees in wasp-waisted suits with venomously erect stingers falling upon the hive’s slacking drones, making stabby and ejecting their smoking corpses from the hive. It was a subversive activity, her equivalent of repeatedly writing I HATE BIG BROTHER on her cubicle walls. But she drew because she had to. She drew because she was unhappy, and she drew to defuse her own unease at the tasks Jennifer assigned to her. Drawing was like breathing for her soul, and the FlavrsMart offices were airless and asphyxiating.
One of the aspects of disciplinary hearings that Amy hated most was the way the drones always seemed to blame her personally for their inability to smuggle memory sticks out of the office supplies cabinet, or to stack shelves fast enough to meet targets. They looked at her with dead, fishy eyes as they whined and evaded and made excuses, but they never saw her, Amy, trapped and bullied just as much as they were, doing a job she hated. They just saw a management uniform wrapped around an Amy-shaped hole, emptily pronouncing anathemas upon them in language scripted by Legal. It would haunt them for the rest of their working lives, because the New Management had instituted a national regime of permanent, transferrable employment records: dismissal damned them to poverty and penury. But afterwards, when the suit with the Amy-shaped hole inside it floated back to its desk to deal with the paperwork ending their employment, health insurance, contributory pension scheme, and tax code—afterwards, when they walked out of the FlavrsMart supermarket and back into the world of living, breathing human beings—afterwards, when they were free, the far-from-empty suit still toiled on beneath the gaze of the branch computers’ panopticon.
And who, one had to ask, was getting the raw deal here?
I really shouldn’t do this, Amy thought despairingly. She tore the top sheet off the pad, folded it twice (carefully keeping it below the desk), then slid it between the front of her blouse and her pocket-deficient jacket. It was the third time this month she’d been unable to keep her restless, itchy fingers away from pen and ink. Sooner or later someone would notice, and then she’d be sitting on the other side of this desk from Jennifer—
The door opened and she stood, oblivious to the trio of bees in tiny suits buzzing angrily around the overhead light fittings.
Gladys Nairn was first through the door. Gladys was a forty-something veteran of two decades in the food retail trenches; she led a hangdog expression dangling from the skull of a once-young man, who Amy deduced to be Adrian Hewitt. “Hello, Ms. Sullivan!” Gladys blatted at her. “I’ve brought Mr. Hewitt to see you, as requested.”
“Thanks.” Amy stretched her face into something the office blurrycam might mistake for a smile. She waved them forward. “This shouldn’t take long. Adrian, please take a seat.”
Shuffling of buttocks on plastic hyperbolic surfaces ensued. The downsizee was to be seated during the process to reduce the risk of a physical altercation, and Amy sat down right after Adrian because The Rules stated that looming over a resource, even a resource that was being downsized with extreme prejudice, might be interpreted as intimidation. Intimidating behavior looked bad in court—even intimidating behavior by a blowsy, green-fringed blonde whose suit didn’t fit properly and who was twenty centimeters shorter than the intimidee. Anyone could be intimidating, if they fronted for a corporate behemoth with a six-billion-pound annual turnover.
Mr. Hewitt slumped beneath the invisible shackles of workplace obedience. He clearly realized he was in over his head. After an uncomfortable twenty-second pause—just long enough for the hangman to drape the noose over the waiting neck and tighten the knot—Amy began.
“Do you know why I asked you to come here, Mr. Hewitt?” she asked.
“Urh.” He gave her a puzzled look, like a cow sizing up an overall-wearing stranger holding a captive bolt gun. “Nuh?”
Amy sighed, as much for Gladys’s sake as for the ever-vigilant cameras. “Security, Mr. Hewitt. Security watches all of us, all the time. We are under his eye—or hers. On your last evening shift, Friday past that was, they recorded an incident in which you were involved. They escalated it to HR for resolution. Would you like to tell me what you were doing?” She turned the laptop so that both Adrian and Gladys could see it. Then she did a double-take. “Gladys, you might want to avert your eyes. This video contains material that may contravene the Code of Conduct section on harassment and public indecency and I don’t want to expose you to it accidentally—”
“Public indecency?” Gladys leaned towards the screen avidly: “Ooh, don’t you worry about me!”
“Public indecency?” Adrian echoed disbelievingly. “But it was after hours!”
Amy hit play. “On Friday the thirteenth, at 1946 hours, you activated the number two textured meat printer—currently assigned to extruding mechanically re-formed charcuterie—and downloaded a 3D model to it from a source other than the approved Bespoke Product Orders Directory.
“You then—without the authorization of your team leader or line manager—loaded the printer with feedstock from the discards tray in the stockroom, which I will remind you is not fit for human consumption, and added unapproved dyes to three of the extrusion heads.” She brought up another still. “From the unauthorized template, you printed out a structure weighing approximately eighteen point two kilograms, then moved it into the front of cabinet number three on the deli counter. Then you posed for a selfie with it.”
Another still.
“You uploaded the, ah, selfie, on your public social media stream, where eighteen thousand, three hundred, and seventeen other visitors saw it, more than two thousand of whom ‘liked’ it. Adrian, just why did you feel it was necessary to upload a picture of a pornographic sculpture made out of luncheon meat, on a chilled display surface clearly bearing the corporate logo?”
The tower of bacon bits Adrian had printed was indeed somewhat lewd. The greasy curves resembled buttocks. The venous depression and smoothly mounded pubes of gammon harbored barely visible labial folds molded from pork fat. But this Damien Hirst departure on the deli counter was not, in and of itself, sufficient to make the call for Amy. After all, it was Adrian’s job to service the 3D meat printers that spent their every working hour extruding novelty meat loaves and saucily suggestive skinless sausages for the discerning customers. But …
“What have we told you repeatedly about selfies, Adrian? And the company dress code?”
“But I wis wearing me hat!” he protested indignantly. “Ya bass Jenny tell’t me to allus be wearing me hat behind tha counter! An’ I wis!”
Amy glanced at Gladys, who was staring open-mouthed at the eyeball-gougingly indiscreet selfie. It had garnered Adrian ten times his entire previous lifetime history of “likes” on the internet, not to mention an indelible stain on his employment record that no amount of striped trousers, starched white coats, and butcher’s porkpie hats could ever bleach clean.
“You are not allowed to take selfies on company premises, Adrian,” she reminded him stiffly. “You are especially not supposed to take naked selfies on the shop floor. Code of Conduct: behavior likely to bring the company into disrepute.” (Translation: you are so fired.) “Nor are you allowed to abuse company equipment for recreational purposes. Nor are you allowed to repurpose waste products, or violate food hygiene standards. And it’s an offense to install unauthorized files on networked company machines,” (or to have sexual intercourse with a pornographic meat sculpture on company premises) “with or without a hat.”
She drew a deep breath. Gladys, mesmerized by the thing on deli counter three, seemed not to notice. “I’m sorry, Adrian,” she said quietly.
“You’re firing me.”
She nodded unhappily. The swarm-sketch sticking to the skin beside her right boob-holder buzzed as the angry management bees attempted to erupt into the real world. “Jennifer and I have discussed this, and we feel that in view of the verbal warning you were given last week—and the severity of this new incident—we have no alternative but to let you go. If you agree to voluntary severance, there won’t be any need to make a note of gross misconduct on your record.”
She reached over to the laptop, zapped the picture of the Meatloaf de Milo back into case-file limbo—for it was clear that Adrian had a museum model in mind when he planned his foray into anthropomorphic 3D printing—and pulled up the discharge forms.
“If you sign here and here, we can ensure that the reason for your dismissal goes no further than these four walls. It’s up to you. However, I’m required to remind you that, as per clause sixteen of your contract of employment, the company owns the intellectual property rights to anything you produce during your period of paid employment. So that selfie belongs to us and, incidentally, so do your two thousand and something ‘likes.’ Not that we want them,” she added, “but we can’t let you keep them. Actions have consequences!”
Adrian, whey-faced, signed the form with a shaking fingertip. He stood, then Amy stood. She did not offer to shake hands, but Gladys laid a gentle touch on his arm and steered him towards the door.
Good luck with your art, she thought, even if it’s not my cup of tea. She waited for the door to close, then picked up her laptop and the pad of paper. The Phantom of the Deli might have left the building, but the dismal start to the week had awakened her personal imp of the creative, and it was scourging her again: her fingertips were almost fluorescing with the urge to sketch.
It was a very bad sign when this happened. It usually meant that by nightfall she’d have another large-scale manifestation to cover up. And heaven help her if she ever lost control and the company noticed: even Jennifer wouldn’t be able to protect her. But there was only one way to get her symptoms under control. So Amy slunk off in search of a camera blind spot in which to hide while she drew out her demons.
It took Mary half an hour to ease Mr. and Mrs. Banks out the door without alerting them to her nefarious intent. First, they gave her hurried directions to the nanny’s bedroom in the dormer attic. Accordingly, she went there to give them space to make a quick phone call to the nanny agency. One of the Boss’s gofers was waiting there to ensure that Mary’s credentials were eagerly confirmed by the receptionist (with a subtext of please don’t break my kneecaps that completely eluded Mr. Banks). Then Trudy went upstairs to herd Robert and Lyssa downstairs and introduce Mary to the kids. She had to pick up and carry little Ethan, who was having an attack of shyness. “This is Mary Drop, she’s your new nanny! You’ll have lots of fun with her while Daddy and Mummy are working abroad, won’t you? Say hello to Mary now, children!”
Robert (ten, tousle-headed and rosy-cheeked) squinted at Mary with the eyes of a college bell-tower sniper and asked, “What kind of fun?”
“Fun fun!” squealed little Emily, who had gradually gotten over her initial shyness.
“I want a unicorn,” said nine-year-old Lyssa. She was wearing a sparkly chiffon princess dress—utterly inappropriate for breakfast, even though it was the school holidays—and clutching a worryingly functional-looking magic wand. Her expression was midway between sullen and hopeful: “Can I have a unicorn?”
“You’ll have to shovel out its droppings,” Mary said practically. “They’re much smellier than horse apples.” She leaned down confidingly: “I have a friend who works at Scotland Yard, and if you’re very good I can take you to see the unicorn stables there.” Mary was lying about having a friend in the Met, and in any case it would be utter madness to let a little girl anywhere near an equoid, but Lyssa’s eyes widened and she shut up.
“I want to build a new model kit,” Robert said thoughtfully. “The Airfix B-29 Superfortress Bock’s Car, with the working bomb bay and the Fat Man.” His eyes narrowed malevolently: “It can replace Ethan’s Spitfire wot you broke.” He spoke with the chilling deliberation of a judge donning a black cap before pronouncing sentence.
Mary’s smile became fixed. Mr. Banks had left her a hastily scribbled to-do list and a credit card “for incidentals,” and they were only going to be away for a week, but she could already see the CARD DECLINED knockbacks looming if she let the little horrors take her for granted. Robert was clearly plotting mayhem on the sly, although the precise significance of his request (as tightly worded as any demonic binding Mary had ever heard) wasn’t immediately obvious to her. Also, there was something curiously dated about his choice of gray school shorts, V-neck sweater, socks, and lace-up leather shoes: as if he’d fallen through a time portal from the 1950s. “Why don’t you run along and play with the Xbox or PlayStation or whatever for half an hour? Nanny has to get her feet under the table, suss out where everything is, and plan your lunch before we can do anything this afternoon. Besides, it’s raining—”
Emily exploded. An air-raid-siren howl of distress was the only warning Mary received before Emily launched herself at Ethan, biting and clawing and screaming with incoherent rage. Ethan giggled excitedly and tugged her hair, then howled in pain. Holy motherfucking Jesus, Mary swore silently before she dived in and pulled the two struggling five-year-olds apart. “Stop that right now!” she snarled, holding the little girl and the little boy apart: they both promptly burst into floods of tears punctuated with mumbled accusations. Mary took a deep breath and evaluated the damage. She glanced up to catch Robert staring at her: “XStation now at the double,” she barked, and he bolted for the living room. Meanwhile, Princess Lyssa had vanished. Typical.
Mary decided to drop the sweet agency nanny act. As long as Mr. and Mrs. Banks hadn’t gotten around to issuing Pugsley Addams and Princess Sparkle-Shoggoth with smartphones she was pretty much home and dry anyway. “Minions! Cease this disgraceful bickering at once! Or I’ll turn you into toads!”
The believe-what-I-say charm in her pocket buzzed angrily and grew hot, but the sobbing subsided almost at once, replaced by quietly terrified hiccups.
“I am the wicked witch Mary Drop,” Mary announced, overacting like mad: “and you are in my power for the next week. I hereby conscript you as minions for my evil reign of evil! Do as I say and we shall have lots of fun together! But never doubt that I can and will be even more horrible to you than your elder brother and sister if you don’t do as I say!” Still holding them gently—she had been made aware that small people broke easily and weren’t repairable—she led them to the sofa. “Now say I’m sorry, and there will be chocolate milk.” Spiked with Valium to counteract the sugar high if necessary (she’d heard about kindergarteners and their glycoside-tropism) but she had to get them settled, or this caper was going to crash and burn before it even reached the runway threshold. She didn’t have a partner on this gig but she was used to playing bad cop with gangsters, and surely children couldn’t be any worse than Triad enforcers? Assuming the internet FAQs about child-rearing were entirely accurate, of course.
Mumbled apologies were exchanged, after a fashion. Mary hurried through the open-plan living room, where Robert was quietly doing unspeakable things to a family of goblins whose home he had invaded, and fetched up in the kitchen. Here she found a fridge the size of the Svalbard planetary seed vault. It turned out that she didn’t need to look for cocoa powder and squeezed cow juice after all because there was an open carton of chocolate milk sitting in the fridge door. Glasses were harder—she didn’t have time to familiarize herself with the cupboard layout: world war three could break out at any moment in the front room—but if she reached into her messenger bag just so—
A minute later, the five-year-olds had conducted détente negotiations and were well into the strategic arms reduction stage of diplomacy, complete with chocolate milk mustaches and much slurping. But Lyssa was still missing in action. “Have you seen your sister?” she asked the twins. But all she got was a bubbly request for more Chocomilk.
“This milk tastes funny,” Emily noted, in such a suspiciously mature tone that Mary was struck by the realization that she was not the first nanny these two had encountered—or even the first to have bigged up her credentials via the agency. The twins were sitting suspiciously close together on the sofa, as if the fight had been staged from the first, a tiny conspiracy to extort Chocomilk and sympathy—and now Lyssa was missing.
“Wait here,” she said sharply. Little boy who can animate toys: check. Little girl: hmm. This aspect of the job had emphatically not been in the briefing. What else had the surveillance team missed? The big boy seemed to be just a regular hell-raising ten-year-old, but she had an edgy sense that she was overlooking something—maybe several somethings, potentially all the way up to literal hell-raising. She marched towards the staircase, hopped on the bannister rail, and slid upstairs to avoid the creaking floorboard and the pendulum trap on the landing which might or might not exist (Mary was taking no chances whatsoever, given the impression the Banks children had made on her in her first fifteen minutes).
“Lyssa?” she called.
The children’s bedroom doors were ajar, and toys spilled into the first-floor passage like a multicolored avalanche of caltrops. The twins still shared a room next door to their parents’ master suite. The older kids’ rooms were easy enough to distinguish: access to Robert’s doorway was blocked by enfilade fire from a dug-in Tiger tank, and Lyssa was singing quietly to someone or something in her own room.
Mary took a few seconds to compose herself, then knocked on the half-open door before she stepped inside. “Lyssa, who are you—” she trailed off.
Princess Sparkle-Shoggoth was chanting over her Barbie doll, who was riding sidesaddle on the back of a pink unicorn with a pearlescent spiral horn and implausibly big blue eyes. The unicorn was trotting in circles on the bedroom floor (there wasn’t enough space for it to break into a canter) and Barbie was clinging onto its flowing mane with a death grip, her plastic cheeks flexed in a tetanic grimace.
Lyssa spoke in a monotone without looking up: “I’m training Twinklehooves to do dressage but Princess Barbie is dying inside, can you help? She’s turning back to plastic and I need Ethan to bring her back to life now pleeeeease Miss can you make Ethan magic her again?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Mary agreed, thinking fast. Ethan animated the toy Spitfire, not Robert, she realized with dawning horror. Robert and Lyssa, the older children, might be harmless, but if one of the terrible tots had powers, then—I left them alone downstairs—
The front door was ajar.
Oh shitcakes. Mary bolted for the porch with alacrity: “Emily Banks, come here at once! Oh don’t do that, you’ll get your dress muddy!” Emily was kneeling in a wet flower bed, her hair lank and dripping, peering at something green. It was sticking out of the ground, but unlike any decent, self-respecting vegetable, it appeared to be writhing. Mary did a horrified double-take—Is that a fucking snake, in London?—as she dashed towards the little girl—then froze again.
Emily beamed up at Mary: “Can Cecil come indoors and play?” she asked. The brilliant green rhizome twitched as it uncurled, fernlike, and strained towards its mistress’s finger. Sprouts quivered and thrust from the soil in front of the little girl, then extended runners towards the front porch, fumbling and probing for cracks in the driveway.
“Is this something your mother would approve of?” Mary asked repressively. Emily’s face fell, and unlike Princess Sparkle-Shoggoth upstairs, this little girl couldn’t charm nanny for toffee. “Tell me, Emily, what would your mother say?”
“Mommy would—” A muddy finger sneaked into the corner of a drooping mouth, and cheeks began to quiver ominously. Shortly the rain would not be the only thing running down little Emily’s face. A viridian tentacle curled across her shoulder and gently stroked her cheek, giving her the comfort that Mary would not or could not. It should have been heartbreaking, had Mary a heart to break instead of a chilly silicone-and-titanium ventricular prosthesis dedicated to a higher purpose.
Mary didn’t break. But she bent slightly: “If you come inside and dry off, if you’re very good, you can play with Cecil on the porch.” Having a gate guardian out of Little Shop of Horrors wouldn’t go amiss. “On condition that you stay indoors, and Cecil goes back to the flower bed when it’s lights-out time. Otherwise,” she said ominously, “it’s the compost heap for him.”
Leading the little girl back indoors, Mary set herself to the next task: working out how to bribe a five-year-old boy (a species of irritant she’d last had to deal with a third of a century ago) into going full Herbert West—Reanimator on Dressage Barbie. Then she returned to the kitchen table to sort out lunch—mustn’t forget to check for mobile phones and divert outgoing calls from the house landline—and figure out how to keep them distracted for the rest of the rainy pre-Christmas Monday. The week stretched endlessly before her. Nobody had warned her that bored pre-tweens could be such a handful, and the Boss’s surveillance operatives were going to get a right earful for missing the fact that at least two of the kids were transhumans, not just the parents. Nor had she quite internalized the implications of not being able to use her normal methods on them, because it simply wasn’t done to drop-kick a toddler into next week. You had to smile and somehow maneuver them into doing what you wanted. It was so frustrating!
But Mary wasn’t one to give up easily at the best of times. She had too much riding on this week’s work to be forgiving. Sink or swim: Mary was in this for the long haul.
As soon as she arrived in the office the next morning, Eve summoned her brother. Then she got down to work while she waited for him to arrive.
An hour later she was elbow-deep in the financials for a project Rupert had given her two months earlier. The Bigge Organization was about to expand its existing stake in FlavrsMart into a controlling interest in the supermarket chain, which was being spun off as a going concern by the HiveCo group, and she needed to go over the paperwork one more time. So of course Reception paged her just as she decided she understood the valuation, breaking her train of concentration: “Miss Starkey? This is the front desk, there’s a visitor asking for you—he says he’s your brother?”
The receptionist sounded appalled: Eve’s lower lip curled in irritation. Perhaps the woman imagined Eve was sui generis, an unholy terror inflicted on the organization by satanic decree? (There were still plenty of people around who cleaved to Christian beliefs about hell and perdition, despite a year under the aegis of the New Management.) “I’ll be right down,” she snapped, then took a few seconds to compose herself. It was true that she’d been hoping Imp would turn up, but now he was waiting downstairs she found herself second-guessing her own intentions towards him. It had been years since they’d been close enough that she could think of him as family without a moment’s hesitation. Working for Rupert had damaged her ability for empathic engagement—Rupert saw affection and love as weakness, and zeroed in on them with the ruthlessness of a public school bully. But she was still human enough that the jagged edges of familial guilt abraded her conscience. She’d distanced herself from Imp to protect him. Now the threat was removed, it was safe to let him close. Better get accustomed to it, she told herself, mentally adding a note to her checklist: relearn how to human.
She found Imp downstairs in Reception, sprawled bonelessly across a ridiculous chair upholstered in violet velvet with a two-meter-high back and spindly baroque legs. He was sipping delicately from a cup of tea, clearly revelling in the butler’s expression of barely suppressed horror. “Jeremy!” she called. Imp stood and turned to face her, smirking. “Long time no see!” She air-kissed him for the peanut gallery (the staff thought she was a Terminator robot: the opportunity to fuck with their heads was too good to miss), then led him upstairs to the boss’s den. She couldn’t quite think of it as her own yet—not until she found that damned safe.
“This isn’t your office,” Imp said. He leaned against Rupert’s desk and smirked at her. “Moving up in the world, baby?”
Eve shut the door, marched round the desk to Rupert’s classic G-Plan 6250 chair—popularized by Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the early Bond movies, actually surprisingly cheap and quite nasty to sit in—and leaned back, ignoring the warning twinge in her hips. “Welcome to my world,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the bay window. She felt curiously empty inside, but it was a welcome emptiness, as if she’d expelled something that had been slowly poisoning her.
“Wait, what—you got a promotion?”
“What can I say?” Eve shrugged. “Dead man’s shoes.” She smirked back at him.
“Wait, your boss…”
“He was so eager he went to get the book himself.” She paused for thought. “You didn’t run into him upstairs, did you?”
“No! What happened?”
“I told him I quit, and he could get it his own damn self.” Instinct made her glance round in search of the hidden cameras. But no, Rupert would never bug his own office—and anyway, they belonged to her now. “Obviously I worded it very carefully. And did it in precisely that order.”
“Wait, you—”
“I resigned, then I told him where he could find the book. He never came back. I’m pretty sure the curse got him: if not, he wandered off into Neverland and didn’t make it out.”
“Damn.” Imp grimaced. “How? I mean, he bought it, didn’t he? Isn’t he its legitimate owner now? Shouldn’t it have recognized him?”
“You might think that, but the book doesn’t necessarily agree.” And now she smiled. She wanted to confess, to monologue, to explain her carefully laid plan to someone who wouldn’t automatically respond by trying to murder her: it was probably the chair’s fault. As her only surviving family, Imp was a safe audience—no shark tank for him—and besides, he was technically complicit before and after the fact. By the time she’d explained everything his lips would be sealed forever. So Eve let her inner criminal mastermind off the leash, although she managed to hold back the urge to cackle maniacally at her matchlessly evil genius.
“Rupert was the chief executive of de Montfort Bigge Holdings, an investment vehicle domiciled in Skaro for tax purposes, private equity with a specialty in oddly unprofitable global subsidiaries—subsidiaries that forwarded their surplus to Rupert’s beneficial trust via a double Irish with a Dutch sandwich … Sure, he told me to acquire the book for him. And yes, I did that. But I didn’t pay for it using money in one of Rupert’s personal accounts, or even a company he owned a majority share of.
“Instead, I used Rupert’s funds to buy a house. And then I remortgaged it. It’s a very valuable property, apparently—it’s on Ken- sington Palace Gardens, don’t you know? I think you can guess the address.” (It was the family’s ancestral pile, which their great-great-great-grandfather had built with the blood money from the family curse.) She proceeded to explain her financial machinations—“The purchase of the book used money coming directly from an offshore financial entity that you and I jointly own, which owes Rupert the twenty-five mil but what the hey, he’s not about to come and collect it anytime soon.”
Her brother was stunned into speaking in clichés. “What. The. Fuck?”
“Dad was right, you know: accountancy really is magic. Only I figured that out too late,” she added with a pang of guilt.
Imp thought his way through her scheme, haltingly: “The curse affected anyone who took the book and didn’t own it. But we owned—we own—the family house again? So the curse couldn’t affect you or me, or someone acting under our instructions, but your boss … oh dear fucking me.” He rocked back and forth, shoulders hunched.
“I’m pretty sure Rupert learned about the book a few years ago, when he hired me. But it took him ages to find the map Grandpa left lying around, and even longer to set me up to go fetch. He told me to buy the book for him. But he didn’t say how I was to buy the book for him, and I was very careful indeed not to give him any authority to collect the book on my behalf.” Her monologue was turning into—an apology? Regrets over having waited for so long to reach out to him? A tacit admission that her cunning plan hadn’t been so cunning after all? Eve’s stainless-steel mind threatened to turn its rat-trap jaws back on her, but Imp beat her conscience to the punch.
“Which is why you resigned first, before you told him where you’d left it.” He looked at her, eyes glittering. “What now?”
“You go back to the house you co-own and check your bank balance,” she told him. This part of the explanation was easy. “I paid the finder’s fee we agreed, in full. The solicitors should be getting in touch soon. When they do, forward me their email?”
“But, but…”
“I’m putting you on salary,” she told him. Don’t ever say I don’t look out for family! she thought defensively, even though putting you on salary couldn’t begin to make up for five years of silence, neglect, and the loss of their parents. “You’ll be listed as a janitor, working at, oh, a certain property I mentioned buying earlier: duties to include any housework necessary to keep it in order, the money isn’t great but it includes on-site accommodation for yourself and up to four designated friends and family. You should have plenty of time left over for making movies on the side. But your principal job—which will not be written down anywhere—is to keep that fucking door shut.” The door to Neverland via the dream roads behind the walls of the world, which opened on the top floor. “And don’t, whatever you do, breed.” Let the curse die with the family line. “Are we square?”
He stood. “This isn’t fair!”
“Jerm.” She walked around the desk until she was close enough to tweak his nose, if she dared: “Life isn’t fair. If life was fair the family curse would come with an escape clause, Dad wouldn’t have died for you, Mum wouldn’t be in a care home, and your elder sister would probably have babies instead of control of a multibillion-pound hedge fund.” She paused. “Although the hedge fund is a really good consolation prize, come to think of it.”
She reached out with her mind and brandy arced from the decanter, filling a pair of cut crystal tumblers. She floated them across the room and handed one to Imp. “Here’s to family.” It wasn’t a toast so much as a peace offering, and after a moment Imp copied her as she raised her glass to the memory of their parents.
“So I’m the janitor now,” he said. Then he stared thoughtfully at the glass. “That’s some serious shit,” he added.
“Jerm. Please.” She reflexively gave him the pitying smile due a middle manager who was slow on the uptake, then instantly regretted it. “That’s a fifty-million-pound chunk of real estate, nobody would believe you were the owner, would they? Even though you are, at least halfway, on paper. As janitor you can come and go as you please, and your friends, too.”
He gave her a too-knowing stare. “I get why you’re doing this for me, I think. Roof over my head, as long as I keep my yap shut.”
Eve returned his stare, thinking, He’s sharper than he used to be. “Yes?” The temperature of her voice dropped.
“But why are you looking out for my homies? Why the special consideration?” He seemed perplexed. After a moment his attention settled on the cuckoo clock behind her. “What the fuck is that clock doing in here?”
“I’m buying their silence, too, in case you hadn’t noticed. And keeping them out of trouble.” Eve never threw away a useful tool, and the gang (or found family, or troupe of supervillains) Imp had assembled was too valuable to discard. With a bit of attention from the whetstone and grinder they might be polished to a fine edge. “Call it an investment in their future. What about the clock?” It grated on her nerves, sure, but—
Imp stood up and walked past her desk, then thrust his face at the clock. “This—” he said—“how long has it been here?”
“I don’t—” Eve flinched as invisible moth wings battered at her mind. “Hang on.”
“Your boss, Rupe: bit of a posh upper-class git, right? Something of a Rees-Mogg.” Rhyming slang for snob, Eve decoded.
“You could say that…”
“Why would he have a fake Black Forest cuckoo clock on his office wall with Made in China printed on the guttering?” He took a step back from the offending timepiece and shook his finger at it: “You’re a ringer, mate, and I’ve got your number—”
“I don’t—” For a moment thinking became very hard, and the ward Eve habitually wore grew hotter and hotter. Then everything came into brilliant focus: the clock began to strike incredibly fast, a puff of smoke burst from the chimney, and with a concussive bang the cuckoo shot across the room and embedded itself in the opposite wall.
“Clock!” She gibbered for an instant, before regaining her self-control. Everything sounded flat, all tones muffled by tinnitus from the small explosion. “I mean to say, of course you’re right, that’s not a clock, innocent clocks obviously don’t have no-see-um geases and exploding cuckoos, do they?” Which begs the question of what exactly is it if it isn’t a clock. Thinking clearly for the first time since she’d entered Rupert’s office, Eve approached the smoking gadget. She gathered the mana for a defensive ward, but the magical bindings that had deflagrated when Imp noticed them were gone, leaving an open door from which dangled a winding-key on a chain. A winding-key which, now her mind was free to notice, had pins that appeared to fit in a lock—and an open door through which she could see a handle.
“What is it?” Imp asked through the noisily ringing silence.
“Trouble,” she said grimly, “of the bomb disposal kind. You should go: I’ve got this.” She stood for a very long time, staring at what was clearly the magically disguised door to Rupert’s safe. She heard Imp close the door behind her, and knew she was alone; she didn’t notice the trickle of blood from the cuckoo embedded in the far wall.
Amy worked like a dog the morning after Mr. Hewitt’s downsizing interview. Lunch was time-expired couscous and black olives with low-fat soy yoghurt from the salad bar, eaten at her desk. Amy was fed and her stress levels were falling slowly back towards baseline when her phone buzzed. Of course, it was Jennifer.
“Sweetie, can you go down to the deli counter? There’s a call for HR, a customer’s kicking off about the lately departed Mr. Hewitt and I’ve got my hands full.…”
“Yes, Boss.” Amy put the phone down—no sighing, no outward emanations of discontent—and stood up. What could possibly have happened? She picked up her pad, patted a stray curl back into place, and hurried towards the scuffed corridor and bare concrete stairwell. She passed the lights-out receiving bay on her way down to the palletized storeroom behind aisles fifteen to nineteen, then in through the door at the end of the enchanted kingdom of dry goods.
Amy scurried across the shop floor, eyes downcast to avoid any customers who might delay her mission. She only raised her gaze as she approached the deli meat counter. The shining row of refrigerated countertops were fronted with luminous green fringes of plastic garnish, the better to offset the ochre and brown muscle-tones on display. Behind the refrigerators there was an aisle for the sales staff, then walls separating the shop floor from an experimental meat processing facility.
These were part of a six-month-old experiment in applied logistics. Carcasses arrived from the slaughterhouse, dead cows and pigs and sheep. On arrival in the loading bay they were attached to meat hooks and fed to the caged chaos of a robotic carving and deboning line. Attractively shrink-wrapped joints and slices of meat emerged on a conveyor belt, along with feedstock for the 3D meat printers.
Amy saw at once that something had gone badly wrong. A pasty-faced youth in white coat, mesh hat, and blue gloves cowered before an irate Member of the Public. Behind his shoulder stood Gladys Nairn, and—approaching from the other end of aisle seventeen—two blue-suited security guards, clearly ready for trouble.
“Hello!” Amy smiled at the MOP: “What seems to be the problem here?” (Never use the word “trouble” on the shop floor, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lawsuits have been lost for lesser cause.)
The Member of the Public spun round and stared at her, all long gray beard and glittering eyes: “Where’s Ade?” he demanded: “Where’s Ade? I needs my hand doin’ and ’e’s overdue!”
“Ade doesn’t—” Mrs. Nairn began.
“I’ll take it from here,” Amy assured her. “Hello, Mister, uh, may I ask your name?” The MOP squinted at her suspiciously. His hair was unkempt, lank, and greasy; his beard likewise. He wore an army jacket of dubious provenance, patched and clearly in need of a trip through a washing machine. He smelled bad. It wasn’t the usual sweat-and-stale-piss aroma of a vagrant, but something worse, something sweet and unmentionable, a battlefield miasma from a place where the flies dined heavily. Amy tried not to recoil or show any outward sign of disgust, but she’d stepped in dog turds that smelled sweeter than this guy. Not my job to judge, she reminded herself. Compliance had been known to employ the most unbelievably bizarre mystery shoppers, after all. “Mister…?”
“Magnus. Sergeant Magnus McVicar, DSC, Royal Irish Regiment, retired.” For a moment his shoulders stiffened and his spine straightened, as if some lost phantom of gallantry was trying to escape. He couldn’t be a year over forty but he looked at least two decades older. “I want to see Ade. Ade Hewitt. It’s abah’t me ’and? I need him to do it for me agin.”
He extended his gloved right hand towards Amy. The unspeakable aroma grew stronger: she gagged involuntarily, then cupped a palm before her face and took a step backwards. “What did—what does Ade do for you?” she asked.
The blue-suiters had heel-and-toed discreetly up behind ex-Sergeant McVicar, and the tall one with the gut bucket prepared to reach for him; his short, sleek companion silently unholstered her taser, watching Amy for her cue. Amy ignored the heavies and focussed on McVicar, taking shallow breaths through her mouth.
“It’s me ’and,” McVicar explained. “Lost it in Kandahar. Got me an armature, and Ade sees to it weekly. Long as ’e strips it back and makes me a new one, I’m fine. Where is he? I ’aven’t ’ad it done since Friday before last! I need me ’and doing!”
Why do I always get the loonies? Amy thought. She glanced past McVicar’s shoulder at tall-and-bulbous, who stood ready to do his duty. “Mr. Hewitt doesn’t work here any more, I’m afraid,” she explained, even though she was on the verge of throwing up from the stench. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, sir.”
“But me ’and—”
Everything happened very quickly. McVicar extended his arm towards Amy: she registered the fine-woven black Lycra glove, fingers bulging stiffly at the seams as if stuffed with bloated sausages. The hideous sick-sweet stench overcame her and she gagged again, turning aside. Tall-and-bulbous interpreted this not as disgust but as fear of assault, for McVicar had his back turned towards him. So the guard reached out and grabbed McVicar by the collar of his jacket with one hand and by the forearm with the other, heaving him around to face away from Amy, and (by sheer coincidence) towards the front of the deli counter—while holding McVicar’s arm in a tight grip.
This was a mistake.
The black-gloved hand squirted from McVicar’s cuff and flew across the counter. A cometary trail of liquifying mechanically reclaimed meat exploded from his empty sleeve and a wave of putrescence sprayed everywhere. McVicar’s hand was made of rotted pink slime, and it had long since passed its use-by date.
Screams, tears, vomiting, and ranting ensued as the security guards hustled McVicar away. Their zip-tie restraints proved less than useful on a man whose right arm was a shining steel rod smeared with filth that stank a thousand times worse than a blocked drain. There was a flicker-flash of cameras as random shoppers witnessed the stooshie in progress and uploaded it to social media: but Amy was beyond noticing.
She dry-heaved uncontrollably over a puddle of bile and couscous salad. And she wasn’t alone: the pasty-faced apprentice butcher had thrown up in the chiller, and Gladys was retching piteously. The stench was unspeakable. Amy mopped at the tear-trails on her cheeks with the back of one wrist, smearing foundation all over her suit sleeve, then tried to catch her breath. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something moving: rice-grain-sized wrigglers vibrating atop the liquor-drenched salami tray.
They were maggots, homeless maggots that until moments earlier had been happily residing in McVicar’s prosthesis. And Amy, even though she was sick to the pit of her soul (never mind her stomach) knew there was only one thing to do.
“Cleanup crew, aisle seventeen deli. The deli counter is now closed.” She straightened up from the PA microphone and met Mrs. Nairn’s eyes. “Can you call Mr. Holmes, please?” (Mr. Holmes was the duty branch manager.) “We need to shut down for a deep clean and environmental health recertification.” She paused. “The MOP was asking for Ade Hewitt, wasn’t he?” Gladys nodded, eyes wide. And now Amy saw what had happened: We’ve been pranked, she realized. “You’ll back me up on that?” Another nod. Mrs. Nairn clearly didn’t trust herself to open her mouth and have only words come out. “Good.” Amy took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. “I’m going to have to write this up. Not your fault. Not”—her eyes tracked to the exit tall-and-bulbous and sleekit-rat-face were frog-marching the shrieking veteran towards—“theirs. But if Ade thinks he can get another printer maintenance job with this on his permanent, transferrable record, he’s got another think coming, because I am going to kick up such a stink—”
It was the wrong word at the wrong time: Amy gulped for air, but it was too late. Everything was coming up again, and she had a feeling deep in the pit of her poor abused stomach that this was only going to get worse.