“Where’s Imp?” Game Boy asked petulantly. “Where is he?”
Doc froze, a half-eaten sandwich gripped precariously in his left hand. “Hasn’t he replied yet?”
It had been hours since his last text message—Summoned away on Big Sister biz—and it was getting dark. Game Boy had replied immediately, pointing out that it was their regular raid night, but Imp hadn’t responded. And the weather was fulminant and wintry, the first spattery wet outriders of a December storm blowing in from the Atlantic and thudding against the plywood covering the windows.
“Nothing. Not a ping!” Game Boy flapped his arms irritably. “Last time he texted his phone was at the London Heliport, but now it says his last known location was some rock in the Channel! That was four hours ago. I texted, but it doesn’t show up as delivered. He’s offline!” Game Boy spat the word as if it was accusation, as if Imp had deliberately allowed his sister to lead him into a digital oubliette. “We’ll be late for the game!”
“Maybe that’s a good thing.” Doc Depression chewed methodically. He’d read somewhere that the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone had chewed every last mouthful fifty times, and he was trying it out for a day in an attempt to slow down his eating. It seemed to him that Gladstone must have had extraordinary dentition, or an inordinate fondness for gruel. “Wherever he is there’s bound to be horrible packet lag and jitter.”
“It the principle!” Game Boy tended to drop his sibilants when he was irate. “He commit to the raid team! Fam that raid together stay together!”
Doc swallowed a sigh. Game Boy had parent issues, or rather his parents had Game Boy issues. He’d run away from home a year ago—or more accurately escaped—and claimed Imp, Doc, and Del as his housemates, homies, found family, and emotional support team. Which annoyed Doc because he hadn’t signed up to be anyone’s therapy guy. He mostly put up with it for Imp’s sake, but if he couldn’t figure out how to bring Game Boy down again the lad would keep him up half the night with his caffeine-fueled ranting.
“Did you ask if Becca and her girlfriend want to play?” Doc suggested.
“What, the cop?” Game Boy sounded offended and incredulous simultaneously.
“Ex-cop, thief-taker, whatever.” Now Doc released a sigh: “Listen, if you don’t want a team for tonight I’ll understand perfectly—”
“No! NoNoNo! Raid!”
“—So why don’t you call her and ask?”
A gust of wind threw a rattling bucket of rainwater against the window boards as Game Boy texted. To his surprise, Doc’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the screen. It was Imp: sis has scored a castle! Catch is, it’s haunted. Stuck here overnight, home tomorrow, don’t wait up.
“Game Boy?” Doc asked.
“Not now. Busy!” Game Boy’s thumbs clicked a syncopated counterpoint to the raindrops. “Talking with Deliverator.”
Doc returned to his sandwich, holding his counsel: if Game Boy didn’t want to hear about Imp because he was busy organizing last-minute team substitutes for his weekly raid, who was Doc to complain?
Half an hour later the front door creaked open. Doc had retreated into the bathroom for an overdue shower and didn’t notice until the sound of raised voices in the front hall wafted up the stairs and through the stained nylon shower curtain. They were raised, but not shouting: Game Boy’s trumpet squeal mixed with Del’s—Rebecca’s—warmer tones, an occasional riff by a different female voice. Wendy. “Doc?” shouted Game Boy: “Doc? Where are you?”
Doc turned off the power shower and stepped over the side of the bathtub, dripping. “Five minutes!” he called through the doorway. Can’t even sluice in peace, he grumped to himself.
Down in the living room he found a tipsy Deliverator and a definitely drunk Wendy trying to ply Game Boy with beer. Game Boy was refusing, with emphasis. It wasn’t an age thing: Game Boy got the alcohol flush reaction, and got it bad. “Stop arseing around,” Doc said irritably, and passed him a can of the low-alcohol ditchwater Imp kept on hand for GeeBee lubrication interrupts.
“But he squeaks so cutely!” Wendy complained.
“So would you if one pint gave you a hangover.” Game Boy grabbed the can from Doc’s hand and snapped the ring pull savagely. “Do you even game?”
“Yes I game—”
“Sit!” Game Boy sternly pointed her at the sofa. “Del! Controllers!”
“Aye aye, Cap’n Squirt!” Rebecca winked at Game Boy and hauled a shoebox full of controllers out from beside the sofa. She collapsed in a sprawl against Wendy, and hiccuped.
“This isn’t going to work if you’re drunk!” Game Boy complained.
“So take a break,” Doc suggested.
“No! Can’t!” Game Boy appeared to be on the edge of a foot-stamping tantrum. “Play or die!”
“I heard from Imp,” Doc said, by way of a diversion. “He’s stuck overnight in a haunted castle, says he’ll be back tomorrow.”
Wendy leaned against Del’s shoulder: “Is that kind of thing normal round here?” she asked, trying not to slur.
“Totes normal,” Del reassured her. “Haunted castles are a regular part of the supervillain lifestyle and you’ll just have to get used to them.”
“Could summat—somebody—have stolen Imp’s phone and be ’personating ’im?” Wendy speculated.
“Angry ghosts!” spat Game Boy. “Or maybe cultists!”
“I think it’s very unlikely,” Doc soothed. “What are we playing tonight, anyway?”
When Eve and Imp returned to Rupert’s den they were confronted by an ominous spectacle. Beyond the French windows the sky had turned a peculiar shade of dirty pink and the clouds were piling up. The waves were showing white crests and there was a peculiar tension in the air: a storm was clearly about to break.
“Well,” said Imp. Simultaneously, Eve reached for her phone and said, “What?” in a tone of voice as chilly as the wind over the battlements.
She must have hit the speaker button, because Imp heard the reply clearly. It was Gammon Number Two on the line: “Ma’am, I’m really sorry but the chopper’s grounded. Pilot says there’s a storm blowing in and it’s tracking south of where the forecast this morning said—wind gusts are going to exceed flying conditions for the next seven or eight hours, and she says even if she takes off right now she won’t be able to land safely on Skaro.”
Eve sucked in her breath sharply. “Keep me updated on the weather conditions by text. I want to know as soon as it’s safe to fly out. I’m prepared to stay overnight but I need to be back in the office by tomorrow lunchtime at the latest.”
“Absolutely, ma’am. In the meantime, are you safe?” Gammon Number Two sounded upset, as well he might. He’d prioritized protecting her transport over her person and left her alone for half an hour, only to be caught off base. “I can try and get a boat out before the storm picks up—”
“I’ll be fine overnight,” Eve told him quellingly. She glanced sidelong at Imp, who nodded. “My brother’s here. He has hidden depths,” she added, before Gammon Number Two could protest. “Keep me posted.” She ended the call, then frowned at Imp. “Why are you still here? Go and get changed, you don’t want to disappoint the staff.”
Imp slouched into Rupert’s dressing room, where someone had laid out an evening suit for him. Going by the cut and the smell of mothballs it had last been worn some time in the 1930s. Mr. Cunningham clearly had a tailor’s eye for size: it fit him perfectly. The unseen minions had left a full range of accessories, right down to cuff links and collar studs. The dress shoes were slightly too large and creaked loudly when he walked, but they were a tolerable change from his army boots. She wants to put on a show, does she? Imp primped in the mirror, then shot his cuffs. Let’s give them the kayfabe, let’s show them Lord Starkey’s face, what ho? Eve was legally Lady Skaro, but if Imp wanted to get anywhere with the staff he had to convincingly play the part of Lady Skaro’s aristocratic younger brother. His distinctly weather-beaten arrival hadn’t made quite the right impression, in hindsight. But Castle Skaro would make a brilliant set for his next movie if he could get Eve and the servants on board with the idea.
Back in the study Imp found his sister holding a champagne flute in one elegantly gloved hand. She’d swapped her suit for a black evening gown and extra jewelry. He’d never seen his big sister in this mode before. She assessed him critically, then drily pronounced: “Adequate.”
“Shall we proceed, Lady Skaro?” He offered her his arm, then led her along the corridor to the grand staircase, just as a gong tolled sonorously somewhere in the depths of the castle.
Dinner proved to be an unpleasantly stiff occasion.
The table in the grand dining room seated twenty but was diminutive for its surroundings. The bulbs in the chandelier dangling three meters above their heads cast a fitful glow across hectares of white linen cloth and ranks of polished silverware. Long shadows shrouded the swords and shields that hung on the walls between the arrow slits. Cunningham led them to two chairs at one end of the table, separated by an empty throne-like seat in the middle: all three places were set. “His Lordship’s seat awaits his return,” he explained portentously.
Eve’s answering smile was sharp enough to cut glass. “I’m sure it won’t be needed tonight,” she said. Cunningham bowed disapprovingly then retreated, to be replaced by a pair of uniformed footmen who delivered the elements of a seven-course feast in sequence. It was the sort of meal that demonstrated why the English aristocracy had felt it necessary to conquer a quarter of the planet and steal the cuisine, although the wine was unexpectedly good—probably because of the island’s proximity to France. After the first top-up Eve pointedly covered the top of her glass and caught Imp’s eye. He nodded regretfully and waved off the waiter. “We have matters to discuss later,” she murmured.
The presence of so many attentive servants was not conducive to conversation, so after a few minutes of awkward gossip Imp gave up. Eve wasn’t terribly interested in Game Boy’s latest high-score shenanigans, and it didn’t seem terribly prudent to quiz her about her business interests when the people who might be affected were listening. After some fatuous speculation about the severity and duration of the storm, and a few where-are-they-nows about absent school friends, the well of discourse ran dry. All work and no play apparently made Eve a dull debutante.
Eventually they got to the end of the meal—by way of a bowl of Eton mess that Imp suspected was a sick burn on his comprehensive school background—and Cunningham returned to assist Eve with her chair. “Would the gentleman care for a cigar and brandy, as used to be traditional?” Cunningham asked. Imp shook his head. “Perhaps my sister and I could share a nightcap in…” He cast about desperately, suddenly realizing that he had no idea how the function rooms in this labyrinth were laid out.
“The east parlor is available, sir.” Cunningham indicated the way. Eve nodded and took Imp’s elbow in a grip of steel. They followed the butler into a room which could almost pass for cozy, if one confined one’s attention to the small circle of sofas and armchairs beside the sideboard, and ignored the concert grand piano and the small orchestra gallery occupying the other four-fifths of the space.
Imp fetched two glasses of brandy from the sideboard and handed one to Eve, who sniffed it, then took a sip. “This is giving me the creeps,” he murmured. “It’s too quiet.”
“How many servants were you introduced to? Did you get a head count?”
“Twelve, I think, including Cunningham and the waiters. It’s a big place, no wonder it’s dusty. You should buy them a Roomba or two. I hear you can get cute Dalek costumes for them.”
Eve gave him a quelling look. “Listen.” The wind outside the high windows moaned and drummed across the battlements. Woodwork creaked and groaned as a distant door slammed, followed by a muffled curse. “Is that what you meant by quiet?”
“I meant people quiet. You should have given me some warning, I’d have brought my gang and then we wouldn’t be standing here talking in whispers. We’d outnumber them. Doc, Becca, Becca’s girlfriend—not Game Boy, he’d wig out at the packet loss. Zoinks! We could even LARP that seventies cartoon show with the Great Dane—”
Eve fixed him with a gorgon stare: “You are not getting a dog, Jeremy. Absolutely not. You know what happens to pets in our family. And you only want a dog so you can call it Scooby—” A crash of thunder swallowed her next words.
“You know what?” Imp took an inadvisably big mouthful of brandy and tried not to choke. “Forget I said anything. Let’s call it a night and go upstairs?”
“I think”—Eve looked thoughtful—“yes, we should do that.” She rubbed her upper arms, then took the glass from his nerveless fingers and returned it to the sideboard. “Is it me or is there a chill in the air? Come on.” She took his arm. “Set your phone to silent vibrate and an alarm for midnight,” she whispered as they turned into the darkened grand hallway. “I want to check out the chapel when nobody’s watching us.”
Amy was stashing her handbag in the break-room locker the next morning when her work phone vibrated. It was a text from Robin Holmes, the branch manager: see me ASAP. It said a lot about the past week that her heart rate shot through the roof. Her first thought was, What else did that dirtbag do? But this time, it was nothing to do with Ade or the deli counter.
She found Robin in his office, waiting with a woman in a business suit and a sensible haircut that screamed detective.
“Amy, this is Ms. Deere, from HiveCo Security.” Amy’s oh shit sense began to tingle. “She’s going to be working here for a while, undercover. I need you to sort out everything she needs.”
Amy sat down heavily. “Undercover?”
Ms. Deere smiled. It didn’t reach her eyes. Her gaze was cold and assessing. “Amy…?”
“Amy Sullivan, Human Resources.” Amy sent her a tit-for-tat smile and crossed her arms. “What’s this about?”
Mr. Holmes sighed despondently. “Quality Assurance…” He looked at Ms. Deere. “Could you explain?”
Ms. Deere reached into a folder of documents and slid a form across the desk towards Amy. “Please sign this,” she said. “It’s a nondisclosure agreement. Uh, I’m bound by one as well, and so is Mr. Holmes.”
Amy took a shuddering breath and reached for her pen. “Why?”
“I believe you were involved in dismissal proceedings against a Mr. Hewitt last week?” Amy nodded: her oh shit sense instantly spiked all the way from tingling to peripheral neuropathy. “I gather that after his departure a number of distressing irregularities surfaced. Leading to a shutdown of the butcher’s counter and the meat processing line.” Amy caught herself before she nodded again, and glanced at her boss.
“Alas.” Right now he was clearly unhappy. “During the deep clean, samples were sent to our QA labs for screening. Mr. Hewitt was a disgruntled employee and it seemed like a good idea to check his produce for tampering. Adulterants,” he added, in a hushed voice.
“Adul—” Amy’s oh shit meter redlined so hard it wrapped its needle around the end of the dial. She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Ms. Deere nodded.
“They wondered if he’d taken a shit on the counter. Turns out he’d done something worse.”
“What?” Amy’s hands clenched involuntarily. “What?”
“Human DNA was found in samples taken from two different meat pies. It was found to be a crossmatch for persons who have been reported missing. Unfortunately only a limited number of items were sampled and the rest were destroyed, so we can’t confirm whether the other people we’re looking for also ended up contaminating the produce. Mr. Hewitt appears not to have returned to his last known address, so he can’t tell us anything, either.”
Amy’s head spun. “I, I had no idea—”
Ms. Deere touched her arm. “Nobody’s blaming you,” she said, which sounded like it was intended to be reassuring, but wasn’t.
“But the police—”
Mr. Holmes shook his head. “They won’t be involved. The missing people were all de-emphasized. Head Office just want to know how it happened, what happened, and to make sure it can’t happen again—that we can draft procedures to make sure it doesn’t happen again—and it’s been quietly dealt with. So they hired HiveCo Security.”
“I’m going to be working on-site for the next while,” Ms. Deere told her. “I’ll be going through files—your HR files in particular, but also anything and everything relating to Mr. Hewitt’s work. I also need to walk the shop floor and see the equipment Mr. Hewitt maintained, and talk to the people he worked with without spooking them. So I need to have employee credentials and be introduced as a new member of staff. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Uh, no, but we normally only do induction training once a month—” Robin caught her eye. “It’s a three-hour orientation course, basic health and safety and procedures, assuming you’ve worked retail before. Have you?”
Ms. Deere shook her head. “I’ve worked as a store detective and I’ve dealt with shoplifters, but not actual front-of-store work as such, no.”
Amy screwed her eyes shut. Fuck my life, she thought silently, wishing she could sketch all her troubles on her art pad and send them off to orbit the dumpsters out back like a swarm of annoying bluebottles. “Righto. Then I suppose … is it okay to introduce her as a management trainee?” she asked Holmes hopefully. “Because that’d explain the lack of shop-floor experience combined with the obvious—” she waved her free hand in a circle—“other stuff—”
“Other stuff?” Ms. Deere enquired, one eyebrow rising.
“I think what Ms. Sullivan is trying to say is that you don’t look like a workfare zombie,” Robin said diplomatically. “Which is all we’re being allowed to hire these days, because head office are trying to clamp down on payroll in the run-up to the takeover.”
“Please explain.” Deere shook her head, perplexed.
“The DSS sends us a continuous stream of no-hopers on their final warning before their benefits are sanctioned. They have to stay here for three months if they want to keep their benefits. All it costs us is a square meal and a hot bunk. At head office level it probably looks like we’re getting a bargain, but they’re unskilled and apathetic and move on as soon as they can. Head Office want our figures to look good for the new owners, so we’re under a hiring freeze. We’re gradually seeing our experienced, qualified people replaced by zombies.”
Robin nodded lugubriously. “The line staff are okay, but we lose about twenty percent every year to natural turnover. The workfare cases are gaining on us and they take more and more supervision and quite frankly they’re terrible employees—no retail service ethos whatsoever. Jennifer came up with the zentai scheme we’re piloting to keep them from getting in the customers’ faces or trying to unionize, but they’re little better than shelf-stacking meat puppets—muppets, she calls them. We’re a designated field testing branch, and it’s Jennifer’s project,” he added.
“Zentai suits?” Deere’s incomprehension was shifting towards bewilderment. “Jennifer?”
“Amy’s boss,” Mr. Holmes explained. “Normally Amy would be in charge of HR for a branch this size, but Jennifer is our region’s HR lead. She’s based here—”
“Come with me,” Amy said, cutting short Robin’s tendency to ramble. “I’ll get you a visitor pass and then I can show you around—it’s easier than trying to explain.” Showing was better than telling: experience had taught her that trying to describe Jennifer’s legion of unpaid meat puppets to strangers always ended badly.
Mary rose well before dawn—which was no hardship: at this time of year it was still dark around nine o’clock—and laid the breakfast table. Next, she took the suitcases she’d packed for each child and crammed them into her messenger bag (not without some grunting and swearing). Then she flew upstairs to rouse the sprogs. “Breakfast time!” she trilled, sticking her head inside each doorway in turn and flicking on the lights: “Rise and shine, you have an exciting surprise in store after you’ve eaten! Don’t forget to brush your face and wash your teeth!” she added to the older two, then returned to Ethan and Emily’s room to make sure that the twins didn’t put their clothes on upside down, back to front, and inside out.
In less than half an hour she had the children dressed, groomed, fed, and irrigated. She only had to break up one fight along the way: Robert’s and Emily’s Frosties were a bad combination. Luckily Mary spotted what was happening in time to settle the matter with a venomous glare and a threat of kale smoothies all round. Emily inhaled her cereal with practiced speed that told Mary this was not an unusual occurrence: she made a note to keep a weather eye on Robert at all future mealtimes.
“Now, children!” She clapped her hands. “There’s no school for the next two weeks but being stuck indoors is boring, isn’t it? So Mummy and Daddy have given me permission to take you on a magical mystery tour! A car is coming to pick us all up in half an hour, and we’re going away. I’ve packed a bag for each of you, but it’s going to be a long drive, so if you have any games or toys you’d like to bring along, fetch them now!”
The next half an hour was an endless hellscape of missing USB cables, stolen game cartridges, Barbie’s hair catching fire, tears, and imprecatory prayers to Baphomet demanding the responsible sibling’s painful demise. In the end it fell to Mary to gather up all the consumer electronics and brightly colored bits of plastic from the living room floor and dump them into her messenger bag. Then she rationed out gobstoppers, aniseed balls, and toffee apples (variously enchanted to bind jaw to mandible until she uttered the word of release), said, “Follow me, children,” and marched her troop down the garden path to a minivan wearing stolen Uber decals.
“Climb in, boys and girls!” she trilled. Robert and Lyssa were old enough to manage their own seat belts, and the twins were easily lashed to the child seats she’d requested, but as she took one last look at her charges she realized something was different. “Elissa, what’s that you’re wearing?” she asked: “Isn’t it a bit, well, not pink?”
Lyssa bounced up and down excitedly, then somehow extracted her cursed toffee apple without losing any teeth. “Yesterday I was Princess Bubblegum, but today I’m Marceline the Vampire Queen! You can all be my subjects! Except you, Ash”—she elbowed Robert in the side pointedly—“and Maja the Sky Witch”—with a significant look at Mary, although after sustaining it for a second she wilted slightly, evidently having second thoughts about giving her sass.
Mary clenched her teeth but kept smiling, despite the near-overwhelming urge to turn Lyssa into a toad. “It’s not nice to call Nanny a witch,” especially when she is one, “so perhaps we should have a little think about offensive cultural stereotypes?” Then she added a low-voiced aside to the driver: “Jerry, hit it.”
Jerry nodded wordlessly and drove off, clearly resigned to the Boss’s punishment assignment. And this was a punishment assignment: it took barely fifteen minutes for Ethan and Emily to finish their boiled sweets and the first “Are we there yet?” and “I need to go pee-pee!” emerged almost simultaneously.
Thirty minutes after departure: Jerry found a motorway service station. Mary escorted the twins to the bathroom and stood guard while Robert and Lyssa re-bonded with his SplatBox Portable and her Teddy Bear Hambo (who was disturbingly clingy).
Eighty minutes after departure: Jerry found another motorway service station, and Mary used Mr. Banks’s credit card to pull out £500 in cash, some of which she then used to buy (paying through the nose) a multiport car USB adapter for the GameClick 3D, the SplatBox Portable, and the teddy bear (whose inner Furby was now moaning eerily about a low battery).
One hundred and fourteen minutes after departure: Jerry glanced despairingly at Mary and pleaded, “Just make it stop?”
Mary peeled the zombie teddy bear’s arms away from the driver’s neck, then turned and told the children, “If you don’t cease and desist forthwith, there will be brussels sprouts for lunch.”
There was silence for a few seconds (apart from the rumble of tires on concrete and the ongoing grumble of the diesel engine), then Emily piped up: “Yay sprouts!”
Mary closed her eyes, then, for Jerry’s benefit, whispered: “Next services, please.”
“Sure.” Jerry’s knuckles, white on the steering wheel, began to relax. He’d been sticking religiously to the speed limit, evidently unenthusiastic about having his head added to the grisly adornments on the motorway camera gantries, but the stress had been grinding him down. Left to his own devices he’d have floored the throttle, just to shorten the agony. He signalled, then slid into the left-hand lane for the exit. Mary checked out the rear seats in the vanity mirror. Robert was entirely focussed on his video game. Lyssa was explaining something to her teddy, who nodded appreciatively and patted her knee. Emily was asleep, and Ethan was mumbling to himself and leaning over—
“Ethan Banks, what have I told you about playing with guns?”
Ethan looked up guiltily. “But Nan…”
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” Mary scolded, then made a plucking motion close to her left cheek: “Schlurp. Now, Ethan, we’re stopping for lunch and if you’re really good I’ll take you to a shooting gallery on the promenade when we arrive. But you mustn’t take Mr. Luger and Mrs. Browning into the restaurant because they’ll make Mr. Motorway Policeman sad.”
“Does that mean he won’t play Mr. Policeman Hides His Truncheon with us?” piped up Lyssa: “Because Mummy always tells Daddy, ‘No I won’t play Mr. Policeman Hides His Truncheon tonight’ when Daddy’s been naughty—”
“Please don’t say that about your parents,” Mary pleaded. I did not need to know that!
“Are we there yet?” piped Emily: “Because Cecil is thirsty.”
Jerry braked jerkily as he entered the slip road for the service area, and barely managed to avoid turning donuts on the curve into the car park.
“You did not bring Cecil,” Mary said, horrified as she watched a green tentacle reach out from behind Emily’s collar and tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
“But Nanny Glinda said I could—”
Jerry killed the engine, bent forward, and began to bang his forehead repeatedly on the steering wheel.
“Is he broken?” Lyssa asked curiously.
“All right, everyone, it’s lunchtime! We’ll be back in an hour,” Mary told the driver. He showed no sign of having heard her. She shepherded her charges out of the minivan; as a precaution, she pocketed the keys. You could never be too careful with distressed minions.
The children’s appetite for the Golden Arches’ finest mechanically reclaimed meat products appeared inexhaustible, so Mary bought them chicken chunks and fries all round, along with diet cola and disgustingly sweet ice cream desserts. One toilet trip later, she was decompressed and ready to hit the road again for the final run to the destination. “Now, children, we’re nearly there! Isn’t that nice? Let’s get going!”
They got going. All the way to the car park, where a shiny black BMW SUV had just pulled into the spot previously occupied by Jerry’s fake Uber.
Mary looked at the car keys in her gloved right hand, then at the BMW. It wasn’t an illusion: she checked very carefully. Like a snared fox gnawing off his own leg to escape, Jerry had hot-wired the minivan and fled. “Botheration,” said Mary, and rapped sharply on the driver’s side window of the BMW.
“Hey!” The occupant was a ripped thirty-something male in a Hugo Boss suit: under other circumstances she might have given him a second glance, but he’d been masticating an M&S smoked salmon sandwich, and was clearly annoyed by her infringement on his territory. Besides, it was an emergency. He cracked the door open, clearly readying a rant: “What do you think you’re doing? If you scratch that I’ll—”
Mary turned to Ethan. “Show him your toys.” Ethan showed him. BMW Man dropped his sandwich on his lap, cream cheese side down. While he was distracted, she opened her bag and pulled out her trusty MP5K. “You. Out.”
“Wait—you can’t—”
“I can and I am. Keys, please.” Mary smiled and held out her hand as Ethan’s Luger wobbled dangerously close to BMW Man’s crown jewels.
“But, but—”
“Stand and deliver!” piped up Robert.
“Into the back seat, children,” Mary said, holding her machine pistol under BMW Man’s chin as she relieved him of his keyfob. The kids piled into the back without argument, although a minor fight then broke out between the twins. “If you report your car missing within the next two hours I will be very irate, and I have friends,” Mary warned the businessman. “You don’t want to meet my friends. I suggest you wash that immediately: grease stains are the very devil to get out of wool.”
She slid behind the wheel, shoved the key in its slot, pushed the start button, and gunned the X5 out of the car park with a squeal of rubber.
“Are we nearly there?” whimpered Emily.
Mary, unlike Jerry, didn’t give a fucking macaque’s arse about the speed limit. She was scragged if they caught her, and why be hanged for a lamb when you could be hanged for stealing an entire flock of sheep instead? Plus, this was a sweet ride. She’d learned to drive, but the fastest car she’d ever owned was an eight-year-old Ford Focus with a manual transmission and a 1.1-liter engine. This two-tonne lump of Teutonic steel brought out all her worst instincts. And so the sixty minutes to Blackpool shrank to forty minutes and a flock of speeding tickets, which would be homing in on the bank balance and driving license of the unfortunate owner of the BMW, who in the meantime was explaining his moist crotch to a pair of unimpressed Highways Agency officers.
Back upstairs after dinner, Eve discovered someone had readied the maidservant’s room for her use. A tarnished candlestick, a bowl, and a jug of cold water stood on the nightstand; the narrow bed was freshly made, and someone had left a fussy Victorian nightgown on the pillow in case she’d forgotten her tee-shirt. She left Imp stalking around Rupert’s palatial quarters muttering under his breath about too many sex toys and not enough imagination as she retreated to her bathroom to shower and change.
Over the years Eve had optimized the hell out of the contents of her go-bag. To minimize bulk she travelled with all-black clothing, except for two business-appropriate shirts. She quickly pulled on leggings, a hooded running top, and a pair of black running shoes. She swapped her pearls for a belt bag of glass marbles and other esoteric equipment, then took a thoughtful second look at the frilly white nightie. On the one hand, she knew what fate usually held in store for ingénues who overnighted in storm-wracked castles staffed by sinister servants. On the other hand, the nightgown gave her an idea. She painted her face carefully: bone-white foundation, overlaid with the charcoal outline of a skull with hollow eyes, nose, and teeth. Then she pulled the nightie on over her ensemble, picked up the candlestick, and went to knock on Rupert’s bedroom door.
Imp answered the door, took one look at her, and stumbled backwards with a shriek of terror.
Eve followed him inside and closed the door: “Hush! Ahem. Whooooohoooo, or whatever ghosts say. Haunt, maybe?”
“Oh dear God, and by God I mean the Prime Minister,” Imp clutched his chest theatrically, “you’re terrifying.”
Eve grinned cadaverously. She hadn’t dressed up as a ghost in ages, but Halloween had always been her favorite time of year. She hefted the candlestick. “If they don’t die of fright, there’s always the medieval Maglite.” Then she noticed that Imp was still wearing his borrowed DJ. “Why haven’t you changed?”
Imp cringed. “I thought I’d James Bond it.” Seeing her expression, he added, “I asked them to wash my other togs and the laundry’s not back yet.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “Come on, then.”
“But it isn’t midnight!”
“Eldritch doom waits for no man. Whoooo, haunt, etcetera.”
Eve set out along the darkened corridor. Imp followed, then did a double-take: “Wait, the staircase was thataway—”
“—And Cunningham knows we know that. Attend.” Eve set off down the grand staircase, then along a darkened passage they hadn’t previously explored. It was unlit so she paused, frowned furiously, and heated her candlewick up to ignition temperature by sheer force of will. It cast barely enough light to see the cobwebs and trip hazards—dark wooden furniture in unlit halls was an ever-present menace—so she slowed. “If you see someone, turn to face the wall and let me go first,” she said softly, barely above a whisper. “I’ve got this.”
“When did you get so bad-ass, sis?” She swept past him like the Ghost of Lady Skaro Past. “What happened?”
“Necessity,” she replied, to shut him up.
A minute later: “The black hood makes you look like your head’s missing, in the dark—from behind, I mean. Neat trick. Was it intentional?”
“You tell me,” she said drily, shoving her free hand against a promising-looking cutout in the wall. It clicked, then popped open. “Bingo.”
“Bingo—zoinks! What’s that?”
“Servants’ concealed stairwell: they’re everywhere. Follow me close and shut the door behind you.” She stepped inside and began to descend.
For the next half hour Eve cautiously navigated the darkened hallways and shortcuts of the castle, steering ever deeper. Whenever she heard voices or footsteps she retreated or waited. Imp held his tongue diligently, relieving her of the need to forcibly mute him. Evidently he’d worked out that being caught sneaking around a castle at dead of night by cultists might not be a life-enriching experience.
In an older part of the building, they came to a heavy wooden door with a metal-barred window secured by substantial iron bolts. “Is this what I think it is?” Imp whispered.
“Probably. Stand back.” Eve searched the door for wards and spell-bindings, but found only dismal echoes of ancient pain and stale despair. “Dungeon ahoy.” She slid the bolts back. “Oiled within living memory.” She took a deep breath. “Have you kept up the … exercises?”
“What, you mean the ritual ones that—” Imp caught himself. “Not very well,” he admitted. “Barely.”
Dad had taught the pair of them what he could of the family speciality: formal magic. Some thought of it as a superpower, others as demonic possession. In these turbulent times there were even weirdos who claimed magic was a branch of mathematics and could be conducted using computers instead of brains. Eve had stuck to the exercise regime he’d given them, carefully not calling on her power so often that she attracted the parasites that caused Metahuman Associated Dementia, but still frequently enough that the basic forms came easily to mind. Imp’s confession annoyed her: I should have asked earlier, she chided herself.
“If you’re out of practice, stay behind me and run like hell if we encounter anything you can’t deal with. Do you even enchant, bro?”
“I, uh, I mostly rely on the gift of the gab.” She knew that much already. Imp had always had a quicksilver tongue—a magically enhanced larynx laden with enough power to get him into and out of trouble.
“Well then. Think of a story and be prepared to use it if we meet anyone.”
“Got you covered.” Imp produced his phone with a flourish. “Cinéma-vérité. Works every time. You can be the Headless Ghost of whatever, and I’m collecting reaction shots.”
“Good. Now hush and let me work.”
Eve swung the door open and descended the stairs, candlestick held high.
At first glance it might have been an ordinary cellar. But underlying the smell of damp there was something else, a graveyard fetor that hung heavy in the stagnant air. Then they came to a row of doors—or rather, locked iron grates set in the arched fronts of dark openings. Imp shone his phone’s flashlight into a couple of them. There were no mummified skeletons chained to the walls, but the second niche contained the remains of a collapsed bunk bed bolted to the wall.
“Do I want to know?” Imp whispered.
“The Lord of Skaro has the right of high justice, ius gladii—Skaro was held to be a private jurisdiction due to its isolation during the Middle Ages. Usually capital cases would be referred to the Duchy, but if the island was cut off or besieged…” Eve shrugged.
At the end of the short corridor they came to a vestibule with modern cage doors, controlling access to four cells—they could be nothing else. A dim electric light shone overhead. One of the cells, padlocked shut, held a cot and a portable commode. It was ominously clean, the bedding folded neatly. “Does this mean what I think…”
“Shut up,” Eve hissed fiercely, as she knelt by the keyhole in the door at the end of the passage. “Listening.” Behind her Imp fell silent, but began taking photographs of the cells for some opaque reason of his own.
Hearing nothing, Eve felt her way into the door. It was a conventional deadbolt lock, relatively modern—possibly installed this century. She scrabbled weakly with her mental fingers until she found purchase. The lock clicked, plates rotating and bolt withdrawing. She eased the door ajar, skin crawling as she saw what lay beyond.
“Fuck.” Rupert did this, she told herself, very carefully eliding the corollary, you enabled Rupert to do this.
The room was electrically lit and immaculately clean, making it impossible not to recognize it for what it was: a temple, obviously dedicated to something that could only be holy in a faith whose axiom system lacked the concepts of mercy and innocence—the kind of faith that was worshipped in private to avoid the scrutiny of inquisitors and criminal investigators.
All lines converged on the room’s central feature, a stone altar. The altar’s borders were decorated with a frieze of screaming skulls, and its middle was a convex surface surrounded by spiraling gutters. Off to one side, a chrome and plastic lectern supported a trio of monitors and a keyboard with an unusual number of specialized function keys. Eve nudged the mouse attached to the keyboard, and the screens lit up to display the comforting familiarity of a locked Bloomberg Terminal launchpad. She tapped in Rupert’s login and password and the display unfroze. “Shit,” she whispered, and hastily logged out again. She turned in place, examining the intricate murals and mosaics depicting the birth, death, and afterlife of the Mute Poet among his peers: the saints of death that certain conquistadores had perverted to fit their own goals and brought home with them when they returned from the charnel house they’d made of the Aztec empire.
Imp cleared his throat and she glanced round at him. His skin was pale. “I think I see why you wanted the bastard dead.”
“This—” Eve pointed at the altar—“this is—” She ran out of words. The altar had been scrubbed spotlessly clean but still stank of bleach and terror. “You asked about haruspicy? The reading of auguries by examining the internal organs of sacrificial victims goes back a long way.” She swallowed. “And that’s what they were doing here.” An altar, an obsidian blade, and a modern dealer desk to front-run the market. “I knew there was more to Rupert than collectables and canny trading, but—” She swallowed again.
“It gives a whole new meaning to insider trading,” Imp attempted, but his feeble attempt at deflection fell flat. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He was a priest, not just a worshipper.”
“It lines up.” Eve glanced at the door opposite their entrance, appraising it grimly. What if Rupert wasn’t just using divination to identify profit opportunities? she wondered in horror. What foul web am I trapped in? “Come on.”
She locked their entrance, then picked the lock on the next door. It was surprisingly heavy, and something clattered as it opened inwards—Imp leaned forward and caught a mop and bucket before they took a tumble. “What.”
“It’s the back of the janitor’s closet.” Eve stuck the candlestick inside, illuminating the empty family chapel. “Look where it comes out.”
“I don’t want to be here,” said Imp. “I don’t want the past hour to have happened. Please make it be a bad dream?”
“Sorry, can’t do that,” his sister replied, leading him into the room where her marriage had been consecrated in absentia. “Going back to bed now. Lock your door until dawn: we’ll fly out as soon as it’s safe.”
“But what happens when we get home?” Imp asked. Eve shrugged, and wished she had an answer.
Wendy followed Amy through the cramped back-office maze, noting her tensed shoulders as she clacked along like a wind-up toy. Interesting, Wendy thought. Amy was really upset about something—some things, more likely: one did not reach such a dizzy pinnacle of uptightness without serious ongoing pressure—but she wasn’t telegraphing guilt. There were none of the subtle tells Wendy had learned to spot in a miscreant confronted by a detective. Whatever had cranked Amy tight lay elsewhere—which, if it could be confirmed, made her a potential informant.
Wendy had no reason to trust anyone at Branch 322 yet: all she definitely knew for sure was that someone had contaminated the supply chain feeding the deli counter. The dismal trifecta of criminology confronted her: Who had the means, the motive, and the opportunity? Amy could be invaluable in ruling out dead ends, but if she was part of the problem …
“This is the general office,” Amy said as they walked past a space almost twice as large as Wendy’s cubicle at Security HQ, into which some sadist had managed to cram no fewer than four desks and three backless chairs. “And this is the security office. Hi, Mr. Grant! This is Ms. Deere, she’s joining us for a couple of weeks as part of the new management orientation and training scheme.” Mr. Grant grunted and kept his focus on the wall of CCTV screens. To Wendy’s eye, it looked as if the supermarket had a camera scrutinizing every single checkout, as well as … Are those the staff toilet cubicles? “As you can see, everything we do and say anywhere on the premises is recorded. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear—but best leave idle chat until we’re off the clock! Also,” she added, sotto voce, “the Branch Security computers run realtime speech recognition and dock your pay automatically if they catch you using naughty words.”
“This is HR, where I—oh, hello, Boss!” Amy jolted to attention, then beckoned Wendy forward. “Ms. Henderson? This is Ms. Deere. She’s joining us for a…”
Wendy smiled blandly as she sized up Amy’s boss. There was something alarmingly familiar about her even though she was a complete stranger. “Please, call me Jennifer,” said Amy’s boss, her smile as empty as an unfilled grave.
“Well,” Wendy said affably, “if you’re willing to be Jennifer, please call me Wendy.” They shook hands, and the penny dropped: She looks like Imp’s sister! Only … not? Maybe it was just a fashion trend among corporate blondes slithering their way around the snake pit, but the resemblance to Eve was striking. “I’m sure we’ll get on!”
“Absolutely! But I’m busy with the head office presentation on the DWP workfare placement scheme right now, so do feel free to run along, darling—” Wendy nearly scowled before she realized Jennifer was addressing Amy, who had the air of a dog who’d been beaten too often. Amy reversed out of the HR office at speed, cheeks flushed. Interesting, Wendy mused as Amy gave her a brisk tour of the stockroom at the back of the store, all the time visibly trying to maintain an even keel.
On consideration the source of Amy’s stress was clearly Jennifer. Amy could see why: despite the superficial polish, Jennifer had all the personal warmth and charm of a viper. But was there anything more to it?
“Can you tell me what your boss is working on?” Wendy asked when they reached the loading bays behind the store. “Something about workfare?”
“Her pet pilot program,” Amy said tensely. “Let me show you. Uh, you! Jasmine! If you could put that down and come over here, please?”
Wendy did a double-take as Jasmine turned to face them. Jasmine was a tall, white-clad person, much like a plague medic in isolation gear: only instead of a respirator she wore a mask on the front of her head that smiled cartoonishly. “Hello, Amy, how may I serve you?” a synthetic voice fluted from where Jasmine’s mouth ought to be.
“Just stand here please, I’m orienting a new hire.” Amy was much more polished and sure of herself in the presence of a—Is that why they call it Human Resources? Wendy suppressed a shudder.
“Jasmine is on placement from the DWP for fourteen hours a day in return for reactivation of her Universal Credit,” Amy explained, paying no more attention to Jasmine than she would to a vacuum cleaner. “They’re rotated through here on a three-month work placement program. We issue them with zentai suits—” she gestured at the head-to-toe body stocking—“with control harnesses, a randomized name badge, and the Company Face. That’s a shaped e-ink face mask/display with speech synthesis and recognition. Jasmine, display test pattern.” Jasmine’s face flickered through a sequence of geometric shapes before it returned to the default: a blandly ageless woman’s face. “The computer tells them what to do via wifi. In event of a customer interaction, the Face handles communication—we’ve got a system based on Cortana to understand requests and generate replies. Her name isn’t actually Jasmine—” Behind the face-shaped display panel, there was a muffled sound—“excuse me, did I give you permission to talk?” Amy snapped. Jasmine’s body shook its head, cringing. “That’s all for now, Jasmine: end override, back to work with you.”
Jasmine almost tripped in her hurry to return to unpacking cardboard trays of dog food. Amy waited until she was back at work before meeting Wendy’s gaze. Her shoulders slumped slightly, and she sighed.
“What?” asked Wendy.
“It’s the wave of the future,” Amy said dispiritedly. “You don’t have to like it, it just is—we have to face facts.”
“Can’t you do something?” Wendy asked, appalled.
“I could try. Then Jennifer would fire me and I’d end up right back here as a muppet myself, wearing the Company Face instead of a management suit.” She plucked at her tailored jacket. “It’s not much worse than regular front-of-store duty: the job’s the same. This just gives us improved CRM quality control—the DWP placements are shi—I mean terrible, at customer interaction. At least the computers don’t throw a strop and swear at the punters. And we let them take their gags out at the end of their shift.”
“But who is she?” Wendy persisted. It seemed monstrous to her, this robbery of identity and agency.
“I don’t know.” Amy’s face was carefully blank. The question obviously troubled her. “I could find out, but it wouldn’t help,” she said quietly. “The names are randomized on every shift change, you know. We’ve got a Jasmine; we’ve also got Rose, Iris, Lilly, Cinnamon, Poppy, and Heather. For the, uh, the temps with a bust. Jennifer was going to make them wear binders—” Amy gestured at her own well-endowed chest—“but there’s no budget for that. So we’re stuck with gendered meatbots.”
“And this is Jennifer’s hobby horse?”
“Yeah, she’s championing it throughout the organization. I mean, we had the branch automation and a custom software build configured by IT for the self-checkouts, and we had the workfare bodies. The face mask displays were originally made for our department store subsidiary—the idea was to let visitors see what they looked like in an outfit with their own face on the store dummy, but the customers hated it, so they were going spare. Anyway, Jennifer put it all together with the body stockings and the novelty ball gags. I thought she was joking at first because, I mean, really? Who’d be willing to work like that? But it turns out—” Amy swallowed—“lots of people are willing to work like that.”
If the alternative is homelessness and starvation, Wendy appended silently.
Jasmine picked up another stack of cans. Beside her, a taller, heavier body labelled “Boris” went at a trolley packed with toilet rolls with a box cutter. It was cold in the unheated receiving area, and it smelled faintly of clogged drains. Wendy grimaced. “Can we carry on? I’m sorry I asked.”
“Of course,” Amy said quietly, then turned and clattered away towards the next room. She wore low heels, Wendy noticed, unlike her boss’s stilettos. Everything about her was like a cut-down, dispirited, ill-fitting, but fundamentally more human version of Jennifer. “This is where I work, mostly,” she said, gesturing at a cramped desk behind a row of wheeled cages full of cardboard packaging. She scooped up a battered laptop and a notepad, tucked them under her arm, and glanced at Wendy. “I’m sure we can find you a proper desk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’d mind sharing the HR office with Jennifer?”
“I—I can do that.” Wendy stuttered from her initial distaste: but realization cut in—Jennifer was absolutely on the list of strange shit that merited further investigation, a list that was already far longer than she’d expected when Gibson handed her the job. This place is beyond fucked up. It put her more in mind of a high-security prison than a supermarket. One that was trying extra hard to graduate to concentration camp.
“Are we the baddies?” Wendy asked whimsically, and didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Amy cringed and hissed, “Don’t ever say that!”
Oops. She covered her lips apologetically. Amy shook her head, clearly upset by the Mitchell and Webb reference. “The walls really do have ears. Listen, how about I finish the tour and find you a desk? Then you can get started.”
The Boss had assigned Mary the task of giving the children a magical mystery tour while playing a shell game that would keep them out of the grasp of their parents and the authorities. That meant she needed, at a minimum, plentiful distractions.
Blackpool was a classic English seaside resort. Even in December, on paper the town had much to offer: the illuminations, the Golden Mile, a two-thirds-scale working model of the Eiffel Tower, even a shiny new Chariots of the Gods indoor theme park.
So Blackpool it was. After all, if you couldn’t keep a bunch of transhuman pre-tweens too distracted to realize they’d been kidnapped in a town that was basically wall-to-wall amusement parks, you were clearly doing something wrong.
Things Mary hadn’t reckoned with about Blackpool in December:
On the other hand, she’d booked a self-catering apartment via Airbnb. It was a couple of streets away from the seafront, close to the Pleasure Beach (although that was closed for winter). And the reality turned out to be not too different from the description on the website. It had four bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a front door that locked with one of those newfangled PIN-pad gadgets. Never mind the ghastly paint job and the seaside tat decorating every available surface: it was accommodation, there was wifi, and once she put Mr. and Mrs. Satan’s hellspawn to bed she could plan the next stage of Operation: Get Lost in peace and quiet.
After she parked them in the living room, Mary abandoned the kids. “I’m going to move the car, dears: don’t burn the house down!” she told Robert and Lyssa, then nipped out and dumped the hot wheels in a backstreet. She left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked: it ought to be gone by morning.
Back in the flat she found Robert and Lyssa trying to burn down the kitchen. Robert was glaring at the hob, which stubbornly refused to catch fire even though he’d turned it on and it was glowing cherry red. “It’s an induction hob,” Mary explained. “There’s no gas in this building.”
“What? No gas?” His gasp of betrayal warmed the chilly cockles of her heart.
“I told you so!” Princess Sparkle-Vampire sang as she dashed around the kitchen.
“But it’s—”
“Pyro-pyro-pyro-kinesis!” Lyssa chanted, for no apparent reason.
“Induction hobs only work if you put a salamander on them,” Mary lied glibly; “the magnetic fields annoy the fire lizard until it ignites its pyrophores. That’s like a chameleon’s chromatophores, only for fire,” she added. Misinforming children was fun: Why had she never tried it before? Ah, yes: she didn’t have children, that was why. Maybe I’ll borrow some when this is over, she thought self-indulgently.
Emily was gravely introducing Cecil to the houseplants in the living room, a pair of extremely torpid succulents that seemed reluctant to clamber out of their pots and go walkabout. Ethan was staging a reenactment of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with the Happy Meal toys from lunchtime—Sheriff Unicorn, Darth Earp, and Doc Dalek faced off against a Cowboy Gang of hapless Imperial Stormtroopers. (They died messily but bloodlessly.)
Mary clapped her hands: “Children! Go and wash your armpits and brush your feet while I unpack your suitcases! When I get back, we’re going out for lunch!” It was closer to two thirty than to one o’clock, but they’d stopped for chicken nuggets on the road. To Mary’s way of thinking it didn’t matter whether the children had junk food four times a day or five, just as long as they didn’t throw up or nag her for sweets while she was trying to put her feet up. Worrying about long-term consequences was their parents’ job.
She flew upstairs and pulled their suitcases out of her messenger bag (not without some grunting and cursing in Polish), then laid out pajamas and toothbrushes on each pillow. Then she skipped downstairs to sweep the survivors of Ethan’s gunfight into her bag for recycling and reassure Emily that Cecil could play with the succulents while the humans were out. Marceline the Vampire Queen and her pyromaniacal brother had tired of trashing the rental kitchen. “Time for lunch!” she announced, and in no time at all Mary was leading the fearsome foursome along the pavement, holding each other’s hands just like a normal family.
She bought them all a late lunch in the nearest Chicken Shack. There were no fires, explosions, or screaming food fights. Mary was rapidly developing a longing for salad, but it would have to wait until she could sneak away from her charges (who thrived on a diet of fried food, chocolate, and sugary drinks). The endless afternoon vista stretched out before her, desolate and unrestful. She had to get away from the kids for half an hour soon, otherwise madness beckoned: Why did I ever agree to this gig? Ah yes, Dad’s nursing home bills.
It was funny how rapidly a series of private equity takeovers—and the subsequent price gouging and focus on monetizing the inmates—could wreck the balance sheet of even the best-run chain of care homes. One damn home after another had either folded or ejected her dad when his condition proved difficult to manage. And each new one cost more than the last. He kept wandering off and hiding in abandoned buildings, setting up his lab again like the old days. But the cops wouldn’t—couldn’t—do anything.
Dad had been ruled incompetent to stand trial by reason of Metahuman Associated Dementia, but the budget for mental health services had been pared to the bone, so there were no state-run facilities that could take him. And although he was a persistent (albeit minor) public nuisance, the MAD diagnosis meant the police couldn’t do anything. They actively went out of their way to avoid noticing Dad, because if they noticed him they’d have to write up a crime report. But he couldn’t stand trial, and because their performance evaluations were based on their conviction rate, their efficiency metrics would plummet.
Why the authorities hadn’t already de-emphasized him was a mystery beyond her ken: but whatever the reason Mary was desperate to avoid it. Keeping him in a comfortable home with a locked front door and the specialist nursing care he needed was the best solution. But it was as expensive as a family-sized heroin habit, which was why Mary was in debt to the Boss: the biggest pusher of all.
All these worries nagging at the back of Mary’s mind as she waited for the children to finish their Chocoslurry Glory™ desserts were eclipsed by the immediate one: Where to take the supercops’ hellspawn next, to keep them happily distracted and out of trouble? Given that it was a rainy December Tuesday in Blackpool and everywhere seemed to be inexplicably shut, this was quite a challenge. But as she scrolled through Yelp listings on her phone, one venue kept coming up top: the Chariots of the Gods Experience, just a short tram ride away along the seafront.
If Akhenaten couldn’t sort them out, the Greys could deal. There was bound to be some sort of toddler zoo where she could park Emily and Ethan, and surely a problem divided was a problem halved. She might even snatch some time to smoke a fag and phone the nursing home, in case Dad was lucid enough to talk this afternoon. And after bedtime tonight, she could throw down with the Boss and find out what the fuck the big man really thought he was playing at.
Eve realized they were in trouble the moment she turned the corner onto the home stretch and saw light leaking from underneath her bedroom door.
She stopped so suddenly that Imp stumbled into her with a quiet “Oof.”
Bracing herself against the wall to prevent a tumble, she spun round and pressed her fingers to his lips. “No,” she breathed.
Imp caught his balance and craned his neck to see past her. His mouth was an “O,” the sequential fuck arrested by her fingertips.
“Problem,” she whispered.
Imp retreated to the corner they’d just turned. “Wait them out?”
“Can’t.” She couldn’t risk leaving her work laptop vulnerable to an Evil Maid Attack delivered via a toxic USB stick. Nor would their midnight walkabout go unnoticed. Anyone sneaking into Eve’s room would certainly notice Imp’s absence at the same time.
“Innocent?”
“Don’t be silly.” They were retreating into the private language of their childhood, when they’d been halfway to mind-reading. Eve thought furiously for a second then put the candlestick down: “Can you cast?”
“Not reliably, but I can push.”
She perked up. “How many?”
“Normally two to four, easy; up to ten in ideal conditions. Now…” He stared at her. “I’ll try for panic.”
“Phone.” Eve held out her hand. Imp unlocked his phone and passed it over. She hit the camera app, flipped to front-facing, checked her skullface makeup was intact, and passed it back to him. Then she picked up her field-expedient cosh and blew out its solitary candle. “Showtime.”
She tiptoed down the corridor, then eased open the door to Lady Skaro’s bedroom. The dim light from the single bedside lamp revealed the door to the maid’s room was open. Someone dressed in dark clothing stood there, with their back to Lady Skaro’s dressing table.
Imp slipped into the boudoir and crouched behind one of the canopy bedposts. Eve glided silently up behind the intruder, careful not to block the lamplight. She raised her candlestick with one hand, gave Imp a ready sign with the fingers of her other, then said, voice pitched low: “Whoo-hooo! Haunt, motherfucker.”
Her ward prickled as Imp pushed belief at the intruder with all his willpower. The results were dramatic. The intruder jolted upright, spun round, gave a tiny shriek of terror, and collapsed in a dead faint.
“Well that went well, I think—” said Imp, self-satisfied. Eve ignored him. She darted into the maid’s room and confirmed there had been just the one intruder (who had been in the process of sorting through the contents of Eve’s go-bag on the bed). She then dashed across the boudoir to the connecting door with Rupert’s room. Imp twigged to her intention as she finessed the lock and quietly unlatched the door. He readied another push as she opened it. Eve inspected bathroom, study, and playroom, but the intruder in the maid’s room had come alone.
“Clear,” she confirmed, as Imp closed and locked the outer door of Lady Skaro’s apartment. “You need to not jump to conclusions, bro. Now. Who do we have here?”
As she bent over, the fallen figure—a middle-aged woman dressed in an old-fashioned maid’s uniform—stirred. She opened her eyes to see Eve looming over her, whimpered in terror, and promptly fainted again.
“You can dial it back now,” Eve said.
“If I do that and she wakes up, she’ll figure it out.” Imp stared at the woman. “Huh! It’s Sybil the housekeeper—the butler’s wife.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Eve said tonelessly. Faceless enemies were easiest to dispose of, especially when they were initiates in the Cult of the Mute Poet with blood on their hands. Knowing their names, knowing they had families and spouses and (for all she knew) children to go home to made it much harder to murder them. Impossible, even. She picked up Sybil’s limp left wrist and unbuttoned her cuff. Rolling up the sleeve she saw a pink dahlia tattooed on the inside of her wrist. Just as she’d feared. “Oh dear.”
“What is it?” Imp asked curiously.
“Flower and song,” Eve muttered under her breath. “Here, give me a hand.” She tugged at the arm. “Keep her out while we move her, if you can.”
“Move her—where?”
“Rupert’s bedroom.”
“But where will I—”
“You can have Lady Skaro’s bed for all I care. Do you want her to escape?”
Between them they half dragged/half carried Mrs. Cunningham through the door to Rupert’s chambers, then laid her out on Rupert’s bed. For the first time ever, Eve was grateful for Rupert’s fetishistic sexuality. The leather-lined ankle and wrist restraints on the bed were functional. Imp secured her wrists first. Sybil began to stir as Eve worked on her ankles, tried kicking, then took a deep breath in readiness to scream. Her mouth opened just in time for Imp to brandish a ball gag in front of her face. “Stop,” he commanded, and Eve saw in his eyes something shadowy and forbidding, a fell expression she never wanted to see again on her kid brother’s face.
The housekeeper stilled, her scream unvoiced, eyes wide. “I can explain…” she trailed off.
Something in Eve’s chest unwound infinitesimally. If she’d started with threats things could only go downhill, but pleas—she’s terrified, Eve realized. “So explain,” Eve demanded.
“Nobody told me there’d be so much blood,” Sybil began again, then stopped.
“Where is your husband, Mrs. Cunningham?” Imp asked, standing outside her field of vision beside the head of the bed. “Does he know what you’re doing? Would he approve?”
Eve bit her tongue in surprise. Cultists tended to be patriarchal shitbags: this was the exact button she’d have told Jeremy to push if they’d planned this ahead of time.
Their prisoner looked ashen.
“The husband is the head of the household, isn’t he?” Imp nudged. “Isn’t that the law, here? What would your Lord and Master think of your petty treason?”
To Eve’s astonishment and deep unease, Mrs. Cunningham began to weep. She sobbed with the silence bred by long-standing fear. Eve glanced at Jeremy. Her brother was wincing, massaging his forehead as he did when inflicting his will-to-believe on another. It gave him a headache: Sybil wasn’t as easy a pushover as she looked at first glance. Keeping her hand out of sight of their victim, Eve signalled, ease up, ease up. Imp nodded. Presently Sybil took a shuddering breath and the tears began to dry.
“He’ll kill me, whatever you do,” she said hopelessly.
“Why? Does he know you’re here?” Eve asked.
Sybil rolled her head. “I’m supposed to be at home. In Skaro town,” she clarified. It was more of a village than a town, a cluster of gray-stone buildings jammed in the fork where the island’s two roads met. (One led to the harbor, the other meandered around the coastline.) “While his Lordship’s in residence my husband overnights in the servants’ quarters, in case his Lordship needs anything. And for nocturna laus, of course, whenever it’s—time.”
Eve caught the slight hesitation. “I know the creed,” she told the woman. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. Eve knew more than she ever wanted to about the mystery cults, the path of flower and song the conquistadores had stolen and perverted for their own ends. She’d made it her business to learn, once she plumbed the depths of Rupert’s depravity. “I obey our Mute Lord, the Prince of Poetry.” The words stuck in her throat, but again, they were technically true (insofar as she was wed and geas-bound to Rupert, of one flesh with the cult’s High Priest).
“Oh thank the Lord!” Sybil was overcome by emotion. “Please, please, I beg you, free me!”
“Free you from what?”
“My husband—” It all came out in a gush. Sybil had been married to Anthony for thirty-seven unhappy years, betrothed at birth to seal an agreement made between two of the islander families in the last days of the previous Lord. She bore the butler’s four children without complaint, toiled in domestic drudgery for long years that unrolled into decades, and never raised her eyes from the path assigned to her. But when the new Lord came to the island, Rupert brought out the worst in his servants. He’d instituted the adoration of the Mute Saint, moved out those who couldn’t stomach it, and induced those who remained to join it. That was how the mystery cults kept their grip, after all, enforcing complicity through shared bloodshed and seclusion from the outside world. Anthony, never a considerate and good-natured husband, was one of those who flourished under the new regime. He found a wild and heedless freedom in the service of his dark Lord. He became demanding—
“Stop.” Eve made a cutting motion. “You’re telling me the penal code hasn’t been updated since 1832? Never mind the sodomy statute—” Imp winced—“you mean marital rape is still legal?”
“Please, I only want a signed warrant to leave the island! His Lordship can overrule a male guardian, but my husband refuses—” She burst into tears again.
Eve touched Imp’s shoulder and led him into the next room. “Do we believe her?” she whispered in his ear.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure we do.” He looked uncharacteristically sober. “Sis?”
“Yes?”
“If you decide to burn this place to the ground, can I pass you the matches?”
Eve thought for a few seconds, then nodded. In the silence, she became aware of an absence: the rumble of wind across the battlements overhead had dwindled to nothing. She touched her brother’s shoulder again. “Jeremy. Imp.” She licked her skeleton-painted lips. “Are you absolutely certain we can believe her? I mean, she’s not just spinning us a yarn to push our buttons?”
He nodded. “I believe her. About wanting to get away, anyway. Why?”
“Stone doesn’t burn, but human sacrifice cults are another matter. And I think I’m going to take you up on those matches in due course…”
There were many bad things about wearing a muppet suit, in Ade’s opinion. The bridle and headset constantly whispered instructions in his ears; the wires monitoring his pulse and his respiration itched; the motion-tracking sensors built into the suit and surveilled by the very walls of the supermarket meant that slacking was out of the question. The branch computers monitored his actions and could enforce commands via a discipline belt. He couldn’t speak, but only mumble hoarse whispers around the gag. (If he was too noisy it released a numbing agent that paralyzed his larynx, a little detail he hadn’t known before he agreed to Jennifer’s offer.)
The computer-controlled meatbots had zipped him into his suit for the first time that morning. He’d struggled involuntarily even though he knew Jenn had his best interests at heart. The itchy synthetic fabric made his skin crawl. But he wasn’t a fighter, and in any case they’d shot him up with some kind of happy juice that made everything fuzzy and bearable. Then they left him on a cot for a few hours. “We’ll ease him in over a couple of days, then titrate a maintenance dose,” the branch pharmacist explained to her assistant as she installed the catheter. “That works best with the bolshie ones.”
“There are people who’d pay good money for this sort of treatment,” said the assistant. Then she blushed. “I don’t mean—I mean to say, I read about it somewhere—I’m not into BDSM myself—”
“Don’t worry,” said the pharmacist, “they’d never make us wear these things! We’re management.”
Ade, zoned out in a world of his own, barely noticed at the time.
But there was one good thing about the suit: once he was plugged in (wired up, rocking the Company Face, fully awake and online), he realized that he was completely anonymous. HELLO MY NAME IS Gordon was his identity right now, but the name changed with every shift, as did everyone else’s. The picture on his e-ink store dummy’s mask was a Scanner Darkly composite, modulated by the computers to react to the emotional cues of whoever the branch computers were talking to. He didn’t have to converse with strangers or meet their eyes: Cortana was his co-pilot. The computers were eerily good at reading body language, better than Ade had ever been. It was as if they were controlled by a ghost in the machine rather than a deep learning neural network. So Ade didn’t have to smile and take shit from the customers any more. Life as a meatbot was easy, as long as you lifted the boxes on cue.
Some time during the day, the other bitch from HR—Jennifer’s fat Mini-Me, the one who’d fired him—popped up, mindlessly twittering at another woman in a manager’s suit. HR bitch didn’t even notice Ade. The new woman, some kind of trainee, was interested in the other muppets. Ade took her measure furtively as he stacked soup cans on autopilot: she looked like a good fit for the program. If he hung her bones on the line he could hit the branch targets for six to seven working days, easily.
As he rolled a wheeled pallet cage of dry goods up aisle six, Ade tried to work out how it had gone so horribly wrong, all those months ago.
The New Management—the government—was Preparing for War. The Prime Minister said so every time they interviewed him on the TV. He said it with a kind, avuncular twinkle in the eyes without a face: “We’ve got to be ready for war, you know!” he reassured his audience. “Let’s get autarky done! Strong and Stable!”
Autarky meant digging up gardens to plant cabbages, raising goats on hillsides, and lots of localism. Localism meant no more refrigerator ships full of New Zealand lamb docking at Felixstowe. Instead it meant just-in-time delivery of locally sourced carcasses to the HAMDAS-RX Plus automatic deboning line on Loading Dock Four, where the robots with carving knives took in dangling animals at one end and spat out neatly packaged cuts of meat at the other. The residuum—bones and scraps—was blasted against mesh screens with high-pressure water, the bones crushed in grinders, skin autoclaved and rendered to yield gelatin, and the resulting slimy goop colored and fed to the 3D printers in the back of the deli department. Mechanically Recovered Tissue. Artificial reconstituted bone, fake skin, extruded fat, and reclaimed textured meat could be printed into appetizingly colored and textured shapes. It was sold as 100 percent pure beef, pork, or lamb: and that was exactly what it was. Eventually vat-grown cell cultures would replace the freezer trucks with the gutted pig torsos that backed up to the loading bay daily. But for now, autarky meant lots of work for Ade.
It was all fine in theory, but in practice, the pigs-to-pies line was a nightmare to maintain. Like every inkjet printer ever, the fleshprinter nozzles kept clogging. The pipelines needed to be flushed and sterilized regularly; the robots with carving knives had to be scrubbed and cleaned until they gleamed every night. (Suspicious stain, meet Food Hygiene Inspectorate.) Worse, he had targets to achieve. Each type of animal carcass had a known fat, bone, and muscle tissue composition. Ade was expected to make sure that 100 percent of each component ended up being retrieved and turned into salable products. Which was impossible. If the nuclear waste reprocessing plant at Sellafield could lose a third of a ton of plutonium, how could he possibly be expected to account for animal carcasses to the nearest gram?
Inside his zentai suit, Ade’s skin prickled with a furious flush as he recalled his slide towards inevitable disgrace and sacking.
Week after week he’d sweated bullets in a vain attempt to meet his targets, and carcass by carcass he fell further behind. Whoever drew up the targets had clearly never met a real animal: they were working to an idealized model, a perfectly spherical imaginary unicorn of uniform meat content, rather than a shitting, bleeding, panicking cow facing execution. He could get arbitrarily close—within one or two percent of perfection—but always fell short. Fucking hooves. You weren’t allowed to sell hooves (apparently they weren’t edible) but if a leg came in with a hoof still attached, that was, fuck, that put him an entire kilogram behind quota right there.
Then one morning in early September, a cold snap brought an Atlantic storm rolling in. Ade had arrived on the loading dock just after seven and noticed something behind an overflowing dumpster that hadn’t been uplifted yet. It was pure happenstance: a flash of electric blue fabric, a crumpled and bulbous sleeping bag soaked through by the weather. The refuse truck was late again, otherwise there’d have been nothing to see. He’d been set on ignoring it but a stray thought struck him, so he walked over and nudged it with his boot. “Wake up,” he grunted. But the occupant was beyond waking. He lay beside his final sacrament: a dirty spoon, a stub of candle, and a used syringe. And although he was scrawny and had needle tracks on each arm, Ade realized that the dead junkie represented an enormous commercial opportunity.
For the first time in months, Ade not only hit his targets but exceeded them.
And that was when Jennifer—who kept her branch staff performance metrics under continuous microscopic surveillance as a matter of course—noticed him.