Reentering the church hall, Eve found the ceremony had taken a disturbing turn. The priestess was chanting in a bastardized dialect of Old Enochian, summoning the faithful to Unholy Communion. There were no wafers, but a white body stocking atop the altar squirmed and heaved as if it was full of twitching maggots. The priestess stood over it with a filleting knife and a pair of gleaming stainless steel tongs, methodically plucking what appeared to be raw hamburger patties from its abdomen, which she fed to a queue of dead-eyed worshippers. The music was bizarrely catchy and everyone was on their feet—including Imp’s crew, even though they were at the very back of the hall, almost invisible from the altar.
“For fuck’s sake, Jerm!” hissed Eve, grabbing her brother’s shoulder from behind: “You mustn’t!”
Imp lurched to a halt and shook himself, visibly disoriented. “Wha…?”
“Snap out of it!” Her ward was buzzing angrily and burning against her skin. “And grab your playmate before the Pied Piper”—the pie-eyed guitarist on fretless bass and drum machine accompaniment—“drags you all down to the altar!”
Imp gathered himself visibly and then grabbed Doc Depression, who had begun to shuffle towards the end of the queue snaking up the nave. “Wake up!” Imp pushed at Doc. Doc jerked and stopped walking. “Grab Del and Wendy,” Imp told him. “We’re in trouble.”
“Don’t eat the mystery meat,” Eve explained, then made a grab for Sybil, who seemed to be asleep on her feet.
“Wow.” Doc shook himself, much as Imp had. “That’s some mojo, right there. Hey—” It was Del’s turn: Rebecca was on her feet, and now she was sidling towards the altar. “No,” Doc told her. “Stop—”
Del shook him off but Wendy, coming to her senses, hauled her girlfriend back. “What the hell is she doing?” Wendy asked, staring at the front of the church.
“Later,” Eve told her. “Let’s get out of here: I’ve seen enough.”
Imp took Doc by the hand. Together, they trailed after Eve like lost ducklings. Behind them, the priestess’s voice rang out. “Eat in the name of our Lord! For by sacrifice I bring you the body and the blood of His Excellent Majesty the Mute Poet, Prince of Poetry and—”
Tendrils of malign magic seemed to wrap themselves around Eve’s head, warm and fuzzy and trying to lull her into a false sense of comfort and safety. Eve knew better, and pushed back against the enchantment. She walked towards the door, careful not to move fast enough to attract attention, tugging Imp behind her. They made it to the curtain at the back of the congregation, then through into the lobby, where her head cleared. Outside on the pavement Eve found Game Boy leaning against the uneven brick wall, the flowery miasma of Eve’s borrowed vaper clinging to his fingers. “Hey, Boy, wake up: we’re going home.”
“Hey,” said Del. She sniffed: “Hey, you been smoking?”
Game Boy swayed and moved to offer the vaper to Eve. “Keep it,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.” Her face was a closed book. Behind her, Wendy looked spooked.
Eve’s bodyguards arrived and they set off. Game Boy was adrift in his own headspace, but en route, the other car pulled over outside a FlavrsMart fast food outlet and he looked up: “Whut?”
“They’ll catch up with us after they’ve dropped Sybil off,” Eve said tersely. And indeed, a few minutes after they walked in the front door of Imp’s house, the door opened again and the seductive stench of fast food preceded Doc and the bodyguards.
Eve backed her brother against the wainscoting and got in his face with the demented focus of a stalker who’d found her rock star. “Did you sense it?” she demanded. “The power and the glamour—”
“’Ere, where d’you want this?” asked a wall of meat in a suit who’d followed her in, speaking indistinctly from behind a stack of pizza boxes.
“Gimme.” Doc materialized in the drawing room doorway and grabbed the comestibles.
“—Dunno, Eve, it could have been—”
“—Stank of adipocere, didn’t it?”
“How much do I owe you?”
“—The body stocking looked clean, I swear it wasn’t just BO—”
“I kept ’er receipt. Thanks very muchly, sir.”
Game Boy moonwalked into the drawing room and assplanted on a chair adjacent to the place setting where he’d left his character sheet and dice. A moment later, a pizza box materialized under his nose and he began to salivate visibly. “Take it,” Doc told him.
“But—”
“Salami stuffed crust and deluxe meat feast topping with added meat and more meat and hot sauce,” Doc explained. “I don’t think Eve’s bodyguards are big on carbs or cheese.” The reek rising from the pile of cooked animal products on the pizza was indescribable, but Game Boy wasn’t about to look a gift pizza in the mouth. “Is that roast pork?”
“Right, that’s it, if you don’t want to listen I’m gone!” Wendy’s voice drifted through the front hall. She sounded exasperated.
“Wait—” Del scrambled to intercept Wendy. Game Boy contemplated the molten alien geometry of triangular pie segments dripping with unidentifiable goop and eventually managed to fold one, then bit daintily into the apex of the triangle. His mind was drifting, the world orbiting his head. I survived, he fuzzily realized. Admittedly it had only been ten or fifteen minutes of church-survival, but he hadn’t completely fallen down the mineshaft of dysphoric memories. The female priest had helped, as had the decidedly unfamiliar liturgy—Be welcome in the House of Our Lord the Undying King, Saint Ppilimtec the Tongueless, who sits at the right hand of Our Flayed Lord, he of the Smoking Mirror—
Wait, what?
Game Boy sat bolt upright, half-eaten pizza drooping in his hand. “Doc,” he said hoarsely, “what the fuck just happened?”
Doc paused his mastication. “We went to church for evening service—” He stopped. “Wait.” He looked at Game Boy, his expression pleading: “It was just a church service, wasn’t it?”
Eve led Wendy back into the drawing room. “How much do you remember?” she demanded of her audience. “Tell me.”
“It was a—” Game Boy’s stomach was a cold ball of dread, as if he’d been chewing on raw pizza dough and regrets—“it wasn’t Christian, was it?”
“Well spotted.” Eve sent him a tight smile. “Jeremy?”
“Well we already knew that, but why did Boy—”
“Doctor Depression. Your recollection, if you please?”
“It was just a church service, wasn’t it?” But his twitching eyelid telegraphed doubt.
“And you?” She rounded on Wendy, who crossed her arms and looked mulish.
“I am never working for you again,” the thief-taker said grimly.
“Fine, but you’re going to tell them. Aren’t you?”
Wendy gave her another mulish look, then faced the others: “That priestess, I’ve met her before. She works at FlavrsMart in Human Resources.” She looked at Eve: “Is that what you expected to hear?”
“No, but it’s a highly convenient coincidence, wouldn’t you agree?” Eve plastered a bright and brittle smile on her face, then picked up an untouched box of HivePie Pizza and sat at the head of the table. “Absolutely typical,” she muttered to herself. “Fucking Rupert. I knew there had to be a reason he was into FlavrsMart.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Wendy glowered. “What the fuck was your boss Rupert doing buying a supermarket? Is it the new hotness in cult accessories?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.” Eve opened the pizza box. “The Church of the Mute Poet gives good glamour, it seems.” Glamours blinded their targets to the true nature of the enchanted subject. “You, Del, and Sybil were unwarded, so you took it full-force between the eyes,” Eve said, pointing at Doc. “Jeremy and I are both practitioners”—Imp puffed his chest out like a randy pigeon—“so we have some natural resistance.” A crease appeared between her eyebrows. “You stayed well clear”—she focussed on Game Boy—“why?”
“Boy has a history with dubious churches,” Imp told his sister, as Game Boy began to rock back and forth, biting his lip to hold back a keen of distress.
“What kind of churches?” Eve asked Game Boy. “What did they do?”
“Not here,” Imp hissed in her ear. “Uncool.”
But something had broken Game Boy’s internal censor—perhaps it was Eve’s silver-chased vaper, or perhaps it was just time and perspective—because he began to speak. “My parents tried to fix me,” he said. “Pray away the gay, gender boot camp, pentacle-costalist churches. Even though I’m not broken, they tried it all: exorcisms and banishments and”—his throat caught—“they put a geas on me to make me be what I wasn’t, but I broke it and ran away.”
He was shaking, and not with religious fervor. He was distantly aware of Doc holding his shoulders protectively, of Imp gripping his sister’s elbow with an unreadable expression on her face.
“You can stop now,” Eve remarked. More quietly, in Imp’s direction: “So that’s where his resistance comes from.”
“Saint Ppilimtec the Tongueless, Our Flayed Lord of the Smoking Mirror,” Wendy recited. Her voice was pitched higher than usual. “What the fuck, Starkey? Why does this always circle back to you and your goddamn boss?”
“There is crossover between Western mystery cults and certain bastardized forms of Mesoamerican religious rites that the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores stole and brought back with them to the Old World, along with syphilis and looted silver and gold and a bad human sacrifice habit.” Eve looked at her warily. “Do you know anything about them?”
Wendy shook her head. “Nope. And I’m never working for you again, remember.”
“What do you know about them?” Game Boy asked.
Eve shrugged. “Rupert was their bishop. Past tense, but they may not have noticed he’s missing. I’m his … I have a certain responsibility for their actions. If I mishandle them, things could get messy. So next week I’m going back to Skaro to clean house.”
“Count me out,” Wendy said automatically. But she reached for a slice of pizza all the same.
“Are you still up for GMing tonight?” Imp asked Game Boy. “You promised you wouldn’t interrupt our game,” he warned his sister.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Eve’s lip curled. “Some therapeutic bonding time is indicated,” she singsonged.
“Let’s get started,” Game Boy announced. “You stand at the threshold of adventure,” he continued, clearly intent on using the suspended game as duct tape for his tattered sense of self. “So, if we can get going? The party are sitting around at home, bored out of their heads, on a rainy morning in Daggerford. You’re siblings—four children—and your parents have gone missing. It’s going to be lunchtime soon and you haven’t heard from them since last night.” A surreptitious roll of the dice—“The four of you and your two trusty porters hired from the village—”
“—Five,” said Eve.
“Hey! Since when are you playing?” Imp asked.
“Since now.” She gave him a look.
“But you don’t have a character!” he protested.
“That’s okay, I brought a pre-rolled one. Dual-classed Mage/Nanny, school of cerebromancy, lawful evil.” She slid a neatly printed A4 page in front of Game Boy and her grin widened: “I paid for the pizza so I’m playing. Call me Mary: think I’ll fit in with your party?”
That weekend, Adrian Hewitt camped in the decommissioned freezer Ms. Henderson had made available to him. His priestess. He belonged to the one true God’s representative on Earth (or at least in West London), body and soul.
Nobody paid any attention to another muppet hiding behind the Company Face while he worked on the meat printers. It was like a malign invisibility spell. At one point he ate, then slept for a few hours. Ms. Henderson had assigned him a username and password on the branch maintenance network, and he ordered in some replacements for consumables that wore out on a regular basis.
Something must have been going right, because at five a.m. on Saturday the store computer told him: “Proceed to Loading Dock Two and prepare incoming feedstock for deboning.”
When he got there he found a quartet of zentai suits engaged in a ritualistic dance. Three of them were behaving normally enough for meat puppets—masks displaying permutations of blandly sympathetic expressions, movements economical. The fourth was malfunctioning. Its mask had slipped, face crashed in a pixellated mess, and it was struggling to escape. They’d duct-taped its arms and legs together, and it was making muffled noises behind its gag, trying to cry for help. As Ade approached, it jackknifed into rigidity, its discipline belt shocking it in response to its attempted flight.
“Check incoming conveyor line, then proceed,” his headset instructed him. He stepped behind the malfunctioning muppet and smartly pulled a noose down from the conveyor, then pushed the winch button to haul it up. The feedstock wriggled as its feet left the floor. It continued to twitch while he checked over the jointing line. By the time he was satisfied everything was working properly, the muppet had gone limp.
“Remove skin prior to disassembly,” the branch computer recited. Ade used a box cutter to slice through the duct tape and spandex. Blood oozed. He carefully recovered the Company Face, gently withdrew the gag from between bruised lips, and removed the other connectors lest they jam the carving knives. The feedstock was bald, male, pasty-skinned and flabby from too much time under office lights. Its face was purple and congested, and a warm glow of excitement lent a spring to Ade’s steps as he replayed the hanging in his mind’s eye. His crotch felt tight despite his catheter and belt: it was one of his fantasies come true. “Query. Is further assistance required for disassembly?
“Stand by,” the computer said, then directed him towards the big green start button beside the gate. The machines inside the cage began to buzz as the overhead conveyor belt lurched into motion, carrying the carcass through the crisscross grid of laser scanners that would guide the blades.
This entire test run was illegal. Not because it was murder—Ms. Henderson had arranged for the subject to be sacked and administratively de-emphasized first—but because the disassembly line was only certified for pigs. It would need a deep clean afterwards. However, it was a necessary test. God needed a reliable and undetectable way of dealing with apostates and traitors. It was Ade’s duty as the Lord’s sword and shield to do Ms. Henderson’s bidding in order to bring about His kingdom on Earth. But as he watched the feedstock dangle and twirl lifelessly towards the robots with their whirling electric carving knives, he felt an almost painful euphoria. Doing the Lord’s work felt so beautiful and right. The starved vagrants and overdosed junkies he’d strung up in the past had been dead before he began: this was so much better that he could barely wait to do it again.
Mary got all the way to Huddersfield before the wheels fell off the plan.
Traffic on the M55 was nightmarish, with an hour-long tailback—a lorry had overturned, shedding a cargo of raw cows’ udders destined for a burger factory—and by the time she’d crawled past the obstruction Emily was squalling for a toilet stop. Mary was minded to press on, but the brat had smuggled a plant cutting into the car. Cecil was already extending rhizomes into the soft furnishings and the roof lining; distracted, Mary mistakenly diverted onto the M65 and thence the M62 rather than continuing south.
She parked up at a service area past Horwich and led the children indoors to use the toilets and seek refreshments. By the time they filed out again thirty minutes later—it was impossible to do anything fast, with four kids in tow—a police motorway patrol had pulled up beside the stolen Zafira.
“Let’s walk.” Mary turned briskly and strode around the corner of the restaurant, chilly sweat beading her neck. It wasn’t the feds she was worried about so much as the skeletal presence crouching atop their light bar, its eye sockets flashing red and blue as it scanned the car park. Not to mention the penumbral sense of dread rippling out from it in waves. Obviously the Zafira had been reported missing, and only sheer blind luck had pulled her off the road in time. Number-plate recognition cameras and police demons: a combination made in hell.
Serendipity presented her with an unattended twelve-year-old Range Rover. The children oohed and aahed over the wood veneer dash and the high leather seats (although getting the five-year-olds to shut the fuck up and sit still in the back was a losing game, and heaven help her if anyone noticed the lack of booster seats and dobbed her in). What was less fortuitous was the petrol warning light that came on a mere ten kilometers down the road, which had turned into a deep cement canyon leading into the trackless depths of Manchester. The Chelsea tractor had less than a quarter of a tank when she boosted it, combined with the fuel consumption of a jumbo jet. She didn’t fancy her chances on a filling station forecourt: they all had number-plate cameras and CCTV these days, so she found a slip road—just in time—and pulled off somewhere in the vicinity of Bury. Fuck, she swore silently, and thumped the steering wheel in frustration as she pottered through the wintry Lancashire suburbs in search of a suitable replacement.
“Are we there yet?” trilled Lyssa.
The next car was an elderly Volvo estate that smelled of wet dog and musty socks. Unlike the Range Rover, its fuel gauge claimed a full tank. Mary checked Google Maps on her phone, told it to plot her a route that didn’t include any motorways—they were crawling with cameras—and Google Maps promptly sent her on a tour of the central Manchester one-way system. After nearly being T-boned by a stealth tram Mary’s nerves were in tatters. Eventually her phone steered her onto a main road heading east out of the city and she began to relax her white-knuckle grip. “I’m sure we’ll be in London by teatime,” she reassured the children, “but we’ll find somewhere to stop for lunch once we’re out of this traffic.”
Poking at the fussy radio-cassette unit (which seemed to have more buttons than it could possibly need, identified by obscure four-letter labels), she brought up a local radio station in the middle of a news report. “Police say the cause of the fire at the Chariots of the Gods theme park in Blackpool is still unknown, but human remains have been recovered from the site. A mobile crane has just arrived on the scene to lift a dead dinosaur—”
Mary cringed and hit the scan button. The radio latched onto BBC Radio 4, a national channel in the middle of a news update. “The search continues for the kidnapped children of leading Home Office superheroes Captain Colossal and the Blue Queen. The children and their nanny disappeared from their London home earlier this week while their parents were on an assignment overseas. A reward of twenty thousand pounds is offered for information leading to the safe return of Melissande, Ethan, Emily, and Robert—”
Mary nearly sprained her finger on the off button, then glanced round the cabin suspiciously. Robert had his earphones on, Emily was cooing at a small plant pot, Ethan was curled up against the car door with his eyes closed, and Lyssa—
“Yes?” Mary asked as the traffic lights turned green and she moved off again.
“Twenty thousand pounds?” Princess Sparkle-Goth had glittery currency signs in her eyes. “Only twenty thousand pounds?” She pouted.
“I’ll give you twenty-five when we get home,” Mary told her, “and we’ll have more fun on the way. Deal?”
Lyssa glowered over her shoulder at Robert, who was ignoring them. “I get his reward money, too,” she announced.
“Keep him from finding out about the reward and it’s yours,” Mary said blandly.
Manchester receded in the rearview mirror. On the other hand they detoured north to avoid the Peak District, and the road grew narrow and circuitous as it wound through the endless valleys of West Yorkshire. They were charming and picturesque at a distance, but full of villages with badly designed multiway junctions, sudden twenty-mile-per-hour speed limits, traffic cameras, and tourist traps. If she tried to feed the kids in a village cafe they’d be sure to attract attention. What she really needed was an anonymous retail mall with a food court where she could shovel burgers down their voracious maws without attracting undue attention. Reluctantly, she pushed on. Bradford she’d heard of, but not in promising terms. What the hell was a hudder and why should there be a town named after a field full of them? It couldn’t be any worse than Blackpool, so she decided to find out.
“Are we there yet?” demanded Ethan: “I need to go pee-pee!”
Driving into Huddersfield, Mary followed the signs for the city center and Kingsgate Shopping Centre. She managed to shoehorn the Volvo into the multistory car park without scraping too much paint off on the concrete pillars, then led the fractious and irritated children out in search of a toilet facility, fast food, and some sort of bribe. “There’s a GameStop in here,” she told Robert, “and something called The Entertainer Toy Shop. Wouldn’t you like to go there after lunch, children?”
By the time they got to the food court it was nearly one o’clock. It was precisely as dismal as Mary had hoped and twice as busy, but there was anonymity to be found in the crowds, and the kids had a bottomless appetite for KFC nuggets and Chocoslurry Glory™. Mary indulged them with ruthless patience, for when the fearsome foursome were in a food coma they were far easier to manage than when cranky from hunger. There was no point going back to the urban tank—the risk of detection was far too high—but if she could boost another set of wheels they could be on the road again by four o’clock at the latest. London was three hours away by motorway, so it ought to be possible to get there by midnight along backcountry routes. What could possibly go wrong?
She looked up from their table and noticed a row of overhead TV screens. They were tuned to News 24, showing a big building well ablaze by night. The crawl said something about Blackpool: and the picture changed to show a group of familiar faces.
“Look, Nan,” piped Emily, “you’re on television!”
The game night petered out by mutual consent around 11 p.m., theoretically so that Wendy could get home before the tube stopped running. In practice, the end came early because Game Boy was beginning to twitch. He was a competent GM, but he was out of his depth: Imp grandstanded at every opportunity, Del and Wendy cooperatively tackled every challenge with a speed and expertise that suggested they were very far from the novices Doc had led Game Boy to expect, and Eve approached every puzzle with a lawyer’s analytical mind and an assassin’s killer instinct. In two hours flat the party bulldozed a path through the entire three-session campaign he’d mapped over a heavily customized version of the Sword Coast, arriving at the gates of Castle Grimstein six real-world hours too early for a planned custom adventure he hadn’t finished designing yet. He was running on fumes and random encounter charts by the time Del began nudging Wendy and muttering about the last train.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” Del murmured in Wendy’s ear as Wendy gathered up her stuff—character sheets, notes—and shoved them in a jacket pocket.
“I can get the”—Wendy shifted mental gears with a visible effort—“you’re coming?”
“I’ll give you a—”
“You are not driving.”
“But I won’t hit anything! You know me, I can’t hit anything—”
Wendy shook her head. She’d seen Del knock back at least three cans of Doc Depression’s Regrettable Beer. “Tube or taxi: it’s the principle of it, I mean, it’s the law.”
Del snorted as she grabbed her jacket. “I know you saw Game Boy with Eve’s vaper.”
“Yeah, but that’s different: Game Boy wasn’t trying to get me to share. And anyway they just decriminalized it.”
“I swear I will never understand you, girl.”
They were at the front door. “You coming home with me, or what?” Wendy enquired.
“Yeah.” Del pulled the door shut and followed Wendy down the garden path to the rusting front gate. Somehow Eve and her SUV full of bodyguards had made their escape before Del and Wendy reached the street. They walked in companionable silence for a minute or two. It was chilly but not unpleasantly wintry, and the rain was holding off until the early hours.
“Do you think Game Boy lost the plot?” Wendy finally asked.
“You bet. Did you see the way he twitched every time Mary Poppins pulled out a new crossbow or hijacked another oxcart?”
“Yeah.” Wendy frowned. “I was less keen on being the littlest girl in the group.”
Game Boy had inflicted pre-rolled characters on the Lost Boys (but not Eve, who had turned up late and gone full tankie on GeeBee’s plans). They were playing as a family of magical kids growing up in Daggerford, children of a pair of retired adventurers who’d mysteriously gone missing. Eve’s character, Mary Poppins, was introduced as the children’s mysterious nanny, who’d blown in on an air elemental from Baldur’s Gate (which she had mysteriously left in a hurry). Game Boy had gone into a huddle with Eve for a few minutes while Imp and Doc fetched more beer, then came back and explained that Mary had agreed to take the children on a cross-country quest to find their parents, who had been abducted by a Big Bad (type: unknown, but sinister) and were being held for ransom in Castle Grimstein.
Castle Grimstein was a Crusader-style fortress on an offshore lump of rock two days’ sailing from Waterdeep. Featuring a sinister village full of close-mouthed fishing folk, and rumors of hidden catacombs and tunnels under the castle, Grimstein was also the ancestral seat of a sinister Baron, who seemed unlikely to provide warm milk and cookies before bedtime for visiting children and their nosy nanny.
But the campaign had not run as planned. The children had slaughtered their way from one side of the Misty Forest to the other, stringing up highwaymen by their entrails and stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Imp’s pyromaniacally inclined boy-mage now sported a cloak of uncured goblin hide. (“Purely as a deterrent,” he insisted sniffily.) They sneaked into Baldur’s Gate via the inexcusably ahistorical sewers and, with the nanny’s help, hijacked a fishing boat. Then they set sail for a small island in the Korinn Archipelago. There was a price on their heads already, but they were having fun. (Even Wendy, whose precocious five-year-old Druid was merrily introducing bounty hunters to the joy of sky burial.)
“Littlest girl, littlest boy.” Del gave her a shoulder bump. “It’s a game, Wendy. You get to step outside your own skin for a few hours and make-believe you’re someone else.”
“Yeah.” Wendy sighed. “It just feels weirdly close to real life at times. Especially when Imp’s sister pitches in.”
They made it into the tube station amidst the closing-time throng of drunk pub- and cinemagoers, and rode in amiable silence through the tunnels under London. They changed at Kings Cross, traversing escalators and endless pedestrian tunnels until they reached their platform just in time for the last train home. Fifteen minutes later they spilled onto the pavement outside Wendy’s suburban stop and found themselves on a high street where the fast-food joints did a roaring trade with homebound commuters from the central London hive.
“You’re thinking so loud you’re deafening me,” Del said as she tugged Wendy out of the way of a drunkard’s pavement pizza. In return, Wendy pulled her into an alley where the noise level dropped ten decibels and the streetlights thinned out. “Planning for next week’s games night?” Del asked. “Or something more important?”
“Just thinking about the priest. And Eve.”
“They do look similar, now you mention it.” Del nudged Wendy’s shoulder: “Those skinny blonde types all look the same to me, like they came off the same production line at the Barbie factory.”
Wendy nudged back. “Isn’t that something-ist? Eve was standing right beside us.”
“Yeah. So: Human Resources manager by day, side hustle as Priestess of the Mute Poet by night? Meanwhile Eve was Rupert’s right hand, Rupert runs the cult, and Rupert is trying to take over FlavrsMart. You think he did it to them? There’s a connection?”
“Could be.” Wendy sounded uncertain. “Is it a cult thing? They’ve both got that look. It’s everywhere, once you start noticing it, like it’s a standard template. There was one in our carriage on the first train: that gang of—”
“—Good-time girls? With the redhead who was trying not to fall off her heels—”
“—Yeah, her? Anyway, the one propping her up? She had the exact same face. Like Eve.”
“Eve’s posh, though, tube-girl was just skanky.” Del grimaced.
“Hey! You did not say that.” They were at the front door.
Wendy slid her key in the lock just as Del slid an arm around her waist. “You’re not skanky.”
“I’m not a skinny bottle blonde who irons my hair and wears five-inch heels on the tube, no.” Wendy led her inside and they climbed the stairs to her bedsit—soon to be her ex-bedsit, once her pay rise came through. “Beer’s in the fridge but I’m not sure I need another one.”
Wendy was about to detach herself from Rebecca so she could get to the bathroom, but the Deliverator wasn’t about to let go of her package. They ended up in an untidy tangle against the inside of her front door, with Del quietly grumbling against her face. “Didn’t come here for no beer,” she said, and captured Wendy’s lips. She tasted of hop oil and pepperoni and Wendy kissed her back tenderly, letting go of a tension she hadn’t been aware of that had been building since Eve dragged them off to church. “Let’s go to bed, girl.”
Wendy had a battered futon instead of a proper bed. Working together, they dragged it into position and brought out the pile of bedding, pausing to touch one another whenever the process gave them an excuse. Eventually they ended up in a heap, kissing and stroking and groping under clothing, then the clothing went away, along with Wendy’s awareness of anything beyond the taste of Rebecca’s skin, the heat and pressure of her touch, and the pitch of her moans.
When she came back to herself—sticky with sweat, limp as a rug, heart pounding and breathless—she spent a long time staring at the damp patch on the ceiling. Del nuzzled happily against her collarbone, pinning her to the futon with an arm thrown across her chest. How did I get here? she thought, and Where am I going? Which slithered uneasily into Where are we going? Assuming we was a thing, of course. It had been less than two weeks, after all. “I need to go house-hunting,” Wendy said aloud.
“Mm-hmm.” Becca stretched. “Right now?”
“Not right now,” Wendy agreed. “But soon.” The landlord wanted everyone out within two months, but if the backdated pay Mr. Gibson had promised her came through she’d be able to put down a deposit by the end of the next week. “What about you?”
“I need to sort out—” Del twitched as if a many-legged thing had crawled over the nape of her neck—“stuff. Things.” She pulled back slightly and Wendy felt a momentary pang.
“Can I help?”
“No. Not right now, anyway.” But Del relaxed a little, as if the offer made her feel better. “Still getting my head around the having-a-job thing,” she admitted. “Feels like selling my—not my soul, like selling something else.” She paused. “I’ll have that beer now.”
Two open cans later Becca unwound enough to explain. “The Ancient Egyptians thought the human soul had nine different parts—all independent. The heart, the personality, the name, a bunch of other shit. Stuff. All different aspects of you. Uh, one of them was literally the soul, and another was the physical body; I’m not explaining this right. Anyway, signing on with your boss felt like I was taking out a spiritual loan secured against a part of me I didn’t know existed. The soul of my Facebook account, the shadow of my credit score. Still not sure I shouldn’t go in on Monday and tell him it won’t work.”
“Well.” Wendy shrugged. “That’s your call.” Please don’t ask me about my headhunter’s bonus. “But … let me have a word with Gibson first?”
“Why?” Del’s expression was now slightly closed off.
“I’m not sure. But you saw the priestess too, didn’t you? Would you recognize her if you saw her again? In a different setting?”
“Sure. Are you thinking of dragging me into your investigation, girl?”
“No, because you’re not officially on the team, your background check hasn’t gone through yet, you’re not a trained investigator, and I don’t care what you’ve seen in the movies—the fastest way to fuck up a crime scene is to turn a random amateur sleuth loose on it.” Wendy smiled to take the sting out of her words. “But Jennifer from FlavrsMart HR is definitely a cult priestess, and I could use corroboration—I’m not sure what it means that the Church of the Mute Poet are involved with FlavrsMart and people are going missing there but it needs to be followed up. I’ll pitch it to Gibson as mentoring, and see if I can shake loose a higher hourly rate for you in the field.”
Del snorted quietly. “Just admit it, you can’t stand to be apart from me during the day.”
Wendy grinned at her: “Busted.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Del, in the tone that meant she didn’t want her girlfriend to imagine she was easy. She yawned. “Long day.”
“Stay over?” Wendy offered. “Stay with me?”
Del yawned again. Then she tossed her empty can at the trash and reclined beside Wendy. “Always.”
Sybil ambushed Eve when she emerged from her office on Sunday morning.
Eve had already been up for a few hours: she’d started her day at five by showering and working out in the gym, before going over the final documentation for the upcoming buy-in at FlavrsMart once more—it was due to be signed off at a meeting on Thursday. After two hours of combing over legal boilerplate she wanted a break, but Mrs. Cunningham was waiting for her in the front office. “Yes?” she demanded.
“You wanted to talk to me about the Church, ma’am?”
Eve did a double-take: “I did say that, didn’t I.” Her lips thinned as she mentally rearranged her priorities. “Could you wait here? I’ll be about three and a half minutes.”
Eve bolted before Sybil finished nodding. Back when Rupert expected her to be available twenty-four seven she’d fine-tuned her bathroom breaks: she stepped back into the outer office just five seconds later than she’d said. Mrs. Cunningham was standing on the same spot, her back ramrod straight. Eve waved her through to the visitor’s chair in the inner office. “So what did you make of last night’s church service? Was it what you expected?”
Sybil seemed oddly nervous. Perhaps it was just Eve’s brutally direct approach to business, but could it be something else? Eve produced a sympathetic expression and waited. Eventually Sybil cleared her throat. “It was very—” Sybil waved her hands—“different. It was the same liturgy as our services back home, but my husband—or Lord Skaro—would never have let a woman officiate!” She burst out: “It’s not right! Men and women sitting together? That could never happen. And there was music! And a woman, a female priest, giving the sermon…!” She trailed off, bewildered that her faith could encompass such deviation.
“I take it it’s not like that on Skaro?”
“There shouldn’t be music in church!” Sybil looked appalled. “People might dance. The sexes might converse with one another!”
Eve nodded encouragingly. Yes, yes, please do carry on. It sounded as if the Church of the Mute Poet combined the worst traits of Free Kirk Presbyterians and electric guitar Pentecostalists, with added necromancy on top. “Was the composition of the congregation very different as well?”
“Well, you know how it is on Skaro, it’s—I mean, we’re islanders. We’re very close-knit, everybody knows everybody else, our families go back centuries except for the newcomers who turned up during Victoria’s reign. But we’re very tolerant! We don’t mind visitors and immigrants. Even if they come from France.” She side-eyed the door, as if terrified that this scandalous rumor might inflict itself on ears unprepared for such a confession. “But yesterday—there were Chinese people. And Africans, and Indians, and all! Some of your brother’s friends are black! It’s—I had no idea.”
Eve silently counted to seventeen in base eleven. “I’m sure you didn’t,” she murmured. Skaro: so insular they don’t even know they’re white supremacists. She made a mental note to write Sybil up for mandatory diversity awareness training before she got the company sued. (Or worse, forced Eve to apply Rupert’s revised downsizing protocol—which she was valiantly trying to avoid, despite learning that her employees included Nazis, cultists, and why-not-both Nazi cultists.) “A word to the wise? If you want to stay in London, you’ve got to learn how to get along with people from other backgrounds.” Without getting punched in the mouth. “But back to the church service. What else did you notice?”
“Well, the liturgy was all jumbled up! That priestess girl had everything in the wrong order—the Hymn to the Black Sun is supposed to come after the Suffering of the Tongueless and before the reading from the Book of the Flowery Penumbra. And the Recitation of the Creed only happens on the first Tuesday of months ending in ‘y.’ But she missed out the—”
Sybil explained everything wrong with the service in interminable detail. Clearly the two congregations approached their book of uncommon prayer from different non-Euclidean angles. They were still recognizable as the Church of the Mute Poet, but the congregations in Skaro and London were separated by an enormous gulf of divergent practice, like subspecies of finch from isolated Galapagos Islands singing subtly different songs. “It’s shocking, just shocking!” Sybil concluded with lip-smacking disapproval.
“When did the Church adopt that liturgy?” Eve prodded. “I mean, I thought Skaro was originally Roman Catholic, but converted to Church of England way back?”
Sybil shook her head energetically. “The New Baron introduced it when he arrived. My mam told me how it used to be. Before, under the Old Lords, we were god-fearing Celtic Christians, not like those heathens on Jersey and Guernsey.” She sniffed, then infodumped all over Eve.
Skaro had been Christian since the sixth century. They’d started out Celtic, then flipped to Catholic, then Calvinist, then C of E—any denomination beginning with a C appeared to be acceptable—before everything fell apart in the nineteenth century and the Methodists moved in. That was the thin end of the wedge: a mere century later they enthusiastically adopted the mysteries of Saint Ppilimtec, the Mute Poet.
“It happened in 1998. The old pastor retired rather suddenly and the new Lord—” Rupert de Montfort Bigge—“took over, conducting the service himself. A new book of common prayer appeared one Sunday: his Lordship had his men distribute copies to the heads of every household, then called an elders’ meeting. A week later the services changed.” Her expression turned distant. “I was a young newlywed back then, still getting to know my Tony. I was at that first service, sitting in the back with the other wives. The B-Bishop? Baron Skaro”—she clearly meant Rupert—“read a prayer in something like Latin, only not—some other language—then led the men in a hymn they’d rehearsed, and I don’t remember what else. The next month there were more funerals than usual. More than we usually see in a year, anyway. And some of the elders retired to the mainland without leaving any forwarding details. I didn’t pay much attention at the time because the Baron was making lots of changes to the way the castle runs and I was very busy. It’s hard when you’re seven months pregnant and the new Master up-ends everything,” she confided.
“How precisely did he up-end things?” Eve leaned forward attentively. She’d taken courses on interrogation, and now she followed the protocol to build rapport with her subject: telegraph your interest, keep your eyes wide and focussed on their face, lips slightly parted, hands on knees. Keep her talking. “What was he changing?” It was more than just the decor in his private apartment, wasn’t it?
“There was the new liturgy,” Sybil said reluctantly. “But there was also a lot of remodeling belowstairs, construction workers from the mainland working in the cellars. He told Tony they’d been neglected, they were damp and there was rot and if it weren’t fixed the castle would collapse into the caves. But he sacked the first three or four construction firms for inadequate performance even though it was he who kept changing the blueprints.” So nobody but Rupert had a clear picture of what was going on down there? Eve nodded thoughtfully. “He sent a bunch of youngsters overseas on scholarships, as well as the retirees. Most of the youngsters eventually came back, but for a couple of years we were very short-handed. I don’t know how we got anything done! Especially with the Our Nation One Faith campaign and all the babies.”
“The … what?” Eve felt a frisson of fear run up her spine as she listened to Sybil.
The new liturgy and the shift to the sacrament of the Mute Poet—initially presented as the New Baron leading the island back to its Calvinist roots—was the set-dressing for a totalitarian coup, using religious trappings as a lever.
Skaro was already half a century behind the times when Rupert arrived and took over: 1960s teen culture, never mind 1970s feminism, hadn’t left a mark, and the mainland was close enough that troublemakers could be discreetly handed a one-way ticket, never to be heard from again. More insidiously, before Rupert Skaro didn’t even have a cellphone mast much less broadband internet. The locals were uninformed, ignorant, and vulnerable to gaslighting.
Rupert had taken advantage of this insular and conservative community to indoctrinate the natives with his faith, starting from the top down. He’d co-opted the islander men by giving them a heady shot of conservative family values, starting with power and dominance. Keep the women busy with babies—barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen—and a generation later the island would be overrun with young adults raised to worship the Undying King, Saint Ppilimtec the Tongueless, right hand of the Flayed Lord, Emperor of the Sixty-Seven-Thousandth Heaven. And to obey Rupert as their Bishop, the Lord and Master of their universe.
It was a strategy that ultra-conservative politicians had deployed in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, not to mention the more backward bits of the United States and the Middle East. But they usually aimed to take their societies back to the social structures of the nineteenth century AD, not BC.
Sybil’s account contained enough details for Eve to assemble the big picture. All the mana Rupert stole from the disappeared went into the geas he wove around the islander community, reinforcing his control until the islanders couldn’t even remember the family members whose ritual sacrifices they’d participated in. He’d been preparing an army of brainwashed cultists long before he’d sucked Eve into his web. And his planning ran deep.
Eve found the notion of Rupert engaging in long-term planning horrifying. It didn’t match the face he had shown her at all. Had he been gaslighting her about his intentions right from the start—keeping her busy with the mundane corporate and financial legwork, while he focussed on some mad cyclopean vision of his very own apocalypse, rather than leading the life of dissolution and debauchery she’d believed in? It seemed increasingly likely. The revelation that Rupert’s wealth sprang from divination through haruspicy and human sacrifice filled in a lot of gaps she’d failed to notice earlier—it was always harder to notice the absence of information than its presence—and now that she considered things in this new light, it was clear that she couldn’t take anything Rupert had done for granted. How far did his oracular insights extend? Had he taken steps to thwart her feeble attempts to free herself, to manipulate her into carrying out his plans even during his absence?
Then another thought occurred to her. The church in London and the chapel in Skaro … which was the chicken, and which the egg? If the London cult had been operational first, why had Rupert even bothered to purchase Skaro—was it merely the lure of his very own feudal seigneury with attached legal system and entrenched patriarchy, or was there something much more sinister about it? If the London church was an offshoot of the Skaroese cult—perhaps established by a party of youthful missionaries—then how many others were there?
Eve forced a charming smile for Sybil’s benefit. “My dear,” she purred, “I have a little task for you, if you’re not busy.” Sybil sat up, eager to find something to fill her days. “I’m interested in knowing more about the history of the church we attended yesterday. I want to know how long they’ve been followers of our Tongueless Lord? Were they something else previously, and if so what? Who brought them to the True Faith, and who trained and appointed the priestess?” She leaned forward again. “I’m concerned about the deviations from the standard liturgy—the progressive variations—and I want to know how it happened, that’s all. Obviously when my husband returns”—she coughed—“he’ll want a full accounting. Do you think you can do that for me?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Sybil bobbed her head. “Is that all? Do you think I should attend evening service there?”
“Yes. I have work to do that will keep me here. Will you be all right? I can assign you a driver.”
“That would be wonderful!” Sybil smiled, her expression luminous. Purpose lent her a saintly, deadly aura as she left.
Eve sat in silence for a while. It was a given that Rupert was—had been—a misogynist and a reactionary dirtbag, but that wasn’t enough to explain the newly emerging picture. Becoming a multibillionaire was one thing. Running a cult was something else. Setting up a microscopic island rerun of the Third Reich was a whole different ball game: and undertaking all three tasks in parallel bespoke a frightening degree of organization. He’d been courting Metahuman Associated Dementia with the larger wreakings: What did he think could possibly justify the risk? And how did FlavrsMart fit in the picture?
Nothing good, Eve repeated to herself, nothing good.…
Mary Drop stared in horror at the sight of her own face repeated across four giant television screens in the food court. The image was recognizable, even pixellated and blurred by the ceiling CCTV camera that had taken it. The Diet Cola she’d been in the act of swallowing fizzed up as she coughed and sneezed simultaneously: the burning in her sinuses was excruciating, but not as bad as the realization that the game was up. Her eyes watered as she sprayed fizzing soda across her half-eaten poké bowl. She glanced up again. The news was showing security camera footage from Hamleys. Not the shooty-bang-bang stuff, or the horrible little oiks running wild, but surprisingly good footage of her leading her little crocodile of miscreants up the escalator.
Mary watched, appalled. On the screens she was wearing her nanny weeds, the same twinset and sensible shoes she now wore, the same cute little cap and the blue wool coat with the big buttons. They even had her bag in focus. A coughing fit racked her, and by the time she could focus again the news had moved on. She glanced around, half expecting to see a tide of bounty hunters converging on her like shopping mall zombies, but nobody was watching. The other family groups in the food court were either queuing or inhaling their chicken and chips or pizza slices or whatever. There’s still time, Mary realized, trembling with tension. She’d have to ditch the nanny uniform and run, but—
“Nan?” Emily was staring up at her, with an expression of such baffled bewilderment that Mary’s treacherous heart tried to melt.
“What is it, dear?”
“Are we in trouble, Nan? Was it the trees?”
“No dear.” Not yet. Mary smiled.
“What’s happening?” Robert demanded.
“Nothing to worry about, eat your chips,” Mary said automatically as she unbuttoned her coat. She opened her bag and shoved the hat inside, shimmied her coat off and out from under the messenger’s strap and squeezed it after the hat, then rummaged around inside until she felt something. She pulled out a blonde wig. She held it under the tabletop, glanced around furtively, then ducked and yanked it over her scalp. Another swift look showed that nobody was watching—then she turned back to the table and found she had an underage audience. Emily stared at her accusingly; Lyssa was completely agog.
“Nan, you didn’t say you could do wigs!” Lyssa glowed with anticipation. “Can I have a wig, pretty please?”
Crap. “What kind of wig would you like, dear?”
“I want to be Marceline the Vampire Queen, only teenage—no, wait, I want … pigtails? Only rainbow pigtails like the one Harl—Harley?—wears in Big Trouble in Little Gotham. And a giant hammer!”
“You can have a hammer or you can have a wig,” Mary said sternly, “not both. And only one wig. Harley Quinn or Marceline?”
“Harley,” Lyssa pronounced thoughtfully, “I can get a big hammer later. I will paint it in rainbows and call it Skullcrusher and—”
Mary handed her a theatrical wig (still sealed in a cellophane bag), then showed her how to put it on and tuck her own hair under it (resulting in a somewhat lopsided Junior Harley cosplay, because Lyssa had too much hair of her own).
“I wanna wig, too,” declared Emily.
“Let me”—Mary reached into her bag—“see?” She looked at the plastic bag she’d just pulled out. “You can be a Terrortot! Look, you’re Laserwasp! You’re bright yellow and have a bouncy death ray on your head!” She thrust the package at Lyssa: “Be a dear and help your little sister get changed?” She checked her bag again. “Ethan can be Devilbaby”—a Crimson Television Krampus—“and that makes Robert Twinkster!” The purple Terrortot, with a pintle-mounted minigun atop his skull. “Lyssa, if you get bored with Harley I’ve got a Flytrap costume for you—”
“Don’t wanna,” said Lyssa, but she took it anyway.
Robert and Ethan looked doubtful. “It’ll be fun!” Mary said brightly: “Let’s all go to the bathroom and put on our costumes, then we’ll be on our way!”
The Terrortots were this month’s viral YouTube hit: a sardonic spoof of the ’90s hit babytainment TV show Teletubbies, featuring four brightly colored cyborg/alien apocalypse toddlers who sought to conquer the world before teatime, armed with built-in death rays and cuteness.
She sent Robert into the gents’ with a stern injunction to mind Ethan, then stood guard while Lyssa led Emily into the ladies’. Seeing nobody approaching up the corridor, she nipped into the disabled loo and grabbed a quick-change outfit from her bag. By the time the four alien cyborgs emerged (the boys’ hands were suspiciously dry, but Mary had no fucks left to give), she was in jeans, a biker jacket, a glossy black bob, and sunglasses. “Come along, boys and girls,” she told her wards, “we have miles to go—”
That’s when she saw the approaching mall cop.
He was middle-aged and portly, clearly not in great physical shape, and this being a British mall rather than an American one, he was unarmed except for a walkie-talkie and an officious attitude the size of an aircraft carrier. “Hey, you!” he said, pointing at Mary and blocking the corridor—“Izzat you what was on the telly? You’d better come with me! Or else—”
Mary smiled brightly: “Ethan? Emily?”
“Dakka-dakka-dakka-ZOOM!” shouted Devilbaby, leaping up and down and unleashing a cloud of buzzing robot murder hornets on the security guard. “Death to humans! Eat death, human scum! Watch me destroy all humans!” Laserwasp stood silently beside her brother, thumb in the general vicinity of her mouth, as green vinelike tendrils sprouted from the bottom of her costume and slithered towards their convulsing victim.
“We’re leaving now,” Mary announced, turning and marching smartly towards the emergency fire exit. She pushed the crash bar. “Come along, boys and girls!” The fire alarm drowned out the guard’s screams of terror. She paused for a quick head count. Robert was lingering on the threshold, looking back wistfully. “Smartly, Twinkster!” she snapped.
“That’s not my—” The freshly minted Terrortot saw her expression and clammed up.
Mary relented. “You can take down the next one,” she told him. “And you, Lyssa, wouldn’t you enjoy that, too?” A green velour Flytrap bounced up and down in delight. “Now fetch your brother and sister and let’s hop to it, we have to acquire another”—she glanced up and down the bare-walled concrete passage leading to the car park—“van?”
They emerged in a commercial parking annex at the back of the mall. It was neither the main public car park nor the loading bays for full-sized trucks, but a smaller area for local delivery vehicles. Mary was confronted with a cornucopia of white Ford Transits: box vans, regular vans, long wheelbase models, one with windows and seating for passengers—bingo.
She darted towards it, lifting the flap of her bag and reaching into the side pocket where the keys lurked. She fumbled around. The pocket had gone, but something cold and metallic, clawlike, grabbed her wrist—
“Really, Dad?” Her voice cracked: “Did you have to do this right now?”
An ominous electric buzz vibrated up her arm and she tugged experimentally. Whatever-it-was was trying to suck her arm in—no, it was climbing her arm, enveloping her in chilly pinching caterpillar tracks and G-clamps and who-knew-what mechanisms.
“Nan?” Twinkster was staring at her, head tilted to one side.
The mechanical snake-leech-thing continued to climb her radius and ulna: it had reached her elbow. Shreds of leather and fabric from her jacket and shirt spewed out of the bag. They smelled burnt. She suppressed the urge to scream in frustration and instead gave the Banks children a brittle smile: “This is all perfectly normal!” she trilled at them, momentarily forgetting that she’d ditched her nanny disguise and was free to be herself again. “It happens every so often!” The bag was one of her brilliant but crackbrained father’s creations, and like everything else he made, every so often it malfunctioned. Most of the time it coughed up wardrobe props it manufactured or stored in some kind of pocket dimension, but there seemed to be an Igor in there as well—one of Dad’s mad science robot assistants—and sometimes it got bored and made shit up. It was supposed to give her whatever tool circumstances demanded, but right now it seemed to think she needed a power-assisted exoskeleton instead of a set of keys.
“Swiving clunge-munching”—she gave up the effort not to swear in front of the kids and gave the bag-strap a good firm yank—“fuck.” The bag dropped to the ground. Her arm from the shoulder down was sheathed in gleaming steel, wrapped in a nest of pneumatic hoses and articulated joints. She flexed her shiny fingers, staring at them in disbelief. When she touched fingertips to thumb she felt skin, but to a first approximation her arm had turned full cyborg. “Fuck,” she repeated faintly, then re-slung the bag over her opposite shoulder. It felt oddly light in her machine-arm’s grip, although it hung heavy on her flesh-and-blood collarbone. I hope I’ve still got flesh left under all this, she thought uneasily, then put her game face back in place for the children: “Right-o!”
She marched up to the Sunshine Holidays minibus as if nothing had happened, grabbed the driver’s door handle, and watched it snap off in her fingers. “Shit.”
“That’s a bad word! You swore!” accused the red Terrortot. Mary ignored him, taking deep breaths as she tried not to panic.
If her bag was malfunctioning, was Dad’s condition worsening? Everybody knew that if you overused superpowers the Metahuman Associated Dementia was more likely to get you. Mary had a phobia of MAD. As a mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, she was already at risk of inheriting the condition. In a matter of months, it had turned her father from a kindly but absentminded man who wanted to solve world hunger into a very unstable genius with a tendency to cackle maniacally and play with giant robots. Mary shivered. Maybe she relied too heavily on the magic bag. It was far less violent than her own talent, which drew entirely the wrong kind of attention when she used it. But if Dad was declining again, not only would he need more specialized—expensive—care, the tool Mary relied on to fund the care in question might be on the edge of crapping out.
“Shit.” Mary flexed her bionic hand. The sensation of steel tendons slithering across ratcheted knuckles and cunningly flexible plates was indescribable but disturbing. But what if … She stared at the keyhole in the van’s door, then extended her index finger to its full length. It kept growing, then the tip opened like a flower and sprouted a torsion bar, a pick, and an oddly esoteric rake. She touched the lock and felt the pins engage with the top joint of her index finger, which smoothly rotated of its own accord until the lock clicked. “All aboard, girls and boys!” she called as she opened the sliding door to the passenger area behind her.
“Nan’s a Terminator!” Twinkster told his siblings. “Wicked!” Mary opened her bag and pulled out Twinkster’s Maimstation Portable, then a baby triffid for Laserwasp, and a My Little Unicorn playset for Devilbaby to animate for Flytrap. Then she stuck the top joint of her thumb in the ignition and fired up the van.
She had three hundred and twenty kilometers to drive, four rambunctious Terrortots to wrangle, and her face was all over the TV news. Pulling on a pair of dark glasses seemed mandatory. She didn’t dare check the fuel gauge: it felt like the job was jinxed. But as long as the bag worked some of the time she wasn’t entirely on her uppers. The time to start to really worry would come if Dad’s creation flaked out and she needed something more substantial than a smile and the whiplash voice of authority to keep the kids in line. Say, if the police caught up with them. Never mind Mr. and Mrs. Banks.
If that happened, she’d have to use her own powers.
Which could get very bloody, very fast.
On Monday morning, Wendy rose early, put on her gray work suit, dropped by the office to update her time sheet, then caught the tube to the supermarket to continue her investigation.
Her first stop was HR, to visit Jennifer and confirm whether she was indeed the officiating priestess from the church. But Jennifer wasn’t in; instead she found Amy, hunched over her desk and scribbling rapidly in a notebook. Wendy paused in the doorway. Amy’s face was set in a mask of concentration. She chewed absentmindedly on a stray lock of green hair, oblivious to the outside world as she extended an intricate inkscape across a page of cartridge paper. Her position was suggestive, and when Wendy glanced at the ceiling, sure enough, Amy was out of view of both of the camera domes covering the desks.
Wendy smoothed her expression into one of disinterest. Then she knocked on the door frame and entered.
Amy jerked upright and flailed for a moment as she flipped her sketchbook facedown, an expression of horror flashing across her face. “I can, uh, I can explain—”
“It’s all right,” Wendy reassured her. She pulled the door shut. Sketching on company time was obviously a sacking offense, going by Amy’s reaction. Or maybe Amy was simply afraid of authority, like so many of the instinctively law-abiding. Wendy indicated the cameras: “Are there microphones in here as well, or can we talk?”
“There would be microphones, if Jennifer hadn’t set the Facilities budget for her office to zero two years ago,” Amy said nervously. Her gaze flickered to the closed door, as if she feared a red-robed Jennifer might pounce at any moment, shrieking, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
“I was hoping to speak to her. Is she out for the morning?”
“Morning and lunchtime, maybe until midafternoon. It’s another of her off-site meetings.” Amy sat up and stretched, with an audible clicking of tortured joints. “What can I do for you?”
Wendy wasn’t going to let her off that easily. “What’s your project?” she asked.
“Noth—” Amy grabbed for the sketchbook, but Wendy was faster. As she flipped the book open, she was merciful: a twitch of her imagination summoned a floor-standing conference display banner between the camera and the naked page. But whatever Wendy had expected to find—I HATE BIG BROTHER, perhaps—wasn’t there. Instead, a beautifully detailed dragon uncurled from the page and glared up at her, channeling Jennifer’s malicious stare with eyebrow-arched precision. Twin puffs of smoke curled from its nostrils as it spread membranous bat-wings that spanned the desktop. It hissed peevishly, a rainbow of colors racing across its diffraction-grating scales: then it inhaled and sneezed.
“Hey!” Wendy leapt backwards, only just avoiding the puff of flame. The dragon crouched on its haunches then sprang into flight, barely avoiding her hair as it flapped towards the door. Clearly peeved to find its path blocked, the miniature firedrake did a midair backflip and folded its wings, sneezed again, then plummeted, sneezing repeatedly, until it snapped its wings out and flitted under the desk. “Shit!”
“Office dragons always get hay fever,” Amy apologized—she did a lot of apologizing—then pulled her knees up defensively. “You mustn’t let them get too close to your nylons,” she warned.
“You don’t say.” Slightly shaken, Wendy leaned against the door, mentally giving thanks for her wool trouser suit and steel toe–capped DMs.
“He’ll grumble for a bit, then go to sleep under the desk—it’s like a cave, you see. Dragons are to caves as cats are to boxes. He’ll fade away after an hour or two.” Amy sounded wistful. “My sketches have no staying power.”
An hour or two? Wendy blinked in astonishment. If she didn’t maintain physical contact with her summoned manifestations they vanished in seconds. And living ones … “That’s pretty special,” she said grudgingly.
“Are you going to tell Jennifer?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” A thought struck her: “Does Jennifer have any special powers? I mean, like … that?”
“I don’t think—” Amy’s brow furrowed. She paused. “You’re taking this awfully well.” Behind her, Wendy’s floor-standing banner evaporated. “Why?”
Wendy pulled out the other office chair and sat down. The grumbling from the legwell grew louder, but subsided when she pulled her feet out of the way. “I’m an investigator. We get to see lots of weird things these days. What you do on your coffee break is none of my business.” Although, a sneaky voice prompted her, it could be your next recruitment bonus. Especially if Amy found herself in need of a new job because Wendy—No, don’t go there. Dark side bad! “Do you know where Jennifer’s gone?”
“She’s giving her big presentation this morning to the Executive Committee at Head Office—on the pilot project she’s running at this branch.”
“Really?” Visions of CEOs strapped into face masks danced in Wendy’s mind.
“The, the system she’s come up with? We’ve only got preliminary financials so far so she’ll mainly be talking about the compliance wearables—that’s the equipment for keeping the bolshies in line—along with the control software, and our initial cost projections. But she’s pitching for a wider rollout at the logistics hubs.” Amy managed the difficult feat of simultaneously looking enthusiastic and mildly disgusted, as if she couldn’t quite understand why she was supporting Jennifer. “She should be back this afternoon.”
Amy’s face reminded Wendy of something she’d seen before, and after a few seconds the penny dropped: it was exactly how the cash room staff at Hamleys had looked, or the Pennine Bank clerks, as they came out from under Imp’s influence. “Huh. Well, that’s interesting. I’m going to need to access the store CCTV records this afternoon—I want to have another go at tracking down Mr. Hewitt—but this chat never happened, okay?” She pushed back her chair. “Can you page me when Jennifer gets back? I’d like a word with her.”
Down on the shop floor everything looked normal, or at least as normal as it ever looked to Wendy: just like any other supermarket, only with fewer regular humans and more muppets hauling produce and stocking shelves. There were, in fact, two masked muppets for every fleshface, to a first approximation. Wendy shivered. Hadn’t it been closer to a fifty-fifty split last week? I ought to keep count, she thought as she made a quick pass through the stockroom and glanced through the window into the manufacturing room. Faceless figures were lifting finished pieces of produce out of the maw of an open 3D printer and placing them on the conveyor belt to the vacuum sealing and labelling machines. Behind them another belt moved, carrying thin-sliced ham and pork chops.
Wendy shrugged, then walked into the loading bay. Something was kicking up a frightful din, and after a few seconds she realized the whining and clanking and hissing sounds were coming from the caged robot enclosure. Sides of beef or pig or something—she wasn’t clear enough on farmyard anatomy to identify them—dangled from the overhead conveyor leading to the doors of the cage. The conveyor vibrated slightly as the whirling knives assaulted a diminishing slab of something reddish that hung just out of view.
“What is that?” a familiar voice just behind her asked.
Wendy managed not to flinch, just in time. “Robot butcher’s line,” she replied. “What are you doing here? I thought you were filling forms today.”
“Training exercise.” Becca smirked impishly: “Gibson said I looked fed up so I should take a hike.” Wendy eyed her up and down. The Deliverator had accessorized her off-the-peg HiveCo Security uniform with a very nonregulation pair of glittery purple cycling shoes. They featured two-bolt cleats that tapped noisily on the concrete floor as she walked. She had a laminated ID badge, but it was turned to face her chest.
“But how did you get in here? That’s not a FlavrsMart badge!”
“Not my fault they left the loading bay door open.” Del’s thumb idly circled over her shoulder. “Thought I’d scope it out on the down-low.” Her nostrils flared. “Nothing to see here but a bunch of dumpsters full of expired food they’ve fenced off to keep the de-emphasized out.”
Wendy rolled her eyes: “Do you have any proper footwear?”
Del straightened, looking aggrieved. “This is proper footwear! My bike’s out back and if I have to chase down a serial killer I’ll need it! ’Sides, Gibson said they were okay for now.”
I’ll bet he did. Getting Del to play by company rules was clearly going to be an uphill battle. Wendy gave up, for the time being. “Well, how about I introduce you to HR upstairs? Get you a proper badge so you don’t have to fake it—”
Del narrowed her eyes. “I’ve had enough of HR this month already—”
“This HR bod is different, I promise: she has dragons.”
“Dragons?”
“Yup, office dragons: genuine fire-breathing toe-munchers who hide under the desk.”
“This I have got to see.” Del shook her head as Wendy led her deeper into the supermarket, working out how she was going to execute the plan that was gradually coming together in her mind.