9
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
Robert Banks came to his senses slowly. His head was pounding, his tongue felt like sticky cotton wool, his eyes were glued shut, and he was lying on a hard surface with uncomfortable ridges under his back. Someone nearby was snoring, and there was a horrible low buzzing in his ears, like a very loud refrigerator. The last thing he remembered was the skulls on the motorway signs outside the car windows. Nan’s forbidding expression discouraged communication. He’d wanted to ask her where they were going, but then he fell asleep, and now they weren’t moving any more. Apart from the snoring and the buzzing, it was too quiet. Did we arrive already? he thought fuzzily, then tried to sit up and bashed his head on something hard.
“Oww!” he wailed, and tried to open his eyes. That stung, and his hearing was muffled, but the bump had surprised him rather than actually hurting. Something was wrapped around his head. Something padded, something he was wearing. He finally forced his eyes open. The hood or whatever he was trapped by covered his face but there was a window in the fabric, a thin layer he could see through. There were gloves, too. I’m Twinkster, he recalled. He whimpered slightly at the pain in his head—it felt like a bad headache, not a bump. Did Terrortots get headaches? He felt dizzy. Mum would kiss it better and make a fuss if she noticed, and even Nan would—would something, maybe.
Where’s Nan? he wondered as he stared at the wooden slats of a bunk bed’s base, centimeters above his nose. The light was very dim and the room was cold, and he ached everywhere and felt like he was going to throw up. “Nan?” he called: “Nan?”
Above him, someone whimpered. It was a familiar, annoying voice: Elyssa was on the bunk above him.
Robert tried to roll on his side but his arms and legs weren’t working very well and for a few seconds he did the dying-fly dance on his back, hampered by his bulbous stomach, which jiggled heavily. When he’d put the costume on it had just been fleece with some kind of springy stuff to hold it out from his belly, but now it felt like there was an actual screen strapped to his tummy, disturbingly dense and heavy. To make everything worse, he wasn’t sure where Robert ended and Twinkster began. Why had Nan put them in these stupid costumes? He felt bad-weird, the kind of bad-weird that happened when he was having one of his turns—not the setting-fire-to-teacher’s-hair bad turns, but the thinning-the-walls kind, where it turned out that there really was a monster under the bed and it wouldn’t go away until he set Daddy on it.9
“Lyssa?” he said, poking the bottom of the mattress above him.
“Go’way, m’sleepin’…”
“Flytrap!” He poked again. “Where are we?”
A quiet wail from the other side of the room told him he wasn’t alone in his concern: “Laserwasp! Hurts!”
A creak from the slats overhead told Robert that Flytrap—No, that’s my annoying sister, why do I think she’s Flytrap?—was sitting up. “Devilbaby?” she called softly.
“Devilbaby! Devilbaby! Devilbaby!” echoed a reedy voice from the vicinity of Laserwasp.
Twinkster-Robert made a herculean effort and rolled his legs over the side of the bunk then sat up, bumping his pintle mount—the minigun was missing—and tried to stand.
There were two bunk beds at opposite sides of a cramped room with brightly colored gloss walls and a white floor and no windows. It was illuminated by overhead fluorescent panels, and the far wall somehow faded out into an archway through which he could see the craters and cinder piles of Terrortotland. There was a door in the opposite wall, thick and projecting several centimeters into the room. This was Totbase Prime, the nuclear fallout bunker where the terrotubbies made their lair and hatched their cute but evil plans to annihilate all surviving humans who refused to bow down before their cuddly cyborg overlords. But everything was wrong: he was Robert Banks, not a Terrortot, and his belly dial itched—
Twinkster clutched his stomach, then frantically twiddled his plastic left nipple until the calming chirps and whoops of a UHF tuner subsided into the pinging of a radar scan and a green screen with a sweeping light track.
“Twinkster!” shouted Laserwasp and Devilbaby.
“I was asleep!” wailed Flytrap, swinging their fleece-shod feet over the side of the upper bunk.
“Quiet, I’m tuning in.” Something told Twinkster—no, Robert, a defiant inner voice insisted—that this was a really bad attack, worse than the one he’d had in the alien abduction theme park when the Trexosaurus had attacked them. Normally the stuff-that-wasn’t-real very sensibly stayed outside his skin, but when he reached behind his neck he couldn’t feel the Terrortot’s suit zipper. He turned his head, seeking signal, and the radar screen on his stomach went grainy, then pixellated and turned into a television image. He fumbled for the volume knob and twisted it. Flytrap, Laserwasp, and Devilbaby formed a line in front of him, staring wide-eyed at the flickering screen.
“… Local news, the search for the kidnapped Banks children continues. Missing since last Tuesday, they were last seen in company with a woman who claimed to be their nanny but whose identity has not been confirmed by Scotland Yard. This woman—” Grainy video footage of Bad Nan snarled out of the screen, causing the terrible trio to jump backwards in unison—“is wanted by the Police for questioning in connection with the armed robbery at Hamleys toy shop last Tuesday. She is also a suspect in the incident at the Chariots of the Gods Experience theme park in Blackpool on Thursday. She is heavily armed and members of the public are advised not to approach her and to call the Police. Coming up after the break: public executions will resume at Tyburn next month, and the weather…”
The door opened. Twinkster startled and lost the channel, then turned clumsily. It shouldn’t have been clumsy (Robert was nimble for his age) but his tummy wanted to keep turning even after his head said to stop: “Whee!” he said, stumbling and nearly falling.
“Again! Again!” Laserwasp and Devilbaby clapped.
Irritated, Flytrap grabbed them and banged their bulbous heads together. “Not nice!” she snapped, then essayed a hair flip that went horribly wrong and left her railgun buzzing angrily.
“Children!” The grown-up who loomed in the doorway was like an adult Terrortot who’d shed his brightly colored juvenile skin and stretched horribly, thinning cadaverously as his belly screen migrated to his face, where it was held in place by disturbingly fingerlike straps. His—her?—voice—was familiar—“Welcome to Totbase Prime! I am the voice of Totnet and you will obeyeyeyeyey—” The voice began to echo itself rapidly, then climbed into a dwindling reverb squawk.
“You’re lying! You’re just Cortana!” Twinkster said, shocked to his Robert-core. Everything was wrong, impossibly so, so wrong that it shattered his sense of displacement from reality.
“You’re not a real Terrortot!” Flytrap accused.
“Here are your personal voice trumpets, to tell you what to do,” said the skinny, silvery grown-up, holding out a spidery mass of headsets.
“Don’t wanna!” Devilbaby announced, and sat down. Laserwasp began to cry, shrieking with deliberation and much expertise, warming up an utter shitstorm of a tantrum.
“You will put on your bridle—personal voice trumpets—or there will be no TubbyCustard for dinner!” Cortana scolded through the grown-up’s mask, evidently getting her TV shows mixed up. The bland face on the head-screen morphed into a glowing skull with flames dripping from its eye sockets.
Laserwasp began to scream, pausing only to draw breath.
“Fuck this,” said a muffled man’s voice behind the skull-screen. “I’m going now!” he shouted. “When I come back you will be wearing your bridles or I’ll bake you all into meat pies!” He threw the tangle of headsets at the far end of the meat locker, then stomped off, slamming the door behind him.
Laserwasp—no, Emily—stopped screaming. “There are plants,” she said, looking at the gate into Terrortotland speculatively. “I wanna play with the plants.”
“There aren’t any plants there any more,” Flytrap reminded her, “Agent Orange deflor—deflowered—defoliated them.” She tugged at the back of her neck and her railgun fell off, taking her head with it to reveal a sweaty, confused-looking Lyssa with her hair still up in Harley-style pigtails.
“Wanna play!” Devilbaby giggled, and wobbled towards his Trunki in search of toys.
Robert could no longer feel his belly-mounted battle radar: the totsuit was once again just a stupid fancy-dress costume, not his actual skin. His head was still sore but his stomach didn’t have tuning knobs and he couldn’t hear the terrestrial broadcast signal in his skull. Best of all, the zip fastener was back.
“How are we going to escape?” he asked, but nobody was listening.
Jennifer had returned to her office after subduing the board of directors, then supervised the special delivery the under-bishop had notified her about. It had been a great day so far. The board presentation had gone swimmingly: she had introduced them to their new role as FlavrsMart Remote Manipulator Units, then left them sedated, suited, and manacled in Barracks Room C, where their indoctrination would commence shortly. Amy was acting up according to the branch computer—her badge had left the building without permission—but that wasn’t really a problem right now: Jennifer had enough balls in the air that bringing her minion to heel was at the bottom of her burn-down list. There’d be a muppet suit with Amy’s name on it in due course.
The good news was that the Banks children were checked in. Ade was supposed to be checking up on them in freezer room 4. No word yet as to whether he’d plugged them in to the branch computer system, but they were only children and the fake nanny had confiscated all their mobile phones before the handover. So that side of the plan was progressing nicely.
A quarter of an hour later Jennifer was on her break time, reviewing her cosmetic surgery plan, when she felt the office door open. “You’ve been out of area without requesting approval, sweetie,” she said, staring at her screen. “What do you have to say for your—oh, it’s you.”
The body wearing the Company Face shifted from foot to foot as if it was impatient. It was a live one, not a muppet, and probably male—slim hips, no visible bust. Jennifer barely resisted the impulse to shock him for his impertinence.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” she repeated. They were the same barbed words, only the target was different.
“The kids are going to be a problem.” Ade’s voice was muffled but audible. She’d replaced his bridle with a headstall, granting him speech privileges so that he could answer her questions. She’d warned him not to take liberties with his larynx: the branch computers would punish him if he tried to communicate with unauthorized persons. (They had more draconian instructions for dealing with him if he ever betrayed her, but she hadn’t mentioned that to him yet. There was no need for further threats while normal workplace discipline prevailed, after all.)
“Did you damage them?” Jennifer demanded, sitting up. That would throw a spanner in the meat grinder, and no mistake.
“No, but they’re unhappy and I don’t know how you want me to—” Ade shrugged uncomfortably.
Jennifer swore viciously inside her own head: Bleep bleepity-bleep. “The children just need to be prepped for onward transport,” she told him. “Do I have to do everything myself?” She rose: “Wait here,” she said, then stepped outside.
Once she’d checked on the children from the security room—despite Ade’s whimpering, they were locked up tight—Jennifer went to make a personal call. There was a gap in the branch CCTV coverage near the loading docks, and she took advantage of it to call the under-bishop. He answered immediately.
“Good afternoon, pastor. Do you have anything new to report?”
“Yes, your grace.” She smirked: “Everything is proceeding according to plan. I’ve consolidated control at this end and the buy-in will be approved without internal resistance. The board were open to persuasion.” By shock collar and drugs, with only a modicum of beatings. “The children are on hand and prepped for transfer. I have my best minion on the case.” Best meatcutter maintenance necrophile, anyway. “Once we complete the handover it will be easy to justify cancelling the HiveCo Security contract, which is obviously a net positive from my perspective. The only loose ends left are the parents, the fake nanny, and the Bishop’s wife.”
“The Captain and the Queen will do whatever we tell them to, or they’ll never see their children again,” Under-bishop Barrett assured her. “And you can leave the nanny to me. She should be a nonissue within the next hour or two.”
“That leaves His Grace’s wife,” Jennifer reminded him.
“Yes.” The Thief-taker General paused. “I have concerns.”
“She’s the one who sent the HiveCo Security snooper my way.” Jennifer thought for a moment. “It’s possible that His Grace didn’t bring her into his confidence and she’s just trying to keep what appears to be a routine takeover on an even keel.”
“That’s a charitable interpretation.” The Thief-taker’s tone sharpened: “I have a report that she—along with her brother and his associates, two of whom are employed by the opposition—were present at your Saturday service.”
Poet’s balls—Jennifer managed to bite her tongue just in time before he continued.
“She visited the citadel last week without advance notification, accompanied by the brother. The caretakers were taken by surprise by her meddling. Furthermore, the lay preacher’s wife left with her when she returned to London. And that woman was seen in the congregation on Saturday.”
“So she’s aware of us,” Jennifer said flatly. “And kept quiet about it. Are we certain that she’s un-churched?”
“It is too risky to assume otherwise.” For the first time, the Thief-taker General allowed a note of uncertainty to slip into his voice. “If she is an initiate on the down-low, we might anger His Grace if we act against her. But if she’s an infidel, we would be derelict in our duty if we allowed her to get any closer.”
Jennifer mused aloud. “I don’t know what his plans for her are, but he married her by proxy. I find that suggestive. She was his secretary! Billionaires don’t marry their secretaries—not without a mountain of cocaine, a five-hundred-page prenup, and a lot of dirty sex.”
“She’s a child of the Starkey lineage. Have you heard of them?”
Jennifer shook her head. “Some sort of high-powered sorcerous clan, aren’t they? Her brother, too. So there’s clearly a thaumaturgic connection, but the Bishop didn’t brief either of us on what he had in mind for her. What a mess.”
“The Bishop sent me an email at the end of last week via an after-death service provider. We have no option but to trust His Grace.” The Thief-taker General was phlegmatic. “Listen, I’ll play my part and you play yours. I’ll tidy up the loose ends starting with the nanny, then I’ll come over and we can fly out together to take care of our Lord’s wishes.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Jennifer nodded unconsciously. “Righty-ho, let’s do that. I’ve got work to get back to, so call me when you’re about to land? I’ll close up shop.”
“Jolly good,” said the under-bishop, then ended the call.
“Amy Sullivan, age twenty-seven, assistant Human Resources manager at FlavrsMart Branch 322, Chickentown,” announced Wendy Deere, standing at ease in front of the transparent table, a faint smile tugging the edges of her mouth.
“Ms. Sullivan,” Gibson said gravely, rising and offering her his hand. “I’ve heard good things about you.” His grip was firm and his palm was drier than Amy’s: she wiped her hand surreptitiously before she sat in the clear plastic chair Wendy held for her. Wendy took her own seat off to one side. It felt disturbingly as if she was on the wrong side of a disciplinary interview, except in this topsy-turvy world, everything was inside out.
“I’m told you’re a transhuman,” he added. His gaze flickered towards Wendy. “We have a permanent open requirement for talented individuals who are willing to join our team. No pressure, you understand, but if you’d like to accept a fifty percent pay rise with immediate effect—” he flourished a contract at her—“all you need to do is sign here.”
“But my”—Amy found it hard to say—“personnel record”—her permanent, transferrable personnel record—“won’t look good?”
“Of course not.” Gibson smiled. “Nevertheless, we know better than to believe anything Ms. Henderson adds to your file.” Suck on that, Jennifer. “Your current employer is going through a highly unpleasant realignment of their business methods, a takeover by the master of a cult that practices human sacrifice, and your immediate line manager is a sadistic bully and also a member of the cult in question. Feel free to take your time,” he said as Amy began to read furiously.
After a couple of minutes Wendy cleared her throat significantly.
“Yes?” Amy looked up.
“It’s the best offer you’re going to get today,” Wendy pointed out. “In view of the takeover.”
“Oh dear. I suppose you’re right…” Amy signed the final page.
Gibson nodded approvingly. “To business,” he said. And by business, he wasn’t talking about corporate defections or head-hunting, except possibly in the most literal sense of the term. “Starting to record under evidence retention rules now. Wendy tells me you have some insights into Ms. Henderson’s personality and interests, and also the events leading up to the dismissal of—” he glanced down at his paper notes—“Mr. Adrian Hewitt. Would you mind talking me through his work responsibilities and the events leading up to his firing again? Then I’d like to pick your brain about your colleague Jennifer Henderson.”
Amy licked her lips. “My boss,” she reminded him.
Gibson smiled. “Your ex-boss, and she’s going to be arrested for murder—” he glanced at his notes again, and his smile slipped—“no, make that health and safety violations and selling adulterated meat products.”
Over the next hour, Amy sang like a diva, giving Gibson chapter and verse on Ade’s questionable deli counter sculptures and the subsequent can of wrigglers his departure had uncovered, and then every petty incident of workplace sadism Jennifer had inflicted on her since her arrival. Gibson nodded along, occasionally making a brief note on his pad but confining his speech to discreet, unscripted prompts. He was as skilled an interrogator as Amy had ever worked with, and she noticed that he didn’t solicit any incriminating admissions from her.
“So you suspect Ms. Henderson locked you out of the track and trace system specifically to stop you assisting our investigation. And a number of senior managers are now missing. Is that correct?” Gibson finally asked. It wasn’t a leading question so much as a summary of what she’d been telling him. Finally, she thought.
“Yes.”
Gibson tapped a control on the tablet, ending the recording session. “Now, about your, ah, talent,” he said. “Ms. Deere tells me that your drawings come to life.” He turned his notepad upside down and slid it across the table towards her. “Could you give me a quick demonstration?”
“It’s not very impressive.” Amy blushed furiously, then began to sketch. But half an hour and three white mice later—one of them was eaten by a small, bat-winged, tentacular monster-doodle that accidentally escaped from page sixteen—Mr. Gibson’s glowing approval began to impress upon Amy that she was not as useless as she’d thought.
“Welcome to transhuman investigations,” Mr. Gibson told her with an inscrutable smile, just as Del slipped into the back of the office. Then he looked at Wendy and Del. “It’s a mess,” he admitted. “This job. I didn’t expect it to go sideways so fast.” He paused. “So here’s what I’d like you to do.”
He looked at Amy. “This part—if you play your part FlavrsMart will probably dismiss you for gross misconduct, assuming you don’t resign first—but I’m pretty sure they won’t be able to prosecute you, and your position with HiveCo Security is already assured. But I’m not going to force you if—”
“What do you need?” Amy asked.
“You haven’t officially resigned yet, so you still have a management badge. I’d like you to go back to the branch with Wendy and Del this afternoon and take biopsy samples from the peo—from the bodies in the company suits. The ones that aren’t people, I mean. While you’re at it, try and take a rough head count of how many human beings are still working there, and how many are just things that look like people. It’s going to be a quick in-and-out. If you could get into the HR office and grab a personnel roster that’d be brilliant. But this needs to be quick, and you might want to send your resignation email as you leave. And at all costs, avoid Jennifer Henderson.”
“You want me to black-bag my form—I mean, they’re still my employers?” Wendy exchanged a look with Del, but before she could say anything, Amy nodded. “If you can cover for me then yeah, I’m up for that.” She smiled. “It’d be a public service.”
“All right. Wendy’s in charge of the biopsies and security. Amy, you’re there to carry a badge. Del, your job is to make sure all three of you get away clean. You don’t need to worry about CCTV, only about actual physical store security and muppets trying to stop you. While you’re doing that, I’m going to get onto Legal and see about getting the camera footage seized.”
Wendy essayed a salute. “Right you are, sir. Okay you two, let’s go down to Stores and sign out a sampling kit and protective wards, then the garage…”
Gibson watched them leave. Finally alone, he picked up the landline handset. He dialed a number he’d hoped never to need. “Good afternoon, duty officer please. SO15, Counter Terrorism Command? This is Melvyn Gibson, HiveCo Security—yes, yes, we’re a private agency. I was given this number in case—yes. I need to speak to somebody in Cults and Secret Societies. Yes, we’re on the Home Office Approved list. PREVENT stringer here, managing investigator. I’m afraid I have to give you a CODE RED notice for Gold Command. It’s about one of your former officers…”
Mr. Barrett had just received Jennifer Henderson’s report on the FlavrsMart end of things—all was going well, only a few clouds on the horizon—and was taking a half-hour break for prayer before his next meeting, when his desk phone buzzed for attention.
“Yes?” he asked irritably.
“Sir? Front desk here, you have a visitor. Ms. MacCandless is here.”
Well of course it would be just like Mary to come calling without an appointment. The brass neck of the woman! He glowered at the skyline outside his floor-to-ceiling window and forced himself to adopt a civil tone: “Send her up via the stopping elevator, please.” He cut the call and dialed a different number. His accent when he spoke again was distinctly rougher. “Shagger, got a job for you and Mad Dog’s team. My suite, at the double, got trouble incoming. That cow you’ve got a hard-on for? This is your lucky day: I’m sending her to the knacker’s yard. Here’s how we’re going to play it.…”
By the time Mary’s lift reached the executive floor a couple of minutes later, her welcoming party was waiting.
The doors opened before her to reveal a marble-floored corridor leading to a reception area. Mary was in as foul a mood as the Thief-taker General, albeit for different reasons. The job was done: her part was over, the kids delivered to her drop-off point. Which was good. But on the other hand, it was premature: she hadn’t even made it through the week. And she was getting a really bad itch between her shoulder blades, a gunsight itch.
The Firm had caught her on video, which meant—in the absence of plastic surgery and a really good fake passport—her card was marked. Marked cards in the realm of the New Management meant skulls on spikes. If she could cover the cost of keeping Dad in a safe home for the next couple of years she could plausibly scamper for cover overseas—to be brutally realistic, it wasn’t as if he’d be able to recognize her for much longer—but that meant recovering at least a quarter-mill from the Boss, preferably more. And now she was here her doubts about his good intentions were coming to the fore.
On top of everything else her metal-sheathed arm was itching furiously inside its glove, and her other hand was coming out in sympathy. Her hips had stiffened up—from driving, she fervently hoped. What the hell had Dad’s bag stuck in her this time? Was she turning into Steve Austin, or was the progressive cyborgification reversible? Mary was unreasonably attached to her body: it wasn’t a great body, but it was the only one she had, and she didn’t appreciate the magic handbag’s morphic meddling.
Still she pasted an artificial smile on her face as she marched up to the glass door, which swished open before her. She approached the corn-fed blonde sitting behind the enormous desk fronting the executive suite. “Hello!” she chirped. “I’m Mary, and I’m here to see the Boss.”
The receptionist bared her teeth prettily. “I’ll just see if he’s in,” she said robotically, then reached for the phone. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No need to call, I’m certain he’ll see me right away.” Mary stepped around the desk before the receptionist could stop her. “I’ve been here before. Turn right past the rubber plant on life support, then take the second door on the left, right?”
Record scratch: “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
Mary stalked along the corridor. Nerving herself for the coming free and frank exchange of opinions, she reached into her messenger bag to see what it held for her. Something satisfyingly solid slapped the palm of her hand: a baton, or maybe a baseball bat. Mary’s smile twisted into something less amused and more likely to scare the shit out of anyone who knew her. The familiar rage was back, warming her from the inside out. It was the rage of a woman repeatedly ignored and overlooked, denied her due, mistaken for just another enjoyable mistake the morning after—the Mad Scientist’s beautiful daughter was her wyrd, after all—and it gripped her with an iron determination: You laughed at me, but you’ll pay in the end! You’ll pay, just like the fools who laughed at my father! Mary was so intent that she failed to ask where the anger was coming from: whether it was truly her own or a manifestation of her power flaring again, the power she’d been so carefully distracting, defusing, and deflecting by every means at her disposal while she was acting in loco parentis.
She opened the heavy soundproofed door.
The Boss stood before the huge picture window, his back to her. Shoulders squared and hands clasped behind him, he gazed out across the vista of skyscrapers with eyes empty of pity, had she been able to see them.
“Mary,” said the Thief-taker General, “please come in and have a seat.” His voice was cold enough to fracture ice cubes.
Mary entered the room and approached the small boardroom table beside the Boss’s desk. Rather than taking a seat she rested her hands on the back of a chair. “I’m here. And I ain’t dead, no thanks to whoever didn’t spot that the kids were all metas before they handed me the script.”
“So I see.” The Thief-taker General turned to face her from across the room. He was backlit by the setting sun, his face in shadow. “I’ve been following your progress on Sky News.” He nodded at the huge TV that dominated the wall at the end of the conference table. “You attracted quite a lot of attention.” His tone was measured, even though his words indicated displeasure.
“None of which has followed me here,” she pointed out. “I got the kids out of London, put the phone divert in place, kept them busy, and now they’re on lockdown with your dodgy supply-chain mates. If you pay me I’ll get out of your hair and lie low overseas. I was thinking maybe Amsterdam or Brussels.” (This was a lie: Mary was more inclined to head for parts east, where faces and papers could both be bought for a price and not many people followed the British media.)
“You only made it through five days, not seven,” he reminded her. “And you left a hell of a mess. Paying off the bill for the chaos at Hamleys—and don’t get me started on the backhander to get Lancashire Constabulary to ignore a dead dinosaur—took a lot of dosh.”
“Then it’s a good thing you used to be a cop, innit? Knowing precisely which palms to cross with silver.” Mary stuck her chin out and glowered. “You think you know me but I’ve got your number, Superintendent Barrett, sir.”
“Mind your tongue.” The Thief-taker General was impassive, but her knowledge of his history had struck home. He’d made Super but he’d been too ambitious: his connections with commercial contractors had made him unpopular, certain allegations by disgruntled subordinates had offered his enemies leverage, and the Commissioner had made it clear that he wouldn’t be considered for any higher rank. So he’d left, taking a private sector role that came his way via the Church, and building … well, the Mute Poet was his Lord, and the Mute Poet looked after his own. “You should be more careful, Mary. Remember I know where your dad lives.”
“My dad is why you’re here, and don’t you forget it,” she spat. Before the MAD began to steal his sanity, Arthur MacCandless had been the Thief-taker General’s chief artificer. Back when he’d been legit, he’d built Officer Friendly’s armored flight suit. (Chief Superintendent Jim Grey of the Met: and what, she wondered, had become of him? He’d vanished into the bowels of the deep state, like so many others under the New Management.) But after Barrett recruited her father, he’d stopped being merely gifted or brilliant and turned mad, churning out death dildos and mind-control toothpaste and other pointlessly arcane secret weapons. The dementia chewed away at his soul and left only Professor Skullface behind. Meanwhile Barrett used the Professor’s magic toy chest to pursue a crime spree, stealing corporate secrets, evidence locker drug hauls, and sorcerous artifacts. The crimes had of course been easily solved by the Thief-taker General, who had used them to frame his rivals and burnish his own reputation. But by demanding devices, Barrett had accelerated her father’s dementia. “You owe him, and I only work for you so he gets the care he deserves.”
“Mary. Mary.” Barrett’s smile was crocodilian. “I’m not going to let Arthur down, why ever would you think that? I hear there’s a secure clinic up north that specializes in therapeutics for scientists with MAD. Place called St. Hilda’s. They had a bed, so I took the liberty of having him moved there yesterday. During his lucid periods he’s still amazingly productive, don’t you think?”
“I think,” Mary said evenly, “that you’d better release my father and pay me, and then fuck off, and fuck off some more, and while we never speak to or see one another again you should fucking keep on fucking off.”
Barrett shook his head, looking sorrowful rather than angry, as the door opened behind her.
Mary was expecting trouble as she spun round, and she was not disappointed. Trouble was ready and waiting: trouble looked like half a dozen heavily built gentlemen wearing dark glasses with pistols pointed at her.
A peaceful realization crystalized in Mary’s mind. She finally knew what the questionable armwear was all about: why she’d been on the edge of one of her rage-driven attacks for the past few hours, and how her steel soul meshed with Professor Skullface’s Beautiful Daughter’s mojo. Her face warped into a skeletal grin as she giggled and raised her hands.
As her arms came horizontal her gloves split from finger to wrist, wrist to forearm, generating a blizzard of leather scraps. Her rage flared, and she finally felt at home in the exoskeleton that had been growing stealthily under her skin, hidden by her biker jacket and jeans, sinking titanium screws into her long bones for stability and grip, expanding in her abdomen and infiltrating her skull. It was less Steve Austin, more Tetsuo the Iron Man. “Come and get it!” she sang, and lunged towards one of the mooks—the one named Shagger, formerly Shagger of the Yard, an ex–armed response/antiterrorism cop turned contract killer. He was fast: he nearly got off a shot before she darted between him and his mates. Then there was blood, blood everywhere, blood and fatty tissue squirting around the drill bit that extended from her raised middle finger as it twirled deeper into his eye socket. Shagger dropped like a brick, and the wild machines in her blood whirled her in a 130- bpm industrial-version of the Danse Macabre: and Mary finally stopped holding back.
She heard an irregular series of thunderclaps. Gunfire: something tugged at her jacket, another couple of bullets came like fists punching her sternum, something bounced off her. There was a horrible sharp pain in her side (Probably a cracked rib, the corner of her mind that wasn’t fighting for her life noted), but then she worked out how to trigger the shotgun extruding from her left ulna and sprayed two of Barrett’s guards with skull fragments from a third. Barrett was disappearing through a door, but to follow him she’d have to go right through three men who clearly bore a grudge—
“Pay me, fucker! Pay me or there’ll be tears before bedtime!” Mary shrieked at Barrett’s fleeing back as the private elevator doors closed behind him. One of the fallen gunmen grabbed her by the leg and tried to bite her ankle. “Bastard.” She clubbed him with her steel fist and he slumped. “Bastard.”
The adrenaline crash hit. Now it was Mary’s turn to slump, leaning woozily on the back of a leather boardroom chair splattered with lumps of something unspeakable. One of the men on the floor groaned; another was twitching tetanically. At least two were dead, and her side felt as if she’d been kicked by a horse. She unzipped her jacket with a hiss of pain and slid a mostly-metal hand in. When she pulled it back it was stained red. “Shit.” Her bag had taken a bullet to the flap, but as she watched, a pair of tiny mechanical arms bearing needle and thread emerged from the side-pocket and began to stitch around the hole. She sat on the chair and zoned out for a few seconds.
When she came to, the office door was open. The corn-fed receptionist stared at her with wide blue eyes. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked in exactly the same tone of voice as before, then retreated into the corridor. She moved soundlessly, torso balanced atop a plastic column, animatronics of a class Mary had never seen before. Dad’s work, no doubt.
What now? Mary thought numbly. The flap of her bag rose, and something white and flat emerged. She took it and found herself holding a sterile wound dressing. “Thanks,” she husked. Can’t stay here. Even with the soundproofing someone would have heard—someone who wasn’t an android, anyway. Or brainwashed. Or. Or. A horrible realization stole over her as she remembered Boardroom Barbie on the loading bay, the discount-supermarket Autons, Barrett’s receptionist. Barrett, meet Barbie: Barbie, how did you meet Barrett? What’s your angle? Humanoid robots? Superpowered kids? What have I gotten into? What have I gotten Dad into?
She’d swallowed the Boss’s line back in the beginning, hook, line, and sinker. It was a straightforward caper to induce the top tier London superhero cops into melting down in public, thus giving Barrett a line back into the Yard—and a bunch of lucrative thief-taker contracts—by returning the kids. But the kids were transhuman, too, and so was she, and Barrett knew better than to trivially ice one of his freelancers. Word got around, and sooner rather than later you’d run out of contractors. So she must have seen something, or been exposed to something, and the bag had inflicted this truly creepy cyborg makeover on her around the time its maker had been shipped off to the new clinic—maybe it was a response to Dad’s panic? Or maybe—and this was the worst realization of all—the bag always seemed to know exactly what she needed right before she knew it herself. Which implied a degree of precognition or foresight.
Forget the mooks, forget the fat paycheck (now receding rapidly in the rearview mirror). What was this all about? Was Barrett part of something bigger, something involving oracles and dark rites and prophecy? And what did her bag think she was going to need next?
“Fucknuggets,” swore Mary, retracting her arm guns. She wiped down her drill bits and concealed her gore-dripping upgrades while she shuffled back towards the reception area and the emergency stairs. “The kids. It’s all about the kids. Got to get the kids back.” Guilt prodded her forward. “Shouldn’t have left them with—” With Corporation Barbie, a willing ally of the man who worked her dad into a premature case of Metahuman Associated Dementia, used her to fuck over his enemies, then hung her out to dry—“whoever.” Hope I’m in time, she thought as she mashed the down button in the lift car and the doors began to close.
“What do you think you’re doing with that?” Jennifer demanded from the office doorway.
Ade looked up from her laptop. She’d secured it with Microsoft Hello, but it’d been the work of seconds to unlock it using the Company Face. All it took was a simple command, Computer, display Face Number Fifty-seven, and the mask clamped to the front of Ade’s head had done the rest. He’d read the PowerPoint presentation she’d delivered to the board, then skimmed her plans for the branch. He had taken due note of his name featured on a list called Loose Ends. It wasn’t unexpected: her patronage had been precarious from the start, and once she didn’t need to hide in the shadows she could train as many meat printer mechanics as she wanted. But Ade had no intention of being recycled as a run of pork pies: he was the Sweeney Todd in this drama, and he still owed her for the way she’d punished him after his dismissal. So he’d poked around hastily until he uncovered her web browser history. She seemed to have some workaround for the company firewall, and she’d been looking at … his head hurt, along with other bits of his anatomy, thinking about the elective surgery she had planned. “I was just foolin’ around ’cos I was bored,” he told her, thankful that he’d prepped a panic window showing perfectly boring industrial printer parts.
“Well stop it.” She slammed the laptop lid shut, narrowly missing his fingertips. Evidently she’d forgotten she hadn’t locked it. Ade felt a hot and prickly sweat of anticipation.
“What about the children?” he asked, aiming to distract her.
She shrugged dismissively. “The under-bishop is flying us to the chapel. I need to shut up shop so I can join them.” Her eyes slitted as she watched him thoughtfully. “How much did you read?”
“Is it true about the employee recycling plan?”
“Yes! Yes it is.” Jennifer’s chill thawed infinitesimally. “Don’t you think it’s a masterstroke?”
“’S long as the board”—he shifted uncomfortably in his bodysuit—“are they gonna get theirs, too?” The fact that the board of directors got to sit in comfy offices all day long and were individually paid more than the entire staff of Branch 322 had long seemed unfair to Ade.
“Apparently we think alike.” She actually smiled. “In fact, they’re already harnessed, masked, and sleeping like babes in the muppet room.” Doped to the gills, in other words. “They’re old and a bit crap and I only need three of them for signatures, so you can reprocess the others right away while I take care of business off-site.”
“Alive?” Ade asked hopefully.
“Alive, dead, gagged, or screaming, however you like,” she said cheerfully, clearly unaware that Ade had an even better idea. “Just make sure they never get in my way again. I have to assist at Holy Communion at the chapel on Skaro.” You’re not invited—you’re not important enough, Ade inferred.
As she reached the doorway her mobile buzzed for attention. “Yes?” she said, then, “Yes,” again, this time in a tense monotone. “They’re coming here? How long do I … is that all? All right, yes, I’ll take care of everything. See you in Skaro. In his house.” She hung up, then raised her voice. “Branch computer: execute security lockdown Plan B.”
Ade’s Face spoke, startling him slightly: “Lockdown commencing.” From elsewhere in the store he heard the clanking of steel roller blinds descending in front of windows and loading bays. A recorded announcement began to repeat: “The store is closed due to a computer failure, all customers please leave immediately. The store is closed—”
Half the overhead lights flickered out, dropping a twilight veil across the corridors and aisles as Jennifer led Ade through the back office rat run and onto the store floor. Confused customers hung around near the checkouts, unsure what to do. “Please leave immediately,” Jennifer called to the milling customers, “there is no cause for alarm.” That got them moving, abandoning hand baskets and shopping carts as they fled. She marched towards the deli counter at the back of the store, then through the door into the storeroom and butchering area. “You and you, follow me!” Jennifer snapped at the only two muppets who weren’t busy directing the customer flow towards the emergency exits. Now that Ade came to think about it, he hadn’t seen a regular member of staff all afternoon—not since Jennifer returned from her board meeting.
Jennifer stalked through the meat cutting room with the two muppets on her heels, Ade taking up the rear. As she progressed, Ade noticed something shiny and picked it up. The filleting knife was no cut-throat razor, but it was extremely sharp and would be perfect for what he had in mind. He held it casual as anything, and felt a warm glow of anticipation flooding his crotch.
The door to the muppet barracks room—a former pet supplies storeroom—unlocked with a click of magnetic latches as Jennifer approached. It swung outwards. “All right, Ade, I’m off to meet the under-bishop. As soon as the store’s locked down I want you to reprocess everyone in here except for him—” her finger stabbed viciously—“him, and her. Leave those three behind. Computer? Assign units Carl and Dave to move the other feedstock elements to the conveyor line for Mr. Hewitt.” She looked at Ade and smiled coldly: “During my absence you have complete control. Carry on.”
Sometimes hours passed like minutes, and sometimes minutes felt like hours. After the scary man in the gimp suit stomped off, slamming the door then fastening it with a chain (judging from the sounds he made), the children huddled in the converted freezer. It was stuffy and hot inside, and after a while Emily became distressed, tugging at her Laserwasp head. Lyssa shuffled over. “Here, let me help,” her elder sister said, and unzipped the totsuit. Emily emerged into the light twitching and slimy with sweat, like an implausibly cute, freshly hatched xenomorph.
“I want my flowers,” she said emphatically. “My happy flowers.” But the flowers were outside the freezer (on the shop floor, marked down to clear at 50 percent off), so she stuck her thumb in her mouth and sulked.
Lyssa was the next to extract herself, shedding her Flytrap pupa like a butterfly angry at the world. She fumbled around for her Harley Quinn wig, then opened her case and rummaged for a clean outfit. To her disgust all that was left was her princess gown, an unacceptable reversion to an earlier instar. Flytrap zipped herself back up, grumbling dark imprecations. Robert unzipped his top. Ethan, for no obvious reason, seemed happy to remain Devilbaby-shaped, although he flung open his Trunki and scattered toys angrily across the floor, then ignored them as they waved helplessly or slowly crawled back towards him.
“Mutter. Grumble,” said Robert, who had picked up the idea that this was a good way to make himself understood. He stared at the wall, willing it to soften as they so often did when he had a staring match with them. Annoyingly, his talent didn’t want to work this time. Must be magic, he reasoned. Other people’s magic sometimes worked at cross-purposes with his own.
“Bored now,” sang Emily. Ethan chipped in: “Wanna go home.”
“Ethan, will you re-magic my mallet?” Lyssa asked, kneeling and offering her weapon to her kid brother. “If it’s magic I can open the door.”
Ethan looked dubious. “Promise you won’t hit me?”
“I won’t hit you,” Lyssa reassured him.
That’s my job! Robert thought indignantly. He slouched over to the scattered cases, then rummaged in the bag of jumbled possessions Nan had left them—all stuff they’d had in the car. He found his Splatstation, a little stickier after a libation from Emily’s SunnyD bottle, and powered it up. 18% charge. There were no visible sockets in the freezer room: he’d looked for them as soon as he awakened, like anyone else born since the turn of the century. Huh. He looked in his messages for anything from his teammates but all he could see was a plaintive Ping?!? from GameBoy291.
Pnig, he sent back. A moment later boredom set in and he tapped away: were lockked ina room in a supermaket in London wiv no pu’erh. Hlep? His typing wasn’t very good, or maybe he’d finally trained the autocorrect.
The message hung, a progress bar crawling across the screen almost as fast as a tree growing. Luckily the Splatstation had multitasking and a couple of cameras, so he turned it to pano and scanned the room. Devilbaby—no, Ethan—had his hands on Harley’s knob, which was throbbing and glowing gold. Harley, overjoyed, made it shrink and swell from fingertip- to thighbone-size, then back down again. Their little sister sat in the far corner, sucking her thumb furiously and glowering at the world. He sent GameBoy291 the picture he’d taken, then just for lulz he zipped his suit up again, flopped Twinkster’s deflated face-sack over his head, and willed himself back into character. Summoning the spirit of the Terrortot was easier this time, and he twisted his tummy dials until they pleasingly tuned in on the game he’d paused on the Splatstation. If I had a mirror I could play with myself! he thought happily, then took a selfie and sent it to GameBoy291: it me!
The message was still trying to send when the door swung open to admit a scary witch in a business suit, followed by a man who looked like a senior cop who he’d been warned was very bad. He barely had time to hit the camera button in his IM client before the woman smiled at them like a skull in a blonde wig. “Terrortots!” she cried, clapping her hands: “My, what fun we must be having!”
The big man stepped into the doorway behind her, knees slightly bent and arms crooked to catch. Another pair of men stood behind him, blocking the exit. “’Ello ’ello ’ello,” he said, “’oo do we have here?”
Robert recognized him. It was Superintendent Barrett, who Dad used to work with. His nose wrinkled with instinctive dislike. Never trust a bent copper, his father had told him with a finger-wag the last—the only—time Mr. Barrett had visited them at home to talk about a job. Once bent, always bent, even if they’re off the force.
“Children!” cried the witch. “This is Mr. Barrett, a detective! He runs Wilde Corporation, a security company, and he’s their Thief-taker General! He’s here to take you back to Mummy and Daddy!” She smiled again, like a snake showing off its fangs, and stepped aside.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Barrett said gruffly. He cleared his throat. “The woman you were wiv’, your, uh, nanny—she’s wanted for armed robbery, car theft, and kidnapping. You’ve been missing with her for days and your parents are worried sick. My firm was commissioned to pay the ransom and get you back. So, uh—”
“Terrortot Tantrum!” shouted Flytrap, doing a victory dance and spinning her Harley hammer. Emily took her thumb out of her mouth; Devilbaby did a Terrortot trot.
“We’re going home?” Robert said, barely controlling his disappointment. Nan had been cool, despite the guns and the mummy’s tomb and the screaming. Also, the food was great. He hoped Lyssa didn’t snitch about the McD’s: Mum would put them on quinoa and lentil salads for a year.
“Yes, right away,” said the Thief-taker General, nodding emphatically. “They’re still in Hawaii, but I’ve got a helicopter. Have you ever flown in a helicopter?” he asked, as the skullfaced witch slithered between his dark-suited guards and disappeared through the doorway. “Are these your bags?” he asked, then continued before the children could reply: “Capital! We’ll bring them along later. Knick, Knack, bring the sprogs, we’re going for a ride.” The Thief-taker General grabbed Lyssa by the wrist, giving it an odd little twist that made her yelp and drop the hammer. It fell with a thud as he pulled her outside.
Robert tried to stuff his Splatstation in his pocket, only to discover that cheap velour Terrortot suits didn’t come with such extras. He dropped it on the bunk and tried to dodge, tubby backside waggling, but Knick (or maybe Knack) grabbed him and twisted his arm. “You be good,” grated the goon, “or it’ll be the child-snatcher for you, understand?” He shook Robert, who couldn’t stifle a sniffle of fear. The men were nearly as tall as Dad—who was two meters from toe to top—and built like rugby props, with short necks and broad shoulders. They grabbed Ethan and the scary witch scooped up little Em, who barely even struggled, and then the adults carried the children through the back corridors of the supermarket.
Robert couldn’t free himself from the meaty fist of the Thief-taker’s henchman, but followed along helplessly. He felt foggy and vague, unable to focus all of a sudden. Then there was fresh air and night, and an empty car park where a metal-and-blown-glass sculpture was poised with engine running and doors open. Robert gazed in awe, any impulse to resist forgotten. Ooh, shiny! He was still afraid, but the Thief-taker General had promised they’d be reunited with Mum and Dad, hadn’t he? And he’d never flown in a helicopter before: only in Dad’s arms. “Ride’s ready, Boss,” called Robert’s captor. To his mate: “Help me load ’em up.”
The children were trussed up and strapped into the back seats in a trice, buckled into complicated seat harnesses and locked behind doors that were scarily flimsy and lacking in soundproofing. A loud rumbling whine came from overhead, deafeningly loud until one of the minions placed ear defenders over the kids’ heads. Even so Emily cried and Lyssa tried to tear the headset off, unhappy with the way it caught her pigtails. The scary witch stuck her head over the seatback, pointed some sort of metal chop-stick at Lyssa, and she slumped, mouth open and drooling. Robert made a note (steal chop-stick if opportunity presents, great way to shut up sister!) then peered out of the window as the engine note grew louder and higher.
The chopper lifted off, crabbed skywards, and turned due west to skirt the controlled airspace around Heathrow before it made its turn south. In the front row of seats, Mr. Barrett—no less a thief-taker for all that he was also an under-bishop of the Church of the Mute Poet—pulled out his phone to text ahead and warn Mr. Cunningham to prepare the dungeon.
Suffer the little children, he thought to himself, and smiled triumphantly.
Mary learned the hard way that descending sixty flights of emergency stairs with a broken rib was a bad idea about two stories into her stumbling dive. She’d sent the lift car down unoccupied, unwilling to put herself in such an obvious trap, but when the black spots began swimming in front of her eyes she had to hastily grab a handrail and lower herself to the steps, trying not to gasp in pain. By the time she recovered, she was reconciled to the need for a Plan B. Luckily one presented itself on the next landing. This wasn’t a hotel and the stairwell doors could be opened from both sides, so she shuffled painfully into the lift lobby and hit the call button. It didn’t take long for a car to arrive, and for a miracle it was empty. She held down the door open button, then extended a pair of probes from her right little finger and shoved them in the emergency key slot. The built-in pick gun did its job: a twist of her wrist later she was in control. She closed the doors and rode the lift straight to the basement of the office block.
After stepping out onto stark concrete beneath a ceiling of exposed pipes and suspended cable tracks, Mary sent the lift back up to the top floor. Then she paused for a minute. The pain in her side was overwhelming her ability to plan. A rising tide of panic threatened to overwhelm her. I need help, she realized, and reached inside her bag once more—a fortune cookie? Oh well. The sweet biscuit wasn’t her favorite, but it crunched nicely as she withdrew the strip of paper. With some difficulty she straightened it out and read: STAND UP STRAIGHT.
“What the fuck?” she said aloud, but drew herself upright anyway. Something grabbed her around the rib cage and squeezed. Jagged, silver pain had her draw breath to scream, but a moment later it vanished, and a few moments after that inhalation stopped hurting. Startled, she reached into the bag again. Another fortune cookie, another message: I MADE A BANDAGE BUT YOU EATED IT. And indeed her ribs felt tight, gripped by something inflexible, but it was weirdly internal, as if—Oh, she realized. The cyborgization had continued, and Dad’s invention had strapped her battered ribs together from the inside. Trying not to cringe at the thought of what the horrible bag had done to her without seeking prior informed consent—in Professor Skullface mode, her father was an ethics board’s worst nightmare—Mary reached deeper into the messenger bag and felt something hard and curved. When she pulled it out she found herself holding a bike helmet, for the final extra touch of daft to punk out her look.
The basement was a badly lit maze, but eventually she found a stairwell leading up to the lobby. She pulled the helmet on and re-slung her bag, hoping she could pass for a motorcycle courier. The Boss would have beaten her to the exit and alerted security, but if she was lucky they’d have missed the emergency staircase up from the subbasement. The Thief-taker General’s headquarters occupied three floors of a former bank HQ but shared the building with numerous other businesses. They probably wouldn’t evacuate the entire building and risk losing her in the crowd.
Mary strode across the marble-floored atrium, gritting her teeth and trying to look like she was on her way with some important despatches. The helmet helped: she kept her head pointed at the revolving doors but side-eyed the other doors off to the side, behind the potted plants and the escalators. They opened, spilling a bunch of uniformed men across the floor. They were regular building security by the look of it, not Barrett’s goon squad, with no legal power of arrest—if they grabbed her they’d risk an assault charge. As obstacles they were little better than human traffic cones. Mary swerved around one particularly speedy self-propelled bollard and dived through the exit before he could catch up. A courier’s motorbike sat waiting in the drop-off point out front. A chopper was lifting off the roof of the building behind her, but it was too late to go back and hitch a ride. So she strode up to the bike without hesitation, swung her leg over the saddle, and hunted for the ignition socket.
“Hey! Gerroff my bike!” Rumbled, she realized, in the heart-stopping moment right before the engine coughed, then snarled into life. How does this thing work … She had taken her CBT back when she was a teenager and thinking about getting a moped, before Dad put her off the idea for life by teaching her to drive the Dad way.10
As she wobbled off—so fast that she left two sets of skid marks simultaneously—Mary confirmed empirically that, like Dad’s hovercraft, the beaten-up Honda she’d boosted lacked directional control and seat belts, the jury was out on steering, and she hadn’t had occasion to try the brakes yet. C’est la vie! Frantically trying to work out how to get out of first gear, she screeched past a police car headed the other way, somehow made it into third, then assaulted a baby roundabout without slowing down or giving way to pedestrians—just like any other London motorcycle courier. But needs must when the devil drives, and there wasn’t any faster way of getting back to the Chickentown supermarket where she’d ditched the kids. Just as long as she didn’t wipe out in the rush hour traffic and end up under the wheels of a construction truck.
Mary’s panicky thinking ran on rails thuswise: get the kids back, drop them on their parents’ doorstep, and maybe she wouldn’t have the Home Office’s top superhero duo hunting her. Then figure out where that clinic was—St. Hilda’s, he’d called it?—and rescue Dad. Next, figure out how to turn King’s Evidence, if that was still a thing this century, and sing like a bird about former Superintendent Barrett and his corporate crime family in order to keep her neck out of a noose (and Dad from being de-emphasized). It was a tall order, dismaying as fuck, but it came to her that she’d screwed the pooch without a condom and was now starring in a ghastly humans-only remake of 101 Dalmatians as Cruella de Vil. Who, of course, ended up homeless and furless—although given the New Management’s conception of restorative justice she’d be more likely to end up skinned alive to provide the binding for a very fetching atlas of her own anatomy— or maybe—
A momentary loss of situational awareness due to woolgathering gave Mary a really good excuse to try out the brakes. They worked, and so did her sphincter muscles; but she was so shaken by her close encounter with the arse end of a white van that had pulled out in front of her with no warning that she pulled over, dropped the kickstand, and sat shaking for a couple of minutes.
This isn’t working, she realized helplessly. Central London at rush hour was absolutely not the ideal place to learn how to operate an unfamiliar vehicle. Also, it now occurred to her that if the Boss thought she was a loose end, that could only mean that the children were also loose ends in some deeper game he was playing, one she’d not seen the start of and probably wouldn’t be around for the end of. He’d played her for a fool. And if he got to the kids first she was fucked.
Mary pulled off her helmet, shook her sweaty hair out, and reached for her phone. Typically for today, her newly encyborged fingertips didn’t work on the fingerprint sensor and she had to try and remember which PIN she’d used before she could unlock it. Once unlocked, at least it could sense her metal talons. She went into her address book, took a deep breath, and dialed a number she’d refused to even imagine calling before now.
“Hello? Mrs. Banks? It’s the nanny—yes, Mary Drop, that’s me. There’s been a little bit of a problem with the children…”
Only a few hours had passed since Wendy and Del had inveigled Amy into leaving her workplace for a guerilla job offer and debriefing, but as Del parked around the back of Branch 322 and they approached the store entrance Amy was clearly tense and unhappy.
“Worried about being escorted off the premises?” asked Wendy. Amy nodded. “Don’t be: you’re with us now,” she said reassuringly. “We look after our own.” It wasn’t strictly true of HiveCo Security in general—the generic rentabodies were employed on zero-hours contracts—but Wendy was pretty sure Gibson would move mountains to look after his nascent crew of transhuman investigators.
“But Jennifer—”
“Bitch is not your problem,” Del butted in. They rounded the side of the building. “Hey, the what now?”
An amber light was flashing above the entrance, as metal shutters slowly ground down in front of the windows. Confused shoppers swarmed around the doors like a smoke-stunned swarm of bees. “The store is now closing,” blatted an automated announcement, “please leave the store now.”
“What?” Amy froze.
“Come on.” Wendy grabbed her hand and took off towards the doorway, which lacked a customer-squishing automatic barrier. “We’re going in.”
The buzzing shop customers were thickest around the door. “Hey, you can’t go in there—” began one self-appointed gatekeeper as Amy smiled professionally and held up her badge.
“Yes I can,” she told him as she adroitly dodged a moon-walking figure in body stocking and Company Face. “Unit Jason, halt!” she snapped, and the muppet shambled to a halt. “Status report.”
“Branch 322 is closing early,” the Face intoned. “Branch 322 checkouts one through nineteen are offline. A fatal exception has occurred and the Branch will now haltaltaltalt—”
The display on the front of the muppet’s head crashed, throwing up a low-resolution image of a screaming skull superimposed over a scrolling hex dump.
“Oops,” said Amy, and grabbed for Wendy’s wrist: “This isn’t good!” She giggled apprehensively and darted through the inner door then hopped the barrier. “We’d better be fast,” she advised, and she took off up the twilit corridor towards the nearest STAFF ONLY door.
“You taping this?” Del hissed at Wendy, who had paused to pan her phone around, capturing video.
“Evidence,” Wendy murmured. “You should do it, too.”
Together they followed Amy, who was impatiently holding the door open. Beyond it a cramped staircase rose into the darkness of the management suite above the shop floor.
The management suite was a maze of narrow corridors with drab white walls and puke-green carpet, rendered murky by the wan glow of emergency lighting. Cork noticeboards held the mandatory insurance and fire safety declarations. Wendy tracked Amy by her stomping. Gibson’s job offer had put steel in her spine and fire in her belly, as if it had lifted a terrible weight from her shoulders: her diffidence had been born of terror of Jennifer. Amy made a beeline straight for the management break room. When Wendy caught up with her, she was staring at the org chart on the wall in evident dismay.
“Let me record this,” Wendy said calmly as she panned across the magnetic whiteboard.
Things had clearly changed since their last visit, and not for the best. Mr. Patrice Jefferson, Director of Human Resources, was still on the board—but somebody had taken a sharpie to his photograph, scratching his eyes out and adding a spit hood and some sort of headset. All but three of the board had been similarly defaced, and five of them had simply been scribbled over with a big black “X.” Meanwhile, there had been additions: Jennifer Henderson’s smile shone triumphant in the gloom, bearing the title Chief Discipline Officer. Below her, a stylized faceless mummy was labelled Adrian Holmes, Shrinkage Assurance Manager. Above Jennifer there were only two faces: an angry-eyed alpha male management clone named Jack Barrett (Non-Executive Director), and another, frighteningly familiar face: Rupert de Montfort Bigge.
“Who are they?” Amy asked bewilderedly.
“Homie? This isn’t fun no more.” Del nudged Wendy as she completed her scan.
“No, no, you’re right. Fuck.” Wendy took a deep breath. “I think this job just dead-ended, but we’re being paid per diem, so … shop floor, head count? Are you still up for it?”
“Wait a minute,” said Amy. She darted off towards the HR office. Wendy was about to follow her when she returned, smirking triumphantly: “Raided the office supplies cupboard,” she announced, brandishing a sharpie and a pad of paper.
“What’s that for?” Del squinted: “What good are dragons—oh.” Amy sketched so fast her pen was almost a blur, the lines sloppy and the shading almost absent. But then she reached into the paper and tugged, and out popped a flashlight the length of her forearm. She pushed the power button and the gloom receded, leaving sharp-edged shadows behind. “Oh wow.”
“Yup, you’ve got two of us now.” Wendy smirked. She flexed her hand, feeling the familiar heft of her side-arm baton pop into reality. “Are you okay with the biopsy kit?”
“Hell to the yeah.” Del reached into the shoulder bag she’d been issued and pulled out the first disposable syringe and sample tube. “I’m right behind you, fearless leader.”
Amy tapped Wendy on the shoulder: “Shortest route is that way,” she said, pointing at another cramped stairwell. Wendy nodded, and they descended in single file into the red-lit darkness.
The only windows in the supermarket were at the front entrance, and the daylight didn’t penetrate this far into the back. With the branch computers complaining of some sort of fault and the store closed to the public, the main illumination came from reddish emergency lights. A recorded announcement kept playing: “The branch is now closed, please leave the premises.” And indeed, it appeared that the customers had done so. Abandoned half-full shopping carts and dropped hand baskets made the aisles an obstacle course, and a faint, foul smell of spoiled meat was making itself known in the absence of air conditioning.
“So much for doing a head count,” Del murmured aloud. Wendy texted out a situation update to Eve—the alarming changes to the org chart clearly demanded her attention—just as a muppet-suited figure lurched around the end of the aisle and stumbled towards them, waving its arms frantically.
“Stop right there!” snapped Wendy. The muppet kept advancing, and now she could hear garbled speech, inaudible, coming from behind the Company Face. “Stop!” She raised her baton and the muppet staggered, lurched against the galleys piled with cereal boxes, and cast around as if searching for an escape route.
“Are you human?” Amy asked: “DWP training placement?” The muppet nodded frantically. “Something chasing you?” More nodding. Amy raised her pad, scribbling hastily. “Get behind me,” she said, as two more muppets lurched around the aisle. Their movements were oddly disjointed, as if their elbows and knees were mispositioned. They marched to the beat of a malign alien drum: the miasma of decay intensified unbearably as they approached. The muppet at the front door looked as if it had been moonwalking, but these two were so unbalanced their center of mass was obviously inhuman. They reached towards the first muppet who cowered behind Amy.
“Stop right there!” Wendy lunged with her baton to bar the advancing meatsacks. Del darted around her, brandishing her sampling kit: she struck first one, then the other, from behind, then froze in disbelief. “There’s no blood?” she complained. The muppets advanced on their—fellow was not the correct word, Wendy felt—with vacuum-loaded syringes protruding from their backs.
“Unit Henry, you are malfunctioning,” the two interlopers’ Faces intoned dispassionately. “Report to Loading Bay Three for reprocessing.” They stepped forward in unison.
“I think not,” said Wendy. “Stop right there.”
“Stand down,” echoed Amy. “Management override zero two, stand down now.”
The muppets turned towards Amy. “Amy Sullivan, Human Resources, suspended pending disciplinary hearing for absence from work without authorization,” they recited. “Report to Loading Bay Three for reprocessing. All human resources will report to Loading Bay Three for reprocessing.” Their arms writhed inside their body stockings, tendons and muscles struggling for leverage with whatever mechanical armature they had been secured to instead of bones. They began to shriek in chorus: “Intruders will be delivered to Loading Bay Three for—”
“—Why won’t they bleed?” Del complained, stabbing one of them with another syringe. “Gah. What is that stench? Fuck, my ward is getting hot!”
“Mmph!” Unit Henry clearly had opinions to offer. Equally clearly, Unit Henry’s discipline belt was kicking in, jackknifing him to his knees with taser jolts to the crotch. He rolled on his back like an up-ended tortoise, writhing in pain as the other two muppets closed in. Glancing round, Wendy saw three more rounding the other end of the aisle.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Wendy said sharply. She let go of her baton, reached into her imagination, and closed her fingers around a very different handle. “Amy, behind you!” she called. “I’ve got these two—”
She raised her katana with an inexpert grip, remembering at the last minute to use both hands, and slashed diagonally down and across the closest muppet’s outstretched arms.
Wendy was no swordswoman. If she’d been up against an armed opponent, or even one in full control of their own limbs, she’d have been in serious trouble. But the muppets weren’t human. There was a brief tug as the blade sliced into the spandex body stocking and the meat within: the stench intensified unbearably, and the sword jarred in her hand as it contacted something harder, but then it swept downward and Wendy stumbled, nearly embedding the tip of her blade in the floor. Both forearms went flying like ghostly opera gloves stuffed with a slurry of mincemeat and bone and smaller, writhing rice grains—maggots, she realized. The muppet barely stumbled, but reached towards the spasming Unit Henry with stubby sausage tubes that oozed decaying raw meat—
“Fuck this shit!” screamed Del, as she grabbed the muppet by the back of its neck and blurred up the aisle.
Wendy gagged, then turned on the second mincemeat golem. Barely able to comprehend what she was doing, she slashed the sword across it thrice, severing the not-really-a-head, gutting its abdomen (stuffed full of traditional British bangers, uncooked pork sausages with more than a little offal), and finally slicing it off at the ankles. The body stocking sagged and began to deflate, oozing armatures of 3D-printed bone scaffolding and a ghastly slurry that stank like a skip full of ripe dog turds in a heat wave.
“I’ve got you,” Amy told Unit Henry: “Try and lie still for a second—” She yanked up the back of his suit and tugged feverishly until she had the discipline belt exposed, then picked up her pad and sketched a keyring.
Wendy wanted to watch, but the other muppets were advancing along the aisle and whatever malign spirit was in the driving seat had wised up to her sword: they were pushing shopping trolleys, clearly intent on hemming the investigators in and cutting them off from their escape routes. “Del?” she called. “What happened?”
Del was right behind her, hyperventilating, her pupils blown wide. “I got ’s far as the deli counter,” she gasped. “You don’t wanna go there.”
“Is it worse than this?” Wendy’s wave took in the putrescent swill and the stench of decay.
Del nodded, gagging. Her lips were pursed and her frown was intense, as if she was concentrating on not throwing up.
“Crap. We need to get off the shop floor. Manager’s office, we can barricade ourselves in until help arrives. Can you move this guy if Amy and I cover your ass?” Amy had the keys finished and was unlocking the control harness from Unit Henry, who had somehow pawed the Company Face off and was grunting frantically for release from the headset and gag.
“Yeah, I’ll try.” Del bent and grabbed Unit Henry’s nearest arm, then heaved. “Follow me,” she told Amy, and made for the staircase they’d just come down.
The retreat was horrifying, for if they turned their back on one group of muppets to face off with the other, the unobserved would crowd them: and the aisle was too wide for one woman to cover, so if Amy and Wendy tried to go back-to-back, the muppets would squeeze around their outside. As well as using shopping carts as mobile barricades, the muppets had acquired weapons—carving knives and cricket bats, still bearing price tags from the store shelves. Even the one Del had removed was back, crawling along behind the moving wall of meat on its knees and arm-stumps.
Del hustled Unit Henry through the STAFF ONLY door. Then it was time for Wendy and Amy. “You go first,” Wendy said grimly.
“Are you sure—”
“Yeah, go. Drop the pig-sticker just inside the doorway, I need it.”
Amy gave her a wide-eyed look and fled up the stairwell. Wendy, her back to the open doorway, grinned mirthlessly at the crowd of mincemeat golems. “You shall not pass,” she said, attempting to flourish her sword (which was, quite frankly, not well-suited to cinematic flourishes). “Ahem. Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, dudes.” She stepped backwards into the stairwell, ducking swiftly to snatch up the handle of Amy’s rapier as she let go of her katana and it whisked out of reality. The muppets tried to swarm her, but she closed the door with a kick and jammed the rapier into the frame to stop it opening again. Then she turned and raced up the staircase and through the office warren to join the others in their bolthole, hoping that she wasn’t leading them all into a death trap.
The assassination attempt, although not unexpected, had given Eve a nasty shock, so she cancelled her appointments for the next three hours, set her mobile phone to Do Not Disturb, ate her lunch, and read legal boilerplate until her eyes bled. The small print on the FlavrsMart deal was troubling, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong with it: Why had Rupert been so set on taking a controlling stake in a regional supermarket chain? And inserting his own followers into its middle management?
She was nearing the end of the first appendix when her earpiece buzzed. “Starkey,” she snapped irritably. “I’m unavailable—is the building on fire?”
“Hey, sis.” Imp was mildly aggrieved. “What kind of way to greet your brother is that? Especially when—”
“I’m busy,” she interrupted. “Can this wait?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Imp paused. “Wendy is trying to message you but getting blocked. It’s some kind of emergency to do with the, the church service. And FlavrsMart? Anyway, she says it’s really urgent.”
“This had better not be about scheduling another D&D night,” Eve warned, but found herself talking to a dead handset. She swore and picked up her mobile, unmuting it. A spew of notifications popped up instantly, proving that contra D:Ream, things could always get worse.
She had a call with the board of FlavrsMart coming up this afternoon, but someone in HR had emailed to reschedule at short notice. Because Eve had previously been Rupert’s PA she’d been on the contact list for such arrangements, and because Eve was nothing if not a control freak she hadn’t relinquished her micromanagement death grip just yet. She’d delegated it to (Who? Oh, him) Brett in Exec Services, who had, in the immortal words of Darth Vader, failed her for the last time by double-booking the call for 1800 hours tomorrow, when she expected to be halfway across the English Channel on board a helicopter. Admittedly, to be fair to Brett, Lead heavily armed band of corporate mercenaries in raid on human sacrifice cult in dungeon beneath castle in middle of the English Channel wasn’t exactly the sort of thing she could put in her Outlook calendar, lest she read about it the next morning in The Financial Times. What had she written instead…? Oh yes: Out of office from 4 p.m., early night with takeout pizza and Hallmark movie channel.
Eve sighed, mentally un-marked Brett’s card, and messaged him that Hallmark movie channel was a euphemism for Netflix and chill, and please find another slot for the call. Then she glanced at her messages. Imp had shared her contact with Wendy Deere. From whom she had received eight messages, increasingly frantic as the afternoon progressed—
Deere: Cult priestess from Saturday svc definitely works at FlavrsMart Branch 322 in HR
Deere: FlavrsMart managers going missing Jenn (priestess) is obvs. suspect
Deere: The Company Face is controlled by a haunted computer
Deere: All the way up to baord level FlavrsMart compromised by Mute Poet Cultists
Deere: Are you even listening???
Deere: Looking for killer but muppets are stalking me suspect Im
Deere: DEL SAYS ITS THE MEAT PIES!! DONT EAT ANY FLAVRSMART PIES!!1!
Deere:
Eve fumed in exasperation. What was it with the youth of today and their tendency to drop into shrieking emoji at the first sign of anything too complex to express in words that would fit in a 160-character SMS message? Leaving aside the fact that Eve was, at most, two or three years older than Wendy and perfectly capable of shrieking in emoji in her own right, just trying to decipher them unambiguously was … trying. (Something about meat pies and zombies? And axes?) At least she’d used brackets so that it was clear where the phrase boundaries lay.
Zombies.
Zombies.
Eve hit the reply button and waited as her phone dropped straight through to voicemail. She checked the timestamp on the messages. Wendy had issued her garbled warning around the time Eve sat down with a pile of paperwork and a salad. Typical. Eve swore inside the privacy of her own head, then speed-dialed Imp. His phone, too, dropped straight into voicemail.
Now that was bad news: either he was ghosting her or there was real trouble afoot. She reached for the desk phone. “Sergeant Gunderson, I need a close protection squad with wheels, most urgent, for an excursion—” she read back the address of the FlavrsMart in Chickentown—“as soon as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Gunderson paused: “Most of the team are prepping for tonight’s mission. What are we expecting?”
“Someone in FlavrsMart HR in Chickentown has been making highly inadvisable hiring decisions. The takeover should have closed as of noon, so I’m going over to kick ass and take names. There may be some resistance—same cultists we dealt with at the meeting.”
“Okay, I’ll round up as many bodies as possible.” Sally didn’t sound happy. “We’ll meet you downstairs in ten…”