Blue Angel

by Phil Williams

  “You’ve got about two minutes,” Lightgate called from up high.

  Pax pulled Casaria’s wrists around her waist, trying to tuck one hand under the other like tying a sweater. The warmth of his wound pressed into her back, and his weight threatened to pin her to the handlebars, making it even harder to start the bike. As if she knew where to go. The hospital would ask too many questions, no matter what Jones said. Those two fuckers didn’t care, as long as this got pinned on their rivals. How could she have been so stupid? This was why she didn’t have friends. Fucking Bees.

  What else? A private doctor? There was Dr Merriweather, from the poker games in West Farling. But he was a massive twat, which Pax vaguely connected with him being a cosmetic, rather than actual, surgeon. And despite the name, West Farling was right on the east side of the city. No one useful lived near West Quay. She cursed again. “Those pricks. Utter pricks.”

  “Humans for you,” Letty said, landing on Pax’s shoulder.

  Pax turned the key. “You got anyone can help him?”

  “It’d take a Fae javelin to stitch that,” Letty said.

  The scooter came to life and Pax breathed relief. Casaria’s fingers wriggled against her gut, limply groping for a hold. She swatted one off then pulled his hands together, interlinking his fingers. His face pressed into her shoulder and he made an indecipherable comment. Pax gave Letty a look. “So where to?”

  Lightgate floated down beside them, hip flask out as though she’d been spectating. “Leave him to bleed out, there’s always Plan A.”

  Pax gave her a disapproving look.

  “Time’s a factor, Pax. My ideas want to happen yesterday, and this gentleman’s not opening doors any time soon.”

  Pax hoped Letty might defend her, but the other fairy hummed agreement. Letty didn’t know about Lightgate’s turnbold, did she? Pax said, “The wound’s not too deep – we get him help soon, he’ll be fine.”

  Casaria gargled something that sounded offensive.

  “Save your energy,” Pax huffed. She gunned the bike and steered away from the viaduct, back towards what she hoped was the city proper. After a few streets of wobbly riding, she listened for the siren and found it wasn’t getting any closer. She kept going until it was all but a whisper, then pulled over again.

  Pax wrestled Rimes’ phone from her pocket and shakily dialled.

  “Dr Rimes’ residence,” Holly’s voice answered, as prim and formal as an answering service. The two fairies hovered down, listening.

  “Holly, I need Rimes.”

  “Oh!” Holly answered. “There’s definitely a joke in there.”

  “Not now,” Pax said. “I need to know if there’s any way – anything there we could use, anyone we could ask – to treat a knife wound?”

  “Oh my God, Pax, what happened?” The receiver was jostled. “No – get your –”

  “Pax?” Barton said. Sturdy, awake. “Where are you? I’m coming for you.”

  For a beautiful moment, Pax found a second’s hope. Then she remembered his situation: “You can barely walk.”

  “She’s been stabbed!” Holly’s fearful voice cut in.

  “No! Not me! I’ve got Casaria, the MEE agent.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “He’s injured. Don’t think it went too deep, the attack got thrown off, but he’s bleeding a lot. Can Dr Rimes do something for him?”

  There was silence, except for Pax’s worried breath coming back to her. Holly asked a muffled question in the background. Pax could imagine Barton’s hand over the receiver, making demands of Rimes, sheltering in the distance. Barton came back: “If it’s bad enough for you to ask, then no. And we don’t have any more glo.”

  Glo. Pax hadn’t considered that. Barton was up and talking, and he’d been through something as bad as this. If it worked, it offered discretion and speed.

  “Drop him at the A&E,” Barton said. “Let his own people take care of him.”

  Pax shook her head, unseen. There was another option. “You know Chaucer Crescent? Is it somewhere you used to pick up glo?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You didn’t always go back to the same places, did you?”

  “Pax” – Barton hesitated – “where’s this coming from?”

  “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Have you had contact with them? You have to –”

  “I’ll explain when I get back,” Pax said, hurriedly. “Chaucer Cresent’s on the way.” Before Barton had time to issue a warning, or something, she hung up. Letty eyed her as she straightened out the bike.

  “You’re nuts, you know that?”

  “The Blue Angel gave me that address before it realised who I was,” Pax said. “There might be something there we can use to help Casaria.”

  “This Blue Angel again?” Lightgate said, amused rather than curious.

  “The Angel’s had plenty of time to spring a trap since then,” Letty said.

  “Why would anyone think I’d be crazy enough to go to that address, after that encounter?” Pax said. “And besides, I’ve got you guys for protection, don’t I?”

  “Why would this Angel offer you any glo when Apothel’s been gone for years?”

  “It thought I was Rufaizu,” Pax said, revving the engine, “and it blindly led Barton to glo before, recently, Holly said so. Maybe it’s trying to keep up the pretence that it’s on our side – it doesn’t matter – it’s our best hope of keeping him alive.”

  24

  Roper knocked tentatively at Sam’s door, holding up a manila folder. He could have been a librarian, with his plastic-rimmed glasses and tousled white hair. “The numbers you were after.”

  “Please tell me you’ve got something,” Sam said, as Landon appeared by the man’s shoulder, watching as though wary of the technician.

  “Not what you’re hoping for, I think,” Roper hummed, leaning into the room and stretching out his hand, afraid to enter. Landon took the folder and passed it to Sam.

  “A list of numbers,” Sam said, leafing through pages of large figures. Only the date column was obvious. Many rows had been highlighted with fluorescent yellow marker, some in adjacent blocks. “What am I looking at?”

  “Novisan levels within a mile radius of the praelucente, during different surges, broken down over ten-metre squares. That is, the energy fluctuations it causes. The highlighted rows are abnormal troughs and spikes. Mostly troughs.”

  “So they are happening in more than one place,” Sam suggested, hopeful that the multiple highlighted rows would clue them in to Pax’s hint.

  “No, these are figures during different surges,” Roper said. “Where you see a whole lot of dips at the same time, they’re next to each other. A wider radius, not different locations. A surge can see reduced novisan across as many as ten areas. Though a spike, with higher levels, only ever occurs in one focal point. The epicentre, directly above the praelucente.”

  Sam sighed. Basically, these reams of pages showed what everyone already understood of the praelucente’s surges – they reduced energy levels in a wider area and occasionally produced a beneficial increase.

  “You may recall the Stray Symphony,” Roper said, helpfully. Sam already knew the story, the classic example everyone in the MEE used to justify the Sunken City. Staring at the numbers, she let him continue anyway. “Sebestyn Furedi’s masterpiece, composed in one inspired night, Thursday 21st November, 1997. There was a novisan spike under his apartment building in Ten Gardens that evening, during a surge that reduced novisan across the two surrounding blocks.”

  Sam turned through the numbers that Roper had wasted time printing out. “Bottom line is, novisan levels are only affected around the praelucente?”

  “Within the mile radius that we measure, yes,” Roper said. “There was one exception, during a surge in Ripton, on page four.” He waited while Sam looked for herself. A single yellow row in the middle, another highlight towards the bottom. “There was a slight increase in Hanton at that
time. Not significant, within the realms of standard deviation.”

  It was hard to say if it was significant, Sam pondered, as these numbers said nothing about the actual locations, above or below the city. “Where exactly in Ripton and Hanton were these?”

  “You mean street names?” Roper replied uncertainly, unprepared to offer real-world details. Just bloody numbers. “I’d have to cross-check against a map.”

  “Please do,” Sam said. “And what about elsewhere? Outside the mile radius?”

  “That would take a long time to scan,” Roper said. “We don’t have the server power or the manpower.”

  “You’ve got twenty computers out there that no one uses,” Sam replied.

  “None of them powerful enough to run the scans,” Roper explained patiently. “Only the Castle, downstairs, can combine the results. We cross-reference readings from half a dozen simultaneous measurements to estimate novisan. They need to be inputted individually, and someone has to update the scan twice an hour. It takes six hours to process the data within a mile radius alone. For a period of twenty-four hours.”

  Sam couldn’t respond at once, torn between questioning why on earth it was so inefficient and admitting that it sounded like a long and difficult task. No. This was her office, this evening. She wanted answers. “Why does it take that long? Why can’t the input be automated? Why can’t we split the task over multiple spare computers?”

  Roper’s face suggested he’d been caught unawares. “Who would implement that?”

  Sam shut her eyes. It was Asquith and his fax machine all over again: why risk change. “Do we have historical records for other locations? Could we do scans retroactively?”

  “In theory,” Roper said. “Measurements are recorded everywhere, but they need to be processed. Covering one mile for one 24-hour period would take –”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Sam said. “We don’t need a 24-hour period, though. We can focus on a single historical moment, when we know there was a surge. There was one this morning, wasn’t there? When that building started shaking. You could check other locations for exactly that time.”

  “Yes, but it would take time...what do you hope to achieve, Ms Ward?”

  Sam gave him a look that said it wasn’t his place to ask.

  “It’s just…” Roper cleared his throat. “It’s a serious appropriation of resources. There are always anomalies in the numbers, that’s why Support exist – we look for important deviations. Otherwise you’d be knee-deep in tangents. Perhaps if you told me exactly why you think novisan spikes would occur elsewhere, I could help explain it?”

  Sam continued to glare at him. As if anyone ever deigned to give her explanations. “I’m just following leads. Thanks for your help, Roper, let me think on it for now.”

  “You know where I am.” He turned to go but paused in the doorway. Sam looked up, hopefully. “Can I bring you another coffee?”

  “No,” she said, deflated. “No thank you.”

  Roper nodded and ducked out, leaving Sam alone with Landon and the pile of paperwork on her desk. She raised her eyebrows to the agent for his report.

  “Fairly sure I found him,” Landon said. His tone sounded no more confident than Roper’s, so Sam sat back deep in her chair to receive the news. “Got a white van on double yellows around the corner from his building, on a traffic cam. Three men entered it a bit after 6am; can’t make out their faces but one was dressed in black, flanked by two bigger guys. Right sort of build for the pair we ran into yesterday. Looks like your instinct was right.”

  “Damn,” Sam said. Her instinct, though, said this wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Pax had fled from Casaria, why go back for him? Who were these people and what did they want? “Can you find them?”

  “I tracked back to when they arrived – the van was there since midnight. I couldn’t trace the direction they came through the traffic on the ring road, though. Tried to follow them leaving, driving across town. Caught the van on an intersection out of Central, and a flyover near Ten Gardens. Then lost it. Could be anywhere west of the Gader, unless they doubled back.”

  “Can you check the –”

  “Number plate? Already done. The van’s registered to a fish and tackle business supposedly based in the Net. Fairly sure it’s a front. Phone number goes to an answering service, company’s registered address is a PO box.”

  The Net was about as far from civilisation as you could get within Ordshaw, sitting towards the city’s northern limits, opposite the Gader from the warehouse district. It mirrored that area’s penchant for sparsely populated industrial properties, though the Net was alive with failing, shady or unsavoury businesses. “Any guesses who these guys are?”

  “Two other cameras around the building had been erased. Between all that and the little performance they gave us yesterday, I’d say they’re career criminals.”

  “We might find their faces in the databases, then.”

  “The images aren’t clear enough for our recognition software – I tried that. But I might find the faces in the files myself. If that’s where you want me.”

  “Yeah. Good work so far. But come here a second, first. I could use your input.”

  Sam’s eyes ran back to the paperwork on her desk, hoping this, at least, might produce results. Around Apothel’s Miscellany, she’d arranged historic reports on the Ripton Chapel, questioning why the word grugulochs was important. According to the files, the chapel had been sealed about two weeks after Apothel had been murdered, along with five other locations. The inventory of recovered items from his lairs included alcohol, pages of scrawled notes, and the barest essentials for living: electric hobs, tired clothes and stacks of tinned meat. There were also the ashes of small fires that had been used to burn other papers. Apothel covering his tracks.

  None of the other locations had been marked in the way that his chapel had been. The claw marks that covered its walls had been notable enough for the investigating agents to photograph and describe in their written reports, but prompted no further investigation. The best-quality photos, which were woefully lit and grainy, revealed hints of words that hadn’t quite been scratched clear. Clusters of letters that hinted at creature names: -ckle, gl-, ven. But none of the photos or notes referenced the one clear word that remained. Most of the images weren’t clear enough for her to tell if they were the wall she’d seen, but the chief reporting agent, Jelani, had starkly written: No legible text remains. Clear the civilian hoped to conceal his legacy.

  Had they actively hidden the word “grugulochs” from the report?

  “Were you based in Ordshaw when Apothel died?” Sam asked Landon.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Strange time.”

  “You knew this guy, Jelani? I’ve never come across him.”

  “Sure. Good man. Black. Got moved to London.” Sam sat back from the report to question why black mattered, but Landon went on, eyes resting on Apothel’s book, open on the page about the Layer Fae. “You getting anywhere with that? The note in the margin said that bit was inaccurate.”

  “I saw,” Sam replied. “You think the rest is?”

  Landon shrugged. “I only had a little scan.” He turned the pages to a section headed Bunch Spider. “From what I read, that one’s roughly true, about tackling one of them. If you had to face one hand-to-hand. There’s other things I couldn’t say either way, creatures I haven’t encountered.”

  “Or don’t exist,” Sam said, voicing the MEE’s agreed line on Apothel’s anomalies.

  “Yeah. And there’s other things we’ve updated the research on now. Particularly the plant life, as we’ve worked with Dr Rimes since then.”

  Sam froze at the name. The doctor on the hill. That unconventional recluse beavering away outside their tight budget. When they first enlisted her help, after Apothel’s group disbanded, she must have verified many of Apothel’s claims. “Has anyone contacted her to cross-reference the information? See how much of it is fiction?”

 
“I don’t think we’ve had the time,” Landon said. “Like I said, no one –”

  “She worked with Apothel, back then,” Sam thought out loud. The doctor’s place had been on Sam’s list of locations to check in the recent search for Rufaizu, which Operations had ignored – what else had they ignored? “If Pax is following his trail, maybe the doctor would have an idea why? The praelucente’s actions today, she might have input on that? Has someone at least checked if the civilians have been in touch with her?”

  “Yes.” Landon confirmed this one proudly, something he could finally answer positively. “Farnham and Devlin checked on her this morning, no one had been there. She seemed clueless as ever, they said.”

  “And we’re satisfied with that? Did anyone ask her if Rufaizu or Barton had been in touch before all this kicked off?”

  Landon said nothing. He stared into space as though the suggestion of missing something so obvious had shut down his mental faculties.

  “Landon?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “That sounds like a no.”

  “I’ll check.” Landon went to the door, and Sam looked to the book again. A darkly etched image of an embattled, gorilla-like creature. Why was she poring over Apothel’s wild drawings when she could ask his scientist friend directly?

  “Wait,” Sam called out. “Get me her number. I want to talk to her myself.”

  25

  On the north side of Ripton, Chaucer Crescent took Pax a mile south of her apartment. She tried not to think about home, easing Casaria down against a tree. He had regained some focus after the initial shock, eyes following her, but his teeth remained gritted in agony.

  Pax assured him, “I’m gonna get you help. Just hang in there.” She walked briskly down the road, scanning semi-detached houses, ignoring his moans and muffled grunts that might have said hospital.

  The homes were masked by weeds and scaffolding, or otherwise had building supplies in their drives. A suburb for people aspiring to better lives, who didn’t have the time or money to complete their projects. Not that Pax could judge. She wasn’t sure if her home was even hers any more. It was almost certainly being watched.