“What the fuck is Vanquis doing—”
Nyarlathotep flicks a disinterested look at the scattered bodies, their million-dollar smiles still soldered in place. “No idea. You can ask them if they make an appearance.”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with this.”
“Tough.” He drapes himself across a plastic seat, elegant as a lord, ankle perched on a knee. His foot begins to wag, the shoe branded with an anime girl’s puzzled face. “Enough procrastination, Rupert. Present your terms.”
The train jolts into motion. I steady myself against a pole, free hand clasped around the dead king’s gift, the orphaned coin hot against my palm. “So, are you working with Vanquis?”
“Rupert.” A warning skims across his friendly South London voice.
“No. I got to know. Background research, you know what I’m saying? You don’t pick jobs at random. You figure out if you’re capable of jiving with their corporate culture. Vanquis tried to kill me.”
“They did not.”
“They brought”—I enunciate each word slowly, deliberately, and with rising emphasis—“a building down on my head.”
“Collateral.”
Memory strobes: ash in my lungs, intestines smeared across my apron, the ceiling collapsing. “Collateral is a very nice word for what happened.”
“But also an appropriate one, innit?” He twitches fingers and a bar cabinet materializes in the wall, lid popping open with a noise like cracked knuckles. “Whiskey?”
“Pass.”
Nyarlathotep shrugs. He picks a clean tumbler from its casement and a sphere of ice from its box, plops one in the other. A bottle of Laphroaig is uncorked. The air glazes with the smell of kerosene-soaked oak and smoky peat, a faint moting of sea salt. He decants an unreasonable portion of alcohol into his glass.
The Body Train clacks around a corner, whistling to the endless void. “So, what’s your connection to Vanquis?”
“You are a persistent fuck.” Nyarlathotep swirls the whiskey, ice tinkling loudly against the sides; the sound is somehow louder than the noise of the tracks. “Honestly, you were never in any real—look, you can just ask them yourself.”
“I—what—oh, fuck.”
The darkness resolves into the cool, waxy glow of an encroaching platform. As the train begins to slow, the inert suits start to rise, first swaying like newborns, tottering this way and that, before accreting a kind of symphonic grace, every movement harmonized to the notations of a greater purpose.
“Vanquis.” Nyarlathotep tips his head.
Ssh. Ssh. Sssssh. A shushing noise transfers between throats, white noise-jabbering which slowly crenellates into speech. Twenty pairs of eyes lock on. “You’re heeeeeerrre.”
“I’d really rather not be, if that helps.” I scoot an involuntary step back. “So—”
The nearest vessel presses a finger to its lips, one tintless eye shuttering closed. Behind me, I hear another chink of glass, a splash of alcohol over melting ice. The doors to the Body Train yawn apart and a deluge of souls spumes into the carriage.
There are hundreds of them. Thousands. So many that there is not even standing room for the spirits. Faces overlap, silhouettes combine. Individual identity is pulped together into raw material, deleting any beginning or end, any distinguishing feature. Their fear gusts over me, dull, cow-like, not quite awake enough to process the enormity of the future.
“What’s going on?”
No one replies, preoccupied with the fresh arrivals. Vanquis is, if nothing else, terrifyingly efficient. It segregates the souls along mysterious vectors. Agents queue in parallel lines to coax ghosts into neat configurations, while others box them into unmarked white packages, their motions thoughtlessly industrial. In minutes, Vanquis has organized the milling chaos into symmetrical cardboard stacks. The doors whoosh shut.
“And that makes eight thousand.” Nyarlathotep declares, dusting his hands, as the Body Train jerks forward again. “Compliments to your employer for bringing us up to an even number.”
I whip my head about, a chill attenuating into a knife between my ribs. Of course the Boss would be involved. Why wouldn’t he be? “I’m afraid I didn’t get the memo on that.”
Nyarlathotep bares a grin, hunching forward to rest elbows on spread knees, glass loosely clutched in a hand. “That’s your problem.”
“Fair enough.” A sidelong glance shows Vanquis obsessing again over the arrangement of boxes, moving containers seemingly at random, creating grand forts before disemboweling them to build stubbly hexagons. Isolated from their artillery, this god of low-income terrors seems almost child-like. “Okay.”
“So.” The tumbler vanishes without preamble, no dramatic deconstruction, no emission of diamondine light. Just—poof. “Are we going to deal?”
“Yes.”
He nods once. And just like the glass, Vanquis, the boxes, the train, the transit-choked warrens under London—it all disappears.
CHAPTER THIRTY
STARLIGHT.
Galaxies unnumbered, nested within spiralling nebulas; constellations twisting in their death throes; a thousand comets fleeing. My breath hitches. The lambency of the universe dims to needlepoints, and Nyarlathotep molts from the gloam, skin slick with ice. The stars flatten into a glittering, glass-like lamina under our feet.
“Seven points for drama,” I manage, my voice a croak.
He shrugs and reclines into the nothingness, an absence of existence that pulses blue-violet against the eye, like a ghost of the sun seared into the retina. “You were saying.”
“Okay.” I lick my lips. The air isn’t cold as much as it is some unidentifiable variance of uncomfortable, dry, salt-tinged. “Firstly, I want to talk to you about what the terms of acquisition incur.”
“Go on.”
“Do you gain proprietorship over my soul? Do we share joint ownership of my body? If you buy over the entirety of my person, spirit and flesh, will you also take responsibility for all bodily functions?”
Nyarlathotep shrinks his brows into a confused frown. “What are you talking about?”
“Fecal elimination. Also, urine. You’d have to take care of all that. Similarly, if you want a monopoly, you’re going to have to make sure I’m walked, fed three times a day, preferably with high-quality produce, as opposed to McDonalds, and—” I know I’m gabbling, but if I stop, hysteria will catch up.
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
“When did it get so complicated?”
I pace the emptiness, footsteps marked by growing ripples of light. “When you decided you needed to procure my, uh, er, me. So, which is it? What do you want from me?”
His eyes color to gold; pupils become cephalopodic, black as eternity. Nyarlathotep sits forward, fingers steepled, and I catch an impression of tentacles in the valley of his cheeks, his features gaunter than I recall.
“We need all of you—”
“I miss hearing a living girl say that.”
“—for three months. Tops.”
I cross my arms. “And why?”
“To infiltrate the Chinese pantheon so that we can destroy it and be on our merry way.” Nyarlathotep pauses. “That sounded rather super-villainly, didn’t it? The flesh keeps its idiosyncrasies, I suppose.”
“It—what—nevermind. I don’t need to know. You understand that I don’t have access to anything but Diyu, right? I can’t go to Ti—heaven—whatever. I literally cannot. My soul—”
“And you understand that the idea of heaven is nothing more than a fantasy created to instill comfort in the dying, right?”
“You remind me of that Dawkins fellow. Only somehow less eloquent.”
He glares.
“Right. Wisecracking. Got to keep that in check.” I scratch at the back of my head and avert my eyes, take a step forward to learn that the landscape is apparently Escheresque. While I wasn’t paying attention, I’d somehow wandered up, around, and behind Nyarlathotep’s right should
er. I halt. “Can’t you just—can’t you just, you know, go and beat up the Chinese pantheon without me?”
“Yes. But we’d rather borrow a Trojan Horse, if you will.”
Something finally clicks. “‘We’?”
“You can’t mount an invasion with just one person. Although you can rest assured that I will be your principal contact in this agreement and will, in turn, take responsibility for the actions of my colleagues.” Nyarlathotep flashes a thin, cold smile. “Three months. Full insurance coverage. All expenses taken care of. You don’t even have to be switched on for the period.”
“I’ve had my affair with recreational chemicals, thank you. Don’t need to lose days like that ever again.”
“Whatever you like.” His tone grows clipped, impatient. “Rupert, I don’t know where you got the impression that we’re at odds, but we’re not. We both want the same things.”
“Truth, love, and minimum wages for everyone?”
“We both want the gods dead.”
“I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.”
“Shut up.”
“Shutting up, sir.”
“You’ve been lied to. You’ve been incarcerated. You’ve been forced into demeaning labour. You—you cook for their livestock. You are an ancillary function, unimportant. Most importantly, you’ve been disrespected. Instead of telling you the truth, instead of letting you know what would happen if you let Minah go, they chose to lie to you.”
He breathes in. “If this were a dystopian movie, this moment would be where you rise up, hold your fist to the sky, and vow vengeance on those who had wronged you. But instead, you keep making excuses for these… monstrosities. We want to give you a chance to change that. One little pantheon at a time. Help us help you.”
“And you.”
Nyarlathotep breathes out slowly, mouthing the numbers from one to ten; it’s an affectation I’m certain he doesn’t actually need, but secretly pray that he does. “Tell you what. As a token of good faith, you can have a freebie.”
“What kind of freebie?”
“Anything you want.”
I sigh and rock on my heels, back and forth, before I bounce up, blowing out hard, hands waggled outspread, like an overeager boxer. This is it.
“How about: I want Vanquis dead.”
“Done.”
“Wait. Wha—”
Between one blink and the next, the landscape shifts, alters from nothing to something, geometries of inhuman construction, plastic seats, and ribs of greasy metal. The train sways, clips around a turn. Lights convulse, plunging the world in a stop-motion film, black and white and red and oh.
It takes me longer than I’d like to admit to register the smell. The carriage stinks of feces and ruptured organs, gunpowder and bile. A faint miasma of urine provides an astringent counterpoint to the blood clotting in the air. I cup my hand over my mouth.
The actual carnage is no less impressive, multi-tiered, a debauchery of slaughter to do Pulp Fiction proud. Vanquis agents lay spread over the carriage, decapitated, dismembered, disemboweled and, in some cases, deboned. I pick a route across the limbs and gray loops of intestines, discarded skins.
Even more disconcerting than the mayhem itself is, perhaps, the fact that the massacre appears mutually inflicted. None of the corpses evidence any sign of struggle, no bruises around throat or wrist to suggest they’d fought back. Instead, I find bodies with their arms looped together, pistols pressed into each other’s mouths, the backs of the skulls split like melons, drooling curds of brain. Bodies in seeming embrace, hands dug below their ribs, fingers cupped about the hearts. The epiphany hits: this had been consensual.
It had been a suicide.
A sacrifice.
“Is Vanquis really—”
“Yes.”
I kick a denuded skull across the way. “Aren’t these just its—”
“No. More than anyone else, I imagine, Vanquis understood that we’re merely components in a grand invention, cogs and wheels and bits of machinery. We’re expendable in the name of the—I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” Nyarlathotep squats over a mound of bodies, each corpse slitted from mouth to groin.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’ll figure it out one day.” He stands and opens his arms to encompass the space, a messianic figure, spotless despite the environment. His grin says everything. He doesn’t believe the shit that he’s hawking. “You’ve gotten your wish. Let’s talk about mine.”
“I could just run away.”
He looks out the window with a smirk, even as we continue speeding through the void, traversing routes that only ever existed in an architect’s delirium. “You wouldn’t get very far.”
“Probably not.”
“Don’t keep me waiting, Rupert.”
“I have three more requests.”
Impatience darts across Nyarlathotep’s face, entirely too angular now to be mistaken for human, jaws and cheekbones extended to inhuman proportions. “Three. Really. Don’t you think you’re being—”
“Hear me out. First,” I declare, very loudly, counting out my terms on my fingers. “You get me all-you-can-eat access to every restaurant in London. Second, you give me twenty-four hours to sort out my mortal affairs. And third, we start with the Greeks first.”
His smile grows teeth. Not figuratively, literally. Dentition multiplies even as the smile extends past the normal capacity, lips stretching to accommodate the new coalition of pearly-whites. I count about twenty-five extra on each jaw.
“Deal.”
I DAB PALE, fatty broth from the rim of my grimace. Shoryu wasn’t anything like what the website had advised, but it was tolerable, which I suppose is good enough for an establishment in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
Outside, tourists ripple across intersections, brandishing cameras in the encroaching twilight, while a lone busker plucks at his guitar, largely ignored by the crowds. A line of iconic red buses snake along the streets.
Twenty-three hours and counting.
I nibble at my last remaining slice of char siu, chase it down with another mouthful of soup. They’ve gotten the consistency mostly right, at least. My lips are oily from the rich decoction, the decadent porkiness underscored by garlic. But I’d have browned the aromatics longer, and I think there’s milk in the mix.
“Can I get you anything else, sir?”
A do-over for my entire life. “More beer?”
The waitress nods and flounces away, leaving me to my study of central London. I glance down at the small black bowl beside my serving of tonkotsu. Once inhabited by a tea egg, it now iridesces with greenish-blue foam. When I’m certain that no one is looking, I use my fork to pry out a spool of muscle from a fingertip, wincing as I disconnect the tissue and deposit the bloody pink lump into the bowl.
The froth consumes it. I press my thumb over the torn flesh, chant a quick summoning. Nothing grand, no conditional evocation; a rookie’s mistake in stereo, presented on a bed of seismic power. More than enough incentive, I hope, to compel a brisk manifestation.
The light flickers.
“I didn’t know we were friends.”
The God of Being Missing is the quintessential girl next door: small-boned, attractively mousey, with a speckling of freckles and straight, dark hair, a smile like a feral thing. Her entrance is abrupt. One minute I’m alone and the next, she’s there, curled primly into the chair opposite mine, my eating arrangement perfectly mirrored, down to the mostly drained pint of beer.
“We’re not. But I needed your help.”
“I don’t have to help you.”
I tense from the horrific memory of her prehensile maws, fanning from the stump of her throat. She’d eaten her way into Jack and then put him on like a jacket. “No, but I’m hoping to appeal to your incredible sense of generosity. By the way, how’s the mister?”
“Digested.” The deity scoops her black bowl into small palms and sips from the foam, the very picture of decorum. I don
’t need to check to know she has her ankles hooked together, knees welded shut. An angelic little girl dying for sexual emancipation; exactly the quarry her food need her to be.
“Good to know. I guess.”
“What do you want, Rupert?”
The waitress returns with a fresh pint and a crystalline smile, deposits both without preamble and leaves again without casting a glance at my companion. I lap at the foam. “Information.”
“On?”
“Persephone.”
“I never pegged you for a homewrecker.”
“Cut the crap.” I put my glass down, and peck sullenly at the dregs of my ramen instead, gathering the noodles into a final, luxuriant heap. “Like you would care even if I was. I just need you to tell me: what’s her story?”
“Millennia ago—”
“No. I read up on that story already. I need to know what’s happening now. I think—I think I saw her body. At the Greeks’ hide-out. Hades had hurt her. Demeter was furious. And obviously nothing is going right—”
“Why do you care?”
“I—” I hesitate. “I don’t know. Because I’m tired of seeing the little guy get kicked around, maybe. Or, maybe, because I’d seen one innocent girl fucked by the system. If I could—I—look, that isn’t important, is it? She’s one of yours. Help her.”
That hits a nerve. The goddess sheds her playful demeanor, smile leeching into a hard line. She slopes her head to the right, the dusk etching light along the contours of her jaw. Fingers beat an irregular rhythm on the wooden table. I wait. Nothing about her softens, although stereotypical thinking would suggest that this is where she divests herself of her predatory mien, exchanges it for maternal concern, gauzy and edgeless. But it doesn’t happen. If anything, she seems harder, brought into greater focus, accentuated. And in that moment, I’m reminded of Kali-ma, mother and murderess, not diametric sides of the same coin but a singular entity.
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