by Laura Powell
“Yes, but that’s the Moon as a prize. The card itself draws on all sorts of lunar myths and legends. It’s illustrated with two towers and—hey, what are you doing?”
“Playing the one-armed bandit.” Cat was already tracing the painted wheel’s lines, feeling the throb as a coin materialized in her hand. “My aunt told me how your chance of winning on an ordinary slot machine is over two hundred thousand to one. But I bet a player with an Arcanum coin is going to hit the jackpot every time. Here goes.”
As soon as the coin went into the slot, the painted glass panel lit up. Cat pulled the lever and the reels began to spin with a soft clicking sound. When they stopped, the symbols revealed were three identical wheels. Toby whooped. The panel began to flash.
Cat hurried over to the door. Sure enough, its handle turned.
“Right,” she said. “I’m going through. Thanks for helping, and all that, but there’s no reason for you to come. This is my business.”
“Are you kidding?” Toby’s foot was tap-tapping, and he had ruffled his hair into little agitated tufts, but he gave her a lopsided grin. “Of course I’m coming with you. You were right, that stuff you said about research not really counting. It’s just … well, this is a big thing, y’know? I mean, wow, I’ve been dreaming about this for such a long time, right, and now it’s actually here—”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him through, before either of them could change their minds.
At first, Cat thought they had got it wrong and the door led to somewhere in the “home” side after all. The dank overcast night belonged to the evening she’d left behind when she’d entered Temple House, just as the concrete jumble hemming them in had a mundane familiarity. Towering apartment buildings of grubby gray reared up to either side, their windows stretching from earth to sky. In spite of the pallid glow of an occasional streetlight, and the scribble of graffiti across the walls, the place seemed utterly abandoned.
“Jeez,” Toby muttered, “I thought it would be a bit more, y’know …”
“Glamorous?” Cat said it sarcastically, but actually she knew what he meant. She thought of the soft primrose morning the other side of Seven Dials, the glowing rooms of Temple House.
To their dismay, the door they’d come through only opened one way. Here it was the front door of one of the towers, with a narrow grille at the top and a row of buzzers to the left. Toby was going to try the buzzers but Cat, made uneasy by the CCTV camera above their heads, stopped his hand.
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll just keep walking until we find a threshold that’ll take us out of here.”
“And look who’s here in the meantime. Score!” Toby pointed across the scrubby open space, slightly smaller than a football field, that lay before them.
There was Flora, walking unsteadily but determinedly toward the underpass of a wide concrete bridge. As they watched, she stopped and took a swig from the bottle of champagne she was dangling from one hand.
Toby and Cat exchanged glances, then hurried to join her. Large greasy-looking puddles pockmarked the yard, and as they crossed its expanse, the concrete seemed to swallow them up and the towers grow higher. But at least one of their problems had been solved: feeling the pins and needles on their palms as they approached the bridge, they knew a threshold must be close, somewhere in the walkway beneath it. Perhaps that was what Flora was heading for. When she saw them coming, she shook her head slightly and began to laugh. “Batgirl and Robin ride again. Haven’t you two got a garden party to go to?”
“Hey, Flora. Sorry to, uh, keep bothering you, but we could really use some advice here. You see, Cat wants—”
Cat cut in. “I’m looking for something.”
“Aren’t we all.” Flora’s eye makeup had run down one cheek, her voice was slurred and she was shivering in her flimsy camisole. Still, her insouciance made Cat envious.
“It’s true though, isn’t it, that you’ve been coming to the Arcanum for years?” Toby asked eagerly.
“Sure. I used to divide my time between here and Narnia—till I got tired of the talking lions, that is.” Flora took another swig, and hiccuped. “Oops.” She smiled coyly. “These days, there’s just the one world in my wardrobe.”
Cat had tired of the All-Knowing Badass act. “Leave it, Toby. She’s too wasted to talk sense even if she wanted to.”
“Excuse me?”
Cat shrugged expressively, and turned away. As she did, her eye was caught by a blurred figure moving quickly across the yard, toward the corner of the building on the left, where he or she seemed to crawl up the wall. Then she realized that whoever it was must be climbing a ladder attached to a fire escape.
“What’s that?” Something in Flora’s voice made Cat turn round again.
The three of them were standing in front of the bridge. To the left was a set of steps leading up to the road; to the right was a lone streetlamp, whose glow barely penetrated the mouth of the underpass. But now Cat could see a pair of yellow eyes gleaming in the sour-smelling dark within. There was the click of nails on concrete and a heavy panting sound.
Instinctively, the three of them moved closer together. “Just a dog,” said Toby, but he sounded uncertain.
Though it was hard to tell in the gloom, it looked a bit like a German shepherd, but bigger and shaggier. From deep within its throat came a low soft growl.
Cat felt Flora’s arm tremble against hers. In unspoken agreement, they began to back away, while the dog crept forward, slunk low on its belly, its teeth bared. The snarl swelled and throbbed. Yet when the animal reached the threshold of the underpass, it went no farther. Crouched as if to spring, it waited, motionless, staring after them with baleful yellow eyes.
Every nerve, every muscle screamed run. Cat could hear the others’ ragged breathing. Steady. Steady … The three of them continued to move backward in a clumsy, almost comical half walk, half jog that gathered in speed the farther they got from the bridge.
Then, just as they were in the shadow of the towers and were beginning to feel calmer, the animal leaped into the light of the streetlamp, flung back its head and howled—a long, shivering cry that echoed through the blood.
At once, they burst into a scrambling dash, and would probably have scattered if Cat hadn’t remembered the figure she’d seen only a few minutes earlier. “This way!” she choked out. “Up!” In a frantic swerve, already imagining the beast snap at their ankles, the other two ran after her toward the lower bars of the fire escape. At the last moment, Flora stumbled. She gasped, lurched forward, tripped again, before Cat came back and dragged her on.
Toby got to the ladder first, swinging himself onto the platform above with a screech of rusting iron. Together, he and Cat half pulled, half pushed Flora after him. Cat scrambled up last, expecting to feel hot breath and stinking jaws close in on her at any moment.
But the wolf hadn’t come after them. Huddled on their perch, about twelve feet off the ground, they watched as it prowled before the bridge, ears pricked.
“The Triumph of the Moon,” breathed Toby. He gestured at the two towers, the gray waste before them where rainwater had pooled, and the wolf lifting its muzzle to the sky. High above, scudding clouds briefly cleared to show the white disc of light. “It’s just like the picture on the card!”
Cat stared at his rapt expression in disbelief. Flora, too, seemed to have recovered her composure. Sticking her twisted ankle out in front of her, she leaned back against the building with a wince and a sigh, as if settling in for the night. She took another swig from the bottle, which she’d somehow managed to hang on to. Catching Cat’s eye, she passed it over.
The champagne was flat and tepid, and a sudden clanging noise from above set Cat spluttering. Whoever had gone up the fire escape before them was climbing higher. Craning her neck, she saw a smudge of face looking down on them, before the figure swung into an open window three or four flights up.
“Is that the knight, d’you think?” Toby asked, still unfeasi
bly chirpy.
“No,” Flora said, pointing. “That’s the knight.”
There was a woman running along the top of the bridge, her figure in silhouette against the sprawl of city lights beyond. Cat felt a lurch of sickness. It was the Knight of Cups she’d seen play the Lottery, on her first night at Temple House. She must have won her next two moves and was now making her final gamble.
As they watched, another howl shivered through the air, not from the wolf they had seen—which had disappeared into the night—but from somewhere farther off. Farther, but not far. The woman froze at the sound, then staggered on. Briefly, she disappeared from view. Then there was movement in the darkness to the left of the bridge, and they saw her head bobbing as she descended the steps.
A moment later, and she had reached the yard. Although the moon had gone behind the clouds again, they could see that she was dressed in a long white nightgown. Her bare feet kept tripping on the hem, and her dark hair had come undone from its knot. In the vast silence of the place, they could hear her sobbing breath; on the crest of the bridge, black shadows massed.
Cat scrambled to stand up, to call out to the fugitive so she could head for the safety of the ladder. Before she could open her mouth, sharp nails dug into her arm.
“Don’t move,” Flora hissed. “Don’t say a word.”
“But we have to help her! She’ll be torn to pieces by those animals—Toby!” Cat looked to him for appeal.
“She’s right. We have to do something,” he whispered back, wide-eyed.
“Idiots,” said Flora in an urgent yet contemptuous undertone. “Don’t you understand? We’re chancers. We’re not allowed to intervene—not without paying the forfeit.”
Cat’s words of protest died in her throat. Her conversation with the knave and knight in Temple House had come back to her with horrible clarity.
As they were talking, first one, then two, three, four wolves had slunk out from the underpass and darted ahead of their prey, cutting off her flight. Meanwhile, those on the bridge poured down the steps, as swift and silent as smoke. Eyes gleamed, tongues lolled, hot animal breath steamed in the air. The knight was encircled. Cat’s whole body crawled with horror.
Flora still had her arm in an iron grip. “Wait,” she said. “Wait.”
For the woman’s face was suffused with a kind of radiance as she gazed up at the sky. With a cry, she plucked at the neckline of her gown, raking her throat and breast with her nails, as she swayed and muttered. The next moment, the clouds parted to reveal the moon, and the landscape was flooded with cold, dead light. The woman lifted up her arms, let out another wail and sank to the ground.
She seemed to shrink into the drapes of her gown, twitching and shuddering, her long black hair spilling over her face and down her back. It grew longer and shaggier, shot through with shimmers of gray. There was a terrible moaning noise. And somehow, in a matter of seconds, the tangle of folds and hair and flesh had vanished, leaving a great silver wolf baying at the moon.
At once, the rest of the pack surged to meet it. It was twice the size of the other animals and its cry was louder and wilder, and more desolate, than any they had heard before. With one mighty bound, it leaped ahead, racing across the forecourt and between the two towers.
Cat, Flora and Toby shrank back on their platform, hardly daring to breathe, as the wolf pack streamed after it and under them and beyond. And sometimes Cat saw the wolf, and sometimes it was the woman, with bare feet and flying hair, running ahead, and urging them on.
For a while afterward, nobody spoke. It felt as if they were eternally locked into this dead landscape, the creaking iron and the damp wind.
Eventually, Toby cleared his throat. “What do you think will happen to her?” he asked.
“Depends,” Flora answered wearily. “We don’t know the conditions for winning this triumph. It could be that changing into the wolf is the knight’s only chance of survival. Or it’s a temporary transformation, which she’ll use to complete her task.” She looked at the other two meaningfully. “Her task, her move. Whatever the outcome, it’s nothing to do with us. Not if we want to stay chancers.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” Toby muttered.
Flora pursed her lips. “I don’t make the rules.”
There was another long silence.
At last, Cat swung around so her feet were dangling off the edge of the platform. “Well, I’m going down,” she told the others with more firmness than she felt. “We can’t stay up here forever.”
Leaving the comparative safety of the fire escape was a drawn-out process. They all halted on the final rung of the ladder, ears straining for the sound of padding feet or panting breath, and once they were on the ground, nobody wanted to be the first to break away from grabbing distance of the rails.
Given the choice, Cat would have preferred to make a run for it, one final sprint to the threshold under the bridge. But Flora’s ankle, though not badly sprained, meant they had to compromise on a scuttling sort of shuffle around the edges of the forecourt, flinching at their own shadows, hardly daring to breathe.
Somehow, though, they made it. Once more they stood in front of the mouth of the underpass, feeling the sign of the wheel prick their palms and fear prick at their necks. But this time the darkness within appeared to be as lifeless as the wasteland they’d just crossed.
Toby felt in his pocket and drew out a mini flashlight. “Thought it might come in handy,” he said, a bit self-consciously.
First Toby, then Cat and Flora stepped under the arch and followed the flashlight’s thin beam. They had gone about seven or eight paces into the tunnel when Flora made a small, exclamatory noise.
“Are you OK?” Cat asked, struggling to keep her voice steady. Flora was farther behind her than she’d realized and Cat could barely make her out in the darkness.
Silence.
“Flora?”
“Yes … sorry.” Her face suddenly loomed into the glow of Toby’s flashlight, pale as a wraith. “Look, we’ve found it. There.”
Sure enough, the slope of the wall to her left had been spray-painted with a fuzzy red outline of the wheel, its curves vivid against the tidemark of graffiti all around. Flora was already reaching out a hand to trace the markings. In a few seconds, her palm gleamed metal. “We only need one,” she told them, peering down at the disc. “But you have to be touching me.” And in a flash of her coin, it was all over.
The home side of the underpass wasn’t much of an improvement, smelling of toilets and littered with fast-food wrappers, but after where they’d come from, the motley row of liquor stores and discount shops ahead looked almost welcoming. All three hurried out toward the street.
Just before they got there, somebody shouldered past Cat, so roughly that she stumbled. “Hey!” she called out to his retreating back, and he momentarily turned, his face a gray blur beneath his hooded sweatshirt. She remembered the youths in Mercury Square, the slouching boy glimpsed in the static of a computer screen, the climbing figure in the Arcanum. But he was already gone.
According to their watches, it was only half past nine. Even on a rainy Sunday night there was plenty of traffic about, and a kebab shop across the street was doing brisk business. Cat glanced back at the bridge and saw the two towers rear into the night, their stories spangled with lit windows.
“Whoa,” said Toby, shaking his head. “I mean, wow. How cool was that?”
“Cool?” repeated Cat. “Cool?”
“Aw, c’mon. I thought it was meant to be one of those female fantasies: ‘women who run with the wolves’—you know—empowering.”
Cat looked at him incredulously. He coughed and changed the subject. “Er, right, we need to think about getting home. That’s Canary Wharf over there, so—hey, where are you going?”
Flora was limping across the road. “Taxi,” she said without looking back. Then, reluctantly, “I suppose you can come too, if you want.…”
They went to join her. Flora was
a mess, her hair straggling, makeup smudged, bare arms covered in goose bumps, but she gave instructions to the cab driver with crisp assurance. Then she sank back into the seat and fell asleep. Toby, meanwhile, wasted no time in getting into an animated—if one-sided—chat with the driver about the local hip-hop scene.
Cat couldn’t believe it. Flora’s indifference was one thing, Toby’s carelessness quite another. She remembered his airy and, as it turned out, completely false assurances that chancers were free to do whatever they liked within the Game. Yet once faced with the realities of the Arcanum, he seemed more inclined than ever to treat it as one big adventure.
She leaned back in her seat, half listening to Toby’s chatter, interspersed with grunts from their driver and the burbling of the radio. Outside, the quiet Sunday streets slid past, streaked quicksilver in the rain.
“This is me,” said Toby, and Cat blinked, realizing that she had been close to nodding off herself. His voice seemed to come from very far away, though she was blearily aware of him saying that he could get home from here, that he’d see them soon, wasn’t it great, bye guys, bye, bye.…
“We can get the driver to drop you off wherever you want,” Flora offered, once they were on the move again. Her voice was no longer slurred, just very sleepy-sounding. “I’ve got plenty of cash.”
I’ll bet, thought Cat. “I’ll get out at Oxford Street,” she said shortly. “We’re nearly there.”
Flora was about to say something else, but the trilling of a phone interrupted her. She extracted a slim metallic-pink phone from her pocket. “Yes? Oh, Georgia, hi …”
Cat closed her eyes and tried to zone out again. The conversation ended on a brightly social note—“Morelli’s at eleven, then. Brilliant. See you tomorrow!”—and the next moment, the cabdriver was pulling up beneath a set of Christmas lights, whose flashing reindeers formed an arch between two department stores.
Cat climbed stiffly out of the cab. Flora was now setting her smeared face to rights with the aid of a makeup compact. She raised a hand in brief farewell, then went back to combing the tangles from her hair.
