by Paul Cornell
Sefton ducked the first two blows, then hit Terry one-two on the body, and winced at the pain in his knuckles as the man fell. He wasn’t used to doing this without gloves. He took a moment to look around, to try to find Quill and Ross, to see if they could get to the door.
He could only find where Barry Keel was lying near Costain, clutching his abdomen. He was craning his neck painfully to bellow at the ceiling. ‘Marlon!’
Something fell from the roof.
It was a figure, Sefton saw in that second. He managed to leap out of the way, and it landed with a crash where he had been. Sefton turned to see that it was the bouncer from upstairs, who was even now looking to Barry Keel for orders. The leather-coated man gestured to both Sefton and Costain. ‘Rip them apart.’
As both Barry and Terry got to their feet, Sefton looked to Costain, found only a shared disinclination to be here, looked back. The bouncer was advancing swiftly.
There were screams and shouts from the crowd, many of whom – with Quill and Ross among them, he hoped – were now finding the space to run for the door.
The bouncer was herding himself and Costain, Sefton realized, back towards a corner, away from the door and the stairwell. Sefton reached into his pocket, and pulled out the vanes. He waved them purposefully towards the bouncer, as if he had any idea how to use them to attack, in the way their last owner had used them on Quill. But the bouncer paid no attention. He made little grasping movements with his hands, waiting for his chance to grab and rend. As soon as they reached the corner, neither of them would be able to get away.
This was the sort of moment, thought Sefton, where, in his former life, there would have been a horde of uniforms outside, ready to race in and bust heads on his behalf.
Now there was nobody. He and Costain were just going to have to run at the same moment and hope desperately that one or both would make it out. Sefton prepared himself to sprint for his life.
‘Hoi! Mush!’ The bouncer turned at the shout.
Quill leaped from the crowd and smashed the bouncer across the head with a champagne bottle he must have nicked from the bar.
The bouncer spun as if to grab Quill. Quill jumped away from him. Sefton and Costain ran for the stairs. Sefton had the feeling that Quill had started running at that moment too.
Ahead of them was a mass of people falling over each other to get upstairs. They were going to have to push their way through. Sefton glimpsed Ross up ahead, shoving to stay out of the crowd as it tried to take her with it.
Something grabbed Sefton from behind and threw him backwards. He was aware, in that second, of the same thing happening to Costain.
Barry and Terry Keel stood over them, Barry in front of Terry. He made a complicated gesture and suddenly something bright was burning in his hand. The bar was emptying. Sefton couldn’t see where his colleagues had gone. He hoped they’d got out. He scrambled backwards and managed to get to his feet. Costain did the same, putting the length of the room between himself and the Keels. The bouncer moved to join the brothers, flexing its fingers once more. Sefton remembered it had been ordered to rip them apart.
Barry Keel drew back his hand, ready to throw his fire.
Sefton had a sudden thought. Just playground stuff: rock, paper, scissors. They had fire but he had—
He grabbed the freezing phial from his pocket. At the instant Barry Keel threw his heat, Sefton threw what he only thought of as pure cold.
Sefton didn’t understand what happened next. He was somehow in the air. Heat was all around. He was breathing in heat. Then suddenly a wall came flying up behind him and it was going to hit him so hard—
* * *
Someone was yelling at him.
Sefton opened his eyes. He couldn’t breathe. The weight on his chest. There was nothing on his chest! No, no, he could breathe, just little breaths. Control it. Just little breaths. What was he looking at? He was looking at the tweedy man who’d been sitting by the stairs leading downwards. The tweedy man was walking quickly down those same stairs, which, a moment later, vanished, leaving a smooth wooden floor.
Oh. What was this stuff all over him? He looked down. That was … silver goo. But now it wasn’t cold. It was sizzling, evaporating. There were gold bits too, streamers of them. Amongst it … the remains of a bouncer’s bow tie.
The bouncer had exploded. Why had the bouncer exploded?
There was a smell of smoke. It was everywhere. There was heat, there was fire … all around him there was fire.
‘Kev!’ That’s who was yelling at him, that was Quill’s voice. ‘Kev, don’t move!’
He slowly got to his feet. His head was ringing. His body ached everywhere. He took a step forward …
With a yell, Costain grabbed him and hauled him back, inches from a dirty great hole in the floor of the bar. A chasm. On the other side of it were Quill and Ross, and there was …
A pile of ashes. A pile of ashes and bones with fragments of a leather coat. The remains of Barry Keel.
He’d done that. He’d had the offhand thought that the cold of the silver he’d thrown would somehow counteract the heat of what Keel was about to throw. But he’d been wrong. He’d been horribly, horribly wrong. What if the silver goo was like … fuel? Something you could store to make the power of London work if you didn’t want to keep on making hand gestures, something that could keep things in place without continual work. The remains of the bouncer, which he was now covered with, were full of it. Presumably the killer they were looking for ran on it, was leaking it.
If that was the case, then Barry Keel had used one of his gestures to call up destructive fire into his hand, and Sefton had literally thrown petrol onto it. The resulting explosion, which had killed Keel, had made the bouncer combust too. Sefton could only hope that, since it had been made of something other than flesh, it couldn’t actually be called a person, that he wasn’t responsible for two deaths tonight.
That felt too big to cope with right now. He put it aside and let himself deal instead with his current situation.
He was standing on the edge of an abyss. The floor of the bar had largely vanished. All that remained of it, apart from the corner where they stood, were … scraps … not the jutting planks and disintegrating concrete you might expect, but ragged edges of wood, sticking out into space from the walls. A couple of narrow ragged strips of carpet still lay, impossibly, across the gap. It was like the aftermath not of a real-world explosion, but of something that had happened in a video game. Sefton supposed that this floor of the bar hadn’t been made of real-world materials any more than the bouncer had been, that they’d disintegrated for the same reason. What Sefton assumed had been lower floors were gone completely. He could only imagine that the gatekeeper he’d seen walking calmly down into them had … somehow taken them away with him. Those thoughts was pushed immediately from his mind by what he saw down there in the void.
What had been revealed beneath it all was wondrous, horrifying, something of passion, not some part of a game designer’s pixelated imagination.
He was looking into a pit of absolute darkness, at the bottom of which … Sefton’s eyes struggled to understand it. Even with the Sight, it was difficult. He dropped to his knees, half to take a closer look, half in awe. He was aware that, beside him, Costain was looking downwards too.
It was a contortion of twisting silver, like the aurora borealis. It was a river of silver, and Sefton instantly understood that this was the same silver as at the Ripper crime scenes, the same silver that was covering him. It shone. The silver was dotted with tiny golden lights, and now Sefton looked closer he could see that they were threads, golden traceries that were spun all through the silver, as they were through the remains of the bouncer. The whole ribbon flexed in silence. He could feel an enormous coldness radiating from it. If he and Costain fell, they would fall into it, and the cold alone would be enough to destroy them. He glanced up at Costain. ‘Can you see…?’
‘Yeah.’ His voice held as m
uch wonder as Sefton had ever heard from Costain.
Sefton sniffed. A smell was rising from the river of silver. It was very subtle. You’d need that much of this stuff together in order for the smell to register at all. It reminded him of … something very old, something ungraspable, always just out of reach, as one’s own earliest experiences were out of reach. It was immensely beautiful, epic, touching him in ways familiar and grand that made him immediately love it. He wondered if Costain felt the same way about what he was seeing. You could just as easily fear this thing. It was outside their time and space, maybe in an ‘outer borough’ like the London of Brutus that he’d visited had been. It was … what was underneath everything, where the power was, the source, the great river. The void it was in … He wondered if this is what they would have seen if, when they’d been in the tunnels Losley had made between all her different houses, they’d knocked a hole in the wall. This void was what everything was sitting in, the bigger cosmos, again outside normal time and space.
Beside his foot, a bit of floor detached itself and fell away into that darkness.
Costain suddenly grabbed him and wrenched him to his feet, dragging him back from the brink.
Sefton gasped. He’d been … kind of transfixed by this thing. He made himself wake up and looked to the room again. The dirty great hole in the middle of the floor had slowly started to increase in size, the floor crumbling away into it on the other side too, the paths across the middle getting thinner by the second. Quill and Ross were stepping back from their edge.
‘What happened to the other Keel brother?’ Costain yelled to them.
‘Escaped,’ called Quill, moving away as another bit of floor dropped away. ‘You two get over here! Now!’
Sefton forced himself not to hesitate, ignored the tightness in his lungs, the bruises and the injuries, and stepped quickly out onto one of the strips of carpet that lay across the gap, didn’t think of what was below, aware the floor might give way under him at any moment. He clung to the thought of Joe, of getting home to him. Costain had taken the other strip of carpet, moving quickly beside him.
‘It’s going!’ yelled Ross.
Sefton broke into a run. He felt the material falling away at his heels. It was crumbling to the left. He ran right, veering away from Quill and Ross. He leaped and in the same moment he heard Costain yell too. He daren’t look to see what had happened to him.
Sefton hit the far wall at a corner by the crumbling edge where Ross and Quill stood. His hands scrabbled desperately. He just got one hand around the frame of one of the paintings, then swung to grab it with the other. He managed to hang on.
The picture held, impossibly. He swung in the void, his forearms in agony, his legs scrambling for a purchase they couldn’t find.
Ross had Costain, he saw. She’d thrown herself to the edge of the crumbling floor, had grabbed Costain’s hands. Quill had taken a step back, realizing that in a moment he might have to try and haul both of them back at once. Wondering if he could, if he was going to have to leave Costain to fall.
Sefton knew he had to do this or die. With one huge effort, all he had, he hauled himself up the painting. There was something extraordinary holding this thing on to the wall. The mad-looking fat man depicted in the portrait glared balefully at him. He started to swing from side to side, wondering about making the leap. ‘Jimmy!’ he shouted. ‘It has to be now!’
‘Okay!’ bellowed Quill. He got to the edge of the remaining carpet, squatting, his hands out awkwardly.
Sefton flung himself sideways. He hit something. Quill had missed him! His hands grasped air. He was going to fall! He got about half his body onto the crumbling edge. He felt it giving beneath him. He’d got so far—
Quill grabbed him under the armpits and heaved and rolled. He was up, and out. They were on solid ground and both stumbling quickly to their feet as they felt it start to give way too.
* * *
‘Don’t bloody let go!’ Costain bellowed at Ross.
‘Like I’d do that!’ She only had a few seconds before her arms gave out, a few seconds until the crumbling edge in front of her broke away and his weight dragged her with him. She should let him go. But she wouldn’t.
She heaved upwards, thinking only that she was giving her life for no good reason when she couldn’t actually save a colleague.
Then she felt Quill and Sefton join in. They grabbed Costain around the wrists and pulled too. The three of them managed to haul him up. They staggered upright. They dashed for the doors as the floor continued to vanish from under their feet. They burst through them together and the carpeted hallway disintegrated as they ran. They raced up the stairs, which fell away behind them too, until they were standing once more, safe, in an empty, evacuated, normal bar. They all looked back to the entrance to the staircase. It all suddenly fell away in one moment, leaving a gap in the floor which, with a slam, replaced itself with the same wooden flooring as the bar had.
They stood there, panting.
‘This level must be the last one that’s, you know, real,’ said Costain.
‘I think everyone else got out,’ said Quill, ‘including Neil Gaiman.’
‘Neil Gaiman was down there?’ said Ross. ‘The writer?’
‘Yeah,’ said Quill. He looked around. He found a sign that said ‘private function’. He put it where the stairwell had been. ‘Nice guy.’
* * *
There was nobody in the bar upstairs either. Ross felt tremendous relief. ‘I think Terry Keel must have got everyone out,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he knew where the damage would stop.’
‘Hell of a lawsuit,’ said Quill, ‘collapse of reality.’
‘Shall we put out the call for him?’ asked Ross. She found she had to sit down, and dropped onto a bar stool. She looked at the floor and concentrated on the conversation. She sensed them all doing that, all willing each other to come up with the next useful sentence.
‘Complicated. Do you fancy lying to a court about the exact circumstances of him assaulting a police officer?’
‘Or his brother being assaulted by a police officer,’ said Costain.
‘You what?!’ said Sefton. Ross glanced up at him. He had a pent-up, angry look on his face.
‘I meant me,’ said Costain quickly, ‘I meant me thumping him, all right? I wasn’t thinking of—’
‘In the circumstances,’ said Quill quickly, stepping between them, ‘I think you were acting to protect yourself and your colleagues, Tony. And you, Kev … well, I don’t know what happened down there. Did you know that was going to happen?’
Sefton shook his head.
‘As your superior officer, I’m not going to be calling any of that to anyone’s attention, not even Lofthouse’s, so the fault’s now mine, all right?’
Sefton remained silent.
‘So, no, I don’t think we should send the hue and cry after him. The other reason is that he still doesn’t know who me and Ross are, and he might well assume that you two died down there, and – unless his brother somehow got the word to him before he copped it – he still doesn’t know anyone there was a police officer. He could just go back to his normal routine. We know where to find him. We know he’s a good source of juice and we might need him later. Let’s not give him a reason to run.’ He moved a touch unsteadily towards the door. ‘Now, given all that’s happened, may I suggest a pint or two on the way home? Only not here, eh?’
* * *
Outside, breathing deeply of an evening that was still light, with curious passers-by looking at their charred clothes and obvious injuries, Ross felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up to see Costain looking seriously at her, holding her back a little distance from the other two.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘listen—’
‘It’s okay.’
‘What?’
‘I know what you’re going to say. I saved your life—’
‘Well, yeah, and thank you, but so did those two, that’s not what I was … L
isten, do you want to go out for a drink?’
‘Yeah, bloody right now—’
‘No, I mean … I … think … okay this is what I texted you about.’ His gaze was darting all over her face. He looked so shaken. He was determined to get the words out. ‘Would you like to go out for a … drink. For dinner, maybe. With me. Tomorrow. That being Friday.’
Oh.
Oh no. Oh no. Absolutely not.
He was looking so seriously at her. There was something lost about it, something honest, as if he’d been shaken to the core and needed to tell her this. She knew she couldn’t trust how he looked.
But she found that she was smiling. On the verge of a laugh. Against her will. Sort of. She was shaken too. She was still, actually, shaking. This was the worst possible thing that she could do. She was laughing at herself.
But … she could still hold on to her secrets, couldn’t she? What, did she think she’d just tell him all he might want to know, just because they were on a date? She didn’t even know if he did want anything from her, besides the obvious. To think that was to think the worst of him.
Damn it. She wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted to hear him in private. She wanted to hear him try to get close to her. She wanted to have some closeness in her life, wanted to be able to choose whether or not to hold it off.
She was flattered. He was beautiful. She would stay in control. She would not tell him those things it would be disastrous for him to hear.
She would find out if he was indeed hoping to discover those things.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Okay.’
SEVEN
Quill stood at the Ops Board, a marker pen in his hand. He’d slept badly the night before, with terrible dreams about being pierced, penetrated. Not so surprising, considering his closeness to a major explosion. Perhaps he was still in shock. He wondered whether people who did what his lot did could ever get a good kip, whether being in shock was his life now. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what have we discovered?’
