There were two red, round intrusions above Edie’s hip.
“Now we both have scars,” Frankie Fossoyeur murmured.
Yes. Frankie had old scars, had them when Edie first met her, and Edie had never asked how they came to be there and now barely saw them any more. Except … now that Edie saw them anew, she recognised them for what they were. She stared. Frankie gave a little sigh.
“Oh, dear.”
“Frankie …”
“I was very young, Edie. I was in love. I was foolish and we were not careful. And yes, I had a child. Matthieu. And then … the occupation, the war. They were on the ship. You recall, we learned of it when I went home.” The refugee ship. The one which sank.
“Frankie, I’m so sorry I never asked.”
“And I am sorry I never told you.” There was something else she wasn’t saying, but Edie did not push.
Frankie didn’t come to the hospital again. Edie couldn’t understand why not, wished that she could hold her hand. She assumed that Frankie was afraid Edie would die, that she could not bear to see her so weak. Edie worried that she might indeed die, and then Frankie would feel guilty. She worried that Frankie not coming might make the difference, but it didn’t. It just made her cry, alone. And now there was something else in her mind, something deeply unworthy and unkind and inescapable: Frankie had found someone else.
Edie didn’t care if Frankie was screwing the entire Coldstream Guard, so long as she loved Edie. So long as she was there, in the world, with her ridiculous refinements of the teapot and her upholstery trousers and the way her hair always fell into her cup when she drank.
Edie went home, and found the flat empty. No Frankie. No pastel mathematics. It was cold and dark. She went to the Lovelace, to the strange carriage filled with coils and tanks and bubbling jars. It was empty, too. She called Amanda Baines, and found she was in dock and Cuparah beached for repairs, and Frankie nowhere to be seen. Finally, she went to the elephant house at London Zoo, where the only pachyderm servant of the British Government had a very special enclosure and a personal bath. She fed him bits of fruit and leaves and an occasional morsel of kelp for Auld Lang Syne, and wondered how much of it all he understood, and whether elephants gossiped.
Frankie came back just as Edie was heading out again on another mission, silent and obscure. She kissed Edie as if the world was ending and wept on her, then fled to the bedroom and they made love over and over and Frankie said she was sorry, so sorry, so sorry she hadn’t come to the hospital. She would not say why, or where she had been. In the middle of the night, Edie woke to see her standing at the window, looking south.
“Where have you been?” Edie said at last, in the awful silence. “I needed you.”
“Elsewhere, I was needed more,” Frankie said. “I promise, Edie. It won’t happen again.”
But, of course, it did.
Edie told Abel Jasmine she couldn’t do it any more, she needed to be at home. Abel Jasmine said he quite understood. The world was changing, anyway, and perhaps it was time for the new guard to have their day.
The new guard struck Edie as very efficient.
Frankie came and went, and Edie didn’t know where to. In the end, she did the thing she had always promised herself she would never do: she spied. She saw Frankie take a taxi to a clockworker’s shop in Quoyle Street, saw her greeted chastely by the little artisan, with his sad-looking bird’s face and his open adoration. She sat on a bench in her daft, obvious disguise, furious that it had worked and more furious with Frankie for being so loving, so faithful, so true. This was not an affair. It was another life. There was no sex. This was so much worse.
A moment later, a boy—no, a young man, well-dressed and brimming with frantic energy—arrived on foot. As he rapped on the door he turned slightly towards her and Edie almost screamed at the sudden likeness. The artisan ushered him inside.
Frankie’s son.
Edie was appalled at herself for intruding. She was furious with Frankie for everything. She stormed home and was even more furious when her attempt to conceal her rage was successful. Finally she packed her life into two small bags and left. Frankie wailed and howled. Edie snapped at her. Bad things were said. Unkind things. More unkind, because they were all true.
Edie took refuge in work, because work was a thing where you could lie, sneak, and hit people in the nose and it was considered laudable. She demanded and received her old job back. Since she was in that sort of mood, Abel Jasmine sent her to Iran, and Edie spied on Iranians. Tehran was a melting pot of intrigue; almost everyone there was a spy. On one occasion, she went to a clandestine meeting and realised that not only was no one in the room actually who they claimed to be, but in fact everyone was notionally representing their enemy. She got reckless and told them all, which was either very rude or very funny. There was a short, huffy silence in which gentlemen and ladies from various secret organisations sneered at one another, and then everyone got very drunk and they had a party. Edie woke up between an agent of the Mossad and a ravishing Soviet girl with bad skin on one cheek and a sailor’s mouth.
Over breakfast—the young man from Mossad was still in the shower—the Soviet girl told Edie that the KGB had killed the Sekunis in Cuba. The girl didn’t know why.
Edie hoped it was misinformation, but knew it wasn’t. The world was getting old and cruel. The great game she had played, the wild, primary-colour roller coaster, had become something harsher. It wasn’t brother monarchs scoring points any more, or empires testing one another, or Vell played, Commander, but vee vill get you next time, you may be sure … What difference does it make if one crowned head replaces another? What matter if the Queen’s nephew displaces the Queen? But now it was different. It was about ideas, and fed by science. An idea could never die. A city, though, could burn, and its people.
Abel Jasmine called her back to Europe. She knew from the lack of detail that something was wrong. Something had happened, and it was bad.
“Is it him?” she asked. “Is it Shem Shem Tsien? Because this time I’ll kill him, Abel. I don’t care what it costs.”
Abel Jasmine sighed. “Come home, Edie. I need you here.”
She took a plane to Istanbul and then on to London, and when she got there she found herself going to Cornwall, and she knew it was worse than she had imagined because no one would tell her, and she gradually realised this was not secrecy or oversight, but fear. They didn’t understand what was going on, and they were afraid. Which was when she knew, absolutely knew, that it was Frankie.
“The Engine,” Abel Jasmine said, and that was all Edie needed to know. Frankie had tested the Engine, and she had somehow got it wrong. Or, more likely, too right.
“Get me to the Lovelace,” she told the Wren in the front seat of her staff car. “Do you know what that is?”
“Yes,” the girl said, and Edie realised that she was getting old, because the Wren looked too young to drive.
Edie sat in the front passenger seat and listened to the road surface change beneath the wheels. She recognised the route, knew where she was going. She forced her mind not to speculate on what she would find when she got there. When they crossed the Tamar and left the main road, it was the in-between hour, too late to be properly twilight but not yet full dark. The other woman’s nervous chatter slowed as she concentrated on the turns and dips, and then stopped altogether when they reached the outer perimeter and were waved through. Ambulances rushed silently in the other direction. Edie had heard somewhere that when they didn’t use the siren, it meant the patient was already dead.
There were soldiers along the road and soldiers in vans and soldiers standing guard over farmhouses and cottages: regular men, veterans who had seen service. They were grim and tired, and as the car wound through a tiny group of buildings on a hilltop—too large to be a farm and too small for a village—Edie saw a private vomiting into a ditch, and his mates holding him up. She’d seen British infantrymen make fun of one another during field amputations. None of them
were smiling now.
The car slowed and Edie thought for a moment they’d arrived, but there was an obstruction in the road, a big, green-canvased transport. It had clipped the stone hedge on a turn and brought down a big block of granite. Three soldiers were levering it out of the way.
Edie watched. Inside the car, sound was muffled. She could hear the Wren breathing.
A moment later, something slammed wetly into the windscreen. Edie lurched back in her seat, recoiling from a wide, gawping mouth which smeared across the glass. She saw a circle of red lips and a line of saliva, and she had her gun pointed directly into it before she realised that it belonged not to an escaped lion or a giant leech, but a bearded man in a blue Sunday-best jacket. The Wren had turned in her seat and was ready to slam the car backwards and away. She glanced across for instructions, and Edie held up her gun hand, palm out: wait.
The man licked and snuffled at the glass, tried to get a grip on it, and slid hopelessly down onto the ground. Behind him were two more figures, slack-jawed and moaning, slopping bonelessly out of the back of the transport. One clutched a knife and fork. A dinner party, Edie realised. They were dressed for dinner. The one with the cutlery sawed aimlessly at the air. The other stepped from one foot to another, a strange, heron’s waddle: quick quick slow.
A sergeant appeared, spun the bearded man smartly around and folded his arms across his chest, bundled him into a bear hug and back into the transport. Two burly privates did the same with the others.
Edie called the sergeant over.
“How many like this?” she asked.
“Near on a thousand, but we won’t rescue all of them,” he said, looking right at her to make sure she understood. “About half of them are dead before we get there. Best we can figure is that they’re all still doing whatever they were doing when it happened. Stuck in a groove. Mostly that’s fine. Bloody awful, but fine. But then some … well. There’s a cattle farm over Tregurnow way. The farmer was butchering some steers. Killed all of them before we got there. Went back to the farmhouse and just kept going.” He trailed off, waiting to see if she needed him to explain. She didn’t. “Is this a Russian thing, do you reckon? Is it war?”
“No,” Edie said firmly. “No, this is an accident. Chemical spill from a container ship.”
The sergeant scowled. “Well, I hope they hang for it.”
Frankie. What have you done?
The Lovelace creaked to and fro in the darkness of Frankie’s cavern, a tiny incremental rocking like a shudder, on axles not powered but not restrained. Every so often, Edie could hear something which might have been footsteps, and beneath them and the sound of nervous soldiers standing guard in a circle around the train, came a steady, cockroach rustling she could not name. At one end of the passenger section, a single light flicked on and off, on and off.
Songbird swore softly and crossed himself. Edie had never seen him do that before. In S2:A, very few men prayed; they’d seen too many stupid chances, for good or ill. The same unfamiliar itch was tickling Edie’s fingers, a sense that this was too big to be her problem, too strange and desperate. There must be someone above me to deal with this. But that was the other thing you got used to in S2:A—the person who came along and took over when things were bad was you.
“Radio?” she asked.
Songbird’s radio man, Jesper, shook his head. “More crackle than a pigling roast.”
Abel Jasmine had told Edie, in London, that Frankie might still be inside the train. Was she dead, then? Or at her desk with wide eyes, like the farmers and fishermen Edie had seen?
Edie gestured to Songbird and to the others: wait. Songbird frowned and shook his head. Coming in with you, Countess, his face said. All for one, ey?
“Give me five minutes,” Edie said. “Then follow, but follow soft, you understand, because those are ours there, whatever’s happened.”
Songbird looked stubborn. Edie sighed.
“Please,” she said. “If Frankie’s dead in there, I just want to be the one to find her.” Although, until this moment, she had not allowed the thought to form in her mind.
Songbird scowled, but acquiesced. Edie turned and walked towards the train.
Edie stepped up onto the rearmost carriage. Lovelace had changed a bit since her time—new carriages added and others gone—but it was fundamentally the same train she had known: defiantly ornate, with the stamps of Ruskinite artisans pressed into the iron. Entering, she let the door spring shut against her back and push her gently in, so that it would make no noise in closing. The solid pressure reassured her, and then an instant later she felt a wild claustrophobia, a deep desire to go no further.
No time for that now.
Inside, the carriage was only partly lit, the curtains closed and keeping out the light from the big siege lamps outside. Tiger stripes fell across one of the Lovelace’s communal spaces, a smoking room. Edie was about to move forward when a faint breath stopped her, a tiny puff of moving air. It smelled of laundry. She folded herself into a low crouch and slid smoothly away, finding her own patch of darkness. She peered around, but her eyes were still adjusting. A crawling sensation whispered along her spine. I am in a room with a dead man walking.
Unfair thought. Irrational. If there was a man in here, he was not a monster, he was a victim. Unless he was eating when it happened. Then perhaps he is both. She was sure it was a man, without knowing why. Scent, perhaps. The length of a stride she couldn’t hear, the weight of a person she could not feel. She just knew, as meat knows salt.
There was a game she used to play with the Sekunis, a training game in the dark. Feel your way. Know your body, your space. In the dark, she would take a guard, and in the dark, they would attack her. The key was not to expect anything, not to look for anything. You moved, you waited, you acted only when you knew.
She dropped her centre and relaxed her body, and waited.
He appeared in front of her as if stepping from behind a curtain. He must have been curled up on one of the seats. One hand reached out to embrace her, or to tear at her, or to take her gun from its holster at her side. She didn’t know. She slipped beneath the hand and laid her arm across his chest, twisting around her own centre and sweeping his leg. O soto gari, firm but not murderous. She followed him down and barred the arm as he tried to continue the motion.
Was he shaking hands? Opening a door?
Abruptly, he bucked, and she heard the shoulder pop, felt the bone shift under the skin. He twisted against the joint, destroying it, and when she saw his face she was so shocked she nearly let go of him. The look of emptiness was gone, replaced by an appallingly focused fury. His head lunged at her like a striking heron, snarling and snapping. He bridged, more vital components snapping in the arm, and she relinquished her lock as she realised it was useless on a man who didn’t care how badly he was hurt.
She backed away. She didn’t want to use the gun, because she had no idea how the other people in here—there were more, she was sure—would respond to a sudden noise. They might ignore it. Or they might converge on it and stare at her. Or they might suddenly try to tear her apart. There was no evidence for that. There was no evidence of any kind, just Frankie inside, in the furthest carriage, the innermost keep of the Lovelace.
The man lurched upright and fell towards her, and she dodged. He lunged again, and this time she stepped in and wheeled him over her back, claiming a leg and twisting it hard as he went down. The knee dislocated. It might not knit properly, after this. He might walk with a limp. But she hadn’t shot him, and that was worth something, although she doubted in her heart he would ever be anything more than he was now, a man reduced to the level of a shark.
She watched him try to get up and fail, then lose interest in her altogether. A moment later she heard a strange, wrenching noise, and turned to see that he was swallowing the fingers of his useless arm.
Edie retched, recovered, and then lost control of her stomach again, emptying it into a corner bin. Then she w
iped her mouth on a hand-woven curtain and moved on.
In the connecting section between carriages was an alcove with a wind-up lantern. It would make light. It would also make her a target. She considered, then took it down and cranked the handle. Better to see what was going on than miss an ambush, whether intended as such or not.
She opened the door and shone the lantern into the next compartment. It was a dormitory, with berths on alternate sides of the carriage to make a sense of privacy and to block enfilading fire. She listened, and knew that it was full.
Edie rounded the first bend and found a Ruskinite and two soldiers, all vacant and still. She shone her lantern directly upon the face of the nearest, and watched his pupils contract. He showed no other sign of having noticed, just stood, loosely. She was walking past him, looking full into his face, when he spoke.
“I think you’ll find—” He seemed to have more to say, but somehow he didn’t. He just stopped.
“I think you’ll find—”
She stepped back.
“I think you’ll find—”
That same intonation, over and over. A recording. Or rather, all that was left of the man. A trace of him, the rest obliterated. She heard a sigh, and turned sharply, gun pointed at the next man, but it wasn’t an expression of anything, just a noise made by air in his lungs when he moved.
Edie surveyed them all, and they watched her in return. They were not curious, but they watched all the same, endlessly. There was an African word she had heard from Songbird when she arrived: zumbi. A corpse which hasn’t the decency to lie down. You have to tie his jaw shut so he doesn’t speak. (Back down the corridor the man said: “I think you’ll find—”)
“Hello?”
Edie turned sharply and raised her gun. The man flinched. He was young, in his thirties, and stout. A hamsterish sort of fellow in a robe. A Ruskinite. She was so glad to see him, alive, in here, that she almost hugged him. Instead, she growled: “Who are you?”
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