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Chapter Text

        It’s like having an appointment with a general anaesthetic; you set the flat in order beforehand, if anybody raised you right. He could wish it were untidier, to stay him on his way. But after one last pass over the sparse dust atop the sombre dark bookcase and the comparatively garish contents of its shelves, one drift of cobweb from the wall, it is done. He begins to approach the cellar-spider in the ceiling corner with a glass and an advertising flyer, changes his mind; scarce kindness to evict it in this weather, and it’s not as though he’s been feeding it. If the spring awakes to find him gone, this tiny animal will not mind, perhaps not notice save as a restful stillness, that he has not returned.

        He shakes out the dustcloth and, though it’s the other arm, regrets it. Not the motions you’d expect, that pull the cords of the pain and set it jangling, but the ones you’d think were safe. He can raise the arm above his head, for instance: practically wave it about. But straighten the numbed and swollen fingers, every second or third time, and the ache grips his left wrist and crushes it, radiates up into his shoulder, tightens a coopering hoop round his chest. 111 would have him at Whittington before he could hang up the phone. But what would they do with him, when he got there? Section him, he expects, if he tried to explain.

        13:12. ‘This is what they call,’ he says aloud in his father’s gallery-voice, ‘le fannying-around.’ He drops the flyer in the recycling, suspends his bag gingerly from his shoulder; eats the last perishables, a scrag-end of Red Windsor and a little russet apple, on the way.

        The doors of the Folly swing back with the silent, well-oiled grace he remembers, and Grant, in neat dark jeans and jumper, leans out very briefly, looking unhappy. ‘If it doesn’t stop raining, there’s going to be flooding, and nobody actually likes flooding, they just say they do to sound hard. Come in.’

        At a little round table on the second-storey balcony, he sinks with some difficulty into a dark-green leather armchair, like a carrack sinking in a duckweed pond. He is frightened by the effort the stairs had cost. ‘Could you get us some light,’ he says sharply to Grant, who rearranges furnishings until he has got a banker’s lamp with a pearl-pale shell on the table, its cord in an HSE-violation tripwire suspension, and another armchair drawn up for himself. How unlined his face, in the glance up from the opened notebook, and how untroubled his eye.

        ‘I know you told me. I know I was there. But tell me again.’

        Only a little past two, but the tide of the day already long turned; the lamplight glints, pools, holds as the early dark comes in, grey-blue, all round them. The murmuring wash of the rain over the glass dome is lovely, lulling. He could close his eyes and be done, done with the whole bloody business. Start a fucking craft brewery or something. But he could have closed his eyes and been done any time in the last twenty-odd years: save that he could not, and cannot.

        ‘So,’ he says. ‘That house. Guleed was right.’

        Plastic bags, empty bottles, stained mattresses, you can imagine to prepare yourself, when they tell you, neighbours think it’s human trafficking. Pokémon cards you can’t. Fucking Paw Patrol tat. Half the time you can’t charge anybody with anything. Every so often they’re all British citizens, living like you’d think nobody would live unless they’d been told they’d be killed for leaving. The other half no one’s there.

        No one there. Cowardice to be grateful. Guleed had stopped him at an upstairs boarded door, said quietly, there’s something weird about this. Falcon. Don’t go in. She’d rung Grant. Ten minutes out. Should have waited. But he had heard behind the door, he would still swear it, some human sound. A kind of catch of the breath.

        One of the things he likes about his body: how it shows up most of the world as flimsy. Only cheap brad nails, only thin old scrap wood. He’s always leaned conservative – discretion, valour – but he’s never guessed wrong yet: which doors need the bosher, and which his heel will do for.

        And don’t they both feel silly, when the room broken open proves altogether empty: empty, looks like, since before the bloody Coronation. Cool, still, dim wood-smelling air, plainly never in communication with the close rank stink of the rest of the place. Dust on the bare floorboards; his boots had left tracks as in snow. One ancient round-pin socket ineptly set in the hallway wall. Sun-bleached shells of insects, probably older than he was, in the frame of the cracked window.

        He had thought, going in, that something had touched him, snagged him: like a little tug on his sleeve. Some small human gesture, a pause before speaking. But when Guleed came in, she could no longer sense anything at all; nor Grant six minutes later, taking the stairs three at a time and coming in with his hands in a ready, warding gesture, like a martial artist in a film.

        Not that night but the next, he had felt now and then a kind of brushed prickling at his wrist, though he could see nothing: not even with the plane of his arm tilted before a light. ‘Like one of those fucking horrible little cactuses.’ By the morning, something had pierced his skin.

        ‘Or – grown. It’s like shrapnel. It’s some kind of metal. There were only a few yesterday. But now – ’

        He has left his sleeve unbuttoned, knowing this was coming. Under the light it’s only marginally gruesome, once you’ve got over the atavistic recoiling, and seen that the foreign matter is nothing living: the scattering of fragments concentrated and spreading like a delta at the tender inner wrist, none larger than an orange-pip and most smaller, sunk under his skin; some submerged and obscured, some, sharp-edged, working their way out. It looks like some reportable but ultimately minor workshop accident.

        ‘The thing is,’ he says. His gaze, casting about, frankly stalling, falls on an abandoned tea-saucer the next table over, and Grant, following his eye, sets it in the pool of light. Thanks, he says; and then, at a loss, drawing the unaccustomed phrase as though on a slip from a lucky dip, ‘Bear with me.’

        He takes from his shirt pocket a disposable no. 10 scalpel: the kind they use in forensics, to lift evidence gently. He breaks the seal of its plastic sleeve and uncaps it, closes one eye, fits the blade to the base of an unbroken lump in the skin of his wrist and makes a minimal, angled incision. A little pressure with his thumbnail suffices. A gram or less of metal falls onto the saucer with a pin-drop clink.

        For a long moment, nothing happens. And then, a few millimetres to either side of the minute, deflated cut where the fragment had been, two new inclusions form, only a little uncomfortably, under his skin.

        He has felt, but not, this time, seen it happen. He has been watching for the shock of recognition to go through Grant, as it had gone through him: has watched him see, in an instant, the pattern. All the instances of symmetry, point to embedded point; not immediately apparent, but unmistakable, once you’ve seen it. It must be a profound relief, that someone else has seen it. But if it is relief, it goes through him like a knell.

        ‘I don’t want this in my fucking arteries!’ he says, in almost the voice he intended to say it. ‘Exorcise me, please.’

        Like any other kind of police report: the complainant desires inconsolably, insatiably, a charge into action with such unified force and momentum that time itself bends back in its wake to reverse the harm, and all that happens is that one bloody DS, if you’re lucky, sits parked on their arse very occasionally writing things down. Grant had already texted Nightingale – coming back tonight, sufficiently intrigued or concerned to leave his present investigation – left a message for Dr Walid. Beyond that, not much: assorted inconclusive hocus-pocus patting-down. The suggestion, very good but already enacted, to contact every officer who had been on-scene and advise that they may have come into contact with a chemical weapon and to report immediately any symptoms, no matter how unlikely.

        What had he been expecting: whip out the magic wand, bippity-boppity-bosh? Of course, or what’s the use of being a bloody magician. Personal juvenile disappointment aside, he has been quietly satisfied to observe, nonetheless, Grant coming into his own; more at ease in the Folly than anywhere he’s seen him, and never losing that essential we’ll-sort-this-out steadiness that, though they try every year at Hendon, cannot be taught. And he had done him the kindness of identifying and forestalling, at once, his most vivid fear. ‘Not Punch,’ he had said in the first few minutes, unasked. ‘I’m certain. He’s very distinctive. This is nothing like.’

        Half past five: he has never before heard the Folly’s doorbell from the inside, an uncanny, lingering note of such purity as to make your teeth hurt. In the lobby, Molly is wheeling a dripping Basso bicycle – brass balls to lock that up in London – with one long, pallid hand and accepting a wet helmet in the other. Handing it over, apparently immune to the prey-animal response Molly induces in most humans, is a tall, economically muscular person in bike leggings with a remarkably plummy voice who introduces himself to them both as Jeremy Chau, consultant endocrinologist at UCH.

        ‘Abdul’s on the wards,’ he says. ‘On lates, I’m afraid, frankly heroic At His Time of Life, as they say on the Archers. But they’re terribly short-handed, you know what it’s like this time of year, and they’d have nobody on Luminal if he wasn’t covering. So he rang me to come by and get some bloods. So here I am. Domiciliary Phlebotomy.’ He unfolds his hands in an elegant gesture; then having produced them says, all business, ‘Where can I scrub up?’

        ‘Through here,’ says Grant, levering open the nearest door for one of the Folly’s unmarked, narrow little WCs; and then, a cautious concern in his voice, ‘Dr Vaughn all right?’

        Chau, out of sight inside the open door, gives a taken-aback laugh and a low whistle. ‘Jenny doesn’t do warm bodies,’ he calls over the ostentatious lathering, bashing, smacking noises he’s making: one of those medico shibboleths, they lose the knack of washing like any ordinary person. ‘You don’t want her to work on you. Or I shouldn’t. Bad luck. She’s fine. I’m not – officially involved. I’m just interested.’

        He is momentarily, privately, overwhelmingly frustrated; he does not like doctors, or Old Etonians: doesn’t want to be seen by another fucking junior weird-bollocist. He wants the real thing, age and experience; sodding Gandalf for preference, not this dilettante. But after a little while in the reading room under the brightest floor-lamp they’ve got – not very – he grudgingly allows that Chau has, like Grant, a composure unusual in youth. Calm, sympathetic, intently attentive: maybe, just maybe would not have fobbed his mother off by telling her it was anxiety for four fucking years, his permanent, irresolvable metric.

        First, sleeve rolled up again, a lot of esoteric differential questions: as though there could be something wrong with him besides the bleeding obvious. Then a brief shine-a-light-in-the-eyes genre of physical examination. Chau’s hands are dry and chapped, deft, very warm. Something in the gaze and gestures, not the features, leads him to revise his first estimate upwards: certainly north of thirty, despite the pristine, misleading skin of good genes and an adolescence spent in diligence under gentle fluorescents instead of the coarsening sun, moorland wind, smoke and salt of his misspent own. All the same, firmly in the bracket a friend of his refers to wistfully as Half-your-age-plus-Never.

        Grant asks, early on, how he got interested, and never gets a word in thereafter. Aetiology, is the short answer.

        ‘Once you know there’s this whole other axis of influence – whatever name one gives it – there’s so much that could be explained. Genetics particularly, if there’s alteration to the structure or function as the result of exposure, like radiation.’ (Internal reversal of all his goodwill: he doesn’t like that idea one bloody bit.) ‘Such an endless wash of unsorted information … how often we can say what goes wrong, how it goes wrong in a technical sense, but nothing of why … If there’s a record of that influence in the genome, like junk DNA preserving hundreds of thousands of years of viral infections, so much that seems like evolutionary accidents might be recategorised. Like sickle cell and malaria, you know.’ (He does not: though out of the corner of his eye, he registers that to Grant this was intelligible.) ‘So many autoimmune diseases sound like curses in précis … Sjögren’s, for instance … ’

        On and on, thoughtful and sonorous, as Chau is putting one well-organised black hard-shell case away and opening another, with the expected short lengths of tubing and yellow sharps bin; clearly likes the sound of his own bel canto baritone, as who would not. It is quite soothing, actually, like putting Radio 4 on when you can’t sleep.

        He waits, face averted, for what seems a long time after the ritual utterance of ‘Sharp scratch’: not phobic, only polite. After a while he perceives a minimal niggling in the crook of his propped arm, like being gently bothered with a biro cap, at which he glances at last to see Chau withdrawing the needle, all done, an inordinate number of little vials filled.

        ‘Was that magic,’ he says in surprise, like a complete fucking numpty, and clarifies, compounding the offence; ‘that I didn’t feel it.’

        Modestly, almost demurely, a faint touch of gratified warmer colour enters into Chau’s rose-gold cheek. ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘I just used to be bad at it.’

        When their visitor has gathered up his medical bag and his helmet and jacket, arrayed his comprehensive collection of reflective and shining and flashing accoutrements about his bike and his person, and coasted off into the wet black night, Grant walks back into the immaculate central atrium and glances to him, a gleam in his eye. For an instant he thinks he’s going to say what Miriam would say – he’d never live ‘Was that magic’ down – but ‘You get orl sorts,’ says Grant in a wondering stage-cockney voice, ‘don’t you, in the Folly.’

        He laughs, willingly enough: not despite, but because of the fact that if he had left and Chau had stayed, Grant would no doubt have found some mild joke to make to unite the two of them. Or, if he had remained, something to join all three. One of his gifts, to get on anybody’s side, and leave the gate open, walking through.

        They delay supper to wait for Nightingale, late and incommunicado, then get it over with, both too unsettled to appreciate it; Grant particularly beginning to worry, though he keeps up his ease of manner with only a trace of perceptible effort. ‘This is Network Rail we’re talking about,’ he says reassuringly out of nowhere an hour or two later, stretching in his armchair with his hands joined behind his head. ‘Anything less than three days’ delay counts as on-time.’

        At which moment, at no signal either of them can detect, Molly – hanging close all evening – drops a silver tray with a clatter and with a thin high cry bolts from the room. He looks away, reflexively, from what he has seen pass in a flash over Grant’s face. He himself is afraid. But age and experience insulate, where the young live on their nerves. ‘Mary Poppins, I presume,’ he says, in the same comfortable voice Grant had used, and heaves himself to his feet without concession to the pain in his chest. ‘Let’s see what’s kept the bugger.’

        His first thought, coming down into the atrium, is that Nightingale looks older: almost as he had in the year they had met, when he’d guessed him to be ten, fifteen years older than he himself is now. Before, of course, he got as old as he is now, and the distance between them began to run the other way.

        His second is unadulterated curiosity as to what in the hell’s happened to him. There is a wide blotch of something dark as engine oil ruining Nightingale’s cabled jumper under his coat, but the coat is unstained though torn at one lapel, almost shredded, as though caught in machinery – Molly, drawing it from him, had stroked it as though it were living and hurt; the way she might have touched his hand, with the long gash of a cut across its back and down the side, and had not.

        Without the distinctive heavy coat he looks dishevelled, bleakly chilled, at an end; the kind of look that, in someone over whom you had the slenderest authority, you would send home. Rather than lying in wait for him, of course, at his home, and dropping some new clusterfuck on him like a weighted-net trap.

        Guilt makes him brusque, as he knows, as has lain at the heart of most of the misunderstandings of his life: all the same he fixes Nightingale with his beady eye and says ‘About time you turned up.’

        ‘Bene venias,’ says Grant beside him, ignoring him utterly. With the joking note gone from it, it is like another voice.

        Nightingale meets Grant’s eye and, holding it, draws up for him an ironical, reassuring smile. Christ, he does look older: for an instant, all his years. ‘Salve,’ he says, husky-voiced. ‘Quam libenter redeo … Always glad to see the place still standing.’ Then, as quickly though there isn’t time, he says, ‘It’s done. It wasn’t … I’ll tell you later. Tomorrow.’ His gaze, leaving Grant, for a long moment is inward, unfocused; then he raises his face and realigns his attention with visible decision, like lock-follow. ‘Alexander? Could you give me an hour? Molly will show you where to go.’

        ‘I’m willing to wait til the morning,’ he says; not from pity, or because he has become any less afraid for himself, but because consulting anybody so patently wobbly is not likely to be a blind bit of use. From the subdued croak of the voice, and the shivering, he wonders if Nightingale’s got flu. Hard lines on him if he has. Hard lines on them both. Always the danger, he tells his own over and over, packing them off grumbling to one kind of training or another, of running a one-man show.

        ‘I think it’s a slow projector,’ says Grant, still unnaturally sincerely. ‘It’s been fifty-six hours, and it hasn’t done all that much. I think it probably could wait, for once.’

        ‘Peter, I trust your judgement to the full extent of your experience,’ says Nightingale without looking back to him, ‘but I have seen a great many more nasty traps.’ And then, not as a question, ‘An hour.’

        That’s them told. He nods civilly. But if you keel over, you autocratic tosser, I’ll leave you where you lie.

        An hour later he has, as usual, to revise his opinions. Molly, drifting before him with the deceptive listlessness of a hawk on a thermal and evading his eye, leads him to a door at the end of a third-storey hallway. He opens it on a long, narrow room he thinks he remembers, or the twin of the one he remembers: fussily, comprehensively wood-panelled, with a strange ceiling, densely set all over with thick little rounds of glass like pavement lights or deck prisms. There is a long table down the centre; like everything in the Folly it could seat sixty, like everything looks unused for half a century. And in one of the chairs is Nightingale, who gets to his feet with surprising vigour, and gestures him in as though to somewhere they both wanted to be.

        Some judicious measure, he thinks, has been applied. Coffee, or liquor, or a hard pinch in a tender place; a trick he himself is not above. Or that invaluable, fatal invention the cigarette – ditto – though if that was the option Nightingale has taken it must have been before ablutions, since there is no trace of smoke about him now.

        There is instead some faint, expensive soap-scent, carried on his damp and tousled hair, and there is a scrubbed-and-polished look about his cheek, flushed in linear patches, as one newly shaved. It is an improvement, on the chalk-white, wretched look he’d had before: the kind of improvement you usually see in somebody who’s been knifed, after a nice plump bag of red cells and a tucking-up in blue blankets. He has got dressed, correct to the shining shoes, in a fawn-coloured tweed suit, omitting only the tie. It’s nine at night. It is ridiculous. It is what he would do himself.

        ‘Sit down,’ says Nightingale quietly; not as a command. Whatever the tricks of the interval, his voice is still gravelly, nearly gone.

        He sits, attempts to lean both elbows on the table to display his forearms, and catches his breath with the pain: an intense, electrical bolt through the upper arm, this time, where no fragments have yet penetrated. Or not visibly. The visible is not what he’s afraid of. He sets his teeth, commits a minor rearrangement, and waits it out.

        When his vision clears and his breathing evens, Nightingale is bent over inspecting his wrist, kindly taking no notice. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he says, abstracted, and he runs through it all again, start to finish; though they both know that every time you relate a witness statement, you remember less.

        He would like to ask the same question, though now is not the moment. He wonders again what made that deep cut across Nightingale’s hand; a cut that ought to have had stitches and hasn’t, and is now just going to have to make the best of it. There is still something dark, indelible, staining the skin round the nails of both hands. With a sudden touch of fear he notices that Nightingale, leaning over the table, is casting no shadow; but then, not exactly reassuringly, he observes that in this room, neither is he.

        Nightingale, straightening and stepping back, clears his throat and says, ‘This may feel odd, but it shouldn’t hurt. Say at once if it does.’

        Despite himself he finds it beautiful, a swift almost iridescent light like a reflection cast up from running water, weaving and wreathing round his wrist and arm. A ringing gathers in his ears, high and singing, changing gently in sequence like some frequency of angels, incomprehensible to fallen Man. Every fragment warms and eases; for a few seconds he has an unspeakable ache of longing, of hope that everything will be all right. But after only a few seconds Nightingale nearly stumbles, standing still, and he sees the tremor run through the outstretched hands and then, shuddering, through the shoulders; and the light and the ringing withdraw, and cease to displace the pain.

        ‘Don’t worry,’ says Nightingale drily, watching his face, which must have altered several times. ‘I’m not going to do any serious work now. I won’t be much use til I’ve slept. But I thought I had better get some idea what we were dealing with.’

        He says, in his formal, fact-gathering voice, ‘How are you?’

        As he had judged, the level note opened where solicitousness, even friendliness, would have closed. ‘All in. It was longer than I meant to be away. And it was damned cold. Glad to be back. Better than I was.’

        ‘Well, I was bloody glad to see you,’ he says, not troubling to conceal how true this is: a fair trade. ‘What is this?’

        ‘I’m not sure yet. I can tell a good deal about what it’s not. Not intelligent. Not a straightforward attempt to suborn or possess.’ The cut hand steadies, pressed to the tabletop; the tendons stand out for a moment, as Nightingale sits down less casually than he stood up. ‘It’s difficult because the human body rejects the imposition of magic, always tries to undo it, push it away. It’s being – swept clean of information, constantly, by the life in you. And it’s very subtle work, very complex. But I can recognise at least two forms in the British tradition. Whatever is doing this was made by a classically trained practitioner.’ Nightingale’s sudden glance up is meant, he thinks, to draw the eye, in case he had been looking away; which he had not. ‘It was almost certainly intended for me. I’m sorry.’

        ‘It happens,’ he says. ‘In our line of work. What next?’

        Nightingale begins to draw a deep breath, checks, and turns to press his face against his shoulder. It sounds painful; the cough, and the impatience. Then, with a strange, sudden flicker, he stills and says in a strained voice, ‘Nothing tonight.’ His face, turned cautiously back, has acquired colour in the cheeks, and lost it from the lips. ‘I don’t think you’re in danger on the scale of hours. I think Peter is right, and it’s meant to be prolonged.’

        ‘There’s a consolation,’ he says. ‘The fucker sticking pins in you wants to make sure you suffer.’

        He is about to ask a different question. But in the silence and stillness of the diffused light it is perceptible, that flickering again: a shadow passing a curtain, a missed tick of a clock. Something about it brushes all his vellus hairs the wrong way, organically wrong, unheimlich; he has a second echo of fear that he’s locked in this box with something that is not Nightingale. He has never particularly noticed Nightingale’s eyes, but he is struck now by the thin-ringed, drained-away look of the irises; a kind of fractured ice colour, nearly as light as the whites.

        He says, measured, ‘What is this room?’

        Nightingale, his weird eyes closing, is trying and failing to suppress a very human yawn. ‘Quiet,’ he says. ‘Sound-proofed, you could say, against everything external. Radio. Magic. And then – amplified, internally. In the old days, it was used for any contentious vote … anything open to accusations of glamouring. Of course, there are all kinds of undue influence. But if you tried to deceive by more than ordinary means, it would show.’

        He says, ‘So that was why you brought me here, before.’

        Four years ago: it had felt reckless to come. But he had thought, then, that most of his life was ending; had expected soon to be out of a job, out of every job he’d want to take. And at the end, from honour, you settle your debts.

        Nightingale, he remembers, had not looked much better that afternoon than this evening; had not risen, then, when he had walked into the room and said, I heard you telling Roberts not to go in.

        Nor spoken, only looked at him. A beat later, he had realised how it had sounded. ‘Not then.’ Not when he had accused Nightingale before the Commissioner of Police of having used Probationary Officer Adrian Roberts, 1986–2009, as live bait.

        ‘Someone made a 999 call, because of the smoke. No one had connected it. I was – ’ He had stopped before the task of explaining why he had been listening to that recording, as he might turn down some alley and stop before a wall. I was wrong, he had said instead. I’m sorry. That was a wall he could get over.

        Nightingale had looked at him for a long time, and finally said only, Thank you. And then something else, almost inaudibly, to draw him further into the room, though he doesn’t remember what it was. He remembers the unwilling dissipation of his own anger; remembers thinking, lucky I told him, he doesn’t look long for it.

        He had said, differently than he had imagined saying it, I’ve told Miriam. She’ll see to it he knows. But if I’m brought back on, I’ll tell him myself. And when, the next week, the IPCC had concluded no wrongdoing, he had kept his word.

        He gets up. He says, ‘I don’t have to be possessed, to admit I was wrong.’

        Nightingale smiles, or the lines about his eyes change. ‘No. But when a revenant approaches you, they most often begin by telling you something you want to hear.’

        He is still taking this in as the door unlatches itself and, with a theatrical creak, drifts open. Nightingale, or Molly, or the Folly itself, giving him his congé. He supposes he’s kept the poor sod long enough. But keeping people talking past the point they ought to be in bed is what he does for a living. He says from the doorway, a little abruptly, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever told you anything you wanted to hear. Good night, Thomas.’

        ‘What’s that useful phrase? Cheer up,’ says Nightingale, the lines changing again; ‘it may never happen. Good night, Alexander.’

Chapter Text

        Nightingale, bade good night to, does not reappear for twelve hours: worth it, he judges despite an increasing impatience of pain, to have him back on form. As he makes a point of being, briskly, when at last he comes in. Still very hoarse and dark under the eyes, still moving like he’s been hurt; but with his usual quickness of glance and gesture, and his accustomed courteous, faintly imperious air of command, to which he can see Grant, like himself, responding. No shame in liking being told what to do, as long as you can think for yourself when it’s stripped away without warning.

        Nightingale’s first action is to visit the house where the trap had been set. He goes alone; Grant, expecting to come with, is turned down flat. ‘I don’t expect you would see anything a second time that you didn’t the first.’ Always the danger of making a point, he thinks, observing that this had stung – observing Nightingale, turning up the collar of a different coat than yesterday, not noticing – collateral damage. But all Grant says, cheerfully, is ‘All right,’ and then, catching his eye across the room, ‘Take an umbrella.’

        He lets Grant see his mouth twitch, for company; though what amuses him this time, a little sadly, is how Grant will break his reserve for anybody, a juggler tossing to the first hand in the crowd, when anyone can see where his loyalty has imprinted, like a coin-die, for life. Still, you can’t coddle, or they’ll never get on. His own ratio of bucking-up to sharp words, with his own detectives, is not dissimilar to Nightingale’s; only distributed a little differently.

        They begin in what Grant, without reference to other options, calls the English library. He composes an initial stack of books, thick and foxed as film props, and won’t let him look at them. ‘Not that you can’t. Only because you’ve got something working at you, we can’t be sure that if you read them, you’ll see what’s really on the page. They did a lot of magic like that in the war.’

        He reads the ones Grant’s skimmed and excluded, at first, though he quickly gives it up: it is information, always, that he is craving, and despite the breathtaking twinges in his arm and chest a few times as he turns the pages, he is incapable of accepting anything in what he is reading as usefully real.

        At ten precisely, all the clocks chiming high and low, Molly shows in a small lightish-brown girl bundled in a knitted hat, mechanics’ gloves, and a misleadingly voluptuous puffer jacket, divested of which she emerges thin as a sapling. He knows who this is before Grant introduces her. He’s never liked them employing an unpaid minor; he’s been complaining about it for so long that he remembers Lesley May – poor Lesley May; fuck Lesley May – saying, what, do you think it would look better to MOPAC if they sent her away with a wodge of cash every night? And him having to admit, probably not.

        Kamara prowls round the room like a cat that’s been to the vet, and he glances up from time to time, deploying his mildest, most reassuringly stupid-looking gaze. But all the while, as always, he is harvesting impressions. Fidgety: more impatient than anxious, but impatient for what? Marked brows, light-spoked hazel eyes, jawbone as fine as the keel of a gull. Her short mini-twists are as precisely gridded as the terrestrial globe. She looks nothing like her cousin, save maybe around the ears: he notices good ears, since his own are blobbed like candle-wax.

        After a little while she has got up her nerve, and sits down at his table with her notebook. He gives her the third brewing of his account, which she interrupts several times: not disrespectfully, but like someone speaking as soon as they think, and thinking very quickly. He has trained a few officers out of that habit. He is of the mind that it would do her good to break it. But he answers without even subtle correction, as she is not his to train.

        Questions: colours of light, neighbours, cardinal directions. He can’t remember those. Window maybe north. The glass had been coated as thickly with drifted city muck as though by some shop-compressor nozzle, and the daylight had come through like light in a silted river; diffuse, is the best he can do, not in direct-sun distinct shapes.

        Kamara, hung up on this last for some reason, asks him the address and, typing as though she learned on a Remington, finds the floorplan on an old laptop as densely plastered with stickers as a beech-trunk with lichen. ‘North. Look,’ she says, turning the screen to him, and then, before he sees it, ‘Peter! Look.’

        He does see it, as Grant comes over: double-quick as though the girl might be hurt. ‘Did we hallucinate that room?’ he says to Grant, levelling a thick finger at the screen. ‘Middle door.’ He remembers it distinctly, the short three-door hallway. End of terrace. It is the right address. But the floorplan shows only the passage and two small adjoining rooms.

        ‘What year is this from?’ says Grant, and Kamara, tense with crossness not to have thought of it, scrolls up and says, ‘1982.’

        ‘They might’ve knocked up a couple of walls without planning permissions since,’ says Grant, considering. ‘But it is weird. Those are proper box room dimensions. You’d need both of them to make a room the size of that empty one. But there still were two others, weren’t there.’

        There had been, crammed rat-beshitted floor to ceiling with the kind of junk that’s almost never criminal but that some poor sod in blue gloves always has to sift through on the off-chance. ‘There were. There isn’t the space for it. D’you know, I hadn’t thought of that until now,’ he says, and looks directly into the girl’s face, which she doesn’t like. But he can’t say, well spotted; she’d like that even less. ‘It was listed as a four-bedroom,’ he says, not looking away. ‘Two downstairs. None of us added it up.’

        She doesn’t like it, but by God, she stares him down. Providence furnishes the diversion of an ambulance passing in the street below, at which each of them glance with different admixtures of attentions. Grant resumes at his tomes, and, closing the laptop, Kamara continues her interview. Commonest answer, as in all witness statements: don’t know, didn’t notice, didn’t think. A pause while she stares down at her own spiky writing, and he watches, like the unwilling schoolboy he had been, the rain on the pane. Then she says abruptly:

        ‘What are you afraid of?’

        Look, he’s a fucking Mental Health First Aider, he knows all the phrases, but the inalienable fact is you don’t get where he’s got in life by broadcasting that sort of thing. He is instantly, instinctively alive to Grant on the other side of the room, not as a person but as a place in a hierarchy. He is also aware, the way he’d be aware of somebody maybe wearing a wire, of Molly. He is tempted to say what he always says when he’s supposed to disclose a weakness, spiders: nice and relatable, always gets some nods from the room, and in fact he likes and admires spiders, so if some total scrote then left a tarantula on his desk he could simply adopt it and give it a happy home.

        ‘You could start with what was relevant in the moment,’ says the girl: as though this is not how she would choose to allocate her limited store of patience, but if he insists, she’ll put it on his tab.

        She is so resplendently unsympathetic that he almost laughs. He thinks, looking at her adamant face, her close-bitten nails, that treacly solicitude must always put her back up too. He realises, a beat too late, who it is that she reminds him of. But that is a thought he’s long practiced not having. To attend to the business at hand: if he can’t trust the people under this roof, he’s well and truly buggered anyway, whatever he confesses or withholds. And Grant, emerging two doors down this morning from the room where he had spent last night, must know, already, some of what he least wishes to tell.

        ‘Missing something,’ he says, after a pause. ‘Failing to stop something I should have seen coming. Having to let some smug fucker go when it’s a dead cert they did it, knowing it’s a hundred to one they’ll do it again. Makes you sick if you let it. Never finding someone who’s being held against their will, that’s a fucking awful one. Generally, overlooking something that would be important. Evidence. Or dangerous.’ Surprisingly hard to say aloud, when you think about it all the time; every day. ‘One of my team being hurt or killed because I missed something, made the wrong call.’

        ‘Do you think that’s any part of how it got you? That is, you noticed anything since?’

        He takes a deep breath, and adjusts his shoulders: hoping to twinge the nerve-pain from the shrapnel, to remind him why he is talking about this, and to subsume any other discomfort. But – sod’s law – it’s like grief; when at last you want it, it’s not there.

        He says, carefully, ‘Yes.’

        Nightingale returns not long after, signalled as before by Molly pricking up her ears and vanishing, this time with a look half sharpened worry, half heart-caught relief. He himself would not want it, all these tremulous reunions every time you nipped out for a Mars bar, but some men would and perhaps Nightingale does. At the sound of the hard-soled footsteps – ringing in the hollow Folly hall as though even its echoes have been polished – nearing the open door, he looks up. Grant, abstracted at his stack, displays his palm in greeting without really looking, like one bus-conductor passing another.

        The girl has got to her feet at once, as Nightingale enters: not in deference. She says accusingly, ‘Umbrabilis erat domus. Te adiuvissem.’

        ‘Discipula sospita, indefessa es, sed ire semper cum vigilia non possum.’ A different smile than last night’s; unforced. ‘Obiter, non erras, tametsi ostium occlusi. Tamen neglegimus hospitem nostrum, fortis Brigantis, audax sed non doctus.’

        At the extreme periphery of his vision, Grant suppresses a very small sound and, he thinks, is being careful not to look in his direction. He says, in an expansive sort of voice like a publican, ‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ and is rewarded with the gratification of seeing both Nightingale and Kamara glance at him rather quickly.

        Grant, as usual, takes pity on everybody, and says, one long hand marking two places on the page in a graceful disposition as though mid-chord on a piano, ‘What did you find?’

        ‘A very small allokosmos,’ says Nightingale, and then, to him, ‘An illusory dimension. A space that isn’t aligned with ordinary reality.’ Either he’s got two of those cream-coloured jumpers or Molly’s worked a miracle in the night.

        ‘What, just the one room?’ he says, disconcerted that he had barged in – that he had led others in – to some malign alternate universe without noticing: talk of bloody well missing something. Worse still is the implication that there might be more of them, littered all the fuck over London. Sufficient unto Southwark are the evils thereof. ‘What for?’

        ‘Part of the trap. Part of what, I think, has allowed such an unusual ability to our hostile actor to interfere with the body directly; that they struck at you while you were in a place they created. What I don’t understand,’ says Nightingale, ‘is why it let you in.’

        ‘That’s a lot of energy to expend on making one room,’ says Grant, in a voice as stilled as last night’s. His hand has flattened on the page. ‘Like, correct me if I’m wrong, but a human-sacrifice amount. If they killed someone for it, would it have been done elsewhere, like with a demon trap?’

        Nightingale pauses; for an instant that same flickering seems to pass over him again, the shadow of a cloud crossing a field. But the light in the cavernous room is poor, and he could not swear he’s seen anything at all.

        ‘As difficult as it was to recover any information, death sacrifices are almost impossible to conceal. I don’t think the medulla was sacrificial, although I must say I’m still not certain how the vestigial traces were removed. A modification of emulgere, I would guess, though chained to what … ’

        Molly has brought a cup of something which Nightingale has absently accepted and, though holding it level, appeared to forget; the progressive roughening of his voice reminding him, he clears his throat, drinks off the cup in one go and sets it down on the nearest table. This time he’s sure he saw it, and the control in the breathing after. ‘But if you’re asking whether there’s a body on the premises, the answer is no. And the allokosmos folded shut, you might say, as I tried to investigate it. It’s gone.’

        The girl has not moved, or altered her attention. She says, her voice almost compassionate, ‘Iam scivimus quod hostem tuum non esse novicium.’

        Unforced, a second time, but not as it was. The hollow of Nightingale’s cheek, turned to look at her again, is like an older man’s. He says quietly, ‘No. But how much worse if they were.’ And then, turning back and realigning his shoulders as though in uniform, ‘Peter. Would you summarise what you’ve found so far? Any word from Harold?’

        What follows is still, to him, largely incomprehensible, in or out of English. No fucking clue, is the short answer. He himself has no further information to contribute, nor anything practical he can do: a state of uselessness harder to bear than the pain, at least at present background intensity.

        For a time, he remains at the lamplit central table with the others, letting his gaze drift and listening; as he does at times when sitting in on interviews, to decouple the information of his other senses. Grant’s voice speaking oftenest, library-low and interested, asking and answering, turning pages. He moves about a lot: creak of chair, creak of table, scratch of pen. Nightingale sounds tired, when you’re looking away. Kamara speaks least but sharpest, no quieter for the rain-washed hush of the room; her interruptions like a barrister’s. She is so preternaturally serious that it comes as a relief when Grant says something accidentally rude, it transpires, in Latin, and she gives an enormous adolescent snort and says ‘Or nah.’

        The rain goes on break and returns without enthusiasm. Grant and Kamara have a resolutely diplomatic squabble over the particulars of something called chalybis and Nightingale revives enough to tell them crisply that they are both exemplifying the dangers of Pope’s ‘a little learning’, which unites them in well-controlled chagrin, as was probably intended. He takes advantage of this distraction to slope off downstairs and play chess.

        Last year, the first time he had seen the board on the stand with its single black pawn moved, he had countered idly enough; thinking, whoever did that doesn’t know the game. Then, alone in the room, he had glanced at the board again and felt a chill: a third piece had moved. And then thought, with an interest only just in excess of his instinctual fear, is that the Ruy Lopez? He had made his move and watched the board for what had felt a long time. Nothing. At last he had looked at his watch, turned away, and on a sudden intuition turned back. Yes and yes. After that it had been remarkably efficient.

        He had walked up to Nightingale and with the extreme casualness which is the Englishman’s gritted teeth, said oh, good game, and Nightingale had said, what game? And then, gallingly, surprisingly, laughed. ‘No. I couldn’t give a child a good game. Never really learned. My sister tried to teach me, but that was – a long time ago.’ And then, at last, told him who had beaten him. How her smile had upset his whole limbic system, when he’d finally got the chance to congratulate her.

        She’s good, at least one class higher than himself: style of play you’d call defensive, hedged-in, except then you look down and fuck me, nothing left but one rook. Clever with knights, tricky, sacrificial: sets them in odd places, sets traps. Something in this was why he thought it was Nightingale. He likes bishops himself, kindred spirits; hang far back, wait, wait, zing in and nail the fucker just when they thought they’d get away with it. Both of them ignore the rules of stalemate: it’s check or surrender. Both are cautious to a fault about when to bring out their queens.

        He always wishes he could talk to her, fix some details in his mind, see if she’s all right. It’s plain Nightingale’s the centre of her universe: fine, but is anybody paying her? She’s been on the job ninety years at least; ought to be collecting a whacking great wheelbarrowful of a pension every month, whether or not she’s still working. Ought to be able to buy the fucking Folly. What if Nightingale dies? She’s got to have something. But whenever he tries to address her directly she turns her face, fine-grained as cyclamen, away.

        Best of three: he suspects she let him win the second. ‘Thank you,’ he says in a rare moment of unfeigned amiability, to the empty room and the handful of sprawled pieces on the side-table, mostly white. ‘Always a pleasure. I learn something every time.’

        The doorbell, at close range, startles him out of his wits. The piercing quality of the sound, as it fades, is like what he’s always imagined the Mosquito anti-teenager frequency to sound like: hadn’t been invented in time to deter him, cruiserweight loitering champion of 1985. Maybe it’s like a Galton whistle, and he’s only hearing the leftovers. He presses the button for the doors himself and begins without thinking to join his hands behind his back in the interests of appearing genial, though Miriam always says this makes him look like XL Poirot, and is absolutely clotheslined by the resultant pain in his chest, which could now factually be described as crushing. He staggers down almost to one knee as the doors open to reveal, helpfully, Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, as compact and bedraggled as a rooster in the wet.

        Out of pure perversity, he lurches up again and reclaims an advantage of approximately ten inches. He feels, though it isn’t personal, like being disagreeable, so he says ‘Ah, Dr Walid. Good of you to join us.’

        They have met once before, and got each other’s measure. ‘I had patients. Have ye got all the bowels ye were born with? Then save your complaint.’

        He recognises, amusement filtering belatedly through the pain, a vice he occasionally indulges in himself, viz being as rude to Londoners as you like provided you play up the accent; abide in patience, they say to themselves, this poor savage has only just got over the woad stage. He means to say, right, I’ll haud my whisht, but the powers of speech have deserted him. ‘I’ve only got forty minutes and I’m forgoing lunch for it,’ Walid goes on, catching his eye and relenting by several degrees of latitude, ‘so I can’t … Man, what have you been doing to yourself? Sit down.’

        With no very clear sense of how he got there, he finds himself further back in the Folly, back past the chess-board under a balcony, imperilling a silly little chair with velvet oval pads and curly paws. Molly has gone past in a flash like a magpie. Walid is checking his pupils and, most forwardly, reaching down his shirt.

        His senses assume their usual functions a minute or two later: his heart is beating rather fast, but much of the pain has gone, and Walid has withdrawn the stethoscope. ‘Sorry,’ he says, roundly embarrassed. Always, afterwards, it seems to him he could have done without making such a bloody fuss.

        ‘Sorry for what,’ says Walid curtly, understanding. ‘Let me see the arm.’

        At this he has been trying not to look, himself: hard enough getting dressed this morning and staying on his feet. But he’d had the forethought to get himself into a vest top under his button-down, which makes it easier, now, to let Walid ease off the sleeve, and move his heavy arm about with cold and steady hands. ‘Well, that’s a proper chib in the median nerve,’ says Walid, sounding, surprisingly, relieved.

        This emboldens him to look: a jagged fragment half the size of a crown-cap surfacing from his upper arm, some dried blood and some new blood round its fretted edges. The pieces that he recalls as pre-existing have grown unevenly, and the density of the distribution has increased: still clustered most at the wrist, but in and well up past the elbow now, halfway to the shoulder. ‘Ach!’ says Walid, more Arabic than Scots; ‘you look like all the grouse on the Twelfth put together. I take it that’s progressed since Jeremy saw it.’

        He is explaining again when there are footsteps on the stairs, and Molly and Nightingale, Kamara and Grant come on-scene. ‘Abdul, hello,’ says Nightingale, looking genuinely pleased to see him. ‘I’m glad you could come. Margaret sends her love. She’s got a new address at the Museum I’m meant to pass on.’

        Walid, unmoved by the singular rarity of welcome and favour, looks up at Nightingale and says in a tone as accusatory as the girl’s had been, ‘You.’

        Nightingale says, in a voice of less formality than he would have believed the man possessed, ‘Oh, Abdul, don’t. Not now. I know. I’m all right. I know what to do.’ And then, both the warmth and the exasperation withdrawn, ‘Could you come up, please. Molly tells me you haven’t much time.’

        ‘Up’ is not to the library where they had been, but to a laboratory he has not seen before, with rows of counters with stained white porcelain sinks and a wide, scarred table under a tall window at the far end; only four chairs, but Molly never sits anyway and Walid isn’t staying. He’s brought a sheaf of results, some boring – low vitamin D, high cholesterol; oh aye, what else is new – most, to the layman, incomprehensible. ‘Coagulation panel’s a bit peculiar. But all broadly consistent with trauma and stress,’ says Walid, ‘not infection. Which suggests you’re growing it personally. Nice and hygienic.’

        Having once gone through a few bags of levofloxacin after a stab with a none-too-clean knife, he does, in fact, deeply appreciate this. Walid says that the pain that feels like his heart is probably referred; ‘but if you stop ticking, we’re just up the road.’ Then, seriously, ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more certain. I can’t rule out an embolism. All I can say is you hadn’t got one yesterday at six o’clock. But these look like fairly normal foreign body reactions, and the nice thing about those is that they do tend to push outwards, as much as something’s clearly trying to push them in.’ He pauses, and then says ‘Best for last. I gave the samples to a friend at Imperial who’s got access to a metallographic microscope. They’re bronze. Not modern bronze; no zinc. Just copper and tin.’

        ‘Bronze,’ says Kamara, the overcast light from the window falling full on her fine-drawn young face. It’s the first time she’s spoken since the library. ‘You sure?’

        Walid, whose red beard is beginning to whiten like a veteran setter’s muzzle, smiles a little. ‘You haven’t met Zainab. Though you should. If she says it’s bronze, it’s bronze.’ And then, lightly, ‘I’ve got to be going. Thomas, walk me out?’

        It’s a good fifteen minutes before Nightingale comes back, a touch flushed about the cheeks with exertion or pique, and walks round the room snapping on the lights at the brass-dome wall switches. Four out of five come on. ‘All right,’ he says, standing straight-backed and sidelit before them at the table, ‘a practical interval. What does the choice of bronze tell us?’

        ‘It means we’ve got to un-rule-out a lot of things,’ says Grant, pulling out the remaining chair politely, which Nightingale ignores. ‘It means, in retrospect, that the absolute first thing we ought to have done was test those bits of metal with a magnet. If it’s not steel or iron as we thought, that means we can no longer assume no Fae involvement.’

        ‘But it also narrows the field,’ says Kamara suddenly, uncurling out of a deep slouch in her chair like a hermit-crab emerging from its shell. ‘More than it expands it. A lot more, ’cos you can’t chain most formae on to just any terminal material. It has to have the right properties. Like how you’ve always got to have glass with lead in it for respicere. You’ve got to have the right thing at the end of the chain, or it just falls apart or blows up in your face. And you said you could see two formae. Iacere and alienare.’

        ‘Yes. Though not directly linked.’

        ‘But that’s the thing about Newtonian magic,’ says Grant, catching up and overtaking. ‘Those wouldn’t link. You can’t join most formae on to each other by just whanging them on. It’s like unit conversions. You have to have the right thing in between. If we know there must be some part A, right … ’ He jumps up from his chair and goes over to an ancient deep-green chalkboard brightly lit by one of the four out of five, and, making a horrible chalk-squeal in the process only twice, writes:

        Grant turns back in the spotlight and looks him straight in the eye, and gives him a jump-lead charge of a smile. What youth is, to have so much hope you’re giving it away. ‘What it means is that we have – coordinates. Something to go on. There’s a limited number of ways to make a projector like the one that’s working on you. Once we know how it’s done, we’ll have a much better idea how to undo it.’

        ‘Peter is omitting, I suspect, what will prove to be rather a lot of intermediary letters,’ says Nightingale, looking with what might be almost amusement from the chalkboard to him, ‘but that is, yes, the general idea.’

        ‘Iacere’s eighth-order minimum,’ says Kamara. ‘Alienare’s sixth, with what it’s trying to do to him. So fourteenth-order at least. Peter’s up to fourth-fifth. I’m third. How do we help?’

        It is not discourtesy, how she addresses Nightingale; not when the whole of her is aligned at attention, and when the offer she is making to him has no apparent bound. But he can see why Grant has said that she has trouble at school.

        ‘Several ways. Start at the bronze. Try a piece as a terminus. Small. In one of the Tammsaar cages. Eye protection non-negotiable. If it feels unstable, stop. Tell me. Don’t push.’ Nightingale, turned to face her, might in turn be addressing a pilot officer: speaking as soon as he thinks, and thinking very quickly. ‘Peter can work with me on the evolutio. When you’ve tried the chainings you know, I’ll show you alienare, and you can try it as a radix. You don’t have to complete it to get some sense of whether or not it will connect. Safer anyway.’

        ‘Can I try that lens thing Varya taught me? Lupa. Non-Newton obviously. But it might show me something I wouldn’t see otherwise.’

        ‘If you think it’s worth the conduit time. Have you got your logbook?’

        The girl smiles, in such a vanishing flash you’d have to see it frame-by-frame to be sure, and says ‘Of course. You got yours?’

        Nightingale, astonishing him, laughs aloud; for an instant, it is how young he looks that strikes him. ‘Oh yes. Operis ne pondere pressus. You had to copy that out because I did. Peter?’

        ‘Right here,’ says Grant, leaning down to give a battered red Moleskine on the table a friendly thump-thump, like you’d give the ribs of a big dog.

        ‘Good. Abigail, hazard table. Peter’ – gesturing him over – ‘you’ve seen derigere, the likeliest opening, but you haven’t explicitly been shown the forma … ’

        How often he has seen this, how the room picks up when you’ve got a lead, though the light may be going out of the sky, or coming in; the tempo changing, the nerves tautening like tuned strings, the whetted glint in every eye. Kamara sits him down at a solid block of a table inside some odd silvery-screened partitions with, he notices, a similarly screened carbon monoxide detector, a smoke alarm, something else that flashes green at intervals, and a gleamingly new automatic fire sprinkler installed directly above it. ‘Do you want me to help with the shirt,’ she says unblinking, and he says Yes, actually.

        She is fastidious or considerate in touching only the buttons and the cloth, and she leaves him the other sleeve. There is no position that is not painful, but if he leans a little forward and rests his forearm on his thigh he gets the fewest surprises. She stands in front of him and jounces up and down, just the once, on the soles of her trainers. Then, giving no warning but her indrawn breath, she leans in towards him and traces a fast pattern on the air, murmuring something he can’t make out.

        What comes over him is not like what he realises, afterwards, must have been Nightingale’s gentleness, the night before. It is like being cornered, being trapped; his jolted heart begins to labour. What encloses him is a patterning like a fractal unfolding, relentless, invading, fine and hungry as roots, and a kaleidoscope shifting by precise turns, clicking into focus like an optometrist’s machine. Christ Jesus, it feels like being hunted down.

        He lasts it out, just. She steps back, and his vision – not exactly his vision – begins to normalise. There are jewelled colours still sequencing in after-image at the back of his eye, deep clear scarlet, blue, amber, violet, like the treasure-chest one imagines finding as a child, and a pins-and-needles prickling all over his skin. He would like to say, See anything interesting? to recover himself; but she has bent over a different table and is writing, which, it’s like station law, you don’t disturb.

        Something still preoccupied in her expression, when she straightens, keeps him from speaking. She waits, this time, for a pause in Nightingale and Grant’s conversation before calling across the room ‘Bronze from him, or some other bronze?’

        Nightingale coughs once to clear his throat, and calls back with that same trace of amusement, ‘From him; Alexander, if you can spare it?’

        ‘I’d be delighted,’ he says, as though accepting a seat at the opera. ‘All yours.’

        Kamara finds him a pair of rubber-tipped forceps, and, though he’d thought to do it himself, ends up extracting at his direction the worst piece: the chib in the nerve. It wrenches out easier than he expects, and though the pain whites out his vision for an instant, it is a relief to have it gone. ‘Fuck. Thanks,’ he says, blinking back involuntary tears. ‘Give me that, it’s a biohazard.’ He washes it, awkwardly mostly one-handed, at one of the sinks with an old bottle of Carex, and puts it on the screened table for her.

        She ignores it, for the moment, in favour of inspecting his arm. The two response-pieces that have formed to either side of the wound where the fragment was are submerged, barely visible – wouldn’t be visible, if his skin weren’t as translucent with winter as some worm that lives in a cave underwater – and much smaller than the original.

        ‘Where is it coming from?’

        ‘Walid said I was growing it,’ he says. ‘So from me, I assume.’

        ‘There isn’t that much copper in the human body,’ say Kamara and Grant, more or less simultaneously, from opposite ends of the room. For a moment, their brows drawn together in identical objecting expressions, they look strikingly like cousins: kinsmen in the noble and storied house of massive fucking nerds.

        ‘And no tin. Unless in fillings. But that would still be only tiny.’

        ‘It must be scavenging from the environment,’ says Grant. ‘Coins, electrical wires. Solder! Don’t let him near your laptop, Abi.’

        ‘We could test that,’ says Kamara, to him, though not looking at him. ‘Count the bits. Time it. Put a big block of bronze next to you and see if it happens faster.’

        ‘Just the ticket,’ says Nightingale, bone-dry, ‘if you wished to hasten his demise,’ and she says, not particularly chastened, fair point.

        You could take it amiss, if you didn’t understand what goes into clear-up rates: the dark glitter of the current of gallows humour running through the way they’re looking at him now, the way they talk. But it’s the ones who can tap into the charge like a train on the line who stay in the job longest, do it best; the ones who take it all to heart who can’t hack it, cost a bloody fortune in long-term sick leave, wash straggling out. He himself has laughed on the scene of a murder: recognition, vengeance, sheer black comedy. Went to all that trouble with the bleach and then forgot your phone on the fucking table, did you, mate. Well, you won’t be in such a hurry where you’re going.

        All three of them have begun to remind him, to varying degrees, of a forensic entomologist he knows, whose ID says Letitia Harmon, though she always introduces herself, with a hard-palmed handshake, as Fitz. Lanky, green-eyed, with that tea-dyed, shipwrecked look that white people get after a few decades of outdoor living; used to be an ecologist, ‘which,’ she told him serenely once, ‘gets you thinking about murder.’ The look on her face when she’s telling you about some extra-special maggot or incriminating pollen grain is always animated with pleasure, sometimes positively gleeful. More than once he’s watched a colleague underestimate her – to some men any woman having a good time must be useless – but Fitz has sent more killers to Belmarsh than anyone in Belgravia nick.

        Kamara switches on a modern halogen floor-lamp over the table, and inspects the bronze fragment with all the consideration due the extra-special maggot. For a long moment she only holds it, her eyes narrowing but never wholly closing, until it must be as warm in her palm as it had been in his arm. Then she puts it in a hexagonal contraption that reminds him of a Chinese temple lantern and retrieves two pairs of safety goggles from a box on the wall; she hands him one, though because both his arms have become very heavy and are hurting remarkably, he does not embark on the palaver of putting them on. She leans over and mutters at it, which generates a few flickers and flashes of light in the lantern, and makes some more notes. But he gets the curious impression her heart’s not in it; and after a pause she takes the goggles off and, saying nothing to anyone, leaves the room.

        He would assume the universal reason, except she took her notebook. Neither Grant nor Nightingale made any acknowledgment of her departure, but although her steps were almost silent, he’d put money on it that neither of them missed it. He feels free, therefore, to close his eyes and listen, as earlier; he is achingly tired, worn out with pain and strangeness, and if not constrained by the need to keep a consistent position could fall asleep in his chair.

        Most of what the other two are saying is too low for him to hear, save an occasional terse ‘No’ or ‘Again’. He is drifting, despite everything, when there is a lightning-flash that shocks right through his eyelids and a crackling, ringing, jangling sound, and he turns without thinking, jarring his arm: in time to catch the last of what looks like a cascade of welding sparks spilling and extinguishing, and Grant saying hastily ‘God, sorry! Sorry. Put me at the hazard table,’ and Nightingale, half-laughing, half-coughing, shaking out one hand and saying, hoarse and rueful, ‘Excess of zeal. Traicere’s notoriously hard to keep hold of. That wasn’t bad for a first try.’

        It is a few minutes after this that he hears the running footsteps in the hall, as quiet as they are initially, and is the first to turn to the door, holding his elbow braced in the other hand. The girl turns the corner and darts in, not exactly at a run but with a momentum she cannot check, with her notebook pressed against her chest with one hand. She has the lightness on her feet, still, of childhood. Although each of the men in the room have turned to look at her, it’s none of them her face is turned, almost transfixed, to find: it’s out into the world, into the mist and rain and the darkening day, past the east-facing window and through all the grand and humble walls of London, and out to the unseen sea.

        Before she speaks he knows the look on her face; has seen it on so many other faces in other rooms, has seen this reflection, in a glass darkly, in other eyes: as fierce, as dead-set on getting it right as she is, in the moment of composing what she is about to say. He can recognise, too, her collecting pause of self-discipline, her determination not to overstate. He teaches this practice; in some distant, disinterested compartment of the spirit, he approves of her restraint. But already he can feel it as the sailor in harbour feels the change in the tide, by slow degrees and then with a rush that can reverse a river, the arrival of a break in the case.

Chapter Text

        ‘So,’ says Kamara, putting her notebook on the table. She has carried a small pamphlet held against it, a little smaller than its A5 borders. ‘So.’

        She draws a long breath with a shiver of nerves in it, and looking carefully again at none of them, presses on. ‘The bronze. It’s no good. As a terminus. It’s like concrete. You work with it five minutes, you can tell it doesn’t want to take. You can’t align it with anything, it won’t turn, like iron will turn for you. So we w—were thinking something about it would be important in the materials sense. But you wouldn’t use it for a materials reason. Not with classical formae. So that meant two things. Or two I thought of.’

        Another deep breath. ‘Either there was a linking part that wasn’t Newtonian. But I thought, you couldn’t make a stable chain with that. Not a long one. So the other thing was, if it’s so hard to work with, they must of wanted it for a reason that wasn’t a material property. And that reminded me. When I had to do all that scanning last year – that book on genii locorum – there was something in it about making a projector for protection. Murray’s amulet. 1781. The white flower and the black root. Like in the Odyssey. Like in the Bronze Age.’

        Nightingale, listening, shifts fractionally in his chair, and then taps his first knuckle against his lips; under the bright light several shadows cross over him in quick succession. When they have passed he is as still as a photograph. Grant’s eye, perceptibly, is caught by this, before he refocuses forward. Kamara, looking past them all, as perceptibly doesn’t notice.

        ‘So. I went looking for more Murray – dead end – or more Greeks. That got muddled by the Georgians. You know what they’re like. Name your dog Jupiter. Or your slave. Or your hangover cure. All the same to them. But I didn’t find anything real til 1859. William Pymberton. His father died in the Crimean War and he thought he shouldn’t have.’

        ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,’ says Nightingale, on one long, overdue breath out. And then, almost easily, ‘A common sentiment. Proverbial, when I was young.’

        ‘Yeah. Though it was in the siege I think. Typhus. ’55. So there’s William. Like sixteen. No family. Ward of the Folly. And he wants his father’s commander to suffer. Like it’s his job in life to get back at him. So he thinks, what does this remind me of.’

        A flicker of her gaze to Nightingale, and away. ‘You were calling it shrapnel because that’s your reference frame, right,’ she says. ‘And it was his too. Bronze medals made out of bronze cannons. He would have seen what had happened, to the ones who came back. But it’s not modern bronze, like Walid said. It’s bronze like in all those tragedy plays. All that killing and killing because when it was done to yours you have to do it back. Like your whole world makes you do it back. It’s bronze like Apollo’s plague arrows. Like the Furies and the bronze-tipped scourge.’

        The wind, out in the deepening blue evening, is beginning to rise; some cord or thin rail outside the window, holding against it for a moment, raises a long ascending vibration of a hum that destabilises into a rattle, and falls silent. Kamara, smoothing open the pamphlet, is looking down at it, almost through it, down into the wellshaft of time.

        ‘He didn’t do it, in the end. Or Hawkins didn’t think he did. The old Folly librarian. William died in 1864. Don’t know how. But he left all his notes. Don’t know who the commander was – never named – so we don’t know he didn’t. Hawkins thought William couldn’t ever of done it because of how you can’t impose that kind of magic on a living body. Thought he’d just lost it. “Morbid derangement.” But he thought the structure was interesting. So he wrote it all up. 1866.’

        She hands the pamphlet to Nightingale laid open on the hardback cover of her notebook, and he takes both in his hands; turns a page, turns it back. How quiet a room without a single electronic hum. Kamara, in the service of retaining composure, has drawn blood at a hangnail. Then Nightingale looks up and says mildly ‘Well, I hardly think it could be anything else.’

        It’s Grant who exclaims in triumph, Kamara apparently struck dumb. Then an interrupting, fascinated clamour: Grant, leaning over the table and reading, saying, impressed, ‘That is awful. The glass vessel. I would never have got that’; Nightingale saying ‘Incernere – what a strange choice – you can see how young he was’; Kamara saying ‘So there’s a physical object it’s centred in, at the other end.’

        If he got up or called out, they would try to include him; but he feels as if he is at sea, and their voices carried to him on the wind, only reaching him in stray phrases.

        ‘But if that’s only a mirror link, then it’s invertible.’

        ‘It can’t be that sensitive if he used a wax model.’

        ‘Abigail, it was seventy years ago … I’ve outlived even their children.’

        By the next time all three voices pause at once, it is full dark. Grant, looking at his watch, says ‘It’s near to the old Folly supper time – old shift hours, won’t it be, because we’ve got a quorum?’; and Nightingale, just in case you were getting to like him, says at his put-upon haughtiest, ‘Oh yes: barracks hours. Well, we mustn’t disappoint her.’

        Of this meal he remembers almost nothing, save how hard it is to raise his good arm, and his wondering whether his vision is going; the whole Folly is darkish once the sun’s down, but he can barely see his plate. He does remember, later, that it is Grant, looking at his face in the low light, who says casually ‘We don’t need Seawoll for the prototype, do we?’, and Nightingale, whose artifice runs in other channels, who says without looking ‘No. Rest while you can. Be back at nine tomorrow morning.’

        The otherwise deserted Folly is very quiet, with the wind wuthering round it; the city noise muted beyond a level that seems natural, in such a draughty single-glazed old barn. Since there is no one to see him, he sits down to get his breath back after every flight of stairs, at first waiting out the dizziness when he stands again with his right hand gripping the spotless brass of the banister-rail: then, on sudden realisation, jerking his hand away. Then, in some annoyance, putting it back. The Folly’s got enough of the stuff for a bloody brass band: penny wise, pound foolish, to refuse superstitiously to touch the elements leaching into him anyway and thereby break his fucking neck.

        He manages a good soak in the grand old bath (brass taps). Grant’s mentioned a shower, but fuck knows where it is, and he wants the bath anyway; the heat helps as much as anything helps at this juncture, plus he’s never since the age of ten had the luxury of a tub that’s long and deep enough. The sole bottle on the shelf, unmarked green glass with an etched stopper, contains some sort of nice-smelling surfactant, pleasantly bitter: for all he knows, wizard Woolite. He isn’t fussy; it lathers.

        Two more bronze fragments slip out of his arm of their own accord underwater, and fall chiming to the bottom. He balances them on the rim of the bath, and only realises back in his large, sparsely furnished pale-blue room that he has forgot them: a mild solecism like leaving a dropped sock. But by then, the door closed and latched, and all but his hurt arm under the covers, he is beyond even reaching to turn back on the light.

        The wind is still high, and the night still black dark, when he jolts awake: not yelling his bloody head off, at least, this time. At first he thinks he’s going to be sick, since every other time in his life he has woken with such an appalled, overwhelming feeling of wrongness and dread, it has been because he has ingested something that his body has decided rightly to reject. He gets six reflexive steps from the bed and realises that he is not going to receive any such deliverance, and also that he can’t walk. He reels back and lies flat, his vision coming and going, the washes of weakness, abhorrence, almost of evil, reaching him like the waves of a receding tide.

        After a time, he can turn his head a little, and, slow and clumsy, reach to turn the light on: pushing at the switch as awkwardly though the hand belonged to someone else. A while later, he is able to turn enough to see the clock: ten to five. At last, as he had been instructed to do and comfortably thought he’d never have to, he manages to reach up and catch between two numb fingers the long oak-leaf needlepoint bookmark of the bell-pull over the table beside the bed.

        Less than a minute later, the door opens and closes, and Molly, owl-silent and owl-unreadable, dressed exactly as in daytime, stands looking down at him. He says, his voice sounding strange in his own hearing, ‘Molly, sorry to bother you, but I need some help getting up.’

        She looks him over, nods, and goes out. She is back a very short time later with a little square blue-green glass bottle of the kind that once held ink, now holding something that looks like lead shot. She tips a few pieces of this onto her palm and, absolutely without warning, seizes his jaw in her icy hand and deposits them under his tongue. His whole mouth floods at once with an intense burning bitterness; for a horrible, salivating moment he thinks he’ll be sick after all, but she presses one finger against his lips as though enjoining silence, which he takes to mean, don’t lose them. Then she vanishes again.

        He lies seized with the somatic outrage of the pilled cat. After a few minutes, he finds that the full-body nausea has receded a little. Even a little is grace unimaginable. He moves his tongue with trepidation and finds that whatever it was has nearly dissolved. He sits up cautiously and successfully, and is just concluding – not ungratefully – that that must have been the extent of the help, when the door reopens.

        She has a tray with enough equipment to alarm him, especially the half-seen gleam of a long blade; but then, as swiftly and as expressionlessly as before, she whips a hot towel from a dish and whacks it onto his face and holds it on. It is sterilisingly hot; he recoils involuntarily: her grip is inhuman as a ratchet clamp. After a few seconds of animal panic, it dawns on him what she’s about. When, after several repetitions, she lathers the brush and begins to shave him, her hands are exactly as cold as they had been.

        Nothing if not efficient: inside of five minutes she goes over his face with another hot towel, then one cold as snow. He is about to thank her – he’d already resigned himself, least of his worries, to going through the day as an unshaven slummock – when she starts unbuttoning his pyjama shirt. ‘Oi!’ he says, though not with his usual brio: and he would swear, though his angle of observation is nonoptimal, that she rolls her eyes.

        It might, he thinks when she’s got the shirt off, be worse: not as many new pieces as he had been braced for, nor as large, though the ones near his wrist, all sizes, have gathered and shifted round the base of his hand to encircle it in a ring. This he finds, with a giddy touch of black comedy, quite reassuring as an explanation for the painful tingling in his fingers: nothing to worry about, mate, just a bit of handcuff neuropathy. He begins to reach up with the other hand to investigate what feels like a progression onto his shoulder and back, and is forestalled. Molly looks over his body the way she must look at the board in the middlegame, and with the knuckle of one implacable finger turns his face away.

        He tries not to tense, though he has guessed what must be coming: she pulls out seven strategic pieces in quick succession, the chill press of her fingers welcome among all the hot places of pain. He expects to hear a chinking as they are dropped on the tray, and doesn’t; struck with a truly unspeakable suspicion, he elects to believe that she has put them in her apron pocket. She has turned back to the tray and is pouring TCP from a venerable bottle onto some cotton wool; seven little stars and flares of stinging, superficial pain where she presses it, where a few deeper and sharper pains have eased.

        He raises his left arm, stretches it, for the first time in days: his pierced flesh protests, but the ache in the shoulder is better for it. Molly brings him a proper shirt and buttons him into it; then shakes out what might be a bleached-clean, worn-soft tablecloth, and lifts and ties his arm into a sling. Astonishing what a difference it makes not to have to consciously hold it steady all the time. He thinks, she’s had practice at that: in the Blitz? ‘Molly, that’s bloody brilliant,’ he says, turning to her in relief: but she has vanished again with the tray, leaving the door to the dark hall open behind her.

        Without the animating, suspenseful distraction of her presence, it is harder to keep moving. In the bathroom down the hall he washes his face and rinses his eyes, intermittently blurry; in the mirror the whites look faintly yellowed, though the light, from some minimal incandescents of two-digit wattage, is yellow itself, all the shadows dark-blue.

        He brushes his teeth gingerly; he has a suspicion they’re loose. His tongue feels scalded. Worst is the fragility of the surface of his lips; however gentle he is, patting at it, it keeps sloughing and tearing. When he touches his finger to his mouth, it comes away with a faint, spreading thread-blossom of blood. It is this last that frightens him, deep and sick, in a way that no grievous bodily harm inflicted with or without any weapon or instrument ever has; because this or something like it, he has seen once in his life.

        Better to be up. He gets himself the rest of the way dressed with moderate one-handed difficulty and begins working his way downstairs. You could put five bloody lifts in the Folly without interfering in the least with its Grade II-star architectural and historical special interest, in his opinion: miles of it, and half the hallways dead ends.

        Lights on in the breakfast room. Nothing to eat yet, which is as well, but a single long table with two plain old five-litre catering urns like you see in any canteen, with placards indicating ‘Coffee’ and ‘Hot water’ in a distinctly nineteenth-century hand, and a row of three silver kettles and tea-urns of varying degrees of ornament on stands over spirit-lamps, burning unattended.

        The only thing he can imagine wanting is the cool astringency of plain black tea gone cold. He takes a cup and saucer from the mismatched set and pours a sample from the first kettle: looks about right. He fills the cup and settles into the nearer of the two deep, wide window-seats, upholstered thinly in sun-faded velvet which must have been crimson once. The burnished wood of the sill is wide enough to set the saucer down, and let the chill of the window draw the heat from the cup.

        With the spatters of rain in the wind, and this hallway’s runner carpet, eroded and tenacious as well-trodden moss, he would not have heard footsteps. But he has heard a cough in the hall that he recognises as Nightingale’s, and turned to watch the door.

        Nightingale comes in moving with a marked stiffness, one hand pressed high on his ribs; but the instant he sees that the room is not empty his whole physicality changes, recalibrates, and he walks in at ease, hands relaxed at his sides. He’s got beautiful posture, almost hostile or rebuking in its beauty, like a dressage rider’s; the kind you get from being plonked down on a correction chair at three years old, and spending the rest of your life in uniform. He goes straight for the middle teapot with a blue willow-ware handle, and pours himself a cup. Then he comes to the central window-seat and with only a trace of a check in his motions sits down beside him, close enough that their knees nearly touch; as close as two soldiers in the field, he thinks, sharing a cigarette. (Chance’d be a fine thing.)

        Nightingale leans against the upholstered backing, looking out into the lightless distance like himself, and, holding the cup to his lips without drinking, breathes in the steam. He still knows next to nothing of where he was, or what happened to him; Nightingale has enough Never-complain-never-explain in him for six or seven queens of England. They are so close – Nightingale’s bent arm would cast a shadow on his lap if there were light enough – that drifts of the steam reach him too, one of those dark smoky teas, almost savoury. It gives him a chill, the wistfulness this scent evokes in him; as though the faint echo of pleasure he takes in it is all he might ever take again.

        He would not say he is afraid, when so much of him seems only in abeyance, though the rattle of the china when he had set his saucer down suggests otherwise. If he feels anything, towards Nightingale or at all, it is the infinite, drifting, irretrievable pity that fills the chasm between the living and the dead. If we had trusted each other. If I had understood you better, earlier. If …

        As though he is dead and gone, and what sits here his own spectre. But how the body wants to live: wants it more than absolution, more than honour, more than love. His hands are trembling still. The room darkens and lightens, blurs and sharpens. He can hear Nightingale breathing beside him, a commonplace blocked-nose whistling, and something deeper and harsher; but for all that each breath calmer, more even, than his own.

        He gathers his nerve at last, and says ‘Thomas? I’m sorry. But I think you need to work quickly.’

        Nightingale meets his eye at once and, making a quick apologetic gesture about his throat, says in a strained low voice, ‘I know.’ Impossible to guess his age from his face as it is now, in this light or perhaps any other. Nightingale drinks from his cup, his eyes closing briefly, and forces his voice on, intent and painful. ‘I know. But keep your chin up. We’re very close. We reached a working armature last night. This time tomorrow it will all be over.’

        Which, of course, you could take two ways. Not because he is reassured, but because he appreciates not being given reassurance that exceeds plausibility, he looks into Nightingale’s face and nods, trying to transmit through this uncertain frequency: I trust you to do all you can. He thinks, from the way Nightingale is looking back at him, that if he doesn’t make it, he will not be the first, or the fifth, or the tenth such death that this man has seen. For an instant, divorced as he would not have believed possible from the question of his own survival, he is touched by an unexpected access of compassion: how long the watching and how often the outliving; in this gaze how many graves. It is Nightingale who glances away first.

        A moment later, looking into the black window, he can hear Nightingale sniff sharply and part his lips to speak, but after a long pause he only coughs once and says in a whisper, ‘If you find you can’t eat, put a pinch of salt in your tea … keeps you going for longer.’

        He wonders what it was that Nightingale had begun to say, and thought better of. He himself cancels several rejoinders, sardonic and sincere. The muddy London sky has begun to sanctify with a deep, as yet impenetrable indigo blue: the plane-trees, still black, are lashing in the wind against it. He doesn’t think he closes his eyes, or ceases to hear the steady rasp of the breathing beside him; but when he next looks up, Nightingale has gone.

Chapter Text

        After a long shift-worker’s rest in the largest armchair in the dust-sheeted small salon next door, leaning back with his eyes half closed as the sky lightens and stills, he rises just before eight feeling marginally better. He splashes his face and makes himself presentable in one of the washrooms – he had not registered, earlier, into what drunken calf-licks last night’s damp hair had dried – and goes to see what’s for breakfast.

        Ghost or not, he’s got to get something the fuck inside him. He is used to eating steadily all through the day: his impregnable control-tower of fat and muscle, his unceasing greedy intelligence with its deep arrays of working memory, his perpetual forward momentum and his legendary speed on the bleep test; he’s like a bloody steam train, the stoking is not optional. Thomas Pinch-of-salt Nightingale belongs to some other species, evidently some kind of reptile, or one of those freakish creatures of the abyssal ocean.

        Difficult, slow, but not impossible. He feels an aversion to meat he’s never felt in his life; could walk out t’morgue and into the carvery, usually. Melon and berries, bizarrely, ditto. Better luck with a corner of cold toast, then with the basket of scones. Molly’s scones are so light you could comfortably eat them if you had not a tooth left to you: she’s got the kind of hand with pastry you can only have when you’ve got Freon in your veins.

        He gets through a good few of these, broken off piece by piece, plain at first, then with jam. There’s a whole bloody jam rack on the table like a stall at a market, the white ceramic jars paste-labelled in the spidery, slanting copperplate that he realises must be hers. Maybe she’d answer a letter, if she got one. Hold that thought. He finds he is craving acid, edge; he could eat the bilberry jam, the rhubarb-and-ginger, with a spoon.

        Grant comes in as he’s finishing what’s on his plate, says hello, and they leave each other to it. He can manage warm tea, now, though it still has to be black and rather weak. What he wants most is water with ice in it – which, though he hasn’t said a word, after five minutes of longing Molly brings him: an entire clinking, rattling, frost-clouded tall crystal pitcher and a highball glass with a saucer of wafer-thin lemon slices. He thinks suddenly that, like Nightingale, she’s seen someone in his condition before; seen how it goes.

        He says, as he should have said upstairs, ‘Molly. Thank you. None of us would be managing without you.’

        Grant says, after a pause for swallowing, ‘This is true. Like last night. You didn’t need to do all this, with the rest that we’re asking of you.’

        She looks at both of them almost coolly; then inclines her head and goes out. He says to Grant, ‘The rest that we’re asking?’

        ‘You’ll see. Easier to show you. Have you seen Nightingale?’

        Having finished the pitcher, he is now eating the slices of lemon, although they sting his lips and Grant is looking at him oddly, with an almost desperate avidity: it feels like he’s got fucking scurvy. ‘Earlier. Show me.’ He licks his chops for more lemon and gets only blood.

        The laboratory, since he last saw it, has taken on that irreproducible disorder generated by several people working on some problem of theory: mugs abandoned in odd places, sheets of paper taped to the walls, chalk-dust tracked about on the floor. Five out of five lights burning now. Someone has dragged two rust-spotted paraffin heaters, in the sage-green spaceship style he hasn’t seen since childhood, in to stand by the table at the back. The room, despite the steady draught from the open window with its rain-wet sill, has a generator-powering smell of coffee and Tozane.

        Nightingale, seated at the window just outside rain-range and inside heater radius, is writing in the same black A4 hardback with the red binding that he had been working in last night. He looks up as their footsteps approach; then, finding the light in his eyes, shades his face.

        That bright, stark second’s glimpse: beside him he can hear Grant draw breath to speak. ‘Hello,’ says Nightingale, hoarse and cordial, into the closing instant of the pause. ‘You’re early. I’ve been thinking about the signalling system.’ He has seen it before, the swiftness with which Nightingale gets up, and crosses to the chalkboard in a few long strides.

        ‘Wasted effort to put in a separate element, when we can’t have real communication. All you need to know is if the line goes dead. We can do that much with a vit on the adligare.’ And then, turning back with precision to meet Grant’s second hesitation and shading his eyes again, Nightingale gestures with the chalk in the other hand towards him in his sling and says forbearingly, forestallingly, ‘We are neither of us at our best, but we’ll do.’

        Grant looks them both over, himself as he had not done before, and says only ‘How can I help?’

        How different two voices can be, fitted round the same question. Grant has the advantages, plainly, of training and faith in the chain of command. Or at least, unlike the girl, the ability to cut his coat according to his cloth. Nightingale’s glance at him is for once uncomplicated.

        ‘Could you look – second storeroom – for the carnelian weights. They’re not in the third. Run through the phosphorus protocol with Abigail again. You’ve got her the vest? If you have time, try the tegumen jointly. Get everything glass out of the room. Thank you.’

        When Grant has gone they both sit down, Nightingale taking up his pen again and tapping it, rereading his own notes. Brighter than this morning’s wet daylight, those filament globes in the ceiling fixtures; Nightingale’s profile clean as a coin’s against the rain-washed city distance, his narrow eye narrowed further against the light, or for other reasons. Having seen what Grant has seen, he would like to say what Grant had said. But he constitutes, at present, the antithesis of help. And he cannot unsay Work quickly, nor would the life in him let him.

        Nightingale looks up suddenly, catching him staring, and says ‘What kind of soles have you got to your shoes?’

        ‘Leather,’ he says, after a pause he regrets. ‘Are we going somewhere?’

        ‘Oh, I thought Peter would have told you. Yes. In a way.’ Nightingale is dressed as he had been at dawn – as though for a country walk, he had thought; an old birdseye gansey over a tattersall shirt, and a rather beautiful Teba jacket in a heavy, heathery dark-green Donegal tweed: the kind of thing he himself could not wear, frankly, without looking like a boulder whose rolling days were behind it.

        He is about to say, where? when they both turn, not at any sound carried over the soft sea-roar of the heaters but at the motion in the peripheral vision: Kamara, holding that notebook – probably sleeps with it – silent and intent. She inclines her head as though to say, go on, don’t mind me, but Nightingale has got to his feet automatically.

        ‘Abigail, hello. A few modifications to our setup. On the board. Could you take anything glass out of the room?’ By now he has guessed what that flickering trick is; not least because sometimes, as now, it fails through impatience, when Nightingale tries to speak too soon after.

        ‘In case of inversion shock,’ the girl supplies with what he gathers is the habitual note of challenge, giving Nightingale absolutely no time to recover. But his glance at her when he turns back, flushed again, is almost grateful.

        ‘Yes. Mind you, I’ve never seen it happen. And if any reaction reaches this room, something will have gone catastrophically wrong. But I’ve seen men blinded and killed by glass alone, when everything else had missed them … I’d rather not take the chance.’

        ‘What about the lightbulbs?’ she says, already kneeling on the dusty floor to retrieve a clinking tray of glassware from an under-counter cabinet.

        ‘Check the base. If there’s an incised sigil, leave it. We used to have those made by a man in Whitechapel – Saltiel – Max Saltiel, think it was. Family of glass magicians. Lost track – after the war. Proof against – everything but being dropped.’

        Nightingale, not increasing in patience, casts about for and drinks down what must be a long-cold cup of coffee as the girl walks over with the tray jammed complainingly on her meagre hip. ‘Give me your watch,’ she says: as though the chain of command went the other way. But Nightingale only inclines his head a touch ironically, and undoes the strap and sets the watch among the glassware on the tray.

        For an odd moment he thinks he can just hear Nightingale’s voice, as though recognising it from another room; but he is distracted by the girl addressing him.

        ‘You got one?’

        ‘Not on me,’ he says, recollected, and she turns and goes out much more audibly than she came in.

        Nightingale, meanwhile, has gone across to a bookcase, withdrawn a book with an indiscriminate lack of hesitation and returned to set it on the table before him, opened similarly to the first natural fall of the pages.

        ‘Like to try something,’ Nightingale says, with a difficulty not resolved by the coffee. ‘Read this passage and try to imagine it in my voice as you would usually hear it. Then close your eyes.’

        Those who consider refraction to occur only in the surfaces which separate transparent bodies of different nature, would find it difficult to give a reason for all that I have just related … He reads it twice through, a degree slower than his slow and thorough usual, once trying to impose on the text Nightingale’s peculiarly dated vowels, once trying to imbue it sentence by sentence with the range of inflections he has heard applied to the voice; brisk, pointedly civil, interested, faintly amused. He finishes with his recollection of the tone Nightingale had used to Grant last night, shaking out his hand; he finds he is, himself, nearly smiling, and resumes a formal expression, closing his eyes.

        Almost at once, he imagines that he has read in Nightingale’s voice:

        The word is northwest.

        It is not exactly hearing or seeing; it’s like, indeed, an ordinal direction, an axis of perception on a diagonal between the senses. He opens his eyes and says cautiously ‘Northwest.’

        He is in time to see Nightingale’s smile, unreserved and transformative in the narrow face made narrower and plainer with strain; in an after-image fading flash like after a photograph he sees it, what has so long eluded him.

        The first few times they had met, he had taken Nightingale for a cult leader on the make: not the first or last man he’d met who wanted to sell a vision of the world as fraught with mystery and terror that only he could control. Even later, when he had grudgingly acknowledged that some of the claims were verifiable, he had never seen the appeal; never seen what holds Grant, had drawn May, has persuaded so many. But for an instant there it had caught him: not as a personal or physical attraction but as an acute pang of exhilaration, a spark-striking of curiosity, a desire to be in on the game.

        First try, says Nightingale, still looking at him, and something in the gaze sharpening, searching. That is remarkable.

        ‘Oh, well done,’ says Grant, whom he had not noticed return with a battered, heavy-looking cardboard box in his arms. ‘D’you know, he had to read to me aloud before I got it? About six times. Took hours.’

        For an instant’s delusion he is susceptible to this too, the idea of a natural talent: never been good on the first try at anything in his life, from parallel parking to taking fingerprints to writing his own fucking name. His has been a life of extreme proficiency achieved by force of sheer bloody-mindedness. But then with a shock he realises what must have opened this channel in him: a thought he is disastrously unpracticed at not having, because what would ever have reminded him, in ordinary life?

        But you don’t get where he’s got by letting yourself remember in public. He fixes upon Grant an expression of panto-villain caginess and says, generously confirming a long-held rumour, ‘Four years in surveillance. Sort through all those fucking mumblers, you get ears like a bat’s.’ Which is true, as everyone who’s ever worked with him knows to their cost. ‘Could you teach anyone to do that?’

        ‘N—o. Not without all the rest of it. I can’t even do it yet. Not for years.’

        ‘Only eighth-order. If you still want it. Hardly worth the trouble,’ says Nightingale aloud, and winces; must sound worse to him too, for having just heard his own accustomed voice sent crisp and clear. He has turned abruptly towards the window as though to cough again; but he is only silent for a moment before continuing, with slight but uncharacteristic discourtesy, still turned away. Many can never hear it at all. Practitioners as much as anyone – even the best – like colour-blindness. And the range is short; and you can’t be selective, among those who can hear. And the hearer’s got to know the language from childhood, or it doesn’t – process, it’s not intelligible. It’s a boy’s trick, ultimately. Trifling. It was useless when we needed it.

        ‘Do French,’ says Grant, with a sudden, calculated lightness. A boy’s trick: hear the shadow, turn up the sunshine. You can see where he learned it, even now. God help those with fathers. God help those without. Nightingale’s sharp breath out as he turns back is just this side of laughter; the long crooked line of his mouth changes, braces, changes wryly again. Then what washes across them is an echoing, wavering half-heard patterning like nothing so much as the bad old days of Manchester Piccadilly platform announcements: like underwater Welsh.

        ‘See,’ says Grant beatifically. ‘It’s just like in Charlie Brown.’

        It’s a localised hallucination, says Nightingale. It’s not a radio channel. Not, I hasten to assure you, two-way. A note of amusement in the transmitted voice, though his face is neutral again; consciously finished with remembering in public. There’s no magic in the world that I know of that you could call true mind-reading. Ubiquitous attempts. Endless frauds. But no genuine successes.

        ‘You want to watch out for that. Lots of – Falcon-adjacent people,’ says Grant, glancing up from his rummaging about in the box, ‘will try to make you think they can read your mind. And they can be quite convincing. But that’s only because, situationally, a lot of desires are easy to guess.’

        ‘Ah, the voice of experience!’ he says in tones of fulsome sympathy, and Nightingale, always guarded but evidently not against low comedy, has to turn away and cough into the crook of his arm for about a minute.

        ‘Could someone tell me,’ he says, when Nightingale has had a moment to get over it, ‘what the plan is here.’

        Nightingale, still getting over it, is looking at his notebook again. Peter?

        Grant, screwing together what looks like two sections of brass curtain-pole, pauses mid-squeak. He glances to the chalkboard and back again, and says ‘Well. Someone planted a transmitter on you, right. That’s what’s attracting the bronze. And it’s also broadcasting something – psychologically destructive. Like infrasound. What makes it difficult is that you can’t remove it by removing the bronze. If we’re right, what the transmitter is attached to is all the atoms of copper in your body. Tin where there is any. There’s no way to get those out.’

        ‘Sounds promising,’ he says. Kamara, who has come back in silently to extract an enormous alembic with a spout you could break by looking at it, gives the world's faintest huff of a laugh as she lifts it and goes out again. ‘Go on.’

        ‘Well. It’s transmitting, right? But it must also be receiving. Constantly, or the – the anti-magic of your body would just clear it, wash it out. Something must be maintaining it. And we know how the link is done. There’s some kind of physical object out there that’s sending the transmitter the signal to do its harm.’

        ‘And you know where that is?’

        ‘Not in the sense of an address on a map. It’s some kind of small glass object, we think – like a bottle or a vase – could be anywhere. But in the sense of being able to follow the chain of magic back to it, yes. We don’t need to know where it is in a literal way. Just to be able to reach it in a way where we can – alter it, defuse it. Turn it off. Or destroy it. Though we don’t know what would happen if it was suddenly destroyed. Nightingale may be able to just disable it, so that it stops affecting you.’

        ‘Reach it how?’ he says, with the calmness in his voice that by now enters as a reflex, when his patience is tried.

        ‘Molly,’ says Nightingale, surprising them both. It is your great good fortune to have Molly on our side. One of her gifts, to instantiate a place between worlds. That is where we’re going.

        ‘To work back along the chain to the glass transmitter,’ he says, testing, and receives an intent, fractional nod. ‘How does she know where to – set the coordinates?’

        She’ll need some of your blood, I’m afraid, says Nightingale. And mine. But with the protocol we’re using, half a pint each should suffice.

        ‘And you’re not afraid of needles,’ puts in Grant; modestly, almost demurely.

        He sees he will never live it down. But what a cheering thought, never living it down: being chaffed about something for years and years and years; having everybody wind you up about it, over and over, for the term of your natural life.

        He catches Grant’s eye and says, smiling only a little ominously, ‘No.’

        Two of five lights burning, a quarter past ten. Heaters shut off and taken out of the room. Everything moveable moved to the edges or evicted, save the supplies on the bolted-down table. Internal shutters of lacquered canvas secured over the glass of the window, casting the laboratory into sepia gloom with islets of brightness. With the window shut and locked the smell of the laboratory is stronger and stranger: Tozane, shellac, wax, chalk, blood.

        In the clearest space at the centre, the two brass poles that Grant had been assembling are now standing on extravagantly clawed feet, like baroque hatstands, about a metre apart, two metres high. At the top of each pole there is a kind of hook, a partially closed circle, into which what looks like a thin dark rope has been fitted: this forms a lintel between the two, pulled level by two large weights of veined and polished red stone, elaborately lathe-turned like finials and of murder-weapon heft, precisely aligned on either side.

        Molly, looking severe and apprehensive in her black wool dress without the white lace collar and apron, her hair uncovered and tightly plaited, is sitting bolt upright in a tall, high-backed chair beside the poles. In one hand she holds a silver cup engraved with acanthus leaves, the gilded inside of which contains a small measure of his blood, diluted 1:12 (%w/w) from a jug of Halfords Battery Top-Up deionised water.

        His alone: this round is a test. Molly, says Nightingale, whenever you’re ready.

        Molly sniffs at the cup and grimaces, like it’s a downmarket wine. (Brash notes of fry-up cholesterol; missing that unctuous roundness of vitamin D.) Then she reaches across and flicks a drop of the solution onto each weight, and pulls the nearer one onto her lap, holding it steady with one hand; the other weight rising and swaying as the available line shortens, tautening between the hooks. Over the silver rim her gaze at him flickers, inimical, until she tilts the cup to extinguish it.

        At once the rectangle of vertical plane between the poles, the line, and the floor floods and saturates with concentrated shadow. For an instant he thinks he can hear it, the lingering way you could hear an old television when you switched it off, and the bulged lens of its eerie eye remained, though dimming, fixed upon you. Then the shadow oscillates and suddenly flattens, two-dimensional, and if it had been transparent, it is not now. It is not a darkness so much as it is an absence, a missing value beyond the human eye’s capacity to interpret. It is a shape cut out from the gaudy surface of the world to reveal the final, eternal emptiness, as unmoving, as indifferently crushing as the deepest water, that you had always suspected lay beneath.

        At least it isn’t only him; Grant is trembling like a rabbit. Peter, says Nightingale, not unkindly, first tests?

        ‘Sorry,’ says Grant with a surfacing gasp, ‘sometimes I get these attacks of common sense. Yes. Just a second.’ As matter-of-factly as though tying his shoes, he draws his wrist across each eye. ‘Yeah. I’m good.’

        First an ordinary battery torch, then a light he calls up in his hand, neither of which make any intrusion, or reflection, into or onto the shadow. Then a taper candle as fantastically long and twisted as a narwhal’s horn, lit and held at an angle that makes drops of the wax run off and fall to the floor, which when brought to the sheet of the shadow’s surface vanishes into it as though extinguished, cut off: but when Grant steps back again to withdraw it the flame reappears at the end of the original length, wavering and streaming and smoking as though it hadn’t liked it either, but steadying again, a pace further back, in his steadied hold.

        ‘Is that what happens if it’s not your blood,’ says the girl with the conquering fervour of another century, ready to sail off the edge of the mappa mundi, and Nightingale, unbelievably, says Put your hand in.

        Some initial paddling about: he can barely watch, expecting a degloving. A lot of back-and-forth with the torch and with a walnut-sized conjured light, which she dims to low intensity and submerges as Grant had done with the candle, and then brings back blazing, briefly blinding, before she causes it to vanish with a gesture like pinching out a flame. Then – he hears Grant draw breath again – she drops down onto her knees with the ruthlessness of someone who’s only had knees for fifteen years, and thrusts her arm through. With her other palm braced on the laboratory floor, she leans at an angle out round the shadow, craning to see behind it.

        ‘There’s a coterminous floor,’ she says, from what must be a remarkably uncomfortable position, and Nightingale says, ‘I should hope so’; and then, not wholly in reproach but not as a suggestion either, Abigail? Spirit of the law.

        This plainly being a familiar phrase, she scrambles back and gets to her feet, and goes to lather her smudged hands at one of the porcelain sinks, flicking the rinse-water away from them fretfully: unmarked, unhurt, thank God. ‘And the candle-wax. What fell the other side. So that didn’t reset or anything, between Peter and me. So it’s just the light that’s being cancelled out – like trying to photograph a werelight, how sometimes they go dark – like for every single real photon there’s one magic one, exactly out of phase in all the muddle. Maybe. But then my werelight should’ve showed. Unless it’s some third kind of light. No. But – ’

        Nightingale, equally plainly used to interposing into the smallest possible pauses for thought, says: On this score, as you know, I plead ignorance. But I don’t think it’s only the light. I think the floor on the other side is borrowed, so to speak, from this one, or necessitated by it. One of Peter’s boundary conditions. (Grant looks touchingly, unjustly surprised, as one whose experience is that everything he ever says to anybody goes out the other ear.) I think you would run out of floor fairly quickly, if yours were not the sustaining blood. But that is not a hypothesis we’re going to test.

        Kamara does not appear to register this, except to hesitate for a second, and then turn from Nightingale towards himself. ‘You try it,’ she says, looking up sharply: into his broad, pale face, a foot and a half above her own. Then, as the peremptory tone of her own voice arrives with a visible delay in her ears, he catches a glimpse of angry nervousness as to how he’ll take it, though she will not let herself look away. ‘I think – if you reach in – it’ll look bright. Like, brighter than it should be.’

        It had been hard enough for him, dealt another hand in another time, to be fifteen. He says, as gently as he can without making a point of it, ‘Better find out. Thomas? I assume nothing’s going to grab me and drag me in?’

        I don’t think so. Nightingale clears his throat and says, to no one in particular, ‘But don’t rush.’

        He switches on the battery torch from the table where Grant had left it, and, giving the game away, dust motes appear within the shadow as he approaches. A faint floor of close-set tiles, like a parish church or an old post office. A few spatters of wax on the floor, and some small finger-marks disturbing its dust. A faint abandoned smell like a house-loft, dry wood, ancient rock wool, cold ashes. And a quiet that is not the quiet of the laboratory. Nothing further, not that the beam of the light can reach. He wedges the torch in his jacket pocket, draws on all the self-command available to him, and reaches out with a successful appearance of unconcern to break a vertical surface-tension like still water.

        Nothing: save, as he extends his fingers cautiously into it, an accumulation of brightness about his hand like a follow-spot, and a distant high humming which increases in pitch as he advances. It has become almost impossible again to raise his good arm, but he grits his teeth and forces it as far up as he can, palm raised as though he can ward off whatever is waiting: and at last withdraws, blinking with the brilliant, patterned after-image of the light that had settled, shimmering like a cloud of insects, round his hand and wrist.

        ‘Close it,’ says Nightingale, and Molly reaches up and unhooks the rope and the void is gone: erased as completely as an ordinary shadow is erased by bright light. There is nothing but the brass poles, and the dark waxed rope falling slack as a killed snake, and the polished stone weights, one swaying, one held still in her lap. It is a shock to see it, what a scant handful of actual material had supported that other world; like when the spell of the theatre is broken and the stage is revealed, as bare, as unconvincing, as it must always have been. Or like watching the glimmering pool of a mirage draw near your train window, watching it vanish: and then being told, next one, mate, you jump into.

        The girl unhooks the rope of her stare from him, reattaches it elsewhere, and says to Nightingale, ‘So put me in.’

        The silence that follows this is absolute.

        She says, ‘You’re always saying. The danger is it closing, and the real world losing its hold on you. And nobody being able to find you again. If you put some of my blood in and stationed me just inside, you’d have a proper line of communication. The vit isn’t going to tell us anything, not when you said yourself the echo wouldn’t, not unless it was too late. Wouldn’t have to be far in. Peter could do the blood table. We don’t need the rest kept standing unless we don’t have any warning. You could run a thomix through me, like Hatherell in the cave. Set a line on one of the reservoirs and keep a tegumen going with it. And a delay catch, so we’d know if we had to call you back. If anything happened Peter could just follow the trace. It would keep the connection open, too, even if something went really wrong and Molly ran out of your blood.’

        Nightingale says at last, with a quietness he himself would not cross, ‘No.’

        ‘It would work though, wouldn’t it,’ says the girl, who must have heard it also, but who appears unable to stop. ‘And you’d be safer. Two-way communication. And propping the door.’

        ‘Might. Not sure. Doesn’t matter.’ Nightingale’s voice, past conserving, is beginning to be past forcing, but he changes modes without pausing, watching the girl’s face. The note in the voice that holds his own attention is not one of command.

        You are not coming in under any circumstances. As I said last night. I’m not at all certain what we’re going to find beyond the region under Molly’s control. It’s an inherently unstable suspension … a tenuous extrapolation of a device meant to kill. A moment’s contact to give you a sense of a haemomantic threshold is one thing. But I would never bring anyone inside a construct like this if I had the option to spare them. You’re already closer than I can in conscience allow. A decision of exigency. If any malignancy comes through this opening, you will be directly in its path. That risk would never have been taken with an apprentice in my day. I cannot allow you further.

        ‘Right,’ says the girl, with an edge so fine it is nearly imperceptible. ‘I just look things up, that’s all I’ve ever done. Make notes.’

        Grant says, not without compassion, though with a distinctly familial impatience, ‘Abi, I’m not going in.’

        But it is Nightingale she is looking at, and Nightingale who leaves off leaning on the table to walk to within a metre of her and bend slightly, stiffly, at the knee, to put their faces on the level; and to say – almost in supplication – something very hoarsely in what sounds like German. It is plain that she recognises it at once, from how she turns away; but after a beat she glances back to him, bows her head, and makes a quiet, formal, brief reply.

        He glances to Grant, copper to copper: what the fuck. Grant looks back: search me, mate.

        What strikes him is the absence, in the look between them, of the usual first suspicion. A thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girl receiving private lessons in the home of a man who, with a gesture, annihilates camera footage: who creates, easy as breathing, localised hallucinations. A man who has always believed that the law reshapes itself around him. It’s fucking always men doing it to young girls, innit, turn over any rock and you find it, except when it’s men doing it to boys. He has the true policeman’s nasty suspicious mind: born with it, like greatness. Grant too; thrust upon him. And yet in the instant before he looks away he feels a shared certainty that whatever they had seen, however concealed, entangled, unhappy, has nothing to do with sex.

        Grant, as usual, who takes pity on everybody, and finds something to knock over with a clatter, shameless as a cat on a counter: Nightingale, Kamara, and Molly all staring bleakly into worlds of their own. ‘Half an hour?’ says Grant optimistically, as though reviving in the absence of the shadow, probably also actually reviving in the absence of the shadow. ‘Breath of air, cup of tea, and everybody at their stations.’ Not for the first time he thinks, it’s a pity: the kind of skipper Grant would make, and these empty halls.

        Forty minutes later, everybody at their stations. Molly back in her chair, still sitting straight-backed as someone who has spent their life in uniform; which, of course, she has. Grant at one of the long counters with the sinks, leaning uneasily over some protective equipment and some killing equipment, in case the line goes dead. Kamara shifting foot to foot at another, with a complicated array of ceramic and silver cups before her, a twenty-litre aspirator tank of deionised water with a stopcock, an old brass weighing scale with the glass taken out of the dial, a box of latex gloves and a pipette; and a faded picnic cooler, about as old as he is, filled with crushed ice and three graduated polycarbonate bottles with big blue screw-top caps, labelled in permanent marker AS – TN – PG, and filled with blood.

        A pint each, in the end, to allow the maximum margin for complications: about twenty-four joint hours, all told. Half a pint from Grant. The girl has got eight dense pages in her book of hand-written charts of continually varying dosing and mixing and dilution ratios, which are some complicated optimising function of solar angles. Nightingale had checked it all by hand in the library, which had taken twenty of the minutes. Grant had looked the pages over, whistled, and said ‘When Molly and I did this, she just bit me’, which is the sort of joke Grant makes under stress.

        Nightingale leaning on the bolted-down table again, the promised cup of tea before him, and the Folly library annual monograph of 1866 laid atop his notebook. He has not opened either one, or touched the cup; his breathing, still harshly audible, is remote and slow as a diver’s.

        And himself, sitting on a counter with his aching arm in his sling; he can feel his every heartbeat in it, and in the roots of his teeth, which he’d like to keep. Ready as he’ll ever be. He has contemplated, a bit late, his sins. He has thought about the people he’s loved, and the people he’s wronged, which have a lot of overlap, and the people he’s failed, which are more varied. He has let himself think more than he is accustomed to allowing himself to think about Lesley May.

        She is the obvious suspect, as they had discussed last night: a period of unlimited access to the Folly libraries, knowledge exceeding any held in the Folly of ways to use magic to modify the human body. Reason enough to feel that both or either had done her harm. Motive, means, opportunity; ‘but it doesn’t feel like her,’ Grant had said, his hand jittering about on his knee like an undercover over-doing their character's nervous tic. ‘If she wanted you dead, she’d tap you on the shoulder and shoot you in the face. On Oxford Street for preference. This just isn’t her style.’

        Likelier, of course, that they will meet no one, and not even Nightingale has been able to extract enough evidence at any stage to make the most tentative identification. But he had thought, the last time that he had spoken with May alone, that they had understood each other; and if he was wrong, he’d like to see her again.

        11:11: get up, wish for luck. Nightingale goes first, light and easy on his feet with what he must not mind letting show is adrenaline; coming out of his trance into a fey, darting brightness in the eye, a high, marked flush over the cheeks and nose. Waiting’s the worst part, he had said, always was. He pauses on the threshold without interest in farewells to anyone but Molly: Molly, seated like a queen with a chalice of his blood.

        In the low light it is just visible, the shock that goes through her when he reaches out to touch her cheek: like the shock of still water touched by a leaf. In anything less than this enclosed quiet you would not hear it, Nightingale’s voice as it is now, speaking to her and to her alone.

        ‘Hold fast.’

        For an instant the lines of her mouth, her eyes, compress in anguish; then she sets her jaw, meets his eye and nods. What silent answer she receives, no one else in the room can see; only that when he has stepped aside and vanished though the shadow, each of them, from her face, look away.

        When he glances back to her again, her dark-eyed gaze has the coolness of blue flame. With the plain dress, the plaited hair, she might be any woman from any time in the last few centuries, a spirit in a mirror or a stranger in a painting: striking though not beautiful, depicted without ornament; her look, arresting the viewer, is the whole of her. She would not move if the walls collapsed around her: not if you built a pyre thick with pitch about her, and knelt to set a light.

        His to live up to. He steps forward, against all instinct. The shadow seems to shimmer as heat shimmers, though if anything radiates from the surface, it is a chill. He feels an impulse to close his eyes, hold his breath, as though plunging into water. From this darkness before him, total, unstable, potentially final, every living cell in him flinches away.

        What had led him through that first door? Courage, anger, curiosity; fear of missing something that he should have set to rights. Are they not, man, in you yet. Damned if he’s going to go in cringing. He steps back, sizes up the opening; resettles his weight, squares his good shoulder towards it, breathes in and bulls through.

Chapter Text

        He nearly barrels into Nightingale; then, the floor slick with dust, nearly falls. He lurches and slows and steadies, his good arm flung out, and turns to see nothing but a bare wall where the door had been. He glances to Nightingale in inquiry, taking in the rest of the space as he does: smaller – about the size of the laboratory – and lighter than he had thought it from the other side, when it had seemed like a warehouse at night. Something like a large workshop now, sawdusty, unlit and windowless, with machinery under sacking, mechanical table-stations, shelves of boxes and tools, everything looking years untouched. It is colder, too, than it had been: an open door at an uninformative angle at the far end, large enough for a car or for a horse and carriage, admits a blueish reflected daylight.

        Safer for those on the other side not to leave it open, says Nightingale, and less of a strain on Molly. It’s not fixed to a single location. We can open it again whenever we like. And then, reading or recognising what must be a rather mixed expression, First rule: don’t get separated.

        He has a sudden giddy impulse to laugh, which by reflex he quashes. Autocratic tosser. He feels benignly charmed. He feels nice and warm all over. He feels as though he has just remembered that everything is going to be all right, which is a feeling he’s never had in his life; a distant, inchoate suspicion begins to gather and shadow him. Unwillingly he senses his own cynical good judgement whuffling and louring and thudding about outside his lovely new assurance like a great big bloody interfering bear. For an instant, cosily, crossly, he resists. Then the bugger’s got in, and is himself again.

        He says at his levellest, looking hard at Nightingale, ‘My arm doesn’t hurt.’

        Nightingale, to his alarm, smiles at him. Nightingale is not a handsome man. He hasn’t the heft or ornament for it – the face too crooked and sparse for more than character; you could draw it in five dashes and one vertical bar. The smile is awful: he looks a wreck. And yet as before, and this time worse, with his own guard down – held down as though mechanically depressed – it catches at him, moves him, with a pang of longing like a promised reversal of loss.

        Not the face for itself, not for any but the barest grace in feature or gesture, but as a window, a conduit for vanished ideals, for the grand life of adventure one imagines in childhood: passionate conviction, comradeship, honour; the shining vision that one supposes universally dimmed and snuffed with maturity. How few, in a life, those whose faces and gazes recall it in glances, gleams, flashes from facets, for even an instant. And how once having seen it one is caught, willing or resisting, by the desire to keep watching. If it were only a cult the man were after, he thinks – self-administering, medicinally, a measure of irony – he could fill Wembley.

        Yes, Nightingale is saying, still looking upsettingly pleased. De cardine beneficence. Or range drunkenness. As you like. You’re right to be wary of it. Anaesthetic. Impairs judgement. Inspires over-confidence. So don’t rush off and do anything valorous. Though it’s a good sign. In its way. Only happens if the concatenation inversion has fully completed – if we’ve joined it up correctly. Wears off as you get nearer. Worse from the halfway mark. Like the children’s game, you know, hot and cold.

        Belatedly he realises that Nightingale, too, must be affected: hence, of course, that unguarded smile, and the light pattering tone now. He says, administering another dose, ‘Right. Rule the second. Remember you’re rat-arsed. Adjust accordingly. What are the rest?’

        Don’t let your consciousness become separated from your body, says Nightingale, as casually as though issuing a reminder to wash up the mug you used before you go off-shift; not that he supposes Nightingale’s ever washed up a mug in his life. He is about to laugh and say, fuck, mate, any pointers? when Nightingale, who has glanced towards the open door, looks abruptly back.

        Something in that cool gaze spooks him, strikes a chime of fear ringing through him, as it had the first night. He can no longer believe, if he ever did, that this man intends him harm. But now and again Nightingale glances out from a world alien to common humanity, which every human language recalls from the cradle, and in its oldest stories warns its children not to touch. The other side of the shining coin, where the wreathed relief is the skull. The window, the conduit, that it would be safer not to open. But willing or resisting he has cast his lot to follow, and whatever either of their reservations, cannot turn back now.

        You recall the text of the invocation?

        ‘“Those you commanded on the field of battle”. Yes. If that’s what you mean.’

        Yes, says Nightingale, with a levelness in his gaze that might almost be pity. Above all, remember that nothing here is real, no more than your dreams were real. The projector is an attempt to drive a wedge into one’s conscience. The advantage we have is knowing how it was made … fundamentally insular in its construction, like a ship in a bottle. All it can do is generate loci of illusion from memory and imagination. Whomever, whatever you see, it will not have sentience – not even the cruelly limited sentience of the true ghost. Remember that the dead you see here are past harm, past help … past reaching at all.

        He has, as usual, a question. But he is distracted by the contrast between the slowed, thoughtful voice and how deeply, almost hungrily, Nightingale is breathing, a little too fast: he had not realised until now how restricted it must have been, on the other side. Almost the elation of some drug, to look at him; like the benzedrine they’d used to give to pilots: or like the fenethylline he’s been trained to recognise, these last years, in the face in the crowd. But even as he watches Nightingale shivers once and straightens his shoulders, and tightens his eyes and mouth: which relax, after an instant, into a slight, self-conscious, almost self-mocking smile.

        Best not linger this end. Onwards.

        On the bright, cold threshold, as they come to it close together, Nightingale raises his arm to stay him. What do you see?

        Nowhere that he’s ever been: a smallish clearing in a forest among hills. Morning light after what must have been a night of snow, which lies at variable depth upon some debris he can parse at once – the unspooled shape of a burst tyre – and some that it takes him a slow, surreal second to recognise as past harm, past help. Not more than he has seen in total, in twenty-seven years on the job; but more than he has ever seen at once.

        He takes a deep breath, and thinks, though the ground looks frozen hard, he knows how he knew. He says, ‘A forest. Bodies. Snow. New snow. Can’t tell how old the bodies are. Quiet. Nobody alive. Some kind of vehicle tracks, I think. There at the edge.’

        Yes. I see the same. I suspect – this is one of mine. So to speak. I’ve never seen this place. But I think I know where it is.

        Nightingale walks forward, the snow compressing crisply under his feet like snow anywhere, turns an assessing few degrees and from his jacket withdraws an object he does not recognise til the blade, six inches if it’s a millimetre, is drawn out and locked. He has never seen a handle like that on a working knife: more like one of those hyper-specialised accoutrements of the Victorian table, or like one of those ornamental suits of armour that emperors used to regift each other just to be bloody show-offs.

        Not like your common or garden flicky, the way Nightingale aims the blade; more like a radio aerial tuned to something on the horizontal. For a moment he is as still as the stillness of the forest; then as though listening he moves again. The deceptive gentleness of the wading bird, lifting one foot and steadying, settling, setting its sights down the weapon of itself where in the sifted, stilled water it has seen a flicker. Nightingale clears his throat and says, low and calm, ‘Johannes?’

        Every form that he had recognised, and some that he had not, gives a unified galvanic twitch. A chill runs down his back like a rat.

        ‘Johannes,’ says Nightingale, still calmly, and begins to bend down as something rises up from the snow to meet him.

        Not the snake-striking speed of a jumpscare film, but the slow inevitability of the accident that seems, for those long few seconds that one watches, to be still, still, to the last, evitable. It is plainly not to hurt him, that the figure clutches at Nightingale, catches him, but as though he can help. What is left of the face is young. The voice, too, choked and cracking, running on without ceasing in a language he doesn’t know but in a tone that carries the meaning, pleading, accusatory, half-desperate, half-extinguished. Nightingale, pulled down by the body’s frantic hands onto one knee, reaches by reflex to support its shoulder and take some of its weight: and its arm and shoulder come apart, not like a living body or like one dead, but like a mass of cobweb tearing, or grey erasing putty stretched to softness. The voice has screamed and dropped and is still speaking.

        Nightingale says something brief that he can’t make out, and leans forward over the body with the knife: use it, he thinks, for God’s sake use it, but instead of drawing back for a blow Nightingale is gesturing with both hands and the thin sunlight glinting from the blade – every glint hanging in tracery, fixed where it had first shone in a pattern like a net –

        The ground heaves as it does in an explosion, and by protocol and by instinct he steps out from under the workshop roof to get open sky above him. For a moment he thinks he has lost his hearing; his sight had gone for an instant at the threshold, from the pain that the shock had struck in his chest. Then the wind, gentle, idle, washes through and clears the static from his vision as though blowing sand from the face of a stone, and he can hear the rustle and sift of snow among boughs and leaves.

        Nightingale has stood up. He closes the knife without looking down. Then he walks to the nearer edge of the forest and reaches out unsteadily to put his hand to a tree, leaning against it with his face downturned, and he glances away in courtesy, thinking he understands; doesn’t blame him. But after a long moment he hears Nightingale breathe out sharply twice with an accumulating crackle in it, and cough deeply and deliberately, and spit among the leaves.

        At the soft crunch of footsteps again he looks up. Nightingale standing with his face full in the light that has thinned and cooled further, gold to silver, from a hazy encroachment of fog across the sun: without even that in the leached-pale eyes that a photograph has, or a skillful drawing. It is only ever that other world he looks from, and more fool you, should you ever forget it. And yet in that first glance up he might have given him anything; anything.

        As he watches the light has dimmed further; the sky is streaked grey and silver, where it had been white. In ordinary life, a cloud before the sun might give for a moment the sense that evening was falling, and then brighten and pass. Nightingale has held out the closed knife.

        Could you see if this indicates anything to you? The next-nearest locus may be drawn from your memory.

        The calm in the voice is total, which from experience he mislikes; can’t last for ever, can end a lot of ways. The knife is warmer in his palm than he expects, and lighter.

        The raised design of the handle is a tree, he sees, enclosed densely in ornament and in its own patterning leaves, starred with shining gilt apples; he turns it over and finds that the obverse is a winding, coiling, crossing serpent with minutely imbricated scales and a golden eye, weaving in and out of concealment among leaves and flowers. The conduit, of course, that it would have been safer not to open. But how do you know that you would rather not have known, til you know it? He is about to look up and say Nothing, when he feels a kind of nudging to his hand, like a dowser’s hazel, or a hopeful dog’s ghost.

        ‘Yes. I think. Open it,’ he says, and then, distracted, ‘please.’

        If he had not had knives as a boy, or if the years had whetted rather than blunted his ego, he would have attempted to open it one-handed. But he’d tried that at nine and bled all over the new champagne-coloured carpet. Nightingale returns it on the flat of his palm, like a treat for a knife-eating pony. The handle, when his hand closes round it, pulls like a kite.

        ‘Ah. Yes. Yes. All right,’ he says, to the knife. He lets it lead him across the clearing, minding where he steps, Nightingale close behind him.

        As they come into the forest the sunlight flares again at their backs, the cloud passing, so that the way is briefly bright with reflected light caught on water-drops: the faint winding of a deer-track of a path between the trees in a dazzling shadow of bracken, moss and lichen, ice running in rivulets down smooth bark and rough, translucent melting snow. The breeze carries the lively chill of the thaw. Ten paces from one season to another. He begins to turn to see if what lies behind them has changed and receives a jerk from the knife as though to say, look not back.

        He’d like to know what it knows. He looks down for a moment to place his feet between pools of slush and raises his face into dimming light again, to find that the trees have thinned, and that they seem to be nearing the end of a wood in a city park; railings, benches, puddles on a worn self-binding gravel path. Nowhere he recognises. The street name plates unread their lettering back along his gaze each time it passes over them, which makes him seasick, and he desists.

        The streets are deserted, though there is that urban smell of stale combustion and collected refuse that suggests it is not untenanted, or has not been for long. The sky is grey and low enough that the streetlamps would come on if they could; there is the complete, eerie flatness of light of a power-cut.

        At the top of the short steps up which the knife has drawn him, he gives a shove to the front door and watches it swing back on deep shadow. ‘Torch please,’ he says briskly to Nightingale, who obliges with an irregular shape of light that darts in with the erratic caution of a goldfish, and then expands and brightens to fill the hall.

        Block of ordinary, mid-dingy flats, looks like. He has no bloody clue what or who he’s looking for. Stairwell dead quiet. One door standing open, at the end of the hall. Nightingale, silently, takes back the knife.

        ‘What do I do, then?’

        Hold the locus still. If you can.

        Not the hanging body, seen from the door, that distresses him – not his first, or fifth, or tenth – but the unfurling guilt of deliberate, successful forgetting. The face would give no information, hardly recognisable now as human; but the height and thinness, the dead fair hair, recall him.

        Jopling: one of those men built like sailing rigging, diligent, meticulous, on the force two years, never any trouble; only that he didn’t get on with the other men – all men that year – in his shift. But you can’t coddle, his own first sergeant had told him, or they’ll never harden up.

        A hesitation at his office door one evening: the light richest when failing, falling with meaningless, mathematical beauty as always, through the slatted blinds onto the wall of the corridor, and onto anyone who stood in its path. Can I talk to you about something, Jopling had said, and without looking up he had said with heavy suggestion, is it urgent? And then, without knowing why, looked up: in time to see Jopling’s faint, relieved smile as he had said no, and the fine-cut bars of light and shadow on his turning cheek, like the hatching-lines in an engraving.

        If he can do nothing else now, he can walk forward; right the kicked-over chair; pull the sturdier table nearer, and with difficulty clamber on. He cannot be ready, but can from precedent expect it, when the body tries to turn and speak to him; though its throat can produce no sound in words the sense carries still, the hopeless desperation, the charge that if he had arrived but an hour earlier, a few minutes, or if he had only waited, listened, if …

        Not for nothing, twenty-seven long years: the pitiless operational steadiness, the abeyance of self, kicks in even here. Through the filter of this detachment he does not believe that what the body is saying is what Jopling would have said: the gentleness in that fleeting smile, given leave to go. It is himself speaking, himself accusing, who has lived long enough to know how often the single conversation, the granted moment of patience, can and does tip the balance.

        With a recurring sense of inevitability he reaches for the squirming shoulder to still it: the rope gives, the body falls against him and bears him down to the table, grasping, disintegrating where touched with a dry softness like something eaten through by moths, not as he has ever seen any living thing decay. As before it makes what screams it can, is still alive, if you can call it life.

        Nightingale is close by at once, near enough that this time he can hear the hoarse quick recitation: ‘Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace.’ He himself, sprawled on the table, has got his hand and arm automatically round what he can – can see the knife-net forming – tries to hold still, looking away, repeating without thinking, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry’, as you would say, without hope of understanding or reception except by God, to some animal whose death you had brought about.

        A faint flash of the net, a fine-spaced glitter as from water, and all the bronze in his arm blazes white-hot and something seems to pierce his heart. He cries out involuntarily and jerks away, seeing nothing but dizzying wheelings and shimmerings, and hears Nightingale say ‘Hold on’ over the noise the body is making; he tries to turn back and take hold but cannot see: then a jolt, a sickening wrench and a silence. After some seconds or minutes he begins to hear Nightingale’s breathing again, and to see, far away, the ceiling above him, and the exposed pipe, and the broken rope.

        He gets himself off the table without looking down, and limps over to Nightingale, who is shielding one hand with the other. There is something like sawdust clinging to his clothes and he paws it away in what, if he had the energy for it, would be horror. ‘Out,’ he says. Once, freakishly unhurt after a motorway smash, he could only speak like this, one word at a time. ‘Out.’

        Outside the sky has lightened, and a sharpening wind is beginning to pick up: he raises his damp face to it, and it begins to stir his wits like a flag on the pole. ‘Are you – all right. What was that?’

        The cut on Nightingale’s hand, which this morning had looked sealed over like a cut on a tree, has reopened, and with walking has begun to drip rather fast onto the pavement. Nightingale has stopped with an exasperated click of the tongue, a reassuringly workaday sound, and has closed the knife and extracted a handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Hold this end. Yes. I’m not sure. I meant to undo the knot, as it were, holding the locus together. I didn’t realise there was – what you might call a current – that would reverse to you. For which I do apologise. Not insurmountable. As the old joke goes, the solution to half the problems in spellwork is chirality … There. Thank you.

        Like Molly, Nightingale has plainly done this before: the neat flat binding round his hand darkens a little and ceases to darken. The moment he has let go, Nightingale sets off at a pace he can hardly match.

        ‘Could I do it,’ he says, matching it doggedly, his heart going like a bloody tumble dryer. ‘What you were doing. With the knife. Doesn’t seem fair. If it hurt you. If they’re mine.’

        That was not altogether what he had meant to say, or how, still reassuming his capacity for speech, he had meant to say it. But Nightingale looks at him as though seeing him, this last hour, for the first time. No. Though I appreciate the offer. The knife is only a power bank, so to speak. Dangerous for anyone without years of training. Best that you handle it as little as possible.

        ‘What happened to you,’ he says, the hold of caution jarred loose by pain, broken-open compartments of memory, thudding pace, magic-electric shock. For an instant he sees a kind of lunatic patience, an alone-in-the-joke amusement, in Nightingale’s face: in what decade, my good fellow? He says, lumbering and labouring on, ‘Middlesbrough. Last week. Cut your hand.’

        Under other circumstances he might resent it, how Nightingale has now perceptibly slowed for him; he who is reliably of any group the fastest walker, longest stride, greatest drive. At present he appreciates any opportunity to catch up on breathing, though it feels like a saw through the sternum, dragging back, forth. Surely the halfway mark or past it: no anaesthetic now.

        An automaton, you would say, that outlived its master. I tried – to reason with it. Never hear the end of it from Peter if I hadn’t. Nightingale glances into the sky with that trace of self-mockery, his lips parting and setting again, and down. A fool’s errand. As I knew or ought to have known. Took a long time to draw it away from the city centre. And it was faster than I thought; and I was slow.

        And then you were on the trains for six or seven hours, and straight on to the trouble I brought you. Christ. He tries to formulate an acknowledgement of this, and abandons the attempt. With a lurch of adrenaline he catches himself on a tree-trunk, where he had stumbled on the pavement in its shadow, broken from the slow forcing of its roots; and looks up to find the whole of the sky patterned with leaves, wet grass and stones under his feet.

        Rain and a river, both heard before seen or felt. Side of a mountain, looks like; nowhere he knows. They are moving uphill, and he begins to temper his own pace, though some of his endurance is returning as the shock wears off: it’s as he had thought, Nightingale makes these shows of speed, a kind of defiance, indulgence really, and can’t sustain them.

        Out from under the cover of the trees the rain is cold and steady: welcome at first, rinsing his face. The unseen river must have little pools and falls from the sound of it, hisses and splashes and fine curling, plucking sounds, varied as a tuning orchestra, above the deeper rushing of the current. For a wistful, drifting moment he wishes he had walked somewhere like this while he was alive: and is checked sharply, thinking, you are alive; with the resultant fear that the force, the rarity of true realisation will not let him long remain so.

        He is recalled by Nightingale’s voice saying with a wheeze in the breathing, and as though not for the first time, ‘Stop.’ He stops and turns. Nightingale has sat down on a wide flat stone, leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees. For a moment his eyes have closed; then irritably he raises one hand and draws the wrist across his brow where the rain-dark hair is clinging to it, and glances up. Just need a minute. Not long.

        He walks over and sits down next to him, where the stone’s slight concavity ensures, alas, a wet bum. But all of him is getting fairly sodden. ‘Well, I want a long minute,’ he says, largely for his own benefit; and, pleased to discover that his faculties of language have come back online, ‘I want a fucking cup o’ tea and a slice o’ cake like bloody Worzel, who I expect I’m coming to resemble. I want a hot bath and a bottle of Dalmore and, fuck me, a pack of Player’s while I’m at it. How long have we been at this? Seems like a bleeding century. Uphill both ways.’

        Expecting no response, he is not unduly alarmed to receive none, though he wishes Nightingale had not closed his eyes again. He had thought, this morning under that first glare of the laboratory lights, that Nightingale had looked feverish: that slant-caught shine in the shallow-set eye, and the cracked lips. He himself is finding it cold now he’s stopped moving, with the rain running down his neck; but exertion and insulation had kept him warm enough – almost too warm – on the way, where Nightingale from the moment he turned has been shivering without ceasing, varying only in frequency as, that uncanny cloud-shadow passing, he sets his mouth and tries to still.

        No use troubling, in the first-responder’s view he is presently taking, about the effects of the chill and the wet in the longer term: someone else’s job, if they survive. What does concern him is that shivering is bloody expensive, energetically, and Nightingale has to last long enough to get both of them out.

        He cannot raise his arm high enough to touch Nightingale’s shoulder, as he would like; but he says in a different voice ‘My jacket’s also wet, but it might help.’

        Nightingale opens his eyes at once, and, as he had not intended, begins to get up. No. But thank you. The rain is part of this locus, that’s all. Soon as we’re through it we should be dry. He glances away from what he can see in the way Nightingale is moving. Not a damned thing he can do but follow.

        When they have turned to move uphill again he can now see through the trees, distantly hear, what must be a small waterfall at a sheer rock-face, and the mist of its spray; then, mixed with this in the slackening rain, a grey pall of smoke. At first, memory quicker than reason calling up the bonfires of his youth, for an instant he is heartened; memory that flashes back to the dawn of the species, where the fire was shelter and harbour, was all. Then the wind changes, the mist blown cool on his cheek, the heat of the smoke eddying after: and the breath catches in his throat.

        Nightingale, who must have known from the beginning, has not slowed or stopped, or altered in expression from that complete and emptied calm. The fire, when they come to it, is greenwood heaped over and under most of the bodies, and the rain has extinguished some of it, though some is crackling still. He has reclaimed, with effort, his professional detachment: if what they must do is pull apart the pile, then they must. But the body Nightingale is looking for, or vice versa, is near enough to the edge that when they are near it, it heaves itself, what remains of it, out.

        The waterfall drowns out most sound, and the ringing in his ears does for the rest. Only his sight, fixed on Nightingale: the shine of the knife, the grimacing, awkward kneeling, the lips moving in the words he has heard before, the blade beginning its tracing – this body’s burnt hand suddenly clawing at him, raking at his throat, and Nightingale recoiling, the shining pattern warping, deforming – something this time like lightning and thunder, like lightning and thunder if you were deaf and blind, and though the silence as before has fallen Nightingale has not got up.

        Slowly, appallingly slowly it seems to him, he stumbles over and closes his hand on Nightingale’s shoulder, shuddering in his grasp, and the sky above them seems to open and lighten, and the ringing in his ears to reach a pitch and fade. He looks up, squinting – what the fuck now – and sees nothing, a tiny coin of sun through a haze. He has not let go. Before him Nightingale is still sitting with one knee folded under him, breathing with difficulty, though beginning, slowly, to level out.

        They are still at the edge of a smouldering fire, but it is only beams and building-rubble now. It is burning where a house had been, at the edge of a small cobbled square. Smashed roofs, whole roofs, shattered windows, all deserted. An almond-tree in flower beside them, though a branch of it has torn and fallen, the blossom and the crushed-sap smell mingling with the burnt wood, broken stone.

        He puts the palm of his hand to Nightingale’s back without thinking, and then steps away and crouches down beside him. He realises, looking him over, that both of them are dry again; and, small mercy, the smears that the last body had left on Nightingale’s front are gone as well. ‘Can you get up?’

        Nightingale only nods, looking wretched: but after a moment rises quite nimbly and decisively, without using his hands. Don’t go charging off again to make a bloody point, he thinks, watching; you haven’t got a lot left in you. But Nightingale begins to pick his way across the square with caution, still holding the open knife.

        That was nearer than I might have liked, says Nightingale neutrally, not looking at him. But every time we force another locus to form, it draws us closer to the origin, as I thought … like beads on a string, or stops on a train. Fairly close now, I should say.

        The knife leads them to what had been a bridge across a canal, choked now with debris; the stone and metal of the arch have fallen in, but lie partly above the slow, opaque water still. There has been human ingenuity at work, since the bridge was destroyed: a plank braced across the widest gap, the spike of a handhold driven into the clay of the far bank. Someone young and light and sure of their balance could cross; himself being none of those and not keen to drown, he is about to speak when Nightingale, gazing down into the wreckage, turns away and says as though in reply, No, we’ll go round.

        When he next raises his head they are in a street of tall close-spaced houses, some partially destroyed. Nightingale is hesitating, the knife held out; at last he selects a door, its cream-and-red paint blistered and peeling at the base from what must have been the waters of a flood, and the knob turns with a rattle in his hand.

        The stairs are narrow, unfinished, and they are both forced to climb in a kind of vigilant crick-in-the-neck hunch, himself almost crabwise. There is scarcely room for him to follow, in the equally cramped hall at the top; he can see nothing but Nightingale’s back, when at the open door Nightingale stops and draws a sharp breath.

        A long, long silent moment before Nightingale steps forward, the boards creaking, and he himself edges in behind him. The single window is blurred with windblown stone dust and ash like sea-spray, and admits nothing but a faint cold light, as though covered over with snow. The floor is clean-swept, the bare boards uneven. A shelf-width low table and an empty basin. And in the enamelled steel-framed bed the body of a woman, laid out as though newly dead.

        His first thought is to wonder what had happened: under the thin sheet the body is partial, missing one leg and perhaps part of one arm. His next, with a stilled shock, is to recognise her.

        Not as anyone he has ever met: but as a pattern. Even in the half-light her features are Nightingale’s: the slanting cheekbones, long jaw, thin high-bridged nose, wide mouth. A pattern, not a copy; in life she must have been nearer beauty. If her face were not wasted with dying, his not haggard with endurance, the eye would be slower to collect them together. Even the same soft mouse-coloured hair, the same widow’s peak; hers lying loose on her shoulders, unstirred in the unmoving air.

        Nightingale steps forward as though against his will, the knife at the ready. From where he himself stands watching he would like to turn away, tensed; he cannot.

        He is braced for noise, not for silence: the body’s eyes open when Nightingale speaks his phrase and sets his hand very lightly to its shoulder, but its mouth is set is in a way that, too, he recognises. Even as it turns away from Nightingale’s touch, tries to turn its back on him and breaks apart at the spine and ribcage, cracking and splintering and sifting into what seems like white sand, it yields no sound.

        The flash this time is like an arc-flash, and causes a cracking and creaking, a ship-at-sea swaying, larger than the room; blinking, able to see next to nothing, he keeps close behind Nightingale by sound alone on the dark stair until they are out of the building again, the sky lowering, and several of the adjoining houses beginning to crumble and collapse inward.

        It is the unmoored, dreamlike freedom of sustained fear, the unreality, that makes him a second time speak without check. ‘Who was that?’

        Nightingale does not turn round in the deepening darkness, or stop; but at last he says with a note of finality, Someone whom my errors killed.

        As distantly, as indistinctly as an out-of-range radio signal he receives the impression he should stop; but it is almost in simple confusion that he presses: ‘Someone you commanded on the field of battle?’

        It seems a long time before he has his answer, and he nearly misses it, because Nightingale’s voice is hard to hear, as it is now; and he only says, still facing away, ‘Yes.’

        Since they have come out of the house he has thought that Nightingale must have been following a signal, since he has been hurrying on without ceasing: but then a little later Nightingale stops abruptly in the middle of a street and turns, and, hardly seeming to see him, hands him the knife. He has lost, somewhere, the bandage on his hand.

        After only a few steps the knife draws him to an open doorway with stairs down into what looks like a cellar, a black tunnel: he is so numbed with weariness that he fears nothing; and Nightingale, perhaps apologising, sends a light flitting before him without asking. Only a few steps more, through a wet-walled darkness; and then up into dusk and the thick smell of an estuarial marsh, and he recognises, sunk in its hillside, one of the pillboxes at Allhallows.

        Always, when you believe an ordeal is over, there is a portion yet to go. Of this he can recall later almost nothing; only the understanding at once that the body they find will be Scoville, a dread that is half relief, when nothing can be like it was finding him the first time. The same broken grasses, the same alien flies; this time the marsh-pool salt seeping into the knees of his trousers and the sleeve of his shirt, trying to say before his touch began to kill and dissolve, making the one offering he could: we got him, you hear me, we got the fucker, he’s done.

        The now-familiar flash and lurch of the ground and the quiet, and himself still down in the muck with it repeating as though anything had ever been there to hear: until Nightingale in silence touches his shoulder, and he slips and slithers and gets himself up at last, and they go on.

        After a time, having paid no attention to anything save keeping close behind Nightingale, he is aware of warmth, of dry knees and shirt again, and looks round to find that they are among trees once more, in such close symmetry that they must have been planted; a kind of corridor or tunnel of conifers, with a dense, softly shining accumulation of short needles underfoot, and a resinous, sun-heated enclosed peace. What light comes in has the coppery softness of evening.

        It is a quiet in which to lose things, set them down. He sinks down onto the needles and leans his back against the enclosing trunks without conscious decision to stop, without saying a word.

        He has closed his eyes; he has almost, sitting, slipped away: then he hears Nightingale saying, with some urgency, ‘Alexander.’

        His eyes close again. Something touches his hand. Very distantly, he feels Nightingale’s fingers slip into it; a dim thoughtless animal pleasure of contact. Then with astonishing strength Nightingale closes the nails of his hand hard into his palm.

        It’s like being bitten: like an electric shock. He is on his feet before he knows it. ‘Jesus fuck!’ he says, suffused with irrational betrayal, breathing hard. Nightingale meets his eye with a gaze as inhuman as a hawk’s.

        Don’t let your consciousness become separated from your body, says Nightingale, without inflection. If you make – a gap – in a place like this, you don’t know what could get in. We’re very near now. We cannot stop.

        After a moment looking into Nightingale’s face, his physical anger fades. He feels sick and dizzied with exhaustion still: but God knows, if this man is still standing, it’s the least he can do to keep up. He takes a breath and holds it, and says ‘Yes. You did warn me. I’m sorry’; and sees Nightingale nod in acknowledgement before turning forward again.

        Soon the tunnel opens up, and the trees thin out and grow wild; the air is cooler here, and brighter. The forest opens onto what at first he takes to be a high valley landscape of jagged rocks, under snow from a wide white sky. Then he sees the scorched, clinging weeds on the rocks of the slope below, the broken barnacles and shells, and looks out automatically into the distance for the water-line.

        There is none. Away to the darkened horizon there is only rock, initially thickly encrusted with the remains of near-shore life, blackening and sparsening as the land lowers, in steep slopes interspersed with level stretches of sand. Far below, far in the distance, he sees several regions of shadow that his eye cannot interpret, til it comes to the nearest.

        Slowly, and then all at once, he realises that he is looking at something like a vast sinkhole, kilometres across. He can see the disturbed tracks of armoured vehicles driven out to it, a few abandoned along the way, most clustered near the opening, tiny in the distance; and he thinks he can see something like scaffolding, machinery, clinging at the edge and extending down into it. But there is no sign of movement, living or mechanical, anywhere among the vehicles; and intuition tells him that however long he might watch, he would see none.

        It is the obstinate, futile humanness of this that reaches him: the echo of his own driving curiosity, in extremis. How, at the last, someone wanted to know. He takes a deep breath, the air warmer than he expected and full of exposed-seabed amines, and coughs: it is the reflexive brushing of his hand across his face that tells him at last that what is falling, gently here, but sweeping thickly in towards them over the dark landscape in veils like an oncoming storm, is white ash.

        He steps back towards the woods without thinking, and treads on something that is not rock. At his feet is the body of a great blue heron, singed but recognisable. Something, somewhere, must be alive: the carcass looks chewed. The long polished beak is gaping, smashed. The dead eye is silver; shining, immaculate in the burnt socket as a bead of mercury.

        He turns to Nightingale, whom he has not let out of his peripheral vision, and says hoarsely, ‘What – is this?’

        In the fading light Nightingale’s face is bleak, hollowed with fatigue; there is white ash, sticky and fluttering, caught in his hair and on the wool of his jacket. But the knife in his left hand is steady, as he too raises his right absently to brush the ash from his brow and cheek.

        Nothing that ever happened. This way.

        It is the other way from the near hole in the seabed, which he doesn’t like turning his back on. It is some distance along the shore, but he can see it a long way off: a large object with the straight lines of human making, set implausibly level among the rocks down below what would once have been the tide-line. In between the rocks, and the places the wind has dried the sand to a hard crust, the wasteland still squelches underfoot.

        What they are approaching stands on a relative peak, a once-submerged promontory, with a steep drop to the sides in the direction of the sinkhole and out to the horizon, and a hilly slope down from the others. The structure looks, as they make their slow way up to it after the descent from the shore, like nothing so much as a wide, flat-topped desk with an enclosing cabinet, with an intricacy of small drawers and shelves set shallowly above it – a precise row of small hooks set into the underside of the shelf above the desk – and deeper ones to either side. It must have been handsome when it was newly made, with the wood gleaming and polished, and its warm metal bright; here, rising out of the peak of the rock as though cemented into it, the wood is worn and flaking with salt and wind, all the hinges and knobs and hooks green with corrosion.

        Only when they have come up close does he see, on the bare central surface of the desk, a small unremarkable clear glass conical laboratory flask, without markings, faintly blurred with the scratches of long use. The base would fit on the palm of his hand. It looks old and empty and light, thin-walled, as though the rising wind would tip it; as though even a stiff breeze would have tipped and rolled and smashed it long ago. But once he has looked at it he knows that the wind will not touch it: that the wind, the desk, the rocks and the whole of the emptied sea are the illusions, and this the single and final real thing.

        He glances at Nightingale and forgets what he would have asked. Here where most needed, the imperturbable, almost cavalier calmness has gone. What is left is a stillness that is without calculation: a look of something worse than fear.

        It is only for a second, and then Nightingale’s face, as always, changes again. He can see a muscle in the jaw tense, and the long bony throat working to swallow. The familiar control, resuming, in the breathing. He has the distinct impression that he has observed Nightingale remembering that he is there. He is again on the point of speaking, but Nightingale precedes him.

        Get back.

        It is the tautness in the voice that he obeys without question. He does not like to let Nightingale out of his sight, but he is obliged to look away momentarily, to navigate back down the uneven slope into the valley with the largest rocks at its base, some almost as tall as he is, with seaweed-streaked gaps and hollows.

        When he turns back, Nightingale has walked up to the peak with what appears a resumption of discipline, if not an untouched calm. It is the pause, later, that he will remember: the straight back, the shoulders aligned as though by spirit-level, the knife relaxed in the left hand, and the grace in gesture, reaching, of the right.

        If Nightingale cries out, the wind takes it: or he only imagines it, watching, as Nightingale pulls his hand from the glass and backs away, nearly falling, by luck alone stumbling back along the way he came and not over the left edge with the clifflike drop. He starts to run up towards him as Nightingale comes down, staggering, borne on largely by gravity, starting to fall; they nearly go past each other. He thinks he sees for an instant Nightingale’s face, colourless, eyes wide and aghast.

        He catches at Nightingale’s hand and closes his fingers on the treacherous softness of ash or dust: against his palm scrape, sharp and shocking, the phalanges of a skeleton long sandpaper-dry and dead. He jerks his hand away involuntarily and as involuntarily tries to catch at it again, as Nightingale collapses away from him into a shadow between two high rocks.

        Reflexively he begins to reach for him, and stops. Under the darkening sky he can hardly see where Nightingale has fallen in the crevice, turned away: can just see the hand of straw-coloured bone gleaming, a grey ash trickling away at the sleeve; cannot see the face. The flecked clothes, stirred by the wind, are not empty, but the heap in the shadow seems too slight to be any living man.

        No motion, no sound anywhere in the world but the long soughing of the wind over the emptied shore.

        For an instant he stands, his hand still reaching, struck bodily dumb. Then he moves with the animal courage of pressure between two terrors, and starts up the hill without looking back.

        He is at the cliff of the nightmare, where you have one idea or none at all. He had been paralysed by the fear that to attempt to help Nightingale, even to kneel to look at him, should trigger a dissolution like the others. The only hope he can see of helping him is to destroy the object that has hurt him: hurt them both, though he is aware of his own injuries, in this moment, only as interference. Inside the sling the bronze at his wrist feels now as though it is moving, seething like locusts on a branch. If he stopped to think of it, or unwrapped the sling to look, it would slow him. It is not his business to stop.

        The air itself, between him and the glass flask on the desk, seems to thicken and push against him as he approaches, as one magnet will repel another. The rocks, small and loose here, are slippery, and the blood is rushing in his ears. The same sense of wrongness, abject repulsion and rejection, that had felled him once before – this morning, a thousand years ago – washes over him again. Twenty paces. His sight is flickering and blurring like the candle passed through the shadow. He places his foot without really seeing, slips on a slimed rock and crashes to his knees and forward almost on his face, his good arm jarred and scraped from palm to elbow.

        For a fleeting second, in the weight and shadow of his own body, in the terrible relief of resting, he could stop. If he were dreaming, the fall would have been the mercy that woke him. If it were only him, on this desolate, irreparable shore.

        It is not. He must believe that it is not. He sets his bloodied palm deliberately to the slant of the largest, most thickly barnacled rock in reach and levers himself against its friction to his knees. Then, swaying, to his feet.

        The wind of the storm has now reached the peak in full, buffeting, and the first curtains of white ash. It scours his face, ash sticking to the wet streaks it draws from eyes and nose; it pushes him, testing, rocking, towards the steep edge.

        All his life he has been heavy, and steady, and stubborn. Ten paces. Animosity, too, could always move him forward when mere ideals could not. Five paces. Nightingale must still have the knife, or if he dropped it, it has fallen somewhere that he can’t see. Three, two. And one.

        He is braced for anything to happen when his hand makes contact with the glass; but it feels so ordinary under his fingers, wind-cooled and smooth, that for a second he is afraid that he has been deceived, and the real harm, the thing that had struck at Nightingale, lies somewhere else.

        There is nothing else, nowhere else. God knows, it makes him feel sick enough to touch it that it can hardly be anything else. He receives a confused broadcast of sensory impressions from it which, helpfully, pain precludes him from analysing. It is not his business or interest to listen to this device. It has always only been his business to put an end to what harm can still be ended. He grips the neck of the flask as best he can with his numbed and bleeding hand, raises it, presses it hard against his chest with his palm.

        Get it as far from Nightingale as he can, and break it. If he could raise his arm better than haltingly and halfway, he might throw it over the edge; but he cannot, and if that didn’t break it then he’d have to go after it. He begins to make his way down the shallower slope, and out to what had been the sea.

        Between the failing light and his streaming eyes, he cannot do better than to guess where to put his feet down. Several times he is saved only by having stepped into a narrow space between taller rocks, where when he slips he is checked, wrenchingly but successfully, by collision of knee or thigh with their enclosure. After what seems a long while the slope levels, and the rocks are lower and smoother, with flats of dark sand between.

        Everything is filmed slick and slippery with what had been infinitesimal life, or still is. He goes slowly, with the sense that he has not got another getting-up in him. He has his head down, hunched forward in pain and determination; for a time this position keeps the wind from his eyes. Then, though the plane of his face is still sheltered, almost parallel to the ground, he begins to cough again with the thickness of the ash.

        After some difficulty, he raises his face and finds it is almost full dark, the only light in the sky held by the ash falling densely as a blizzard, weightless, clinging, choking. He realises with a shock that he has no idea which way he is facing: he can see less than a metre in any direction. He can only hope that the path he has been travelling is away from Nightingale, since he is certain that he has, at least, not gone back uphill. But he might have turned, when he was bent over blind with coughing, or when he straightened; no way to know.

        One idea, which has become the whole of him. He can just see, silting over with ash, an almost-flat rock at ground level a few steps before him. He walks forward and drags one foot over it, clearing it, to be sure that it is rock. Then he uncramps his arm from where it has held the flask pressed against him, and holds it up as far as he can force his arm, and as hard as he can casts it down.

        The wind strips all sound from him, but in the dimness he sees the bright encircling line of a crack appear in the base. He does not take his eyes from it. He takes a step back to eke out what momentum he can, heaves himself forward and brings down a hundred and thirty kilograms of plod with all the vehemence left to him. Without sight, without sound, he feels the glass shatter under his foot.

        There is a strange, soft explosion, a wavering and implosion, an acceleration of brightness like a time-lapsed dawn, faint silver-blue to an all-encompassing, all-erasing silver-gold, as though the whole sky were the midday sun. For an instant, still standing, he can see nothing, nothing but light. Then the ground, which has always had it in for him, comes up and hits him from behind.

Chapter Text

        Someone has left the electric light on beside the bed, in the blue room, in kindness or in haste. If that is the light. If this is the room. His filament of awareness is too fine to transmit distress, when he cannot turn his head or focus his eyes. Blur of faded cornflower-blue, blur of cream-coloured ceiling in shadow, gleam of polished wood touched here and there with a low-wattage glimmer. He hopes it is the blue room, because among his very few and tenuous ideas is that the blue room is safe.

        The colours waver round him, and go out.

        Some time later, minutes or hours, he opens his eyes again and, reflexively, reaches up to blot them; his cheeks are wet. With a heave of all his available powers he sits up abruptly, superstitiously, against finding out he can’t.

        So he can. All right. Blue room. Black night at the window. Heart racketing about, worse for sitting: fine, so it’s beating, keep going. Both arms present and more or less correct, the left stiffly clotted with drying blood under a shredded sleeve; both hands responsive, if not very precisely. Minus the sling he’s in the clothes he went through the door in, shoes and all, on top of the covers. He is covered all over in a surreally fine silver-white powder, slippery as a silk shirt, staticky, insinuating, sensorily appalling. His eyes are itching something chronic; he can feel another helpful, irritated eyewash tear roll down his cheek.

        In the bathroom down the hall, he rinses his eyes as best he can at the basin: the water runs, again and again, through his attempts to cup his hands. He’s a fucking CBRN responder, for the fat lot of good that did him: he didn’t exactly think to put himself and Nightingale in peeler suits and respirators. He hopes to God the powder is more along the lines of fuller’s earth than novichok. He hopes to God Nightingale’s alive.

        He undergoes a brief intensification of inchoate dread resolving partially into a violent sneeze, at which his nose starts bleeding; he leans on his elbows dripping silvery-marbled blood into the basin, shivering, eyes still tearing, all over pins-and-needles, jangling, racing. Keep going, he thinks, keep going, like a phrase from another language of which he is on the verge of recalling the meaning.

        After five minutes of difficult, stiffly twisting sat-in-the-bath rinsing, progressing in tenor from panicky to desultory, his wits creep back about him: as they would not, if the dust were a nerve agent, or if, presumably, he had stamped on a nuclear bomb. So, my lad, use them. At least one other person is alive and ambulatory: someone laid him on that bed, and there had been water-drops clinging to the sides of the empty bath.

        As for himself, now lying back too knackered to sit up as the water rises slowly round him, he is – for now – in better case than he might have expected. The bronze, touch wood, is gone from him: the flesh where the fragments had been is densely torn as road rash, seeping and pinkening the hot clear water, and stings and aches like anything; but the pain feels different, an eased internal pressure, as though the wounds might now knit together. His heart, still aching, proves capable of slowing; his teeth, cautiously touched together, then closed round his prodding finger, feel rooted in their places again. His right arm, which he vividly remembers grazing, is unmarked.

        In the blue room again he peers, still blinking, at the low-contrast face of the tiny carriage clock: ten to one. It feels like twenty past the end of the world. He puts on, with incredulous normality, his pyjamas; then, resentfully, unsteadily, still largely one-handed, heavy wool socks and leather house-slippers. The last bloody thing he wants at this juncture is to go for a wander; but there are several things that silvery powder might have been – he had noticed with a start, this morning, an ancient briefcase survey meter on Grant’s table – that he would not want to give eight hours’ advantage, over himself or over Nightingale, if Nightingale is still in the race.

        The Folly is unlit, but the London sky never darkens, and he can see well enough not to fall over the railing down the well of the atrium. All the same he keeps one hand to the wall, for support as much as guidance; his body has become possessed of a quietly fanatical desire for the horizontal, and keeps sinking hopefully at the knees.

        Very faintly, he thinks he sees a light falling from an open turning, and hears some slight noise. He turns a corner and receives two impressions: a golden line of light outlining a door at the very end of the hall, and something enormous flying about like a man-sized owl. Reflexively he flings his arms up over his face and flattens himself against the wall behind the very insufficient shelter of a pilaster. Then he sees that the swooping shadow has itself frozen in what seems at first mid-air; has a white front; is, bloody hell, Molly.

        His heart is not up to all this. He can feel his arm and shoulder, wrenched and reopening, beginning to dampen and stick to the flannel of his pyjama shirt. His eyes, still adjusting, seek and find the lines of her narrow black ankles and feet reflecting faintly, seamlessly down into the shining floorboards like dock-pilings, though he would swear she’d been up near the ceiling. She has put her apron back on, the strings trailing, but not the cap, or she has lost it; her hair is loose again and falling tangled about her face, of which he can see almost nothing, save an ectoplasmic shine from an eye with a reflective layer like a cat’s.

        ‘Molly,’ he says, just above a whisper. ‘Molly, only me.’

        No response, until he begins to step forward, and then she seems to grow in size as with spread wings, the unmistakable hostility of a creature standing its ground: she makes a backlit, unearthly saurian hiss with a low warning, clucking rattle at the end of it.

        ‘Mate,’ he says gently, ‘I just want to see that he’s all right.’

        He thinks, I want to know you’re not defending what’s left of his body. If there were nothing left but a handful of ash, she would eat the ash, to keep it safe.

        With the extreme unsubtlety almost of stage-comedy, he lifts his foot for another slow, exaggerated step, and as he sets it down the figure before him expands to fill the hall – blotting out the light at the end – like a wall of dark briars, like a den of many creatures, rustling and fluttering and slithering, glinting with glossy scales, spreading leathery wings, gleams of nictitating eyes, claws, wet fangs, gathering ready to strike. All around him it seems both to begin to fold in to enclose him, and to tense and draw back for attack: it gives another multiplicitous hiss shading into a cry like no animal he has ever heard, with a long, gulping ululation at the end.

        It is all the things that sixty million years of his ancestors hid under rocks from. If he had met it under other circumstances, it would have exacted the correct reflexive terror. But he has reached, at the end of this very long day, his limiting capacity for novel fear. He is done. He is out. His amygdala has gone off-shift. It’s only Molly, innit.

        He holds out his open hand and says, with the peace of sheer exhaustion, ‘It’s all right.’ He walks forward.

        The mass of thorns, fangs, wings, gives a last recoil and rushes him, striking, leaping, boiling round him: and tumbles in a wild long divided flurry past him, brushing and bumping and buffeting, like standing in the opening of a cave fled by a spate of bats. Head bowed, eyes and mouth closed, not in his heart surprised, after a moment he takes a slow breath of the still, silent, beeswax-polish air of the hallway, and raises his face.

        Not a sound that makes him turn from the lit door, not a movement, not a breath. A few paces behind him, pressed against the wall much as he had pressed against it on the opposing side and deriving considerably more shelter from its pilaster, there is a thin dark-haired child in a dirty shift, barefoot, avoiding looking at him with such an intensity of wariness that he feels her attention with a force greater than a direct stare. For a second he doesn’t know her: and then, of course, he does.

        He hadn’t known whether someone, something like her had a childhood or youth as he understands it; how much the apparent resemblance to human form was mimicry assumed imperfectly later. But the exaggerated sharpness, the length of her adult face are absent here, and the close-spaced, slit-pupilled intensity of the eyes. As she is now, if you put her in a skirt and school cardigan, no one would look twice in a crowd.

        She looks appallingly, wholly human; in the low light her pallor looks like the mark of long illness or confinement, the fineness of her skin only the fineness of childhood. Her knees under the outgrown hem of the shift, her bare arms, look starved. She looks like what you find when you’ve made the arrest and you’ve gone to search the address, and you hear some small human sound behind a door.

        The front of the shift is filthy, black-streaked, and her hands and wrists are darkly smudged with dirt or bruises. He is not naïve or sentimental about child labour: three of his four grandparents breathing the lint dust in Wren Nest before they were ten. But something in the set of her shoulders, of her arms held close in about her, he wishes to God he didn’t recognise.

        The equal stillness he has assumed is reflexive, and practised. He earned a reputation early for talking down jumpers and has sometimes over the years almost wished he hadn’t, but it’s not the kind of thing you can fuck up on purpose so you won’t be asked next time. Nor can he delegate, when his trick can’t be taught, is not a reasoned technique at all.

        Not compassion, which like all his emotions vanishes under pressure and is chary of creeping back after; nor calmness of manner, which is a pity, as that’s a habit anyone can learn; but the deep, deep curiosity in him, inexhaustible as divine love is said to be, and unlike divine love manifestly present and speaking, insistent and compelling, at the bridge over the river, in the howling wind at the height. In those moments he wants to know with his whole soul, how has this happened, how came you here? Tell me all. The thing entire. Let the sun come up if it has to. But I want to know.

        He does not think either of them are in danger. But the same instinct draws him on, when all else has left him.

        Molly, lovey, he says, as soft as his hoarse voice will go; as though he needed to get her attention. Molly, are your feet not cold.

        For an instant she looks him full in the eye and, he thinks, knows him. Then she is gone. Not turned and run, not gone upwards or down, not faded out like a ghost, but vanished, blinked out, from the unblinking steadiness of his gaze. Recovered her adult self-possession, perhaps, and her fluency of movement that passes beyond the range of human perception. Or her shame or her fear, to be seen in a form that could be hurt; though she must have seen so many, and himself so recently, in worse case.

        He would like to reassure her, question her, now as ever. But he cannot blame her now or ever for turning, whenever any low voice but one speaks to her, away.

        Molly, he says once more in the dark gleaming of the empty hall, though he knows already that he is alone.

        How much, how distractingly much, he would like to know. But he takes a deep breath, holds it three perceptible, painful heartbeats and lets it go, and walks to the end of the hallway and knocks at the door of the light.

Chapter Text

        Whether or not he has heard, as he thought he heard, an answer, his hand was already turning the ornate brass knob. He wrenches the door open: gleaming bare floor, high sash windows, small slant-topped writing desk and chair—

        Nightingale, alive; seated, turning to look: alive. One glance exceeds his capacity for sight, for comprehension: his vision and his thoughts so intensely occupied as to be functionally blank. Like someone mortally injured, for whom, though he’s never believed it, the pain is said to arrive at a delay, it takes a long moment for him to realise that what he is overwhelmed by is relief.

        When the glittering clears from his vision, he finds he has looked away, as from a light. How empty the room is, for someone who’s been there longer than he himself has been in existence; though he must have taken the one next door for his clothes.

        He registers that Nightingale is looking at him an instant before he says, rusty-voiced and courteous, unmoving, ‘Are you all right?’

        Not surprising the man should wonder, when he had blundered in and only stood there gawping. He tries to say ‘Yes,’ makes no noise that is intelligible, coughs once, and manages to say, his own voice rough, ‘Yeah. What about you?’

        Nightingale’s look at him changes a little. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he says, a touch ironically, not insincerely.

        He hadn’t realised. He almost laughs, still tipsy with relief, and makes a doesn’t-matter gesture with his good hand. ‘No. After everything. Least of my worries. Are you all right? What happened? What was that powder?’

        ‘Silica,’ says Nightingale, his voice cracking halfway through, and then, less reassuringly, I think. Glass that has come apart into atoms. I’ve seen it with spells centred in metal objects … have to sweep them up with a hand-brush, if they failed. Whatever it is, it’s inert. Not magic, not corrosive, not metallic, not radioactive. Something rueful, almost gentle, in the half-heard voice, when Nightingale says, Peter was – quite thorough, before he would go.

        This time he does laugh: not at Grant, to whom he is grateful, but at his own fears, which have assumed at once the lurid extravagance of the woken-from nightmare. ‘Well, fuck me,’ he says, ‘here I thought it was the End of Days and both of us poisoned, and all it was is Silica Gel, Do Not Eat. No wonder I’m so bloody desiccated. Is that water? Can I have some?’

        Nightingale inclines his head with that same trace of ironic civility. He closes the door and moves, not taking his eyes from him, round to the narrow little table beside the desk with a tall etched-glass carafe and a matching glass on a tray, and fills the glass twice in quick succession: he had drunk as much as he could from the cold tap in the bathroom, but he is parched beyond easy replenishing. He is obliged to lean on the deep, draughty sill of the window now that the better part of the tension has gone from him; it had been holding him up, like starch in a shirt.

        As necessary, as painful and grateful as the water in the dry throat, the pause to go on looking. Nightingale, leaning on his elbows, is gathering up the papers on the desk, some handwritten, some typed, a few in translucent plastic sleeves, and setting them in order: both hands in the low light bony, sallow, ordinary living flesh. There is a handkerchief crumpled on the desk with a distracting amount of dark blood on it. Nightingale is in pyjamas not dissimilar to his own and some kind of odd, ancient-looking shapeless wool overgarment, double-breasted with buttons, in a honeycombed stitch round the chest and back, a ribbed one for the arms; though the room is cold and his shoulders drawn in as though he feels it, his cheeks are flushed.

        He glances away at last as Nightingale moves, though the turning in the chair proves without relevance to himself; Nightingale wanting only space to lean forward over his knees and cough, sounding as though he’s been lying flat and it’s done him no favours, with another handkerchief pressed muffling over his mouth. After a moment, Nightingale silent, he refills the glass and, looking back, holds it out.

        Nightingale, distracted, accepts this with one hand, the other being occupied with adding some blood to the cloth, now held to his nose: partially settling one of many pressing questions. He looks away again, and back only when he has heard Nightingale drink, and set down the glass.

        Not reassuring, all this gazing, if your list of criteria is longer than ‘living’. How swiftly Nightingale’s type of high-boned face comes to look sunken under strain, fallen-in. His own had been little different in the mirror: fat as a tomcat’s and twice as engaging, with assorted pocks and dents and dings to show he hasn’t spent his life on the shelf in the original packaging. Only the eyes had looked bruised and deepened; but the pupils had been responsive and equal in size, the whole set of his requirements.

        They are both on the point of speaking; Nightingale is the quicker. Could you come here for a moment? I shouldn’t, really, do much more magic. But I’d like to check you over, if I may.

        ‘Of course.’ He steps forward and rolls up his sleeve, itself minutely blood-blotted, and holds out his battered wrist, which Nightingale, surprising him, takes in his hands: not as icy as Molly’s, but cold enough to have a light way with pastry. Convenient, since entering the room he has wanted to touch him: not, necessarily, solicitously; a poke with a stick might have just about done it; but for proof that they are both real, and free.

        Nightingale pauses, and adjusts his thumb with a craftsman’s precision, almost smoothing, from where it had been resting on one of the small wounds: and tightens his hold and says, not looking up, As before.

        As before, the high held note heard with a sense that is not hearing, altering by slow turns major and minor; but this time, amplified by contact and held longer and longer, doubling and joining, overlaying, carrying a current like images, or like the shining images half seen, half imagined, that play on the inside of the eye. Like a flight of white birds wheeling and turning and settling on dark waters; the patterning, the grace in the turning, clear and plangent as a phrase in music. The same spaced neatness, the precision, in the dip and flicker of willow boughs to the river, if you had but the eyes to see. It is like, for a long passage of light on clear water, having the eyes to see.

        For a long moment he has been standing with the sightlessness of one listening, the abstraction by which the body, willing or resisting, recognises art; but as the ringing begins to draw to a close he feels as though from far away the cold fingers about his wrist jerk slightly, resettle, shake again. He looks down, recollected, and though the note moves faultlessly steady through its receding, easing, closing with a last evocative turn, he sees Nightingale’s face averted and tensed, eyes closed, and a running line of shadows passing over him, swift and unsteady as a candle-flame guttering. God knows what pulling his arm away would do. Nothing for it but to wait until the last trace fades what must have been less than a minute later; and at once Nightingale returns his arm to him and turns away, leaning with his elbows braced on his knees again, and his hands over his face.

        What strikes him, for the first time with immediate rather than general concern, is the spent, almost helpless way Nightingale is now coughing, wet and ineffectual: also bloody expensive, energetically, and expended to no purpose if your chest’s no clearer after. However he had looked, earlier, he had always sounded as though he had the upper hand.

        Not much he can do, personally; but nor are they still alone on some charnel house of a mountain in nineteen-forty-fuck. Nightingale, with some flickering difficulty, is steadying his breathing, still bent forward, his hand held to his side.

        When, a moment later, Nightingale raises his face with a smudge of blood on one cheek, its look is startlingly triumphant: but this time he is the quicker.

        He says, not altogether like a first responder, ‘I thought you were better.’

        Nightingale’s face alters, but his gaze remains steady, and his voice mild. I was. And then, clearing his throat as though to arrive at the real point, he says aloud, thin and hoarse but with no small satisfaction: ‘It’s done. You’re clear. I’d like Peter to confirm tomorrow. But I’m certain as I can be there’s nothing left.’

        ‘Good. Good. It feels gone. But has anybody had a look at you? Walid? Paramedics? Anything?’

        ‘Not yet. Not hurt. Just bruised.’

        Not, he thinks in a sudden welling of clarity like anger, since Middlesbrough: how the tendons of Nightingale’s hand had stood out in the shadow, pressed to his ribs in the doorway before dawn. He’ll be bloody lucky, if bruised is all he turns out to be. Of course, not then, when anyone who had examined him might in conscience have stopped him, closed off the only path. The open tricks, the discipline amounting to arrogance, the last gambling draw on the low reserves. From the first night he too had seen it; had almost seen, in the first glance, the consequences.

        He could not have asked anything less or other of him: had not had to ask. In this, there has never been misunderstanding between them. But his voice carries a sharpness that he had meant to keep for himself, when he says ‘You don’t want to leave it.’

        ‘No. I know. Tomorrow,’ says Nightingale, after a carefully negotiated deep breath; and then, with a sudden brittle vehemence, ‘I can’t bear – one more thing tonight.’

        Sometimes, among his own juniors and seniors, he himself has deliberately displayed a single instance of stress or impatience: to invoke a pitying, usable camaraderie in recognition of his ordinary humanity; to engender an obligation to keep their own nerves or temper; to impart the seriousness of the matter at hand. It is not his impression that any of these are what he has heard.

        He doesn’t like it: but it is the truth, also, when he says, about as gently as he can without making a hash of it, ‘Nor I. In your place. Or even in my own. But you could go to bed, at least.’

        Nightingale has turned in the chair again, and begun collecting the papers into a faded red folder. The reply, when it comes, seems to come, like an echo, from further away. Yes, of course. I was only looking through some things first.

        He does not ask what couldn’t have waited til morning, the answer being patently, pointedly, nothing. He can envision, since he is looking at it, the scene if he himself were absent: the room with a fortune to furnish it bare as an old cheaply hired office, the single electric light, the small-hours chill and silence, and the bowed figure as still as a prisoner’s. He says, the impulse checked, recalculated, ventured, ‘You could live somewhere else.’

        Nightingale does not look up, but a shade of something comes into his face, and goes. He says, quietly, ‘I could not.’

        After twenty-seven years on the job, you recognise the tone of confession. And you recognise when not to press. He is distracted by the fine-grained trembling creeping unemotionally into his knees: he is going to have to sit soon, or fall. There is one other chair, an armchair with Nightingale’s silvery-dusted clothes heaped on it; there is an unmade bed. He stumbles over, steps out of his slippers and gets into the path of least resistance.

        The bed-frame makes melodramatic cracks and creaks, but he is inured to this heckling from furnishings, which almost never make good on the threat. The sheets are so cold that they feel damp; like going to bed in a tulip, fresh but chilling. He pulls all the covers over him he can, shudders in one long wash, and then feels, as it were, the boiler come on, and the sheets begin to warm around him. Another of the things he likes about his body: how warm it is, steadily, defiantly, extravagantly warm; heat a flat like that, twenty-four seven, and it’d cost you a fucking fortune. In the autumn his breath is visible a month before anybody else.

        He sits up, regretfully, in haste: if he lies back he’ll be out in five seconds flat. The roof above the bed is slanted, though the ceiling is high enough to accommodate, nearly everywhere, even his height. He can hear, faintly, a slow copper-scaled wash of what must be rain over the roof. ‘So,’ he says, his hands about his knees. ‘First things first. You said Peter has gone? Where’d he go?’

        Nightingale has turned back in the chair, though his gaze is not directed anywhere in particular. Home. He had a long day of it. He ought to be – with Beverley. Something indefinable in the tone strikes him, confirms a rumour; he’s going to owe Miriam a tenner.

        ‘And Abigail? Is she all right?’

        Peter took her home. Yes.

        ‘So they got us out?’

        Yes. Peter went in. As planned. He had to work damned fast. It was breaking up – Molly did well to hold it together. Abigail – Nightingale passes his hand over his downturned face and raises it, hollow-eyed. If she’d been on the other side of the door when the shock hit, she’d have been killed. But as soon as the line went dead, she offered Molly her blood.

        Through the professional lens he was born with, crystal-chill as a splinter of ice in the eye and unclouded by compassion, he observes: if someone ever really wanted to hurt him, he hasn’t made it difficult to see how.

        Molly refused, as I’d warned her, though the new blood would have held it longer … They all showed extraordinary courage.

        ‘Yes. What happened – to you? There at the end.’

        I might ask you the same question. I did say not to rush off and do anything valorous.

        Incredulously, he detects in this a note of amusement, genuine or deliberate, not reflected in the dimly-lit face. ‘I thought that was the rule for the first half,’ he says, to answer the gesture, ‘and after that it was Billy Big Bollocks all the way. No?’ He coughs once, beginning to feel it in his throat, and says in a different voice, ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I thought you were dead.’

        Nightingale, for the first time in a while, is looking at him. When?

        ‘When that glass thing – hurt your hand.’

        Automatically Nightingale spreads his hands before him and, turning them, looks them over. Some inextricable neural connection, how his lips part to speak every time, though he is sensibly saving all his breath for breathing. There seems to be some discrepancy. I went to make an initial assessment. I – stepped back.

        Whatever else Nightingale might be, a deep well of unknowns, he does not think he would lie from pride or pique. He says, watching, ‘I thought I saw you fall.’

        I stepped back to – collect myself – I thought for only a moment. When I looked up you were at the top of the hill. I called to you – started after you. But you had taken the glass and gone. Nightingale’s gaze is still on his hands, now joined absently together; their knotted lengths of bone and vein in shadow are the rope-net hands of an old man.

        You seemed to vanish. I thought you might have fallen. I went after you down the side. The ash was falling so thickly I could hardly see. I kept calling. All the magic I could use told me that I was alone. Nightingale pauses, a shadow crossing his shoulders, and moves; but for a second time, it is without relevance to himself.

        After a while, Nightingale says with a resuming briskness, That’s the last I remember. Woke in the laboratory. Peter said we hadn’t been far from each other.

        He wonders how Grant had got them out, unresponsive. Not a kindness, to the boy who’d had to jab the Narcan in twice before he was twelve. God help those who believe life will be easier when they’re older. And God help those who don’t.

        When he glances back, Nightingale is leaning with his elbows on his knees again, the bloodstained handkerchief twisted in his hands, his face thoughtful. I suppose you saw that I hesitated … saw yourself, for the first time in the projection, as the commanding officer.

        How slow he is, as tired as this, to unfold the logical consequent. ‘Did you see – things happening to me?’

        One develops, with experience, a certain intuition for illusion. But yes; from the beginning.

        He looks away, this time, in a kind of self-defence. He says, finally, ‘You can’t go on with it being only you. Logistically. Grant’s good. But you’ve got to have more backup than that.’

        Nightingale gives what might almost be a laugh, which ends with the handkerchief pressed to his mouth; though not for long. ‘Yes, well,’ he says, when he has raised his face again, ‘ars longa.’

        When he’s slept long enough to be compos mentis, he’ll regret this: so he’d better say it fast. ‘Look, I’ve got … There’s a DC from Kingston who came to see me, a few months back. Heard the Falcon rumours. She wants in.’

        However he had imagined Nightingale’s response, it was not this: at once gone still as a hare in the shadow, the colourless eyes tinted chameleon-warm by the low incandescent light, almost apprehensive.

        After the moment of decision, the momentum always carries him. He says, ‘Danielle Wickford. Twenty-seven. Four years on. Good record. Good eye, level head. Persistent.’ He had ignored her every message, til she stood in his office door. ‘Wanted to know what I could confirm or deny. Wanted to know how she could get involved. I told her I’d get back to her.’ This is, technically, true; though Nightingale could guess the tone in which he had said it. But he must guess, too, what had changed his mind.

        He shifts and rolls his shoulders, which unpretendedly hurt like buggery, and resettles his hands, ensuring that his sleeves are raised a little, like a maiden displaying an ankle. You don’t get where he has got by the refusal to make use of everything you can; or to see the need and fill it. He looks Nightingale in the eye and says, with the full weight of what they have survived behind him, ‘It would be good for him to have the responsibility.’

        For an instant, in that uncanny half-lit quiet, he could think Nightingale flinches; a blink, a trick of the light. But then, holding his eye, Nightingale nods; and a moment later, looking away, says easily enough, I can’t promise anything. Interest is no guarantee of aptitude, in magic as in the rest of life. But we’d be glad to meet with her.

        A natural silence, with the rain on the roof. This would be the moment, his aims largely achieved, the most urgent concerns addressed, his own strength at an end, Nightingale with his nerves and breathing raw, to get up and in mercy say good night.

        But his motive power is not compassion: and more fool you, should you ever forget it.

        He says, ‘Why did you step back?’

        Watching for a recoil, what he sees is a stillness, a tensed shift in the muscle and bone of the face, as he had seen once before. Half his work has always been letting the other man – almost all men, when it mattered – break his own silence. After longer than most would have waited, Nightingale coughs again and says, in a voice which a cough would suffice to explain, ‘I had – a friend. We grew up together. We were in the war together, briefly, at the end.’

        He wonders, for a passing instant, whether Nightingale means what so many have meant: wonders for the first time what Nightingale has heard of his own private life, whether it would make a difference to the version he is told. But something in the way Nightingale has composed his shoulders tells him that he meant what he said. Which can after all be the harder to bear, when the parting of lovers is proverbial, and the constancy of friends. He has buckled his belt by many beds, and never minded, or never much. But he will bear God the grudge of one particular loss til he meets him; or til what held him together is borne out on the river and dissolves, in the delta, out to sea.

        He has himself looked away, carried onto a track he did not mean to take. He has nearly looked back before he hears Nightingale say, the tremor in the breath pressed flatly out, ‘He took his own life in 1946. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year. He had written. I hadn’t replied. I’ve wondered for – some time – whether if I had pulled myself together sooner, I might have prevented it.’

        He is not inhuman; it is a deliberate suppression, not to speak now, not to look. But breathe with what tenderness you will, the lens will never cloud over.

        Nightingale says as though compelled, the voice half whisper, ‘I thought – at least – he was out of it. I thought that was all. But that desk was his. Couldn’t mistake it. Those hooks – he used to hang things from them, when he was working out some problem. I used to – leave him notes, like that … When I touched that glass I knew the trap had been set by someone who had known him.’

        He holds absolutely still: the stillness of the hunter in the hide. He might be said to have a right to know, as an injured bystander. But in this moment, he has forgot that, since it is not why he asked.

        ‘Not him … the imprint of magic like a fingerprint, you know … no two, ever, alike. But someone he had taught. And that – ’

        He does glance over, this time, and then, unobserved, away. Nightingale, pale about the lips, is longer in getting his breath back than he would like. But at last he hears the thin-drawn voice resume slowly as in wonder, then in horror, ‘That’s the strangest thing. I hadn’t known he had an apprentice. Must have had – for years and years. The echo in the imprint was very strong. As happens with a single master. He always – made out to be working alone. I didn’t recognise the rest of the – the distinguishing marks … but it must have been – someone in the Folly – all the time, after – with me, watching me … holding me responsible.’

        It is not mercy: but once he has got what he wanted, he never draws it out. He says, his voice comfortable, almost idle, since it is no more than the commonplace truth, ‘People always look for someone to blame, after a suicide. The parents. The partner. The little sod that pushed them over and took their choc ice when they were five. You’ve seen it. It doesn’t matter.’

        Nightingale’s voice is as though he himself had not spoken, when he says, ‘I thought I had known him. I thought – if I had known anyone, in this life – ’

        The catch in the breath, this time, is unmistakable. But how can you know where your voice will fail you, when you have never before said what you are saying? He thinks, if this goes any further, Nightingale will find it hard to forgive his listener. He wishes he had something else to call him: after years on the ostentatious, grating first-name basis, the only humane form of address left to him is, more or less, ‘You’.

        Not in compassion, not in compunction, not in anything the soul’s most generous accounting could class as unselfish, he says as brusquely as though interrupting, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, enough. You’ve told me. That’s enough. Go to bed,’ he says, with an impatience, not wholly feigned, a little short of command. ‘I’ll go. Just – have done. Lie down.’

        The dim bare wall opposite the bed, white or cream-coloured, finely cracked at the joining with the ceiling: supplying not much in the line of contemplation, while you’re waiting. He can hear the chair moved out, and replaced with irrelevant care at the desk; hears Nightingale, at length, rearranging his breathing. He is on the point of judging it all right to look, and leaving, when he feels the bed shift with what he first assumes is Nightingale sitting down on the edge; then realises he’s got in to the narrow space that was left.

        He glances down in surprise, still with his arms about his knees; Nightingale lying with his back to him, still wrapped in that odd jumper, with the covers pulled up over all but a hand and wrist and turned-away face; ear and nose and hollow of cheek, worn lines about the closed eye. If his own mouth moves, noting the distribution of colour in the face, he doesn’t notice. He does know that he parts his lips to speak, and changes his mind. He has begun to move away, straightening his legs, when the light goes out.

        For an instant he stops in alarm, in case it’s his personal lights. But his vision, obediently recalibrating, doing its best, traces for him the brighter region of the window and a gleam on the glass of the carafe. For a second time he is about to draw away; but very lightly, accidentally or coincidentally, almost imperceptibly, he feels Nightingale’s back resting against his hip.

        He holds, this time at a loss, very still. He had meant what he said. It is his profession and his nature, variously indulged and restrained in his work, to intrude. It has always been a point of honour never, in his private life, to impose himself where he is not wanted. He has very rarely guessed wrongly, as to where he is or is not wanted.

        If Nightingale wants him gone, he can magic the bloody lights back on and say so. The prospect of venturing back out into the unquiet dark of the Folly in search of another cold bed uncontaminated by silica-dust has lost, now that an alternative presents itself, the whole of its very limited appeal. With caution, with a vertical margin of about a millimetre, he eases back until he is lying more or less flat.

        He has taken care not to lose the point of contact, now a little awkwardly between Nightingale’s back and the outside of his own good arm; but after a moment he feels Nightingale shivering, trying to stop and failing, and pulling in failure away. Has the man not heard of the electric blanket, thirty quid at Argos. Then he realises no, of course, they’ve got a bloody chip in. You’d think Molly would bustle in with fifty litres of hot-water bottle. Perhaps she does usually, only tonight she’s still feral. He thinks with a pang of pure exasperation, silly bugger, hold still, and shifts correspondingly after to bring Nightingale’s back and shoulders against the warmth, meaninglessly generous as a coal-plant’s waste heat, of his side.

        An instant’s startled stillness; then the resumption of the harsh, whistling breathing, and the shivering, though it begins to come at longer intervals. With his eyes open in the dark he lies still and listens, astonished, suspicious – always – not unmoved. Unlike any physical contact of his adult life, not being in pursuit or service of affection or diversion; not encouragement; not even consolation. Only a chance collision in a night like a shipwreck, to which, after the dawn allows a return to the world, no one would by choice return again. But here they are each other’s proof: alive, alive; real and free.

        He is just on the verge of sleep when he hears, not long after, Nightingale precede him; the shivering having ceased and the breathing, briefly softened, beginning once out beyond conscious measure to draw in and tighten, hollow and difficult, with an accumulating rattle at the end. A distant sense of apprehension reaches him, begins to recall him: then Nightingale gasps and sits upright, choking and coughing with a note of fear in it that he has not heard before.

        Almost at once this begins to level out, but in a mirrored fear he reaches out blindly and by chance catches Nightingale’s hand. For a second the chilled hand clutches his, reassuringly strong; in unthinking humanness he gives it a hard squeeze back, as you would for the stranger whose face you had never seen, in the dark, in the wreck. Then, recalled to what he intended, he presses his fingers to Nightingale’s wrist; the wrist jerks away irritably, but not before he has felt the pulse leaping and skipping, racing faster than he could count.

        ‘Christ, mate,’ he says, taken aback. He sits up and gropes around with the back of his hand until it presses against Nightingale’s cheek, which makes them both flinch. The last time he’d handled anyone who felt like this, it had been a sixth-former overdosed on MDMA who’d started seizing before the paramedics could get through the crowd.

        Nightingale pushes him and the covers away, an almost panicky edge in the gestures, and has a strategic, determined bad couple of minutes with the handkerchief over his mouth. Then, leaning forward and breathing better than he had been, he whispers something that might be ‘Don’t.’

        ‘Don’t what?’

        Nightingale tries a last throat-clearing cough and, obtaining a surprising access of voice, low and congested but clear enough for radio, says: ‘Don’t expect – normal diagnostics.’ He has the fleeting impression that this was not the original sentence; but Nightingale goes on, sounding weary. ‘It’s not the first time. It’s not – even day-to-day, the range isn’t … it always evens out. I’m all right.’

        ‘You’re still human, aren’t you,’ he says, unconvinced. ‘I assume wizards can die of natural causes like anybody else.’

        ‘Oh, yes, they can,’ says Nightingale, soft as ash in the hand, ‘though nowadays they’re not allowed to.’

        He winces, struck in the dark: not by what he has heard, which he had not had to be told, but by what it will be like for Nightingale to remember having said it.

        ‘Of course,’ says Nightingale, still more lightly, almost dreamily confiding, a forestalling fraction of a second too quickly – remembering already – ‘it does vary, what the causes are … the practice of magic seems to protect against some things, create a susceptibility to others, the longer you’re in the game.’

        He almost laughs aloud. Good God, he thinks, have I got the man to introduce you to. He feels drunk with exhaustion, which unfortunately is how he feels when drunk with drink: still prohibitively, intensely aware of all his problems, and everybody else’s.

        ‘Almost never cancers, except in the blood, but all kinds of deficiencies, sometimes fatal. Empties out the bones … a lot of the best were light as birds when they died. There’s never been a practitioner on record who’s had smallpox, though as a friend of mine in Lhokha used to say, you wouldn’t like to be the first … but all the ones who got scarlet fever when I was young died very quickly. They checked us twice a day at Casterbrook, boiled all the milk … they’d lost a whole generation in 1891.’

        Nightingale is shivering again in what must be fever chills, bundled as he is in wool under heavy covers, and a distant, elaborate quality has come into the husky voice, as well as a certain unconcern for the comprehension of the listener. But he recognises, too, after the decades, this expansive fluency: the way men go on when desperate to talk about anything, anything but what they have done, or what’s been done to them; even or especially when they have just spoken of it, or come too near.

        Nightingale has folded the pillow behind him and subsided, still speaking; like rowing to put some distance in the river, though the current is going your way.

        ‘But more than anything, the real blight of British wizardry, for four or five hundred years, was syphilis … Many still dying in my day. You always knew someone who had it, you simply didn’t talk about it, until one day they didn’t come back … Half the books, for centuries, left unfinished. Magic seemed to speed it up … You can’t imagine now, the brevity, the blindness, the rush to finish what they could, the resignation. All that alchemy … helpless against the infinitesimal.’

        He can. He thinks, that answers one question. Unless you’d gone to ground so deep you didn’t notice. Or unless that is one reason you are shivering with this violence now.

        He says meditatively, matching the tone in counterpoint, ‘No wonder it took until Newton for you lot to get anywhere.’

        Nightingale’s voice is going again, though he keeps clearing his throat to try to get it back. ‘That was part of why we thought magic was on its way out. All the advances. Salvarsan. Nuclear. Moon landings. We never did – anything like that. Too solitary. Jealous – secretive. Too few. Through our own rules, too few … Then too few for – anything. As though it were going because – we’d failed it.’

        Something in the voice, perhaps unfairly always to his ear sounding through its accent mannered and composed, strikes him again as having been spoken impulsively. He thinks, you must be short of confessors, to apply to me. Nightingale has drawn breath to go on and broken into another spell of that miserable, futile treading-water coughing, mouth closed, hand tensed at his side.

        ‘Good for you to be wrong every once in a while,’ he says, not unkindly, into the dark. ‘Sit up. Here.’

        He adds his own pillow to Nightingale’s, all the pillows being Nightingale’s really. Against his better judgement he puts his hand on Nightingale’s back, sharp-spined, radiator-hot. He thinks, another sodding thing to worry about, Grant’s bone density. Guleed’s. Nightingale draws a sudden deep, skittish breath under his palm, and he can feel the crackle in it; then feels the breath as suddenly suspend. He begins to speak, closes his mouth in a grimace, and takes his interfering hand away.

        Nightingale lowers back in cautious stages; then, sounding nearly extinguished like a lowered lamp-wick, says ‘It’s all right. Ia—’; then coughs once and carefully, and says, face turned away, sounding obscurely nettled, ‘I have – amoxicillin – here. In case. Started – tonight. Just need – to wait – for it to work.’

        He thinks with all the layman’s righteous indignation, that’s irresponsible prescribing, you’ll get a bloody superbug. He allows, grudgingly, that the prescriber probably knew what he was doing. ‘Good,’ he says, a little late, aware with reservation and pleasure of Nightingale’s shoulder pressed once more, must have felt the absence as he had, against his own. He ought to have guessed, if Grant had left him. ‘Good.’

        Then, gently, ‘Ian gave you?’

        Ian James Meikle, born a few years before himself to a handsome house looking out over the Sound of Kerrera, put in the papers for the deed poll, public record, at the end of 1979: still has all the bowels he was born with; as for his qalfa, that’s between him and God. There is no reason to press this, save to test his own judgement, making the guess. It is not a personal question: or not personal to him, or he would not have ventured it. No reason, save the obsessive, methodical acquisition of information, the defining habit of his life.

        A short rasping-breathing silence. Then ‘The servant of truth,’ agrees Nightingale, almost as gently: heart uneven, voice calm. ‘Like yourself.’

        While he’s about it, he says: ‘What did you say to Abigail?’

        Nightingale has stopped shivering. The silence this time is longer, and not broken aloud. To remember that I am the past, and she is the future. And that she is too valuable to risk frivolously. This voice, too, is blurred with exhaustion, but level enough. Then, with a sharpening note that might be amusement, might be impatience: Anything else you wished to ask?

        ‘Yes,’ he says automatically: always. He has the sense that he might press a third time, no more. He is taking, accordingly, some care to select his question. Then he registers the change in the breathing, this time better settled, and realises that his chance has gone, for the night and perhaps for ever, since he does not expect to encounter Nightingale in such a state again.

        How much, how much more for what he has heard, he would like to know. If he could move without waking Nightingale, he’d like to write some things down. But without the distraction of conversation he is fast becoming precludingly suffused, drugged, with the drowsy stillness that follows the nearer misses of death through illness or injury: the greatest of the luxuries granted only by chance, since the afterglow of consensual pain and danger, however meticulously arranged, has nothing on the remission of suffering you couldn’t see coming.

        How much the body must want to live, to feel it so profoundly, like the dream in which one receives the revelation irretrievable on waking: the transcendental contentment in which any creature lying beside you is a comrade and a friend forgiven everything; in which the humblest and tattiest cover, enclosing the warmth of your shoulders, surpasses in value cloth-of-gold lined with ermine folded in a jewelled chest or any other pointless treasure that rust and moth consume; and in which to rest in breathing stillness, hurting less than you had been and with nothing chivvying you up again, is the absolute and entire compass and fulness of desire, and to attain it is the only true sufficiency, is bliss.

        Ten minutes later there is a creak as fine as the cry of a bat, and the door drifts open a fraction, as dark outside as in: no good for anything, if your pupils are babyishly round. But she has brushed her hair and regained her composure, and after only one long, confirming glance she closes the door with such cool-skinned control that the latchbolt resumes its place in its recess with no more noise than the last grain in an hourglass, and in the darkness, swift and soundless, passes on.

Chapter Text

        He wakes with a start and a snort in the blue room again: like he’s died in a video game. Morning, unless it’s evening; dim winter light welling below the drawn curtains, clear and cold as a rock-pool. He had left the lamp on when he left the room in the night, but someone, in the interval, has switched it off.

        In the wary stillness of pain and stiffness, he collects his impressions. The house is silent. Bed’s been stripped and changed to faded pink-striped sheets. This time he’s under the covers. The list of people who could have put him there gets worse and shorter all the time. He does not believe he relocated of his own accord, since on none of the occasions he had woken in the night had he considered it.

        Without watch, mobile, or familiar red glow of the tank-like clock radio he’s had since 1987, no ancestral mill-shift intuition had manifested to tell him the time in the dark. Several times he had surfaced with a jolt from scenes better forgotten, and sunk under again in the quiet. Several times Nightingale’s restlessness had woken him, turning, pulling at the covers, coughing in his sleep; once in the grip of some vision flinching and stifling a cry, and then saying something sharp and hushed in a language he didn’t recognise.

        Only the last time he thinks he could guess, the lowest-ebb hour before dawn: recalled from somewhere far in the black depths by Nightingale sitting up beside him, bent forward in the dark having a rough go of it. He had come awake in an instant, hearing it: how the note of impatience had gone.

        He had sat up himself, on the point of decision – nearest phone third-storey hall; at this empty hour should be five minutes once he rang – but at the last instant he had heard Nightingale manage one uninterrupted breath, and then, shakily, still with an frightening, faltering wheeze in it, another. They must both have been counting; at the tenth, Nightingale had drawn his hand across his face and, abruptly, got out of the bed.

        Of all the tricks this the one he might confess to envy, the light called up so easily, visibly unthinkingly, more almost like a familiar spirit than a tool; not how he himself would use it. Perhaps a difference in temperament, perhaps in century, how the lights he has seen Grant produce have always the unsparing cool clarity of diodes, where Nightingale’s have the shimmering warmth of oil burning inside glass.

        The light this time had been summoned dim and minimal as embers in a grate; like in a darkroom, or an army headlamp. He had been able to see almost nothing, in the patterns of red light and shadow across the room; but automatically, pryingly, he had listened. An ordinary sound of water pouring, and Nightingale drinking; a few footsteps; some key or latch turning and a small drawer opening. The room had brightened a little, with Nightingale’s attention to the movements of his hands: tipping out a few-millilitres measure from a small bottle into the shallow water of the glass, the neck of the bottle set against the rim with a chink; an evenness, a care in the gesture that was not a care for quiet.

        Nightingale had first replaced the bottle in its drawer with that slightly contrived attention to order that he has himself observed a certain genre of person to adhere to most conscientiously in adversity, and then drunk down the glass with a shiver, catching his breath. Then he had poured more water and drunk again to rinse the glass; then, unexpectedly, stepped to the wide sash window, turned its claw-lock, and given it a shove that had raised it to its full height, and leaned forwards, almost fallen forwards in the sill to rest on his elbows, head bowed.

        The rain had stopped, though the wet wind was soughing in long risings and fallings, blowing in and ruffling the room’s few soft edges, the clothes on the armchair and the hems of the bedsheet, rinsing round and out again, eddying, sweeping, never stilling. He had not been at an informative angle, from where he had remained sitting up in the bed; but it had seemed to him that the original light had gone, and a silvery-ivory moonlight had been lain across Nightingale’s shoulders, as unmoving in the chill of the wind as a monument. He had heard him draw a longer breath, rattling but managing not to catch, and let it out in stages.

        Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace.

        This time tomorrow it will all be over.

        He had been drawn by what he would have sworn had been the sound of the sea: as though it were so near that he could hear the tumbling of pebbles drawing back in the waves. He had thought, at first, that it must be some trick of the wind, angling between buildings. But on the air that blew in there had come a cold, fresh, clear smell of salt water deeply stirred, borne on a wind with a long, long fetch; and of the smoke of bituminous coal, a scent of his own childhood, which even then had seemed a memory of something lost.

        Not in fear, not in any but the most mild and dreamlike curiosity, he had got out of the bed with a care that was not a care for quiet, and walked round to stand a few paces behind Nightingale, and look past him through the window.

        All who have seen the path that light lays upon the sea knows where it leads. When you see it struck by the sun in the day it is a promise, a reassurance; a glory far away; it washes the vision clear when one has looked away and gone on lighter in heart. This disentangling, scattering beauty, this wild, joyous dissolution, be thou not excepted; but not yet, not yet. But by night the moon brings it so much nearer that you remember a promise is there to be kept; the way lies directly closer and clearer; and looking away from it there is nothing but the all-forgiving, all-forgetting darkness from which none, by mercy, are excepted.

        For a long moment he had only stood and watched the light of the low moon moving on the waves, and taken deep breaths of the salt air; stood and seen, too, the nearness for himself. Then he had put his hand in his shirt-front a moment to warm it; and walked forward, and laid his palm to the back of Nightingale’s bent neck.

        Not in affection, not in encouragement, not even in consolation, he might have spoken; but there are times when to speak first is to seal the silence of the other for ever. It has always been the hardest-won of all his skills, the knowing when to stop.

        Nightingale, out of stone-stillness, had started violently and begun to shiver: as though the life in him had been elsewhere, and recalled. All the same he had said nothing. He had moved his thumb once and gently, almost smoothing; and withdrawn his hand, and gone back to the bed, and waited.

        Long enough for the sheets to have warmed round him again, long enough that he might have slept if he had lain back, before the silver light faded and left the room in darkness, as though a cloud had passed over; though the sky when he had seen it had held only the burnished moon and the intricate drifts of stars, dimming with the beginnings of dawn, still in themselves undaunted, infinite and brilliant as he had never seen them, not even from the hills of his childhood, where you had to clutch the grass or fall into the sky. But when the moonlight had gone, so had the sound of the sea.

        In the dark he had heard the window come down again on its cords; the brass cricket-creak of the claw-latch; Nightingale shivering and sniffling sharply like he’d been out for a walk, coughing muffled against his arm almost carelessly once or twice as though there were nothing much the matter with him. The warm light had resumed in silence, a little late, like the striking of a match.

        The faint-lit face, when he saw it, had brought him the nearest to speaking that he had come. But he had held to what he had decided, and only moved over and gestured that Nightingale should get in to the place where he had been. The indifference of sheer exhaustion, he thought, had precluded question or argument. Nightingale had got in and curled on his side, the light disappearing like a dropped torch; even the shivering ceasing as much from weariness as from received warmth.

        So much would have been mere pragmatic courtesy, like giving one’s seat on the train. But he had turned on his own side and moved to set against Nightingale’s back the bulwark of his own broad shoulders, broad back, broad rear; had stretched himself in the cold sheets into a divider between the door and window and the other side of the bed like Hadrian’s ruddy Wall: as though to say, whatever else wants to try it now must go through me; or as though to say, to say also, something else.

        Like all gestures futile; like all command hollow. But Nightingale had paused in his breathing, and then with a last effort shifted nearer, straightening, aligning the long slack line of back and shoulders to rest against his own; got through a last-straggler shiver; and fallen almost instantly asleep.

        It had been what he intended, and not expected. Half in superstition, half in abstraction, he had waited with his eyes open to the dark for some time; long enough to hear the rain gently resuming, long enough to hear, hardly softened by its veiling, the London daybreak begin, as some listen for birds in the hedgerow: a distant wet screech of tyres; the bang and boom of something heaved into a skip; the bleating of a lorry forced backward into an alley. But these, to him long familiar and as harshly energising as a cup of acrid station coffee, were not what he had waited for: though it was only a few minutes more before the sky had unequivocally lightened, and at last he had pushed back all the covers that he could remove without disturbance – Nightingale, poor bugger, still putting out heat like a banked stove – and had thought, now; now, just for a minute, a rest.

        He would like to know where Nightingale is now. All right. All right. Up. Curtains pushed open. Carriage clock says ten to eight. He steadies himself on the edge of the table with that old familiar hollow-hearted, glycogen-scavenged feeling of the repeatedly broken night. Miriam’s bloody mad, to want a baby: put him through a month of nights like that, he’d be dead and fucking buried by the end of it.

        The nails of his hairy hands, seen in daylight, gleam as though manicured: after a moment of absolute bafflement it comes to him that silica is a polish, as in rock-tumblers. His torn-up wrist and arm, now confoundingly scabbed, appear nonetheless not to have accumulated any foreign matter in the night. The skin of his other arm remains unbroken; but he is unwillingly interested to find that a spectacular mottling and blooming of bruises has come up where he had fallen on the rocks in the projection. His knees, which he tries to treat with the tact and consideration of someone who’s had knees for fifty years, hurt like they’ve been kicked.

        Limping back from the bathroom a little later, teeth brushed and present and correct, hands steady enough to have got through shaving without incident, he finds the bed has been made in his absence, with the jacket and trousers he had worn yesterday pressed and folded with precision at its foot. He picks up the jacket, immaculately clean and smelling faintly of cedar, and by reflex catches what begins to slip from it: yesterday’s shirt folded in tissue-paper inside it.

        He holds this out and stares. The shirt had been a total loss: the left arm torn to shreds from the elbow down, the shoulder ripped at the seam, all the left side pierced with small holes and tears. He distinctly remembers detaching a large blood-glued scrap from his back last night in the bath, like soaking the label off a jar.

        It is now, or again, symmetrical and undamaged, still familiar as the shirt it had been: a sparsely pindotted dark blue cotton, worn thin with the honourable frayings of an old favourite, faded a little where the hem tucks in. It had cost him forty quid in the last millennium. It had been missing the lowest of its acrylic buttons. Now its every button is mother-of-pearl. He moves it in his hands in the light of the window, looking for where the joins, the new material, must surely be: can see nothing, save that where the pindots are not original he can just see that they are stitched instead of woven; each, at the limits of the resolution of his vision, a minuscule eight-pointed star.

        He sinks down onto the edge of the bed, as a shiver passes over him like a shadow; an involuntary, painful wash of comprehending tenderness; the deceptive softness in passing, the implacable force, of a wave of the sea. What he holds in his hands bears the imprint-flash of love concentrated as through a glass into the white fire of terror; radiating still an indiscriminate, devouring gratitude, unearned, unearnable, beyond reason, beyond comprehension. He thinks, with a pain in his chest: you may see him out, girl, no matter what I do. He is tired, you might say, for no more than the obvious, the commonplace to strike him as it does; but he is often tired and almost never would he hesitate to look up, to speak, if anyone should come into the room.

        After a long, blurred moment, he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and watches the wheeling stars, ringed traceries and diffraction patterns that the nerves of the eye make, like magic or anti-magic, any time for the asking, for so long as their cells carry the electricity of life. Then efficiently, expressionlessly, he gets up and dressed, though no longer in any particular hurry: if Molly’s had time for this kind of faff, Nightingale’s fine, or not in the Folly.

        He finds, at the long table in the breakfast room, a single place set and a note weighted by a squat little silver salt-cellar, heavily ornamented, its three claw-footed legs pugilistically bowed; as though to say, I’d like to see anybody try to knock me over.

        Peter will be by at ten for last checks. If all clear, free to go. Nightingale.

        ‘And? And?’ he says aloud, on the ascending, warning note he uses with officers, not always his juniors, who have tried to get past him an insufficient report. Nightingale’s handwriting is the distinctive scraggle of the left-hander who got their little paw whacked with a ruler often enough to change over: one of the vanishing crafts these days, like hat-plaiting. He rereads the note as though, reproved, it might have made an addition, and pockets it crossly, not in his heart surprised. Like Molly, vanishing after the glimpse of the soft underbelly. It is the impulse he would feel himself.

        He goes philosophically down the row of silver chafing-dishes with his plate, his spirits lifting with every cloche. Appetite after incapacity is one of the great sensual pleasures. Almost anything would have served as grist to its mill; and before him is spread everything: everything, as in the uncanny castle of the fairy-story, that he has ever demonstrated a preference for.

        Half an hour later he rises from his chair with prudence and reluctance: one mouthful more and he’ll sink down and snore, despite several cups of strong coffee, like a hibernating bear. ‘Molly, your kedgeree is a national treasure,’ he says to the empty air, the warmest in the Folly and at present infused cosily with wick-fuel, fried bread, marmalade, coffee, stretching his aching back and gazing round: the gloomy, indistinguishable under-exposed oil paintings in their gilt scrolls and mouldings; the high ceiling with its oak-leaf plaster cornices; a transitory, underwatery sunlight through the windows opening wells of brightness along the long white-draped table like places set for angels: dimming and vanishing.

        He turns round suddenly; turns round again. He has the feeling he’s not alone in the room: but if he’s summoned her as intended, she’s not letting on. ‘Molly,’ he says softly to the hesitant light, ‘I hope you’re all right.’

        Once, left alone in the Folly, he’d have searched it. Now, though unafflicted with propriety, he would hesitate to open so much as a drawer. He walks up to Nightingale’s door, wishing it were on the way to something, to confirm his suspicions: open, unlit; set in such exemplary, valedictory order that it spooks him. He wanders down to the chess-board, but she isn’t biting. The glimmering pool of daylight under the atrium wavers, vanishes; comes back up to full intensity, in the deep gloom of the Folly, like stage-lights. He yields to temptation.

        He’s wanted this since the first time he walked in, steps ringing, and heard all the brisk voices echoing. He walks to the centre, raises his face to the skylight and sings the first thing that comes into his mind:

        ‘My ma–ma–aa says I’m reckless, my daddy says I’m wild.’

        It hurts his throat a little, but the return is all that he had hoped: a resonance just shy of an echo, a transmutation in the upper reaches, almost a ringing, a magnification. It is such a satisfaction that he repeats it, laying stone on stone, as is correct to the text. Then he feels like a draught a flicker of cynosure, and his glance alights not on Molly but Grant, walking forward silent in trainers out of the shadow between two pillars.

        Grant dodges his eye, joins him in the centre, and with an unfurling compère’s gesture holds out his hands, tips his face up and fits the crooked keystone like the Empress herself:

        ‘I ai–ai–ain’t good-lookin’, but I’m somebody’s angel child.’

        Embarrassment is fatal and futile. He says, his ordinary voice hoarse, not without enjoyment, ‘Bollocks. You knew you were a handsome bastard from the day you were born. I thought you were coming at ten.’

        Grant’s singing had been a little thin and flat, but not in mockery: only not among his gifts. The faintly camp gesture, too, patently, savingly not an imitation – real or imagined – but an original of that blithe way that young men can have about them when they dwell in perfect certainty of orthodox sexuality. Like the deep shades of rose he favours in trousers and trainers, is wearing, in fact, in well-brushed lambswool, now. His face upturned to the clearwater light of the glass dome is undeniably beautiful, unbelievably young: illuminated with good-natured amusement like the fluorescence in a glowstick at a rave, or a rescue at sea.

        ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I keep telling Abigail to bring her school cello. Give Molly a recital. He did say come at ten. But I wanted to go back to the lab and have a think about it. See what I could get from the evidence. And I do live here,’ says Grant in a voice of dawning remembrance, ‘some of the time’.

        Between two men who made a professional skill of courting under-estimation, you could dispense with the pretences. ‘How is he?’

        ‘All right,’ says Grant, though he turns away to say it, gesturing that he ought to follow. ‘At UCH. Probably all day, if it’s like last time. Maybe overnight. Walid’s got a friend on T8 he wants to take a look.’

        A man who may confidently expect the NHS, too, to reshape around him. Does he, the humble bloody Muggle, perceive the necessity? Obviously. Had he been ready to go with him, in the wee fucking sma’s? So he had. Does he approve of queue-jumping, when your nan can’t get an ambulance? Piss right off.

        ‘He’s not doing it on purpose,’ says Grant unexpectedly, glancing back to his face, and dispensing with the pretences. ‘He always thinks he’s fine until he isn’t. And he doesn’t have a lot of options. He’s tried to get a new NHS number and Computer-said-No, twice. So it’s not straightforward in hospital either. I think Walid has to make out that he’s some sort of foreign diplomat.’

        ‘What!’ he says, stopped in his tracks. ‘He’s going to cause an international incident.’

        He is suddenly happy: transported, diverted with the pellucid happiness that springs from the vision of a really good cock-up, where nobody dies or gets hurt but everyone looks maximally silly and none of it’s his fault.

        ‘What the fuck do they do when there’s a nurse or somebody who speaks the language? It’s the NHS! It’s like the bloody UN. “Ooh, terribly sorry, Gospodin Nightingilovitch is a bit deaf.” And that accent! Minute he opens his gob, nobody’s going to believe him as – Nightingalardi. Nightingellichtenthaler. Nightingolafsson,’ he manages, beginning to cough and sputter like an engine through his laughter, his hands on his bruised knees.

        ‘Monsieur Rossignol,’ contributes Grant: solemnly, though his ears, backlit and delicate in the glow of a wall sconce, have reddened. ‘He gets letters from Strasbourg that say that. He does know a lot of languages.’

        ‘He’s had a governess and a century,’ he says, when he’s got his breath back. ‘Christ. Good luck to them. Hope nobody realises he’s only conversational in Serbo-Croat. What did you get from the evidence?’

        ‘It’s gone,’ says Grant, now leading the way up the stairs at a nicely judged pace: not creepingly solicitous, but not oblivious, either, of the unaccustomed hand on the rail. ‘The bronze samples. And the glass dust. If that’s what it was. That is, it can’t have gone anywhere, conservation of mass, but sublimated or something. Probably still in the screw-top pots, only you’d need a mass spectrometer to see it. But the composition wasn’t the interesting part anyway, it was the forces working on it. The way the bronze was pulling itself together, and now something’s driven it apart. Like reversing the polarity of a magnet. Which is what we wanted, of course, but the result isn’t very informative … No, down the hall.’

        He pauses, with a relief he hopes is not obvious, at the closed door to the laboratory, which he had not specially wanted to enter again. ‘What’s in there?’

        ‘Oh – nothing. It’s just very cold with the window gone.’

        ‘The window?’

        ‘Oh yes,’ says Grant, with a certain familiar astringency: that perfection of mimicry only ever achieved unconsciously. ‘That was all the warning we got. One minute past sunset, and the window blew in. Canvas screens caught it, but there’s still glass all over the floor.’

        ‘Inversion shock,’ he says sagely, just to see what happens; and observes Grant, turning to the next door a second too early, straighten his face.

        ‘Yes. In here.’

        Half the width of the other laboratory, but with more machinery, and fewer battle-scars. Where your probie wizard progressed to, he supposes, after his turn at the hazard table. It’s where Kamara stowed all the glassware, collected on a table to itself at the back; arrayed by ascending height in odd rows, pairs, singles and triples, like a translucent, alien Noah’s Ark.

        The place where he is to sit has, plainly, been arranged beforehand: instruments, solvent-bottles, weighing-boats, and several small, expensive-looking cans of Pure Organic Birch Water. ‘Russian magic,’ says Grant, following his gaze. ‘Though we don’t know if it’ll work, pasteurised. Our advisor’s only ever tried it newly tapped.’

        You wait til they reach the comfortable wittering stage, and then you spring your question. ‘If the evidence has vanished, how are you going to find who did this?’

        Not by sight, deliberately averted, but by professional vibrissae, he registers Grant go still for an instant; and then, with an ease you would not say was pretended, take off and hang up the jumper, and go about setting up his station. A quality most in the Met would rate invaluable, the training from infancy to cover reflexively for his seniors.

        ‘It’s a right pain in the arse, magical crime,’ Grant says, still easily. ‘Your whole scene vanishes. Your evidence vanishes. Your surveillance footage vanishes, or is useless. That reminds me, we ought to take another set of photographs of your injuries … We go back to the address, since at least that’s still there, even minus the allokosmos. Almost certainly won’t get anything from forensics, the state it was in, but we can try. Go through the history of the building.’

        He’ll give Grant this: it’s impossible to tell what Nightingale’s told him. The same principle Grant’s operating on, with himself. Sometimes you get bloody tired of it. But you can’t take it out; like the steel girders of a building: not unless everything’s already in wreckage, as when somebody’s dying. There is no other mode of life, for adults.

        For a moment, from force of habit – and? and? – he considers remarking on the conspicuous omission from the list. But Grant, with or without anyone’s nudge, is going to go through the history of the intended victim. He supposes he had better leave them to it. If Nightingale had wanted time to collect his thoughts, that was one way to buy it. That is, you could see why he would want to make use of it, when you saw what the pause had cost.

        He runs through the options, and then he glances at Grant and, remembering what to call him at the last instant, says ‘Thomas said something about ghosts not being sentient.’

        Grant has an open sort of face, when you’re not leaning on his reflexes. This time, he can see the interest in the changed subject, and the beginnings of some helpfully erroneous conclusions. ‘No. Well. Some aren’t. They’re more like – accidental recordings, most of them. Put your hand on that plate, where the lines are. Thank you.’

        The flat plate is metal, silvery, with incised, concentric measuring-lines that remind him of one of those shoe-measuring devices; but it is the open bed of what seems like a scale, with a separate back-plate for other inexplicable hardware. He watches, with submerged amusement, Grant notice the shine of his fingernails, and wisely reserve comment. Grant presses a miniature lever, and a spring-loaded striker rings a tiny bell.

        ‘Other hand. Thank you.’ The chime is the same. ‘You can take your hand away. I don’t know that I’d say they weren’t sentient, though I see why he’d have put it like that. They’re like film loops that can talk. Like something you’d have in a museum. You can see them for a moment, it seems like they see you, but you just know there’s not a full person there.’

        ‘Would they know anything you hadn’t told them?’

        Grant pauses, perceptibly thinking it through, deep and quick and inward: all the intuitively sensed fulness of a person; a journeyman in a craft he himself cannot fathom, an officer whom he has judged ready for command. ‘Not that hadn’t been part of their life. They don’t seem to have any mystical access, if that’s what you’re asking. Mostly worried they’ve left the kettle on. Careful not to touch this.’

        A small brown-paper parcel about the size of a deck of cards, tied about and wound round over and over with twisted gold wire, that Grant, apparently permitted to touch it barehanded – though he’s put his sleeves back – is gingerly setting on the plate. This time the chime of the bell is a thin, shrill wave, fading over and over again before it’s finally gone. There is something uneven and discordant in the sound that he doesn’t like; Grant, though determined to take no notice, has shivered once like a plucked string.

        ‘What is that?’

        ‘Something with a curse on it. A control. Nightingale said it should be perfectly safe as long as I didn’t open it.’

        ‘But what is it?’

        ‘Don’t know,’ says Grant, with a gleam in his eye. ‘Haven’t opened it.’ And then, generously relenting, putting the parcel in an enamelled dish on a high shelf and beginning to disassemble the device, ‘Abigail’s the one you want to ask about ghosts. They were her specialty, for a while.’

        In the last week, for the first time in his life, he has begun to think he might some day ask about it; though not of the girl, or of present company. He says, conversationally, ‘How is she?’

        ‘Well cross,’ says Grant, with feeling. He has cracked open two cans of Pure Organic Birch Water and poured one and a half into a beaker, and is unabashedly referring to what appears to be a printed-out email thread as to what to do next. ‘Home safe. She was meant to be on req anyway. On break. They did it at his school.’

        More measuring and mixing like a haute cuisine cocktail, stirred with what is either a magic wand or a porridge spurtle. A brief infusion of cool light, flickering and fading. Grant’s voice has slowed and eased, like anybody given work to do with their hands. ‘Four weeks active magic, two weeks strictly theory, so they had time to adjust to the practice. Like muscle fibres, you know, how you have to have a rest in between. I’m still supposed to be on six-on, one-off, but it’s like clockwork, you get to the seventh and something turns up … There.’

        Grant, making no effort to conceal that the pleasure of success has come as a surprise, shows him: the mixture, tipped into a shallow straight-sided glass pot on the slate-topped counter, looks like nothing so much as newly poured washing-up liquid, clear and dense with unmoving bubbles. But then Grant taps the side of it, and the surface shimmers quick as though thinner than water, though the bubbles hang fixed in their places; and then lays the length of his hand alongside it on the counter, not touching.

        At first he doesn’t see it: then it seems almost like the glimmering of stars. He has to lean forward, closer than he’d like, to see the tiny crystals forming and dissolving to enclose the bubbles, again and again. It is the conscious suspension of his own breathing that leads him to realise that the pattern has human timing; the unhurried beat, he would guess, of Grant’s heart.

        ‘It sounded as though it was going to be a bit more obvious,’ says Grant with interest, looking at the last page of the printout again. With his hand withdrawn, the birch-water, or whatever it is now, has stilled. ‘So either it’s weaker because the sap’s been stored for ages, or because of operator error. Or both, probably. You try. Left hand first.’

        For a moment, long enough for the mid-morning noise to reach them as though from far away through the closed single window, they both watch; the crystallisation a little quicker in tempo than the response to Grant, not otherwise dissimilar.

        He has changed hands in silence, when Grant says with an odd note in his voice, clearing up the reagents on the counter with what could not, in a laboratory, be called a contrived attention to order:

        ‘They’re not just for not getting cauliflower brain, those breaks. She’d never. She’s a fanatic about that logbook. It’s all the rest of it. She’s doing more theory than they ever did, to hear him tell it. More than he ever learned himself. And she does it all the time, on req and off. And thirteen GCSEs on top of it. Of course her parents – are proud. But she’s going to wear herself out.’

        He himself is quiet, hands on his knees, going through the file of his knowledge: some documented facts, some gossip. It is his business, indelicate, incessant, necessary, to know everything about everybody. You could do that in Broadbottom. Harder in Belgravia. But the girl falls within his sphere.

        He is on the point of speaking when Grant says, his voice low and preoccupied, still watching the work of his own hands, ‘I don’t want her to end up like Nightingale.’

        Twenty-odd years ago, at Grant’s own age, his face would have betrayed his astonishment. This is a development, from the man he has spent the last four years wishing did not look upon Nightingale as God or worse. This is the moment to stop.

        He says, instead, gently, ‘How do you mean?’

        Grant, whose grimace expresses the wish that either of them had stopped, is visibly on the point of saying something like, tragically unhip. And then, as visibly, he decides to live up to the part he had played yesterday, or to the ramifications of a rumour; and says, equally softly, ‘Isolated.’

        For the sake of keeping his face averted, for the sake of staying in motion, Grant reaches up for the white enamelled dish containing the fuck-knows-what, and aligns it carefully alongside the glass pot. The angled beam of the bench-lamp clipped to the lower shelf catches, between and under the eyes, what the diffused light under the atrium had not. But it illuminates, also, a kind of wry willingness, having committed himself; and his voice is almost unguarded as he goes on, still gazing out into the future, as though out to sea.

        ‘By skill. By the kind of time you have to put in. And by choice. Eventually not by choice. Living in the past … always thinking about the harm she couldn’t prevent, and not all that she’d stopped happening. Or of all the good she’d done.’

        And then, startled, ‘Oh, fuck!’

        In the same instant, they have both registered the smell of burning. The surface of the birch-water has heaped up a mass of long-needled crystals beginning to spark and blacken, along the side of the pot beside the curse-dish, as though someone’s got a blowtorch to it. For a second both of them scan the room with the rapid, emotionless assessing gaze that can be instilled in almost anybody, given training. He himself has moved for the fire-blanket on the wall, but Grant, familiar with the space, has beat him to it: withdrawing a pair of crucible tongs from a pigeonhole he unhesitatingly clamps the pot, lifts it across the room’s central aisle, and drops it into a deep steel sink filled with water, where it fizzes and cracks.

        The look Grant directs into the sink is accusatory; the look he directs up at the ancient double-belled heat and smoke detector is the guilty, outraged look of the justly accused, though it hasn’t said anything. There is no visible smoke, just a faint burnt-sugar smell, quite pleasant really. By the time Grant’s glance comes round to him, it has acquired a distinct world-weariness. Not wholly unsympathetically, he is about to laugh: someone had told him once that Grant could set a water spell on fire. Then he remembers who it was, and stops.

        Grant, watching with one of the assessments that can’t be taught, grins at him suddenly and says ‘It’s true. You’ll notice I had the sink standing ready.’ And then, beating him to it, begins to laugh.

        He glances away, half smiling, reconciling some conflicting impulses of expression. No such thing, he supposes, as true mind-reading. Only that some jokes are easy to guess, when you’ve walked bang into them. And some desires, or memories.

        He looks back and meets Grant’s eye, and recognises among the lingering lines of amusement the reflection of his own thought: if they’d had that trick up their sleeves four years ago, how much harm might have been prevented. The bullet in Nightingale’s back, not far from the spine. They didn’t see her in the projection, but that doesn’t mean she’s still alive. For an instant he almost says, Peter, I’m so bloody sorry. But nobody’s ever going to be sorrier than Grant. Coals to Newcastle. Quicksand to Essex.

        He says, instead, gently, ‘Thomas is less isolated than he was.’

        Grant must be tired, for his face to show for an instant how he has been moved by no more than the commonplace, the obvious. He watches him glance away to recalibrate, probably preparing some joke; to forestall this he says, in nearer to his usual register, ‘Thank Abigail for me, when you get a chance. I see what you mean. But her quickness saved a lot of time, and it was down to the fucking wire at the end.’

        Grant looks a little tired, if you’re looking for it, when he turns back; but at ease again, with a lightness, a reserved self-command that, though familiar, is not mimicry. ‘Oh, I will,’ he says, smiling; rolling his sleeves down, and beginning to fasten without looking the shining button at one narrow, strong-corded wrist. ‘But you may well see her again. And then you can tell her yourself.’

Chapter Text

        The cellar-spider is where he left it, leading its exiguous, incomprehensible life. He stows his provisions, serenades his shower, slathers a fire-hazardous quantity of Sudocrem over his wounds and goes to bed at five in the evening, initiating his infallible protocol: hottest shower he can bear, sixteen hours’ sleep; plate of scrambled eggs, three oranges, litre of builder’s tea, one episode of the earlier Tom Baker seasons; back to sleep: iterate as necessary. This regimen has restored him after shingles, influenza, several bad funerals, a ruptured appendix, and the watched-for, caught-early beginnings of sepsis from the stab with the none-too-clean knife. He won’t hear a word against it.

        The protocol, and the constitutional hardiness of a Welsh Black bullock, get him over whatever he picked up from Nightingale in short order: a passing tender throat and a snuffle. Trivial, unless you have the hubris to treat sleep and breathing as soft options for lesser beings. Or unless, in justice, you have lost half the capacity of one lung to scar tissue, and you are aged one hundred and sixteen.

        He has a minimal exchange of messages, the second day, with Grant. Overnight twice. Home safe. Well cross. Returning to his mobile for no particular reason a few hours later he finds something quite different: NHSBooking: Hello ALEXANDER, this is a reminder for your upcoming appointment with IMAGING on ... Tomorrow. He nearly texts back CANCEL, blankly, before the penny drops. Then he nearly texts back CANCEL on principle; but thinking with a revising, grudging sympathy of Nightingale, decides in the end to accept.

        It takes all bloody day at Barts: an ordinary X-ray and CT of his arm and shoulder and some extraordinary space-age investigations of his heart, which tell him some things he doesn’t want to know and one he does, which is that there aren’t any foreign bodies in it; only a lot of slightly reformulated suet. He walks out into the darkening late afternoon, rattled; stops in for a number-three haircut just to stare down the mirror: he’d like to see anybody try to knock him over.

        Fine. Fine. All at once, that evening, everything aches like he’s a hundred and fucking sixteen, and he’s as tired as he’s ever been. Fine. He is still on leave; he’s got it to burn. He reiterates the protocol, and is sufficiently revived to have a very improbable dream about Jeremy Chau, from which he wakes ruefully amused as he has not been in years. For a lunatic, lingering instant he considers sending the man a message – Dear Jeremy, come up and read me a phone book. Trade you some intel on wizard diseases. Wear a kilt – and then, snorting aloud, files the thought. If the fates cast them again in the same room, he’ll try his luck. He has been lucky, as it happens, so variously and so thoroughly over the years that he has nothing else left to prove or try; though he is amenable, always, to suggestion.

        He sends an experimental postcard. He goes to a shop on Baker Street, and spends a long time looking. His fingernails (and toenails) still have, four days on, a rosy shine like tellin-shell, though he cherishes the hope that they are dulling.

        And then, on the fifth morning at dawn, he opens his eyes with a certainty: as sometimes happens, when beyond his conscious mind the implacable engines of his intelligence have been sorting and sifting and joining his evidence, his intuitions and his suspicions, for more than one night. It is nothing he has dreamt, or remembered; though it has been a long time since he has allowed himself to remember, as, lying still in the warmth and quiet and watching the tide of the light rising on the wall, he does now.

        How the lost return, when you would rather they stayed lost: recalled in the friend or stranger’s glance, in the shape of a gesture, a turn of the head, the grace in the turning. How long you can hold, a kind of blinding jealousy, to the idea that with the one you have lost was their every distinctness extinguished, across all humanity: never again this quickness, this deliberation, this provocation, this joy. As though any human quality could be lost from the world, til all the seas run dry.

        How far the distance grows, until you can only turn your head to look back along the river: the glance the only possible offering, knowing before looking that you will no longer see. A shock to realise, a few years ago, that he has lived as many years after as he had before; though it should hardly have surprised him, since they had been children when they met.

        He had been eleven, just. Sim had been ten. A bright, crisp Saturday morning in June: he had been out on an errand for his mother, though he would have denied this to the death, when he had seen Rob Perry scuffling somebody down a ginnel like a dog that had got a pigeon. Couldn’t see who, but almost nobody Rob hit ever deserved it, which made him satisfying to hit in turn, most everybody else his own age off-limits on account of being smaller.

        (How he misses, inadmissibly, the justice he used to dispense, at ten, eleven, thirteen, sixteen. You couldn’t get away with it now, even at ten; get mixed up with all those bloody agencies, get a record. But no one had seemed much to have minded, at least never reported, the kind of meddling he’d done: break up the school fights and get scratched and kicked, slashed once – scar to prove it – for his trouble; crouch with heart racing in the dark til that creep been bothering our Katy sloped out the local, knock the breath from his lungs with a knee to the clackers, yelling You go near her again I’ll bite yer fuckin ears off. Where in God’s name had he got that one? Worked, though.)

        He had shouted and got Rob by the collar, shoved him against the wall, seen him off; then turned to find a stranger, a scrawny boy in a track jacket with a smudged, unmistakably tearstained face who stared shocked at him, wavering on the verge of a roulette-wheel of expressions, and then said in a proper Manc accent, ‘Excuse you, I was obviously winning’ and burst into uneven, beats-the-alternative laughter.

        Sim, now that I think of it, I never saw you look as uncertain as that again. Only the bitten nails showed it, and then the cigarettes. The perpetual motion, the ambition: the kind of plans that when you told people about them, they laughed; then stared. But you had it all worked out: you could always do in two years, a year and a half, what would take anyone else three. How easy to say in retrospect, like you knew you didn’t have time.

        God knows, the rest of us lived expecting it. Me and your mother being fucking terrified every time you and your mates went out to Maine Road to pick a fight with the National fucking Front. Me being fucking terrified every time you went out at night in case one of Anderton’s lot picked you up, or in case you got carried away and forgot what you had in all your jacket pockets. Me and your brothers being fucking terrified every time you went for a pint or so much as down the chippy, the way you could set off a row like an avalanche, about Thatcher or the bloody weather: how they used to joke, oh, where’s our Shimel got to? Just listen for the shouting match, the smashing glass, the whole place in bedlam, and you’ll find him sat in the centre of it all watching, coy as the cat got the cream.

        All those years on the tightrope, all those plates you were spinning, adding more all the time and never a wobble, and you died safe in bed one night because your landlord was too fucking tight-arsed to get a real gas engineer to put in the new boiler. You and three other bright lads. THE DANGERS OF CHEAP STUDENT FLATS, that fucking newspaper had said: like it was some natural hazard you could have avoided if you’d wanted, like a stroll on the bloody Broomway. Like there wasn’t the man still out and walking who had killed you.

        How easy it would have been to carry out the sentence: turn up in uniform, close the door behind him, lull the man with flattery; tell him he was an important witness, essential. Then suffocate him. See if he knew why. Man was half his size, by the driving licence. No fingerprints, no marks. He still believes that he would have got away with it. By now, he almost believes that he would not have done it.

        But he had driven out to the address from the licence, once; not in uniform, no equipment. You could say, for no reason; save that it was the nearest he could bring himself to visiting a grave.

        A cool, empty Sunday morning in June: early sun dappling the pavements through the poisoned, persisting urban trees; the streets quiet as aftermath. He had straightened his newly minted sergeant's shoulders, set his hands to the wheel and stretched—

        I see it is just as I warned you, Sim’s voice had said, acid and exact as it had ever been in life, about the effects of state power upon the immortal soul.

        He had frozen in the stretch, hardly breathing, a freak-accident receiving antenna not to be jostled. ‘He killed you,’ he said, finally. He had tried to refrain from even peripheral vision, in case that was too much to ask.

        I know, said Sim, in his old so-much-was-bloody-obvious tone. I noticed. But it cannot be undone. Do you not think I have the right to turn the hand that would avenge me? What makes you think I would ever fucking want the offering of a civilian casualty? After everything you know about me? Alexander, do not become this.

        The breeze had changed the patterns of the tree-light, and in the unmoving air of the car he had shivered with such painful violence that he had been afraid of losing the connection. That must have been, he supposes in hindsight, his appendix giving it up as a bad job, which it had taken him a foolishly long time to recognise; a pity, or a mercy, you can’t learn from that mistake, do better next time. At the time, he hadn’t noticed much out of the ordinary: when he thought about some things, he always felt cold, and his stomach always hurt.

        Do you think you have to be born evil? Do you think that since you were not, you are preserved? This time, Sim’s voice had gone on, you think, ah, he hasn’t got a wife and children, so I can do what I like. Next time you think, ah, he’s got a wife and children, I can do something with that.

        A pang of intimately familiar exasperation had gone through him like a spear. Any time you disagreed with Sim he would at length say pityingly, I expect you think that … Which was usually, more or less, what his interlocutor thought. Which was no good, as a technique in argument, it made the poor sod he’d outmaneuvered, viz usually himself, dig his heels in. Which made every point a mortal grapple. It was a wrench of acute frustration he had expected never to feel again.

        ‘It isn’t justice. What’s happened to him. Sod-all. After four dead.’

        Why do you think justice only means equal harm? And how would you exact that? Kill him four times?

        He had said, like a child, like an idiot, his voice nearly failing him, ‘They just let him go free.’

        So the law is a sieve, a shadow. Is this a new idea? Did I get nowhere with you?

        Sim’s voice, but not only Sim’s voice: not an intrusion but a multiplication, an infinite depth of field like in a chamber of mirrors, where some reflections are bright-winged, some dark. Sim’s familiar impatience, but not only Sim’s; as your fate would speak to you, or what is behind your fate, that you cannot turn and look at directly: except at the very end, when you are turned to stone, or salt, or ash, and all that happens after happens without you.

        Where the law fails us is where we recognise justice, which is the good that cannot be compelled. Which is not smothering some pensioner. Do you think, in the chaos, all you are meant to do is extinguish? How could you think I would want this? Did you never know me? Alexander, Sim had said, with a gathering charge like the hum of electricity nearing capacity, like a note joined and held by a choir, do not do this.

        About the sealed sphere of the car the wind had risen again, and chilled him as though it had touched him. His ears had rung; his vision had glittered and overflowed with light. He remembers, even now, how bodily afraid he had been: sore afraid, like a layman before the pressure vessel of a nuclear reactor.

        He had said, finally, ‘No. No. I knew. I do know. You got through. Then and now.’

        He had had a sense, in response, of something on a sweeping scale disintegrating, shimmering, releasing and receding, in a current flowing and dividing around him; he had let his eyes go out of focus, blurring, and tried to gather and transmit without words all of what he never had put in words while they both had lived.

        I know, Sim had said, sounding then like only himself; as softly, as easily as he had only ever once, in the dark, heard him speak. I noticed. But it cannot be undone.

        Only a cloud passing over the sun, that all before him had then gathered in and dulled and darkened in an instant. But when a beat later the world had flared to brightness again he had been alone; though a shaft of brilliant light had pierced through the leaves to lie for a long moment in a blazing bar across his wrists, almost with a weight that held them on the wheel; and through til dawn that night in the Royal Infirmary he could feel, with a faint warmth as of a burn, where it had been.

        He has thought, a few times over the years, that he might have felt an echo of it again: but he thinks now, as then, that those had been only the jangling of his own mind and nerves, casting about in their knots and tensions, looking for direction. He has told himself, more than a few times, it never happened: it was fucking peritonitis and a temperature of forty degrees; you had pink elephants, that’s all, and bloody lucky you didn’t drive into a lamp-post.

        He has never, until now, been able to believe simultaneously what he now believes: that he had been alone in the car; but that, past denying, it had happened. Whatever had opened the channel – the electrical errors of the brain with some fuses flipped, overheated, shorting with circulating poisons; or the touch of what he must at last allow there is no better name for than magic – the direction had come through, insistent and compelling, and turned him in its current; turned his whole life.

        He would not have believed it, that it could be a comfort to think it had been himself speaking, himself accusing; himself knowing what Sim knew. Better the awful accuracy of memory, even the loneliness of mimicry, than the imprisoning accident, beyond his capacity to amend. Better, though it has taken him decades to believe it, to have the stillness, the peace of absence, than the tormenting expectation of meeting again.

        How it is not loss that takes the longest to accept, but persistence; how the lost remain, indivisibly, most imprinted where most missed, in your own glance and gesture; in the turn and direction of your gaze, and of your will.

        The daylight has filled the room as far as it can, amidst the wind and the hurrying clouds in the silver sky; for a moment moving a little on the walls and ceiling, like a brimming fountain; and fading as softly as a note in music.

        After the moment of decision, a lightness: as the keel of a ship drags on the rocks and then lifts with the rising water, and willing or resisting gives its weight over, and is free.