End of the World Blues (31 page)

A Saturday crowd came and went, deals were done, four girls went to the bathroom together and came out looking much happier. Money or drugs seemed the obvious answer to
what
Kit was expected to produce. A bar in South London was the
where
. In Japan, kidnapping was the preserve of hardcore criminals. Over here, Kit wasn’t sure, maybe amateurs got in on the act as well. He needed someone who would know.

When his mobile buzzed he got her.

“You’ve been looking for me?” It was Amy, her voice guarded enough to give Kit pause.

“Look,” said Kit, “I need some help.”

“Yes,” Amy said. “I enjoyed supper too.”

I enjoyed?

In the background behind Amy, a printer was clattering and half a dozen men discussed flack jackets, raising their voices to be heard above the noise. It sounded like any office, apart from the number of times
Guv, Ma’am,
and
Boss
got dropped into the conversation. A conversation that stumbled when Amy said, “No, there’s nothing I need to tell you…”

Someone sniggered. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a domestic spat.”

“Shut the fuck up,” snapped Amy, remembering to add, “sir.” Unless that was meant to be part of the insult.

Oh shit, indeed.

“I’m at work,” said Amy. “Call me later.”

“This can’t wait,” Kit told her. “I need to know about Ben Flyte. Everything you’ve got.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever’s taken Neku thinks that’s who I am.”

“Unlikely,” said Amy. “Ben Flyte’s dead.”

“He’s what?”

“Murdered,” she said. “Six months ago. We just haven’t released the news. If I call you back it will be in five minutes. Go somewhere private.”

A courtyard behind the Queen’s Head was stacked with metal barrels and mixer crates full of empty bottles. Its walls were high enough to muffle traffic from the street beyond. No one stopped Kit when he walked through the kitchens and took up position against the wall.

“Kit,” he announced, answering his phone on the first ring.

“I’m sorry,” said Luc.

“For what?” Lady Neku had never met anyone like the boy for apologising. He’d been sorry about tripping on the stairs, although she got in his way, rather than the other way round. He regretted taking up her time and not wanting to practise with Nico, Petro, and Antonio in the duelling room. Now he was apologising again. Hadn’t anyone ever told him never apologise and never explain?

“What am I sorry for?” said Luc. “I’m sorry for everything.”

Lady Neku laughed. “You can’t be,” she said. “No apology would be long enough.” She watched him think that through.

“You’re not what I expected,” Luc said finally.

“Really…what did you expect?”

Oh God,
thought Lady Neku. Now she’d embarrassed him. They were loitering in a corridor that led from the duelling room to the archives, which was an old name for an area now mostly given over to rubbish.

“Antiques,” her mother called them. “Heirlooms.”

Rubbish all the same.

“I don’t know,” said Luc. “Someone…”

“Weirder?”

He grinned at that. “How long do you think they’ll be busy?” Luc asked, glancing at the entrance to another corridor. One that led to the throne room, where Lord d’Alambert and Lady Neku’s mother were locked in discussion. It amused Lady Neku that Luc had such trouble orientating himself in her habitat. A lifetime of exploring corridors and levels had imprinted a mental map into her subconscious. Unless, of course, it had been imprinted earlier and she’d been born with the thing.

“Hours, I guess,” said Lady Neku. “Maybe days if my mother is feeling difficult. It depends how much negotiating they have left to do.”

Luc looked shocked. “What’s to negotiate?” he asked. “The major domos agreed everything in advance.”

Lady Neku was about to say this was the first she’d heard of it, only she’d been saying this a lot recently and it worried her to discover Luc knew things she didn’t, so she swallowed her comment.

“Come on,” she said instead. “I want to show you something.”

“What?” demanded Luc. He was still asking when Lady Neku reached the drop zone. A dozen opalescent pods sat gathering dust, while the thirteenth was already releasing its door.

“Get in,” Lady Neku said.

“You’re joking…”

“Why would I do that?”

As Lady Neku watched, the door sprang open and its inner membrane began to nictate. The pods liked to do these things for themselves, so Lady Neku made herself wait. Once door and membrane were open, Lady Neku reached for a grab bar and hauled herself inside, sitting patiently while the pod grew straps.

“Yuck,” said Luc, watching sticky tendrils tie themselves tight around Lady Neku’s upper arms and shoulders.

“It brushes off,” she promised. “Come on, climb in.”

Luc did, reluctantly, only realising too late that he should have entered from the other side; after all, that was where the pod had grown a door for him.

“It’s okay,” said Lady Neku, as Luc began to climb down. “Just clamber over me…and hold tight,” she added.

Luc was about to say something when the door membranes finished regrouping, both doors sealed, and the floor fell away, turning the pod a hundred and eighty degrees, before releasing it towards the planet below; which had suddenly become the planet above.

“Warned you,” Lady Neku said.

Slow entry speeds were essential. Even so, the friction on the falling pod was sufficient to ionize its surface and create a luminous bubble that trailed colours behind them like a broken rainbow.

“Is this safe?” said Luc, looking at dials that had begun to spin wildly.

Such a child.
Did he really think pods came with dials on the original spec? Lady Neku considered admitting the dials had been her idea and she’d demanded needles that spun, but decided not to bother.

“Well,” she said. “This is my tenth drop and I’m still alive.”

Luc didn’t seem to find this comforting.

After a while, Lady Neku flicked out the wings and had the pod roll through another hundred and eighty degrees, changing her descent to a wide spiral. The forces on her body felt more natural that way.

Cracks in the earth became ruined towns and those towns expanded to reveal districts and finally roads and even houses. Only the very largest buildings could be seen from this height, but half of one town was obviously buried by sand and an earthquake had ripped another across its edge like badly torn paper.

“Welcome to Katchatka Segment,” said Lady Neku. “Glory of Planet Earth.” Leaning forwards, she brushed one finger across the window and sat back as a living town spread itself across glass.

“Shit,” said Luc. “What’s that?”

“History,” Lady Neku said, removing the town with another brush of her finger. “What used to be…how old are you really?” she asked.

“Sixteen,” said Luc, sounding offended. “You know that.”

“And me?” She was going to have to do something about his habit of changing colour. Luc couldn’t keep turning pink at every question, or her brothers would never leave him alone.

“Fifteen,” she told him. “I’m fifteen.” Lady Neku paused. “Do you believe that?”

Luc nodded. “What’s not to believe?”

“What if I’m a copy?” said Lady Neku. “Then how old am I?”

Luc looked at her.

“Okay,” said Lady Neku. “Think about it…Fifteen, plus the age of my mother when the copy was made. Right?”

The boy shrugged.

“But what if my mother was a copy, then how does it work? My age, plus her age when I was copied, plus the age of her mother when she was copied? That would make me…” Lady Neku began shuffling numbers in her head, only to abandon her sum when the pod caught the outer edge of a massive dust cloud.

“Turbulence,” she said. “You might feel sick.”

“I already do.”

As she grinned, Lady Neku watched Luc make himself release his grip on the chair; he minded her noticing his knuckles had gone white.

“Don’t worry,” said Lady Neku.

“I’m not—” Luc caught himself. “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “We’re falling out of the sky in a pod the size of a large table and we don’t seem to have an engine.” He looked at her. “We do have a Casimir coil, don’t we?”

“No,” said Lady Neku, shaking her head. She’d have shaken it whatever the answer, but for once the truth was on her side. The pods were strictly one use only and that was down.

“Oh fuck…” Luc’s voice was small.

Come on,
Lady Neku wanted to say.
How can you miss it?
Surely Luc had spotted Schloss Omga by now. It was that enormous castle crawling up the side of a mountain.

“Luc,” she said, and when Luc stayed silent Lady Neku leaned over to touch his shoulder. It was rigid.

“Leave me alone.”

“Come on,” said Lady Neku. “You can tell me what’s really wrong.”

Faded blue eyes turned towards her. A sky magnified by sadness and something else, something darker. “I’m afraid.”

“Why?” asked Lady Neku, meaning,
Why now, why here…
God, she knew what she meant.

“Because I was born afraid,” said Luc. “And I didn’t think it would happen like this.”

“What?”

“Death.” Luc shrugged. “She told me you’d try to kill me.” For someone talking about his own fate the boy seemed almost resigned. Afraid, but resigned, there was probably a term for it.

“Who did?” Lady Neku demanded.

“My mother, that’s why she refused to come. She doesn’t trust your family.” Luc shrugged again. “She told my father it was all a trick.” His broken smile was heartbreaking, and the really weird thing was that Luc obviously had no idea how heartbreaking. Nico would have been milking it his entire life.

“We’re not going to die,” said Lady Neku. “And I’m certainly not here to kill you.”

“But we’re out of control.” He gestured at the altimeter’s spinning needles. “You said it yourself, we’ve got no power unit.”

“Luc!”

He wasn’t listening.

“It must be odd,” he said, a moment later. “You know, being able to back up and be more than one person. I find it tough enough just being myself.”

“I’m just me.”

“Yes,” said Luc. “But there’s another you back at High Strange. How did you agree which one should die?”

“We’re not going to die!”
shouted Lady Neku.

“Of course we are. You can’t just fall out of the sky. Someone lied to you,” he said. “About not crashing.”

“Luc,” said Lady Neku, grabbing the boy’s hand. “There’s only one of me and we’re not going to crash.” When Luc stayed silent, she gripped his fingers so hard he tried to pull them away. “I’ve made this drop ten times,” she said fiercely. “It’s going to be fine. The castle will catch us.”

“What castle?”

“That one,” she said, pointing down.

It took seventeen minutes to fall from High Strange to earth. The pods had enough strength to survive the howling winds that turned Katchatka Segment’s lower atmosphere into a danger zone, after that it was simply a matter of sitting out the fall.

Each of the families had owned a land base and an overworld back in the early days. These talked to each other, even when the families themselves refused to communicate. Lady Neku had been so surprised by this that she made Schloss Omga provide proof. A history lesson followed. The land bases talked to each other and to individual nodes on the filter, which was what Schloss Omga called the overworld mesh of Nawa-no-ukiyo.

The glitch was not that the bases and nodes could talk to each other, it was that Lady Neku could talk directly to them, without needing to go through a major domo interface.

“Neku…”

“What?” she said, dragging her thoughts back to the pod.

“We’re slowing.”

“Of course we are.” Tapping the window Lady Neku woke it up again. “Look,” she said. “We’ve arrived.”

Spread out below was a massive spiral that twisted to a blunt point, while a leathery fringe around its base locked the castle to rock. A thousand people had lived in its upper levels. Eight members of the Katchatka family, a hundred military modifies, and eight hundred and ninety-two fugees who provided service in return for shelter.

“Wait,” Lady Neku instructed. “And watch.”

So Luc stared intently at the shell below him. “That’s a
Viviparus malleatus,
” he said finally.

“A what?”

“A trapdoor snail. We’ve got them in our koi pond.” He glanced from Schloss Omga to the mountains on both sides and then at the altimeter dials in front of him, which had slowed to a lazy twirl. “It’s vast.”

Lady Neku smiled. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” Looking across at Luc, she wondered if the boy realised she was still holding his hand.

Kit counted off the time by the bells from St. Dominic’s, a new church on the corner of Conde Street, in what had once been a carpet warehouse. After a single peal for quarter past two and a slightly longer peal for half past, the landlord of the Queen’s Head finally arrived to see what the stranger was doing at the back of his pub.

Since the after-lunch staff had been stepping out for cigarette breaks on a regular basis and most had scowled at the sight of a stranger this was not unexpected.

“Police business,” said Kit, barely bothering to take his eyes from a narrow passage back to the road. He must have sounded convincing because the landlord turned back, and whatever was said when he got inside, that was the end of the cigarette breaks.

Motorbikes, rickshaws, taxis, and more white vans than Kit could count rolled down the road. The third time he saw the same shiny black Volvo, Kit left his hiding place and waited for its return at a pavement table on Conde Street.

“Where have you been?”

“Watching,” said Kit, although what he really wanted to say was,
Just who the fuck is this?

“Afternoon.” Flipping up her arm, an old woman angled it backwards to shake, while simultaneously pulling away from the curb.

Amy shut her eyes.

The driver’s grip was strong, though liver spots splattered her wrist like dung. Greying hair had been cut tight to her neck, and she wore heavy dark glasses to shade her eyes. “Brigadier Miles,” said the woman, introducing herself. “I gather someone thinks you’re Ben Flyte?”