The next section of tunnel is plunged into darkness. Smith abandons the coat, caught on the central armrest, and makes another attempt to phone for help. If a phone call were possible from his location, he would not need to make one – help would already be on the way – but Smith is living the nightmare now: the machines are broken and the world is coming to an end.
– No carrier, the Witness says, so that she understands.
Smith gets out of the car and runs hopelessly. He’s not wearing the right shoes and he’s fatter than she realised when she met him. Leather soles skid on the road surface and he slips. He looks back over his shoulder, and starts to run again. The Inspector wonders whether he’s telling himself that it must be a nightmare, and if so whether he’s running through some variant of those same three tests she performs herself. There’s text on the walls of the tunnel, some sort of notice, if he dared to stop and read it. Perhaps that’s how he got caught. But no: he runs, with a single-minded certainty and desperation that almost makes her care about him.
Smith looks back over his shoulder, and then the inevitable happens. As he is turned the other way, the five sections of lighting ahead of him go out in quick succession. The darkness actually seems to lunge. Smith plunges into it. She has a brief glimpse of the scene in passive infrared, Smith falling painfully on his face, something cracking in one knee. He gets to his feet and calls out some sort of apology: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it,’ although frustratingly the conversation is in media res and he doesn’t feel the need to say what he’s sorry for, or to whom. She hears what might be footsteps, or water dripping from a pipe, or some sort of static, and then the feed cuts as the recording comes to an end.
– Power-saving measures, the Witness says. Anomalous. Reconstruction follows.
It does not occur to her what this will be until she sees it, and then it is too late. In the too-perfect images created by the System to fill the gap in its own knowledge, Smith once again kneels on the floor of the tunnel. He cannot see, and so he is blind to the monstrosity that hovers over him. As he makes his brief apology it flicks away into the absolute subterranean dark, and then an instant later strikes him from behind and shears through the upper torso, white teeth casually cutting bone. The pieces fly apart, tumbling and bouncing and showering the road in bright ejecta. The shark spits, tossing its head, and something falls shining from its teeth into the guttering at the side of the road: that ridiculous watch fob.
– Ends, the Witness says, and adds, anomalous, apparently in case she wasn’t listening.
But to Neith, it seems hardly anomalous at all.
She lets out the breath she has been holding and turns away from the body to think. Seeing it increases her awareness of the cloying air, the particulate fug of traffic and dust punctuated now with tiny fragments of blood and bone that she’s breathing in, that the cells in her nose are reporting as a sensation but which are really floating samples of the red death of Oliver Smith.
*
She walks along the road, between the baggy blue plastic suits of the crime scene technicians and the pools of blood and piles of other things, until she reaches the spot. Then she kneels down in the scum of the road, and reaches though a grating with her gloved left hand. Almost, she recoils as she imagines that hand dangling in black water like a lure. Then her fingers touch a thin length of metal chain. She tugs, gently, with her fingers, and feels it come away. She draws it up.
Oliver Smith’s watch fob.
And on it, beneath the grime, an engraving: a burning torch in a bundle of sticks.
– Flambeau, the Witness says immediately. With fasces. The latter were appropriated by Mussolini’s Fascisti, but were originally the badge of a Roman magistrate. The bundle would more usually contain an axe. In this case, the flambeau suggests a more recent armorial confection or a logo rather than an ancient source, although in some variations of the Prometheus myth, he conspired with a serpent to steal the sacred flame, and that serpent was fed as a punishment to the Titans. It could even be thought of as a simple rebus, meaning—
‘I know,’ Neith tells the machine. ‘Fire Judge.’
She scowls down at the object in her hand, and then looks up and into the crowd, knowing with a furious certainty whom she will see and preparing herself, the hunt fizzing in every inch of her.
And there it is: the pale, amphibious face of Lönnrot, coat collar turned up against the evening chill. She sees just a flicker of the smile, and then it’s gone behind a white personnel transport with a thick metal grille across the windscreen. ‘Rhino van’, they used to call them in her mother’s day, because they could roll over anything. The Inspector shouts something incoherent, points, and her officers converge without knowing what they’re looking for. She speaks the name and knows that the Witness is updating them, sees them surround the place. She surges through her own line, the crowd suddenly too slow to move. She sees Lönnrot by a service tunnel doorway and screams again: ‘There!’ and knows four of her uniforms are following, more demanding street-level assistance, knows if they lose Lönnrot now it’ll be too late.
She smashes into the closing door, head glancing against it, reels in and gives chase up a flight of concrete stairs, her shoes clanging against the metal treads on each one.
– There are four hundred and eight steps, the Witness says. This is one of the deepest points of the tunnel.
*
The West End at 2 a.m. wears the high-end suit and too-polished shoes of a man who used to be something, back in the day. Bursting through the service access on to the street, the Inspector casts around for Lönnrot. Bright lights dazzle, rickshaws spin, and the doors of respectable and less respectable members’ clubs are watched by discreetly muscular bouncers.
There: a flash of cartilaginous skin. Lönnrot doesn’t seem to have felt the endless climb to sea level at all, moves through the closing-time crowds at the same steady sprint that the Inspector kept thinking must surely fade as the stairs went round and round in a haze of white-glazed abattoir tiling and settled atmospheric grime. She is still following, still keeping the spiked black hair in sight, though her breathing sounds black in her ears and the edges of her vision are tinged with patterns cut in coffee stains or the residue of nicotine. Somewhere behind her, two constables are rasping on, booted feet heavy and determined, but the Hoxton academy obviously isn’t making them like it used to, and they are falling behind. Neith will not quit. She will not lose Lönnrot again. Assailant and murder suspect be damned: Lönnrot has answers to the larger puzzle, and this time she means to have them. She drives herself onward, ignoring the warnings of the Witness and her own body that if she catches up now she will be incapable of making an arrest. Her quarry must surely be in the same case, and somewhere on her body is the taser. She does not believe she is pursuing a ghost or a god-shark in the guise of a human being, nor yet a killer who just happens to be a specialist in endurance running. Everything about Lönnrot says mind: a perverse lethality that is the product of self-consideration rather than overclocked physical acumen. The pale feet crammed in those shoes must be hurting like hell.
Lönnrot turns down a narrow alley against the flow of human traffic, colliding with the first row and blasting through, exciting angry cries and objections. The Inspector puts her right shoulder forward and bull-charges straight ahead shouting ‘WITNESS OFFICER!’ As soon as this message makes itself heard, it clears a path, but the hubbub created in front of her is such that the advantage is minimal, and then when they reach the main street beyond she almost screams as she sees the pale face smirk at her and then duck into the entrance to the Soho Square tube station.
‘Close it,’ she tells the Witness, an instant later. ‘Close the whole thing. Trains are non-stopping as of now. No one leaves. Do it.’
The machine acknowledges the order but sounds unwilling, and she knows why. At this time of night, the flood of people departing the central London leisure area is at its height, and the number already on th
e station will be in the tens of thousands. Ventilation and temperature control will rapidly become an issue. Under the wrong circumstances the closure could turn into a panic. How desperate is Lönnrot? How mad? Mad enough to shout ‘fire’ or ‘bomb’? Surely, yes. If Lönnrot killed Smith, conventional perceptions of violent insanity may not touch what is behind the smile.
What if Lönnrot actually has a bomb?
She goes in.
The temperature inside is already a couple of degrees warmer than the outside, but it wouldn’t be uncomfortable if she hadn’t just been running harder than she ever has in her life. People stare at her, then see the Witness badge and step hastily aside, pressing against the corridor walls. The upper level is not packed out, but as she approaches the escalator she realises that her stop order has already blocked her path. She looks back, hoping for more officers, and finds none.
‘Which way?’ she asks.
– Unclear, the Witness replies. The suspect must have taken refuge in the crowded area.
Where line of sight is blocked and chemical trace – the detection technology based on bloodhound nasal cells – is deployed only in its crudest form to look for the telltale molecular wash of toxins and explosives.
There is no way out. She need only wait.
She knows that waiting is futile. She must put her hands on Lönnrot now, or wait for their next encounter.
She hops up on to the silvered metal of the escalator middle and slides down, slowing her descent with the soles of her feet against the informational touchscreen recessed into the metal. At the bottom she stands up and brandishes the badge again, jumps down into the small gap created for her, and begins to push through the crowd.
– There has been a mistake, the Witness tells her. The lockdown is compromised.
‘They let someone out?’ she nearly screams.
– No. Egress is perfectly controlled. However, two gates have continued to admit travellers, and the station is nearing its recommended capacity.
‘Close it off!’
– The matter is now in hand.
She wonders if it is. Perhaps I can walk through walls, Lönnrot said, the first time they met. She still doesn’t know how Bekele escaped from his cell. She wonders if she could check now, while running: stay conscious in two worlds at once, or play it all on fast forward. It’s her mind after all. Probably an expert could do it. She pictures herself running blind on to the track: ‘Witness officer!’ and the crowd obediently parts, allowing her to fall towards the live rail. No.
She looks around at the mass of people and at the ceiling above. How many tons of rock? How many people now piling in on top of them all, choking the path to the exits? She pushes the thought away. Not relevant.
She pushes through the crowd, peering into faces, under hats. You? You? You? No. None of them is Lönnrot. The gaps between people narrow and the throng begins to push back against her, people asking where the trains are and whether they should leave, being told they can’t, there’s a lockdown, and starting to worry, to demand to know why.
The Witness comes back to her.
– Stress hormone levels are rising in the lower levels.
‘I know, I’m here.’ Her own stress levels are being affected by it, the unsubtle human crowd reaction. ‘Turn on the fans.’
– The circulation system is functioning at seventy-eight per cent of capacity. A higher power usage at this time will generate problematic amounts of waste heat. Since the heat is a potential health hazard, the present level of ventilation is regarded as an optimum compromise.
The Inspector steps up on to a bench to look out across the sargasso expanse of faces. ‘Give me a direction!’
– The fugitive is not visible in the station.
She swears and turns back the way she came, once again brushing people aside, using her body as much as her authority; a physicality she normally despises and regards even now as dangerous. Her Witness identification is a pacifying factor rather than a magic wand.
But it is effective. There, ahead of her and somehow running without really appearing to do so, is Lönnrot.
Each stride betrays the same uncanny weirdness as the bleached, kelpy face – a movement that speaks of a muscular invertebracy, as if this is not a human being she is chasing at all, but something bonelessly old or chimerically new: a person augmented with the muscle of a python; with cells from the trunk of an elephant. She looks again, and extends her hand to issue an instruction.
And then she stops, because she sees.
She sees, and she stares, not at the figure she is pursuing but at the cameras on the ceiling of the passageway, and at the vile, impossible thing they are doing. It is worse than the spineless hips, the dislocated steps. Those things she expects, somehow, from her quarry. If she learned tomorrow that Lönnrot were an image projected on to her eyes by her glasses in response to some illegitimate algorithm planted upon her personal devices by a felon, perhaps Smith himself, her only response would be that it explained a great deal. This is different.
‘Where is Regno Lönnrot?’ she asks, not believing what she hears when the response comes, even though she anticipated what it would be.
– The fugitive is not visible to System surveillance at this time.
And it is true, in a way. As Lönnrot moves, each camera is turning to look elsewhere. The Inspector knows with a disembodied, eerie certainty that if she looked at the screens upstairs, right now, she would see a babble of confusion and consternation, and that confusion would appear to be the perfect map of what is happening down here – but it would be missing, in perfect synchrony with Lönnrot’s movements, the image of the one person she really needs it to see.
Perhaps I can walk through walls.
Yes. Perhaps you can.
*
Lönnrot, turning, catches sight of the Inspector. The elastic lips open into a lolling smile, and one hand moves in a lazy bedroom wave.
Mielikki Neith feels her fatigue lift. In the sudden firing of a rage she barely knew existed within her, she finds her feet absurdly light, her muscles fluid and responsive. Physical laws no longer seem to matter. She knows this for what it is: the famished predator’s last gasp, the final effort gifted by hunter biology to stave off a death of depletion. She has very little time – but that does not matter. Nothing does, except that she is flying now, and laughing, as she steps after Lönnrot along the companionway, gaining ground, then on to the platform and through – ‘Stop incoming,’ she snaps to the machine, and trusts it is possible – and down into the track itself, from the heaving riverbank into the dry stream of high voltage and thundering mass. Lönnrot runs into the tunnel, into whatever train might be coming that cannot slow in time, and into the dark beyond. She follows, still light, but in her chest is a kind of acid ice she knows portends the end of her endurance: not the wall, but the thing that comes after it, the slow, cold halting that cannot be beaten.
But Lönnrot, too, has slowed. The white hands and face are all that she can see, bobbing and dancing jack-o’-lantern style in the gathering gloom as they press deeper into the dark, and then the left hand reaches out, smacks hard against a metal surface and presses in. The Inspector lunges but cannot stop the door from closing, hears the fatal clang of a thick bolt sliding into place. She rests her head against the door, feeling tears and mucus on her lips, foam and bile. For an instant she sleeps, or passes out.
When she opens her eyes again she sees in the light of her terminal what is written here, stencilled over the flaked metallic paint of the door. She remembers, just in time, that saying it out loud may have consequences.
FIRESPINE.
The Inspector walks back to the platform, and climbs out of the tracks.
‘Open the doors,’ she says after a moment. ‘The suspect has evaded capture.’ Then she watches the worst part of it all happen again.
– I will inform the street-level officers, the Witness says. They may well be able to establish contact.
&nbs
p; Overhead, one by one, the cameras resume their vigilance.
*
In the aftermath of any great horror come two strange pauses, and during these one may hear the broken pieces falling to the floor. After a bomb, or a murder, or the collapse of a mine, there is the immediate silence of the dying. The first flush of demolition is done, and now there is consequence, and it is small and personal and infinite. The last of a stained glass window falls to the floor; the living count their wounds. Some get to their feet, while others discover their impermanence and struggle to comprehend the final curtain as it drops. It is the moment Neith knew floating in the ocean at Santorini, when the tectonic symphony had played itself inside her body, and ten thousand silver fish, each no bigger than a finger, drifted up and around her to die on the surface and in the mouths of gulls.
But after that moment, after the triage and the lonely wail of ambulances and the abrupt conversions of the survived, there comes another silence that is not physical at all. It is the sound of the world adjusting to its new shape, the hesitation before one life steps in to the vacuum left by another. It may last for weeks, or snap abruptly into place like the bursting of a balloon. Perhaps it is always both, and the difference is a question of where you stand.