The White City

29

Mary opened the door, Dalip trained the rifle on every corner of the room. It looked as she remembered it, a chaotic mess of clothes, weapons, containers and artefacts, but the meaning of it had changed. It was a stage set, the first act of deception in a long line of set pieces and misdirections that were as deliberately designed as a theme-park ride.

He declared it safe, and she went in, still cautious, poking around, lifting sheets and opening lids.

The sheer variety of items was astonishing, like a charity shop, full of discards. Most of it, she could recognise, but the purpose and use of some of the things was lost on her.

‘We need more bullets.’

She nodded, and looked up at the hangers over the fireplace where the rifle had sat. Any spare rounds might be close by, so she picked her way towards the cold hearth. She could have spent hours sifting and sorting carefully, but she wasn’t that sort of girl. She picked up boxes and baskets, tipped the contents out in a space on the floor, and raked her hand through the pile to spread them out. It took a second or two to confirm there were no bullets, before she swept the space clear again and emptied the next box.

‘You’ve done this before,’ said Dalip.

‘So? You’ve got things you’re good at, I’ve got mine.’

There was a pretty brooch in this one, a cluster of deep red faceted stones set in a dirty gilt setting. She pinned it to her bodice, and carried on searching.

Dalip poked at a few things, before slumping into the ferryman’s chair.

‘I should have…’

‘Well, I don’t think so.’

‘Really?’

‘No. You were going to kill a man while he was asleep. You think that’d make you feel good?’

‘It’s not about me. It would have been justice. Doing it while he slept would have been more than he deserved.’

‘What, you wanted to watch him piss himself before you pulled the trigger?’

‘I just wanted him to realise what he’d done.’

‘He knows what he’s done. He doesn’t give a shit about that or anything else. We know that.’

‘You stopped me.’

‘Since when were you the sort of bloke to kill someone in their sleep? You think your grandfather would’ve done that?’

‘I know he did. He told me he slit the throats of three Japanese soldiers one night when he crept into their camp.’

‘That was war.’

‘And this isn’t?’

‘You’re not your grandfather, though, are you?’

‘No. No, I’m not.’ He looked bitter and disappointed, and she kicked herself for trying some stupid easy comparison with a man Dalip had a hugely complicated relationship with.

‘Look. So he did that. And yes, I stopped you from mashing Crows’ head with your big rock. But I didn’t stop you from shooting him. That was you.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m angry. Not with you. With me.’

‘Talk to me about the map,’ she said. She was running out of nearby boxes and baskets to upturn, but there were still one or two left.

‘There’s no pattern. There never was. And that’s the problem. Whatever they’ve got in the White City is distorting the natural order, forcing it out of shape so hard the portals are snapping away from London, one by one. Every time that happens, new lines of power are made, but they’re not stable.’

She contemplated that piece of information. ‘Are you sure? I think there’s a portal here that goes all the way to the future. These things in robes have to be getting their orders from somewhere.’

She watched him carefully. He didn’t dismiss her idea out of hand. He raised his gaze, resting his head against the barrel of the rifle he held between his knees, and his frown deepened. ‘Both of us can’t be right.’

‘Whatever it is, it’s in the round building, right?’

He nodded. ‘If we can get in.’

‘I asked. No one knows.’

‘More like no one’s telling. We’re going to have to find it ourselves.’

‘Just you and me? Against all of them? It took how many shots just to bring one of them down?’

‘Three,’ he said. He turned the rifle across his knees and unclipped the magazine. He used his thumb to flick out the brass bullets, one by one, into the palm of his hand. ‘Five left.’

‘Is this a good time to tell you they have more guns? They offered them to Simeon in exchange for the maps.’

He fed the bullets back into the magazine and locked it back into place. ‘This just gets worse. We know where to go, but can’t get anywhere near it. And we’re not going to find any more ammunition, are we? You have what you carry through the portal. No planning, no supplies. You come as you are, or not at all.’

He looked down to his left, and rummaged through the pile of things there. He came across the bags of honours. ‘What are these?’

‘They’re like fairground tokens. You spend them in the city, but you don’t get anything real for them. They give them to you so you think you’re in control, but they’re cheating you the whole time. You think there are monsters and men, and it turns out some of the men are really monsters. You think that some of the others are people looking for answers, like you, but they’re not. And while you’re asking questions, they’re getting all the answers and telling you nothing. It’s like a big experiment for them, and we’re the things getting poked.’

‘The city, down by the bay,’ he said. ‘It’s huge. It… used to be huge.’

‘That fits. They came here to get away from poor people. People like me.’

‘The portal◦– the original one◦– is there, somewhere in the forest.’

‘They told me that all the other portals just opened up. Magic started happening. They couldn’t control it, so they all went home.’

‘Not all of them.’

Mary shook her head. ‘No, all of them. They left these things behind to see what happened next.’

Dalip got to his feet slowly. ‘So they built an anti-magic weapon, to protect their, whatever you want to call them, observers. They turned it on, and pfft. They broke their own portal.’

‘So why not just turn it off again?’

‘Too late. The energy released in breaking the portal destroyed their London. There was nothing left to connect to.’

‘Fuck. But doesn’t that mean…?’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Her hand went to her mouth. What else was she going to say? His entire family had been wiped out. So had Mama’s. Everyone she’d ever known was gone too, but that was less of a personal loss for her, because she didn’t have anyone. Regret, yes. Grief, no.

‘But what are they doing now? What do they think they’re doing now? Do they even know what happened to their own London, or was it a case of “we’ve lost contact” and an assumption that the people back home will be busy trying to reopen the portal?’

‘I told them,’ she said through her fingers. ‘I told them what happened to us. They wanted to know everything.’

‘I’m sure they did. We were, what? Lucky to be where we were?’

‘We’re only guessing, right? We don’t know any of this for certain.’

‘I don’t really feel like asking them. They’re only going to lie to us.’

‘Makes you wonder what Crows told them.’ She hugged herself. ‘What the fuck are we going to do, Dalip? Can we do anything at all?’

He sat forward in the chair, and hunched over the rifle. ‘If it is an anti-magic shield generator thing, we have to turn it off, because if every time a portal snaps off our world, and a London dies, we have to stop that. Afterwards? If Down can settle on a pattern after that, with at least two Londons gone, and maybe more, then, I don’t know: it’s more likely that we can hold on to what’s left than bring back what’s already lost.’

‘Down is a time machine, right? Doesn’t that mean we can fix this?’

‘Do I look like Doctor Who?’

She tiptoed through the debris she’d spilled across the floor. ‘You could be, if they’d cast some Sikh bloke instead of what’s-his-face.’

She stood at the arm of the chair, at his sagging, curved back, and laid her hand gently between his shoulder blades. She felt the tremors and the quakes and the shudders of his grief. She’d never felt so strongly about anyone to elicit this strength of emotion. People she’d known had died, often through their own stupid fault. She’d watched their relatives in the crematorium chapel, or by the graveside, and she’d wondered what that could feel like.

She might know one day, but today was not that day. She was patient, though, and waited for him to become calm. She needed him focused, because otherwise they couldn’t come up with a plan.

After a while, he sniffed and snuffled, and for the want of anything else, he blew his nose on a piece of cloth and wiped his face with a different part of it, before wadding it up and throwing it into a corner.

‘There’s a lot of them,’ he said, ‘and two of us.’

‘One of us can be the diversion, and one of us does the sneaking.’

‘That division of labour neatly matches our well-defined roles.’

‘I can be the diversion. I mean, I’m wearing this dress. That should be diverting enough, right?’

‘I’m going to break the habit of, well, the past few weeks, and change out of being orange. The night’s going to be pitch-black, isn’t it? We’ve just had an eclipse, so the moon won’t rise at all.’ He put the rifle aside, and started sorting through the drifts of spare tops and bottoms. ‘Have you thought about what you’re going to do?’

‘Fuck, no. You’re going to have to teach me how to fire that thing, though. You can’t sneak with it, and it’s too useful to leave behind.’

She saw him hesitate, then carry on.

‘We can’t practise actually firing. We only have five bullets left.’

‘Then you’ll have to teach me properly.’ She started her own search, looking for another sword or dagger she could handle. ‘I know I try to come over all gangsta and shit at times, but I think I’ve held a gun once, and even then I reckon it was fake.’

‘If you hit something, it’s a bonus. All I need is for you to keep them looking the other way.’

The light from the open door suddenly occluded. Dalip snatched up the rifle and Mary raised the machete. There was a moment when it could have all gone horribly wrong, where no one recognised each other, and might have acted without thinking.

‘Dawson,’ said Dalip.

The man lowered his sword. Behind him, two other pirates were watching the path.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘What y’doing here?’

‘Where the fuck did he come from?’ Her heartbeat was still hard and urgent against her ribs, and she turned on Dalip. ‘I thought you said they were all dead.’

‘Who’s all dead?’

‘Pretty much everybody,’ said Dalip. ‘I’d forgotten Simeon had sent people over the top to try and find another way out. I take it you found one?’

‘Aye. Why’s everyone dead?’

‘Because the bastards in the robes decided we were screwing with their experiment.’ Mary let her sword arm dangle. ‘Can you go up the same way you came down?’

‘Everyone?’

‘The steersman might be okay. He was when I left him.’ Dalip pointed the rifle at the floor. ‘Simeon…’

‘It wasn’t looking good,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t know. He was fighting them off so I could run.’

Dawson turned his back on them and stared outside.

‘Bloody mess,’ he said. ‘Who had the gun?’

‘Crows.’

‘Did you kill him?’

Dalip kicked the chair and looked sour, leaving Mary to answer.

‘He got away. We got the ferryman, though. He was one of… them. Some sort of robot.’

Dawson didn’t know the word, didn’t know what it meant, and she couldn’t explain it other than with a shrug.

‘Back to the ship, then,’ he said, ‘if we’ve enough crew.’

‘We’re staying,’ said Mary. ‘We’ve got to make it right, somehow.’

Dawson’s scrunched-up face raised a single sceptical eyebrow.

‘Tell him, Dalip.’

‘We have a chance to maybe change everything. We’ll only know once we’re inside that round building, back in the valley.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘We don’t know. Whatever it is, it might be breaking the portals between London and here. It might mean we get to go home again, if there’s a home left for us to go back to. It might mean nothing of the sort.’

She took over. ‘They don’t want this to happen, so we get to fuck them over whatever the result.’

Dawson scratched the back of his neck. ‘You asking for help?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Ship’s mine for the taking. Pick up more crew. Job’s done.’

‘You’re going to run out of crew,’ said Dalip. ‘And after a while, there aren’t going to be any more people coming through, because there’ll be nowhere for them to come through from. Those already here will grow old, die, and that’ll be that. Down, wherever it is, will just carry on without us. And probably be better for it.’

‘I’ll show you the way around the cliffs if you want. You youngsters don’t know what you have to lose.’ Dawson sucked at his uneven teeth. ‘It’s different for us.’

She’d never heard it put like that before. ‘If I get to be as old as you then, well: it’ll be a fucking miracle. Just remember us to Mama, right?’

Dawson nodded, and went out to report to the others in his group.

‘Is that the best we’re going to get?’ she asked.

‘We can’t insist people throw themselves at danger, just so we can have an easier ride.’

‘Why the fuck not? We’re doing it for them.’

‘No we’re not. We’re doing it for people we don’t know, in the hope that they carry on living entirely oblivious of the disaster that’s waiting for them in twenty-twelve. This isn’t the pictures, Mary. What’s done is done: right now we’re just trying to stop Down from wiping out every single London ever.’

‘What if we can fix everything? There’s got to be a way of fixing this, right? Maybe whatever’s in that building will tell us the answer.’

Dalip looked pityingly at her, even though she knew it meant his family. He moved a lever on the side of the rifle and handed the weapon to her. ‘Take it. We’ll go through the basics in a minute. At least with a rifle, it’s difficult to shoot yourself with it.’

She took it from him. It was heavy, the combination of smooth dark wood and dull grey metal. There were clips, front and back, for a carry strap, but the strap itself had long gone. She kept her hand clear of the trigger.

‘Remember they might have guns too,’ she said.

‘If they’re shooting at you, then you’re doing your job properly. If they’re shooting at me, then I can’t get into the round building.’

‘And if they hit me,’ she countered, ‘they’ll start looking for you.’

‘I’m teaching you how to fire a rifle, not dodge bullets.’ He jerked his head at the door. ‘Out. I’m getting changed.’

She pulled the door to behind her and sat on the doorstep, rifle across her knees. For the first time in ages, she wanted a cigarette.