End of the World Blues (34 page)

“What’s all that?” asked Kit.

“Paperwork,” Amy told him.

“Yes,” he said. “Obviously. What kind?”

Amy’s gaze slid to a shelf of cheap paperbacks and old magazines. A novel at the end seemed to hold particular fascination. She was wondering whether to tell him, or maybe she was just hoping he’d forget the question.

“Well?” he demanded.

“She’s taking responsibility if it goes wrong. You know, if the Brigadier’s plan fails and…”

“I get killed,” said Kit, finishing Amy’s sentence for her.

Amy nodded a little too fast.

Not just me,
Kit decided.
Neku too.

He spent the next few minutes looking at the paperbacks and magazines. Crime novels, thrillers, and romance. A couple of back issues of
Cosmo
and an American edition of
Esquire
. A handful of locally produced booklets about the area. Holding up a pamphlet, Kit showed Amy the title.
Necropolis Railway.

“Great,” she said, and left Kit to his reading.

As the living crowded London to such an extent that speed limits were introduced for horse-drawn traffic, the dead began to take more space than the city could provide. In the winter of 1837 fever took victims so fast that families had to stand in line in London churchyards to wait for the funerals ahead to finish.

So, when it was suggested that corpses be freighted out of the city and buried at a purpose-built necropolis big enough to take London’s dead for a hundred years, funds were raised quickly, and work begun. Necropolis Station opened in 1854, allowing the dead to make their journey to the grave in three levels of comfort, first, second, and third class.

“Interesting?” Amy asked.

“In a sick sort of way,” said Kit, putting down his pamphlet and looking round the room. “Are we done here?”

“I reckon so.” She glanced to where Maxim and Brigadier Miles were folding up a huge map and talking into their phones, fingers in one ear and both obviously irritated by the noise they considered the other was making.

“Demarcation,” said Amy.

“Security forces and the local police?”

Amy looked at Kit. “God no,” she said. “We don’t involve them.”

“Five squabbling with six?” guessed Kit, naming both security and counter intelligence.

“It’s internal,”
said Amy.

Kit scowled.

“What?” she demanded.

“You’re enjoying this,” said Kit, “aren’t you?” He watched Amy begin to deny it and then stop. That was Amy, honest to a fault even with herself.

“Well…” she said. “It beats the milk run. Is that bad?”

“No. Of course not.”

“But what?” Amy said, voice flat.

“Nothing,” said Kit. He checked his watch, worked out how long he had until de Valois’s deadline ran out, and remembered Charlie all in the same breath. “I need to make a call,” he said. “I left a friend of Neku’s at the flat…”

“Charles Olifard,” said Amy.

Kit looked at her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He’s fine. The Brigadier sent him home last night.” She caught Kit’s expression. “Charlie’s on an Mi6 scholarship,” she said. “He’ll be working at GCHQ when he’s done at Imperial.”

“Sweet fuck,” said Kit, more loudly than he intended.

Across the room Maxim and the Brigadier, who’d just been flipping shut their phones and smiling grimly, stopped looking pleased with themselves and glanced across.

“That’s what Charlie was?” asked Kit, his words little more than a savage whisper. “Someone to shadow Neku? Still, at least he didn’t crawl into her bed.”

Amy slapped him.

“Feeling better?” Kit asked, watching her walk away.

“You want to tell me what that was about?” demanded Brigadier Miles, after Amy had slammed the bathroom door, leaving the entire flat ringing with silence.

“Charlie,” said Kit.

The old woman frowned. “I doubt,” she said, “Amy slapped you over Charlie Olifard. They’ve never even met.”

“You know Charlie?”

“No,” said Brigadier Miles.

“You didn’t put Charlie up to meeting Neku?”

Dragging on her cigarette, the old woman shook her head. “GCHQ and my lot don’t really talk,” she said. “Not these days. Still, he’s obviously a good boy.” Brigadier Miles spoke with the Olympian detachment of someone at least four times Charles Olifard’s age. “And he left you a message.”

Kit scowled at her.

“Keep rolling the dice, whatever that means. Charlie called the police, you know, yesterday afternoon. When you didn’t come back. Told them about the kidnap. Guess what they found?”

“Charlie?”

“Ten thousand dollars in used notes, wrapped in book covers, packed in the bottom of a kid’s rucksack. You want to explain that to me sometime?”

“I can’t,” said Kit.

“Of course not,” said the Brigadier, grinding out her cigarette. “I imagine it belongs to your little friend. Word is, she takes after her grandmother.”

The problem with boys was that they were too easily impressed. The correct response on entering a cleft in the shell of Schloss Omga was interested boredom, where the interest was ice-thin and the boredom deep and obvious.

A casual comment from Luc that his family’s castle was bigger or smaller, simpler or more ornate, would also have been adequate: provided it was said in such a way as to turn any compliment inside out. Alternatively, he could just have mentioned the obvious, that Schloss Omga was dying, and having crawled up the side of a high mountain, the vast mollusk had nowhere left to climb.

So sad,
he could have said.
How awful. It must be terrible to watch.

And since shells existed to create ideal internal conditions, as much as for protection, he could have mentioned that hole at the tip of Schloss Omga, while undoubtedly making it easier for Lady Neku to land was not, in itself, a good thing.

Neku would have mentioned it. Casually, in passing.

“What are we doing here?” asked Luc.

“Arriving,” said Lady Neku, then smiled to show she was joking. “You’re about to meet my father.”

Luc’s mouth dropped open as fast as if someone had cut a wire on his jaw. “But he’s…”

“Dead,” said Lady Neku. “Yes, I know.” Waiting for the pod to open, she reached for a grab bar and hauled herself from her seat, landing lightly on a mother-of-pearl deck below.

“Don’t worry,” she added, when Luc slipped. “It’s always tricky at first.” She led him towards a leathery wall that opened as she approached, sealing itself behind the two of them, before opening again into a curving corridor beyond. In the handful of steps it took to enter Schloss Omga, the air grew less sour and the ambient temperature dropped by several degrees.

“Fuck,” said Luc. “How did you do that?”

“Not me,” said Lady Neku. “That was my father. Most probably. It might have been the castle. No one’s quite sure what happens to nervous-system state vector maps after they upload.”

Luc looked blank.

“Well,” Lady Neku said. “What do you do with people in your family when they die for real?”

“Bury them,” said Luc.

The corridor they were in curved round and down, circling from the tip of Schloss Omga to a level where the shell of the walls became less rotten and the floor less treacherous. On the way they passed a dozen other flaws in the wall but none as large as the one through which Lady Neku landed her pod.

It seemed unfair to Lady Neku that something as beautiful as the mother-of-pearl patches closing the gaps should be the result of the castle’s failure to heal itself properly. Although her mother would probably regard this as childishly naïve. All beauty, according to Lady Katchatka, had its origins in pain.

“Here we are,” said Lady Neku, opening a real door, the kind with hinges and a handle. “This is where my father used to work.”

Huge windows looked down onto the wastes of Katchatka Segment. It was this view that drove their father mad, in Nico’s opinion. This view that finally drove him to suicide.

The ground was yellow, with black rock spines. A mat of weed floated on top of the distant lake, a different kind of weed crawled from the depths towards the land, unless it was the other way round. The ruins of the old city looked very distant, and battered enough to pass as natural. A giant sand devil was sinking into itself in the distance. This was the world she knew, the one she saw inside her head when people talked about Katchatka Segment.

Lady Neku had been given lessons on radiation, cell mutation, suicide genes, splicing, and sickness. Splicing was what separated fugees from animals and her family from fugees. Those who stayed, her father said, were those who lacked the will, determination, or strength to go elsewhere.

Nico, Antonio, and Petro chose to assume he was talking about the fugees. Lady Neku was much less sure.

“Come on,” said Lady Neku. “Let’s get this over.”

It had been a gentle summons. A simple,
Your father would be pleased if you were to drop by his study sometime.
Of course, the main advantage of being dead was never having to raise one’s voice. Had he remembered she’d have to pod drop from High Strange, negotiate fifteen minutes of unsafe corridor, and risk whatever her mother would do if she found out?

Hard to tell. And all Lord Katchatka said when she and Luc entered the study was, “That was quick.”

“This is Luc d’Alambert,” said Lady Neku. She watched the boy look round the huge room, searching for the source of the voice. “It’s in your head,” she told Luc, when he started looking for a second time.

“How do you do,” Luc said.

“Well enough,” said the voice. “All things considered.” It sounded amused about something. “I’ve got a question for you…”

Luc waited.

“What did you see during the drop?”

What Luc can still see.
It was all Lady Neku could do not to answer for him. She stopped shuffling her feet long enough to peer through a window in front of her. It was a very high window, arched and with little marble pillars to support the curves where they dipped in the middle and then soared away.

“Sand,” said Luc, having considered the question carefully. Sand was all anyone saw when they looked at Katchatka Segment. Sand, mud, cracked earth, and a rotting lake. There was life in the lake, so people told him. Mud skippers, maybe. Evolution was going backwards. At least life was being killed off in reverse order of appearing, or something. As he’d already told Lady Neku, that part of future history went straight over his head.

“What was there before the sand?”

“More sand?”

The room sighed. It seemed that before the sand had been mountains, formed when two continental plates collided. For a while, the lake had been a sea; not quite big enough to be an ocean, but perfectly able to support trade in a city that sprawled along its western edge: until one of the overhead wires making Nawa-no-ukiyo had snapped and the sky torn, letting in what High Strange and every node like it had been created to hold at bay, the solar-induced disaster of a planet in decline.

End days,
Lord Katchatka called it.

“You know why this happened?”

Luc blushed.

“It was before your time,” said the voice. “Before even mine. The truth can be useful sometimes.”

“The sails,” said Luc. “They broke.” He meant the sky sheets high above Schloss Omga, the ones controlled by Lady Neku’s family. The 33.2 million square miles of mirrored gossamer that constituted Katchatka’s responsibility.

“All sails break,” the voice said. “Such is the nature of fragile things. Our failure was not to act until it was too late.”

“It’s not,” said Luc. “My father says the sails can still be mended.”

“Using what?” asked the voice.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You know what else puzzles me?”

It was obvious that Luc didn’t, just as it was obvious that the voice had every intention of telling him. “Why you are marrying my daughter.”

Opening his mouth, Luc shut it again.

“Yes, I know,” said the voice. “You’re marrying her because that’s what you’ve been told to do. And that’s also why she’s marrying you…”

Lady Neku and Luc looked at each other. “But that doesn’t answer the question, does it? What would a family as cryozoic as the d’Alamberts want with one old woman, three boys, and a half-wit girl? Because that is what’s left of Katchatka’s rulers.”

A voice woke her in the darkness. As unexpected as it was unfamiliar, until gut-level instincts caught up with the obvious and Lady Neku realised it was Luc, sounding close enough to be in the same room.

“You awake?”

Pulling herself out of sleep, she sat up and glared around her, even as she realised how absurd that was. Alarms would have gone off long before Luc reached this far inside her private quarters.

Only she was still in the castle. A graphite silver night visible through the high windows of her father’s study. She seemed to be wrapped in a silver blanket and lying on leather cushions taken from three different chairs.

“You must be awake,” said Luc. “You’re sitting up.”

And then Lady Neku saw him, in the half darkness beside her, also wrapped in a silver blanket. Although she was glad to notice it was a separate blanket.

“Are you scared about tomorrow?” he asked.

No,
thought Lady Neku, as she wondered what tomorrow was meant to bring and then remembered. Banquets, marriage, and a public bedding. Compared to most of her life, it would be simplicity itself.

“Of course not,” she said.

“I am.” Luc’s voice was thin, unashamedly lonely. “Tell me again,” he said. “How your family was first chosen…”

The idea to cut the moon into segments came from one of Lady Neku’s ancestors peeling an orange, either that or it came from the province of Satsuma itself. One was a family holding in pre-Meiji Japan, later folded into the Kagoshima prefecture, the other a citrus fruit with a high tolerance to cold.

Japan, Kagoshima,
and
cold
Lady Neku knew only as concepts. She knew the whiteness of satsuma blossom and the smoothness of the leaves from personal experience. Almost all of the plantings in the Stroll Garden bore fruit; the few that didn’t were saved by the medicinal qualities of their sap, leaves, or bark. The original culling of plants had been carried out with a ruthlessness Lady Neku admired but wondered if she would be strong enough to imitate.