May Contain Traces of Magic (26 page)

‘Hang on,' he interrupted, appalled by what she'd just said. ‘You're telling me your government actually sends—'

She nodded. ‘Convicted criminals,' she said. ‘Dissidents. It's the standard punishment for antisocial behaviour. We're pretty strict about that sort of thing.'

‘Oh.' He blinked. ‘Sounds a bit over the top, if you ask me.' Shrug. ‘Depends on your point of view, I suppose,' she said. ‘In my case, it was disruptive thinking and serial failure to conform to stipulated dress codes. I got seventy years in a SatNav.'

Chris opened his mouth, then shut it again. ‘Seventy
years
—'

‘Actually, that's pretty lenient,' she said earnestly. ‘Please bear in mind, we live practically for ever. We don't feel physical pain or anything like that, and time works in a very different way as far as we're concerned. Also—' She turned her head to conceal a distinct hint of embarrassment. ‘Well, there's some of us, me included, who'd rather be over here no matter what, even if it means being sealed in a plastic box, telling humans to take the third turning on the right at the next roundabout. In fact,' she added, with a rather guilty grin, ‘I made legal history back home by being the first convict to appeal against my sentence on the grounds that it was too short. So please, don't get the idea that I'm not perfectly happy to be here. Quite the opposite. This is so much better than home.'

He thought about that for almost fifteen seconds, then said, ‘So you haven't been trying to - well, escape?'

‘Escape? No way.' She seemed genuinely shocked by the suggestion. ‘In fact, when my time's up I'm seriously considering applying for metaphysical asylum and becoming a supernaturalised citizen. So, escaping? Not a bit of it.'

‘But you did,' Chris objected. ‘Jill said you got out of your box and came after - came after me,' he added lamely. ‘She said—'

The raised eyebrow, the set mouth. ‘I bet,' she replied. ‘Well, it wasn't like that at all. I came to find you, partly because I knew you were in danger, but mostly because I need your help. Which is what all this is about,' she went on. ‘Bringing you here. I think it's time you knew what you're caught up in, before you either ruin everything without realising it or get hurt or both.'

A little voice in his head was yelling
But Jill said -
He'd have loved to listen to it, but somehow he knew he mustn't; not yet, at least. ‘All right,' he said. ‘Go on, then.'

 

It's about demons (she said).

I'm assuming you know what they are. Well, I think it goes without saying that my lot dislike them just as much as your lot do. They break into our space just like they do into yours, and they do a lot of damage, and sometimes people get hurt. We try and keep them out, same as you, and when they do get in, we hunt them down. Zero tolerance. Simple as that.

But it's not quite so straightforward; well, nothing ever is. There are some demons - a few, very much the minority - who reckon that the traditional way of doing things just isn't sustainable. They're worried about how the demon-hunters on this side are gradually learning how to beat them. Oh, it's no big deal as yet; one in fifty that breaks through actually gets detected in time, and maybe one in five of them gets killed. But the demons who are worried, the dissidents, they think that their lot have been seriously underestimating humans, especially their inventiveness and resourcefulness. The majority reckon that's rubbish; only a handful of humans even know they exist, they argue, and the authorities would rather see the whole human race wiped out than actually tell them the truth. Which isn't so far off the mark, as far as I can see, but even so. That elimination rate's gone up seven per cent in the last five years. A trend like that—

(Five years. Chris did the mental arithmetic. Since Jill had been in charge. He made a mental note to be impressed, as soon as he could spare the mental capacity.)

 

So you see, they've got a point. If things go on like they are at the moment, the demons are going to find themselves pretty hard-pressed. Humans are ninety per cent of their food source. Though they find it hard to accept, they could be staring extinction in the face.

So what? Well, it's highly unlikely they'd just sit back and accept the inevitable. You'll start seeing coordinated raids in force, rather than just one or two of them hopping over the line for a snack. Escalation, leading to open war; and even if your lot rise to the challenge and fight back hard enough to win, just think of the implications. I mean, there's no way the authorities would be able to keep a lid on it if it came to an all-out invasion or something like that, and just think what it'd mean for your lot, suddenly finding out that there are demons out there trying to invade you. Come to that, think what it'd mean if the whole world knew about magic. It's the sort of thing that'd wreck your entire civilisation.

Which means, basically, that the dissidents are probably your best chance, as a species. Not a particularly comfortable idea, since they're so few and their own people hate them so much. You think humans can be vicious and intolerant. You just can't begin to imagine what
they
're like.

The thing is, though, it doesn't actually have to be that way. You see, it's not the flesh and the blood the demons need to live off. Demons don't have digestions and metabolisms, they don't need proteins and vitamins and carbohydrates. What they get their nourishment from is - well, for want of a better word,
spirit
. Emotional energy. They kill people because it's the most efficient way of getting the emotions. It's true; they've studied it carefully, done the research, they're a very thorough species. Typically, a demon attack lasts thirty seconds, from the demon materialising in your dimension to the moment the victim dies. In that thirty seconds, an average human produces more emotional calories - panic, terror, disgust, despair - than it would in twelve years of ordinary life. It's a simple case of getting the maximum yield for the minimum risk and effort.

But, the dissidents say, it's the wrong approach. They argue, it's like the ways humans make electricity. You can boil more kettles and power more electric lights from milking one thimbleful of uranium than you'd get from fifty dinky little Notting Hill wind turbines in a year; established fact, no arguments. But the uranium will poison the air and the water, and if you go on using it, sooner or later you'll all start glowing green and die; whereas all the wind turbines do is sit there making a gentle humming noise, which may piss off the house martins but it won't kill you. Same, they say, with humans and emotion. Instead of going for maximum yield with maximum intrusiveness, much better to use the little-and-often approach.

Human beings going about their ordinary, miserable lives, the dissidents say, generate enough emotion to feed a thousand times the current demon population, without the demons having to lift a claw to encourage them. Trouble is, it's all in small amounts, spread around terribly thin. I mean, in any square kilometre of your typical urban environment at any one time, you can reasonably expect to get ten blazing rows, fifteen long-term sulks, say a dozen arguments about whose turn it is to do the washing-up, a couple of cases of road rage, four broken hearts, and a good ninety milligrammes each of greed, lust, envy, anger, resentment and depression. Add that up, you've got a square meal for a normal healthy adult demon. The problem, though, is harvesting the stuff. I mean, it's not like recycling, please sort your emotions and put them outside in the appropriate colour-coded receptacles. Trying to get the demons to live off that would be like trying to relieve famine in a disaster area by flying over it in a bomber at twenty thousand feet, cutting open great big sacks of flour and chucking it out of the bomb doors.

But that's where A776015 comes in—

 

‘Sorry?' Chris said. ‘What—?'

She frowned. ‘I forgot, you don't know much about demons. Fine. Well, they don't have names. In fact, they can't, they're nomenclature-intolerant. Your friend Jill knows all about this: get a demon to accept a name and he bursts into flames and dies. So they have numbers instead. All clear, or would you like me to draw you a flow chart?'

Sarcasm, he thought. The difference between sarcasm and a plane ticket to Switzerland was that he didn't need sarcasm right now. ‘Perfectly clear,' he said stiffly. ‘You were saying.'

‘A776015 is the dissident leader,' she said. ‘A visionary, a truly great and original mind. She's figured out a way that demons can harvest the emotion they need, unobtrusively, without your lot even knowing they're there. It really would work, I'm sure of it, if only she gets the chance to try. Unfortunately,' she went on, pulling a sad face, ‘that's not very likely. The orthodox demons hate the idea, won't hear of it. And if they catch her, they'll kill her, just to shut her up. Which is why she's on the run,' SatNav added, ‘and why you've got to help her.'

One of those two-pages-at-once moments. When eventually Chris got his voice back, he said, ‘
Me
? What the hell have I got to—?'

Shrug. ‘Serendipity, really. You just happen to be in the right place at the right time.'

Um, he thought. If that was her idea of the correct use of the word ‘right', he had a good mind to report the editors of her dictionary to Trading Standards. ‘Why?' he snarled; and then, because it was still bugging him like anything, ‘It was you, wasn't it? You wrote all over my bathroom wall, all that stuff about saving the one who is to come.'

‘That's right,' she said. ‘A776015 is the one who is to come. So glad you were paying attention.'

‘You cow,' Chris snarled again. ‘It took me
hours
to get all those marks off.'

‘Sugar soap,' she said. Of course, he hadn't tried that. ‘I tried to warn you about the demons,' she went on reproachfully, ‘but you didn't even try to understand.'

‘Well, it was a bit bloody cryptic,' he snapped back defensively. ‘All that stuff about the one who is to come and the one who is cursed. Who the hell is that meant to be, by the way? And why a hummingbird?'

But she wasn't paying attention. Looked like she'd just heard something; she put a finger to her lips and mouthed ‘Shh.'

He could hear it too; something between faint, distant whispering and the scuttling of mice. A fair bet that it wasn't anything nice. Suddenly, SatNav rose quickly to her feet and produced the long, thin sword she'd had in the Ettingate car park, apparently out of thin air. She nodded sideways, towards the kitchen. Clear enough what she wanted him to do, but he stayed where he was. ‘What's—?'

She glowered at him. ‘They're coming through,' she hissed. ‘Get out, now.'

Definition of
they
easily guessed from context. Oh shit, Chris thought, as he jumped up and darted to the kitchen door. He opened it—

And tripped over the door sill of his car, hovered for a second, fell forward, bumping his head, and flumped into the driver's seat, banging his chin on the wheel as a sort of coda. The door slammed shut. The keys, he noticed, were in the ignition. SatNav's casing was suckered to the windscreen in its usual position, but the light was off and the screen was blank. Through the passenger-door window, he could see Honest John's shopfront. Fine, he thought, be like that. Just for fun, he checked the car's milometer, which assured him he hadn't been anywhere since he'd noted the mileage when they arrived. Everything, in fact, to suggest that none of it had happened, and he'd just left John's place; apart, of course, from the little dangly mascot hanging from his rear-view mirror. It definitely hadn't been there before. He'd have noticed if it had. A little plastic hummingbird directly in your line of sight isn't something you overlook.

Chris felt as though he ought to be doing something, but nothing sprang to mind. Furthermore, he had other calls to make; he reckoned he could probably kiss Honest John's order goodbye, and he still had a quota to meet. True, he could ring Jill. Probably he ought to do just that. For some reason, though, he didn't feel like it. Maybe something SatNav had said? He didn't even want to think about that—

Someone was banging on the window; Angela, looking pale and scared. He wound the window down.

‘Where the
hell
were you?' she gasped at him. ‘I've been worried sick.'

‘Really? I just—' He couldn't think of anything to say, truth or lie. Fortunately, Angela didn't give him the chance.

‘I waited and waited for you but you didn't come out, so I went back in, and that John person said you'd gone out the other way without saying where, so I came back and waited by the car, then I went back in again and there was John lying on the floor in
pieces
—'

‘Sorry about that,' Chris said awkwardly. ‘There was an accident, so I—'

‘An accident? He was all
sliced up
. And still
alive
. What in God's name—?'

‘Get in the car,' he said. ‘I'll explain as we drive.'

Angela got in, and he noticed she had a scratch on her cheek. Loads of ways she could've got that. ‘Well?' she demanded, as she fastened her seat belt. ‘What happened?'

But Chris was thinking.
Where is she?
the Ettingate Retail Park demon had asked him; and the fugitive-dissident-visionary SatNav had told him about had been a she. The right place at the right time, huh?

The little plastic hummingbird started to sway on its short cord as he pulled away and joined the constipated traffic. Angela didn't seem to have noticed it.