Angelmaker (53 page)

Problem: this was the only door.

Problem: these lost ones were in the way and would crush fellow humans who intervened between them and their objective.

Problem: Edie needed to be on the other side of this wall, and not admit the crowd to Frankie’s laboratory.

And then someone grabbed her by the neck and hit her with something, and she saw stars and Ted Sholt rammed against the window, and then the same someone started choking her.

No time. Her assailant was killing her. Strangulation is fast. Her vision was brown already.

She moved.

Drop your weight. Never mind that it constricts your breathing. You can’t breathe anyway. Find your base, your connection to the ground. Yes, there. Now: snuggle closer to your attacker. Lock his arm where it is. Grab him by the elbow and bicep and twist your whole body, pivot on your feet. Ninety degrees, more, away from that bicep. Project your hands forward, as if you were pushing a grand piano with the heels of your hands
.

Tai Otoshi
.

It was like
Yama Arashi
, but for stranglers.

A man flew over her hip into the desk. He reared up, bloody-faced.
There is no compromise in this fight. No pain, no retreat
. Edie twisted with his movement and out of the line of his attack, then scooped his neck in a fluid circle and dropped him on his back across the sharp edge of the mahogany veneer. She hoped it would paralyse him for a few seconds, but he was heavier than she had realised and she heard a sharp snap.
Iriminage
, but she hadn’t meant to kill him. She peered down at the slack face, and recognised it.

Denis. Frankie’s assistant in Addeh Sikkim. Big, friendly, patient Denis.

After a moment, Edie said “Shit.” It came out croaky and loud. And then hated herself. And then hated herself more, because, as she started to say there was no other way, she realised that there was, had always been.

I knew the trick to this one when I was a wee slip of a girl
.

She checked on Sholt and found he was conscious, but his collarbone
was broken on the left side. She moved him gently back into the previous carriage and told him to stay put, then levered herself up and out, through the skylight, and onto the roof of the train.

It was warm up on the roof, and pleasantly calm. Abruptly, she didn’t want to go back inside. Actually, she wanted desperately
not
to go back inside. But down at the rear of the train she could see her soldiers. Songbird looked up, hope in his face. Edie sighed.

Yes, of course. He—and the others—needed her to fix all this. Not to be afraid or confused or alarmed.
The Bloody Countess never wavers, ey
.

She moved forward, and lowered herself through the ventilation panel into the laboratory carriage, holding her breath and praying.

Frankie’s laboratory was empty. In the middle of the room there was a plinth, and on it was a gutted shell of Frankie’s strange making, a Ruskinite casing for a Hakote device. There was nothing inside. Coils of cable hung from the ceiling to the plinth, messy and typically Frankie. The room was calm, and clean.

Edie searched methodically, and tried not to rush. She looked under tables and in cupboards, opening each one with a horrid anticipation of finding Frankie standing inside. A stack of pencils fell on her and she screamed sharply, then threw them with considerable force across the room, her fear changing its face: what if Frankie was
not
here? If she was not in the lab, then where? Gone, wandering, mindless in the night? Eating the dead outside? Or taken? Was this a kidnapping, rather than an accident? Edie knew of someone who would consider a thousand murdered a good diversion.

She turned, and found her answer: a single word written in chalk on the blackboard:
Edie!
And underneath, a note, folded neatly. The handwriting was Frankie’s.

Edie grabbed the note and ripped it open.

Edie stood in Frankie’s lab for ten minutes and stared at the empty plinth. She looked up, and realised that Frankie must have gone out the same way she came in. How many hours? Ten? Twelve? Frankie was doing a flat drop. She would take what she had and run. She might have a bag somewhere, or she might not, but she was gone as best she knew how.

Edie gathered the papers, the victims, and hid them away. She hid the
Lovelace
. She mothballed her only real home. Because it was her job. Because she believed more than ever that the world didn’t need Frankie’s machine or Frankie’s desperate conviction or anything of Frankie except her silence. Build a better mousetrap. Fix the mill wheel before it breaks. Leave the bloody secrets of the universe alone.

“Bring her home, Edie,” Abel Jasmine said in Whitehall. “If someone else gets hold of her, they might force her to … well. Bring her home.”

Edie went.

She traced Frankie to Salzburg, then Budapest, then Delhi and Beijing, then back again. Frankie was a genius. She had a way of distracting you. People saw curious machines and worried about them. They celebrated breakthroughs in mathematics made by obscure, hard-working local academics who had had a random conversation with a slender, bookish woman in a café or a bar. They got stock tips derived from some strange, inspired formula, made a fortune and went on holiday. Frankie herself, with a schoolmistress’s bag in one hand and the secrets of the universe in her head, leaving a trail of brilliant, cometary solutions to impossible problems, was weirdly invisible. All the same, you could find her from time to time, if you knew how. Edie could. Shem Shem Tsien could.

They played cat and mouse—or cat and mouse and dog, perhaps—from one corner of the world to another. It got to be a bad joke among the intelligence services of thirty countries. Where one went, so also the other two, and mayhem and bombs and guns inevitably followed. They fought, they fled, they raged, and nothing changed. It was as if the world was elastic, and always returned to the same rotten, stupid shape.

To this day, Edie has no idea where or when Frankie died, only that she must have, because at last she truly wasn’t there any longer.

On the bus, Edie cries dry tears and silently tells Frankie she is sorry for waiting so long to change everything. From the ugly handbag comes a consoling nose. She laughs. Yes. Whatever else, Bastion is for ever.

He arrived very small and badly injured, late on a September evening. He had marbles instead of eyes and a vague, confused expression of discontent.
A stray
, Edie thought,
of course
. Frankie could never resist such a thing. And with the dog, a last letter.

Edie tipped the waiting cabman and carried the whole package indoors. She knew she should call Abel Jasmine, or rather, whoever had taken over his job. But by then she had persuaded herself she no longer cared, and for sure she no longer trusted anything to do with governments.