China Mieville - Kraken

“I have the leaflet you put out here,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Is that Marge? I have your leaflet. I know where Billy is. Do you want to meet? I know it’s all going weird tonight, but it’s now or it’s not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”

Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.

“DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.

If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.

“What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.

No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.

“There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us… and it’s not just us who’ll die.”

They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.

“What did we say in front of him?” someone said.

“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”

“Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”

“Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could only keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”

PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?

She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.

She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”

They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s places it’s hard to find us.”

He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.

Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.

“Where are we?”

“Hoxton.”

“I don’t even know what to ask you…” she said. “I don’t know what to-”

“Me too.”

“Who are you? What’s your story?”

“I got away.”

Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.

“Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”

“I know a friend of yours, I think…”

“Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon…”

“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.

“Billy?”

“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”

“Did he send you?”

“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.

“Tell me.”

“Let’s both.”

Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.

“Why did you find me?”

“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”

“You want me to be a go-between?”

“Yeah. I got access to… It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve got access to some… powers that they want. But I need protection. From them. And other stuff too. I can make them a deal. But they might think they’ve got reason not to trust me. I’ve not been myself. I’m being chased.”

“You’re the one that knows where they are, I don’t have any idea, I told you, they haven’t contacted me, even though they’ve got my number…”

“Billy was trying to protect you. Don’t think too hard of him. But you can still get a message to him. Like I say he’ll trust you.” He met her eye, looked around.

“How? Got a number?”

“Hardly. I mean through the city. The Londonmancers’ll get that.”

“… I got a message through the city myself, once.” He looked closely at her when she said that. “From Billy.”

“Is it?” he said quietly. “Did you? Noise? Light? Brick Braille?”

“Light.” He smiled quickly and rather beautifully at that.

“Light? Did he? Yeah. Perfect, then, light.” He stepped out of the car and Marge followed. “Already a little connection then, between you. Makes this easier.” He peered toward the bins, toward the shadows, then pointed-“Look”-at a fluttering bulb in the concrete roof, one among several, but one about to fail. “Give you an idea the way it comes on and off?”

“Oh,” Marge said. She almost whispered. “That’s how this all started.”

He smiled tightly again. “Don’t need to know where Billy is. By now, I got no idea. But the Londonmancers always listen to it. The city’ll pass a message to them. Yeah, I know Morse Code. I learned all kinds of things these past few years. All kinds of useful things. Do you trust me?” He stood in full view, put his arms a tiny bit out, to show her he held nothing. “I can do him a deal. We can help each other. And he wants to see you. You can ask him to come to you.”

B ILLY, SHE WROTE, IT’S MARGE MEET ME.

“He’ll think it’s a trap,” she said. Paul shook his head.

“Maybe. He might have a pootle around to check if it’s you.” A momentarily humorous saint. “Maybe he’ll just come. He’s worried about you.” Is he? she thought. “Tell him something secret if you want. So he knows it’s you.” She wrote Leon’s middle name. She wrote the address of the carpark where they were. Paul translated it into the longs and shorts of Morse and transcribed dots and dashes under the letters. She was the one getting Billy a message, he told her. It was her message, he told her, to her friend, her way.