Conrad Williams - One

The sweet served only to make his appetite more keen. If you kept busy enough you could forget about hunger, or at least press it into some ancient part of the brain, that lizard knot of slow thought. He was about to suggest going out to hunt for some real food when she told him about the body found that morning at Pentonville. Intact, which meant it was definitely not a Skinner attack.

'Who?'

'Fielding,' she said. 'Throat cut.' Her voice stumbled over the violence in the words.

'Suicide?' Jane asked, but Becky was shaking her head before he'd even begun to shape the question. The dream he'd had tapped him on the shoulder.

'This was a thorough job. And there were wounds inflicted after he died.'

Jane didn't know how to react. Murder had become a thing from history; compared to what was going on today it was almost a polite crime. That fellow survivors had resorted to killing their own during an ongoing crisis seemed a behavioural aberration.

'Do we know who did it? Did anybody see anything?'

'No. Fielding was just clocking off. He said he was going to check out some buildings in De Beauvoir Town before calling it a night. He'd forgotten his chalk and his medipack. Jamie Cosgrove went after him. Found him near the Essex Road train station.'

'Did we check this Jamie Cosgrove out?'

'He was spotless, Richard. Unless he'd had a shower after slicing him up, he had nothing to do with this.'

'I know, I know. I'm just thinking out loud. Jesus. I only saw him last night.'

Becky sighed. 'Yeah. The prison is shut down now.'

'I know. We're moving west. Where's Aidan?'

'He's at the river with his chemistry mates. Testing acid levels.'

'That's helpful.'

Becky jolted his arm. 'He's learning,' she said. 'You never know, he might be one of the people who pulls us out of this mess a few years from now.'

'It's being stuck in the mess now that's kind of a pain,' he said. 'We've got enough eggheads scribbling equations. We could use Aidan on recon, or working the library.'

'He does his share.'

Jane could feel a tension building up behind his eyes. His gums were sore and his tongue kept worrying at one of his molars; he was convinced it was loose. 'All right. Look, I need to get out of here. I don't like this place. I don't like sub-street level. There's nowhere to go.'

'It's secure, Richard. It's safe.'

'Nowhere's safe,' he said, and wished he hadn't. 'How are you, anyway?'

'You're not the only one who wants me to move on. I'm staying at a safe house in Balham from tomorrow. Word is that there are Skinners drifting south from Camden and the parks.'

'Well, then, that's good.'

'What do they want with us?' she asked him, her voice suddenly pressured, cracking. He was reminded of the Ceto; his mates in the chamber all trying to equalise as the pressure piled against their sinuses. Squeezing their noses and blowing, trying to yawn. The first sign of the heliox mix pulling their voices into falsetto.

She didn't mean us as in everyone, she meant the women. He knew that. Why did the Skinners choose to hunt the men but abduct the women? Together they'd watched it in the early weeks after their arrival. They'd seen a group of girls pulled from the ticket barriers at Shadwell and dragged away screaming by things that had once been men but whose skin was now swollen with the knuckles and ribs of something that didn't quite fit inside. Black joke eyes staring out of dead holes of bone, a mimic with cheap props. They'd been strangled almost to senselessness, then flung on to the backs of tethered, invaded okapi. Steam had come off the frayed bodies: they'd looked like ghosts fading into the night. Nobody had said anything at the time. People still didn't. You could posit all you liked, but it came down to the obvious in the end, and the obvious, if it was so repellent, so horrifying, was always ignored, concealed, skirted. He could answer her right now, but the question was a squeak from the safety valve. She didn't really want to hear it. She knew what was going on.

'I thought maybe we could walk down to the river, find Aidan, go on up to the power station, bed down there.'

'It's late. And it's a long way. We have beds here. We can go up to the research rooms if you want.'

It wasn't just that he was feeling cabin fever in a place that made Jane uncomfortable and nervous. He didn't like Aidan going off on his own even though the river was generally safe and he was among friends. And Jane still had motion in his joints. He wanted to be on the street, tracking down the gossip about the raft. He didn't like Fielding, but he was sorry to hear of his violent death. The threat of it was like a storm cloud that had slipped inside the building and was clinging to the ceiling, getting fat, building up the pressure on everyone beneath it.

Becky's hands on his shoulders. He thumbed off the bicycle mask and the goggles and stood blinking in the candlelit room. She gave him a little half-smile; she knew she'd won. She slipped a hand into his. 'Come on,' she said.

They took the steps up through the oak-panelled stairwell and pushed through a door into an area filled with old bookcases. Some had collapsed against each other and had not been righted. Magazine racks were loaded with newspapers and glossies bloated and dulled by time and water that had coursed down the walls from a crack in the roof. Ranks of PCs with shattered screens sat on tables cluttered with cups and mugs and soup bowls.

A circular window in the dome of the library was filling with shade. Candlelight flickered from the far end of the room. They bypassed the loans desk and headed for the light. Sleeping bags were wadded into the gaps between the bookcases. There was a silence of deep sleep, the kind of sleep that punched people unconscious as soon as their head hit the pillow, the result of little food and much exertion.

There were two empty sleeping bags in the corner. Becky's bag and coat marked her territory. She undressed quickly and slipped into her bag, pulling the corner up over her body, but not before he saw the rippled sandbar of her ribs, the deep shadow of her stomach. She patted the space next to her. Jane smiled. He looked out at the Marylebone Road as it sought the heart of the city. Figures drifted across it or along it. A fog was rising, or the clouds were sinking. Everything grey. Somebody screamed, far away, and he almost didn't register it. You got to a point where you didn't hear the tragedies unfolding around you. Wasn't it always this way?

Becky unhooked her bra and he touched her breasts haltingly, as if the lambent light around them was being manufactured from within. They made love quietly, although Jane doubted whether anybody would have been roused had they given their fucking full volume. Jane withdrew at the moment of his climax and she held his penis as he came on her stomach. He didn't look. She wiped herself clean and fell asleep almost immediately, her head on his chest, the smell of their sex rising from the sleeping bags whenever she moved. Bitter thoughts of Cherry. A shameful wish that she might walk in on them like this.

He raised himself up slightly and balled a coat and put it under his neck. He pulled a dead mobile phone from his pocket and dialled the number.

'Hi, Stan,' he said. 'What you doing?'

'Colouring in. I done a Batman but it got boring because he's only blue and grey.'

'What did you have for dinner?'

'Pasta. And parmigiano.'

Jane laughed. He'd taught Stanley to say 'parmigiano' at a very early age, with a cartoon Italian accent, and it always tickled him when he said it.

'You had a bath? Brushed your teeth?'

'Roger, roger.'

'Sleep tight, then. See you soon.'

'Night, Dad.'

Jane was about to press the end-call button when a sharp bill shot out of the casing in an explosion of brushed steel and embedded itself in his cheek. He smelled the cloaca of the bird, and the carrion of what it had last dined upon. But he was so tired, so exhausted, that the nightmare could not impinge. He slept, looking down on himself, disinterested, as the bill stripped away the flesh of his face to reveal a thin white bowl filled with dust.