As he scrolled down, he leant forward. Information interested Ho to the precise degree that it might prove advantageous, and the data he was looking at had no relevance to himself. But it was of interest to Catherine Standish. Among the names he’d processed, she hoped, was that of Mr. B’s contact; a Soviet sleeper from the old days. Finding out who it was would impress her. On the other hand, she already knew he was shit-hot at this, and while it was true she was nicer to him than anyone else in this dump, the fact remained that she’d blackmailed him into—
Something caught his attention. He stopped scrolling, scrolled back up again, checked a date he’d just registered. Then re-scrolled down to where he’d been.
“Hmph.”
Ho pushed his glasses up his nose with a finger, then sniffed the finger and made a face. He wiped it on his shirt and returned his attention to the screen. A moment later, he again stopped scrolling.
“You’re kidding,” he muttered.
He scrolled down further, then stopped.
“You have got to be kidding.”
He paused and thought. Then he keyed a phrase into the search box, hit return, and stared at the results.
“You have got to be fucking kidding,” he said.
This time, he didn’t stick to the chair at all.
He heard a voice.
“Walker.”
The booming noises remained, but only inside his head: a pulse like a dull metal drumbeat, caroming round his skull. With every contact a starburst was born, died, and rose again. His body was one big fist, its knuckles raw.
“Jonathan Walker.”
River opened his eyes to find he’d been captured by a dwarf.
He was where he’d always been; curled at the foot of an indestructible tree, the only thing fixing the earth to the sky. The ruined building had shrunk—or everything else had grown—and his heart was trying to burst free from its cage.
How long had he been here? Two minutes? Two hours?
And who was the dwarf?
He unclenched himself. The dwarf wore a red cap, and twinkled in an evil way. “Enjoy the show?”
River spoke, and his words swelled up as they left his mouth. His head had been swallowed by a balloon.
“Griff? He’s long gone.” River could have sworn the dwarf rolled back on his heels, like a toy you couldn’t push over. Then he loomed back into River’s face. “Not likely to stick around during artillery practice, is he?”
He hauled River to his feet, and it turned out he wasn’t a dwarf at all, but a medium-sized man. Unless River had shrunk. Terror could do that. He shook his head, and when he stopped the world carried on shaking. He looked up, which was another mistake, but at least the sky had calmed down. No new scars ripped it apart. He looked back at the no-longer dwarf.
“I know you,” he said, and this time his voice more or less behaved itself.
“Maybe we should move.”
River pressed his hands to his temples. This suppressed all movement for a while. “We in danger here?”
“The night’s young.”
The man in the red cap—not a dwarf, but that cap remained real—turned and plodded out of the shell of the building. River stumbled after him.
Lamb wiped his face with a meaty hand. “This better be good.” He’d been asleep in his chair, and looked barely awake in it now. But when Roderick Ho had appeared in the doorway, printout in hand, his eyes had snapped open, and for a moment Ho had felt like a rabbit who’d wandered into a lion’s cage.
“I found something,” he said.
Catherine appeared. If she’d been sleeping, too, she’d been less messy about it than Lamb, who was smeared with big red blotches. “What kind of something, Roddy?”
She was the only person who called him that. Ho couldn’t decide whether he liked it that way, or wished more people did.
He said, “Don’t know. But it’s
“That wasn’t the best sleep I’ve ever had,” Lamb said. “But if you woke me to play twenty questions, you’ll be sharing a room with Cartwright when he gets back.”
“It’s the village. Upshott. The population spread.”
“It’s pretty tiny,” Catherine said.
Lamb said, “It’s bloody Toytown. With fewer amenities. You have any information we don’t already know?”
“Fewer amenities, exactly.” Ho was starting to feel confident again. Remembered he was a cyber warrior. “There’s nothing there. And even when there was, it was the Yank airbase, and none of the names on the list had anything to do with that.”
Lamb lit a cigarette. “First of the day,” he said, when Catherine flashed him a look. It was ten past midnight. “Look, Roddy.” This was said kindly. “All that crap I lay on you? The name-calling? The threats?”
“It’s okay,” Ho said. “I know you don’t mean it.”
“I mean every bloody word, my son. But it will all seem trivial compared to what’ll happen if you don’t start making sense sharpish. Capisce?”
The cyber warrior leaked away. “None of them were connected with the airbase. Something else must have attracted them to Upshott, but there’s nothing else there. So—”
“Urban flight?” Lamb asked. “It’s what happens in cities when too many undesirables turn up.” He paused. “No offence.”
