There were soldiers along the road and soldiers in vans and soldiers standing guard over farmhouses and cottages: regular men, veterans who had seen service. They were grim and tired, and as the car wound through a tiny group of buildings on a hilltop—too large to be a farm and too small for a village—Edie saw a private vomiting into a ditch, and his mates holding him up. She’d seen British infantrymen make fun of one another during field amputations. None of them were smiling now.
The car slowed and Edie thought for a moment they’d arrived, but there was an obstruction in the road, a big, green-canvased transport. It had clipped the stone hedge on a turn and brought down a big block of granite. Three soldiers were levering it out of the way.
Edie watched. Inside the car, sound was muffled. She could hear the Wren breathing.
A moment later, something slammed wetly into the windscreen. Edie lurched back in her seat, recoiling from a wide, gawping mouth which smeared across the glass. She saw a circle of red lips and a line of saliva, and she had her gun pointed directly into it before she realised that it belonged not to an escaped lion or a giant leech, but a bearded man in a blue Sunday-best jacket. The Wren had turned in her seat and was ready to slam the car backwards and away. She glanced across for instructions, and Edie held up her gun hand, palm out: wait.
The man licked and snuffled at the glass, tried to get a grip on it, and slid hopelessly down onto the ground. Behind him were two more figures, slack-jawed and moaning, slopping bonelessly out of the back of the transport. One clutched a knife and fork. A dinner party, Edie realised. They were dressed for dinner. The one with the cutlery sawed aimlessly at the air. The other stepped from one foot to another, a strange, heron’s waddle: quick quick slow.
A sergeant appeared, spun the bearded man smartly around and folded his arms across his chest, bundled him into a bear hug and back into the transport. Two burly privates did the same with the others.
Edie called the sergeant over.
“How many like this?” she asked.
“Near on a thousand, but we won’t rescue all of them,” he said, looking right at her to make sure she understood. “About half of them are dead before we get there. Best we can figure is that they’re all still doing whatever they were doing when it happened. Stuck in a groove. Mostly that’s fine. Bloody awful, but fine. But then some… well. There’s a cattle farm over Tregurnow way. The farmer was butchering some steers. Killed all of them before we got there. Went back to the farmhouse and just kept going.” He trailed off, waiting to see if she needed him to explain. She didn’t. “Is this a Russian thing, do you reckon? Is it war?”
“No,” Edie said firmly. “No, this is an accident. Chemical spill from a container ship.”
The sergeant scowled. “Well, I hope they hang for it.”
Frankie. What have you done?
The Lovelace creaked to and fro in the darkness of Frankie’s cavern, a tiny incremental rocking like a shudder, on axles not powered but not restrained. Every so often, Edie could hear something which might have been footsteps, and beneath them and the sound of nervous soldiers standing guard in a circle around the train, came a steady, cockroach rustling she could not name. At one end of the passenger section, a single light flicked on and off, on and off.
Songbird swore softly and crossed himself. Edie had never seen him do that before. In S2:A, very few men prayed; they’d seen too many stupid chances, for good or ill. The same unfamiliar itch was tickling Edie’s fingers, a sense that this was too big to be her problem, too strange and desperate. There must be someone above me to deal with this. But that was the other thing you got used to in S2:A—the person who came along and took over when things were bad was you.
“Radio?” she asked.
Songbird’s radio man, Jesper, shook his head. “More crackle than a pigling roast.”
Abel Jasmine had told Edie, in London, that Frankie might still be inside the train. Was she dead, then? Or at her desk with wide eyes, like the farmers and fishermen Edie had seen?
Edie gestured to Songbird and to the others: wait. Songbird frowned and shook his head. Coming in with you, Countess, his face said. All for one, ey?
“Give me five minutes,” Edie said. “Then follow, but follow soft, you understand, because those are ours there, whatever’s happened.”
Songbird looked stubborn. Edie sighed.
“Please,” she said. “If Frankie’s dead in there, I just want to be the one to find her.” Although, until this moment, she had not allowed the thought to form in her mind.
Songbird scowled, but acquiesced. Edie turned and walked towards the train.
Edie stepped up onto the rearmost carriage. Lovelace had changed a bit since her time—new carriages added and others gone—but it was fundamentally the same train she had known: defiantly ornate, with the stamps of Ruskinite artisans pressed into the iron. Entering, she let the door spring shut against her back and push her gently in, so that it would make no noise in closing. The solid pressure reassured her, and then an instant later she felt a wild claustrophobia, a deep desire to go no further.
No time for that now.
Inside, the carriage was only partly lit, the curtains closed and keeping out the light from the big siege lamps outside. Tiger stripes fell across one of the Lovelace’s communal spaces, a smoking room. Edie was about to move forward when a faint breath stopped her, a tiny puff of moving air. It smelled of laundry. She folded herself into a low crouch and slid smoothly away, finding her own patch of darkness. She peered around, but her eyes were still adjusting. A crawling sensation whispered along her spine. I am in a room with a dead man walking.
Unfair thought. Irrational. If there was a man in here, he was not a monster, he was a victim. Unless he was eating when it happened. Then perhaps he is both. She was sure it was a man, without knowing why. Scent, perhaps. The length of a stride she couldn’t hear, the weight of a person she could not feel. She just knew, as meat knows salt.
There was a game she used to play with the Sekunis, a training game in the dark. Feel your way. Know your body, your space. In the dark, she would take a guard, and in the dark, they would attack her. The key was not to expect anything, not to look for anything. You moved, you waited, you acted only when you knew.
She dropped her centre and relaxed her body, and waited.
He appeared in front of her as if stepping from behind a curtain. He must have been curled up on one of the seats. One hand reached out to embrace her, or to tear at her, or to take her gun from its holster at her side. She didn’t know. She slipped beneath the hand and laid her arm across his chest, twisting around her own centre and sweeping his leg. O soto gari, firm but not murderous. She followed him down and barred the arm as he tried to continue the motion.
Was he shaking hands? Opening a door?
Abruptly, he bucked, and she heard the shoulder pop, felt the bone shift under the skin. He twisted against the joint, destroying it, and when she saw his face she was so shocked she nearly let go of him. The look of emptiness was gone, replaced by an appallingly focused fury. His head lunged at her like a striking heron, snarling and snapping. He bridged, more vital components snapping in the arm, and she relinquished her lock as she realised it was useless on a man who didn’t care how badly he was hurt.