‘Indeed,’ said Jack sardonically. ‘But even if we put aside how we’re going to get out of here, there’s something you’re forgetting.’
‘What?’
‘Kingdom. If anyone can fire up your weapons, he can.’
‘Harry hates him. He’ll never hand your body over.’
‘Do you really think Harry can stand up to a god? Sooner or later, Kingdom’ll take the body off him. And he’ll find us too. He can force us to do things we don’t want to, and we don’t have any countermeasures against him.’
‘Oh yes we do!’ Fist bounced up happily. ‘Me! I’ll just have to kill him. With a bit of warning, of course, so that someone nice and powerful can step in and sort his people out.’ He winked at Jack. ‘I’ll be very ethical.’
‘If Kingdom catches us, he’ll wipe me and burn your personality out before he drops you back into our body. By the time you get your hands on your weapons hardware, you’ll be his creature. And he’ll be able to repair you properly, and point you at whoever he likes. And that means he’ll run the Pantheon.’
‘Bollocks,’ grumbled Fist, kicking at the sand in theatrical frustration. ‘It was all looking so good.’
‘Sticking to the plan is more important than ever. We need to expose Kingdom before he catches up with us. Though gods know how we’ll do it from here. You’ve still got the files that prove he was running Yamata?’
‘Oh yes.’ Fist turned a shoulder to show Jack a little rucksack, strapped to his back. ‘Safe in there.’
‘And we might not know how we’re going to get out, but at least we can find out the last piece of the puzzle.’
‘What other piece?’ asked Fist. ‘We know everything.’
‘No. We need to find out why Penderville’s so important.’
‘I don’t see why that matters.’
‘All of this began with him. His death was nothing to do with the bombings, he died before the Soft War even began. It was nothing to do with sweat smuggling, either. Yamata was very clear about that. There’s something deep and dark there – something that Kingdom’s very scared of. We’ll uncage Penderville and find out what it is. We might also be able to release some of the anti-war people too. They’ll back our story up.’
‘A jailbreak! I’m in.’
‘There’s just one thing we need to sort out.’ Jack waved his hand at the landscape around them. ‘You got us in here. How the fuck are you going to get us out?’
‘If I can kill gods, I’m sure I can bring us back from the dead,’ Fist replied in a tone too airy to be properly reassuring. ‘Weavespace is up there beyond the clouds. I’ve got a pretty good sense of how fetches work, I’ll have a look at one and reverse-engineer a way out, we’ll be fine.’
‘We won’t be fine. We’ll be ghosts. What about my body?’
‘Remember what Harry said about it? He was going to put one of Yamata’s control systems in it and wear it. If he can do that, you can too.’
‘If we can avoid Kingdom and get our hands on it.’
‘Details, details,’ said Fist. ‘Everything’s sure to sort itself out. Oh, and, talking of clouds, there’s a silver lining to all this.’
He paused dramatically.
‘Gods’ sake,’ said Jack. ‘Just tell me.’
‘Now I’ve killed you, I can’t kill you! Neither of us live in your body any more, so I won’t have to take it from you and you won’t have to die in it!’
‘Fucking hell, Fist,’ groaned Jack.
‘I thought you’d be happy,’ said Fist, sounding hurt.
‘I suppose it is good news. But it doesn’t mean anything if we can’t get out of here. And if we can’t find my body again and bring down fucking Kingdom.’
‘Gods, Jack, you worry too much. We’ll escape first, we’ll worry about the rest once we’re out. We need to find some fetches, I’ll take a look under the hood, if that doesn’t work something else will turn up, we’ll go from there.’
‘That’s not really a plan, Fist.’
‘And you want to jailbreak Penderville and his mates. So we need to go where the dead guys hang out. Where’s that? Not too many of ’em round here.’
‘Fucking hell.’ Jack grumbled for a bit, but in the end had to admit that Fist was right. ‘We’re on a big, round island,’ he said. ‘The dead live in the middle, beyond these dunes.’
‘Then let’s go find them.’
It took much longer to cross the dunes than it had the beach. Jack slithered up and down, straining to reach each peak then tumbling down the other side. His feet vanished in soft black avalanches whenever he put any weight on them. He found that half-climbing, half-crawling was the most efficient way of moving. His wet clothes hung heavily on him and black sand stuck to him, rubbing against his skin like so many small razors.
‘It’s a pretty convincing simulation,’ commented Fist cheerfully. ‘Very impressive.’ Being lighter, he was finding the going far easier.
‘Easy for you to say,’ Jack wheezed. He’d been panting for a while now, forcing himself to keep going as he felt unreal muscles become more and more tired. ‘You don’t get out of breath. Can you turn my physical presence off ?’
‘Sorry, Jack. You’re still very new to this virtual lark. Your subconscious expects physicality. Losing it all of a sudden would be too much of a shock. All sorts of bad things would happen.’
‘Can’t be worse than this.’
Fist didn’t hear him. He was already skipping down another sand dune. Jack half-ran, half-tumbled along behind him. Fist ran quickly up to the top of the next one, his rucksack bobbing perkily, leaving Jack sprawled at its base.
‘Jack – get up here! This is your last dune.’
‘Thank the gods.’
Jack dragged himself up to join Fist. The wind snapped at him. His clothes were nearly dry. ‘So that’s where fetches live,’ he said, looking down at the sight before him.
The dunes formed a vast circle around a deep, dusty, lens-shaped depression, several kilometres across. A river stretched all the way around the rim of the dip, a dark ring, leaden in the gloom. Four bridges crossed it, equally spaced at the four points of the compass.
Beyond the river, corrugated metal gleamed dully, sometimes almost silver, sometimes a rusted red, forming an uncountable rabble of small buildings and shacks. Hard, bright patches of colour blazed out where shafts of light broke through the clouds from the weave. A round, black lake lay at the heart of the ramshackle city, a pupil in the city’s lens. Its waters were perfectly still – a mirror, showing the sky back to itself.
At the heart of the shining waters was a higgledy-piggledy pile of something that at first looked like rubble. Looking closer, Jack saw that it was a mountain of small black cubes.
‘I never imagined it like this,’ he told Fist.
‘Can you see anyone?’ Fist replied.
‘I don’t know.’
Movement was visible throughout the Coffin Space, but it was difficult to tell if it came from people or from the wind snatching at loose metal. Jack couldn’t make out the geography of the city. There were no roads. He imagined tight alleys and passages squashed between rickety houses. Remembering the city’s inhabitants made him see it as a great, overfilled cemetery, graves and tombs squashed together, coffins tipping against each other where the earth between them had subsided.
Fist skipped down the dune. ‘Come on!’
Jack imagined all the dead he’d ever known, clustered in the squalor before him.
‘Come ON! Let’s go meet some fetches!’
Jack let himself slide down the dune and set off towards the nearest of the bridges.
‘That’s interesting,’ Fist shouted back at him. ‘They manage time differently on this side of the dunes.’
It was indeed difficult to measure its passing in that empty landscape. Jack had a sense of an endless march towards the bridge, between the river, the dunes and the shifting clouds above. Step after step jarred through his body, telling him that he was moving forwards, but nothing seemed to change. Fist paced beside him, for once silent. At various points Jack said something, but Fist said nothing in response, leaving him unsure whether he’d only imagined speaking.