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 something.”
“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.”
“Except that’s a gradual thing,” Ho said. “And this wasn’t.”
The smoke from Lamb’s cigarette hung motionless in the air.
Catherine said, “What do you mean, Roddy?”
And here was his night’s triumph, though it involved fewer blondes than he’d wanted. “They moved into the village in the space of a few months. A whole bunch of them.”
“How many?” Lamb asked.
Handing his printout to Catherine, Ho said, “Seventeen of them. Seventeen families. And they all arrived in Upshott between March and June, nineteen ninety-one.”
And he had the satisfaction of seeing, for once, Lamb lost for an instant reply.
Stomping up the slope Griff Yates had led him down earlier, River had to rest halfway. But the pounding in his head was fainter, and he was starting to notice he was alive, when he could easily have been sprayed across this landscape as a fine red mist.
The thought of encountering Griff again was starting to energise him too.
Redcap waited at the top. He was little more than a dark outline, but River’s brain was firing again, and a name popped into it. He said, “You’re Tommy Moult.” Outside the village shop, selling packets of seeds from his bike basket. That was where River knew him from, though they’d never spoken beyond a hello. “What are you doing here this time of night?”
“Picking up strays.” Tufts of white hair sprigged out from Moult’s cap. He must have been seventy: he had a well-lined face, and dressed like he lived under a hedge with an ancient tweed jacket that smelled of outdoors, and trousers that were knotted round his ankles. Makeshift bike clips, River supposed, though less sanitary possibilities occurred. His voice was a rough gargle: the local accent poured over pebbles. An unlikely saviour, but a saviour all the same.
“Well, thanks.”
Moult nodded, turned and walked. River followed. He had no idea which direction they were headed. His inner compass was spinning crazily.
Over his shoulder, Moult said, “You’d have been all right. They don’t target the buildings. If they did they’d be rubble, and those trees would be matchsticks. See the humps in the land back there?”
“No.”
“Well, they’re bronze age barrows. The military don’t plant ordnance on them. Draws criticism.”
“I suppose Griff knows that too.”
“He didn’t plan on you being blown to bits, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’ll bear that in mind next time I see him.”
“He just wanted to scare you shitless.” Moult halted so suddenly River nearly bumped into him. “What you probably ought to know is that Griff’s been in love with young Kelly Tropper since she took the stabilisers off her bike. So what with you and her being so friendly—and in the middle of the day—well, you can see he might take that amiss.”