Vardy turned to the shelf of Darwin’s specimens and raised his arm.
Billy struggled to his feet. He could think only, Not like this. He would try to spill the fire. Perhaps it would reverse the life cycle of the heavy-duty floor, rubbers separating, the chemicals racing back to elemental forms. But his hands were behind him and he was far too far away.
“No!” Billy wheezed, bleeding.
The shadows shed by fire danced over labels handwritten by Charles Darwin. Billy sprawled flat like a mudfish. With a bark of religious joy, Vardy threw the time-flaming missile.
IT FLEW AND TURNED AS IT FLEW. BILLY’S ARMS WERE TRAPPED. BUT there were other arms aplenty in that room.
The undead specimen Architeuthis shot out its long hunting limbs all the way across the room, from far away. A last predation. It caught the bottle. Took it from the air.
Vardy stared. Vardy screamed in rage.
The time-fire was touching the Architeuthis’s skin, and was burning. The zombie squid’s second hunting arm whipped Formalin-heavy up, around Vardy’s waist with a thwack. It coiled him in. It whipped the bottle toward its mouth. Vardy howled as its shorter arms spread to receive him.
Vardy screamed. The time-fire was roaring, and spreading. The squid was shrinking. Vardy’s arms and legs were shortening.
The squid looked at Billy. He could never put into precise words what it was in that gaze, those sudden eyes, what the bottled specimen communicated to him, but it was a fellowship. Not servility. It did not obey. But it did what it did deliberately, offered it up and looked at him in good-bye.
The time-fire shrank it further, cleared the deadness from its skin, made it smooth. A selfless selfishness. Without evolution, what would it and its siblings be? The deep gods were not this thing’s siblings: it let itself be taken for the sake not of kraken but of the exemplae, all these specimens around them, of all shapes, these bottled science gods.
The tank was roaring with fire. The flesh was burning younger. There was a last flurry of combat. Silhouetted in the glow, Billy saw a baby screaming adult fury at the little arm-length squid that encoiled it. Both were on fire. Then both, still wrestling, were hot embryos, that intertwined and stilled in grotesque protoplasmic détente, and were burning gone.
The sides of the tank fell in, into smouldering crystals of ore and chemical and then atoms before they could even shatter.
Chapter Eighty-One
THE LAST OF THE BURNING EBBED AWAY. THE LIGHT OF FIRE WAS gone. Only the glow of fluorescent bulbs.
Something a little rucked
singed and melted
and
There was an inrush growth rejig. An imperfect healing but healing. A huge, epochal sealing. London reskinned. Fire scorched and then went out.
And there was Billy in the new skin, there in time. There was a Billy. Billy breathing out from something, and he breathed in, shook with release. He was in a room.
DARWIN’S SPECIMENS WERE SAFE. BILLY TOUCHED THEM, ONE BY one, stretching out his tethered hands behind him. He ran his fingers along the steel surface where no Architeuthis had ever been. The tiny mnemophylax watched from under its bell jar. Its bone head tracked his movements.
Nothing had gone. Billy thought that very exactly.
Billy knew with a strange precision that in all his recent adventures, the specificities of which were slightly vague, no giant cryptid animal had ever been here in this room. The angel of memory rolled on its tiny base and shook its skull head. Billy laughed and was not sure why. There was a pyromancer who was alive and waiting for his daughter, because there was no one nor had there ever been who could have blackmailed him with her. Time felt a little raw. The threat that Billy had defeated in this room, and it had been baleful, had neither involved anyone, nor existed. He laughed.
The sky was different. Billy could feel it beyond the roof. Different from how it had not been. The strain was gone. The end of the world, a true finish, was only one very unlikely possibility among many.
There were details missing. Billy was canny enough by now, after everything, to know what that might mean. There was a burn scar in history. There was still a smell of burning. Billy was definitely descended from simians and ultimately from fish in the sea.
He met the gaze of the mnemophylax across the room, eye socket to eye. Though it had no face to crease he would have said it smiled back. It wriggled and wrote with its tiny fingers on the inside of its glass-he could not tell what. It opened and closed its mouth. It was memory. It shook its head. It put its hair’s-breadth fingerbone to its nonexistent lips. Its tiny bones fell, its skull settled into nothing, it became a test tube and some specimen rubbish.
Billy sat on the steel where no great mollusc had been. He sat as if he were a specimen. He wondered what searing thing had not been overcome. He waited for whatever would happen, whoever would find him.
It was Baron and Collingswood who came, at last, into the room. They were not missing any colleague, Billy thought, carefully. They’d never had a third in their crew, though they stood often a little close together, a little close to a wall, as if they would be framed with another presence. They recalled enough, and they knew that something had happened, had finished.
Billy stood and waved with his handcuffed arms. The cops picked over the ruins of glass, spilt preservative, scattered specimen remains, scattered by no one.
“Billy,” Baron said.
“It’s okay now, I think,” Billy said. They stared at each other a while. “Where’s Simon?”
“He went,” Collingswood said.
Baron and Collingswood muttered together. “Fuck this,” Collingswood said. She undid Billy’s locks.
“What’s the crime?” Baron said to Billy. “You nearly came to work for me. What animal?” he said. “There’s never been one here.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “Piss off,” he said, not unfriendly.
Billy smiled slowly. “I wouldn’t have been-,” he started to say. Collingswood interrupted.
“Please,” she said. “Please just sod off. You were offered a job a while back and you said no.”
“Whatever the circumstances,” Baron said.
“We may be a man down,” Collingswood said, “but we were always a man down.” She sniffed. Looked at him thoughtfully. “Burns don’t heal pretty,” she said. “Always a little melty-looking scar. You can’t fuss about that sort of shit, Billy.”
Billy held out his hand. Baron raised an eyebrow and shook it. Billy turned and looked at Collingswood, standing at the edge of the room. She waved at him.
“Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy,” she said. She smiled and winked at him. “You and me, eh? What didn’t we do?” She blew him a quick kiss. “See you around,” she said. “Till next apocalypse, eh. I know your bloody type, Billy. Be seeing you.” She nodded farewell. He did not disobey.
BILLY WALKED THE CORRIDORS, ROUTES HE KNEW INTIMATELY, THAT he had not walked for weeks. He mooched. He left the Darwin Centre and reentered a night still frenetic with fights, thefts and heretic prophecies, but increasingly, epically sheepish, uncertain of its own anxieties, unsure as to why it felt like a final night, when clearly it was not and never had been.
In the tank room, Baron was scribbling in his notebook.
“Right,” he said. “Honest to bloody blimey I’ve got no idea how we’re going to write this up,” he said. “Shall we, Collingswood?” He spoke briskly and did not meet her eye.
She paused before she answered him.
“I’m putting in for a transfer,” she said. She met his shocked eyes. “Time there was another FSRC cell, ‘boss. Boss.’” She air-quoted. “I’m going for promotion.” Collingswood smiled.