Losley whirled round and stared at the radio. She looked as if she’d been physically struck by something that had impaled her at an angle to all her world’s rules.
Quill leaped at her. She threw a gesture at him that was little more than a slap, but it still sent him sprawling. But the others had rushed in, were between her and the cauldron. Costain had his gun up, ready to try for a shot, but Jessica was in the way.
Suddenly, Losley ran for the outside door, taking Jessica with her. ‘Hold your fire!’ yelled Quill. He rushed after her, and the others ran too.
Ross was just behind Quill as they burst out onto a balcony, the sudden chill of night air providing a shock to her senses. Losley was standing on the parapet along the far edge, a three-storey drop below her, open land stretching behind her, leading across to another long low apartment building. The sound of match commentaries echoed from a thousand satellite dishes all along the balconies, a sea of lights glowing behind curtains. And already people were stepping out of their doorways, yelling and pointing, turbans and burqas, football shirts and chav caps. Losley grasped Jessica, with a small gleaming knife set against her ribs. She had a coil of twine already wrapped around the child’s neck, the noose held firmly in her other hand.
‘Daddy!’ screamed Jessica.
‘Wait,’ said Losley, as Quill took a step forward. ‘This is to keep you there.’ She let go of the noose, but kept the knife where it was. She made a gesture with her free hand as if she was pulling the world into her, the remains of the flesh of her fist sucking on the air.
Ross felt the result as much as she saw it. Something was rushing into Losley from all directions. She could see the images now: all the different versions of Losley, the visions from the front of the newspapers, the haunting photographs, they were smashing into her, plastering themselves over her, putting flesh back onto her bones new, skin forming out of newsprint, muscle from the three colours of television.
‘Is that her getting her power back?’ whispered Costain.
‘I think it’s her cashing her last cheque,’ said Sefton. ‘She’s leaning on being remembered, taking it all at once.’
Losley’s newly healed eye looked balefully at them. Unreal because it looked black and white. She put her free hand into a bag at her hip, and threw a handful of soil over her left shoulder. Ross, impossibly, heard it land on mid-air. She wondered how much of this those people leaning out from their flats were seeing. Losley stepped back off the wall.
‘No!’ shouted Quill.
But she was still standing there. In mid-air. On a trail of soil that stretched out into the gap between the buildings. She took another step backwards. ‘I must continue to do as I have always done,’ she said. ‘I will have to kill Milo Faranchi, even though he is on my team, even though he is beloved by me. You see, I said I would now kill every scorer. Such are rules. We all have to make sacrifices.’ She continued to move backwards, higher into the air, her hand tightening again on the noose around the child’s neck. ‘A blow to her head, a wound to her side, one quick swing of the rope. The threefold death. An even better sacrifice. Especially with her father here to watch.’
Quill bellowed something incoherent at her. Costain had taken up a firing position on the wall. But Ross couldn’t see how he was going to get a chance at a clear shot.
‘I’ve made sure I have enough left,’ she said. ‘I have my soil on me. I have these people remembering me. . oh, look at them, how they’re remembering me now! I have enough to do this!’ And she spat out a sudden noise that could easily do the work of a gesture. A very London noise.
Ross pulled the knife from her pocket as the noise burst past her. Her knife split the noise. The noise hit the others. It hit Quill and Costain, and even Sefton, who was starting to turn it away as it hit, and it broke them from their bodies. She saw their personalities fall, screaming, endlessly through the infinite depth of the housing block, pulled by the gravity of something beyond London. She saw their bodies collapse where they stood, their souls blasted out of them. But she could still see a connection, still see that they would return if she did something quickly. She saw how this happened between time, as all the watching public just started to react, but would never understand every moment of it.
Her knife had split the noise.
Losley stared at the knife. Losley stared past it, towards her.
Ross became very sad and very sure. It was just her now. She had only moments left to save the others. She could feel the heat starting to blaze from their bodies behind her. She could hear the sound of their falling. In moments their bodies would explode into blood.
She jumped up onto the wall. She stepped out onto the soil bridge.
She didn’t look down. She knew there was a long fall beneath her, but that didn’t matter. Losley held the child before her as a shield as Ross got close to her. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. She jerked suddenly as if about to drop the child or to stab it or hit it.
Ross slashed out.
Jessica yelled in terror.
The rope around the child’s neck parted and fell into the dark below. Ross looked Losley in the eye, wrong eye to wrong eye. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is my knife for freeing fathers.’
Losley lashed back with her own knife. Ross caught it with her blade, sending the blow swinging aside. Losley screamed in defiance, and turned that swing into a long, downwards, sacrificial stab-
Ross cut Losley in her side. She cut her on her brow. That blow set the witch swaying on the spot, with blood flying from her, spattering all down the child held in one arm. Losley was still trying to deliver her own killing blow. ‘If I die or I flee,’ she yelled, ‘this bridge will collapse and you will fall, and the child too!’
‘I know,’ said Ross. And slashed her across her neck.
Losley tried to keep the blood in. She tried and nearly succeeded.
Ross’ sudden punch caved in her nose.
The witch vanished. The soil dropped away from under her feet. And from under Ross’ feet. And the child screamed in mid-air.
Ross grabbed the child. They fell.
Quill slammed back into his body and hit the wall of the balcony-
Just as Ross fell, with Jessica in her arms.
Costain and Sefton were there a moment later. The small clinging mass of two bodies plummeted to the ground far below. Quill rushed for the stairs. Costain and Sefton ran immediately after him.
Quill shoved his way through the crowd that was gathering around a bundle lying in the dark, torches casting light over the wet grass. There she was, there was Ross, lying flat on her back with a bush crushed underneath her. Her eyes were closed, one leg projected at the wrong angle. It took a moment for Quill to find what else he was looking for. Something was screaming. It wasn’t Ross screaming. It was what she still held tight in her arms. What had landed on top of her.
Quill pulled Jessica from hands that would loose her only to him. She was screaming for her daddy. Quill felt horribly, distantly, that that wasn’t him. He looked back towards Ross.
Fumbling, Costain had found her pulse. ‘She’s alive!’
‘We called an ambulance,’ said a woman. ‘She just. . threw herself off.’
‘No she didn’t,’ said Quill, frustrated to the point of anger at what these bloody people hadn’t seen. Suddenly, from all the flats around them, the crowd noise on radios and televisions became very loud indeed.
‘Something’s happening at the Boleyn Ground,’ said Sefton.
Mora Losley had run to where she felt most safe. She was dying. And soon. But she still knew how to save herself.
She threw herself off the wave as it entered the West Ham stadium. She found herself stumbling forward onto the blessed pitch, the floodlights washing over her. Blood was pouring from her wounds, and she couldn’t stop it now. Meanwhile the match was continuing. But now she was on the sacred turf! Her blood was mingling with it. In a moment, power would surely come to her. She started heading into the midst of the West Ham team, and there he was, Milo Faranchi, stopping now, slowly turning to stare in horror at her approach. She waved the dagger at him, so sadly. But it had to be. She had to do what she had always done. The dagger would have to make do until the power came.