It took a moment for fear and self-pity to be replaced by anger and self-pity. Arbogast managed to get to his feet despite the pain. He had to see what she had done to his face.
The door to the balcony opened. They were twelve storeys up. It didn’t make sense: nobody could have been on the balcony. Dark urban wear, hooded sweatshirts, expensive trainers and monster masks.
The one in the front, flayed skin mask, held a phone in one hand; his other hand was cupped. It looked like it was full of glitter. He held the phone out. Arbogast saw a picture of Talia and dearly wished that he had never even met the fucking emo bitch.
‘Look, I know people, right. She’s fucking dead.’ Every time he spoke it felt like his face would split open; more blood coursed from the wound Beth had made. ‘I think she and her friends were trying to cook meth or something. They blew themselves up.’
Flayed skin stared at him. Then he lifted up his cupped hand and blew glitter all over Arbogast. King Jeremy decided it looked as cool as he’d thought it would. He’d seen it in a comic book.
The sun had gone down some time ago but the night was still warm. He had decided to look over Arbogast’s building, justifying it to himself as lazy reconnaissance. Actually he had just fancied a cup of tea. Du Bois was sitting outside a cafe opposite the luxury flats where Arbogast lived. He was wondering why, in Britain, he could get just about every type of coffee possible, including some he felt were patently ridiculous, but finding a good cup of tea was becoming harder and harder.
Arbogast’s picture was on his phone screen. He could have had it appear in his vision but he was of an age that made him very uncomfortable with that kind of thing. Using the phone to externalise things might have been unnecessary but it helped him feel more human.
He saw the woman leave the building. Leather jacket, combat trousers, boots, all looked well worn. Her long hair was tied back into a ponytail, sides shaved. She had a Celtic knotwork symbol painted on the back of her leather jacket.
She looked out of place. Du Bois decided to take a picture of her. The phone’s intelligent graphics software cleaned up the blurry image and ran it through facial recognition software far in advance of what was available to the public. The search was slowed only by having to use police and government databases.
He found the girl. Du Bois read about her. Her sister. Her conviction. That she had beaten someone to death for what he’d done to her sister.
‘Shit.’ He ran towards the apartment.
Du Bois stood in Arbogast’s open-plan lounge. It was mostly white. The sofa had been white. Bits of it still were. Not the bits where Arbogast was sitting, apparently unable to move, though not restrained, his face cut up. Trying to chew off his own fingers. There was no way the girl had done this, du Bois thought; someone else had been there. Someone had slaved him. Someone with access to S- or L-tech.
‘That would make me the ghost of Christmas future then,’ he said. Arbogast was staring at him, eyes full of pain and desperation, but he couldn’t say much as teeth cracked on bone.
‘You are a drug dealer, Mr Arbogast. Do you have a syringe in the house?’
Arbogast’s eyes went wide but he was desperate enough to try anything. There was pointing and searching. Du Bois found the reasonably well-hidden drug paraphernalia stash. Arbogast was a careful man. The syringe was still in its sealed packet. Du Bois walked out of Arbogast’s sight. He suspected what he was about to do would give Arbogast hygiene and contagion issues. Du Bois concentrated momentarily, programming his blood. He tapped the vein and then slid the needle in, removing a very small amount of blood. It was all he needed.
Arbogast tried to protest around a mouthful of his own fingers but du Bois slid the syringe into his neck and depressed the plunger. Then he sat down opposite Arbogast, his .45 held in one hand, resting on his leg, pointed in Arbogast’s vague direction.
He waited for the nanites in his blood to eat the nanites that had been used to control Arbogast. Someone else was playing. Someone in the know. But who? This wasn’t the City of Brass’s style and they had more to cope with. All over the world the Circle was mobilising to utterly annihilate them. After all, they’d doomed humanity, so why not use your not-inconsiderable resources with a final act of revenge? The Eggshell was little more than a myth, even by the time he had joined the Circle.
Arbogast stopped trying to eat his fingers.
‘I realise you’d probably prefer to die at the moment, but I need you to tell me everything that you told everyone else. Only quicker.’
The stairway was made of glass. It gave him a commanding view of the harbour. He could see the neon-lit Spinnaker Tower, designed to look like a sail. He could see the real sails of historic ships and, as he rounded the corner, the cranes in the naval dockyard.
Du Bois attached the vial containing a sample of Arbogast’s blood to the bottom of the phone. He texted the info sent from the nanites in the vial to the phone, which then sent the info on to Control. Then he hit speed dial to Control. The phone ran a biometric check on his fingertip, and one of the most secure telecommunications links in the world connected him to the soothing female voice.
‘Kids in monster masks – who else is in town?’
Beth felt like shit. They had let her into their place; they didn’t know her but they had shown her kindness. She was repaying them by washing blood off a family heirloom in their bathroom sink. She had to take her madness out of their life.
The bathroom door burst open.
‘What! The! Fuck?’ Uday demanded. Beth had thought she’d locked the door properly. ‘Omigod! Have you actually killed someone?!’ He was still too angry to be frightened of the woman with a bloody knife yet.
‘I’ll go,’ Beth said. ‘Please don’t tell Maude about this.’
She could see Uday lose some of his certainty. The fear start to crawl in.
‘What have you done?’ he asked more quietly.
‘It’s Arbogast’s. I… I… didn’t kill him.’ You wanted to, she told herself savagely, just to lash out.
Uday nodded. He was still not quite sure what to do. He could see Beth’s face crumpling. The tears came.
‘My sister’s dead,’ Beth managed before the sobs racked her body. She slumped to the bathroom floor. Uday stared at her, not sure what to do. Finally he knelt next to her and hugged her.
Maude appeared in the doorway.
‘What’s all the noise?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Oh…’
Uday beckoned her in. Maude knelt down and held Beth as well as she cried. She didn’t even notice Uday hide the knife.
One of the problems with being a petty criminal is that there are always people higher up the ladder. Still, there were always people lower as well, and the beating he had taken at Beth’s hands had not done his self-esteem any good. The likes of Beth were supposed to be prey, not predator. It was thoughts like this that made Jaime think he was quite the street philosopher. However, as the BMW took him closer to Bucklands, self-pity was fighting with fear as the dominant emotion. Nobody in the drugs game wanted to hear the words ‘Mr McGurk wants to see you’ from any of his large and violence-capable business associates. Jaime just hoped he didn’t piss himself on the leather seat. He couldn’t see that going down well.
The underground garage under the long wall-like block of flats smelled of sweat. None of the inhabitants of the flats above had been stupid enough to park a car in the garage for years. The vehicles that weren’t burned-out husks had come for the fight. Their headlights were used to provide illumination. They cast long and violent shadows from the two combatants.