“That must have been strange,” Raghavendra murmured.
“Oh, it hasn’t been so bad,” Swinburne responded. “Of course, we looked forward to seeing you all again, and I must confess, I’ve felt rather a fish out of water in this age. The nineteenth century always felt more like home, and I’ve missed it.”
“Likewise,” Trounce grunted.
“But the blinkers?” Burton asked.
“An impression that William and I never possessed before we died,” the poet answered. “A constant suspicion that what we sense is only a fraction of the full picture. That there’s a greater truth.”
“A feeling that we’ve forgotten something,” Trounce said. He raised a hand and slowed his pace. “Stay quiet now. We’re coming to a monitoring station. There may be someone in it.”
They crept ahead in silence until they were brought to a halt by a round metal door. Trounce put his ear to it and was motionless for two minutes. He stepped back, said softly, “I can’t hear anyone,” then turned the handle and pushed the portal open.
The room beyond was empty. It was also small but nevertheless came as a relief to Burton. Little more than a metal box, with a second door leading to the next section of the tunnel, it was at least well lit. In one wall—the one closest to the sewer—there were mounted a number of flat screens from which unfathomable displays glowed, charts and diagrams and rows of numbers.
Trounce started slightly, put his finger to his ear, motioned them all to stay silent, and murmured, “It’s Lorena. This must be important. We’re supposed to maintain network silence.”
He listened, his head cocked to the side, his eyebrows low over his eyes.
Slowly, the colour drained from his face.
“Bloody hell,” he mumbled. “You’re certain?”
His lips whitened as he received the reply.
“Confound it! Do what you can, all right?”
He lowered his hand. It was shaking. He used the edge of his cloak to wipe his forehead and glanced at Swinburne, who said, “What’s happened?”
“Father has been captured.”
Swinburne gasped.
“Bendyshe?” Burton asked.
Trounce nodded. “After planting the bomb in the Embassy. He ran straight into a group of constables.”
“Where have they taken him?” Swinburne asked.
Trounce reached up as if feeling for his bowler hat and looked irritated when he failed to find it. He sighed. “We don’t know. She’s lost track of him.”
Burton asked, “She can’t locate his position via his nanomechs?”
“They must have realised his nanomechs aren’t under government control, so they’ll have passed a nonlethal but very painful electric current through him to destroy them all prior to interrogation. It’s left him totally isolated.”
“Interrogation? Where would that occur? At police headquarters? Is there still a Scotland Yard?”
“No headquarters. There aren’t even police stations. The constables don’t require them.”
“Then where are crime suspects held?”
“Suspects aren’t held. They’re executed. Immediately. Without trial.”
“So—I’m sorry, William, Algy, I know he’s your father—” Burton blinked rapidly. He still couldn’t get to grips with that idea. “But if this age has such a barbaric policy, why do you think Tom Bendyshe will be interrogated rather than killed?”
Trounce and Swinburne exchanged a glance.
“I told you Lorena Brabrooke is a genius,” Trounce said. “And she is. With her every successive clone, she’s increased her skills. But the problem with keeping the Cannibal Club off the surveillance net—with making us invisible—is that it creates holes. Lorena can’t fill those holes, but she can relocate them, so what you might term ‘the absences we make’ are not in the same places as we are. That’s how we evade detection.”
The king’s agent dwelled on this for a moment, struggling slightly with concepts that remained highly abstruse to his nineteenth-century intellect. Before he’d properly formulated his next question, Raghavendra asked it. “Does Spring Heeled Jack suspect the existence of the Cannibal Club?”
“Until nine o’clock this evening, for all these years, we’ve resisted taking any action against him,” Trounce replied. “We’ve been wary of drawing attention to ourselves. Had we done so, he might have hunted us to extinction, and your mission would be jeopardised. Nevertheless, he’s known for some considerable time that something was evading him, and tonight—the date being what it is—we suspected his paranoia would be at its most extreme. That’s why we feared your arrival would be detected and why we finally made a move.”
“So where will they take Bendyshe?” Burton asked.
“I don’t know,” Trounce said. Frustrated, he slapped his right fist into his left palm. “Let’s get going. Not a word in this next section. The pump room at its end is almost certainly occupied by a technician.” He turned to the door that opened onto the second length of tunnel, twisted its handle, swung it wide, and holding his torch before him, led the way in.
Burton, Swinburne, Wells and Raghavendra followed.
This stretch proved longer than the first. They traversed it as rapidly as they could until they neared the pump room, at which point they slowed down and trod with care so their footfalls wouldn’t echo. By the time the light shone upon another door, Burton’s clothes were damp with perspiration and his eyes were slightly wild. He’d been clenching his teeth so hard that his whole face ached, and he felt as if his sanity might break at any moment.
Get me out. Get me out. Get me out.
Trounce looked back and put a finger to his lips. He passed the torch to the king’s agent, but Burton’s hand was trembling so much that the illumination shuddered back and forth until Swinburne reached out and took hold of the device.
Pulling his pistol from his waistband, the cloned Scotland Yard man wrapped his fingers around the door handle, clicked it down, and put his shoulder to the portal. It swept open and he hurtled in, brandishing his gun.
The room beyond was large and humming with machinery. The wall to the right of the door was entirely covered with buttons, screens, levers and projecting valve wheels. A woman with pale, wormy blue skin was sitting on a high stool facing it. Her limbs—two legs and eight arms—were exceedingly long, thin and multi-jointed. Her slender hands bore fingers of outlandish length, extending across different sections of the control panel.
She turned her head as Trounce barrelled in. Her skull, horribly narrow and drawn upward into a pointed cranium, was dotted with a plethora of glittering black eyes. Her mouth, packed with crooked and spiny teeth, opened and produced an uncanny whistling as the detective inspector, having misjudged the force of his entry, collided with her and knocked her from her seat. She hit the floor with Trounce on top of her but immediately thrust him off with such force that he flew into the air, hit the low ceiling, and crashed back down with a loud grunt, the breath thumped out of him. His Penniforth Mark II went skittering across the floor into a corner. The woman scrabbled up, employing her arms as extra legs to quickly back away, like a monstrous arachnid.
“I ain’t doin’ nuthin’ but me job, m’lords,” she hissed. “I keep to the law, so I does.”
Burton stepped in and drew his weapon. “I have to render you unconscious, madam. It won’t hurt and you’ll recover in a little while.”
“Unconscious? Unconscious? I doesn’t want to be unconscious, m’lord, and I ain’t no madam.” Shook her head and put her hands to it. “I’m confused. Scared. Me head hurts.”
“The nanomechs in your system have stopped working,” Swinburne told her. “You can think freely.”
“I doesn’t want to think. You shouldn’t be ’ere. It’s the rules, m’lords.” She looked at Burton, at his uncovered face. “Oh gawd ’elp me, it’s you, ain’t it! I dunno what to do. I dunno. I dunno. I ain’t ready fer no revolution. I’m just a simple girl. I does me job an’ nuffink else. What should I do, m’lord?”