It was only when I had closed the door on his hurried departure, and turned to face the dark stair and the silent house, that I allowed myself a secret smile.
Ghosts were just what I needed.
I was my father’s daughter, after all.
Allenby took another pull at the cigarette and stared at Jake through the coil of blue smoke. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take you—a prisoner on remand—out of here, across the bomb craters of London, to a smashed-up house in a street that no longer exists?”
Jake nodded.
“You really have a nerve, Wilde.”
Jake leaned back. “It’s the only way. If you want Alicia’s spy network, you have to take me to her house.”
“Her house is in smithereens!”
“Not all of it.” Jake leaned forward. “Come on. Your men must have been digging about in there. They’ve found it, haven’t they. You know they have. The mirror. The machine.”
He made his voice as confident and enticing as he could, but in truth he felt sick and desperate. He had barely eaten for days—the muck they gave him was inedible—and his brain was weary and fuzzy from broken sleep, because at night the cells were crammed with drunks and infuriatingly noisy women. But at least they were keeping him here. There was no sign of the military. Allenby wanted the credit for this for himself.
Allenby crunched the cigarette in the ashtray. The door opened; the sergeant came in with two mugs on a tray. As he set them down, he gave Jake a particularly filthy look.
Jake grabbed the tea with both handcuffed hands and drank it gratefully. The hot sweetness was a glorious comfort.
Allenby watched. His calm, alert face was hard to read.
“What is this machine?”
“I told you. Alicia used a very strange device. It won’t have been destroyed. It looks . . . appears . . . to be made of glass. Black glass.”
A flicker. Hardly anything, in those steady eyes. But Jake was sure.
He put the mug down. “You have found it.”
After a moment Allenby said, “Let’s say we’ve recovered . . . something. Something we don’t understand. But . . .”
“Take me there. I’ll get it working for you.”
Their eyes met across the table. It was a game of chess, Jake thought, with London the board and himself as one of the pawns, the smallest of pieces. But it had to work, because if Gideon failed him, he certainly wasn’t going to be stuck here for the rest of his life.
Allenby sighed. Abruptly, he scraped the chair back and stood. “I must be a bloody fool,” he said.
Sarah said, “You can’t do it, can you?”
Piers, sitting on the floor among a pile of wiring as big as he was, looked at Venn.
“It’s not that I can’t do it exactly,” he said warily. “I mean, given time, given a bit of leeway, I could. But to be honest, I’d rather work on that page you brought.”
“Jake needs us now!” She scrambled up and walked angrily to the mirror, staring into its enigmatic curves.
The mirror slanted her own gaze back at her. She knew Piers and Venn had been up all night re-aligning it. Once, they had tried to activate it. At four o’clock a shudder of noise and energy had rippled terrifyingly through the house, waking her and sending her racing out into the dark corridor and crashing into Wharton’s startled panic.
“What the hell was that?” he’d yelled.
Now he lay in an armchair dozing, his maroon dressing gown tied tight over a pair of ridiculous pajamas with little anchors all over them.
She looked at the film canister. “Can we see this?”
“I’ll have to find the old projector,” Piers said, not looking up.
She frowned. Then she touched the bracelet. Gideon had told her about the Blitzed world. And Jake was there, locked up in some cell, fuming with restlessness and fear. She knew how that felt.
“Where’s Gideon?”
“Gone back to the Shee.” Wharton yawned. “Everything needs to seem normal. If Summer knew . . . Really, sometimes I fear for that poor boy’s sanity.”
Venn had said nothing for ages. He watched Sarah, his glance sharp and cold.
She said, “Listen to me. We can’t just work in the dark. We don’t have any more time to experiment and get things wrong over and over. If we make a mistake, we could miss him by years. We could be too late.” She turned to face him. “You know what to do, and you don’t have any choice about it. There’s only one man who can possibly help us now, and that man is Maskelyne.”
Venn, leaning on the filing cabinet, stood upright. He walked slowly into the very heart of the labyrinth and stood beside her, and the dark glass showed her his face, subtly warped. He said quietly, “How can I trust you, Sarah? How can I ever be sure of you? What we want is so different.”
“What we want is the same.” She turned on him. “Jake back. David found. Leah saved.”
“And then?”
“Then you give me the mirror.”
He smiled, remote. “You make it all sound so easy.” He gazed at the dark reflection of the room, the mess of machinery, Piers sitting exhausted and cross-legged among the tangle. “You! What do you say?”
“I think she’s right, Excellency.”
Venn took the bracelet from Sarah’s hand and held it up in his frostbitten fingers. She saw how its silver enigma angered him, how frustration and despair were eating him away. Without looking at her, his voice a low snarl, he said, “Do it.”
She turned fast, grabbed Wharton, and shook him awake. “George. Get dressed. Get the car. Quick.”
High on the moors, the air was frosty in the dawn. The sun was barely up, struggling through a great bank of cloud in the east, and as the car rocked and bounced along the frozen track, she had to grab the map to keep it open on her lap. “Be careful!”
Wharton drove grimly. “What about my suspension! Are you sure it’s up here?”
“So Piers says.”
How Piers had found out where the scarred man was living, she had no idea. But the rutted track led to a gate tied with rope, and as she jumped out to open it, she saw the stunted trees of a small pine copse, and beyond, far on the horizon, pale as a diamond, the sea.
She stopped, astonished.
“Sarah?”
She had never seen a sea so beautiful. She stared at it in utter delight. Wharton got out of the car and came up behind her. He said quietly, “So how is the sea different at the End of the world?”
“It just is.”
“You could tell me.” He sounded fascinated. “You should tell us, Sarah, about how it is there. About what Janus has . . . will do to the world. Maybe the mistakes need never be made . . .”
She glanced at him then, at his wide-eyed curiosity, thinking again how naïve these people were, in their green world with their clean water and ancient buildings and comfortable, convenient lives. How to them the future was something that they would never see. A story, nothing more.
For a fierce, angry moment she just wanted to shock him violently out of his complacency. But she made herself shake her head. “Not now, George. I couldn’t even begin.”
Before he could answer, she had unlooped the rope and pulled the gate open, lifting its heavy metal bars out of the stiff mud. “Leave the car. This track’s too narrow.”
He took the keys and let the door slam, loud and alien in the silent morning. The track was lined with gorse bushes, their furzy branches already green, and small sturdy bluebells lurked in the bottom of the scrappy, sheep-gnawed hedge. Walking down, Sarah felt the soft rustle and brush of the rough grass against her legs calming her, the wind whipping her coat wide.
Wharton came behind, watching her. He knew she had almost told him something then, had been on the edge of some revelation, and drawn back. The girl who could become invisible still held so many secrets. Now she was pointing into the wind. “That must be it.”