The presumably airless moon had drifted in the direction of her feet, affording her an oblique look at the ring of mountains surrounding one crater. The sunward slopes were bright, those in the shade utterly dark. Beyond it, the sky was blank, like a wall of night. No stars, no other planets, nothing. Down, its moon and its sun, was all there was.
‘What do you think happened?’ she asked. ‘To London.’
‘There’s a thing called a firestorm.’ Dalip shrugged and sat down on the trunk. ‘Learnt about it in history. If enough stuff burns◦– and we’re talking about a city-sized amount of stuff◦– all the hot air rising causes a hurricane-force wind to suck in fresh air from all around. It feeds the fire with fresh oxygen, and it gets hotter and hotter until there’s nothing left to burn. We made it happen in the Second World War, dropping incendiaries on German cities. Killed tens of thousands of people. Not soldiers, either. Just civilians, hiding in their cellars from the bombing, roasted alive by the heat. Like we almost were.’
‘Fucking hell,’ she said.
But they’d escaped. They’d opened the door to the street, caught a fleeting glimpse of an inferno, then been in Down in all its baffling majesty.
‘Nuclear bombs can do the same sort of thing. It doesn’t take a thousand bombers any more. Only one. But’◦– and he clenched his teeth, showing them white in the darkness◦– ‘you’re right. That’s not what happened. We would have felt the bomb go off; it would have been like an earthquake. Unmistakable.’
‘There were bangs and other noises first. Like thunder, in the distance sometimes, then closer. I thought it was actually thunder. Then I went underground, and I couldn’t hear it any more.’
‘And an hour, an hour and a half later, the whole of London was burning down.’ Dalip stood again and raised himself up on tiptoe. ‘If it wasn’t a bomb, then I don’t know. London just caught fire, everywhere, all at once. If we made it out, then maybe other people did, if there are other portals attached to our time. They’d all be starting off at different points on Down, and they’d all be as clueless as us. And assuming we stay alive, we might bump into them one day.’
‘That’d be weird.’
‘No weirder than meeting a whole bunch of people from the sixties, or the thirties. When did Crows say he crossed over?’
‘Thirty… six? They cut him. Badly. If he hadn’t found Down, they would have killed him.’
‘That doesn’t make him a decent man. Or rather, it didn’t. Let’s face it, none of us deserved to be saved. None of us are wiser, smarter, stronger or prettier than all those we watched die. Whatever criteria Down uses, how worthy we are doesn’t come into it.’
She climbed to her feet and brushed her skirts free of leaf litter. ‘So what if it was just luck? I didn’t want to die, and I still don’t. I wanted to live, which is what I can do now. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same?’
Dalip looked at the ground, then at the trees around the edge of the small clearing they’d co-opted for their camp.
‘It’s not just the lack of tides that scares me,’ he finally said. ‘I’m not very… I just… Look, I have to face up to the fact that I’m comfortable being told what to do. I know where I am with that. I’m safe.’
‘You were nails taking on Stanislav. Fucking nails, man. You threw us off a mountain to finish him off.’
‘And where did that get me?’
‘Here. Alive. What the fuck are you complaining about?’
‘My own choices nearly killed me. When I sleep, I dream I’m falling. Sometimes I don’t wake up in time. Sometimes, you don’t catch me, and you know what? It hurts. I hit that water so hard, it’s bits of me that sink.’
She regarded his shadow. ‘Why didn’t you say before?’
‘Because you’re so obviously enjoying yourself, there didn’t seem any point in, you know. Raining on your parade.’
‘I thought we were mates. Proper friends who told each other stuff.’
‘I’m,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m not supposed to be weak. I’m supposed to be a lion. It’s even my name. One of our gaolers called me “Little lion man”, but not in a good way. He knew. He knew I was weak.’
‘So what happened to him?’ she asked Dalip.
‘Stanislav killed him. Stabbed him a dozen times in the guts.’
He shrugged again, and she didn’t know what to say. She was used to the empty posturing of street kids, posing for shaky-cam videos while brandishing kitchen knives and ball-bearing catapults, where weakness was the one thing you didn’t dare show, let alone tell anyone else. It didn’t matter whether they were cowards, or too stupid to run when it all went down: it was the act, and that was the one thing that Dalip’s tightly controlled world had never taught him.
If she wasn’t careful◦– if he wasn’t careful◦– Down would eat him alive. It might have already started, and she couldn’t tell.
The others were on the opposite side of the fire; four still shapes, curled in various configurations on ground that, no matter how soft it started off, always ended up like concrete.
‘That bloke’s gone, and you’re still here. And you know what? That’s what counts. You found it when you needed it, and when you need it again, you can always find it again. I don’t know what you think a man is, but I’ve put up with kids pretending that they’re all grown up, all big men, and they can fuck right off. You don’t want that any more than I do. We all know what you did, and none of us think you’re weak. Fucking hell, look at you. You were this stringy thing, and now you’ve got all the muscles and stuff.’
He acknowledged his subtle transformation with a shrug. ‘My grandfather—’
‘Fought the Japanese when he was still a kid, you told me, like a dozen times. And what a pain in the arse he was to live with.’
For a moment, Dalip’s expression darkened and deepened, and he held himself tense and still. Then he let it go, and looked up at the receding moon. ‘You sound like my mum.’
‘Maybe you should have listened to her.’
‘I did. I do. I… I’m hanging on to the few certainties I have left.’
Mary walked the few steps to him, and landed a slow, deliberate punch on his shoulder. ‘We need you, not your grandfather. The war veteran we had turned into a soup of eyes and teeth, and I don’t want you going the same way.’
He nodded, but she could see that he was scared of that, too.
‘You’re not, are you?’ she asked. If he was, there’d be very little she could do, except ask him to leave. Stanislav had hidden his transformation so well that by the time it had taken him completely, he’d been almost impossible to kill. Almost.
‘No, that’s not happening,’ said Dalip. ‘At least, not that I know of. Keep an eye, or three, on me.’
‘That’s not a good joke.’
He shrugged, and the glimmer of his smile shone in the moonlight. ‘I was never any good at telling them. Always the serious kid in the corner. I thought I might lighten up a bit.’
‘All work and no play, right?’
He shrugged again. ‘Something like that. I’m not actually dull, just… people tell me what to do, and I do it. It’s a habit.’
‘No one’s going to tell you what to do here. Not now you’re free of Bell and her Wolfman.’