Angelmaker

XI Ancient’s history; a personal matter; Lovelace.

Edie wakes, still cold from Cuparah’s icy salvation of decades gone. It’s earlier than she intended, and the effort of getting vertical is for the moment too much to contemplate. Her body is old, and the bones themselves have taken up a kind of muttering. Even Bastion, she sometimes thinks, is in better overall repair than she is.

She ruffles his ears gently, and he makes a sound in his belly like a lawnmower but does not wake. Almost, Edie lifts him up for a hug, but a dog must be allowed his dreamtime. She refrains, and curls around him instead, hoping his hot-water-bottle body will draw her down into her own sleep. She gets, instead, the strange, meandering kaleidoscope which has recently been her mind’s recourse: the weird pageant of her life.

Alas, without many of the dirty bits.

Edie Banister could never decide if it was a dream or a nightmare, that long, strange fugue which carried her—and, incidentally, His (and then Her) Majesty’s United Kingdom—from 1946 to the end of the century. The Cold War framed everything, the great Soviet steamroller looming to the East and the plucky Yanks to the West—but Edie fought an altogether different war of her own: a long, shadowy, personal one against an enemy who somehow never went away. It did not matter how many times she beat Shem Shem Tsien. He always came back, and each defeat served only to make him more cruel.

Sleep clearly isn’t an option. With the assistance of the headboard and being careful not to disturb Bastion where he lies, Edie rises and stands naked in front of the mirror in the attic of the Pig & Poet. Not twenty any more, alas. Not even thirty or forty or fifty, or any of those comfortable landmarks which come before people call you “old.” And yet there is muscle, still, in her narrow arms, and though her joints protest, they will move, will serve, will—in absolute necessity, and on the understanding that the following day will be a world of pain—glide through the steps and swirls of the featherlight hiji waza Mrs. Sekuni recommended for senior combatants.

She brushes out her hair and trims it, then puts on her next identity: a severe grey suit and flat shoes—Sunday School Edie, complete with ugly handbag big enough to conceal Bastion and some other items she has recently cooked up.

The arrival of Mr. Biglandry at Rallhurst Court implies, of course, that Billy Friend has been interrogated, and if he gave her up he has likely also yielded the name of Joshua Joseph Spork. Assassins, though… Edie did not anticipate that. An arrest warrant, for sure—but killers, no. If Shem Shem Tsien were still alive, that would be a different matter, but age and cumulative injury have by now surely achieved what she never could. The Opium Khan would be a hundred and twenty-five this year. No. Shem is dead, and good riddance. Which implies either someone new, or that her own country’s secret service has just attempted to erase her.

She has seen the news, of course, knows that there are golden bees in the air over warships and cities and stock exchanges and homes, knows that governments are screaming blue murder. All the same, she had expected something more subtle. But perhaps she is simply sugar-coating the past. Maybe Abel Jasmine would have ordered her death: former agent launches one-woman revolution, engages doomsday device.

Edie stares back down the tunnel of the years, and feels the urge to shout advice to herself. Follow your heart, make the world you believe in. Governments promise everything, but change nothing. Beyond anything else, trust Frankie.

At last, she wakes the dog and ladles him gently into position, ignoring a burble of profound betrayal. Bastion does not approve of the handbag as a method of conveyance. Edie slips her hand between the leather straps and gentles him. Thinking about it, she realises it may not be the handbag per se, but the three or four Tupperware containers on which he sits, which smell of strange chemicals and plastic tape. Bastion most especially does not approve of Tupperware. He views it as a means to keep him from things rightfully his own, such as liver. The list of things of which he does not approve is long and complex, embracing such varied sinners as cats, thugs, wellington boots, brightly coloured umbrellas, cows, and unlicensed taxi cabs. But things which keep him from liver are near the top.

Edie catches the bus in Camden and lets it take her all the way west, then waits for the Catholic school in Goldmartin Street to disgorge its students and teachers, equally dressed in grey uniforms, so that she is suddenly just one of a great throng of severe women striding along the wide pavement. If anyone is following her, she has just made their lives almost impossibly difficult and annoying.

In the Underground she doubles back on herself and heads towards Harriet Spork’s convent. Sooner or later, she’s fairly sure, Joe will go there, and that is a calculation others will make, too.

Love causes people to do stupid things. That does not, she realises now, make them the wrong things.

The war came to an end and—as with the one before it—everyone was too exhausted to cheer. People smiled at one another not like victorious heroes but like punch-drunk prizefighters, eyes swollen shut and lips rippled and split, who do not understand why everyone is clapping. A numb silence settled over Europe from Snowdon to Ararat. Edie Banister—in the person of Commander James—was detailed to accompany Frankie from London to Calais and down to her family’s home in rural France.

“Did you win the war for us?” Edie asked her in the grim little sleeper compartment of the southbound train.

“No,” Frankie said seriously. “I would say I am responsible for no more than a few percentage points of variance in the outcome. The military men are incapable of asking a clear question. If they can only see one way of doing a thing, it follows that there is only that way. I spent six weeks working on an issue with sonar before I established that the use they proposed for the new technique was utterly…” She waved her hands in a gesture of aggravation and stared moodily out of the window. Then she looked back at Edie, and forced a smile. “I’m sorry. It was frustrating. More honestly… I do not believe this will be a pleasant journey for me. There will be pain of the soul. But… it is pleasant to see you, Commander Banister.” She reached over and grasped Edie’s hand, and smiled a wide, inviting smile. Then she drew a little closer. “More than pleasant, if I am honest.”

“Frankie,” Edie said after a long moment, “my name is Edith and I am a female person.”

Frankie Fossoyeur nodded, puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “I know. The ratio of your hips to your head is inconsistent with maleness. Also, the formation of your voice, while the note is quite deep, is not indicative of the presence of…” She waggled her fingers and then leaned closer, touching Edie’s throat at the midpoint.

“Adam’s apple,” Edie Banister said, after a moment.

“Yes! Exactly. Also the skin, the eyes, the odour of the body, the hands… these are not mathematical observations, by the way. They are qualitative…” She had not removed her fingers. Edie could feel the second one, resting on her neck just to one side of the first. If she stepped forward, she would feel the third, then the little finger and eventually the palm and the thumb, then the forearm, and then all of Frankie at once.

“Just so that we’re clear,” Edie said. She shifted her weight. Frankie’s nails grazed her skin.

“We are,” Frankie said. “Quite clear.”

How long they stood there Edie was never sure. At some point, they began to kiss, and the distance to Marseilles seemed very short. Undressing, Frankie announced sternly that she did not believe in exclusive love, which was a ludicrous construction of the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy. Edie agreed, never having thought about it, and wondered distantly whether the Judeo-Christian Patriarchy was a plot to which she should alert Abel Jasmine, or one he had perhaps created. Certainly, she wasn’t going to argue about it now.

The journey was easy, but arriving was hard. Frankie’s home was burned out. A pair of tweezers and a copper pot lay broken on her old hearth, beside a single, charred shoe. She asked about her family, her relatives, but once they knew who she was, the remaining local people would not talk to her. The young ones looked ashamed and the old ones turned away and muttered. A soldier said he thought it likely they’d been denounced as traitors to Vichy.

“They did a bit of that,” he said, looking out at the town. “Pointed the finger at those they didn’t like. People who were too rich or too pretty. All over occupied Europe, belike. Here for sure.” He shied a pebble at a man pulling a handcart. “Half the world at war with the other half and good French lads fighting in the shadows to set ’em free, French soldiers in England readying for the day, and these buggers down here were just settling old scores. Bollocks to ’em, is what I say. Still… they had to live somehow, I suppose.” He showed them a pile of belongings, dug up from the town dump, and Frankie moaned, clutched an ugly beaded necklace of her mother’s from the pile.

Edie walked her away from town, followed a narrow track to a tree stump on the shore of a mucky lake.

“They hate us this much…” Frankie whispered, between gulps of horror. “My people. Because we are witches. Hakote. Children of the Sea. Webbed feet and shadow. Because we see the world, my mother said.”

“I don’t understand,” Edie confessed into her lover’s hair, because she knew already that when Frankie needed to talk about human things and life, you had to give her the cues or she became convinced you weren’t listening.

Frankie swallowed. “Numbers,” she said, after a moment. “Always numbers. We are born with numbers as you are born with sight. Do you see? So we are witches.”

“Because you can count?”

“Non, not exactly. It is like that, but it is more than counting, and less. It is… Alors… Suppose I am a crude peasant girl—which I am, but suppose it is Louis XIV’s time. I see a waterwheel. I see the rotation and the angle, and I know that in thirty to forty rotations, it will wear away and collapse. I do not know why I know. How can I express periodicity when I have never learned to write? When I have never needed a word for ‘rotation’? But I run, anyway, to the miller and I say to him to stop the wheel. Now, the miller is a rich man and he did not get that way by listening to foolish girls. He does nothing. The wheel breaks and a man dies. Now I am a prophet! A witch! It is all my fault! Do you see?”

“Hakote.”

“Sorceress. Yes. So they make up stories. Lies, embellishments. And my mother’s house is a ruin and my… everyone I loved is gone. Because people are too stupid to know the simple truth when they hear it, and believe the most outrageous lies.” And then something else which Edie could not quite hear, but which sounded like: Please let them have escaped. More family, more vulnerable witches. More targets.

Edie beside her, Frankie made inquiries from anyone who would speak to her. She discovered her mother and uncles had been put into one of the Vichy French camps quite early, and had died. Two more relatives—Edie wasn’t sure who—had perhaps escaped over the hills to the coast, but been in a convoy which was sunk by U-boats.

The following day, they travelled on into Germany. It was not like seeing a fallen knight or the corpse of a monstrous wolf. It wasn’t even the way Edie had imagined it, with burned-out tanks and beaten, thankful people.

It was like the aftermath of bad surgery, or a pit fight in Calcutta.

Lady Germany had taken a knife to her own face. In a strange, bewildered frenzy, she had cut off her proud, Semitic nose, and skewered her brown Romany eyes. And then came her violent rescuers, no more subtle than herself: they beat her, burned her, stabbed her, and then finally could not agree which of them should own the mess, so split her Solomonically (yet more bitter irony to which no one paid attention) and both parties were now having their way with the remains. A truly befitting European tragedy. Fossoyeur: it means gravedigger.

In the rain amid the mud and twisted metal: Frankie Fossoyeur was crying, water from her eyes as if they were the very Möhne and Eder dams themselves. Slick-cheeked and open-mouthed, she stared as if seeing the whole of Germany spread out below her on a table. The country had undone itself as much as it had been undone.

“More dead of lies. More millions.”

Leaning on Edie Banister, Frankie choked out horrors and sucked in air which was half mud.

Back home at Edie’s flat in Marylebone, Frankie bawled and wailed and stared into space. Germany had been her enemy, but France had betrayed her. France was dead to her. She would never visit the Louvre again. She would never take Edie to the Orangerie to see Monet’s water lilies. Monet was a bastard, and his style was evidence of a myopic condition, not of genius at all. No genius ever came out of France. None. Not even Frankie. Frankie was not French. She was Hakote, and that was all. She would work.

She would work. The Apprehension Engine, yes. The truth would come out. Everyone would see. The world would become honest, mankind would be better off. No lies, ever again.

Edie took her to bed and kept her there for most of a week, and by the end she wept only occasionally. Edie bought her oil pastels and paper from an art shop in Reading, and Frankie sketched faces Edie did not recognise over and over again, and touched her hand and said “I love you,” which she had never done before. Occasionally, she stopped sketching and wrote numbers on the wall, and other symbols Edie had never seen, symbols which expressed things for which spoken language had no name. Warmed and lit by the single bar of an electric fire, Frankie Fossoyeur drew the faces of the beloved dead, and surrounded them with wild, dangerous comprehensions no one else on Earth could have understood. It was the first time Edie heard her speak of her book, in the ghastly lethargy which took her between bouts of mania.

I shall write it all down, like Marie Curie! Not just numbers. I shall tell the truth. It does not have to be this way, Edie. It does not! We do not have to be small, and stupid, and weak. I shall make a book unlike any you have seen. A book of wonders… A book of the Hakote, and you shall read it and see it and still you shall not believe what I have done!

Frankie’s handwriting was so bad that most of the words were single letters followed by long wiggly lines. Edie brought her tea and wrapped arms around her, and Frankie allowed herself to be held. A month later they were sharing the flat, Edie’s small number of belongings swamped by Frankie’s accumulated books and devices. In the evenings they huddled together under a quilt, and Edie did crosswords while Frankie wrote.

It was winter, and it stayed that way until 1948.

Shem Shem Tsien had not died in Addeh Sikkim.

Edie had known this, peripherally. She had been aware of him quitting the field, leaving his soldiers to burn where they fought. She had seen him take a moment to kill the crucified bishop, slicing across his gut so that the man would die painfully rather than quickly. She had known, too, that the subsequent explosion regrettably failed to claim the Khan—Abel Jasmine had shown her the reports, so that she would not be surprised into betraying herself if ever she met him again. Edie had assumed that Shem Shem Tsien would be occupied with rebuilding his citadel, licking his wounds and looking for another genius.

He did nothing of the kind. Before he had been Khaygul of Addeh Sikkim, she realised, he had been the Opium Khan, master of the heroin trade in Europe and Asia. The nation he had usurped had been little more than an amusement park for him; his own personal Brighton Pier. He had killed his family because they were in the way not of some great unfulfilled desire, but of a whim. He had no need to be ruler of an actual country. His power was in himself, and in the men who served him, and ultimately in the extremity of his vision. A prince of horrors is no less a prince if the land he holds lies in ruins.

All the same, it seemed his hate for James Banister was surpassed only by his rage against Dotty Catty. To hurt her, the report said, he had evolved a system for the torture of elephants, and the outlaw hills where he kept his fortresses howled and bellowed with their agony and the markets of Asia were filled with his bloody ivory and the contorted heads of his victims. Moreover, he had let it be known: Frankie Fossoyeur was his. The man who brought him his genius should be exalted above all others. He should be rewarded with wealth and concubines and whatever else he wished, so long as she was compos mentis, and could work.

Abel Jasmine supplied guards for Frankie, and Edie made her practise escape and evasion. She taught her how to do a flat bolt: how to drop everything and leave a country without stopping at your bank or getting a change of clothes; how to find someone who would supply you with a passport; how to vanish from view in a city and in the countryside. Frankie thought it all a nonsense. She barely listened, and yet by the end she was suggesting improvements and refinements and Edie was wondering how long it would take her to understand the tricks of invisibility better than Edie herself.

But if Frankie was learning to be a spy or some variation thereof, she was learning with the smallest necessary aspect of her mind, as if she sent Frankie-the-stenographer to pay attention so that some other, inner Frankie could do the real work. The Apprehension Engine was in her heart, and its defining numbers were scrawled in chalk on a blackboard in her study. She no longer found herself distracted by things. Brother Denis, visiting from the Ruskinite mother-house, worried that she was alarmingly focused.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Edie said discouragingly.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me,” Denis told her. “But you bloody better not kid yourself about it. She’s not the same. She’s got a look.”

“What look?”

“Vision,” Denis said. “Monomania. I don’t know. But it’s not her.”

“Maybe it is,” Edie said. “Maybe this is how she is when she cares about something.” Someone, she was saying. This is how she is when she loves someone. Me. And she only needs one big project and me to fill her attention. Denis had the good, unmonkish sense to leave well enough alone.

The following day Frankie went out, and three thugs in a black sedan jumped on her in front of a shop called Cadwallader’s which sold soap, but Songbird and a few others, now notionally part of a civilian service, sent the would-be kidnappers to Paddington Green for a sharp discussion about British law. A week later, Shem Shem Tsien sank a British warship in the North Sea and a Russian one in port at Helsinki and tried to start a war, and while the eyes of Whitehall were fixed on that little disaster, two more hoods tried to steal Frankie from a symposium in Cambridge where she was meeting Erdös and von Neumann.

Edie Banister glued on her moustache and flew to Tallinn, and found Shem Shem Tsien posing as a Russian prince. He even carried a purse full of Romanov gold and swore Romanov-style, in French. He was surrounded by secretaries, men writing in books. A photographer bustled around him. There was even a cameraman with a Bolex.

“So, Commander Banister. You look well,” Shem Shem Tsien murmured across the card table at the Kolyvan Casino. “I myself do not. I am well aware.” He was craggy and drawn, and there was a newly healed scar on his neck, but his film-star eyes were glittering and cold. He gestured at the secretaries. “Forgive my affectation—I am preserving my journey for posterity. My pathway to transcendence is noteworthy. I suppose that makes these good men my apostles. My gospellers. ‘If I have the mind of Napoleon…’” He smiled at the nearest one, then leaned closer. “You stole my scientist, Commander Banister. I want her back.”

“She’s her own woman, old boy.”

“No, she is not. Everything that is, is mine by divine right. It is used by others on sufferance, and by my leave.”

“Well, I suppose I ain’t a believer.”

“No,” Shem Shem Tsien said, without irony. “But you will be.” Abruptly, he changed the subject. “I understand Frankie is writing a book. Fiction, no doubt.”

Edie shrugged, but James Banister’s face gave her away. Shem Shem Tsien smiled.

“Oh. Not fiction. Surely not mathematics? My mathematics?” He leaned across the table. “I will have it all back from her, Commander. Her brain is not yours to plunder. Oh, but I have a gift for you.” He smiled, and slid a small wet thing across the table. “My mother’s tongue. It’s quite fresh, I assure you. I kept her alive for some time to watch the deaths of her elephants, but eventually I tired of her. I did keep her head, for a memento. I feel inclined to share.”

Commander Banister stared at the tongue, and wondered whether it was better that it should be Dotty Catty’s, or that Shem Shem Tsien should have ripped it out of someone else’s mouth purely for effect.

Edie couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so she just smiled James Banister’s most irritating patrician smile, and saw Shem Shem Tsien stiffen in fury. Later, they tried to kill each other in a frigid dockyard among giant shipping crates. The gospellers did not intervene. They simply watched everything, and recorded it.

James Banister and the Opium Khan lost their guns in the first exchanges, emptying the magazines and discarding them as useless junk, and then it was hand-to-hand. Shem Shem Tsien moved with a weird, loping step, spine slightly bent, and Edie realised he had scars on his back and could not straighten it. The fire, she thought, or the elephant. It did not change his speed, or his lethality. Remembering him in Addeh Sikkim, she judged it likely she would lose, and therefore die.

On the other hand… Edie grinned tautly, recalling Mrs. Sekuni: Cheat, Edie. Cheating is much better than skill. Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory, which is why it is called cheating. And some people are so horrified by it that it is an advantage in itself.

“You’ve picked up a rummy habit,” James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. “Sort of a crouch. You look a bit… well, I’m sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?”

“By all means, Commander, do amuse yourself while you can. I owe these scars to you, after all. You should get some satisfaction from them. Although I am depressed to see such a dear enemy giggling like a girl at a soldier’s wounds.”

Gotcha, Edie thought. Of course.

“Shem Shem Tsien,” she told the Opium Khan in her own voice, “I laugh because I am tired of you. I cannot imagine that you aren’t bored with yourself. There’s very little about this which is clever or funny. With all that’s going on in the world, with all that is possible and wonderful, this is what you do. You’re a sideshow. A hack. A waste of time.” His eyes bulged in absolute, stunned fury. Edie unbuttoned her shirt and opened it, baring a proud—if slight and somewhat foxed—bosom to his view.

Shem Shem Tsien himself was silent with what Edie took to be actual amazement. When he spoke, it was with a genuine, unaffected truthfulness. First real moment of communication we’ve ever had, Edie thought.

“Oh,” the Opium Khan said. “I honestly had no idea.” Then he swung at her, not to kill but to erase, and they were back on familiar ground.

She taunted him, drew him out into the open, keeping the wind at her back. It cut through her jacket and made her shiver, but it was in his eyes, and the ice on the ground made the fight a matter of footwear as much as skill. Edie was wearing steel toe–capped boots with discreet metal studs, the better to emphasise her masculinity and conceal her relatively small feet, and also because she liked unfair advantages. The Opium Khan, fresh from the gambling tables, wore dinner shoes. She attacked, and he slid towards her with that familiar ghastly smoothness, then lost his grip, skittering and sliding on the frozen stones while he wrenched his upper body around to guard against her. She threw a rusted iron chain at him, then followed it to drive her forehead into his face and grapple with him as bluntly and brutally as she knew how. Shem Shem Tsien, with his nose squashed to one side and his fine moustache clogged with blood, looked quite amazed. Edie took advantage of his hesitation and applied Mrs. Sekuni’s sixth wrist-lock, a working man’s pugilism which lacked elegance but got the job done, and cut off one of his fingers with his own knife. He lost the fight, but she couldn’t bring him down, and he fled. Even so, Edie had the sense that Shem Shem Tsien was having fun. To her this was work, and very hard. He was playing out his passage to godhood, and he enjoyed hurting people.

In April the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, and Moscow fumed. Abel Jasmine moved Frankie’s laboratory to the Lovelace and kept it moving, effectively making her disappear. Shem Shem Tsien faded away into Europe’s shadows, one more hateful little bastard in a forest of them. Edie could almost hear him shouting “You haven’t heard the last of me!” in the darkness of the winter sea.

And that much, at least, was certain. Nine years later, Edie stood on the lip of a chasm and stared downwards. She had battled with Shem Shem Tsien across the world, and it never changed or got any better. He did something awful, she went and tidied up; in Rome, in Kiev, in Havana. They fought on boats and in caves, on the roofs of houses and in alleyways. Sometimes one or other of them had an army, sometimes they were alone. It went on and on and it never settled anything. Shem Shem Tsien didn’t change, didn’t learn, did not accept that the new age had no space for him. Her body was a dictionary of woundings now, courtesy of his impossible speed, and she had learned to distract him, harry him, cheat him of her own death by guile. Once or twice, on good days, she had even survived him by skill. She tried not to think about how their addiction to this private, predictable conflict mirrored the ridiculous proxy wars the East and West were fighting with one another.

The wind brought the smell of sulphur and decay to her nostrils, and she gagged.

She was in Addeh Sikkim at the palace of the Opium Khan, except that the citadel was gone, replaced by a giant pit. The water which had powered Frankie’s machines roiled in a simmering lake heated by the Earth, and the whole place was walled and scaffolded in black iron. A pit of industry. A birthplace of monsters. Edie wrapped herself in a local shawl and coat and staggered down with the other women who went to work in the pit. The long circumference road was punctuated with heads on poles. Some were human. Others were elephants, the flesh long gone and the pikes bowed beneath the weight of bone.

At the bottom, Shem Shem Tsien had made a sort of factory and mine combined. Vast presses turned out metal sheets and slaves worked them into parts for mechanical soldiers like the ones Frankie had made. In the very centre, beneath his tents, there was a ring where they were pitted against one another. They were clumsy and hopeless, the same awkward chessmen Edie had seen before, and when he wanted blood, the Opium Khan was obliged to hobble a prisoner or blind him so that the machines could get close enough to strike. And yet, they were improving. Fractionally, painfully, whatever pattern Frankie had created to guide them was refining itself, and when an automaton fell, the animating mechanism was recovered so that it would learn from defeat. Already, they followed his minions around like dogs, lunged at whatever the minion indicated. One day they would work, Edie thought, and hoped she never had to see it.

She took photographs and went to the embassy in Dhaka to report. She was walking to her hotel when Shem Shem Tsien’s car pulled up next to her and the Opium Khan shot her twice in the gut.

“So nice to see you, Commander Banister,” he drawled at her as she bled into the gutter. “I do hope your visit was satisfactory? Are you dying, do you think, or shall we meet again? I should miss our little chats.”

She honestly did not know, and when her vision went grey at the edges and she felt cold, she was terribly, terribly afraid and alone. Shem Shem Tsien got back into his car and drove away, apparently content to leave the decision to Edie. She had no recollection, later, of the long crawl to the ambassador’s residence which stripped the skin from her hands and knees.

Edie woke in a hospital bed, and the first thing she saw was Frankie. She thought Frankie was so beautiful, so perfect, that she started to cry. Frankie stroked her face and told her it was all going to be all right, and Edie wanted to say “I love you.” But she fell asleep.

“Please do not do that again,” Frankie said sternly when Edie woke, “this getting hurt. I do not appreciate it at all. I would not like it at all if you went away and did not come back.”

Edie dutifully promised to try her best. Frankie growled that “try” was synonymous with “fail” and then—when Edie looked crestfallen—immediately apologised and embraced her, very carefully. Later, the nurse came, with a look of deep disapproval, to change Edie’s bandages.

“Children will be more difficult,” the nurse warned, “if that is a consideration. But not impossible, I don’t think.”

There were two red, round intrusions above Edie’s hip.

“Now we both have scars,” Frankie Fossoyeur murmured.

Yes. Frankie had old scars, had them when Edie first met her, and Edie had never asked how they came to be there and now barely saw them any more. Except… now that Edie saw them anew, she recognised them for what they were. She stared. Frankie gave a little sigh.

“Oh, dear.”

“Frankie…”

“I was very young, Edie. I was in love. I was foolish and we were not careful. And yes, I had a child. Matthieu. And then… the occupation, the war. They were on the ship. You recall, we learned of it when I went home.” The refugee ship. The one which sank.

“Frankie, I’m so sorry I never asked.”

“And I am sorry I never told you.” There was something else she wasn’t saying, but Edie did not push.

Frankie didn’t come to the hospital again. Edie couldn’t understand why not, wished that she could hold her hand. She assumed that Frankie was afraid Edie would die, that she could not bear to see her so weak. Edie worried that she might indeed die, and then Frankie would feel guilty. She worried that Frankie not coming might make the difference, but it didn’t. It just made her cry, alone. And now there was something else in her mind, something deeply unworthy and unkind and inescapable: Frankie had found someone else.

Edie didn’t care if Frankie was screwing the entire Coldstream Guard, so long as she loved Edie. So long as she was there, in the world, with her ridiculous refinements of the teapot and her upholstery trousers and the way her hair always fell into her cup when she drank.

Edie went home, and found the flat empty. No Frankie. No pastel mathematics. It was cold and dark. She went to the Lovelace, to the strange carriage filled with coils and tanks and bubbling jars. It was empty, too. She called Amanda Baines, and found she was in dock and Cuparah beached for repairs, and Frankie nowhere to be seen. Finally, she went to the elephant house at London Zoo, where the only pachyderm servant of the British Government had a very special enclosure and a personal bath. She fed him bits of fruit and leaves and an occasional morsel of kelp for Auld Lang Syne, and wondered how much of it all he understood, and whether elephants gossiped.

Frankie came back just as Edie was heading out again on another mission, silent and obscure. She kissed Edie as if the world was ending and wept on her, then fled to the bedroom and they made love over and over and Frankie said she was sorry, so sorry, so sorry she hadn’t come to the hospital. She would not say why, or where she had been. In the middle of the night, Edie woke to see her standing at the window, looking south.

“Where have you been?” Edie said at last, in the awful silence. “I needed you.”

“Elsewhere, I was needed more,” Frankie said. “I promise, Edie. It won’t happen again.”

But, of course, it did.

Edie told Abel Jasmine she couldn’t do it any more, she needed to be at home. Abel Jasmine said he quite understood. The world was changing, anyway, and perhaps it was time for the new guard to have their day.

The new guard struck Edie as very efficient.

Frankie came and went, and Edie didn’t know where to. In the end, she did the thing she had always promised herself she would never do: she spied. She saw Frankie take a taxi to a clockworker’s shop in Quoyle Street, saw her greeted chastely by the little artisan, with his sad-looking bird’s face and his open adoration. She sat on a bench in her daft, obvious disguise, furious that it had worked and more furious with Frankie for being so loving, so faithful, so true. This was not an affair. It was another life. There was no sex. This was so much worse.

A moment later, a boy—no, a young man, well-dressed and brimming with frantic energy—arrived on foot. As he rapped on the door he turned slightly towards her and Edie almost screamed at the sudden likeness. The artisan ushered him inside.

Frankie’s son.

Edie was appalled at herself for intruding. She was furious with Frankie for everything. She stormed home and was even more furious when her attempt to conceal her rage was successful. Finally she packed her life into two small bags and left. Frankie wailed and howled. Edie snapped at her. Bad things were said. Unkind things. More unkind, because they were all true.

Edie took refuge in work, because work was a thing where you could lie, sneak, and hit people in the nose and it was considered laudable. She demanded and received her old job back. Since she was in that sort of mood, Abel Jasmine sent her to Iran, and Edie spied on Iranians. Tehran was a melting pot of intrigue; almost everyone there was a spy. On one occasion, she went to a clandestine meeting and realised that not only was no one in the room actually who they claimed to be, but in fact everyone was notionally representing their enemy. She got reckless and told them all, which was either very rude or very funny. There was a short, huffy silence in which gentlemen and ladies from various secret organisations sneered at one another, and then everyone got very drunk and they had a party. Edie woke up between an agent of the Mossad and a ravishing Soviet girl with bad skin on one cheek and a sailor’s mouth.

Over breakfast—the young man from Mossad was still in the shower—the Soviet girl told Edie that the KGB had killed the Sekunis in Cuba. The girl didn’t know why.

Edie hoped it was misinformation, but knew it wasn’t. The world was getting old and cruel. The great game she had played, the wild, primary-colour roller coaster, had become something harsher. It wasn’t brother monarchs scoring points any more, or empires testing one another, or Vell played, Commander, but vee vill get you next time, you may be sure… What difference does it make if one crowned head replaces another? What matter if the Queen’s nephew displaces the Queen? But now it was different. It was about ideas, and fed by science. An idea could never die. A city, though, could burn, and its people.

Abel Jasmine called her back to Europe. She knew from the lack of detail that something was wrong. Something had happened, and it was bad.

“Is it him?” she asked. “Is it Shem Shem Tsien? Because this time I’ll kill him, Abel. I don’t care what it costs.”

Abel Jasmine sighed. “Come home, Edie. I need you here.”

She took a plane to Istanbul and then on to London, and when she got there she found herself going to Cornwall, and she knew it was worse than she had imagined because no one would tell her, and she gradually realised this was not secrecy or oversight, but fear. They didn’t understand what was going on, and they were afraid. Which was when she knew, absolutely knew, that it was Frankie.

“The Engine,” Abel Jasmine said, and that was all Edie needed to know. Frankie had tested the Engine, and she had somehow got it wrong. Or, more likely, too right.

“Get me to the Lovelace,” she told the Wren in the front seat of her staff car. “Do you know what that is?”

“Yes,” the girl said, and Edie realised that she was getting old, because the Wren looked too young to drive.

Edie sat in the front passenger seat and listened to the road surface change beneath the wheels. She recognised the route, knew where she was going. She forced her mind not to speculate on what she would find when she got there. When they crossed the Tamar and left the main road, it was the in-between hour, too late to be properly twilight but not yet full dark. The other woman’s nervous chatter slowed as she concentrated on the turns and dips, and then stopped altogether when they reached the outer perimeter and were waved through. Ambulances rushed silently in the other direction. Edie had heard somewhere that when they didn’t use the siren, it meant the patient was already dead.

There were soldiers along the road and soldiers in vans and soldiers standing guard over farmhouses and cottages: regular men, veterans who had seen service. They were grim and tired, and as the car wound through a tiny group of buildings on a hilltop—too large to be a farm and too small for a village—Edie saw a private vomiting into a ditch, and his mates holding him up. She’d seen British infantrymen make fun of one another during field amputations. None of them were smiling now.

The car slowed and Edie thought for a moment they’d arrived, but there was an obstruction in the road, a big, green-canvased transport. It had clipped the stone hedge on a turn and brought down a big block of granite. Three soldiers were levering it out of the way.

Edie watched. Inside the car, sound was muffled. She could hear the Wren breathing.

A moment later, something slammed wetly into the windscreen. Edie lurched back in her seat, recoiling from a wide, gawping mouth which smeared across the glass. She saw a circle of red lips and a line of saliva, and she had her gun pointed directly into it before she realised that it belonged not to an escaped lion or a giant leech, but a bearded man in a blue Sunday-best jacket. The Wren had turned in her seat and was ready to slam the car backwards and away. She glanced across for instructions, and Edie held up her gun hand, palm out: wait.

The man licked and snuffled at the glass, tried to get a grip on it, and slid hopelessly down onto the ground. Behind him were two more figures, slack-jawed and moaning, slopping bonelessly out of the back of the transport. One clutched a knife and fork. A dinner party, Edie realised. They were dressed for dinner. The one with the cutlery sawed aimlessly at the air. The other stepped from one foot to another, a strange, heron’s waddle: quick quick slow.

A sergeant appeared, spun the bearded man smartly around and folded his arms across his chest, bundled him into a bear hug and back into the transport. Two burly privates did the same with the others.

Edie called the sergeant over.

“How many like this?” she asked.

“Near on a thousand, but we won’t rescue all of them,” he said, looking right at her to make sure she understood. “About half of them are dead before we get there. Best we can figure is that they’re all still doing whatever they were doing when it happened. Stuck in a groove. Mostly that’s fine. Bloody awful, but fine. But then some… well. There’s a cattle farm over Tregurnow way. The farmer was butchering some steers. Killed all of them before we got there. Went back to the farmhouse and just kept going.” He trailed off, waiting to see if she needed him to explain. She didn’t. “Is this a Russian thing, do you reckon? Is it war?”

“No,” Edie said firmly. “No, this is an accident. Chemical spill from a container ship.”

The sergeant scowled. “Well, I hope they hang for it.”

Frankie. What have you done?

The Lovelace creaked to and fro in the darkness of Frankie’s cavern, a tiny incremental rocking like a shudder, on axles not powered but not restrained. Every so often, Edie could hear something which might have been footsteps, and beneath them and the sound of nervous soldiers standing guard in a circle around the train, came a steady, cockroach rustling she could not name. At one end of the passenger section, a single light flicked on and off, on and off.

Songbird swore softly and crossed himself. Edie had never seen him do that before. In S2:A, very few men prayed; they’d seen too many stupid chances, for good or ill. The same unfamiliar itch was tickling Edie’s fingers, a sense that this was too big to be her problem, too strange and desperate. There must be someone above me to deal with this. But that was the other thing you got used to in S2:A—the person who came along and took over when things were bad was you.

“Radio?” she asked.

Songbird’s radio man, Jesper, shook his head. “More crackle than a pigling roast.”

Abel Jasmine had told Edie, in London, that Frankie might still be inside the train. Was she dead, then? Or at her desk with wide eyes, like the farmers and fishermen Edie had seen?

Edie gestured to Songbird and to the others: wait. Songbird frowned and shook his head. Coming in with you, Countess, his face said. All for one, ey?

“Give me five minutes,” Edie said. “Then follow, but follow soft, you understand, because those are ours there, whatever’s happened.”

Songbird looked stubborn. Edie sighed.

“Please,” she said. “If Frankie’s dead in there, I just want to be the one to find her.” Although, until this moment, she had not allowed the thought to form in her mind.

Songbird scowled, but acquiesced. Edie turned and walked towards the train.

Edie stepped up onto the rearmost carriage. Lovelace had changed a bit since her time—new carriages added and others gone—but it was fundamentally the same train she had known: defiantly ornate, with the stamps of Ruskinite artisans pressed into the iron. Entering, she let the door spring shut against her back and push her gently in, so that it would make no noise in closing. The solid pressure reassured her, and then an instant later she felt a wild claustrophobia, a deep desire to go no further.

No time for that now.

Inside, the carriage was only partly lit, the curtains closed and keeping out the light from the big siege lamps outside. Tiger stripes fell across one of the Lovelace’s communal spaces, a smoking room. Edie was about to move forward when a faint breath stopped her, a tiny puff of moving air. It smelled of laundry. She folded herself into a low crouch and slid smoothly away, finding her own patch of darkness. She peered around, but her eyes were still adjusting. A crawling sensation whispered along her spine. I am in a room with a dead man walking.

Unfair thought. Irrational. If there was a man in here, he was not a monster, he was a victim. Unless he was eating when it happened. Then perhaps he is both. She was sure it was a man, without knowing why. Scent, perhaps. The length of a stride she couldn’t hear, the weight of a person she could not feel. She just knew, as meat knows salt.

There was a game she used to play with the Sekunis, a training game in the dark. Feel your way. Know your body, your space. In the dark, she would take a guard, and in the dark, they would attack her. The key was not to expect anything, not to look for anything. You moved, you waited, you acted only when you knew.

She dropped her centre and relaxed her body, and waited.

He appeared in front of her as if stepping from behind a curtain. He must have been curled up on one of the seats. One hand reached out to embrace her, or to tear at her, or to take her gun from its holster at her side. She didn’t know. She slipped beneath the hand and laid her arm across his chest, twisting around her own centre and sweeping his leg. O soto gari, firm but not murderous. She followed him down and barred the arm as he tried to continue the motion.

Was he shaking hands? Opening a door?

Abruptly, he bucked, and she heard the shoulder pop, felt the bone shift under the skin. He twisted against the joint, destroying it, and when she saw his face she was so shocked she nearly let go of him. The look of emptiness was gone, replaced by an appallingly focused fury. His head lunged at her like a striking heron, snarling and snapping. He bridged, more vital components snapping in the arm, and she relinquished her lock as she realised it was useless on a man who didn’t care how badly he was hurt.

She backed away. She didn’t want to use the gun, because she had no idea how the other people in here—there were more, she was sure—would respond to a sudden noise. They might ignore it. Or they might converge on it and stare at her. Or they might suddenly try to tear her apart. There was no evidence for that. There was no evidence of any kind, just Frankie inside, in the furthest carriage, the innermost keep of the Lovelace.

The man lurched upright and fell towards her, and she dodged. He lunged again, and this time she stepped in and wheeled him over her back, claiming a leg and twisting it hard as he went down. The knee dislocated. It might not knit properly, after this. He might walk with a limp. But she hadn’t shot him, and that was worth something, although she doubted in her heart he would ever be anything more than he was now, a man reduced to the level of a shark.

She watched him try to get up and fail, then lose interest in her altogether. A moment later she heard a strange, wrenching noise, and turned to see that he was swallowing the fingers of his useless arm.

Edie retched, recovered, and then lost control of her stomach again, emptying it into a corner bin. Then she wiped her mouth on a hand-woven curtain and moved on.

In the connecting section between carriages was an alcove with a wind-up lantern. It would make light. It would also make her a target. She considered, then took it down and cranked the handle. Better to see what was going on than miss an ambush, whether intended as such or not.

She opened the door and shone the lantern into the next compartment. It was a dormitory, with berths on alternate sides of the carriage to make a sense of privacy and to block enfilading fire. She listened, and knew that it was full.

Edie rounded the first bend and found a Ruskinite and two soldiers, all vacant and still. She shone her lantern directly upon the face of the nearest, and watched his pupils contract. He showed no other sign of having noticed, just stood, loosely. She was walking past him, looking full into his face, when he spoke.

“I think you’ll find—” He seemed to have more to say, but somehow he didn’t. He just stopped.

“I think you’ll find—”

She stepped back.

“I think you’ll find—”

That same intonation, over and over. A recording. Or rather, all that was left of the man. A trace of him, the rest obliterated. She heard a sigh, and turned sharply, gun pointed at the next man, but it wasn’t an expression of anything, just a noise made by air in his lungs when he moved.

Edie surveyed them all, and they watched her in return. They were not curious, but they watched all the same, endlessly. There was an African word she had heard from Songbird when she arrived: zumbi. A corpse which hasn’t the decency to lie down. You have to tie his jaw shut so he doesn’t speak. (Back down the corridor the man said: “I think you’ll find—”)

“Hello?”

Edie turned sharply and raised her gun. The man flinched. He was young, in his thirties, and stout. A hamsterish sort of fellow in a robe. A Ruskinite. She was so glad to see him, alive, in here, that she almost hugged him. Instead, she growled: “Who are you?”

Her gun was still pointed at his head.

“Sholt,” he said. “Call me Ted. I came this morning.”

He was holding a glass. She realised after a moment that it had milk in it, that his chest was covered in splatter and what might be milky vomit.

“Don’t corner them,” Ted Sholt said, “and don’t put them in a position where they cannot possibly do whatever they seem to be doing. That makes them…” He glanced up, saw her face. “Oh. You know that.”

“Yes.”

“What… did you have to…” He was asking her if she had killed one of his friends.

“No,” Edie said, and they shared a moment of stark understanding: not that it will probably make a great deal of difference.

One of the zumbi brushed past, very close, and she jerked away. He pursued, brushing against her. She turned. He turned, too, slack-jawed face following her own like a reflection. She bobbed. He bobbed. When she straightened, so did he, and when she stopped still, he did too. She turned, walked straight ahead, and he stopped, his path blocked by a chair. He stood still, hips resting against the chair’s back, making no effort to sidestep, as if the concept was far beyond him.

“I’ve been trying to feed them,” Sholt said, following her gaze. “They don’t swallow. You can make them, but it just comes back up again. I’m not sure why they’re still breathing. I’d have thought…” He stopped. She looked at him again, seeing him properly for the first time. He must have come in here in spite of—no, because of—what had happened. No gun, and no lantern. Just a bottle of milk and a lot of faith, or maybe this counted as charity.

Plucky little hamster.

“I’m Edie.”

He nodded. “Hello.”

“Have you been in?” She gestured up the line of carriages towards Abel Jasmine’s office.

“No,” Ted Sholt said. He raised the milk, lowered it again. Edie saw him for a moment in her mind, patiently pouring the stuff into the mouths of men he knew, even loved, and having them gargle at him, or choke, or let the milk trickle out down their chins.

They moved on. Corridor. Living spaces. Galley kitchen.

And then the Code Room—where Edie worked before the night of Clarissa Foxglove and the great train burglary.

Ted Sholt made a little noise of grief.

There were Ruskinites in the Code Room, or men and women who had been Ruskinites. Edie recognised a boy named Paul, a glassblower. He had made a set of wine glasses for her and Frankie a year ago, beautiful things. He was lying on the ground, staring at the ceiling. She waved her hand in front of his face.

“Glah,” he said. When she did it again, he repeated the one word, with exactly the same intonation, and she thought for a moment he was alive, still in residence, still Paul, but it was the only response she could get from him. Glah, glah, glah, glah… She had a moment of horror when she thought he was never going to stop, that the eerie, sad little noise would follow her through the train, but when he had said it exactly as many times as she had moved her hand across his vision, he stopped.

Edie moved on. Frankie, I love you. Please don’t say “glah.”

At the door to the room which was apparently Frankie’s laboratory, she found two Ruskinites and a crowd of soldiers, and a woman from the support staff. They were moving forward, bouncing gently off the wall, then moving forward again, as if the architecture of the train might somehow be worn away by their repeated attempts. As they walked, they rose and fell slightly, and Edie realised after a moment that they were standing on another man, or his corpse, because he had been slowly flattened and pulped by the footfalls. As she drew closer, she realised that he had not actually died yet. Nor was he trying to scream; whatever had happened had removed even his sense of his own shattering.

Problem: this was the only door.

Problem: these lost ones were in the way and would crush fellow humans who intervened between them and their objective.

Problem: Edie needed to be on the other side of this wall, and not admit the crowd to Frankie’s laboratory.

And then someone grabbed her by the neck and hit her with something, and she saw stars and Ted Sholt rammed against the window, and then the same someone started choking her.

No time. Her assailant was killing her. Strangulation is fast. Her vision was brown already.

She moved.

Drop your weight. Never mind that it constricts your breathing. You can’t breathe anyway. Find your base, your connection to the ground. Yes, there. Now: snuggle closer to your attacker. Lock his arm where it is. Grab him by the elbow and bicep and twist your whole body, pivot on your feet. Ninety degrees, more, away from that bicep. Project your hands forward, as if you were pushing a grand piano with the heels of your hands.

Tai Otoshi.

It was like Yama Arashi, but for stranglers.

A man flew over her hip into the desk. He reared up, bloody-faced. There is no compromise in this fight. No pain, no retreat. Edie twisted with his movement and out of the line of his attack, then scooped his neck in a fluid circle and dropped him on his back across the sharp edge of the mahogany veneer. She hoped it would paralyse him for a few seconds, but he was heavier than she had realised and she heard a sharp snap. Iriminage, but she hadn’t meant to kill him. She peered down at the slack face, and recognised it.

Denis. Frankie’s assistant in Addeh Sikkim. Big, friendly, patient Denis.

After a moment, Edie said “Shit.” It came out croaky and loud. And then hated herself. And then hated herself more, because, as she started to say there was no other way, she realised that there was, had always been.

I knew the trick to this one when I was a wee slip of a girl.

She checked on Sholt and found he was conscious, but his collarbone was broken on the left side. She moved him gently back into the previous carriage and told him to stay put, then levered herself up and out, through the skylight, and onto the roof of the train.

It was warm up on the roof, and pleasantly calm. Abruptly, she didn’t want to go back inside. Actually, she wanted desperately not to go back inside. But down at the rear of the train she could see her soldiers. Songbird looked up, hope in his face. Edie sighed.

Yes, of course. He—and the others—needed her to fix all this. Not to be afraid or confused or alarmed. The Bloody Countess never wavers, ey.

She moved forward, and lowered herself through the ventilation panel into the laboratory carriage, holding her breath and praying.

Frankie’s laboratory was empty. In the middle of the room there was a plinth, and on it was a gutted shell of Frankie’s strange making, a Ruskinite casing for a Hakote device. There was nothing inside. Coils of cable hung from the ceiling to the plinth, messy and typically Frankie. The room was calm, and clean.

Edie searched methodically, and tried not to rush. She looked under tables and in cupboards, opening each one with a horrid anticipation of finding Frankie standing inside. A stack of pencils fell on her and she screamed sharply, then threw them with considerable force across the room, her fear changing its face: what if Frankie was not here? If she was not in the lab, then where? Gone, wandering, mindless in the night? Eating the dead outside? Or taken? Was this a kidnapping, rather than an accident? Edie knew of someone who would consider a thousand murdered a good diversion.

She turned, and found her answer: a single word written in chalk on the blackboard: Edie! And underneath, a note, folded neatly. The handwriting was Frankie’s.

Edie grabbed the note and ripped it open.

Edie stood in Frankie’s lab for ten minutes and stared at the empty plinth. She looked up, and realised that Frankie must have gone out the same way she came in. How many hours? Ten? Twelve? Frankie was doing a flat drop. She would take what she had and run. She might have a bag somewhere, or she might not, but she was gone as best she knew how.

Edie gathered the papers, the victims, and hid them away. She hid the Lovelace. She mothballed her only real home. Because it was her job. Because she believed more than ever that the world didn’t need Frankie’s machine or Frankie’s desperate conviction or anything of Frankie except her silence. Build a better mousetrap. Fix the mill wheel before it breaks. Leave the bloody secrets of the universe alone.

“Bring her home, Edie,” Abel Jasmine said in Whitehall. “If someone else gets hold of her, they might force her to… well. Bring her home.”

Edie went.

She traced Frankie to Salzburg, then Budapest, then Delhi and Beijing, then back again. Frankie was a genius. She had a way of distracting you. People saw curious machines and worried about them. They celebrated breakthroughs in mathematics made by obscure, hard-working local academics who had had a random conversation with a slender, bookish woman in a café or a bar. They got stock tips derived from some strange, inspired formula, made a fortune and went on holiday. Frankie herself, with a schoolmistress’s bag in one hand and the secrets of the universe in her head, leaving a trail of brilliant, cometary solutions to impossible problems, was weirdly invisible. All the same, you could find her from time to time, if you knew how. Edie could. Shem Shem Tsien could.

They played cat and mouse—or cat and mouse and dog, perhaps—from one corner of the world to another. It got to be a bad joke among the intelligence services of thirty countries. Where one went, so also the other two, and mayhem and bombs and guns inevitably followed. They fought, they fled, they raged, and nothing changed. It was as if the world was elastic, and always returned to the same rotten, stupid shape.

To this day, Edie has no idea where or when Frankie died, only that she must have, because at last she truly wasn’t there any longer.

On the bus, Edie cries dry tears and silently tells Frankie she is sorry for waiting so long to change everything. From the ugly handbag comes a consoling nose. She laughs. Yes. Whatever else, Bastion is for ever.

He arrived very small and badly injured, late on a September evening. He had marbles instead of eyes and a vague, confused expression of discontent. A stray, Edie thought, of course. Frankie could never resist such a thing. And with the dog, a last letter.

Edie tipped the waiting cabman and carried the whole package indoors. She knew she should call Abel Jasmine, or rather, whoever had taken over his job. But by then she had persuaded herself she no longer cared, and for sure she no longer trusted anything to do with governments.

With decades between her and Frankie’s confessional letter, Edie alights from the single-decker bus and clutches her bag like a woman who fears the temporal world for its sin and iniquity. She wanders as if aimless or bewildered, and her long, roundabout route brings her by happy coincidence to a convent on a dull, dreary street, where Sister Harriet Spork keeps her vigil for a life lived in wickedness.

Edie sits on a public bench and feeds the pigeons. She sits for an hour, with a Bible propped against her hip in case anyone comes, and watches and waits. And finally, her patience is rewarded. Not Joe Spork, whose approach she suspects will be less direct, but a long black car with tinted windows. Edie peers myopically at a seagull, and gets up to shoo it away from her breadcrumbs. She waggles her hands vaguely at the bird, and it glowers murderously before taking wing. Her return path brings her into the orbit of the car, and she glances in to see a robed, shrouded figure at the wheel and another in the second seat, whose stooping, hesitant motions she finds nauseatingly familiar: quick quick slow. And then she looks into the back and sees the passenger as a car, passing in the other direction, illuminates his shrouded head from the side, and his profile is briefly visible beneath the veil.

Edie stares. Belatedly, she hides her face, panic and outrage rising inside her.

Impossible!

But Edie no longer uses that word, having long ago learned its worth.