Sleeps With Angels

Sugar Engines

The Household Cavalry had set up their own country on Oxford Street. It wasn’t a very big country, but it was pretty wealthy. Even after fifteen years the stores on London’s main shopping street were still packed with goods for trade.

They had created their country by the simple expedient of parking buses across each end of Oxford Street and then blocking all the side streets with various vehicles. As countries went, they weren’t too bad — the Sangatte Republic had been much worse — but Oxford Street was the most direct route to Hyde Park and the Household Cavalry had recently begun to require visas from anyone who wanted to pass through their territory.

“I’m starting to get sick of this,” Willem muttered from the front seat of the Espace.

“They’re just frightened,” Rae said. “They only want somewhere to call home.”

Willem snorted. “This is their home. England. What do they want to create another country for?”

Rae closed her eyes and leaned the side of her head against the window. It was a bright summer’s day and the glass was warm. The sunlight hurt her eyes and the heat was making her nauseous and her mouth tasted as though she had been chewing a wet dog. “We could always go round them,” she said.

“Yes, I suppose we could,” Willem said in a hectoring tone of voice. “But I don’t see why we should have to.”

“At least they’re not shooting at us.” Rae sighed and opened her eyes. The convoy had come to a stop at the junction between New Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road. Ahead of them, two Routemasters had been parked nose-to-tail across the entrance to Oxford Street. Rae remembered when the Routemasters, the iconic London Buses with the open platforms at the back that you could hop on and off of, had been taken out of service because they didn’t conform to European Union rules about disabled access. A few had been left running on heritage routes for the tourists, but Rae had to admit they made a handy barricade as well.

She opened the door and got out of the Espace, stood stretching and looking about. Apart from the unusually-parked buses — and of course the total lack of pedestrian or vehicular traffic on what had been one of the busiest junctions in London — everything looked completely normal. No signs of rioting or looting, no bodies, no crashed cars. It looked like a particularly easy `what’s wrong with this picture’ scene. What’s wrong with this picture? No people, that’s what.

“Still there?” Willem asked from inside the car.

Rae tilted her head back and shielded her eyes with her hand, wincing as the sunlight burned into her head. If she squinted against the light she could see, far far above her, a tiny figure, wings beating periodically as it soared in and out of the thermals rising from London’s buildings.

“Still there,” she agreed, lowering her head and blinking away purple afterimages. She wiped her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said. “I mean, it’s done what it was sent to do. Why keep following us?”

“Because it still has something else to do, dear?” Rae suggested.

“I don’t understand,” Willem said again, stubbornly.

“What doesn’t he understand?” asked Mikhail, climbing down from his mini-bus.

Rae pointed at the sky.

Mikhail looked up. “Oh,” he said. “Still there, then.”

“We’ve all been together too long,” Willem said from the driver’s seat of the Espace. “We’ve run out of things to say to each other.”

“Been a long time, that’s true,” Mikhail nodded.

Rae took off her cap, brushed her hair back off her forehead, put her cap back on. She’d found the cap in a gift shop at the Eurostar terminal in Calais. It had the stylised image of a Chunnel train on the front. She looked back along the street at her little convoy: half a dozen people movers and SUVs and a Polish paramedics’ ambulance, all of them dusty and battered. She’d warned everyone to stay in their vehicles, but they’d been parked here almost an hour and people were starting to get out and stretch their legs, and she couldn’t blame them. They’d had a long trip. She waved and a couple of people waved back.

“What do you think everyone’s going to do now?” she asked.

“Company,” Willem called.

Rae looked round. Two figures were emerging from the narrow gap between the Routemaster barricade. Even without zooming her viewpoint, it was easy to tell that one was Eddy Colorado, with his foot-high orange coxcomb and his baggy green clown’s pantaloons. She had to concentrate more to make out the other figure properly. It wore British Army battle order (Northern Europe) and was carrying an SLR across its chest on a webbing sling. Rae started to walk back along the convoy towards the junction.

Willem had got out of the Espace. “Is this good news or bad news?”

“If we didn’t have bad news, we wouldn’t have any news at all,” Rae said as she walked past him and out into the middle of the junction. Behind her, she heard Willem reach into the back of the car for his rifle. She looked over her shoulder and called, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I’ve been doing stupid things ever since I met you,” he called back. Rae shook her head and went to meet Eddy Colorado and the English soldier.

The soldier was in his early thirties and he towered at least a foot and a half over little Eddy Colorado. His uniform was clean and neatly-pressed and in addition to the automatic rifle slung against his chest he had an automatic pistol in a holster at his hip, and a combat knife strapped to each calf. Beside him, Eddy Colorado was carrying his Italian shotgun and grinning. He winked at Rae as they approached.

Rae blinked and her hangover went away. She smiled at the soldier, put out her hand, and said, “Hello.”

The soldier ignored the hand. “Captain Gottlieb, Household Cavalry,” he said.

“Captain Gottlieb,” Rae said, “you have a German name.”

“My Grandfather, ma’am,” Gottlieb answered without missing a beat or betraying any emotion at all except smooth efficiency.

Rae waited a moment to see if any more details of Gottlieb’s antecedents were forthcoming. When they were not, she said, “Okay.”

“Are you Mrs Peterson?” Gottlieb asked.

“Miss.”

The distinction just bounced right off Gottlieb. “I understand you have a sick child.”

“That’s right.”

“Could I see her, please?”

“Are you in a position to help us?” Rae inquired mildly.

“I am,” said Gottlieb. “May I see the casualty, please?”

Rae thought about it for a moment or two, then she turned and indicated the convoy. “Of course. She’s back here.”

Elżbieta was in the back of the ambulance. Marta and Beata, the nuns who had driven her all the way from Poznań, had got out of the vehicle and were standing watching Gottlieb distrustfully.

“It’s all right,” Rae reassured them. “Open the door, please.”

Beata looked at the Captain for a few seconds, then went round to the back of the ambulance, turned the handle, and pulled the door open. She stepped back while Rae and Gottlieb clambered into the back of the vehicle, where a sheet-covered bundle lay writhing gently on a stretcher.

Rae lifted the sheet. To Gottlieb’s credit, he didn’t flinch. Rae thought his expression may have softened slightly, but it might have been her imagination.

Gottlieb climbed out of the ambulance and straightened up. Willem appeared in the doorway beside him, holding his rifle. Gottlieb ignored him and looked at Rae. “I understand you can talk to the Dust,” he said.

Rae got out of the ambulance and glanced around, but Eddy Colorado was nowhere to be seen. She sighed.

“Perhaps you could demonstrate, please?” asked Gottlieb.

Rae looked at him for a few moments. “Perhaps we could give you some beads and a couple of mirrors and be on our way, Captain,” she said evenly.

That finally got a smile out of Gottlieb. Thin and wry, perhaps, but a real smile. For the first time, Rae noticed how tired the soldier looked beneath that shell of smoothly-pressed efficiency. “A quick demonstration would do,” he said.

Rae lifted her arm and snapped her fingers and all of a sudden she was holding a wizard’s staff. It was just a bit of wood, not much more than a broom handle — she could do this kind of thing in her sleep — but it was topped with a crown of thorns cupping a tiny bright light. Rae had always found that this impressed the post-Lord Of The Rings generation.

Gottlieb, on the other hand, did not seem unduly impressed. Perhaps he’d never got into Tolkien. He looked levelly at the staff and he said, “Could you come with me, please?”

Rae looked across at Willem, who suddenly looked concerned. “Where?”

“Not far,” Gottlieb replied. “We have…” Suddenly, and charmingly, he seemed rather embarrassed. “We have a little problem you may be able to help us with.”

Rae made the staff go away. “What kind of little problem?”

“It really would be easier to show you,” he admitted.

“I’ll go with you,” said Willem.

Rae looked at the two men and sighed. “Mikhail?” she called.

Mikhail appeared around the side of the ambulance, bushy eyebrows raised. “Can I come too?”

“No, Mikhail, you can’t come too,” she said patiently. “Make sure everybody stays near the vehicles. We won’t be long.” She looked at Gottlieb and said, “Will we be long?”

Gottlieb shrugged.

“We won’t be long,” she told Mikhail. “Try to stop people wandering off.”

He said, “What about Eddy Colorado?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She rubbed her eyes. “Try to stop everybody else wandering off. Use your common sense, Mikhail, please.”

“We have food,” Gottlieb suggested.

“Well so do we,” Rae snapped at him. She closed her eyes and took a breath. Opened her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, and she genuinely was. “We probably look rather unorthodox to you, but we’re actually quite well-organised.”

Gottlieb looked levelly at her. “I haven’t seen anything that looked orthodox for about fifteen years, ma’am.”

“That much is probably true,” Mikhail said. He and Gottlieb looked at each other. Willem rolled his eyes, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and put his hands in his pockets.

“Eddy Colorado will come back when he feels like it,” Rae told Mikhail. “Just keep an eye on everybody else.”

Gottlieb led them a little way up the Tottenham Court Road, where a black cab was waiting, its motor running and a uniformed sergeant sitting behind the wheel.

“You’re joking,” said Rae.

“You’d rather we travelled around in humvees and half-tracks, Miss?” Gottlieb asked, holding one of the passenger doors open for them.

“Good point,” Willem allowed.

“And it certainly contributes to the local colour,” Rae added.

The sergeant drove north a little way, then turned the cab onto Mortimer Street, then into the maze of little one-way streets in Fitzrovia. Rae sat looking out of the window, watching the BT Tower go by. Everything seemed neat and tidy; the Household Cavalry had been busy, clearing the streets of cars, using them to block off side-roads. All the buildings were clean and undamaged; there was no sense of abandonment here, more the feeling of a particularly quiet Sunday afternoon. The cab turned up Portland Place, not far from Broadcasting House, where a stripped-down version of the BBC was still putting out a few hours of music and news every day, and negotiated a tricky roadblock of skips and buses on Park Crescent to turn onto the Marylebone Road.

“How many people are here?” Rae asked Gottlieb.

Sitting on the fold-down seat with his back to the driver and his rifle cradled in his arms, Gottlieb shrugged. “On Oxford Street we’ve got almost a thousand,” he said. “In Greater London? We don’t know for certain. Not very many.” He paused and then said, “May I ask a personal question?”

Rae was so touched that, in a situation like this he had asked permission, that she beamed at him. “Of course, Captain.”

“What language were you speaking to that gentleman back there by the ambulance?”

“Lithuanian. Mikhail’s Lithuanian.”

“And I noticed you spoke Polish to the two young ladies.”

Rae nodded.

“You sounded fairly fluent in both languages.”

Rae nodded again.

“How many languages do you speak?”

“All of them.” She smiled at him again.

The cab stopped outside Madame Tussaud’s and the driver said, “Here we are, guv. That’ll be six-fifty. Cash or account?”

Gottlieb opened the door. “Yes, thank you, Sergeant Nutt,” he said in the tone of voice of a man who has heard an old joke one too many times. “Wait for us here, would you?”

“Right you are, guv.”

“Sergeant Nutt was a cabbie in Civvy Street,” Gottlieb said sotto voce as they stood on the pavement. “He’s very handy for getting around London, but he won’t go south of the River. Anyway…” He looked at Rae and Willem and then gestured towards the front doors of Madame Tussaud’s. “Shall we?”

Rae remembered a school trip to the wax museum years ago. She supposed she must have been eight or ten years old, and she remembered that apart from the figures of The Beatles she hadn’t recognised a single one of the exhibits. It was hard to imagine quite why Gottlieb had brought them here, or what he wanted her to see, but the moment the captain pushed the doors open she heard music inside and her legs suddenly gave way and she stumbled against Willem.

“Hey,” he said, putting an arm round her waist. “Are you okay?”

For a moment, her head swam and she thought she was going to be sick. She hung on Willem’s arm while Gottlieb stood just inside the doorway with a quizzical expression on his face. Rae took a deep breath and stood up. “I’m all right,” she said. “Really. Must be the heat.”

“You sure?” asked Willem.

“Yes, really.” She patted his shoulder and swallowed. “I’m fine.” She looked at Gottlieb. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Later, when she looked back on it, Rae thought the short walk from the foyer to the museum’s main exhibition space might have been one of the bravest things she had ever done. At the time, all she could do was grip Willem’s arm and drive herself onward, step after step after step, because being strong had become a habit and she wasn’t about to fail now. Willem and Gottlieb kept glancing at her with concerned looks on their faces, but she kept shaking her head and urging them on through the music, trying to disguise her fear with a show of irritation.

Madame Tussaud’s, as Rae remembered it, had been laid out in a series of themed rooms. Sports, politics, music, and so on. You moved from one to the other and looked at the waxwork tableaux, and it had all been rather cosy, if a little puzzling for a schoolgirl.

The intervening years, it seemed, had seen a radical rethink about display policy. Now all the exhibits stood around the edge of a single huge room, a great atrium with a curving glass roof that owed more than a little to envy of the roof of the British Museum’s Great Court. The room was divided into segments by waist-high movable barriers, arranged so that visitors could pass in an orderly manner from one to another, and in each segment were a dozen or so interactive tables so that visitors could learn more about the wax models of the celebrities standing in ranks before them.

Rae didn’t recognise many of the waxworks. She spotted a couple of American Presidents she thought she knew, a Prime Minister or two. The King and Queen. Lord and Lady Beckham. The last surviving member of U2. Pretty much all the models were strangers to her. But they were all singing. Like a bizarre frozen choir, only their mouths moving, they were all singing — quite heartily — ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’ Rae felt her knees sag again for a moment before she somehow found the strength to stand up.

Gottlieb looked at her with what she thought might have been trepidation. “They’ve been doing this ever since we got here,” he said. He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the singing. “It bothers the men.”

Rae almost burst out laughing. It bothers the men. “You can’t hear it from outside, Captain.”

Gottlieb inclined his head. “But they know it’s happening,” he said. “They know these things are singing. All the time.”

“Maybe they only sing when you come in here,” Willem said, and Rae hugged him for saying it. “Maybe they don’t do anything when nobody’s present.”

Gottlieb nodded. “Well, we did think of that,” he said. “That would have been worse, really. But we set up recorders. These things sing all the time, regardless of whether anyone’s here or not. We put the recorders in here eleven years ago and they haven’t stopped for a moment. And I’m reliably informed they’re all singing in Bobby McFerrin’s voice.” He looked about him, at the hundreds of singing waxworks, and shook his head. “I have to admit, it’s bloody spooky.”

“And you want me to stop it,” said Rae.

Gottlieb looked at her. “Could you?” he asked.

“Oh, Christ yes,” said Rae, and she sent the kill codes and a sudden silence fell on Madame Tussaud’s. It was like a weight rising from her shoulders. She stood up straight and let go of Willem’s elbow and rubbed sweat from her eyes. She wondered just how terrible she must look. She said, “Do I pass?”

Willem, who was used to her everyday miracles, just stood there. Solid, watchful, reliable. Gottlieb turned slowly in place, looking at the waxworks with an expression of wonder on his face. Finally he looked at her, and she thought he was a little afraid of her. “There’s a gentleman who would like to speak with you,” he said.

“Well, that should be an experience, Captain,” said Rae. “I haven’t spoken with a gentleman for quite a while. Lead the way.”

“He’s not here right now,” said Gottlieb. “He’s on his way, though. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

Now the song was gone, she felt stronger. “And where is this gentleman coming from?”

“He’s in Berlin,” Gottlieb told her. “But he’s on his way. I’m to offer you and your party every courtesy while you wait.”

Rae felt Willem tense up beside her and she said, “We would really rather not wait, Captain. We’d like to be on our way.”

Gottlieb nodded. “I do appreciate that, Miss Peterson. But I’m obliged to ask you to wait until the gentleman arrives.”

“Are you going to try to stop us?” Willem asked.

Gottlieb looked at him and tipped his head to one side for a moment. “I promise you, we are better armed than you are,” he said. “And the groups controlling all the other routes to… your destination are not as well-disposed towards strangers as we are.”

Willem started to say something, but Rae squeezed his arm. “We’ll be delighted to accept your hospitality, Captain,” she told Gottlieb. “To be honest, I think we could all use a shower and a decent meal. Isn’t that right, Willem?”

Willem never took his eyes off Gottlieb. “Yes,” he said finally. “Creature comforts. Yum yum.”

Gottlieb seemed relieved. “And we have some of the best creature comforts in London.” He gave the silent ranks of waxworks a last glance, and Rae had a sudden malicious impulse to start them singing again. “Perhaps we could go now?” Gottlieb said. “Sergeant Nutt will have kept the meter running. It’s his little joke.”

The Household Cavalry’s territory extended a kind of pseudopod south and east from the Tottenham Court Road into Covent Garden and down towards Leicester Square. Gottlieb led the convoy to a hotel on one of the streets off Seven Dials. It was one of those hotels that used to be called ‘boutique,’ for no good reason Rae could ever understand; the sort of place where wealthy tourists and visiting film stars and musicians used to stay while in London, discreet and quiet and unfussy. A couple of Gottlieb’s men showed them up to their rooms, and for about fifteen minutes the corridor rang with voices expressing delight in several European languages.

Rae and Willem wound up in adjoining rooms; it wasn’t planned that way, but Rae wasn’t surprised and Willem probably didn’t even give it a second thought.

She had met Peter at university in Nottingham. She was doing English Literature, he was studying nanotechnology. “We complement each other perfectly,” he joked, and in a strange way he was right. After they graduated, he got a job with a little nanotech startup in Eindhoven and she followed him to the Netherlands, finding a job teaching English at a local school, and she stayed there until she retired forty years later. The little startup became one of the powerhouses of the European nanotechnology revolution, and Peter became a senior vice president in charge of research. He was still there when La Silence descended on the world. They never married, never had children, and they were about as happy as two people can be. And then, one weekend in October, he was gone.

It happened quickly but without any fuss. Peter went into the office on Saturday morning, just like he always did, to catch up on the administrative stuff he never seemed able to clear during the week. Rae went shopping at the local market, bought some food for a dinner party they were having that evening, came home about lunchtime, and decided to have a nap before she started to prepare for the party.

Sometime later, she had a dreadful nightmare. She dreamed that she woke up and the bedroom was full of smoke and the smoke was alive. It was surging back and forth across the bedroom in waves, sometimes coalescing into complex solid geometrical shapes, sometimes forming faces. It was buzzing, far far down at the bottom limit of her hearing. It smelled like jacaranda and when she breathed it in it tasted of pear drops and made her go back to sleep.

She opened her eyes and bright autumn sunshine was streaming into the room. She felt better than she had in years.

She got up and went downstairs. Someone was moving around in the kitchen. It sounded as if they were opening and closing cupboards and drawers, as if they were looking for something. Peter was always doing that, trying to find something he had mislaid.

“Pete?” she called. “What have you lost now?” She got to the kitchen doorway and stopped, suddenly frozen.

It was Peter in the kitchen, going through the drawers and cupboards looking for some lost thing. But it was Peter with a full head of brown hair, Peter as she remembered him from the first time she’d met him, young again.

“Pete…?” she said, so quietly even she barely heard it.

Peter looked at her and smiled, and suddenly the air was full of music, a bouncy half-familiar tune, and Peter opened his mouth and started to sing in a gorgeous baritone completely unlike his usual scratchy off-key voice, “Don’t worry, be happy…”

Rae didn’t hear the rest of the song because she had started to scream, and she kept on screaming, and for quite a long time after that the world had to get by without her.

Gottlieb hadn’t been kidding. The Household Cavalry’s pocket nation was very well-stocked, and the hotel was in beautiful condition. The dining rooms were oak-panelled, the furniture heavy and solid, the beds — even if she hadn’t spent the past five days sleeping in the car — deliriously comfortable. The food was among the best she had ever tasted.

“We have three Michelin-starred chefs,” Gottlieb told her at dinner that evening. “Fresh produce from farms in Hertfordshire. Fish is a bit scarce, though. We don’t get any sea-fish at all.”

“There are fishermen on the French coast,” Willem said.

The Captain raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know that. Do you think they’d be up to trading with us?”

“They’re a bit… cliquey, Captain,” Rae said.

“That’s an understatement.” Willem sipped what had turned out to be a truly excellent burgundy. The Household Cavalry had access to some of the best wine cellars in the country. “They have their own country too. La Republique Sangatte, they call it. We wanted to ask them if they could bring us across the Channel, but they shot at us. We shot back.” He shook his head. “Not a good outcome.”

Rae reached out and squeezed his forearm gently. “They trade a bit, up and down the coast, but I don’t think their hearts are in it, really. They’re still trying to come to terms with what happened.”

“As are we all,” Gottlieb said soberly.

“How was it here?” Rae asked.

Gottlieb sat back and looked at the remains of his steak and kidney pie. He sighed. “We were on a night exercise on Salisbury Plain,” he said. “We bivvied down, and the next morning two-thirds of us were gone.” He looked out of the window. Beyond the glass, the street was gently sinking into a buttery golden twilight, perfectly peaceful. “We couldn’t raise anyone on the R/T, couldn’t pick up anything on the battlefield net. Nothing.” He looked at her and shrugged. “I expect it was much the same for you two.”

Willem nodded. Rae said, “It does sound familiar, Captain.”

“Yes. Well, we marched to the rendezvous point and there was nobody for us to rendezvous with. We went into the nearest village and there wasn’t a soul about. The telephones were working, but nobody answered. Electricity was on, but there was nothing on television and the internet was down. We borrowed a few vehicles and drove to our assembly point and our vehicles were there but…” He shrugged again. “No people. So we transferred to our vehicles and drove up here. All the way back up the A303, then down the Westway into central London. Nobody. No other vehicles. We stopped off in a couple of villages on the way, but they were all the same.”

“And so you set… this place up?”

“Some of the men wanted to try and find their families. We let them go. Most of them came back after a while, without their families. We needed somewhere to live, somewhere to… cope. My commanding officer decided to fortify Oxford Street.” Gottlieb smiled. “I gather he was very fond of Selfridges.”

Willem said, “Your commanding officer…?”

Gottlieb shook his head. “Not here any longer, I’m afraid.” He drained his own wine glass. “We have made contact, over the years, with other countries — although not with North America. I rather think there isn’t a living soul in North America. Our best guess is that only a fraction of a percent of Humanity is still here.” He put his glass down. “The gentleman who’s coming will tell you more about what we’ve found.” He stood and looked at them. “Ms Peterson, Mr Van Rijn, I have an early start in the morning. If you need anything, just dial zero on any of the house phones and one of my men will answer.” He bowed fractionally. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

After the Captain had left, Willem and Rae sat drinking their wine in silence. Finally Willem turned to Rae and said, “I think —” and Eddy Colorado chose that moment to toddle into the dining room and walk up to the table.

“Eddy,” Rae said, ignoring Willem’s tight-lipped expression of annoyance. “How can we help you?”

The little Belgian looked awkward and out of place in his brightly-coloured clothes. He said in the fractured English of which he was insanely proud, “Mrs Rae, I must visit the Emirates.”

Some nuns found her wandering near Eindhoven. She was entirely out of her mind and suffering from borderline malnutrition. The nuns took her in and fed her and bathed her, and to their great credit they didn’t throw her out when, in her madness and thinking it was what they wanted, she made Jesus appear briefly among them.

Gradually she got well, or at least learned to fake normality, she was never sure. She got used to the idea that, somehow during her wanderings, she appeared to have shed thirty years. Her hair was long and dark again, her wrinkles were gone. Her periods had started again. The liver-spots had disappeared from the backs of her hands, to be replaced by a single tiny black dot, the size of a pinhead, on each fingertip. She wondered about all this for quite a while.

Getting used to what she still thought of as her superpower took a little longer. Obviously, she had somehow developed a talent for manipulating the nanotechnology which by now must be infesting the Earth the way dust infests some homes. She experimented, learned its uses and limitations, and eventually found that it could be used for healing.

Word of the miracle worker of Eindhoven spread out into the deserted countryside and cities of Europe, and people started to turn up at the nunnery, most with simple illnesses and ailments that could be cured by a straightforward command to machines so small they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. Others were afflicted with changes caused by the nano itself, and these were more tricky to fix.

From Peter, she knew that there were whole bewildering ecologies of nanotechnology, some industrial, some medical. Some of it powered itself by catalysing atmospheric pollutants; other types got their energy from blood sugar or the electrical potential of muscle fibres. All of it had, apparently, been reproducing unchecked and undirected in the fifteen years since La Silence, and some of it had begun to do unusual things.

Willem was one of those stricken by nano. A second, fully-functioning, head had grown from his waist. It was the head of a young man and it talked, on and on, all the time.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Willem said amiably, “but it just won’t shut up.”

Rae and the nuns discussed Willem. He didn’t know how much they discussed him. The nuns contended that the head was a sentient being and therefore had a soul, so it would be a sin to cure Willem. Rae argued that it was just an artefact of nanotechnology, a thing made by little machines that had spent far too long with no outside commands and had started doing things for themselves.

In the end, Rae prevailed. The nuns were still in awe of her. She healed Willem. The head withered and fell off and then dried up and crumbled. “Thank Christ,” he said. “Now maybe I can get some fucking sleep.”

He didn’t leave, though. He hung around the nunnery, doing odd-jobs for the Sisters. Some of the nuns were afraid of him — he was a spare, hatchet-faced whiplash of a man who made no secret of the fact that he had once been an enforcer for one of Amsterdam’s criminal families — but he refused to leave.

“I have nowhere to go,” he confided to Rae one day, walking in the nunnery’s physic garden. “I might as well make myself useful here.”

“You scare the Sisters, you know,” she told him.

“Rae,” he said with great seriousness, “you have no idea how scary they can be.”

And she laughed, and that was it. They were never intimate, but down the years they became close. He appointed himself her protector and confessor, and when two Polish nuns drove a battered ambulance up to the front door of the nunnery four weeks ago, there was never any question of him not going with her.

The stadium was beautiful. It sat in a kind of urban wasteland right next to the West Coast main line out of King’s Cross Station, all red and white and glass and steel in the morning sunshine. Sergeant Nutt drove them, along with a couple of Gottlieb’s men. He parked at the bottom of the steps and let them out. “That’ll be twenty-nine fifty,” he said, and guffawed.

“Keep the meter running, Sergeant Nutt,” Rae told him.

He laughed. “Will do, Miss,” he said.

Rae looked at Eddy Colorado, standing beside her on the pavement. “Ready?”

He swallowed, nodded.

She looked up at the stadium. The word ‘Emirates’ was painted in colossal red letters on the side of the huge building. “Well, let’s try and find a way in, shall we?”

There were those people who everybody knew by their first names alone, like Elvis and Madonna, and there were those people for whom you only ever used their full name, and Eddy Colorado was one of the latter. Nobody ever called him ‘Eddy’ or even ‘Mr Colorado.’ It was always ‘Eddy Colorado.’ Eddy Red.

He said he was ex-Belgian Special Forces, although he also said he had been Feyenoord’s reserve goalkeeper. They’d found him sitting at the roadside not far from Antwerp, a rucksack the size of a steamer trunk on one side of him and Tommiboy, a huge dirty-white Tisza, a Polish mountain dog, on the other. Tommiboy had not, it turned out, wanted to leave Continental Europe. While they were waiting in Boulogne for Willem to find them a ride across the Channel the dog had just wandered off and never came back. Eddy Colorado had spent a couple of days looking, but Tommiboy was nowhere to be found and eventually they had to move on. For a moment, Rae had thought Eddy Colorado was going to stay in France and try to find his dog, but as the convoy moved out the little Belgian threw his rucksack into one of the cars and climbed in after it. He’d been quiet for a few days after that, but he seemed to snap out of it after they left Folkestone.

Rae had never found out why he wanted to visit London. She’d assumed that once they arrived he would just wander off, like Tommiboy, and they would never see him again. It had never occurred to her that he might need her help.

They passed down corridors and up stairways and down stairways and along more corridors, and finally they came out into the sunshine halfway up a great raked sweep of seating overlooking a football pitch. A small flock of sheep was grazing in the middle of the pitch. Eddy Colorado looked about him and took a deep breath, let it out noisily.

Rae looked at him. “You okay?”

Eddy Colorado thought about it for a while. Finally he said, “My brother-in-law, I love that guy. Great athlete, really great guy. He was Arsenal’s reserve goalkeeper, before La Silence.”

Rae looked around the stadium. “Oh,” she said in a quiet voice.

“My sister died,” he went on. “Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The club were great, they really were. The best specialists, the best treatment.” He shook his head. “All for nothing. They gave my brother-in-law a leave of absence. He’d just come back when…” He raised his hands gently to the sky. He looked at her. “What happened, Mrs Rae?”

Rae had found that you could tell a lot about a person from what they called the catastrophe that had overtaken Humanity. There were those who called it Rapture, and they were the ones who believed that God had taken His flock home to Paradise and left behind the unbelievers. God’s flock had turned out to be a lot bigger than anyone expected, and being Left Behind was actually rather pleasant.

Then there were those who said Singularity, and mostly they were the ones who believed that one or both of the world’s experimental quantum supercomputers had suddenly achieved sentience, bootstrapped themselves to godhood, and ascended to a higher plane of existence, taking with them the greater proportion of Mankind and a large number of Earth’s animals. Rae had thought about this and could see no substantive difference between it and the Rapture.

Aliens, said others, and Rae had mentally filed them away with the Rapture and Singularity people because they were, at bottom, all the same thing.

There were those who said nano, and they believed that Mankind had suffered a nanotechnological apocalypse, that the tiny machines had turned against the human race and almost destroyed it. That was harder to argue against, because nano was obviously involved somewhere along the line.

Then there had been that man in Eindhoven who believed that the universe had somehow split in two, like a document being copied, but most of the people had stayed in the original.

And there were those who believed that they were really dead, that this was Hell, or at least Purgatory.

She said, “I don’t know. I’m sorry, but I really don’t.” They stood a while longer in silence. Rae asked, “You didn’t really think your brother-in-law would be here, did you?”

Eddy Colorado nodded. “The angel told me he would.”

The angel had arrived two days after the Polish nuns and their patient. Rae was still trying to work out what to do with Elżbieta; obviously she was afflicted with a form of nano, but Rae had never seen anything like it before. It wouldn’t respond to any of her commands. She’d even taken a trip to Peter’s company and accessed the secure servers to see if there were any kill-codes she didn’t know. She’d never needed to see the codes before, she’d always known instinctively what they were, but she was completely out of ideas. Nothing worked.

She was sitting in her room considering this one morning when she heard a commotion in the gardens outside. She looked out of the window and saw three nuns running for their lives through the flower beds, which was an unusual enough sight in itself for her to stand there watching them for a while without wondering what they were running from.

There was a knock on the door and Willem looked in as she turned to face the sound. “Someone’s asking to see you,” he said calmly.

“Who?”

“It’s probably best if you just come and see,” he told her.

The angel was standing in the middle of the physic garden. Its body was skeleton-thin and it had enormous white-feathered wings. From the cuffs of its jeans protruded big clawed feet, absurdly like the feet of a budgerigar. Naked from the waist up, the angel’s skin was tanned a wonderful golden-brown, it had long blond hair, and its face was the most beautiful Rae had ever seen. Like something from a collaboration by Breughel and Raphael.

“Well,” Rae said, “this is new.”

“It wants to talk to you,” said Willem.

“To me?”

“Asked for you by name.” He smiled. “You have interesting friends.”

Rae glanced about her. All the nuns had fled. “We’re being awfully calm about this, aren’t we?”

“You are,” he said. “I just wet myself.”

The angel looked at them. “Rae,” it said. The voice was like a heavenly choir and it carried effortlessly across the distance between them.

“I’m not coming any closer,” she said. “We’ll have to talk from here.”

The angel looked at her. It looked at Willem. “Okay.”

“Who are you?” Rae asked.

“I’ve got a message for you,” said the angel. “Just you.”

“I have no secrets from Willem,” she told the creature. “Who sent you?”

The angel thought about it. “I don’t know.” It held up a slender, beautiful hand as Rae started to protest. “I really don’t. It’s no use asking me, because I don’t know. I just know I have a message for you.”

Rae and Willem looked at each other. She shrugged. “I don’t know either,” she said. She looked at the angel. “Well, you’d better give me the message, then.”

The angel nodded. “You will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London,” it told her. “Someone there will cure her.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London. Someone there will cure her.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Shall I repeat the message again?”

“No, thank you. I heard you the first time. I just don’t understand. Who wants us to go to London? Who’s going to be there? How will they cure the little girl?”

“I don’t know. You will repeat the message.”

“Sorry?”

“I have to hear you repeat the message, or I have to stand here saying it over and over again.”

No, Rae thought, the world is obviously not surreal enough already. She said, “I will take the little girl to Hyde Park in London. Someone there will cure her.”

The angel nodded. “Thank you,” it said. “Have a nice day.” And with a single great clap of wings it sprang into the sky. A moment later it was just a tiny dot against the clouds.

“You know,” said Willem, craning his neck to watch the creature soaring across the sky, “I really didn’t think there were any surprises left in the world.”

“You’re not serious,” Willem said.

“He says the angel appeared in front of him a couple of days before we passed through Antwerp,” Rae said. “It told him to sit by the side of the road at a certain time and someone would come along and take him to Arsenal’s football ground to find his brother-in-law.”

“Little bastard,” Willem said wonderingly. “He might have mentioned this.”

“Don’t say anything to him, Willem,” she said. “He’s upset enough as it is.” The little man had cursed the angel through tears all the way back from North London, inconsolable. He’d stormed off when they got back to the hotel and she hadn’t seen him since.

“No sign of the brother-in-law, then.”

“No sign of anybody.”

“Which does call into question just how reliable the angel is.”

“Yes, dear, that had occurred to me,” Rae said irritably. They were sitting in the hotel’s bar, drinking mineral water. Outside, a clear, lambent summer evening’s light was settling over London. Members of the convoy periodically passed through the bar and waved hello. Rae waved back to them all, even though she had actually begun to tire of all these people looking to her for guidance. It had been bad enough back in Eindhoven, but at least there the people who needed her were really ill. These people had just… attached themselves to her as she and Willem and Marta and Beata drove towards the French coast. Mikhail and his caravan of Lithuanian expats, the Leclerc Sisters, Bongo Fry and his common-law wife Theresa, Eddy Colorado. You’re going to London? That sounds like fun; can we come along with you? Oh, and while you’re at it, will you lead us and make all the decisions for us and make sure we’re fed and happy? She rubbed her eyes. “I’m tired.”

“We’ve come a long way,” Willem said. “Of course you’re tired.”

“It’s not that far, Willem,” she said mildly. “Before La Silence you could do Eindhoven to London in less than a day.”

He put his glass down and steered it in a little circle on the tabletop. “Listen, Rae —” he began.

“I know, Willem.” She sighed. “You told me so.”

He gestured at the ceiling. “We don’t know what that thing is —”

“It’s nano.” Willem raised an eyebrow. “Trust me, I know. It’s some kind of construct. An avatar built out of nano.”

Willem nodded slowly. “And you waited this long to tell me because…?”

She rubbed her face. Lowered her hands and looked at the little black dots on her fingertips. Careful examination had revealed them to be graphite, the tips of some kind of structure that extended back into her fingers. She had a shrewd idea what they were, but their presence made no sense.

“I couldn’t just ignore it and leave Elżbieta like that, Willem. I was out of ideas; I couldn’t help her on my own.” She thought about what she was about to say, then took a breath and said it all in a rush. “Suppose I created the angel. Suppose my subconscious came up with a solution, something I didn’t consciously remember, and it built the angel to pass the message on.”

Willem thought about it. “And you think this solution might be here? In Hyde Park?”

She raised her hands in a helpless shrug. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. You could be right; it might just be a wild goose chase. But I didn’t dare take the chance.”

He looked past her. “Good afternoon, Captain,” he said.

Rae turned in her seat. Gottlieb was standing in the doorway. “Ms Peterson, Mr van Rijn,” he said. “The gentleman’s arrived. He’ll see you now.”

They drove from Seven Dials to an office building near the Western end of Oxford Street. Sergeant Nutt must have been busy elsewhere, because Gottlieb drove them himself in a Hummer.

He led them into the foyer of the building and took them five floors up in the lift, then led them down a corridor and knocked at a door. Without waiting for a response, he opened the door and stood aside to let them through.

There were two men sitting at the conference table in the room. One was huge and bulky; he was wearing threadbare flying coveralls, his chestnut-coloured hair was awry, and he was clutching a small stuffed panda toy in one huge fist.

The other man was small and neat and wearing chinos and a black polo shirt. He had a chicken under one arm. For a moment Rae thought she had been ushered into the presence of lunatics, that Gottlieb had finally decided to reveal his true colours and murder them all, then the man with the chicken was out of his chair and holding out his free hand, smiling. Rae noticed he was wearing kidskin gloves.

“Ms Peterson,” he said. “Mr van Rijn. I’m delighted to finally meet you; please accept my apologies for not being here in person to greet you.”

Rae found her gaze drifting to the huge man in the coveralls.

“This is Flight Lieutenant Oak,” said the small man. “He probably won’t want to shake hands. But then again, he might. You never know with Flight Lieutenant Oak. I’m Henry Pargeter. Everyone calls me Harry.”

“I’ve heard of you,” said Willem. “Everyone calls you ‘The Last Spy.’”

Pargeter beamed at them as if genuinely delighted that someone had heard of him. “Well,” he said, “I think lost is more accurate than last, and I was never a spy, but yes, I believe I am the only remaining member of His Majesty’s Security Service.”

Rae looked at Willem. “This is the one with the helicopter,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked at Lieutenant Oak. “Oh,” she said again.

“The helicopter,” Pargeter said. “Just so, yes.” He rubbed his gloved hands together. “Well, I’m told you want to see Hyde Park, is that right?”

“That was our…plan,” Rae said carefully.

“Then see Hyde Park you shall.” He beamed at them again and indicated the door. “Shall we?”

They went back down the corridor, back down in the lift, back through the foyer, and out into the growing dusk, Rae becoming more and more baffled with every step. Pargeter and Gottlieb didn’t say a word as they walked the short distance to the end of Oxford Street.

As they reached Marble Arch, Rae became aware of a humming in the air, a minor chord, not unpleasant, hanging just above the level of normal hearing. It wasn’t loud, but it was everywhere.

“The Household Cavalry call this the Hum,” Pargeter said, shifting his hands to get a better grip on the chicken. “It was here when they arrived, but they didn’t know what it was, and there were… casualties.”

“My commanding officer and his driver,” Gottlieb put in. “Brave men.”

Pargeter snorted. “Yes. Brave. Quite so.”

They crossed the road at Marble Arch and Pargeter stopped them in the middle of the southbound carriageways of Park Lane. A few yards away there was a central reservation dividing the northbound and southbound carriageways, and beyond the northbound were the trees and lawns of Hyde Park. Rae looked down at her feet. A few inches from her toes a thick red line had been sprayed on the road. It ran away, none too straight, down towards Hyde Park Corner in one direction, and cut across the complex traffic junction at Marble Arch and off towards Bayswater in the other.

“Captain Gottlieb’s boys call it the Deadline,” Pargeter said. “They painted it after Major Burton and his driver tried to drive into Hyde Park.” He grabbed the chicken by the feet, drew his arm back, and pitched the squawking bird underarm across the road. Flapping and tumbling helplessly, the bird crossed the red line and exploded like a silent supernova made of smoke, a sudden off-white puff of vapour. Rae and Willem flinched back. Pargeter looked at the cloud of smoke. “Sic transit, Major Burton and…?” He looked at Gottlieb.

“Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Gottlieb said.

“And Staff Sergeant Crisp,” Pargeter agreed. He brushed his hands together. “It goes all the way around the Park. There’s no break and no way through it; anything that tries is, um, explosively disassembled. Captain Gottlieb’s men mapped it before I got here. They didn’t use chickens, they just walked along holding out sticks. The Household Cavalry are pretty good at thinking out of the box; they found a shop that had a stock of those Chinese lanterns — you know, the little paper balloon things you fly up into the sky with a candle inside? They released hundreds of them and let the wind carry them out over the Park, to see how high the barrier goes.” He looked into the Park. “Not the most scientific way of measuring things, but we think it’s a dome.”

“Over the whole Park?” asked Willem.

“Over the whole Park,” Pargeter agreed. He looked at Rae. “We think there’s something inside. And we think it may be waiting for you.”

Rae couldn’t stop thinking of the way the chicken had just burst in a puff of smoke. “Me?”

“You were told to come here, weren’t you?”

Told by an angel, possibly from her subconscious. “I have no idea,” Rae said. “I really don’t know what to do next.”

There was a story that had come to the nunnery with the procession of ill people. It was the story of an Englishman who, in the months immediately following La Silence, had flown a helicopter right around the world. Rae had dismissed it; there were too many wild stories going around to keep track of. And here she was, sitting in a London office with the man in the story.

“I was on an aeroplane,” he said. “I was coming back from a security conference in Jakarta. We landed at Heathrow, we taxied to the terminal, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I was the only person on the aeroplane.” He sat back on his chair. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to get off a transcontinental airliner if nobody’s rolled the jetway up to the door. I had to make a rope out of blankets.”

Rae smiled, picturing the little man climbing down a blanket rope like an escaping prisoner. “What was London like?”

Pargeter thought about that. He thought about it for so long that Rae thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. But he said finally, “Ms Peterson, it was lovely.”

Captain Gottlieb himself had served sandwiches and coffee. Lieutenant Oak had not partaken of the meal; he just sat there at the end of the table, staring at nothing.

“You have no idea how difficult it was to find a car with its keys in the ignition,” Pargeter went on, picking up the plate with the last of the ham sandwiches on it and offering it to Rae and Willem. They both shook their heads, so he put the plate down and took the sandwich for himself. He still hadn’t taken his gloves off. “Eventually I found a bicycle and I cycled into town.” He took a bite of the sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “The whole place was deserted. I went to the office, tried to raise someone, anyone, and there was no answer. So I cycled out to Permanent Joint Headquarters — the big military base at Northwood? I found some people there. Half a dozen of the Fleet Protection Marines detachment, and Lieutenant Oak and his colleagues Lieutenant Birch and Flight Sergeant Holly.”

Rae parsed this part of the story. Pargeter made it sound like an innocent Sunday morning’s jolly, but what he had done was cycle quite a considerable distance across the capital in the first hours after the apocalypse. She glanced over at Lieutenant Oak, sitting impassively at the table holding his stuffed panda.

“Northwood was simply packed with aircraft,” Pargeter went on. “So we borrowed a Puma and we flew off to see what we could see.”

“You just flew off,” Rae said. “And I presume air traffic control was…”

Pargeter waved air traffic control away.

“That could have been a short trip,” Willem said.

Pargeter thought about it and smiled. “Well,” he said.

Rae leaned forward, fascinated. “How far did you go?”

Pargeter scratched his head. “Well, we did a tour of the country, but to be honest there wasn’t very much to see here so we flew over to France and looked around there for a while. Then we did Spain and Portugal. Germany. Poland — Poland was very interesting. Did you know it’s the most populous nation in Europe now?”

Rae nodded. The Poles, the ones who believed in the Rapture at any rate, were not best pleased at having been left behind. They had harnessed this displeasure and invaded Germany, which had been more or less entirely depopulated.

“Anyway, we flew down through the Balkans, into Turkey, the Middle East. Jordan, Israel.”

“Anyone there?” asked Willem.

“Not a soul,” said Pargeter. “All gone. We found some people in Cairo but they shot at us and we had to leave.”

“Mr Pargeter,” said Rae, “how far did you go?”

“Oh, we wound up in Kazakhstan,” Pargeter said brightly. “Lieutenant Oak wanted to visit Baikonur.”

“Jesus.” Rae sat back on her chair. Pargeter and Lieutenant Oak had flown a Puma helicopter all the way into Central Asia and back again. Even before La Silence it would have been a tough trip, involving many permissions and much technical support. These days, it was nothing short of epic.

“Was there anything at Baikonur?” asked Willem, as if he was enquiring about a day-trip to Brighton.

Pargeter shrugged. “Rockets,” he said. “Lots of concrete. Lieutenant Oak was disappointed, weren’t you, Lieutenant Oak?”

Rae watched Lieutenant Oak’s fist close on the panda and then relax. No wonder he was crazy. If he was crazy. She said, “Someone ought to compose a song about that.”

Pargeter said, “What? Oh. No, I don’t think so, somehow. Somebody had to take a look around, get the lay of the land. Just doing one’s job, really.” He looked at the windows. It was dark outside. They’d been talking for almost four hours. First it had been Rae’s story. Then it had been Willem’s. Then it had been Pargeter’s turn. He said to Willem, “I think I need to speak with Ms Peterson in private.”

“We don’t have any secrets,” said Willem.

“That’s true,” said Rae.

Pargeter smiled. “But there may be some personal things we have to talk about.” He looked at Rae and raised his eyebrows, and Rae understood.

“He’s right,” she said. “Go and see how everyone’s doing, would you?”

“Okay,” said Willem, and he got up, picked up his rifle, and left the room.

When Willem had gone, Pargeter said, “Now there’s a useful talent to have.”

Rae nodded at Lieutenant Oak.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Pargeter. “Yes. Why don’t you go with him, Lieutenant? Stop him getting lost.”

Without a word, Lieutenant Oak got up from the table, still carrying his panda, and followed Willem.

“If you don’t mind me saying, he’s rather scary,” said Rae.

Pargeter smiled. “Lieutenant Oak? Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Never trusted anyone more than I’ve trusted Lieutenant Oak.”

“Was he like that before..?” she mimed a swooping helicopter with her hand.

“It was a long journey,” said Pargeter, and Rae wondered what their journey a quarter of the way around the world had done to him. Although he hadn’t been doing the flying, the slightest mechanical failure could have stranded them thousands of miles from home, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. “We lost Birch and Holly, I’m sorry to say. In Moscow, on the way back.” He shuddered slightly. “There aren’t very many Muscovites, but let’s hope they don’t decide to move West. Anyway.” He smiled at her. “Could I see your hands, please?”

“My hands?”

“Don’t be coy, Ms Peterson.” He took off his gloves and laid them on the table. “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” He performed a brief and rather awkward jazz hands routine, and Rae saw that there were little black dots on his fingertips too.

She shifted her chair over until they were sitting almost knee-to-knee, and held out her hands, palms turned upward. Pargeter leaned forward slightly and looked at them, but didn’t touch them.

“I’ve only seen this once before,” he said. “There was a chap in Kabul. Well, I say chap, he was about twelve years old. He had marks on his hands like this, and he could work miracles. The locals told me he was a god, or a demon; they weren’t sure, so they thought it was safest to worship him.”

“The locals told you?”

“I have some Pashto.”

“I’m sure you do.”

Pargeter inclined his head. “I finally gained an audience with this god, or demon, and he was just a little boy doing magic tricks.” He clicked his fingers and suddenly there was an egg in his palm. Clicked them again and there was a live chick standing there, looking around bemusedly. Clicked them again and his palm was empty. “Do you know what those little dots are?”

“Graphite,” she said. She scribbled a fingertip through the air. “Handy for writing notes when you can’t find a pencil.”

“Graphite radio antennae,” Pargeter said. “That’s how you communicate with the Dust. Have you had a scan?”

She shook her head. She hadn’t dared.

“Well, I have, and if you’re the same as me you have a network of the stuff all through your body. You’re a little radio station, Ms Peterson. While we were asleep, you and I were rewritten.”

“Although not quite as radically as Lieutenant Oak,” Rae said.

Pargeter smiled bashfully. “I wondered whether you’d notice that.”

“What is he?”

“Lieutenant Oak?” Pargeter looked surprised. “I’d have thought the name would give it away. He’s a tree.” He reconsidered for a moment. “Although I suppose the technical term would be golem. An avatar created by rewriting a tree.”

“A tree.”

“A tree.”

“A tree that can pilot a helicopter.”

Pargeter spread his hands. “I needed a pilot, and Lieutenant Oak turned up. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“About what?”

Pargeter got up and walked over to the wall. He reached out and flicked the light switch up. The lights went out. Rae heard a click as Pargeter flicked the switch back down, and the lights came on again. He stood there smiling. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

“Yes, Mr Pargeter,” she said. “I had noticed that there is still electricity.”

Pargeter came over and sat down again. “After fifteen years, there is still electricity,” he agreed. “And not a soul making it happen. Lieutenant Oak and I took a trip out to the big power station at Didcot, to see where the electricity’s coming from, and you know what? It’s not coming from anywhere. All the equipment’s gone, as if it was never there. The buildings are empty. We flew up to Nottingham, there’s another big power station there. Same story.”

“All right,” said Rae. If she could believe in helicopter-flying trees, disappearing power stations were hardly out of the ordinary at all.

Pargeter got to his feet again and started to pace. “Hasn’t it struck you that there’s something incredibly English about this catastrophe?” he asked. “Doesn’t it all seem very cosy? Not a single aircraft crashed during the Silence. No fires caused by people suddenly disappearing and leaving the cooker on. No car crashes. The countryside’s starting to look a bit scruffy, but after fifteen years it should be wildly overgrown. The cities are in good order. We still have water and gas. The toilets still work.”

“Someone’s running things,” said Rae.

“Someone’s running things for us,” Pargeter corrected. “If you leave aside the fact that almost the entire human race isn’t here any more, things are actually jolly nice now.”

“Lieutenant Oak,” she said.

“I needed him, and he was given to me,” Pargeter said. “He was given to me by someone.” He rubbed his face. “Tell me about nanotechnology.”

“I’m not an expert, Mr Pargeter. My partner was an expert; I’m an English teacher.”

Pargeter inclined his head. “But you lived for a very long time with an expert; that makes you the closest thing to an expert that we have. You and your partner must have spoken about his work.”

“Well, yes, but twenty minutes on Google would tell you as much as I know about nano.”

Pargeter smiled. “You may have noticed that Google is unavailable. Whatever is helping keep civilisation running has not decided to extend its goodwill to the internet.”

“Mm. Good point.” She thought about it for a few moments. “All right. Well, Pete once told me that, at a basic level, all ‘nanotechnology’ means is ‘technology at a nanoscale,’” she said. “That could be anything from weather control to particle coatings on clothes to make them resist dirt. But what everyone means when they say ‘nanotechnology’ is nanocytes, and there are really only two types of them — effectors and assemblers. Effectors are the little machines that do the work; assemblers do just what it says on the tin — they sit there patiently putting molecules together to build stuff, including effectors. Assemblers have a short shelf-life, and they are never programmed to make more assemblers. That’s just a basic fail-safe.”

“Except the fail-safe seems to have failed,” Pargeter observed.

She nodded. “Certainly after fifteen years all the assemblers should have stopped working. No assemblers, no more effectors. Nanocytes are fragile; the effectors should all have become inert by now.”

“So how do you get assemblers in the first place?”

“They’re factory-made. You run off a batch, test a sample, then set them loose to make effectors.”

“The production lines could still be running, then.”

Rae thought about that. “They could,” she allowed. “That never occurred to me. But assemblers were made in secure conditions — there was a lot of very tight legislation; people were terrified of Grey Goo. And an assembler won’t do anything until it’s tasked. It doesn’t matter whether the labs are still running; without orders the assemblers would just hang around doing nothing until they degraded.”

“Perhaps someone is giving orders.”

“Yes, and perhaps Elvis will tour again one day.” She sighed. “If you’re one of the people who thinks this is The Rapture, I’m afraid this conversation is over, Mr Pargeter.”

“No.” Pargeter smiled sadly and shook his head. “No, I don’t believe in The Rapture. I think I may have some idea about bits of what happened, but not all of it.”

Rae looked at the little Englishman. “Well, we all have some idea about what happened.”

Pargeter tipped his head to one side. “Do you?”

Rae pulled a sour face. “All right. Fair point.”

“But you must have come to some conclusions, surely. Otherwise all this…” he waved a hand to include the room, the building, Oxford Street, London, Europe, the world, “…is just meaningless. Beyond meaningless.”

“That is pretty much the way I look at it, yes.”

Pargeter raised an eyebrow. “You’re an extraordinary woman, Ms Peterson.”

“I’ve never responded particularly well to flattery, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said tiredly.

“No, really. It’s human nature to look for reasons when outside events suddenly change our lives. That’s how we get conspiracy theories. It’s rare to find someone who just regards life as… chaos.”

“I would have thought it was the only sane way to respond to what’s happened.”

Pargeter leaned forward in his chair. “But what has happened? Let’s take that as our starting point, shall we?”

Rae shrugged.

“A large proportion of the human race — very nearly all of the human race — and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has simply disappeared. I think we can agree on that, can’t we?”

“I think I’d find it difficult to argue with you on that point, Mister Pargeter.”

“And if a very large proportion of the human race and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has disappeared, there must be a reason. Musn’t there?”

Rae rubbed her face. “Mister Pargeter,” she said, “I fell asleep fifteen years ago, and when I woke up I could do this.” She clicked her fingers and a motorcycle appeared in the corner of the room. A heavily-customised Harley-Davidson she had once seen on a television lifestyle show. She clicked her fingers and it disappeared again. “It’s taken a great deal of my attention since then just to deal with that, and I haven’t always done terribly well. I haven’t had the luxury of being able to look for reasons.”

Pargeter looked at the space where the motorcycle had been. “Have you ever wondered how you do that?” he asked.

“I do it by talking to the Dust,” Rae said. She raised her hands in front of her face and made tiger-claws at him. “With my radio fingers.”

Pargeter smiled. “What was that motorbike made of?” he asked, turning back to face her.

“The Dust. Nanoassembled molecules. Oh.” She stopped and thought about it. “You know, that never occurred to me before.” She remembered the big experimental assembly chamber at Peter’s company, filled with a solid fog of effectors and gaseous feedstock. It took hours to produce simple shapes like chairs and tables, days for more complex forms, with a dozen supercomputers running constantly to send instructions to the effectors. Nanoassembly had been a constantly-refining technique, but it had never been instantaneous. She’d just got used to it.

“We think that, to create something like that,” Pargeter waved at the corner, “the effectors must be working at close to lightspeed. Faster than lightspeed, possibly. This isn’t the Dust that your husband was developing, this is something quite different. And it must use a colossal amount of energy. Where does that come from? Where does it go?”

Rae looked at the corner and said nothing.

“There’s also the question of how you know how to build a motorbike,” Pargeter went on. “You just think ‘motorbike’ and click your fingers, and there it is, and I’m willing to bet that if we tried it the engine would work and we could just ride it down the street. How do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He clicked his fingers and there was the chick again, sitting in his palm, looking calmly around. “This is a real living thing, Ms Peterson,” he said. “Right down below the cellular level. I’ve lost count of how many of these little chaps we’ve autopsied, and there is literally no way to tell them from the real thing. They’re not automata. They even have DNA. Here.” He bent forward and let the chick step off his palm onto the floor. “There you go, little one. Off you go.” He made gentle shooing motions and the chick wandered off until it found something interesting on the floor to peck at. Pargeter sat up and clasped his hands in his lap and looked very seriously at Rae. “I’m classically-educated, Ms Peterson. Winchester, Oxford. I read Greek and Latin. What I know about biology you could write on the back of a postage stamp; I have no more idea of how to build a chick than I have about the interior processes of a star. So how could I do that?” He nodded at the chick, which was gradually pecking its way in little circles away from them. “How can I instruct the effectors if I don’t know what instructions to send?”

Rae scowled. She’d been taking it for granted all these years…

“The way I see it,” Pargeter continued, “there are two possibilities. Either you and I have been changed far more drastically than we imagined, and we’ve somehow been loaded, on a subconscious level, with unimaginably-detailed templates for all the things we create. Or we’re not giving the orders, we’re accessing a database of all possible templates.”

Rae shook her head.

“The world, Ms Peterson, has become a lot stranger than we thought. We have become a lot stranger than we thought.” He reached out and tapped Rae on the shoulder. “Come on,” he said, “I’d like to show you something.”

Rae stood and followed Pargeter out of the room and up a couple of flights of stairs. At the top of the stairs, Pargeter opened a door and Rae felt a gust of cool air billow past her down the stairwell.

The door opened onto the roof of the building and an extraordinary view over London. Most of the buildings were dark, but the streetlights were on, a higgledy-piggledy gridwork of light that draped itself over the heights of Highgate and Hampstead to the north, out towards Heathrow to the west, to the River in the south and away to the City in the east.

A telescope had been set up near the centre of the roof, and Rae knew what Pargeter wanted to show her. She said, “I don’t need that, Mr Pargeter. And neither do you.” And she looked up at the gloriously star-strewn sky and zoomed her view.

It had been obscurely comforting for Rae to discover that her eyesight had its limitations. Her eyes were simply too small to receive enough light to resolve things like exoplanets or the details of distant galaxies, but if she stood on a tall enough mountain she’d have been able to see people halfway round the world, and all the planets of the Solar System appeared larger than a full Moon. All except one. She looked around for a few moments, and there it was, a glittering shield the shape of a car windscreen hanging motionless in space. She’d looked at it many times in Holland and had never been able to make out much more than its oddly granular structure.

“Do you know what it is?” Pargeter asked, standing beside her with his head tipped back.

“There’s a fogbank off the Dutch coast,” she said. “The Hook Shield, they call it. The fishermen won’t go anywhere near it; it just hangs there, never moving, never changing. It’s the same shape.” Except the Hook Shield was composed of billions of nanoparticles, each one hanging motionless in the air, a condensation nucleus for water droplets. This thing in space, whatever it was, was colossal.

“Have you tried counting the planets?” he asked.

All of a sudden, Rae was tired of Pargeter’s cute little conversational strategies. “I have noticed that Mars is no longer there, Mr Pargeter,” she said. “Thank you.”

Pargeter noticed the tone of her voice and looked at her. “We have some very bright people living here, Ms Peterson,” he told her. “They’re not the brightest people who have ever lived in Britain, but they’re almost certainly the brightest people living here now. And they believe that Mars has been… dismantled. Disassembled. And reassembled to make…” he gestured at the sky. “… that.”

“And that is…?”

Pargeter scratched his head. “Our people are of the opinion that that is where the human race, whatever it is now, is living.”

Rae blinked her vision back to normal and looked at him.

“It’s an enormous solar collector,” he went on. “The concave face is always turned towards the Sun; it’s absorbing an extraordinary amount of energy, and it’s using that energy to power something. Some of it is providing electricity for us, but we don’t know how and it’s only a tiny fraction of what it’s absorbing anyway. My bright people have theorised that the rest of it is being used to power some kind of hive mind composed of every person who disappeared during the Silence. And probably most of the animals, too.”

Rae thought about it. She thought about it for quite a while. Finally, she said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no way anything could build something like that in fifteen years.”

Pargeter nodded. “Well, yes, that’s what I thought, too,” he said. “But we looked at the stars. Have you looked at the stars?”

Rae’s patience snapped. “Mr Pargeter!” she said.

Pargeter raised his hands in apology. “Our people compared the positions of the stars on the day before the Silence to their positions now, and they believe that it’s actually been a little over one thousand seven hundred years since the Event.”

Rae shook her head. “No, no, no.”

“Our people think that none of us survived the Silence,” Pargeter said. “We were all… disassembled while… whatever it is did whatever it needed to do. Then the world was put back exactly the way it was on the day of the Event, and some of us were put back into it.”

Rae thought of clouds of animated smoke surging back and forth across her bedroom, of Pete singing in the kitchen. “No,” she said in a small voice.

“Ever since I got back from the continent, I’ve been collecting every scientist and expert and theorist I can lay my hands on,” Pargeter said. “I’ve sent scouting groups as far as Korea. We have quite a lot of clever people here now. And if you sit a lot of very clever people down for fifteen years and ask them to think about a problem, they come up with all manner of strange ideas. But eventually they boil all those strange ideas down.” He turned from the telescope and started to walk back to the stairway. “I’m told that there aren’t a lot of explanations — even very strange ones — for what seems to have happened to the stars. Earth hasn’t been moved; it’s in just the right place, if seventeen hundred years have passed. The stars haven’t been moved, because, well, that’s just impossible. I’m sorry, but this is the best explanation we can come up with.”

“Your theorists are wrong, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said.

“Possibly. Yes, quite possibly.” He stopped at the doorway to the stairs and turned to look at her. “I think your angel may have been sent by…” he waved a languid hand at the sky, at the great artefact that had replaced Mars. “If it told you to come to Hyde Park, there must be something important here. And I need to know what it is.”

She barked out an astonished laugh. “You want me to spy for you?”

Pargeter looked abashed. “One hates to revert to type,” he said. “But, you know, it was one’s job. For the past fifteen years we’ve been scrabbling about trying to understand what has happened to the world, and why, Ms Peterson. I think you’re about to be given a chance to find out. We might not get another one.”

Unable to sleep, she went downstairs and sat in the bar. No one else was about, but through the window she could see two of Gottlieb’s men on guard outside the front door. He’d told her that they were there to protect the hotel and its guests from other groups of survivors, who sometimes carried out raids into Household Cavalry territory, but right now they looked to her like armed guards.

She got up and went into Reception, where another soldier was standing behind the desk. She walked right past him without saying a word, and opened the door.

The two guards turned when they heard the noise behind them. One was a corporal named McKie; the other, she didn’t know. “I’m going for a walk,” she said to McKie.

“With respect, miss, I wouldn’t advise it,” the corporal said smoothly and professionally. Everyone here was calm and matter-of-fact and professional, she thought.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m perfectly safe.”

McKie considered for a second or so. “If you’ll just wait a moment, Miss, I’ll call it in and then I’ll be delighted to accompany you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Willem said, seeming to materialise soundlessly at her shoulder. “I’ll be taking the air with Ms Peterson.”

McKie said, “With respect, sir —”

“Enough respect,” Willem said. “I was fighting the Chechen Mafia when you were still being toilet-trained. Have you ever fought the Chechen Mafia?”

“No, sir,” McKie said, in a baffled tone of voice.

“If you had, you’d know there is nothing here I am afraid of,” Willem went on. “And I am armed.” He held up his rifle.

“Me too,” said Rae. She held her hands out and all of a sudden she was holding a futuristic-looking rifle, matt-black, with many strange buttons and modules and a parabolic reflector at the end of its barrel. “Phased plasma rifle,” she said. “Fifty kilowatt range.”

The other soldier took a step back, but McKie stood his ground. “I’ll still have to call it in,” he said finally.

“Fine,” she said. “Call it in. We’re not going far.”

She and Willem left the two soldiers standing there outside the hotel. They walked up towards Shaftesbury Avenue, then turned up the Charing Cross Road, their footsteps echoing in the great silence of London. Not all of the streetlights were working, Rae noticed. Power was certainly coming from somewhere, but the bulbs still burned out. She assumed Gottlieb’s men replaced them, but she also assumed he couldn’t spare the manpower to replace them all.

“Does that thing work?” Willem asked after a while, nodding at the gun she was carrying.

She lifted it up. “This? Of course it works.” She raised it to her shoulder, sighted up the road at the front of a building, and squeezed the trigger. The gun made a modulated beeping sound, LEDs flashed on its sides, and a stream of soap bubbles emerged from a hole in the middle of the parabolic antenna. She looked bashfully at Willem, and they both laughed, but she wondered. She had wanted a toy gun, and a toy gun had been created. What would have happened if she had really wanted a futuristic particle beam weapon? Would she have got one of those?

“Can I ask you a question?” she said a few minutes later, as they wandered through the little streets and squares of Soho.

“Of course.”

“What you told Corporal McKie about the Chechen Mafia. Was that true?”

He nodded. He had never spoken in any great detail about his former life. He’d never hidden the fact that he had been a gangster, a killer, but he had never volunteered any stories about it, and she had respected that, all these years.

“Were they bad? The Chechens?”

He shrugged. “Any man who kills you is bad,” he mused. “The Chechens were ruthless and tough, but they were honourable men, by their own lights. Not everyone was so honourable.”

“I still find it hard to imagine you, living that life.”

“I’m not.” He smiled briefly at her. “That life’s over.”

“Why did you do it, though?”

He thought about that for a while. “I was good at it,” he said finally.

They walked on for a while in silence, until they reached a set of streets blocked by parked cars and lorries — the southern edge of the Household Cavalry’s little nation. They turned north and found themselves at Oxford Circus.

“Pargeter’s experts tell him it hasn’t been fifteen years since La Silence,” she said. “They say it’s been almost two thousand years.”

“And why do they say that?” he asked.

“They have computer programs that can show you the positions of the stars from any time since the Crucifixion to, oh, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of years into the future. They just ran it and compared the results with the positions of the stars.”

Willem thought about it. “I don’t feel two thousand years old,” he said.

“Me neither. I remember those computer programs, though. They’re supposed to be pretty accurate.” She turned and started to walk back eastward along Oxford Street. “Do you remember I told you about Mars?”

“I remember you told me it isn’t there any more. I remember you said there was something in its place. You didn’t know what it was.”

“Pargeter thinks that’s where everyone is,” she said. “He thinks the human race became some kind of group mind, dismantled Mars, and built this thing to live in. He thinks that’s where the electricity’s coming from.”

“You keep saying thinks,” Willem pointed out. “I presume he doesn’t have a pretty accurate computer program to tell him these things.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, he doesn’t. It’s all conjecture.”

“Does it matter?”

Rae looked at him, walking softly and alert beside her. “Of course it does. Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“I used to. Now? No, I don’t think so. Would knowing change anything? Would it bring everyone back? Would I even want everyone back?”

She was surprised. She’d never heard him talk like this. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“My old life, it wasn’t much of a life, to be honest,” he said. “The lifestyle of the organised criminal is over-rated. Always wondering when someone would ambush you and cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the slit. I have another life now.”

“I can’t just let it go like that,” she told him. “I have to know, if I can.”

“Do you think there’s an answer in Hyde Park?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. Pargeter thinks so. He wants me to spy for him.”

Willem said, “Pargeter this, Pargeter that,” and made a rude noise. “Suppose there is no answer? Suppose this is just something the universe does, for no conscious reason? Suppose it just… whips away the tablecloth from underneath us every few million years? Suppose it’s just part of the way things are?”

“That’s a scary thought,” Rae said.

“Scarier than Pargeter’s hive mind?”

“Yes,” she said. “Much scarier.”

They cut south again, around Soho Square and back down the Charing Cross Road towards Seven Dials.

As they approached the hotel, Willem stopped and turned to face her. “You came here to cure a little girl, Rae,” he said. “Or to try, anyway. Forget the big questions, for a while at least. Try to concentrate on the things you can understand.”

“But I don’t understand,” and she felt small and helpless and lost. “I don’t understand any of it.”

He nodded. “Neither do I. But Elżbieta needs you; you’re no good to her if your mind’s full of Pargeter’s cosmic madness. Okay?”

Rae rubbed her eyes and nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re tired. Go to bed.”

She nodded. “Thank you, Willem.”

“It’s what I’m here for,” he said. “And I think you can get rid of that gun now.”

Breakfast the next morning was bacon and egg and sausage and fried potatoes and hash browns and baked beans and croissants and fried mushrooms and devilled kidneys and kedgeree and cereal and muesli and coffee and tea and a rainbow of fruit juices, and everyone was very happy. Rae surprised herself by being ravenously hungry, and piled up her plate. She didn’t even mind when people kept drifting across to her table and interrupting her breakfast to ask advice or settle little disputes. My people, she thought. They had come with her for no other reason than that she was coming here, and she felt rather proud of them, and rather ashamed of being so grumpy the previous evening. She wondered what they would all do when this was over. She wondered where Eddy Colorado was.

She was just finishing her second cup of coffee when Mikhail came into the dining room. “It’s here,” he said, and everyone rushed to the windows to look out into the street, where the angel was standing, rather uncomfortably, on its great clawed feet.

Rae put down her cup and dabbed her lips with the linen napkin. “Marta, Beata,” she called. “Bring Elżbieta down and put her in the ambulance, please.” And while the nuns went upstairs to their suite, she went outside.

The angel wasn’t alone. A small group of people had gathered at a respectful distance. Most of them were from the convoy, but she spotted Pargeter and Gottlieb and a handful of soldiers among them. She took a deep breath and walked out into the street.

She stopped a few feet from the angel and said, “Hello.”

“Rae,” said the angel. It was looking shabby; the nano that made up its body was obviously starting to fail. Its wings were threadbare, there were tatty holes in its jeans, big clumps of its hair had fallen out, and patches of dead white had appeared on its skin. It was on its last legs, its mission almost complete. “You got here, then.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rae saw Beata and Marta carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle out of the hotel. She said to the angel, “Well, I’m rea —” and the window of the hotel dining room shattered and fell into the street. There was a moment of utter silence, and Rae found herself looking in wonderment at the little hole in the middle of the angel’s forehead. The angel itself was trying hard to focus on it, which made it comically cross-eyed. It looked at her for a moment, seemed to sigh, and then exploded into a huge cloud of smoke. And then everyone started screaming.

Rae looked over her shoulder and saw someone moving in a fourth-floor window of one of the buildings just down the street, and she stepped into the room behind the window and found herself in a little office. Eddy Colorado was making for the door, a long-barrelled rifle with a silencer and a sophisticated-looking sniperscope cradled in his arms.

He skidded to a stop when Rae appeared in front of him. “It lied to me, Mrs Rae!” he protested. “Harry gave me the gun!”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Rae, and suddenly Eddy Colorado was a rapidly-expanding cloud of smoke, just like the angel. The rifle thudded to the floor.

Dust to dust, Rae thought, and stepped back into the street, where everyone was screaming and shouting and running about. She took Elżbieta from Beata and Marta’s unresisting hands. Wrapped in her blanket, the girl seemed to weigh nothing at all. Rae pivoted on the balls of her feet and advanced on Pargeter, who was backing away holding his hands up in a placatory gesture. Gottlieb, to his credit, hadn’t moved an inch.

“I wanted to provoke a response!” Pargeter shouted. “That’s all!”

“If you try to follow me, or if any of my friends are harmed in any way, I’ll give you a response, Mr Pargeter!” Rae yelled.

She turned away from the little spy and found Willem standing in front of her. “Didn’t know you could do that,” he said calmly.

“Me neither,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek. “Look after things here. We’ll be back.” And she took a deep breath, gathered herself, and stepped into Hyde Park.

There was a serpent in The Serpentine. It was wearing a Tam O’Shanter and its breathing sounded like bagpipes. Rae stood watching it, Elżbieta in her arms, and after a moment or two it slipped away beneath the surface.

The serpent wasn’t alone. Hyde Park had been transformed into an opium eater’s idea of Fairyland. There were lions and tigers bounding across the grass, and monkeys in the trees, and little things with arms and legs and wings flying through the air, and extravagantly-armoured knights riding along the horse-paths on warhorses the size of armoured cars. There were unicorns and manticores and gryphons and princesses and warty dwarves and minotaurs and hobbits and at least one Darth Vader. Gauzy three-dimensional geometric figures danced in the hot, humid, heavy air, forming and reforming and suddenly darting away across the park. It smelled like the inside of a circus tent. It was a madhouse.

She found a tree and laid Elżbieta down gently beneath it. Then she sat beside the blanket-wrapped bundle.

“I have the kill-codes for everything here,” she told the tropical air quite calmly. “I’m going to count to ten and then I’m going to use them. Your turn. One. Two. Three.”

“My,” said a voice behind her. “Aren’t we the feisty one all of a sudden.”

Rae looked over her shoulder and breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been afraid it would be Peter; she couldn’t have stood that, she’d have just broken. But it wasn’t Peter. It was a little girl, maybe seven or eight, plump in the face and with her hair in ringlets. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress with petticoats and an apron. Tenniel’s Alice.

“Pargeter killed the angel,” Rae said.

“I know,” Alice said. “He wanted to provoke me into doing something. Silly fucker.” The little girl walked over to the blanket bundle. “Is this her?”

“Yes,” said Rae.

Alice lifted a corner of the blanket. There was nothing underneath that resembled a human being. There was nothing but a mass of hands, linked together by short lengths of arm and wrist, writhing and spasming in constant motion, the fingers wiggling and opening and closing. Alice shook her head and said, “What a fucking mess.”

“Little girls shouldn’t swear,” Rae told her.

“Fuck off. I’m really pissed off about what you did to that nasty little fucker Eddy Colorado. I’ll reinitialise him in Belgium; he won’t remember any of this, but it’s a pain in the arse having to do it all the same. I should kick you both out and send you on your way.”

“The angel promised she’d be cured,” said Rae. “I don’t care what happens to me. Just so long as she’s cured. Whatever you are, if you can’t keep your promises you’re not worth my time.”

Alice dropped the blanket and snorted. “Piece of cake. Tell you what, you’ve got lots of questions. So you can have four questions, then I’ll fix her, then you go.”

“Why just four?”

“Because I make the fucking rules and I fucking say so,” Alice said irritably. “And that was your first question.”

“That’s not fair!”

“You don’t like the rules? Fuck off out of here, and take…” she nudged the mass of hands with the toe of a silver-buckled shoe, “…this with you.” She looked at Rae. “Three questions left. Ask me anything. Go on, take your best shot.”

Who are you? Am I real?

“What the hell has all this been about?”

“I’m interested in Pargeter,” said Alice. “I wanted to see what he’d do when he met you and the angel. Turns out he’s a bit of a bastard. That might come in handy. And no, I won’t tell you why. But I’ll save you a question and tell you that yes, I set up Eddy Colorado, and I set you up. It was up to Pargeter what he did with the situation. Call it an experiment in free will. Oh, and yes, I do enjoy being a deus ex machina thank you very much. Next?”

What happened? Has it really been one thousand seven hundred years? Are you where Mars was…?

Rae said, “Is Pete there?”

Alice regarded her levelly. “Yes,” she said. “He’s here.”

What are we here for? What do we do now? Will we be able to speak with you again…?

“Is he happy?”

Alice’s round face crinkled into a sad, beatific smile. “Yes, he is.” She looked at Rae for a moment longer, then she turned and walked away. “All fixed,” she said without looking back. “Now fuck off.”

There was a little girl lying on the blanket in front of Rae. She was about five years old and she had long auburn hair. She blinked at Rae. “Am I in heaven?” she asked.

Rae smiled at her through tears. “Could be,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name’s Rae.”

“I was in the sky,” Elżbieta said.

Rae wiped her eyes and looked for Alice, but she was nowhere to be seen. All the other lunatic avatars seemed to have gone, too. As she sat there, she felt a cool breeze brush her cheek, a breeze from the River blowing away the mad greenhouse air as the invisible shield over Hyde Park lifted away into nothing.

“I was in the sky,” Elżbieta said again. “And a beautiful lady was there.”

“I’m sure there was, my sweet.”

“Are you an angel?”

Rae laughed. “No. No, I’m not.” She stood and took Elżbieta’s hand and helped her to her feet. “But I met an angel once. Would you like me to tell you about it?”

The little girl nodded, a look of almost comical seriousness on her face. Rae draped the blanket over her shoulders and round her body and took her hand again. “It’s a long story,” she began, “and it started a very long time ago. Or perhaps it didn’t…”

They walked away, hand in hand, and as they walked tiny white flowers blossomed in their footsteps.

v

As with a lot of my stories the title came first, and the idea of nanotechnology which powers itself by metabolising blood sugar sort of popped up out of that. I’d always wanted to tackle a ‘cosy catastrophe’ story. It’s also the only story of mine, off the top of my head, that has a female protagonist. As a bit of an experiment, I self-published it as an ebook on Amazon along with another story, and eventually, after a couple of years, was rewarded with a cheque for twenty-five quid, which I regard as a bit of a win.