Falling (20 page)

‘It's not true, you know,' he added conversationally, palming the extra ticket and handing her the agreed number. ‘This rumour that we hypnotise people into joining us.'

‘I'm sure it's not.' Jude tugged the tickets from his grasp. ‘I'm sure you're the purveyors of genuine truth and wisdom, and we're all going to be sorry come Judgement Day. But I really have to be somewhere.'

‘Loved one waiting?' the eyeless man asked, managing something distantly related to a benign smile.

‘Yeah,' Jude admitted, pushing through the crudely-rigged turnstile towards the stationary elevators. ‘And you wouldn't believe how long overdue I am.'

The southbound platform was near empty and even colder than she remembered. The overheads displays were working, though, alternating a probably optimistic arrival time for the next train with Ferryman slogans, which drew uneasy giggles from the lads arguing and posturing at the far end of the platform.

WHERE IS IT YOU'RE HEADED? the screen blared, silencing their laughter; THINK ON YOUR FINAL DESTINATION.

Good question.

She couldn't go to Fitch. Even if she (he? too many possibilities) still lived in the same house and worked in Club Andro, those would be the first places Warner would have staked out. She'd been too chatty, too careless all those years. Mentioned too many names, dropped too many hints. Between what she'd said directly to him, and what he could wring out of other employees, he could reconstruct practically her whole life.

This left her with two options. She could give herself up. Okay, let's give it due consideration. It wasn't like they were going to hurt her. She was the only ReTracer who'd ever travelled forward in time. She was a miracle. She was the most valuable thing on earth.

But valuable things got locked up for their own protection, and miracles existed solely for scientists to debunk or duplicate, preferably both. Right now, Jude trusted Warner and friends about far as she could thrown their damn techno-helicopter with one hand tied behind her back.

The alcohol she'd gulped at the canalside had settled her stomach, but her head felt like it was stuffed with feathers, heavy suffocated thoughts turning over and over in endless slow-motion. Fumbling in her pocket, she took the cap off the next miniature and drained it without thinking. Neat gin. Gin and despair in the ruins of the Underground, how Romantic.

Shit, she thought, I'm getting poetic. Things are definitely serious.

That leaves option two.

There's no guarantee that Warner won't trace you there. And you always said you'd never get that desperate.

She might not even take you in.

A low, bone-shaking rumble echoed up the unlit tunnel towards her. The other travellers – the boys wearing the red sash of the junior Sewer Rats, a courier hugging a suitcase to his chest, a couple of depressed-looking tarts in girlish floral dresses – gravitated slowly to the edge of the platform. Tense with the unfamiliarity of Underground etiquette, Jude hung back.

Hung back until the clanking mass of pistons and levers that passed for a steam engine had rattled to a halt, dragging the battered carriages level with the platform. Hung back until everyone was aboard, the boys yelping and bouncing on the threadbare seats. And then the engine was whining with a fresh head of steam and about to struggle onwards, and she had no choice but to take those last two steps towards the perpetually open doors and step aboard.

The tarts looked at her and sniffed, as if suspecting that she'd come to steal their customers. No one else seemed too interested. Most of the seats had been replaced with whatever came to hand; a plastic chair, a board, even a baby seat. The original, threadbare seats were the only ones occupied. Settling cautiously on a plank seat that immediately bruised her spine and filled her trousers with splinters, she realised why everyone else had been in such a hurry.

As she turned to scan the platform one more time, a final reassurance, a young man in a suspiciously expensive jacket hurtled from the stairwell. Tense, eager, and just a little too late. They were already moving, steam spiralling from the gap between the carriage and the track, obscuring his footing if he decided to jump.

‘Hey, suit man!' one of the Sewer Rats yelled. ‘Lost your limo?'

Her would-be tail broke stride, one hand moving inside his jacket. The taunting Sewer Rats ducked back behind the doorposts, squealing animal alarm-cries, as quick and wary as their namesakes.

In the next carriage, a long, lean figure stood up, flicking the dark silhouette of a weapon from his hip. Jude registered the tattoo on his neck. The shining eye of arcane knowledge, the mark of a Ferryman enforcer. Registering the movement, her tail frowned and slowly swung his empty hand away from his jacket. The enforcer bowed his head very slightly, acknowledging a professional courtesy, and turned to watch the grey-suited figure diminish as the tunnel raced forward to swallow them.

Suddenly, pathetically grateful for the Ferrymen's neurotic anti-violence policy, Jude leaned back in her seat. A protruding stub of the original seat fitting connected with her elbow, adding another bruise to her collection.

‘I hate travelling by Underground,' one of the tarts said, tugging listlessly at her stockings. ‘The class of people you have to travel with, y' understand?'

Her companion glared meaningfully at Jude. ‘Bloody gangs.'

‘Bloody wage-slaves, more like. They cause all the real trouble. Gang boys, they're all right. Good customers. I was up Whitechapel the other day with one of the Barrier Boys, he bought me dinner and everything. Couldn't fault his manners. Those government types, they can't even manage a please and thank you.'

Jude fingered the material of her far-too-expensive jacket and wondered if she should stop off to go clothes shopping.

The connecting door jolted open and the tattooed enforcer swayed through it, lithely mirroring the movements of the accelerating carriage. He'd probably spent most of his adult life down here, riding the trains and dispensing lethal punishment to anyone who dishonoured the cult's ‘sacred caverns'. No gang rivalries, no private quarrels, no violence verbal or physical, was tolerated below ground.

And annoying the enforcers was generally regarded as a pretty bad idea. Any of them who actually had to resort to violence to keep the peace were rendered ceremonially unclean by it, and had to undergo a complex forty-eight hour ritual before they could return to whatever bizarre form of worship took place on the platforms after dark. The slightest prospect of enduring that tended to make them rather annoyed.

Fixing her gaze on the garish slogans painted into the poster slots above her fellow passengers' heads, Jude sat very, very still.

‘I must apologise for that small disturbance,' the enforcer said, retaining his balance perfectly as the carriage jolted across a damaged rail. ‘It's always unfortunate when the karma of a journey is disturbed. Perhaps we might all share a moment of meditation, to restore the balance of our environment?'

By the time she changed lines at what remained of Green Park, the enforcer had the tarts sniffling sentimentally and crooning along with a mantra to the glory of Charon, and Jude was developing a headache.

The westbound train was in better repair, and quieter. Her seat was marginally more comfortable, and she spent the time pondering the slogans affixed over her fellow passengers' heads. LOOKING FOR A SIGN?, one said; WELL, THIS IS IT. And directly opposite, daubed in six-inch blood-red capitals: ETERNITY IS A LONG TIME TO THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE.

Yeah, preach it, brother.

Another enforcer got on at the first stop, strumming absently on a harp the size of a pizza and about as tuneful. A woman shepherding four or five children took over the end of the carriage, huddling on a broken car seat under a rambling slogan in Arabic. Jude amused herself for a couple more stops trying to count her brood, but they wouldn't stay still long enough. The carriage echoed to their voices, mostly monosyllabic cries of rage as they fought for toys or seats or their mother's attention.

It was only as the woman got up to leave that Jude thought she recognised her. The name was on her lips before she could stop herself.

‘Yona?'

The woman looked round. Her hair hung lank, and she limped badly. It was hard to see the ghost of the giggly trainee ReTracer in her face, but it was there still, buried under years of resentment and despair.

‘Well,' she said, as the children clustered around her, proving their allegiance in the face of this strange threat. ‘Jude. You've obviously done well for yourself.'

For a moment, that made no sense; then she remembered the suit and the briefcase, and was about to protest, but Yona was already saying, ‘I never thought you were the type.'

‘You were right. I, er, should probably have left years ago.' Straining to put together the pieces, calculate how Yona's past might have been changed by this constant interference with reality, ‘Like you did?'

‘Oh yes,' Yona agreed, a death's-head grin spreading across her taunt face. ‘Because that's the life, isn't it? Your only decision – today, do we beg, borrow, or steal?'

She nudged the oldest boy, a lanky thing of about ten, with big blue eyes and startlingly pale skin. Snapping into a familiar routine, he stepped forward and extended a hand in silent entreaty.

‘What happened to you?' Jude asked his mother.

‘Don't play dumb with me, Jude.' She was already shoving the youngest kids onto the platform; the carriage vibrated as the engine built up a head of steam for the next stage. ‘We weren't all as lucky as you. Mart, c'mon!'

Confused by his role in this pageant of adult hostilities, the boy took a step back. Jude pressed the briefcase into his still outstretched hand, almost unbalancing him, and then he leapt from the moving train and was gone, hugging his unforeseen bounty as the cloud of steam in their wake blurred him into nothingness.

The enforcer frowned at her over his harp and began to play something that sounded unnervingly like a lament.

But he made no comment, the suitably elderly blind man at the barrier accepted her ticket without any attempt at evangelism, and she emerged on to the desolation of the Hammersmith flyover in the wake of a shower, the wet pavements glazed with sunlight.

Didn't look like Warner had anticipated this. No sign of helicopters, no sign of tails or armoured cars or any kind of official presence. Just the usual. Fires burning under the flyovers, kids rollerskating: racing each other, tag-teaming, hurling insults and stones across the central reservation to confuse the other team. Shabby men in leather coats handsignalled the odds to one another, or counted gambled cash with the same mechanical precision as the blind ticket seller.

She wondered if the two worlds ever collided; if the touts would give odds on the arrival of the sweaty, reeking trains, or the Ferrymen had the faintest appreciation of the shouting, shrieking battles being fought in the world above.

We've separated off into our own little worlds. Legal or illegal, rich or poor, above the street or under it. Perhaps that's what the fortune teller in the park meant when she said the city was dying. It's not ceasing to exist, it's just changing. Fragmenting into ever smaller units, each isolated by an empty expanse of motorway or canal or abandoned parkland. A world of tribes lost in a concrete Amazon, each thinking themselves the sum of creation, blissfully unaware of what lies outside their little kingdom.

Jude ground her knuckles into her eyes, blinked a couple of times. Windows greased with rain reflected sunlight across the emptiness. Under the shadow of the high and glittering entrance of the Palais, a pack of scrawny dogs lounged, regarding her with suspicion. No doubt other eyes, human eyes, were watching too.

Hurrying despite the total, decades-long absence of traffic, she crossed the cracked expanse of the Broadway – a green-way now, tufted with grass and silvery thistles – into King Street.

The theatre was still standing. Which was good. In a manner of speaking. The sight of its cracked and patched glass frontage, the lopsided signs in the windows, sent a shiver through her. Unsure if it was terror or relief, Jude forced herself to keep walking. All the way up to the crumbling access ramp, the perpetually open door, and through into the gloom.

At what must have been the ticket desk, an old man was sitting with his feet on a wooden box, entering data via a keyboard with one crooked finger.

‘Public meetings are Monday and Thursday,' he said gruffly, without raising his eyes from the screen. ‘Please do take a leaflet.'

Jude shook her head. ‘I'm here to see Ms DiMortimer.'

‘On what business?'

‘Call it a family reunion.'

'This is extremely tiresome of you, Judith,' the woman sprawled on the chaise lounge sighed as she entered. ‘You know that I told everyone here that I don't have any children. What I'm going to say now, I really don't know.'

Jude stood there for a moment, watching the light of the candles on the window ledge play across her mother's face. It reminded her of the toy projector she'd had for her sixth birthday, a cheap rotating ball that scattered the bedroom ceiling with flecks of blue and gold. For the ten days until the batteries ran out. A light that seemed designed for hiding than for looking, for concealing things that neither of them wanted to face.