This corridor, landing, mezzanine, whatever sort of architectural thing it was, was also covered in cats. Hundreds and hundreds of square feet of them. They weren't milling, but sitting silently watching us as we were led to the door of suite 102. I paused for a moment at the door, looking out over the cats and wondering what was up with them. It wasn't even the fact that they were all here that bothered me, so much as the fact they all looked so serious. The cats in Cat are always friendly: it's their place, and they have nothing to fear from anyone who comes there. Thousands of eyes stared back at me impassively. I knocked on the door.
Ever since I'd come back from Jeamland, through the flight from Colour and our strange entry into Cat, I'd had a feeling. It's difficult to describe, except that it felt like structure. It felt as if things were coming together in some way, as if something that had been on the horizon for some time was finally getting closer. I didn't like the feeling. I didn't like it all. I've learnt to dislike structure, because it generally means that there's something going on which you don't know about. I particularly disliked this one, because it felt like it was coming from inside.
When the door opened and Ji stood massively in front of me, I was inarticulately glad to see him. We both were, and for a moment stood just staring at each other. Then he moved forward quickly and grabbed Alkland off my shoulder, rolling him into his grasp in a strangely delicate move that made me realise that a baby might actually be safe in his arms.
He turned and walked up the short corridor towards the room at the end. I followed him, slumping now that I only had my own weight to carry, and behind me Shelby reached up and pummelled my shoulders gently.
As we entered the main room of the suite Zenda and Snedd stood up. Like Ji, Snedd still managed to look resolutely primitive and dangerous, even when ensconced in the ghost of a five-star suite. He nodded at me.
'Guess you got the right place then, Ji,' he said.
Ji grunted and deposited Alkland gently on the sofa. He ripped the bottom half of the Actioneer's trouser leg off, and bent over him to examine the damage.
I was looking at Zenda, and she was looking at me. Instead of the rich skirts she's worn in recent years, instead of the power suits, she was wearing a pair of battered black trousers and a long coat in very deep green. Her hair was pulled back loosely with a rubber band, and she looked young and tall, just like she always did.
She smiled and walked towards me, and I guess I looked like I used to as well, because I've always dressed the same. When she reached out and hugged me ten years fell away, and I felt the structure again, and knew that it had to be. It only lasted a moment, but that was long enough for me to know that things had to change. That finally, it had to be.
'Broken?' asked Snedd in the background.
'Yeah,' I said. Zenda's hand slid down my arm as we moved apart. 'And shot.' I went over to crouch by Ji at the sofa, as Shelby and Zenda exchanged polite greetings. They've met before, but not often. I don't understand why, but there always seems to be some undercurrent between them. 'How bad is it, Ji?'
'Bad. He's going to die.'
'No, don't hold back. Give it to me straight.'
'What can I tell you, Stark? He's going to fucking, die. Look at your front.' I did. It was covered in blood. 'He's lost a shitload, and he's sick. If this was a mediCentre, he might stand a chance. It's-, not, and he won't make it to one.'
I sagged, face in my hands. I've lost clients before, and I guess it's similar to a doctor making a bad call, not doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time every bloody time. Someone dies. No matter how much you tell yourself you did all you could, that you made the best decisions you could make at the time, it still feels like shit. It's not your fault, but it is. It is.
I walked back to the centre of the room. Zenda, Shelby and Snedd watched me, and I felt unwelcomely at the centre of attention. This felt bad. This was not just any client. This was not just any job. The suite felt like a dimly-lit stage and my friends looked like actors left adrift on it. There was no audience and no script. As I stood there, watched by the eyes of the people who knew what I was, I realised finally that it was all coming down, that I was going to have to find myself again, and do something about it.
The moment stretched and burst, and I reached out for the coffee pot at the same time as Shelby asked conversationally, 'Are you guys aware that it's like floor-to-ceiling cats out there?'
Everyone turned slightly, moved, and the room was just a room again.
'Yeah,' said Snedd, maybe a little uneasily. 'It's been filling up for the last couple hours. Stark's cat is out there somewhere too.' He paused, and then looked at her. 'Who are you exactly?'
Zenda came and got some coffee too.
'Why this suite?' I asked. She shrugged. I found that I was searching for my lighter, studying my coffee, doing anything except look directly at her. I wondered if she noticed, and if she felt anything. I wished I could tell if it was just me this was happening to.
'We went to Tabby 5,' she said. 'But Spangle leapt out of my arms and ran here. We followed.' She shrugged again, more flamboyantly. I nodded. 'Listen though,' she added seriously. 'Something weird is going on.'
'No shit.'
'Yes, but listen. C came to talk to me about five minutes before Ji called.' Hearing this reminded me that Darv and three other agents were prowling outside the gate. Maybe inside by now.
'And?'
'He looked tired. He looked very tired.'
'What did he want?'
'I'm not sure. That was what was so weird about it. He came into my office, said hello. Asked how I was. After that he didn't really have anything to say, but he stayed. It's as if-' She came to a halt.
'As if what? Tell me.'
'It's as if he wanted to say something to me, but he didn't know what it was. He hung around for a couple of minutes, and then he left. Just before he shut the door he did say something. He said "There's something very strange happening, and I don't know what it is. Tell your friend to be careful."'
Before I could react Ji spoke.
'Stark, Alkland's in trouble.'
I walked quickly over to the sofa and looked down at the Actioneer. His breathing was very irregular, coming in harsh but shallow bursts, and his face reminded me of my grandfather's face in the snow. The next thirty seconds happened as if driven by a metronome. Snedd suddenly cocked his head.
'Stark, I hear sound.'
'Where?'
'Next block.'
'Are we armed?'
'Two guns.'
'Kill the lights.'
Snedd bounded accurately and soundlessly towards the switches and the second before the lights went out froze in my head like a still photo. Ji, straightening up and turning, his eyes still on Alkland's dying face. Shelby, wrapping her coat around her, looking frightened and alone. Zenda crouching down near the window, and Snedd poised over the switches.
I moved towards Zenda and the lights went out.
It was very dark. A little light crept under the door from lamps in the corridor outside, but there were no windows out there. The curtains behind me were drawn, and glowed barely perceptibly from a light down in the street. In the room there were a few soft glints, silhouettes of faces and edges of furniture. That was all.
We listened. Snedd's hearing is supernatural: I knew that from experience. It was several minutes before I heard the faintest wisp of sound. It was coming from several streets away.
'Can they track us?' I asked in a low tone.
'Possible' said Ji. 'Wet pavements. Is the door locked downstairs?'
'No' said Shelby tonelessly. 'Just shut. What are we going to do?'
'Wait.'
'Wait for what?'
There was a noise from behind a door on one side of the suite. The movement of five heads snapping towards it was almost audible.
'What's through there?' I hissed.
'Bathroom.'
'What the hell's that sound?'
It came again, and this time I realised that it was a note. It was a voice singing a note, singing 'la' so quietly you could barely hear it.
The 'la' came again, on the same note, and then again. In the dark I felt the hair on my scalp and neck ripple, felt moisture pricking in my eyes. I couldn't blink. Zenda clutched my arm tightly, so tightly I thought she'd cut me, and her arm was shaking wildly. None of us were breathing.
'La, la la.'
It sounded like the unselfconscious singing of a child, a child who is absorbed in something else and probably isn't even aware they're making a sound.
There was a soft swishing sound, like a mat moving across a tiled floor, and slowly the door to the bathroom began to open. I had to blink to clear my eyes, and I had to breathe, but not yet. I couldn't.
The door swung quietly inwards, opening into a room that was even darker than our own. The pool of darkness inside was still for a moment, and then a glint moved across it. I thought I heard a soft sound from the sofa, a deepening in Alkland's breathing. The glint moved out of the doorway, and the darkness underneath it took shape as it walked into the centre of the suite.
It was a little girl. It was a little girl with a pretty, chubby face and blonde hair that stuck out cutely every which way, hair that a mother would want to cluck over, but which looked beautiful as it was. Under her arm was a battered teddy bear.
'La la la the girl sang quietly, 'la la la.' Alkland's breathing hitched again, and the girl took a wobbly baby stride towards him, grinning as if she'd seen a doggy wagging its tail. She reached out towards Alkland's arm and patted her hand on it, palm open. She waited a moment, and then patted his arm again, a little harder, but still gently, still with love, still like a little girl trying to attract her brother's attention, and then I knew.
Slowly the girl began to cry, soundlessly, and her face stretched as her mouth opened in misery, a misery that couldn't find any sounds. She patted Alkland's arm again desperately, her face turning unseeingly towards us, looking not for us but for a mother that wasn't there, a father who had died years ago. Her breath hitched in time with Alkland's as the pain tried to get out, as the hurt and terrible incomprehension cut up her heart as it had sixty years before. Her brother couldn't help her now either, was damaged as badly as she, still suffering from the same pain and from the guilt of not being able to protect his sister, of seeing the shock settle behind her face so that a smile would never fit there again, of knowing that a hand had pulled her straw hair and bruised her baby's legs. They'd died together that day in the park, that day when someone had taken the little girl's laughter and smashed it against a wall, smashed it until it bled, smashed it until there was nothing left in his filthy hand but silence, a silence that grew between Alkland and Suzanna because of all the things they couldn't say to anyone, because of all the ways they never felt again.
I heard Zenda sobbing into my jacket behind me and blinked my eyes rapidly. I remembered the photo I'd seen, and the feeling, and as the little girl howled with silent horror behind a pane of glass I smelt the pain beneath Alkland's still waters.
You never think it will happen to you, never understand how it could. When a smiling father watches his daughter playing in the garden, laughing and spinning beneath the sky, how can he tell that his little princess will end up insane and jabbering, a flea-ridden bundle of piss-soaked rags in a cardboard box under a bridge? If you looked at all the family albums and saw all the little girls clapping their plump hands together in delight, dressed in their best frocks, happy beneath the sun and watched by mothers who look absurdly young, how could you tell which of them would end up scrabbling at their faces, scratching and gouging as they try to tear off spiders that aren't there?
And if you were that little girl's brother, and you couldn't protect her, and you couldn't heal her, and you couldn't make her smile, could you ever forgive yourself?
Alkland coughed violently, his chest arching up as if punched from within, and suddenly the room was freezing. There was a splitting sound and a line of intense yellow light appeared on the ceiling, a line that streamed from a crack in Alkland's chest.
'Stark!' screamed Shelby, backing sobbing towards the wall.
I stood up, feeling my teeth shifting as they clamped together in fury. I heard a cry from the street outside but it was completely unimportant and I shouted myself, shouted at the growing crack.
'I'm coming.'
I walked stiffly towards the sofa, past the sobbing child, and Alkland's eyes flew open in horror as he saw death reach out, and as he felt the evil which had possessed him for weeks or months drop him to the ground to break, used up and finished. Ji stood up too and threw his gun to Snedd.
The two of us walked together, as we had before, towards the worst of everything, Ji in step beside me for the last time. Alkland's chest burst open and we strode into the light.
A ghost once said, 'I'm not a heaven person.
I'm not a heaven person either.
I killed my best friend. I saw the front of his head burst out, saw his bright green eyes shredded by splintering skull as it threw his brain over the room. There was nothing heroic about it, no big climax, no romantic clash of the titanic forces of good and evil with a cast of thousands. Ji and I tracked him down, hounded him through Jeamland and The City and backed him into a corner in Turn Neighbourhood. Rafe tried to flip back, tried to tear his way back into Jeamland but I held him fast and I was stronger then, much stronger. That was back in the good old days, when I was still me occasionally, when I was still more or less awake.
I pushed him down onto his knees and he didn't plead, didn't ask for mercy. He just stared up at me with chips of green ice as Ji took out his gun and held it against his skull. Then Ji pulled the trigger and spread Rafe's face over three square yards of rotting concrete in a dark room that smelt of shit.