The Rhesus Chart (45 page)

It’s a naked lunch moment. The instant when you freeze and see for the first time what’s on the end of your fork. Or in my case, Mo’s tuning fork.

“I should destroy that thing.”

She looks at me with pity and cynicism. “They won’t let you. The organization needs it. It’s all I can do to keep squashing the proposals to make more of them.”

“Yes, but if I don’t it’s going to try and kill me again.” I know it’s true the moment the words leave my mouth. It’ll wait. It’s patient. But she has to practice, daily, in an elaborately warded anechoic chamber. And she carries it everywhere, takes it to bed. I don’t think she’s a natural sleepwalker, but I wouldn’t put it past the violin to make her: sometimes she mumbles and cries out in her sleep.

“I can’t let go of it.” She bites her lower lip. “If I let go of it—return it to Supplies, convince them I can’t carry it anymore—they’ll just give it to someone else. Someone inexperienced. It was inactive for years before they gave it to me. Starving and in hibernation. It’s awake now. And the stars are right.”

The picture she’s painting doesn’t bear thinking about. I feel like I’m being backed into a corner by the inexorable logic of the situation. My skin feels clammy and my heart is pounding. “What are we going to do? It wants me dead.”

“If I let go of it a lot of other people will die, Bob. I’m the only thing holding it back. Do you want that? Do you really want to take responsibility for letting it off the leash with an inexperienced handler?”

Our eyes meet. Ten years of love, pity, and regrets are all wrapped up in a single moment: I take a deep breath and say the words that I’ve somehow known were coming for the past few weeks, ever since our sushi date with destiny.

“I’m going to have to move out.”

*
During the big Mexico City earthquake in the 1980s, a twelve-story concrete office building collapsed on the Strowger unit in its basement: the damn thing kept working under the rubble for nearly two weeks, until its lead-acid batteries ran down.

*
Obtaining a supply of cannulae and sample tubes was easy enough: there’s a small chemist’s in Stratford where the pharmacist is convinced that the supplies she’s ordering for the phlebotomist at the local clinic are entirely legit. Teaching the pigs to use them properly was the hard part. Alex still feels faint at the sight of blood, although he’s getting better; but it took actual threats of bodily violence—accompanied by a brisk lecture on hitherto unconsidered aspects of forensic dentistry—to convince Dick not to use his teeth.

*
UCLH is a rare surviving example of old-time NHS architecture. It was founded in 1859, and extended continuously with total contempt for architectural consistency. The result is, to coin a neologism, Gormenghastly: a nineteenth-century workhouse with WWII-era Nissen huts tucked into corners at the bottom of Victorian gothic stairwells, 1960s Brutalist extensions clamped to the roof, and twenty-first-century high-tech side-bays shoe-horned into a First World War–era ward for Shell Shock patients. The porters drive electric buggies and there are signs inside the larger labs to keep the staff who work there from getting lost; they send out search parties for stranded patients on a daily basis.

*
OCCULUS is short for Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations—the occult equivalent of a Nuclear Emergency Search Team. They’re staffed by folks from 21/SAS or, these days, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Scary fuckers who you do not mess with, in other words.

*
Don’t ask me how we crammed a hundred-meter-long underground firing range into the sixty-meter-long basement of the New Annex; it probably has something to do with ley lines and spatiotemporal distortion.

*
The noises you can hear in the distance are all my vegan friends giggling with shocked schadenfreude.

*
His cover story: they’re part of the viral marketing campaign promoting a not-yet-announced low budget horror movie.

*
Scratch that last: it’s actually all because of BLUE HADES and DEEP SEVEN, which is arguably
our
fault. But that’s another story.

*
The proposal to flood-fill the building with dark fiber and light it up on demand would be great if it didn’t run headfirst up against the equally high-priority proposal to make the entire place an airtight Faraday-caged box with optical, as well as e/m spectrum, emission control . . .