“Boss,” said Collingswood. “Give them a second.”

“What makes everything stop?” Saira said. “Fire, the squid, the…”

Billy stared, and thought, and remembered. Things he had heard and seen, moments, from weeks and weeks before.

“You end to start again,” he said. “From the beginning. So you burn backward. This isn’t an end… This is a rebooting.”

“Get out,” Baron said. “Shift, Harrow.”

“How?” said Saira to Billy.

“Burn out whatever set us in the wrong direction. If you want to run a different program. Oh my God, this was never about the poor squid… it was a bystander. We started this. You did. Fitch kept saying it got closer, the harder you lot tried to protect it. You brought it to attention.” There was a straining sound. Everyone looked up. That was the sky stretching, ready to break into flames.

“How far to the Darwin Centre?” Billy said. “How far to the museum?”

“Four, five miles,” Collingswood said.

“Get out,” Baron, uselessly, said.

“It’s too far… Baron, can you send a message to… You need to get someone…”

“Shut up or I will pepper-spray you,” Baron said. “I’m sick of this.”

“Boss, shut up,” Collingswood said. She shook her head. Pointed, and Baron blinked in outrage, suddenly unable to speak. “What you saying, Harrow?”

Something new had walked when the Londonmancers had learnt of Grisamentum’s plan, when Al Adler had indulged the traditions and respect his boss had taught him and gone for a supposedly useless reading. The new thing had grown stronger into itself when the kraken was taken and the alternatives narrowed. But it was after that that the memory angels had gone for it, that its sentience, its meta-selfhood, had become great enough.

“Why’s the angel of memory not here?” Billy said. “It’s supposed to be my guardian angel, right? It wants to protect me, right, and to beat this bloody prophecy, right? So why isn’t it here? What’s it got to do that’s more important?”

Billy knew exactly where he had been when that last phase had begun, and what he had been showing to whom. He knew what was the concatenate development that had made the sea, that soup of life, what it was, and why it had sensed it was under threat. He knew what was happening, and why, and at whose hand, and he could not get anyone else where they needed to be, and he could not explain fast enough.

He needed to be at the Darwin Centre, now. “Oh, God,” he breathed, and slumped, then stood up straight. The anglerfish had stopped moving. Billy silently said good-bye to everything.

“Simon,” he said. “Simon,” he ordered. “You know the bearings of the Darwin Centre. The heart of it. Get me there, now. Now.”

Simon hesitated. Baron strained and failed to speak. “But you know what that means. That’s how I…”

“Put. Me. There.” Simon would not disobey that voice. Billy tried quickly to catch everyone’s eye. Saira half understanding, stricken. Simon, miserable at committing murder again. Baron actually shouting, quite unheard. Collingswood nodded at him, like a soldier saying good-bye.

There was the shimmered static sound, a muffled cry as Billy made a noise, the last thing he would ever do, as light enveloped him from the inside, faded out and he was gone, and Baron was tugging at nothing.

Chapter Eighty

AND THE SMELL OF THE SEA (SEEMED TO) EBB, SUDDENLY replaced with chemical. Light shimmied in front of Billy’s eyes, different from how it had (not) been in his eyes a moment before. He knew he remembered nothing, that these were rather images he was born with. But he would not think about that now.

He was inside of the tank room, in the Darwin Centre. Across from him, beyond two rows of steel tanks, was Vardy. Who turned.

Billy had time to see that the work surface in front of Vardy was littered with vials, tubes and beakers, liquids bubbling, electric cells. He had time to see that Vardy was aiming a pistol at him, and he dropped. The bullet went above him, bursting a thigh-high bottle of long-preserved monkeys. They slumped as reeking preservative sprayed. Billy strained against the handcuffs that still (so to speak) constrained him. He stayed below the level of the steel and crawled. Another shot. Glass and Formalin littered the floor ahead of him, and an eviscerated dolphin baby flopped in his path.

“Billy,” said Vardy, his voice grim, terse, as ever, just the same. It could be a statement, a greeting, a curse. When Billy tried to creep closer another bullet ruined another specimen. “I’ll kill you,” said Vardy. “The angel of memory couldn’t stop me, you’re certainly not going to.”

There was a jabbering, a tiny high-pitched mouthing-off. Through cracks between furniture, Billy saw on the side a tiny raging figure. It was the mnemophylax-a bottle-of-Formalin body, bone arms and claws, a skull head, snapping like a guard dog. It was under a bell jar. Vardy had not even bothered to kill it. It had come and gone so many times, had emerged and been dissipated so often, it was tiny. A finger-sized glass tube that might have been used to contain one insect, and its limbs must have been, what, mouse legs? The skull that topped it was from some pygmy marmoset or something. It was a joke, a little animate failure like a cartoon.

“What did you do with the pyro?” Billy called.

Vardy said. “Cole’s right as rain. Did exactly as I asked-wouldn’t you, if you had it patiently explained that your daughter was in my protective custody?”

“So you got what you needed. Time-fire.”

“Between the two of them, I did.” Vardy fired again and ruined an eighty-year-old dwarf crocodile. “Been trying versions out and I think we’re good. Stay where you are, Billy, I can hear every move you make.”

“Kata…”

“Katachronophlogiston. Shut up, Billy. It’ll be finished soon.”

Billy huddled. It was him who had given Vardy the idea. The prophecy had given rise to itself. It had snared him and Dane and his friends because they had paid it attention like it was a disease, a pathological machine. He cursed it without sound. That was what the angel of memory had been fighting, that certitude, struggling for the fact of itself. So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated. There was a clink as the phylax jumped up and down and banged its tiny skull head on the underside of the jar that jailed it.

The noise of porting came again. The shadows and reflections shifted. The Architeuthis in its tank had returned to the place from where it had been stolen. Billy stared at it. Again, the eyeless thing seemed to try to look at him. It wriggled its coiling zombie arms. What the fuck? Billy thought.

“You brought it to life?” Vardy said. “Whatever for?”

“Vardy, please don’t,” Billy said. “This won’t work, this’ll never work. It’s over, Vardy, and your old god lost.”

“It may not,” Vardy said. There was the noise of combustion from his workstation. “Work. It may not. But it may. You’re right-he did lose, my god, and I cannot forgive the cowardly bastard for that. Nothing bloody ventured, say I.”

“You really think they’re that powerful? That symbolic?” Billy crept on.

“It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps by now you know. It’s all a matter of making an argument. That’s why I wasn’t too bothered by Griz. Is that where you’ve been, with him? With a category error like that in his plan…” He shook his head. Billy wondered how long ago Vardy had insighted what Grisamentum had in mind, and how. “Now, these things were the start of it. They’re where the argument started.”

Billy crept close to the real targets of the time-fire, the real subject of the predatory prophecy. Not and never the squid, which had only ever been a bystander, caught up by proximity. Those other occupants of the room, in their nondescript cabinet, like any other specimen, exemplary and paradigmatic. The preserved little animals of Darwin’s Beagle voyage.