“Bertrand!” Goss said, and gave him a friendly wave. Subby stared. “You got me so excited, I had another question for you!”

Anders backed away. He felt for his mobile phone. “You call us if you hear anything else from them, right?” Baron had said, and given him a card, the location of which he was trying to remember. Anders bumped into the wall. Goss leaned on the counter.

“So anyway,” Goss said. “There we are, Subby and me and, oh, you know, all of us. You know. ’Course you know, you of all bleeding mathematicians, eh? So the question is, what’s the skinny?” He smiled. He breathed out cigarette smoke he had never breathed in.

“I don’t understand,” Anders said. In his pocket, he thumbed for the 9 button.

“No, of course,” Goss said. Subby walked under the flap in the counter and stood next to Anders. Touched his arm. Tugged his sleeve. Anders failed to dial. Tried again.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Goss said. He pronounced it mo-wah. “I could not agree more. It’s all a bit much at the jockey club, which is why we had to put that doping little saddler bang to rights. Imagine my surprise when I heard my name. Eh? All for the best.” He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

Anders felt as if cold water filled his belly. “Wait.”

“Did you was be chatting up my gob handle? Would I be right in that? Now all manner of whatnots are asking after me!” Goss laughed. “It’s all a bit of a pony. Say my name, say my name! You said my name.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t even know your name…”

Anders brought his thumb down, but there was a rush of air, a fast and cut-off bang. Anders saw no motion. All he knew was that Goss was on one side of the counter, Anders pressed the button on his phone, there was noise, the hatch was still sailing slowly through the air in a trail of splinters, and Goss was on the other side of the counter, in front of him, up close to him, holding his wrist and squeezing it so that Anders let go of his phone and gasped.

The hatch hit the floor. Goss made a chat-chat motion with his free hand. “You talky little fellow,” he said. “You and Subby, never a bloody word in!”

Anders could smell Goss’s hair. Could see the veins below the skin of his face. Goss pulled his face up close. His breath smelt of nothing at all. It was like air wafted by a paper fan. Until another breath and smoke came. Anders began to whimper.

“I read them books,” Goss said. Inclined his head toward the origami shelves. “I read them to Subby. He was enthralled. En. Fucking. Thralled. Never you Very Hungry Caterpillar me, with this one it was all ‘Oh, now tell me how to make a carp! Now how do I make a horsey?’ I’m ever so good at that one now. Let me show you.”

“I never told anyone,” Anders said. “I don’t know who you are…”

“Shall we make an apple tree?” Goss said. “Shall we make a tortoise? Fold and fold and fold.” He began to fold. Anders began to scream. “I’m not as good at it as you!” Goss laughed.

Goss folded, with wet-flesh sounds, and cracks. Eventually Anders stopped screaming, but Goss continued to fold.

“I don’t know, Subby,” he said, at last. He wiped his hands on Anders’s coat. He squinted at his handiwork. “I need more practice, Subby,” he said. “It isn’t quite as much like a lotus as I’d have liked.”

Chapter Twenty-One

BILLY WOKE AS IF RISING OUT OF WATER. HE GASPED. HE PUT HIS head in his trembling hands. In that deep dream, what he had seen was this.

He had been a point of awareness, a soul-spot, a sentient submerged node, and had drifted over an ocean floor that he had seen in monochrome, lightless as it would have been, and that had pitched suddenly into a crevasse, a Mariana Trench of water like clotted shadow. His little selfless self had drifted. And after an inconceivably long time of that drifting, again he had seen a thing below him, rising. A flattening of the dark, coming up out of dark. Beggaring perspective. Dream-Billy knew what it would be, and was afraid of its arms, its many limbs and endless body. But when it came into water faintly lit enough that he could see its contours, it was a landscape he recognised, because it was him. A Billy Harrow face, Atlantean, eyes open and staring into the sky all the way above. The huge him was long lifeless. Pickled. Skin scabbed, church-sized eyes cataracted by preservation, vast clammy lips peeled back from teeth too big to imagine. A conserved Billy-corpse thrown up by some submerged cataclysm.

Billy shivered on his bed. He had no idea if it was the start of a day outside, or if whatever schedule he was given came according to the church’s clockless grooves. He wanted suddenly and very much to tell Marge that Leon was dead. He had not thought of her, until then, and he was ashamed. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath at the thought of Leon. Billy tried to flex whatever inner thing it was that he had touched when Goss had come for him, when the glass had broken and hesitated.

On his tray was a glass of murky drink. The inky posset. No one would spike him secretly anymore-the choice was his. The offer was there, the hope, though he was dreaming without the ink’s help. Billy was a hostage-prophet, augur-inmate. He was being played as a piece in a variant game of apocalypse.

You were supposed to run the numbers. Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes. That variation, the disagreements, indispensable to the calculation. Triangulating possibilities. No one knew what to do now prognosticators all agreed. Billy gripped the frame of the bed. He stared at the ink-intoxicant.

There was a knock and Dane entered. He leaned against the wall. He wore a coat and carried a bag. For a long time, neither man spoke. They just looked at each other.

“I’m not your prophet, Dane,” Billy said. “Thanks for saving my life. I never said that yet. I’m sorry about that. But this is… You have to let me go.” Still sought, yes, but. “You can help me.”

Dane closed his eyes. “I was born in the church,” he said. “My mum and dad met through it. It was my granddad, my dad’s dad, who was the one really into it. It was him taught me. He used to do catechism with me. But I mean, that’s bollocks, ain’t it? It’s not about reciting like a parrot. It’s about understanding. He used to talk me through it.”

He opened his eyes and took equipment out of his bag, checked it, put it back. A spearhead emerged from the muzzle of what looked like a pistol. “Most of my friends… Well you know what it’s like with church and kids. They don’t stick with it, do they? Me, though… I had a calling. You know what the Teuthex said.” Dane examined his kit. “We can protect you. You’re being hunted by Goss and fucking Subby. Everyone wants what’s in your head, Billy. I know, I know, don’t tell me, there’s nothing in your head. Whatever.”

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

“My job. I done such things for the church. You can’t ask me all the things I done for the church, ’cause I won’t tell you. All the faiths got their…” There was a pause during which even the empty hallways seemed to wait.

“Crusaders,” Billy said.

Dane shrugged. “I was going to say oddjobsmen. Go-to guys.” The hashish-eaters; the Hospitallers; Francis X. Killy. Sanctioned wet-workers of the devout. “Everyone’s got apocalypse brigades, Billy, for when it all goes down. Waiting like kings under hills. They couldn’t exactly go undercover.” He laughed. “They couldn’t exactly get a job at the Darwin Centre.”

Dane lifted his shirt. His skin was studded with keloid marks. He pointed and one by one named them like little pets. “Clockworkers,” he said. “Saviour Sect. Mary Martyrs. This one…” A long and snaky path. “That’s not from a godfight, that one, just a straight-on face-off with a crook. He was stealing from us.”