“We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”

“Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”

“Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.

“Are you the only one?” Billy said.

“No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”

Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was…” He shook his head. “Is that his… knack?”

“His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”

Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.

“Whose is all this?” he said.

“In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.

Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope, crocodile-clipped to knickknacks. When he plugged it in there was a thud, waves fluxed on the screen and the air felt dryer.

“Alright,” Dane said. “Bit of security.”

Alarm systems and signal-jammers fucking with the flows of sentience and sensation-magic. Call it “knocking,” Billy told himself. The occult machines left not nothing, not a void that would attract attention like a missing tooth, but projected a shred of presence for remote-sensors, a construct soul. The residue of a pretend person.

When Dane went to the bathroom, Billy did not try to leave. He did not even stand by the door and wonder.

“Why don’t you want this?” Billy said when Dane returned. He raised his hands to indicate everything. “The end, I mean. You say it’s ending. I mean, it’s your kraken doing it…”

“No, it ain’t,” Dane said. “Or not like it’s supposed to.”

It would have made sense to Billy, had Dane hedged and hemmed and hawed, dissembled and evaded. It could not be so uncommon a phenomenon, the last-minute cold feet of the devout. Absolutely I was all signed up for the apocalypse but right now? Like this? It would have made sense, but that was not what this was. Billy knew then and quite certainly that had Dane trusted that this was the horizon of which he had read and catechised since his feisty fervent youth, he would have gone along with it. But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem. It was according to some other plan. Some other schema. Something had hijacked the squid finality. This was and was not the intended end.

“I need to get a message to someone,” Billy said. Dane sighed. “Hey.” Billy was surprised by the speed of his own anger, as he squared up. The big man looked surprised too. “I’m not your pet. You can’t order me around. My best friend died, and his girlfriend needs to know.”

“That’s well and good,” Dane said. He swallowed. His effort to stay calm was alarming. “But there’s one mistake there. You say I can’t order you around. Oh I can. I have to. You do what I tell you or Goss or Subby or the Tattoo or any one of all the others out there looking for you will find you, and then if you’re very lucky you’ll just die. You understand?” He prodded Billy’s chest one, two, three times. “I just exiled myself, Billy. I am not having a good day.”

They stared at each other. “Tomorrow the real shit begins,” Dane said. “Right now, there’s nowhere as much knacking floating around as you’d think. There’s what you could call a power shortage. That gives us opportunities. I don’t just know church people, you know.” He opened his bag. “We might not have to do this totally alone.”

“Let’s make sure,” Billy said carefully. “Just answer me this. I mean… I know you don’t want to get the police in, but… What about just Collingswood? She’s not like the leader of that lot-she’s a constable-but she’s obviously got something. We could call her…” The flat anger of Dane’s face hushed him.

“We ain’t dealing with that lot,” he said. “You think they’ll keep us safe? They won’t mess with us? You think she ain’t going to hand us right over?”

“But…”

“‘But’ fuckity shite, Billy. We stick to who I know.” Dane brought out maps of London felt-tipped with additions, sigils on parkland and routes traced through streets. A speargun, Billy saw to his surprise, like a scuba diver might carry.

“You’ve never shot, right?” Dane said. “Maybe we need to get you something. I didn’t… I didn’t have time to plan this a whole lot, you know? I’m thinking who might help. Who I’ve run with.” He counted off on his fingers, and scribbled names. “My man Jason. Wati. Oh, man, Wati. He’s going to be angry. If we want to get a talisman or anything we need to go to Butler.”

“Are these kraken people?”

“Hell no, the church is out,” Dane said. “That’s closed. We can’t go there. These are people I’ve run with. Wati’s a red, good guy. Butler, it’s all about what he saw: he can get you defences. Jason, Jason Smyle, he’s a good bet.”

“Hey, I know that name,” Billy said. “Did he work at… the museum?” Dane smiled and shook his head. No, thought Billy, the familiarity abruptly gone.

They ate from the bag of junk food Dane had bought. There were two beds, but like campers they dossed down on the living room floor. This was a landscape through which they were passing, a forest glade. They lay without speaking some time.

“How did it feel?” Dane said. “To work on the kraken.”

“… Like smelly rubber,” Billy said at last. Dane looked as if he would thunder disapproval, but then he laughed.

“Oh man,” said Dane. “You’re bad.” He shook his head. His grin was guilty. “Seriously. You telling me there was nothing? You’ve got something.” He clicked his fingers, made that spot of biophosphor, like a deep-sea squid. “You didn’t feel nothing?”

Billy lay back. “No,” he said. “Not then. It was earlier. I was rubbish at what I did, the first few months I was there. I didn’t even know if I’d stick it. But then all of a sudden I got much better. That was when it felt something special. Like I could preserve anything, any way I wanted.”

“What about in the alley?” Dane said. Billy looked at him across the dark room. Dane spoke carefully. “When Goss was coming for you. You did something, then. Did that feel like something?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“If you say so, Billy,” Dane said. “My granddad was a holy man. He used to ask me who my favourite saint was. He said you could tell a lot about someone if you knew that. So I’d say Kraken, because I wanted to be a good boy, and that was the right answer to most… religious questions. And he’d say, No, that’s cheating. Which saint? I couldn’t decide for ages, but suddenly one day I did. I told him.

“Saint Argonaut, I said. Really? he says. He wasn’t angry or nothing, he was just, like, surprised. But I think he liked that. Really? he goes. Not Saint Blue-Ring? Not Saint Humboldt? They’re your fighting saints. He said that because I was big like him and everyone knew I was going to be a soldier. Why Saint Argonaut? he goes. Because of that pretty spiral it makes, I says.”