You couldn’t trust it. It wasn’t one thing, for a start-though it also was-and it didn’t have one agenda. A gestalt metropole entity, with regions like Hoxton and Queen’s Park cosying up to the worst power, Walthamstow more combatively independent, Holborn vague and sieve-leaky, all of them bickering components of a totality, a London something, seen.

“No one’ll give us a straight answer about what’s coming,” Billy said.

“Well it’s hard to see,” said Fitch. “Except for it’s bloody… Just the thing of it. I can see something.” Billy and Dane looked at each other. “Alright then. You want a reading. You want to know what’s going on? Saira, Marcus. Let’s take Dane and Billy to see what we can see.”

OUTSIDE THE WIND WHIPPED AT THEM. “YOU KNOW WE’RE HUNTED?” Billy whispered to Saira.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think we got that.” She smoked with the offhand elegance that reminded him of the girls he had been unable to get with at school.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“I was thinking about a friend of mine, and his girlfriend.” It was true. “I can’t even…” Billy looked down. “He died, it was that that got me here, and I can’t help, I’m thinking about her, about what she’s…” It was the truth. “I wish I could tell her, she doesn’t even know he died.”

“You miss him.”

“God yes.”

Marcus lugged a heavy bag. “I know you’d rather be indoors, Dane,” Saira said, “but you know how this works.”

Dane watched the skies and the buildings. He kept his hand in his bag on his weapon. They went between glass fronts and banks, beside sandwich shops, into the deeps of the City of London. They kept off the main places full of pedestrians, suited workers.

Saira was looking at Billy sideways. He was not really watching where they were going. He was not keeping his eyes open, as he knew he should. He was just at that moment, in that second, all wrapped up in the misery of it, of what had happened. He followed the sound of his companions’ footsteps.

“Fitch,” Saira said. She spoke to him quietly.

Dane listened. “We ain’t got time,” he said.

They emerged into a more main road, by a red postbox. Billy was watching now, bewildered, as Fitch put his hands on it, at belly-height, as if feeling for an unborn child. He strained. He looked to Billy as if he was having a shit.

“Quick,” he said to Billy. “It won’t last forever.”

“I don’t…”

“You want to say something to your friend’s friend,” Saira said to him quietly.

“What?”

“Look at what you’re carrying. Talk to her.”

What is this bollocks? Billy thought. Saira’s face was carefully neutral, but the kindness angered him. Not her fault, he knew that. I’m not going through this charade, he thought.

“It’ll make you feel better,” she said. “This isn’t Hoxton. You’re alright to do this here.”

London as therapy, was it? It was everything else, why not that too? Why was Dane not racing them on? Billy was exasperated, and turned, but there was Dane, merely waiting. In the open, exposed, rushed for time, waiting for Billy to do this, like he thought it was a good idea.

It’s not like I’m going to cry, Billy thought, but that thought was a bad idea, and he had to turn away. Toward the postbox. He walked toward it.

A pretty drab metaphor, such obvious correspondences; here he was about to pass on a message through the city’s traditional conduits. He felt absurd and resentful, but he still could not look at those waiting for him, and he could still think only of Leon, and, some mediated guilt, of Marge. There were passersby, but no one watched. He stared into the darkness of the postbox’s slot.

Billy leaned in. He put his mouth to it. London as therapy. He whispered into the box: “Leon…” He swallowed. “Marge, I’m sorry. Leon’s dead. Someone killed him. I’m doing what I can to… He’s dead. I’m sorry, Marge. You stay out of this, alright? I’m doing what I can. Look after yourself.”

Why were they making him do this? For whose benefit was this? He pressed his forehead to the metal and thought he would cry, but he was whispering his message again, and remembering the scene that he could hardly remember, the confrontation between Leon and Goss, and Leon’s disappearance. And he did not feel like crying anymore. He did, in fact, feel like he had dropped something into the hole.

“Feel better?” said Dane when he stepped away. “You look better.”

Billy said nothing. Saira said nothing, but there was something in how she did not look at him.

“HERE,” FITCH SAID. THEY WERE IN A CUL-DE-SAC CLOTTED WITH refuse. Behind a wooden hoarding, cranes swung like prehistoric things. There was a pounding and whine of industrial machinery, the shouts of crews. “No one’ll hear.”

Fitch opened his bag. He took out overalls, goggles, a mouth-mask, a crowbar and a well-used angle grinder. A strange, strange image in one so frail. Dane had told Billy, “Marcus has got something to do with the immunes, Saira’s a plastician, but Fitch is boss even though he’s past it because he’s the haruspex.” And seeing Billy’s face, he had added, “He reads entrails.”

Fitch was an old man in protective gear. He started the cutter. With a groan of metal and cement, he drew a line across the pavement. Behind the blade welled up blood.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy, jumping back.

Fitch drew the cutter again along the split. A spray of concrete dust and blood mist dirtied him. He put the angle grinder down, dripping. Put a crowbar in the red-wet crack and levered harder than it looked like he could. The paving stone parted.

Guts oozed from the hole. Intestinal coils, purple and bloodied, boiled up wetly in a meat mass.

Billy had thought the entrails of the city would be its torn-up under-earth, roots, the pipes he was not supposed to see. He had thought Fitch would bring up a corner of wires, worms and plumbing to interpret. The literalism of this knack shocked him.

Fitch murmured. He poked the mess with his fingers, gentle as a pianist, moving the fibred tubes subtly, investigating the angles between the loops of London’s viscera, looking up as if they mirrored something in the sky. “Look look,” he said. “Look look look. Do you see? Do you see what we’ve been saying? It’s always the same, now.” He sketched shapes in the innards pile. “Look.” The offal moved. “Everything closing down. Something coming up. The kraken.” Billy and Dane stared. Was that new? The kraken? “And look. Fire.

“Always fire. The kraken and all the jars. Then flames.” The guts were greying. They were oozing into each other, their substance merging.

“Fitch, we need details,” Dane said. “We need to know exactly what it is you’re all seeing…” But there was no containing, corralling, shepherding Fitch’s flow.

“Fire taking it all,” he said, “and the kraken’s moving, and the fire taking everything, the glass catches on fire until it goes up in a cloud of sand. And everything’s going now.” The pooled guts were oozing into a slag pile, becoming cement. “Everything’s going. Not just what’s there. It’s burning undone. The world’s going with it, the sky, and the water, and the city. London’s going. And it’s going, and now it’s always been gone. Everything.”

“That is not how it’s supposed to go,” Dane whispered. Not his longed-for teuthic end.

“Everything,” Fitch said. “Is gone. Forever. And since forever. In fire.”

His finger came to a stop, on what was now a bubbled-up, setting mound of concrete. He looked up. Billy’s heart had accelerated with the pitch of the old man’s speech.

“Everything’s ending,” Fitch said. “And all the other maybes that should be there to fight it out are drying up, one by one.” He closed his eyes. “The kraken burns and the jars and tanks burn and then everything burns, and then there’s nothing ever again.”