“You got to let me go back in, Dane,” he said. “You want to get them worried?”

Dane raised his weapon as if he did not know what to do with it, and gritted his teeth.

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered.

“We didn’t know what you wanted to do with it,” Fitch said. “Or we would have said.”

“We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Saira said. “You know how some Muslims get rid of Qur’an pages? They burn them. That’s the holiest method. Whatever’s coming is after burning the whole world down, starting with the squid. And it’s still out there. We thought that might be your plan.”

“You thought I’d end the world?” Dane said.

“Not deliberately,” Fitch said, in a strange reassurance. “By accident. Trying to set your god free.”

Dane stared at them. “I ain’t going to burn shit,” he said levelly. “Take me to it.”

And we can tell you what we know, Billy thought. That Grisamentum’s still alive.

“There’s things need preparing,” Fitch said. “Protections. Dane, we can work together. We can be in this together.” He was eager now. How long had he been bending under this?

“We ain’t short of offers,” Dane said. “Everyone wants to work with us.”

“There’s things we need to know,” Saira said. “There’s got to be something about this kraken. That’s why we need you,” she said to Billy. “You’re the squid man. This is perfect. If we can work out what it is about this one, maybe we can stop it.”

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered. He heard the grind of glass. “I think I do, Dane.”

THAT WAS HOW THE TWO OF THEM ENDED ALONE IN THE YARD, while the Londonmancers returned inside, to mum normality for a few more hours.

“What if they…?” Dane said as they waited.

Billy said, “What? Run? They can’t disappear their whole operation. Tell someone? The last thing they want is anyone to know what they did.”

“What if they…?”

“They need me,” Billy said.

They wedged the door closed so frustrated smokers would find another place to go. “Wait,” Saira had told them. “When we’re done here, we’ll go.” They sky went dark over hours.

“Soon,” said Dane. What impeccable timing, what a perfect jinx: as he said that, there was the glass noise, in Billy’s head. Knowledge came with it. He stood.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

“What?” Dane stood. “Who?”

“I don’t know.” Billy held his temples. What the fuck? “Jesus.” His headache was talking to him. “I just know they’re coming. I don’t think they know where we are. Not exactly. But they’re close and they aren’t friends.”

Dane looked around the yard. Grind grind. “They’re getting closer,” Billy said.

“They can’t find us here,” Dane said. “They can’t know the Londonmancers are in on this. We can’t lead them to God.” He grabbed a metal shard and ground into the wall the words BACK ASAP. Written in scratches among scratches.

“Up,” he said. Made his hands a sling and pushed Billy back onto the roof. They scuttled under the arriving night, back down drainpipes and corporate fire escapes, to the main streets of the city, close to deserted now. This was the worst for them, being almost the only people in a street. Every lamplight was like a spotlight. Billy could hardly think through the noise of glass.

“You hear a noise?” Dane said. “Like glass?”

No one else was supposed to hear it! There was no time. There was another sound now. Running feet. CCTV cameras spun, twinkled their lights, looked every which way. From around a corner came men.

Billy stared. They wore a raggedy new romance of costumes. He saw punk stylings, top hats, pantaloons and tube tops, powdered wigs. Their faces were quite ferocious. Billy raised his phaser.

As they came the attackers’ bad knacks waxed, and the streetlamps they passed glowed too bright, changed colour, snapped one by one into blacklight, so the men’s white cuff-frills and reflective cat’s-eye flourishes glowed. Billy could see stitched on their clothes many-armed tags, some kind of profligate mutant swastikas. The men hissed like moon monkeys.

Dane and Billy shot. There were so many flamboyant figures. Billy shot again. He waited for them to shoot back, but they held whips, blades. Darkness encroached, overtook the attackers and hid them. There were no lights in any window, no glimmer from any office. There was only one last orange streetlight still burning, a lighthouse now, at which Billy stared as the men came.

Dane went back to back with him. “They want us alive,” Dane whispered.

“Alive yes for discussion,” someone said. “Someone wants to pick your brains.” There were laughs at that. “Alive, but limbs and eyes are optional. Come on now and you can keep them.”

“There’s always the workshop,” someone else said.

“There is the workshop,” the first voice said. Obscured by the unnatural dark. Billy fired at random, but the shot illuminated only itself. “He does love his workshop. What will you be?”

“Be ready,” Dane whispered.

“For what?” the voice said. A whip kinked out of the shade and wrapped around Billy’s leg, sticking where it touched like a gecko foot, yanking him off his feet and out of the circle of last light. Down on the tarmac Billy opened his mouth to shout, but there was that glass grinding, much louder than he had ever heard it before. His head was full of communicative pain. Something came. It whirled.

Bone arms windmilling. There was a clack of teeth, vivid empty eyes. Finger bones punctured meat like fangs. The thing arrived with incomprehensible motion, too fast. It punch-punched stiff-fingered, leaving blood, ripping the throats of two, three, five of the attackers, so they screamed and fell pissing blood.

Billy kicked off the whip. He crawled back. The interceder rocked at the edge of the light.

It was a skull on the top of a giant jar. A huge glass preserving bottle, of the type that Billy had for years been filling with preservative and animal dead. This one was nearly five feet high, full of flesh slough and clouding alcohol. On its glass lid was a shabby human skull liberated, Billy absolutely knew, from one of the cupboards of remains in the Natural History Museum. It snapped its teeth. Where the rim met the lid the flaring glass served as shoulders, and the thing raised two fleshless taloned arms taken from bone boxes, humerus, ulna radius, clacking carpals and those sharpened phalanges.

The angel of memory.

The jar-angel rolled on its round base, oscillate-rocking forward. It punched again and killed again, and with a tiny incline of the skull-head opened its lid. A dandy man froze. He was motionless, then not there at all, and Billy saw more meat shreds in the jar. The bounty hunters scattered. There was a flat sound. Dane was down and motionless. Billy was too far, and the lasso or whatever it was that had Dane by the neck went taut, and Dane was dragged into the dwindling shadow the swastika-wearing men had brought with them.

Billy fired twice, but he could see nothing of them, and Dane was barely visible anymore. Billy grabbed Dane’s gun. “Here!” he shouted to his glass rescuer, and he heard it wobble and roll toward him. The attackers hurled half-bricks and iron as they retreated.

A lucky heavy piece took the cylinder full on. The jar-angel smashed. The guard of the museum’s memory burst. Its bones went dead among the chemical slick and glass shards.

Billy raised his phaser in one hand, gun in the other. But the attackers did not come back. He ran in the direction Dane had been dragged, but the darkness retreated quicker than he moved, and when it was gone he was alone. The corpses were still there, the glass scintillas, the skull of what had saved him. Dane was gone.

As always when a quiet holed the city, a dog barked to fill it. Billy walked through the ruined remains of his rescuer, left preservative footprints. He sat heavily and held his head by the dead, in the doorway of a sandwich bar.