“Dane, what are you doing, you could be seen, we have to get you out of sight…”

“Take me to the kraken.” Saira twitched and patted the air for him to quiet: most of her colleagues knew nothing. “Now,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, “alright, alright alright. I have to get Fitch. What happened, Dane? I have to-”

“Now. Now. Now. Now.”

OF COURSE BILLY AND WATI, WHO HAD FELT BILLY’S EMERGENCE from that protected Nazi zone and gushed into the doll he carried, had clamoured at Dane in relief and tried to make him rest.

“We have to get Jason too,” Billy said, and Dane nodded.

“We will,” he said. At least the police, cruel as they might be, would not, he thought, kill his friend. Not yet. “He was trying to find me?”

“Yeah.”

“We will. As soon as I’ve-” His words ended.

“Do you want to tell me?” Billy said. “What happened?”

And what kind of bleeding stupid question was that? he asked himself the moment it was out, into the quiet that followed. He said nothing as Dane said nothing and they only walked, and at last Dane said, “The Tattoo was there.”

“You saw him?”

“I couldn’t see nothing. But he was; I heard him. Talking through one of his things. He’s desperate. He’s under attack. Some of his business. From monsterherds. If he doesn’t know Grisamentum’s back he most certainly fucking suspects it by now.” His throat was untouched, but Dane croaked with the memory of damage, from the times it had been cut.

“What did he want to know from you?”

“Where the kraken is. Where you are.”

“Did you-?”

“No.” Dane said it with a kind of wonder. “No.”

“I thought they’d…”

“Yeah,” Dane said. “Yeah they did kill me,” he said. But he had come back. Even if it was by their malevolent interventions, Dane had come back. How many martyrs emerge from martyrdom’s other side?

“He can feel something,” Dane said. “Like we all can.” He closed his eyes, he stretched out his arms. “He knows the angels are walking…”

“I have to tell you about that,” Billy said.

“In a minute. It’s not just about wanting it for power anymore. He knows there’s an end and he knows it’s something to do with the kraken and he’s going insane because he thinks if he can get it maybe he can stop what’s happening. He can’t. He won’t. He’ll turn whatever’s happening into… something. We can stop whatever it is from happening.”

“The Londonmancers don’t seem to have managed that,” Billy said.

“No?” Dane turned to him, looking all new. “Maybe the universe has been waiting for me.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

So when they got to the Londonmancers, Dane said, simply, take me there now.

“WE HAVE TO BE CAREFUL,” SAIRA SAID.

“Now,” said Dane.

“You can’t be seen with us,” she said, and Billy laid his hand on Dane’s arm. Easy. A little rushed preparation. Saira and Fitch went in Fitch’s little car, leaving Dane to steal another to follow. They gave him a knack-fucked satnav, a little handheld unit into which Dane plugged a cloth scrap with one drip of Saira’s blood-she had cut herself right there, in front of him, good faith.

“Why would we try to get away from you?” she pleaded. “We need each other.”

Billy and Dane swept rubbish in their wake. They looked disguised by night, by how unremarkable they were. That fooled Billy not at all, and he kept his phaser up. “It’s only a matter of time before we get found again,” he said. “Where the hell are Goss and Subby?”

No one knew. They’d been and gone. Was that the end of it? No one believed that. But they were out of the city-that was obvious from the way everyone felt a little more oxygenated. We’re looking for something in far-off lands, is what Goss had supposedly said to someone they’d unaccountably left alive.

The satnav blinked at them and pointed them through streets, at Saira’s movement. “Look,” said Billy. “Watch her. Evasive manoeuvres.”

As they approached London’s edges Billy felt risingly strange. “Where is she going?” Wati said. He was clipped to peer from the top of Billy’s pocket.

“The sea couldn’t see it, or hear it,” Billy said. They turned onto the North Circular, the city ringroad, and traced a way out east. “They’re… Look, look.”

There was the car, stationary, and there, pulled over onto the hard shoulder, was a lorry. Large-not one of the really huge articulateds that filled streets like poured-in concrete, but big enough, way larger than most house-movers. There was some forgettable logo on its sides. They pulled in behind it and the rear doors opened minutely. Saira beckoned. She pulled the door to behind them as they hauled into the dark insides. Wati could not enter past repulsive fields. He whispered and went out away to his other front, his union war. The vehicle started again. Striplights came on.

Strapped in place in the trailer’s centre, cushioned and surrounded with thick industrial cording stretched to the edges and corners, holding it so it barely jostled on the steel table, was the tank. And in it, placid in its death-long bath, was the kraken.

THE LORRY VEERED A LITTLE, SENDING A LAP OF LIQUID UP THE tank’s inside. The movement clouded the preserving liquid. There were the knotted arms, the gone eyes. Architeuthis. Billy almost whispered hello.

A couple of other Londonmancers, more of the conclave within the already secretive sect, were there. There were tools. Microscopes, scalpels, computers loaded with biological modelling software and sluggish 3G connections. Centrifuges. Chairs, books, a cabinet of weapons, a microwave, chunks of masonry torn from London walls, bunks built into the truck’s sides.

Nothing moved a moment but the truck and the shreds of skin in Formalin. Of course it travelled, so as not to snag attention. A weight of animal godhead like that couldn’t but become meaning: stay fixed and people would notice. So it was escorted in a circle like an aging king. Its motion hid it, as must the scraps of gris-gris stuff, the offcuts, the accoutrements nailed or placed in the vehicle’s interior.

“Who’s driving?” Billy said. He turned.

Dane was on his knees. He knelt close to the tank. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. His hands were clasped. He was weeping.

EVEN THE LONDONMANCERS, USED TO STRANGE FERVOURS, STEPPED back. Dane murmured. He prayed half audibly. Billy could not hear what it was he said, but he remembered a snip that he had read in the teuthic canon, a phrase: Kraken, with your reaching, feeling the world to understand it, feel and understand me, your meaningless child, now.

The passion ran as long as it would run, and it was a long time. Dane opened weepy eyes. He touched the glass. “Thank you,” he said, again and again, to the tank. He stood at last.

“Thank you,” he said to the room.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” he screamed suddenly. “Why would you do this, why wouldn’t you tell me?” He slumped, and made a face that Billy realised he must have made when he was being tortured to death. “But you took care of, of, of it,” he said. “Of my god.”

DANE SANK AGAIN. POOR TORTURED MAN. HE PRAYED. BILLY PUT ON the long full-arm rubber gloves, like a vet’s, the Londonmancers provided. They-well, their little inner cabal-watched him.

He did not know exactly what he was looking for. He looked at Dane until Dane saw him do so and did not stop him or say anything, and with that permission Billy took off the lid and reached through the cold broth of dead cells and chemicals. He touched the specimen. It was dense, coldly and deadly dense.

We found you, he thought.

“What’s going on?” said Saira.

Billy clenched, but there was no twitch of time now. He pressed into the flesh to feel what he would feel. He ran his hands along it, parted its parts, gently, pressed his fingertips into the suckers that acned the dead animal’s limbs. It could not vacuum him, but the very shape of those pads stuck them for a moment to him, as if it were gripping, all dead as it was. He heard Fitch make some noise like huh. Then Fitch said, “I need… I need to read…”