Chapter Sixty

ON THE CAMPUS OF THE SUBURBAN UNIVERSITY, BILLY AND Dane’s vaguely purposeful scruffiness was camouflage. It had not taken long at an Internet café to check which room was Professor Cole’s. They knew his office hours, too.

While they were online Billy had poked around to find and check Marge’s MySpace. He saw the picture of Leon, the call for help, the number that was not her number, must be some dedicated phone. It shocked him how much it made emotion fill him. He printed more than one copy.

“If this bloke’s such a powerful knacker,” said Billy, “why’s he work at Shitechester Central Poly? And is it not a bit nuts for us to go up against him?”

“Who said we was going up against anyone?” said Dane. “Is that the plan? We’re just looking for information.”

“We might. Like you said, it sounds like this might all be down to him. The fire, the everything. So what can we-”

“Yeah. I know. We might.”

Wati would not come. The strike was dying, and even now his first allegiance had to be to his members.

“We don’t have time to wait. We have to find out whatever there is to find out,” Dane said. “This is the first lead we’ve had. So yeah.” That long stare had come with him out of the basement. “We do what we have to, and we be ready.”

Every one of their moves now might plausibly be the last, but they could not do everything, could not take care of all business. They did their best, just in case there was an aftermath. Dane spoke to rabbi Mo, a quick connection through stolen phones. Simon was curing. They were purging him of all those angry ex-hims. “He’s drained and weak, but he’s getting better,” he said she had said. “Good.” As if it were likely that it would, ultimately, make a difference.

Billy and Dane waited in the corridor, forcing smiles when Cole’s secretary, a middle-aged woman, and the three students waiting glanced at them curiously. Cole must have protections. They had made what desperate plans they could. When at last the student who had been with the professor left the room, they walked to the head of the waiting line. “You don’t mind, do you?” Billy said to the young man in front. “It’s really important.”

“Hey, there’s like a queue?” the boy whined, but that was all he did. Billy wondered passing if he had been so feeble at that age.

They entered, and Cole looked up. “Yes…?” he said. He was a middle-aged man in an ugly suit. He frowned at them. He was cave-pale, and his eyes were shaded ridiculously dark. “Who…?” His stare widened and he stood, grabbing at the clutter on his desk as he came. Billy saw papers, journals, books open. A photo of a young girl in school uniform between Cole and a bonfire.

“Professor,” said Dane, smiling, holding out his hand. Billy closed the door behind them. “We had a question.”

Cole’s face went between expressions. He hesitated and took Dane’s hand in his shaking own. Dane twisted and pulled him down.

“I ain’t going to take him if we go knack to knack,” Dane had said when they prepared. “If he’s what we think. At the very least it sounds like he knows what’s going on, and just in case he is the burner… the only chance we’ve got is to be stupid, and brutal, and fucking base.”

Dane brought Cole’s body down beneath him, expelling the man’s breath and locking him into place. He struck Cole twice with the weapon he pulled from his pocket. The way he held him Cole could make no sound.

“Billy?” Dane said.

“Yeah.” Billy found two places in the doorway where there were drill holes. He gouged with the knife he had brought, uncovering a scrap of flesh and thin chains, a wire figurine. He could see no other magics. “Done,” he said.

“Exit?” Dane said. Billy went fast to the window.

“One floor down, onto grass,” he said. He aimed the phaser at the groaning Cole.

“Professor,” Dane said. “I’m sorry about this, genuinely, but I’ll do it again the second I think you’re knacking. We need you to answer some questions. What do you know about the kraken? It was you wanted to burn it, wasn’t it? Why?”

Billy riffled urgently through the papers on the desk with his non-gun hand. He went to the bookshelves, found the collection of books and papers by Cole himself: A Particle Physics Primer, offcuts, an edited volume on the science of heat. He took the latter and saw, behind it, a second row of works. A slim book, that he grabbed, that was also by Cole, that was called Abnatural Burnings. He took another look at the photograph of Cole and his daughter.

“Come on,” Dane said. Billy shoved the papers into a bag. “Could be this is all nothing,” Dane said. “We got to get you so you can’t do anything, in case it’s not nothing. You’re going to come with us, and if it turns out you’ve got bugger-all to do with it and we owe you an apology, then what can I tell you? We’ll apologise. What did you want with the kraken? Why burn everything?”

There was a noise. Cole was staring up at Billy. Dark smoke was coming out of his scalp. Dane sniffed at the burning.

“Oh piss…” he said. Cole was not looking at him. He was staring at Billy, holding his papers, his picture. “Shit…” The smoke came from Cole’s clothes now. Dane gritted his teeth. “Billy, Billy,” he said. “Go.”

Cole smouldered and Dane swore and scrambled off him, shaking his hot hands, and Cole rose onto all fours and bared his teeth in the smoke that coiled like mad hair around him.

“What have you done with her?” he shouted. Flames came out of his mouth.

Billy shot him. The inventy phaser-beam slammed him into unconsciousness and the smoke dissipated. They stared at him supine, in the sudden quiet.

“We have to move,” Dane said.

“Hang on, you saw him,” Billy said. “He thought we were-” There was a knock on the door behind him.

“Professor?”

“Window,” Billy said to Dane. “We got to go.”

But the door was shoved suddenly and sent Billy staggering. The secretary stood in the threshold, shadow coagulating around her raised hands. Billy fired at her, missed, as she ducked animal fast into the room. He tightened his gut, and time slowed for her, held an instant, and he fired again and sent her spinning.

Dane smashed the window and gripped Billy, cantripped. He pulled them out. His weak little knack slowed their fall by a second, still depositing them on the verge with a breathtaking smack, but without breaking bones. People stared at them from around the irregular quad. Billy and Dane rose and ran raggedly. A few braver and bigger men halfheartedly tried to get in their way, but at the sight of Dane’s face and the phaser Billy waved they got out of the way.

There was a shout. Cole leaned out of the window. He spat in their direction. The stench of burning hair swamped Billy and Dane as they ran, making them gag. They kept running, did not stop, out of the university grounds, back into the city proper and away.

“THAT WENT WELL,” BILLY SAID. DANE SAID NOTHING.

“You saw the picture?” Billy said.

“You still got it?”

“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”

“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”

“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”

In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.

“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.