Petrovitch did more. He waited for her to pull ahead, then picked his way to the first visible window. As he approached, he became more and more relieved: the carriage was empty. It was nothing more than a ghost train. He put his head inside to check. No bodies, no blood. No repeat of the lifts inside the Oshicora Tower.

He caught her up and they walked side by side, past the end of the platform and into the long sloping cut that led into the tunnel’s entrance.

“There was no one there,” he said quietly.

“Thanks.”

“That’s okay.” He listened to the sharp, high chatter of a machine pistol as it echoed off the enclosing buildings. “Of course, I could be lying.”

“I know, but then I’d thank you for lying to me.” She looked down at him and picked a glittering bead of glass from between his collar and his neck. It embedded itself in her finger and drew out a bright drop of blood. She flicked both the glass and blood away, then stiffened. “There’s something else coming.”

Petrovitch cocked his head. The violence of the train wreck had left him with ringing ears, and he couldn’t hear anything.

She grabbed his hand and ran up the tracks. Hidden behind the buildings to their right was an Underground line that briefly appeared from the depths before plunging into the shared tunnel ahead. Before disappearing out of sight, there was a section in the open air where the two systems ran parallel to each other.

Petrovitch felt a drawn-out vibration deep in his bones. He pulled back, but she was irresistible. She wanted to see all the horrors invented for this day. A tube train hurtled into view around the corner of the building, shaking and rolling, sharp flashes of blue light bursting from underneath its wheels. It ran away from them, up the narrow-gauge track, its grafittied livery bright against the drab veil of dust it pushed through.

The rear door of the last carriage was open, forced by those inside, and there was a figure braced in the frame, feet and hands clawing at the sharp metal edges before being propelled out onto the rail bed.

A spin of skirt and a flap of jacket: she landed across the electrified third rail and jerked and bounced. But just because she was dead didn’t stop her moving.

Her place at the door was taken by another as the rear of the tube train rattled away into the tunnel. Its lights faded and sank as the darkness took it.

They walked slowly forward. The woman’s body was starting to smoke, little tendrils of steam that the wind caught and blew ragged.

“You know,” said Petrovitch, “When I find the New Machine Jihad, I’m going to have to think of a way to make them pay for this pizdets.”

The corner of Madeleine’s eye twitched involuntarily. “I thought you said they were in charge.”

“They’re no more in charge of the Metrozone than they are of the weather.” He was level with the contorted body on the tracks, and he resisted the urge to pull it clear. The clothing was on fire, and yet again there was nothing he could do. He hated feeling powerless, especially with the smell of cooking flesh in his nose. “Fucking amateurs.”

The tracks crossed a canal: the surface of the water was black and bubbling, thick like mud, and interrupted by shapes that could have been the rotting corpses of barges. It looked to be the last place to head for, but the only danger was organic decay: no automated systems to go wrong down there.

Madeleine climbed over the bridge parapet and skittered down the rough concrete support until she landed on the rubbish-strewn tow path. She crouched and looked both ways. She beckoned him on.

The footing was uncertain, slippery after the rain, the moss acting both as a sponge and a lubricant. He was covered in wet, greasy stains as well as mud and dust by the time he joined her.

“Tell me this is strictly necessary,” he said.

“No one comes down here. Or at least, they never did.”

“I can’t guess why.” It smelled of the deep wood in autumn, of earthy sulphurous decomposition.

“Don’t fall in. You’d be poisoned before you drowned,” she said, and tried to take the land-most side of the path.

It seemed, however, that for the past two decades the canal had been treated as nothing more than a tip for everything from everyday refuse to old furniture and appliances, not to mention the obligatory shopping trolleys. In places, the tow path was buried underneath drifts of filth that jutted out like headlands into the stagnant water.

They had little choice over the route they took, slipping and sliding on the inconstant ground, determined not to use their hands for fear of being cut by something unclean. Instead, they held each other’s hands—one bracing themselves and the other moving, leapfrogging across the ad-hoc tip until they reached a place behind an ancient, rusting industrial building that was all rusting pipes and leaking tanks.

“Climb up here,” said Madeleine, and made a stirrup of her hands.

Petrovitch slapped his hands against the wall he had to get over and tried to scrape off some of the mess that had stuck to the sole of his boot.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said.

“Yeah, well. I’m told it’s the thought that counts.” He put his foot in her hands; he was so light and she so strong that he was hoisted almost level with the top of the wall. He overbalanced, and started to fall.

There was only one way to go: forward, because back toward the canal would have been unthinkable. His hands waved ineffectually at the brickwork, scraping his knuckles raw, and he fell on the other side in a heap of dead and dying weeds.

He wasn’t alone. His glasses had been knocked awry by the impact, and it was as he straightened them that he saw three pairs of feet. On looking up, there were three guns.

One of the men—a skinny white kid much like himself, but with a milky eye—jerked the barrel of his gun up.

Petrovitch made certain they could see his hands, raising them with nothing but grime and blood on his pink palms. Then he shouted in one breath, “Runmaddyrun,” before a metal-filled fist crashed into the side of his head.

26

It wasn’t the first time he’d come round to find himself being dragged through the streets like a piece of meat. All the other times had been in Russia, though, and it took him a few moments to recognize the unwelcome strain on his arms and the scraping of his toes on the tarmac.

He was slung between two people, head down over the road. They had hold of him under his armpits. They seemed to be content to half-carry him, and Petrovitch was content to let them. He was in no shape for a fight, especially since his pockets were considerably lighter than when he’d last checked.

His glasses were missing: that was something that was going to cause him far more problems than the lack of a gun.

He tried to get a sense of where he was, without looking up. The poor condition of the road surface, the echoing, the gloom of an occluded sky: he could only be in Paradise.

They’d been waiting for him, for both him and Madeleine, which was odd considering she’d changed their route on an ad-hoc basis. He was certain he wasn’t carrying a tracker, and no one would have dared get close enough to Madeleine to tag her. Neither had they been followed; she wouldn’t have allowed it.

His attackers pulled him up a ramp and into a building. He could see a bare concrete floor, stained and damp, and could feel a ceiling over him. Natural light seeped in behind, and he was facing a wall.

They dropped him without warning, and his face closed with the floor at alarming speed. He managed to turn his head in time not to break his nose, instead choosing to stun himself into insensibility again.

He lay there, quiet and still, and wondered what they were all waiting for.