Except for Petrovitch and Madeleine.

He looked over the top of his glasses. The lights of the beast flickered away in the distance, but the sky itself was dark.

33

They could hear other machines in different parts of the Metrozone, signaling their presence with flares of burning gas and the slow, heavy rumble of collapsing buildings. The sky flickered with flame and echoes of explosions.

Petrovitch half-expected them to start calling to each other, crying Ulla! across the rooftops.

“The car’s a write-off,” said Madeleine. It was on its side against the buckled steel shutters.

“To be fair, it wasn’t in much better condition when we stole it.” Petrovitch squinted at it. He still couldn’t see too well. “Can you get it back on its wheels?”

She squeezed in behind it and braced herself against the shop front. Petrovitch stood well out of the way as the car toppled back down. Whatever glass there was left fell out into the road.

“Good as new,” he said, and kicked at the driver’s door. It swung open, and he felt under the steering column for the wires.

“You’re not seriously suggesting it’ll work?”

He caught the battery wire with his fingertip. It bit him and he jerked away, growling. He reached farther up and took hold of the insulated part.

“Out of gear?” she asked.

He nodded, and she reached across the passenger seat to waggle the gear stick. He used touch to guide the wires together, flashes of blue worrying at his skin.

The engine coughed. He moved the wire back and forward and finally found the right point. The car wound itself into life again.

“Desperation plus East European engineering equals result,” he crowed. “Not pretty, but it works.”

“We’re still not going to make it in time, are we?” She clambered over the bonnet, and put her hand under Petrovitch’s shoulder to help him up.

“Not that one. Broken.”

“Sorry.” She swapped her grip to the other side. “But we’re taking too long. They must be at the tower by now.”

Petrovitch shook himself out. “You’d be forgiven for thinking so. But since the Jihad’s monsters are still crashing around, I can only conclude that Chain either hasn’t access to the secret room yet, or that it’s less use than he thought it was. Which means, we still have some wiggle room.”

“Get in the car and shut up, Sam.”

“Yes, babochka.”

She drove slowly down the road, moving this way and that to avoid the larger obstacles, rolling over the smaller ones. There were signs of the Jihad everywhere: gaps in the architecture where there ought to be none, straight furrows plowed across the fabric of the city, marked by fluttering yellow flames.

There seemed no reason for the pattern—one building left, another destroyed—but Petrovitch rather fancied that, come daybreak, a passing satellite might notice the similarity between the new face of the London Metrozone and the Tokyo rail network.

It hadn’t occurred to him that there might be people buried beneath the drifts of rubble, and that some of them might still be alive, until he saw a man bent over one of the mounds of rubble, picking at it piece by piece.

They rolled past, Petrovitch transfixed by the man’s lonely labor. He never looked up, just went on flinging bricks behind him one after another, digging down.

“Are you Okay?” Madeleine asked.

“I’m getting worried, that’s all.” He gnawed at the back of his hand. “You. Me. Especially me. We’re the weak link in the chain. If we get killed trying to stop the Jihad, no one else knows what’s going on. If there was a way of getting a message to Marchenkho…”

The Skoda scraped its already battered side against an abandoned fridge, lying in the street. There was more debris; boxes, clothes, shop fittings, loose packaging. Madeleine slowed to a crawl and peered out through the hole where the windscreen used to be.

“Don’t these things normally come with lights?”

“I thought it was going to be a five-minute dash to the tower. I didn’t connect them up.” Petrovitch kicked the footwell. “Maddy, turn right.”

“Isn’t that toward the river?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure?”

“Turn already.”

She remembered to depress the clutch as she spun the wheel. “Where are we going?”

“Just bear with me, okay?”

The university foyer was shattered—doors forced, glass like frost on the floor, tables and chairs scattered like stones. Petrovitch shoved a desk aside, and listened to the hollow clatter it made.

“Chyort. Too late.”

Madeleine tiptoed in behind him, letting her eyes adjust to the near-total darkness. “The river’s at the end of the street. Getting closer, too.”

“The place is abandoned. I was hoping, you know?”

“I know.” She suddenly became still, frozen mid-step. She ducked just as a beam of blue-white light flashed into Petrovitch’s eyes.

He gasped, tried to raise his right hand to shield his face, groaned again as his broken bones ground together. He gave up and stood tall, blinking into the torchlight.

“Nothing for you here,” said a voice. “Turn around and go.”

“We’re armed,” said another. “Don’t think we won’t use them.”

“That,” said Petrovitch, “is the best bit of news I’ve had all day. I’m going to reach into my pocket and get my student card out, and you’re not going to shoot me. Deal?”

“You’re a student? Here?”

“Postgrad. I share an office with Doctor Ekanobi in the Blackett building.” He slowly withdrew his battered student card and held it up.

The torch beam wavered and the source moved closer. Behind the light, he could make out a gun.

“Is that the Jericho?”

“What?”

“The gun. It’s the Jericho I gave Pif. Where did you get it?” The light centered on Petrovitch’s card, then back onto his face. “It was a true likeness, once upon a time.”

“Okay. Sorry. Can’t be too careful.” Both the gun and the torch lowered, and the dark figure illuminated the makeshift sentry post set up at the rear of the foyer.

Madeleine was poised behind the other guard, her fist raised. The other woman was holding a ball-bearing catapult made from bent steel, and oblivious to anyone standing near to her.

“It’s fine!” called Petrovitch, “Maddy, stop it.”

“It was just in case,” she said, and held her hands up. “No harm done.”

“What’s going on?” asked the young man with the gun. “What’s happening?”

“I was about to ask the same thing. Where are the paycops? Who’s in charge?”

“The guards are gone. It’s just students and some of the staff. As to who’s in charge?” He shrugged and looked at his equally young colleague. “I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Petrovitch picked his way to Madeleine. “Stay here with them. I’ll be back in five.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Arrange some insurance.” He stepped over the remains of the back doors.

She shouted at his back: “Sam, one day you’re going to have to tell me what you’re doing before you do it.”

“Yeah. We haven’t got time for a democracy.” He started down the back lane between the faculties. The high walls refracted the sounds from the city: the grinding, the roaring, the howling. The machines of the Jihad were still carving their songlines without distraction. No time for voting, perhaps, but enough for a last will and testament.

He felt his way up the stairs in the pitch black, closing his eyes and counting the landings until he’d reached his floor. There was the door, and there the corridor. He ran his hand down the wall, chanting the names of the occupants of each room until he got to his.

There was a faintest glimmer of light seeping from under the door.

“Pif? That you?” he whispered as he opened it a crack.