Dana pressed the ground-floor button and I didn’t argue, leaning against her and watching my world steady itself as we rose up with a slow cranking sound through the lift shaft. I didn’t know how much blood they’d taken or how much they’d put in me, but by the lightness of my head I was willing to guess that it hadn’t been a proportionate ratio.
We had passed the grid to the basement exit when the lift lurched, the lights went out and everything stopped.
Dana said, her breath coming fast and ragged, “What the hell?”
“Friends are coming,” I replied, straining to hear something through the dull echoes of the shaft. “It’ll be all right.”
“Is this something to do with your bloody shoes?”
“Yes. Magicians are always so hung up on magic, they never bother to check for technology.”
“You… were followed?”
“Pretty much. I’m not the only one capable of tricksy planning and cunning insight, you know.”
She scowled, staring round the tight confines of the lift, uneasy at the small space. “We’re going to sit here?”
“Too many shadows,” I answered.
“You had to say it, just when I was being steely with self-control, you had to say it!”
We took a deep breath and rubbed our hands together, searching for warmth between our fingers. The magic was easy in this place, we didn’t need much to work with. I opened up the palm of my hand and let the bubble of pinkish-orange neon light float up above our heads, illuminating the tight space of the lift. Dana’s face was pale, the fixed smile scared, but refusing to sink into any more honest expression. “He’s going to kill me, isn’t she?” she said, not bothering to raise her voice or let the terror fill it. “He’s going to kill me.”
“He hasn’t yet.”
“So?”
“The shadow… is part of Bakker,” I answered, thinking about my argument a word at a time. “Perhaps there’s a part of him – both the man and his creature – which doesn’t want you dead?”
“You’ve always got a way with the implausible.”
“I’m just theorising.”
“What now?”
The lift jerked, and started moving again, of its own accord, tossing us to the sides to cling on for support.
“Good?” asked Dana breathlessly.
“Buggered if I know.”
“You know, for a man possessed – sorry – in a complicated relationship with mystical entities of bloody magic and forgotten life – you’re pretty useless when it comes to a tight situation, aren’t you?”
“This isn’t a tight situation yet.”
“Tell that to the white room and the operating table,” she retorted sharply. “Looked pretty tight from where I was.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but you
She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated, thought about it, then opened her mouth again. “You are a total…”
The lift jerked to a stop. The door slid open with inexorable slowness. Beyond was a single cream-coloured corridor, lined with tinted glass windows that obscured the light and darkened even the shadows beyond it. Outside it was night; inside it was harsh strip-light day, the floor cold and the air dry, unstirred. I stepped out of the lift cautiously and looked around. Dana said, “This isn’t the ground floor.”
Behind us, the lift door slid shut.
I walked to the window and looked down. Some distance below I saw the shape, tinted brown, of what in real life was a bright blue, floodlit fountain of three treble-pronged stone nozzles that squirted water into the pool around them and, chaotically, over the narrow pavement beyond. I guessed it to be about four floors down. Dana said, “I’m sure I pressed ground.”
“I’m sure you did too,” I answered, looking around the corridor. There was no feature in it except a red fire extinguisher next to a closed door. “But lifts can be subject to other people’s control.”
“I didn’t feel we moved that many floors…” she began again, a note of urgency entering her voice.
“Moving without covering all the distances involved,” I answered cheerfully. “It’s been known. Dana?”
“Yes?”
“If Mr Bakker got round to teaching you any sort of protective magics, now might be the time to practise them.” I could hear a humming, a sound like an angry beehive, or perhaps a very expensive, very badly treated car engine caught in traffic…
“Is this where the lights go out?” she asked.
I wandered over to the fire extinguisher and tugged it out of its rack on the wall. “Deep breaths,” I said, and kicked open the door.
On the other side was another long white corridor. Standing in it were at least half a dozen men and women, armed variously with grenades, handguns, and rifles, and assorted magical baubles that floated and drifted, or had just been slung down casually at the owner’s feet. In front of them a huge motorbike dominated the corridor, black tyre marks skidded all around it. Sitting on it, mirrored visor lowered over his face, was the wide form of the biker. He revved his engines.
Dana said, “Um…”
He put his foot down on the pedal, kicked the bike off the stand and, with a roar of engine that filled the whole corridor with an angry thrum, and a burst of black fumes that darkened the faces of the people around him, charged straight for us.
I pressed down on the fire extinguisher.
From its end came thick white billowing gas. I pressed down harder, caught a fistful of gas between my fingertips, spun it into a tornado of whiteness and threw it down the corridor, straight at Blackjack and his friends as they ran towards us. It spread out as it moved, rattling the windows and splattering the walls with patches of pale foam, thickening in an instant to the consistency of froth on hot cappuccino, blinding the eyes of the men with the guns and the women with the bombs as they ran at us, choking them and filling their noses with the stench of chemical suppressants. But not Blackjack. Behind his empty-faced helmet he just kept coming. I grabbed Dana’s hand, pulled her away from the door and said, as calmly as I could, “Run.”
Bakker had taught her as he had taught me, because she did as I said without question.
We ran.
Corridors, offices. The offices sat behind dull plywood doors. Most of them were empty. Some were missing panels on their ceilings, through which wires drooped and odd foil-covered pipes poked. Some had water coolers, the gossip-corner of any workplace; some had long rows of endless boring desks lined with endless boring computers that were probably capable of making phone calls to innocent bystanders, but had almost certainly had all the games wiped before installation, with no opportunity to install any more.
We ran into another office of neglected desks and the odd revolving chair. Right behind us, the biker burst through the doors, smashing them apart with the front wheel of his bike. Dana dove left, I dove right and the biker tore between us, spinning around a few metres beyond with a screech of burning tyre that tore a gash in the carpeted floor. He revved his engine a few times, like the challenge a knight gives before the joust, and the sound was so loud that the windows tinkled, the loose wires in the roof swayed, and the chairs creaked and rocked; the noise went straight through the eardrum and made the inside of our nose ache, shook into our stomach and blurred the edges of our vision. From the back of the bike, a cloud of noxious black smoke whirled up around him; its instant taste in our throat was like the stench from a garage forecourt, which could penetrate even the thickest glass and suck moisture from our mouth.
The lights faltered around us and, for a panicked moment, I looked down at the floor to see my own shadow; it was not turning. I looked over to Dana and saw that she had one hand raised towards the ceiling, and was dragging crackling jagged arcs of blue electricity out of the wires above us, causing the lights to dim as she spun it between her fingers. The motorbike roared into life, and went straight for her. She threw her bundle of voltage at
