child’s finger, appeared on the glass. Then a little fault line shimmered out from the edge, divided, spread a bit further, split, divided again, moved again, split, divided, spread. It took no more than a few seconds, but watching each spreading fibre through the glass was like waiting for a glacier to move down a mountain.
Behind me, Mr Pinner shrieked his fury and rage, raised his hands and seemed to throw his whole weight towards us. The paper whirlwind burst around him, shrouded him in a second, filled the room with a thousand screaming edges of white, razored sheets that cut and tore and slashed. I pressed my palm against the scar in the glass and pushed, throwing the weight of my arm, my shoulder, everything, jumping, lifting my feet off the floor to push against the glass and it shattered with a roar, splintered into a thousand thousand shards that burst outwards around me.
And that was nothing.
Not far, as luck and sensible precaution would have it. As we fell, we twisted, turned; I grabbed at the frame and swung with my legs, and she, clever, strong Oda who was so very good at killing things that should have killed her, swung as well, pulling me as much as I pushed her through the shallow fall from our broken office window down and through the shattered window of the office below. Outside, the glass and paper fell like hail and snow in a gale, splattering and spilling down to the street below. We landed on a floor covered in twisted files and warped plastic, Oda pulling my head down as the computer on the desk above us popped and flared in angry, futile explosion at the indignity of its circumstances. And then she was dragging me to the window again and already halfway out, lowering herself down over the shattered steel edge where carpet met open air, and swinging her legs down to the floor below. I looked down; it was much easier to do now there wasn’t a window to stop me craning my head. It was a long way. I wheezed, “Oda, I can’t . . .”
“Ngwenya dead with a bullet in her brain!” she snarled back, already in the darkened office below. “I swear to God, Swift, I swear by all that is sacred, by all that is holy, I shall put a bullet in her brain and it will be your fault, the sin on your head, burn in hell, Matthew Swift! Now
I looked up and there was Mr Pinner, standing on the edge of the office above, looking straight down at me, like Harlun and Phelps was nothing more than an open dolls’ house, and we no more than its occupants. We snarled, stretched our fingers to the air, felt for a fistful of glass spinning by and hurled it furiously back at him. He ducked away, but a fat spinning shard of glass tore his cheek, right across his eye, and from the whitened centre I saw slide another sliver of paper, which he pulled carelessly from his skin and threw away.
We scrambled down, flopping like a dying fish from one window to the other, Oda catching us at the bottom of each drop and throwing us, speed more than strength her advantage, into the room below before we had a chance to fall.
We went down three floors in this clumsy way, before enough glass remained on the floor below to make the jump impossible, and I crawled onto my knees and gasped, “Just a moment, please, just a . . .”
“No time!”
Oda grabbed me by the arm, dragged us through the office floor to the nearest stairwell, and there it was still playing,
Tenth floor, ninth, it was getting louder, getting nearer, and above me I could hear doors being blasted back, the roar of paper, smell paper as it started to fill the stairwell, spinning up and down like a tornado in the middle of the stairwell to tear and batter at us. Eighth, seventh; Oda kicked the door back and there it was, just waiting on the other side. The spectre raised its knife and I wasn’t close enough, I was still in the stairwell. She’d led the way and it was there, going to tear her apart. Instinctively she raised her hands and in one of them was a bottle that had once held beer. She plunged it deep into the spectre’s hood, not thinking, too fast to breathe; and all at once the spectre started to crumple, sucked into the hot smoking interior of the bottle. I caught her arm as her fingers began to let go, held the bottle in place, kept pushing it into the hood until the creature’s clothes were nothing but a pile on the floor; then stuck my thumb over the lip, slipped Sellotape over the hole. Oda was just standing, staring, not moving, mouth hanging open. I grabbed her by the shoulder, dragged her into the office; we hurt, every part hurt; pulled her past the desks and the computers and the water coolers and all the samey sames of any office anywhere, tangling our feet in the fallen tracksuit of the spectre as we went.
We looked for signs, markings, anything to tell us the truth of this wonderful exit Earle had spoken about; and there it was, fire muster point, in big white letters on a green board. We rushed towards it, pushed the door open, stepped into a corridor that was bare except for a few recycling bins left forlornly on the concrete floor, ran to the end, saw a door, a handle, a sign warning of alarm, and there it was, burning blood-red on the door: the twin crosses, on fire, emitting too much light to look directly at them. I covered my eyes with my sleeve, slammed down on the door release with my elbow, kicked it open and looked out onto a dark rooftop on a cloudless night.
There weren’t any stairs down. Just a rooftop, sloping at a shallow angle, red tiles, old-fashioned chimney stack, new-fashioned TV antennae and satellite aerials, and this door, leading onto it from Harlun and Phelps. The roof was part of some old guild building, leading down from here to there, wherever there was.
There, rather than here. I pulled Oda out of the door, stepped past the uneven angle onto the sloping roof, slid, caught at the tiles, felt them hard and sharp beneath my fingers, slid a few steps and pressed myself flat, belly-down onto the slope. Oda was beside me, breathing even faster than us. We were . . . our eyes were . . . and our hands were doing some other business, and we’d slipped because there was blood beneath our feet, and it was our blood, what had Oda said? What was a spleen good for anyway?
My bag was still on my back.
The hat was still in the bag. I looked up, saw Harlun and Phelps lit up like a giant crimson warning against careless playing with matches, and half-imagined that somewhere in its depths, I could hear screaming. Aldermen fighting, Aldermen dying, while we snuck away in the night.
“We have to get away,” I hissed at Oda. “Come on! We have to find Ngwenya.”
Oda’s head was turned back towards the red tower, her eyes wide. “They’re . . .” she began.
“We can’t kill him! We can’t stop Pinner without undoing this spell! We have to move! Oda! You have to help me!”
She half-turned, stared straight at us, and in her face was a look of such hollow nothingness that for a moment I thought I saw the empty hood of the spectre, not the flesh of a woman at all. “Damnation,” she whispered. “
“We can undo it!”
“Not this.”
“Oda! Listen to me, I need your help, we need to get to Ngwenya, I know where she’ll be, you have to help me!
Our shout seemed to shake her for a moment, and there was something still there, hard old psycho-bitch, tough as tar. She turned her head up to the top of the roof and started to climb, scrambling over the old red tiles to the chimney stack and dragging me up behind her. My hand slipped in her fingers, blood sliding over skin between us; she caught me by the wrist and pulled, dragging me up to the top of the roof and looking down. On the other side of the slope, the roof dropped down into darkness, promising at something else: a flatter roof, another building, just below. We slid down the other side, tiles bumping and banging uncomfortably beneath us, reached the gutter, crawled over it, the old black metal creaking uncomfortably, jumped the little foot or so between us and the next building, landed on a roof of stagnant dirty water, old pigeon poo, silent, rusted vents and cracking grey concrete.
“London Bridge,” I hissed. “We have to get to London Bridge.” Behind us, Harlun and Phelps was a burning crimson brightness, the whole tower lit up with it, and there was someone in the door, the same one we’d jumped out of, hands in pockets, looking at us, just looking.
Oda had seem him too, and didn’t seem to be able to take her eyes away. I shook her, and still she didn’t turn. We slapped her, hard, across the cheek, and her hand instinctively rose into a fist, that stopped its swing an inch from our nose.
