Will stopped. Slowly, with great deliberation, he set the bowler back on his knee. He adjusted it twice. Then he sat up straighter. His ches swelled with a deep breath. He held it for several moments before responding. “I don't know what you're suggesting, Pip.”
Marsh looked straight into the deep, dark things Will's eyes had become. “Bring her back.”
The lines around Will's eyes disappeared. He stared at Marsh, wide-eyed but silent. His head drooped. He looked at the floor. He ran a hand through his ginger hair, massaged the nape of his neck. Still looking down, he said, “I'm sure I didn't hear you properly.”
“Bring my daughter back,” said Marsh. “Make the Eidolons give her back to us.”
Will ran his hands over his face. He sighed. “Pip.”
“I'll help you. Anything you need.”
“I ... I don't know where to begin—”
“The price doesn't matter. I'll pay it.”
“What if the price is your own life? Yours for hers?”
“I'd agree to that in a heartbeat, Will. I don't care what it costs.”
Will said, “I can't believe we're having this conversation. This is monstrous.”
“More monstrous than having the power to save her life and not
“First of all, Pip, nobody—
“I knew you'd say that. But this isn't simply about me and Liv. It's our chance to thwart them, to stick it to von Westarp's brood.”
“Now I know I'm not following you.”
“Ask yourself, Will. Why Williton? What was so important about one insignificant little village in Somerset that Jerry had to bomb it into powder?”
“I haven't a clue. But I'm sure you'll tell me.”
“It was Agnes. They wanted her dead, Will. I'm sure of it. They wanted my little girl dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Will muttered. More loudly: “Are you even listening to yourself? You sound like you've gone completely and utterly round the bend.”
“It's the only explanation that makes sense. We know they'd been watching us, Liv and me.”
“Do you realize what you're saying? Can you honestly look me in the eye and tell me you believe the Luftwaffe conducted a raid specifically for the purpose of killing one infant? And that now you want us to reverse her death?”
“I don't care how it sounds.” Marsh grabbed Will's arm. “Bring Agnes back.”
“You should care, because you sound like a raving nutter. And as for Agnes, even if we went so far as to resurrect her body, I promise you, the thing inside it wouldn't be
He continued, “I wish I had the power to undo things. I wish I had the power to breathe just one person back to life. To make up for ...”
Part of him still grappled with Will's objections. Marsh put that aside in a special place where he could go back to it later; he wasn't ready to consider that Will might be right. This was different, something new.
Cogs turned. And turned. And turned.
“Are you listening to me?” Will asked.
“I'm sorry, Will. What did you say?”
“Nothing at all. I was merely unburdening myself to you. It won't happen again.”
“No, earlier. Before that. About Agnes.”
“She's somewhere else now.” Will sighed again. “You need to accept that.”
“That was it. You said she's gone somewhere else.”
“A figure of speech. What of it?”
Marsh cracked his knuckles against his jaw. “You've just given me an idea.”
“Oh, bother.” Will crossed his arms over his chest. “I'm listening.”
“You said yesterday that the Eidolons are omnipresent.”
“They are, insofar as nothing can be everywhere, I suppose. They don't relate to things like we do. If you imagine points in space and time as bricks in a wall, the Eidolons would exist in the mortar between the bricks.”
“In that case, let me ask you,” said Marsh. “What prevents us from using them for transportation?”
Silence stretched between them long enough for another drip to become audible. Finally, Will said, “Are you suggesting we should regard the Eidolons as our own private Tube system?”
“Like a Tube system with no distance between stops.”
Will said, “This is the third mad thing you've said this morning. You need to start sleeping, Pip.” He stood. “I don't like what happens to you when you don't.”
Marsh stood as well, feeling animated for the first time in days. “Are you willing to tell me that nobody has ever thought of this before?”
Will's mouth opened and closed soundlessly for a few seconds. “It—well—that is, there are
“So let's do something legendary.”
The window behind Stephenson's desk afforded Will a grand view of St. James' Park and the preparations under way there. Sleet pattered against the mullioned windowpanes, sounding like the impatient tapping of fingernails. It trickled down, slowly collecting along the sash like diseased hoarfrost.
The sleet had started out as a bone-cold drizzle within the fog that rolled off the Thames the day before. It was an unusual fog, but still a natural manifestation, rather than something wrought through prices and negotiations. Nobody complained. It kept the Luftwaffe at bay.
Down in the park, swaths of camouflage netting fluttered violently in a gust of wind. Moments later the same gust splattered a new layer of sleet against the glass. Will stepped away from the drafty window.
For the moment, he had the old man's office to himself. It smelled of winter rain, stale cigarette smoke, and Stephenson's brandy. Will helped himself to more of the last thing. He concentrated on pouring, but the liquid slopped over the side of his tumbler and trickled down the side of the desk.
“Oops,” he said to nobody in particular. “Opps.” He giggled. “Secret ops.”
He sipped again. The brandy burned on the way down, but the fire died when it reached the ice in Will's stomach. Nothing could melt that.
Outside, across Horse Guards' Road, a ten-foot privacy fence had been erected around two acres of royal parkland. Inside the rings of fences and sentries, under the camo, stood a jumble of tents. At least a dozen, but probably more by now. Will couldn't see well enough through the thickening weather to count them. But they'd been popping up like toadstools since the fog rolled in. There were one or two Nissen huts down there as well.
The encampment put Will in mind of a violent carnival. (“Carnival.” He giggled again. “Farewell to the flesh.”) Several tents had been erected to protect the machines that Lorimer and the science boffins had designed. One tent would soon contain a stone plucked from the lake in the center of the park.
All part of Marsh's ill-conceived plan to attack the Reichsbehorde. Marsh and his crusade.
The door opened, sending warm yellow light across the darkened office. Will's reflection appeared in the window. He looked like a haggard ghost hovering outside the Admiralty building, a revenant spirit condemned to wander endlessly through a landscape of winter fog.
“Beauclerk? What are you doing in my office?”
Will turned. Stephenson tromped in. Droplets of ice water sparkled in his graying hair. He shrugged off a sodden black mackintosh, flipped it off his shoulder with his good arm, and hung it on the coatrack in the corner in one practiced motion.
