Del took Wendy’s arm and threaded it around her elbow. “Taken care of,” she said. “Our mystery employer is hiring you as we speak, to help us with a little job tonight.”
“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
“No—” Del stopped, tugged the other woman closer, and kissed her cheek—“I’ll make it up to you.”
“I am going to regret this.” But Wendy followed her lead.
Del gave zero fucks about Imp’s fit of the vapors over showing Wendy where they lived. Yeah, it had been Imp’s family’s house for generations, but it wasn’t now. They were unwelcome squatters who could be evicted or arrested at any moment. Imp needed a reminder before he put down roots.
Del circled around the front of the palace, surreptitiously watching Wendy’s face for signs of the disturbing royalty-worship to which so many white English people seemed to be prone—as if purple parasitic mind wasps had laid the eggs of imperial mind-control slavery in their heads, so that perfectly rational people snapped to attention like so many zombies at the first sign of a coat of arms—then led her round the back of the high-walled garden, secretly relieved when the spikey ex-cop passed the test. “What?” asked Wendy.
“Just checking.” Del gave her a smile. “C’mon.”
“I don’t think this can be—what the fuck?”
“Welcome to Neverland.”
“No, this can’t be right—” Del rattled her front door keys under Wendy’s nose. “Wow.”
“Used to be in Imp’s family,” Del told her. “C’mon in.”
There was a fancy dress party going on inside the games room, and it was Del’s turn to be all what the fuck, man? at her crew. As for Wendy, she was having a hard time not catching flies in her mouth.
Imp, who had pulled out his court-appearances suit, was strutting around the room cooing portentous instructions at Doc and Game Boy, with his chest puffed up like a male wood pigeon in mating season. In and of itself this was not entirely unprecedented, but the weird thing was that Game Boy and Doc were going along with it. Game Boy looked particularly dapper in wing collar and top hat; Doc looked like a cadaverously Victorian version of himself.
“What’s going on?” asked Wendy.
Doc thrust a laser-printed treasure map at her. “We’re going back to the 1880s,” he said, as Imp snapped his fingers at Game Boy.
“You’ll need outfits,” said Imp, pointing at a wheeled rail sagging with Victorian ladies’ gowns.
“What the hell?”
“We’re going on an adventure,” said Imp; “time travel. You need to dress the part.” He pulled some papers from his inner pocket and fanned them in front of her. “My sister said she was hiring you via HiveCo—that makes it official, right? But it was Becca’s idea really, you’ll be doing her a favor, too—”
Wendy narrowed her eyes. “Don’t you dare fuck with me,” she warned him. “What’s this about?” She took the papers and glanced at the top sheet. “This makes no sense—”
“It’s a treasure map!” Game Boy said excitedly. “We’ve been asked to retrieve a lost manuscript from the 1880s. There’s a door into history and Imp can handle the book safely but he can’t get there and back on his own—”
“My story, Game Boy,” Imp interrupted with ill-concealed temper. “So you wanted to know what was in that bank deposit box? It was an invitation to bid in an auction. This—” he shook his copy of the map at her—“is where our client who won the auction—the client who is hiring you on our behalf right now—wants us to go to pick it up, through the dream roads opening off the top floor of this house, leading back into the shadows of history.”
“Time travel.” Wendy’s eyes crossed. “Fuck me, Gibson’ll have an aneurysm. The jurisdictional issues alone—” Imp smirked at her. “You seem to know a lot about this,” she said quellingly.
“Long story.” Imp looked at her insolently. “In or out?” He shoved a bundle of banknotes at her. They were purple, they were plastic, they bore the face of the New Management beneath a royal crest that had been ancient when Egypt was born. “Just in case whatever the hell HiveCo pays you isn’t enough.”
Wendy counted the money. “Two thousand.” Del could see the gears turning in her mind. “We’re not stealing anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Imp said carefully. “The book was hidden by its owner, misfiled in a private library in 1888. My sis—the winning bidder—bought the location and title to the lost manuscript. That side of things is entirely legal. The library was bombed during the Blitz. Our job is just to go back in time and retrieve it.” He twitched slightly.
“Tell me. Everything.” Wendy gave him a hard stare.
“Why don’t you pick something to wear?” He gestured at a screened-off area in front of the windows: “I can explain while you get changed. You, too, Del. When you’re both ready—if you still want in—we can go upstairs and get started.”
By the pricking in her thumbs and the soreness of her conscience, it slowly came to Eve that she might, conceivably, possibly, however innocently, have fucked up.
Item: Rupert wanted the AW-312.4 concordance. Good enough.
Item: He’d sent the Bond to take care of loose ends, like opposition bidders. Which was standard operating practice.
Item: Loose ends could conceivably include anyone below her level who knew about the acquisition. Now, that was not so good.
Item: She’d commissioned Jeremy to take care of the retrieval, which was necessary because Jeremy was one of the few people who had the background and training to handle a live codex, and he had an adequate supply of disposable minions to do the potentially fatal bits of the job.
(And now that she came to think about it, was her current employment entirely earned on merit, or could it possibly be due to Rupert’s awareness of the existence of her brother and a desire to keep the Impresario on a very long string…? No, don’t go there. That way lay paranoia and madness.)
But:
Item: It turned out that
