One

boy. He was dressing hurriedly, trying to pack his bag in poor light, wishing Stanley would stop screaming, calm down, say something, when the nature of the screams changed. If anything, they grew even more frantic. The hammering had stopped, or rather it had lost its metallic beat. Now it had increased its tempo but it was landing on something far less resistant that metal or wood. Jane stopped rushing around and dropped to his knees. He covered his ears but Stanley was behind them and even by the time he had begun to realise it was a dream it wouldn't release him.

He woke up much later. Plessey was gluing pieces of wood together, a box to protect his precious radio. Becky was helping with another batch of batteries, throwing the ones encrusted with salt into a metal waste-paper basket. She was doing it with enough force to suggest she wasn't fully engrossed in the task.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, 'did I wake you? How thoughtless of me.'

'I was awake anyway,' Jane said, levering himself upright. 'You forget that most of my working life I slept through worse noises than that. Once, a friend of mine called Carver was beating sheet metal for two hours not six feet away from my sleeping head. I didn't even change position.'

His voice faltered at the utterance of the word 'beating' and both Becky and Plessey caught it, shooting him a look. But nobody asked any more; everybody had nightmares. Everyone had something that stuck in their craw.

'The others, they'll want a demonstration,' Jane said, 'before we can even think about planning an exodus.' He stood up and began to get dressed.

'I'll nip over to HQ later today,' he said, and Jane thought, Yeah, right. Nip on up to Heathrow. It'll take you the best part of a day.

To Becky, Jane said, 'We should try some of Aidan's haunts. See if we can find out why he's not turned up for so long.'

Becky went back to her batteries. 'If Aidan likes it so much here then I'd rather be around when he turns up. I think I'll stay here for a while, if that's OK with Daniel.'

That Plessey didn't look at her when she said this told Jane it was already a done deal.

'Of course, my dear,' said Plessey.

Becky nodded. 'I've decided.'

'All right,' Jane said. 'And if I find Aidan I'll bring him over here, yes?'

'He's not my son, Richard,' she snapped, and flung a battery more forcibly into the bin. 'I'd prefer it if you stopped trying to compensate for . . . for . . .' She broke off. Her shoulders hunched; she put her head in her hands and began gently to shake.

Jane left her like that, unable to cope with her sudden change of mood. Plessey caught up with him just as he cleared the buffer of razor wire. Something had been in the market the previous night. Clothes and bones and almost an entire human skin were spread across the hall. The signs of a scuffle were drying into the poured- concrete floor, along with human blood, Skinner blood, Jane wasn't sure. It was black, there was a lot of it. A familiar sight, a familiar smell.

'She's a little raw, Richard,' Plessey said, taking in the devastation. Out of his cosy bolt-hole and with his balaclava off for the first time since Jane had known him he looked too pale, waxy. His hair was a beige scrim grafted onto a sweating pate. 'Aidan . . . it's not that she doesn't care. You can see that she does. But—'

'But she fears the worst.'

'I think so. I think that's the case, yes.'

'Plessey, I've been fearing the worst for the past ten years. But it's the not knowing that's the killer.'

'I'll pass that on,' he said. 'That will help, I'm sure. She'll come round, eventually. She's strong. People like her don't give up easily.'

Jane looked away, in the direction of Commercial Street. He thought there was trust, some love, even, between himself and Becky, but her dismissal of him, her preference for Plessey's nostalgic comforts indicated that there was no space for sentiment now. You took what comfort you could from people and you moved on. He supposed it was a kind of evolution. He would learn from it.

'What about you?' Plessey asked him. 'Where are you going?'

'I'll see if I can find Aidan at my Library.'

'You're carrying on with that pointless job? When we've got this cause for hope gifted us?'

'We have to make the effort,' Jane said, not believing it for a second. 'It's the decent thing to do. Some of us want to carry on. Some of us want to keep busy.'

He didn't mean it as a slight but he didn't doubt that was how Plessey would take it. 'Let me know what the Shaded think of the broadcasts,' Jane added. He started for the road, then thought of something. 'Plessey, one thing. The Skinners. Could they intercept those signals? Understand them?' As soon as the question was out he thought it witless. Of course they couldn't understand; they didn't speak, they moved as though they had the brains of dinosaurs. They were driven only by hunger. But something in Plessey's expression spoke of his not having even considered this possibility. Now he seemed to, and he began to shake his head, but the gesture was without conviction. They stared at each other, Plessey halted by the razor wire, his skin sickly white against the dark tweed of his jacket, a vampire in hawthorn.

19. FOETAL ECHO

The Library was wherever you wanted it to be. Jane liked to take his journals with him to Trafalgar Square. If the rain had paused he might climb to the top of the ENO building and sit under the dead neon letters of its tower, looking south past the amorphous, dissolving statue of Nelson on his column towards the great roads of Whitehall and The Mall. You could write anything as long as it was connected with the Event. Your experiences, fears, hopes. You were encouraged to write about what you knew of the Skinners, and the way they made you feel: reportage as therapy. You could write about how they killed, if you were up to it, or more prosaically, what your work had consisted of since you last were the Librarian. But you only had one day on the job. Someone had decreed, some psychologist manque, that it was too damaging to dwell for any longer on the agonies of how you got here and what might yet come. There was a greater likelihood of burn-out this way, it was argued, than there was in cleansing the city of its corpses.

The words were designed to be a gift to whoever came after. A warning and a set of guidelines. How to survive. Parallel to Jane's Event work (he usually wrote diary entries expanded from brief notes he made at the end of each day), he continued with his letter to Stanley. He guessed it must be around five thousand pages long now. All of these he kept in a series of fireproof suitcases in the boardroom of a boutique hotel in Covent Garden, fully intending to pass them on to his son one day.

Aidan liked it up here too. But he was not on the rooftop today. Jane looked out across the ceiling of London but could spot no other figure. The possibility that Aidan had been taken was strong, but he doubted it, somehow. Aidan had grown to be a tough, resourceful young man, despite his sickliness. He knew places to hide that Jane would ordinarily have walked right by. He could melt away like shadows on a cloudy day.

The skies around London had lost definition. Where once there had been a strange miasmal fog as black as sea-coal and thick mammatus hanging from the base of vast storm clouds, and the teasing of crepuscular rays suggesting that the sun still hung beyond and had not forsaken the planet, there was now a featureless blanket. The cloud was not leaving, merely retreating into the heights, as if aghast at the behaviour of what lay beneath it. It was becoming dangerous now to travel across the city's ceiling. The persistent hungry rain had eaten away the waterproof outer layers and was tucking into less resistant parts of the rooftops. Already some older, less well-tended buildings had collapsed. Some of the warehouses on the banks of the Thames that had missed out on renovation were now little more than scruffy lines of brick dust on the wharves and dockyards nestling against the river. Fires were still breaking out in some buildings as gas pipes corroded and released pockets of fuel. Jane had been close enough to an explosion in a pizza restaurant in Waterloo East some years previously to have felt the ends of his beard crisp.

The grand plaza of Trafalgar Square was awash with dirty water, like a shallow lido that had been neglected by cleaning staff. The great bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's eroding granite column had developed a patina of verdigris and sat hunched like moss topiary. Screams flew out of the city, confused by distance, dopplering towards or away from him like weird sirens, calls for help that were rarely answered. Although there were jobs to be done,