Page 107 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘I must have a book that has something to do with this,’ Willis grumbled, and went back out to his study.

If Mori knew they were talking, he was ignoring them. A shard of gravel pinged off the glass and a shatter-spider cracked over the surface. Mori didn’t move. Some boys outside cheered.

‘We need to get him to another room,’ Willis said from behind them. ‘They’re going to smash that.’

‘They’re not,’ Thaniel and Takiko said at the same time. A faceful of glass would be very memorable, even twenty years away.

Fukuoka shouted something at the boys and they went to throw stones at something else. He glanced towards them – he must have been able to see them clearly with the lights on inside – and bowed awkwardly and quickly, looking worried someone else would see. Thaniel nodded back to him.

Upstairs, someone turned up the volume on the phonograph. Some joker had put on the 1812 Overture, and the cannon blasts were drowning out the little bottle-bombs that were smashing against the walls now. The crashes made him study the window. If it had exploded inward, Mori would have felt it. Even if he was so lost that his lungs and his heart didn’t know how often to beat and breathe.

Willis retreated to his office again.

Thaniel stared at the floor and tried think what he remembered clearly from ten years ago, the things that stood out and acted like lighthouses and landmarks. He’d been twenty; just moving to London for a job in the telegraphy department at the Home Office. He could clearly remember moving into a small flat in Pimlico, overlooking the Thames. But everything after that was a just a grey haze of day shifts and night shifts on a complicated rotation. Nothing that shouted out a particular moment. Moving, getting married, and dying: those were the days you could pinpoint exactly from years away. Nothing he could very well recreate here for Mori.

‘This isn’t you,’ Six observed from the bookcase. She was talking to Takiko. She had managed to highlight a whole pair of ghosts, talking over cigarettes. One was Mori. The other, as Six said, was a little woman, but not Takiko.

‘No, that’s Countess Kuroda,’ Takiko said quietly. She was watching the cigarette smoke wisp. ‘I forget when that was. One of the parties nobody wanted to go to.’

‘That’s really clear,’ Six noted. ‘They’re deciding something that matters.’

Thaniel watched them hard. He could read lips, always had done; you had to across orchestras. When he understood what they were talking about, he caught Takiko’s hand and pulled her across to make her see.

‘—says I’ve got a year maximum. Then it will all be rather unsightly.’ The Countess paused, and lit a new cigarette, which she gave to Mori. The flour grains clustered whiter where her silk dress shimmered. It made her look luminous. ‘Takiko tells me you know things.’ She smiled. ‘And you’re not surprised, are you?’

‘No. I’m so sorry. It’s … Midori, it’s a bitch of a disease.’

‘I’ve always had the constitution of a damp cobweb, I’m not shocked.’ She studied him quietly. The cigarette smoke wisped, perfectly clear in the flour. ‘Listen. The stories about people like you. Are they true?’

Mori flicked his eyes up. ‘Which ones?’

‘You can change things. Given the right leverage, you can … do something decent. Kuroda thinks you’re a death god. Or something.’

He was quiet at first. He sat back from the smoke as though it had made him feel queasy. ‘Yes,’ he said.

She straightened, pleased. It made her look like a very cheerful, very beautiful pheasant. ‘Well then. Let me give you a present, then. I am not going to die coughing out my lungs onto your beautiful nightingale floor. I meant initially to have a nice walk on the cliffside and then jump off it when I started to feel bad, but that’s rather stupid. I’d rather give my death to you. What can you do with it?’

Mori watched her for a long time. When he was entirely still, it was easy to see he wasn’t altogether an ordinary human. There was something else in him. ‘Could I have the cigarette packet?’

She gave it to him. He tore open the packet so he could write on the inside with a pencil. It was impossible to see what he was writing – the flour ghosts didn’t show up the lead on the cardboard – but the way his hand moved implied lines, and numbers; maybe a kind of chart. He gave it back to her without saying anything, in the way serious traders handled balance sheets.

Her expression changed as she read it. When she looked up, the balance sheet might just have told her that, after a lifetime of penury, she had inherited millions of pounds’ worth of holdings. ‘How do we do this?’

‘Kuroda. If we can make him kill you on this day, at this time, we’ll get that end result within ten years.’

‘That’s hundreds of thousands of people.’

‘Yes.’

She started to laugh, and then suddenly she caught the side of his neck and dragged him close into a hug. ‘This isn’t a trick, is it? This isn’t some Winter King semantic rubbish?’

‘I don’t really do semantic rubbish, I’ve not got the right sort of brain,’ Mori said. He kept his hands in his lap rather than touch her.

She held his shoulders for a little while. She still had a vestigial smile around her eyes. ‘Well; let’s go back up and get howling drunk, shall we? Can we tell Takiko?’

He looked past her, terse now. ‘I – no, she’ll … I think she would kill me before we managed any of it.’

The Countess frowned. ‘You don’t sound like you’re joking.’