Page 13 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Not all of Mori’s colour had come back. Thaniel propped Six into his lap and opened the generator manual. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to try Princess Kaguya tonight?’ he tried.

Six shook her head. ‘I already know how princesses work.’

When they went downstairs, Mori opened the kitchen door just as the Haverly boys kicked a rugby ball right over the fence. He caught it, but rather than give it back, he threw a firecracker back at them and then pulled the door shut. There was a bang and a lot of yelling. Thaniel poured them both some more brandy. Mori gave the ball to Katsu, who whirred delightedly and hurried off with it.

‘Are you all right?’ Thaniel asked.

Mori was unsettled enough to have been thrown out with his timing. He answered the next question – has something happened? – rather than the present one. ‘Nothing—’

‘What will happen, then?’ Thaniel said. He frowned. ‘Is someone going to blow something up again?’

‘No, no, it wasn’t the firecracker. It was the die.’

Thaniel felt like he was drifting even further out to sea. ‘Traumatic backgammon game?’ he hazarded.

‘No, but anything random – it’s a bit … you know, like someone jumping at you from behind the bins.’

‘When did that start?’ Thaniel said carefully. They had played with dice before and Mori had been fine.

‘I don’t know,’ Mori hedged. ‘Lately I suppose.’

‘The last time you were scared of anything, it was heights, and it turned out you were going to fall off a building.’

‘I’m not going to fall off any buildings.’

‘I think we both agree that that was such a specific truth it was really a lie, can’t we?’

Mori laughed, though it was more like patience than humour. It just cracked the lines around his eyes. ‘I’m fine, I’ve just been a bit fragile the last few weeks. As I say, I – came down with something in Paris.’

Thaniel thought about pushing, but Mori shied away when he overheard that future. ‘Listen, let’s ask Mrs Haverly to look in on Six. I’m taking you out.’

Mori’s mind must have been elsewhere, because the idea seemed to clip him from the side. ‘Out, out where?’

‘To a show.’ Thaniel gave him his coat. ‘With humans and laughing, like normal people do. Jekyll and Hyde’s on at the Lyceum.’

SIX

London, 3rd December 1888

The room was still dark when Thaniel woke up. Fog pressed against the diamond-paned window, but the fire was still glowing from last night, and his skin carried the warm, sherry and candied-almond smell of the theatre. At next door’s hearth – the two houses shared a chimney flue – Mrs Haverly was singing to her baby.

It wasn’t until he shifted that he realised Mori wasn’t there. As he sat up, all the muscles between his ribs hurt. He must have been coughing in the night. He’d only just had time to worry he might have driven Mori out when Mori came in with two cups of tea.

‘God, thank you.’ Thaniel took it carefully, enjoying how it felt to hold it. His normal morning trajectory for the last nine months had been sink-clothes-Osei’s, with Six in tow. He hadn’t been bothering with tea until he reached the office, not because he didn’t want it, but because he’d developed a private hatred of making it just for himself.

‘Did I keep you awake?’ he said, embarrassed. Even when he didn’t have a cold, he was always acutely aware of just how much space he took up in this room, Mori’s room. Mori was a person who made society girls look doughy and huge, never mind someone who had a permanent locker at a boxing gym.

‘What? No.’ Mori leaned down over him and kissed his throat, and the awkwardness dropped away. ‘I’ve only been up five minutes.’ He folded down on the quilt and crossed his legs, facing the headboard. He could never get back into bed once he was up; he thought it was decadent. He was wearing a heavy Aran jumper with sleeves that came to his knuckles, and a green scarf Thaniel’s sister had sent at Christmas. The wool made him look soft, and it had caught the smell of woodsmoke. ‘They’re sending people home from the Foreign Office today. You could stay,’ he said. He tipped his eyes away as though despite everything, he wasn’t sure Thaniel would want to stay at home. ‘See Dr Haverly about that cough, maybe.’

So Thaniel had coughed all night. ‘I will,’ Thaniel promised, and then hugged him, trying to communicate that he was sorry about what must have been quite a lot of lost sleep without having to mention it.

Six creaked down the loft ladder then. Thaniel sat back fast and pulled yesterday’s shirt back on. The bolt of shame-fear woke him up much better than tea could.

‘There’s no school,’ Six reported from the doorway. She had her hands clamped around fistfuls of her dressing gown. As she spoke, she glanced wretchedly back along the corridor. ‘They said no school if there’s fog and –there’s fog.’

Mori held up a piece of paper folded into a star.

If Six moved at anything quicker than a walk, she looked off-balance, and so it was with a kind of tripping lurch that she hurried across. She took the paper star and opened it up. It was a schedule for the day, divided into half-hour slots. Her whole posture loosened and she touched her palm to Mori’s, which was the nearest she could manage to a hug when she’d been worried. Thaniel trapped his hands under his knees so he couldn’t scoop her up. Hers was always such a frail happiness that whenever he thought about sending her out into the world, his tongue turned to paper.