Page 76 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘One of the warehouses on the canal?’

‘Must be.’ Thaniel lifted Six up, less because she needed any reassuring than because he did. Like always, she didn’t lean against him and only sat girder-straight.

‘Look how bright the city is,’ Vaulker breathed.

He was right. The whole city was alight, so bright that there were orange reflections on the undersides of the clouds. It looked unlike itself. At night Tokyo was usually a place of leaning wooden gates half lost above the lamps, and then sudden, new stone places. There were great dim expanses that were the parks, points of candlelight moving on the river where the night bargemen arranged cargo crates ready for the morning. But now it was brilliant. Thaniel could see the shapes of the streets swooping alongside the canals. Half of Tokyo must have bought lightbulbs in the last couple of days. It looked like the inside of a phosphorescent hive.

Something exploded in the building that was on fire. The bang rattled the windows and they stepped back. As they did, some of the junior diplomats came down the stairs in an anxious, excited cluster.

‘There’s another fire on the other side,’ someone said. ‘Ow, Jesus!’

‘What?’ said Thaniel.

‘The – bloody door handle. It’s red hot. Even through the towel.’

‘Is there … not a cotton factory down there somewhere?’ Thaniel said slowly.

‘The tea-towel is smoking,’ the junior diplomat reported.

‘The cotton factory is next to the building on fire,’ Six said to him in the quiet way she had when she was worried she wasn’t meant to be speaking.

‘Christ – get back from the windows. Everyone. Now.’

There was a rush for the back rooms just before a much bigger explosion blew the windows inward. He snatched Six up again and looked back in time to see the silk curtains catching fire on the in-furl. They went up like they were soaked in oil, still swimming in the hot air and the floating cinders. Blackened rags frayed away and settled over the papers on the desks. He saw a sheet begin to burn, still upright in a Corona typewriter.

A quarter of an hour later, they were sitting in raggy groups in the dining room of the Dutch legation, while the Dutch diplomats’ wives came round with hot drinks and blankets, and sweets for the children. Six seemed to think it was an interesting variation on an ordinary night. Thaniel didn’t understand why that was all right but going down the corridor the wrong way wasn’t. She’d got the other children together and now they’d made a fort under a table. He was still seeing after-flashes of the explosion, and as they popped and spun on the edges of his vision, they sounded like xylophones.

The Dutch had listened to their servants a lot earlier than the British. There was brand new linoleum on the floor, lightbulbs looped around the rafters, and rubber stitched over all the door handles and hinges. Buckets of sand waited on either side of every door and window.

‘Steepleton,’ Vaulker said, and then stopped short. Thaniel was sitting with the Dutch doctor, who had made him take off his shirt. The doctor was lifting bits of glass out of his shoulders with tweezers. ‘Christ, you’re black and blue. Did you – fight the man who killed Arinori?’

‘No, the carriage crashed, before. The horses spooked.’ He hadn’t noticed before – he hadn’t looked at himself – but he was bruised right down what he’d been thinking of as his uninjured side. With the twang and burn of the bullet wound, he hadn’t felt any other pain, not even from the glass shards.

Vaulker looked like he wanted to say something, but another explosion went off close by and they both jumped. ‘What the hell was that?’

Much longer than the explosion was the crash of a falling roof. It took whole seconds.

‘The fire crews demolish houses to stop fires. All the houses are wooden. There’s no other way to control a fire until it reaches one of the canals. Are you all right?’ Thaniel added, because he was starting to think that neither of them was. He didn’t usually startle easily, but the noise just then had fired a jolt right up and down his spine. He was shying at smaller sounds than that too, as badly as a hare. ‘Have you even sat down?’

‘What we saw …’ Vaulker began. He crumpled down beside Thaniel, all the creases in his skin and his clothes outlined in soot smudges. ‘If it’s caused by this weather – well. We need to know if it’s going to get worse. And particularly if it’s to do with Fuji. If this is a sign the volcano is about to go off, we have to evacuate.’ He was speaking very quietly. He glanced around the room after he’d finished, and when Thaniel followed his eyes, he saw that some of the Dutch diplomats were talking in the same way, low, heads close. Nobody wanted to say volcano loudly. The room was full of children. ‘The Dutch Minister has just sent someone to wake up that fellow who runs the Met Office, but I don’t think they’ll be allowed to say even if something was about to happen. Chaos at the docks.’

Thaniel nodded. ‘You want to go, in case?’

‘Francis Fanshaw will have my head on a plate if I evacuate everyone and nothing happens. I haven’t got much goodwill capital with him at the moment, I suspect.’ He flicked his eyes up at Thaniel.

‘I haven’t told him anything,’ Thaniel said. ‘If no one’s noticed you weren’t at the promulgation, good. What are we doing, then, if not leaving?’

Vaulker looked taken aback. ‘You haven’t told him I didn’t go?’

‘No. Why would I?’

‘You don’t like me.’

‘I do not,’ Thaniel agreed, smiling.

‘Well …’ Vaulker stopped to laugh. ‘Thank you. No, so. We need to send someone to Fuji to see what’s going on.’

‘Foreigners need papers to leave Tokyo. They’ll never issue them if they think we’re poking around.’