Page 83 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Well … Tokyo is on fire.’

The director bristled, but then nodded. ‘Yes, of course. Naturally I don’t have an enormous amount of time to spare; you don’t mind being briefed by one of our scientists? You’ll get on. Foreigner too.’

‘Thank you,’ said Thaniel, wondering how long he could keep it up. It was ridiculous, but they had no way of checking who he was; if he didn’t lose his nerve, it would be all right. And he only had to hold his nerve long enough to find out what they were doing. With any luck, it would only be about twenty minutes.

The director led the way down a flight of wooden stairs, below ground, to a broad, heavy door clad in rubber. From beyond it leaked a sound, deep and thrumming, and purple. When he opened it, the door swung on hydraulics, too heavy to move by hand, and as soon as it was open, the purple noise was everywhere.

Thaniel only knew what a generator looked like because Mori had one at home. Theirs was small, easy to take apart. This one was a hundred feet high. The heat it gave off was so intense he had to take off his coat. A lance of static snapped out and touched his sleeve. It made him jump and he expected a horrible shock, but it was only a breath on the back of his hand. He felt a bit wry as Six’s voice in his head reminded him that you only got a shock if you touched a charged object, not just static.

The electricity flickered at him again as he moved away from it, following him, and, for all he knew what it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a sort of bright animal, trying to work him out.

Although they were indoors, it was snowing.

It wasn’t until he rubbed his sleeve that he realised the white particles weren’t snow but chalk. The air tasted dry from it, and, when he looked down, there was a thick layer on the floor. They had made perfect powder footprints in it, and with each step, it puffed. It was falling in curtains from great fans turning ponderously in the roof.

Standing there, he could feel the bulk of the steel tower above him. Static brushed at him again, very gently, though the noise it made was infernal. He wanted suddenly to get out. Deep under the floor somewhere was that earthquake-purple thrum. It made him nervous even after he reasoned it was just the water moving through the dam, and perhaps other machines buried under the generator.

He didn’t see the ghost at first. It was crisp and perfect, but despite all the chalk, still only as solid as a moonbeam.

‘What the hell is that?’ he said quietly.

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?’ the director said. ‘We have no idea. But it wanders in and out, so its territory must have been fairly small.’

The ghost was a monster four times the height of a man. It had a cruel thick beak and a birdish look, but though it had glorious long tail feathers that swung right round the generator, it didn’t have wings but strange, small forearms and claws. It was pacing gradually to and fro, looking at far less substantial shapes that might, at a stretch, have been trees. As they watched, it stretched right up onto its hind legs and reared up to snap at something. At its full height, its neck stretched up, it must have been upwards of fifty feet tall.

‘Here be dragons, hey?’ the director said, pleased. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you with Baroness Matsumoto.’

Thaniel spun and then had to keep a vice on his expression. He recognised her well before she turned around. She managed to keep her face completely neutral when the director pointed him out. She came towards him on the very edges of her shoes, like she was tightrope walking, to keep from exploding chalk dust all around herself.

He felt like he’d swallowed a mouthful of sand. He’d forgotten how frightened of her he was. It wasn’t the kind of fright that came with ghosts, or being made to jump. It was an unpleasant background tang, just like the taste of the electricity. She was the only person in the world but Mori who knew why they had got divorced.

He tried to keep his expression friendly and to stave off the unpleasant truth, which was that she was the worst possible person he could meet here. Not only could she have him thrown out straightaway for illegal nosing about, she could smash him to pieces with an accusation that would send him to an asylum.

She shook his hand as if they had never met, smiling. ‘Keep pretending you don’t know me. Someone’s always watching. Understand?’ She said it in a bare whisper.

‘I understand,’ he said, and had to rearrange what he thought of her and the world.

‘I’m afraid the director didn’t tell me your name?’ she said, over-politely, at normal volume.

‘Compton. I’m from the Ministry.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Compton. I’m Grace Carrow. What do you need to know? Apart from what on earth this lizard thing is. We don’t know. It’s very, very old, though. Millions of years. Someone has an interest in prehistoric flora and apparently that fern over there hasn’t existed since the Jurassic.’

She was no different. She was little and sparse, and she still had short hair, though it was in a sleek neat bob now, and she had the glow of someone very well kept. Because her dress was grey, she could have looked like a governess from a distance, but close to, it was beautifully made. The creases were too white; chalk dust.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he whispered.

‘A progress report,’ she said loudly. ‘Yes, of course. Come up to the office with me.’

She led him out of a side door that looked like it belonged in a bank vault. She sealed it after them and nodded him up a tiny narrow staircase with its own door, which she thumped shut as well, and then sagged.

‘Thank Christ,’ she breathed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to turn up for months.’

‘What?’

‘You have to believe me. I didn’t know it was about Mori til we got here, and then it was too late. We’re stuck up here. They’ve got our papers, they lock the gates, there’s no way down. The guards shot the ornithologist when he tried to escape. I mean an ornithologist, Christ’s sake! He was studying owls!’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Thaniel said quickly. ‘Mori’s here?’