Page 56

In my stillness, I realized that the fracturing that I had unleashed at Saint Rose’s seemed to have followed me. I could see faint cracks running through empty air, and through them bled a new kind of light, pale but strange, tingeing the world with curious hues.

On the ground to my left, something revealed itself in this alien light, almost like those objects in video games that want to be noticed. As I turned my head, the cracks and their illumination moved with me.

“Footprints.” Glistening like a slug’s trail, the footprints started in the middle of the pavement, carried on a few yards, then veered across the road toward the hospital. The worm’s latest host? They were heading in the right direction, so I followed them.

I walked through a covered entrance, beneath bright rainbow colors, through sliding glass doors, and into the hospital’s foyer. The trail pointed to a man in an overcoat, standing vacantly about five yards from the wide arc of the reception desk. Even as I watched, he began to shake.

“It’s in my head!” he shrieked, clawing at his face before falling to the ground.

Security, nurses, concerned public, and at least one doctor all converged on him as the public, whose concern was more selfish, drew back like a retreating tide, drawing stray children with them.

I started forward only to see a single nurse retreating from the huddle at speed, and in her wake, glistening footprints.

Without the distraction it’s likely that I would have been challenged before I could head up the stairs, but with all eyes on the drama in the foyer, I was able to follow the nurse as she clattered up the underused steps, avoiding the crowds waiting for the lifts.

Fortunately for me the worm appeared to know exactly where it was heading and not to have considered that anyone might be following it. I kept pace, not starting to pant until the fourth floor. The nurse’s ponytail bobbed relentlessly, always a flight of stairs ahead of me. I found myself hoping that the poor woman would survive the parasite’s exit a lot better than Director Smith had.

I followed her out into the corridors of the fifth floor, past playrooms and waiting areas and orderlies with trollies and cleaners and parents and children and other nurses. We came via three left turns, two right turns, and four sets of double fire doors to a quiet corridor that seemed more dimly lit, and where my new additional lighting caught for the first time on other fractures in the air.

The nurse, a pleasant-looking woman in her thirties, stopped at a door halfway along and reached for the handle. She turned as she went in, casting a look my way. One eye widened at the sight of me, the other, bloodshot, was already as wide as it could go. The hiss she gave before throwing herself into the room was somewhere between angry serpent and angry cat.

I reached the door while she was still trying to brace it against me. I could see her head bent toward her purpose through the door’s window.

I didn’t bother shouting or making threats. I’d seen a man explode, most of his insides splattering me. I’d put a bunch of worrying cracks in reality that were following me around. Barging a door open into a nurse’s face didn’t seem that big a deal in context.

She ended up on the floor, hissing and bucking as if she was having a fit, or as if the worm had forgotten it was wearing a human. I stepped clear and stared at the girl in the bed. She had tubes and wires in place, monitors above her head displaying her vitals, but none of that stopped me knowing her immediately. I’d known it since I saw the hospital sign. Known it all the way up all those stairs. Rose Penrose. Dead to the world, but not quite dead.

Despite the National Health Service’s chemical cleanliness and shiny floors, there was something about the room. The cards. The withered flowers. Something that said Rose had been here a long time. A very long time. And nobody expected anything to change.

I looked away from Rose, unwilling to leave the worm to its own devices, which might well be biting off my foot. The nurse lay still now, clear, greenish slime drooling from her slack mouth. Stepping around her, I discovered a wormhole in the floor behind her. The worm might have considered itself up to smothering a vacant body, but clearly I’d knocked the fight out of it.

There’s something about things running away that makes us want to give chase. An appeal to the hunter, or the bully perhaps. But there’s also an urge not to lose track of something horrible. Who lets a big spider crawl beneath their pillow and just shrugs—well, that’s gone. I couldn’t just let the worm wriggle free. It would be back, and unless I wanted to camp out in Rose’s room for the next few years, how else could I protect her?

I hit the big red button that brings all the medics racing. There’s one next to every hospital bed. Rose might not need them, but the nurse surely did. Then, without giving myself time to think about the consequences, I jumped down the hole, arms pointed above my head so I could fit.

Chapter 25

Rose

“Debt?” Rose looked back at the Mechanism where Gar had been imprisoned in a book, seduced into some new role within a story that was not his own. “You only helped me because of a debt?”

Hannah’s face stiffened, and for the first time Rose could see the woman’s age—crow’s feet around her eyes, fine wrinkling on her cheeks. “That’s how magic works. My magic at least. Barter and trade. Balances maintained. I died a long time ago, child. I live only in my writing. I’m too old to change my ways.”

“I’m written too,” Rose said.

“Ah, but you didn’t write yourself. You were written by someone who loved you.”

Rose let out a defeated sigh. “We got the worm man, but where’s Red’s sister? Will he find her where you’ve sent him?”

“Let’s see, shall we?”

Hannah led Rose down a corridor wide enough for half a dozen elephants to walk side by side, and tall enough for each to carry a howdah on its back, with a flagpole set atop it. The walls were plain and gray and smooth like porcelain. No ornament. No flaws.

“What about the worm?” Rose hated to sound as if she was whining…but she was whining, at least a bit. “It only needed Gar on the other side—Red’s side. It can still chase me here.”

“You seem to be outrunning it.” Hannah shrugged.

“But I’m tired…” Once more, she felt like a four-year-old, trailing after the Chimney Woman with endless complaints.