One

Jane woke in the night and he was crying silently. Candles burned in their makeshift bedroom, a small kitchen in which the erstwhile staff could have taken their breaks and eaten lunch. He could hear Becky breathing next to him; she held a swatch of blanket tight in one fist. Plessey's snores carried from the heart of the shop; he seemed to complement the creased, tired things that surrounded him. Jane could imagine him always being here, gradually melding with the furnishings and knick-knacks to the point where he would be camouflaged by them.

He had dreamed of sitting in Plessey's office chair, the crystal radio assembled before him, switched on. It had hummed with potential; even the valves unconnected to the body, strewn across the workbench, had glowed with some arcane intent. He touched the rod to the tightly coiled copper wire and at every contact there exploded from the amplifier a terrible screech, the unselfconscious cry of a child in danger, scared and hurt, a boy with death only seconds away from him.

'Stanley,' Jane called, even though there was no transmitter. 'Stan, it's me. It's Dad. Tell me where you are and I'll come for you. Tell me where you are. Please.'

Stanley kept screaming. The sound of something familiar in the background, a weird, metallic, percussive beat. Each time Stanley paused for choking breath Jane heard it, a spastic, robotic infill. He realised with a euphoric pang that he was with the others at the beach, waiting to board the raft. In two days he could be reunited with his boy. He was dressing hurriedly, trying to pack his bag in poor light, wishing Stanley would stop screaming, calm down, say something, when the nature of the screams changed. If anything, they grew even more frantic. The hammering had stopped, or rather it had lost its metallic beat. Now it had increased its tempo but it was landing on something far less resistant that metal or wood. Jane stopped rushing around and dropped to his knees. He covered his ears but Stanley was behind them and even by the time he had begun to realise it was a dream it wouldn't release him.

He woke up much later. Plessey was gluing pieces of wood together, a box to protect his precious radio. Becky was helping with another batch of batteries, throwing the ones encrusted with salt into a metal waste-paper basket. She was doing it with enough force to suggest she wasn't fully engrossed in the task.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, 'did I wake you? How thoughtless of me.'

'I was awake anyway,' Jane said, levering himself upright. 'You forget that most of my working life I slept through worse noises than that. Once, a friend of mine called Carver was beating sheet metal for two hours not six feet away from my sleeping head. I didn't even change position.'

His voice faltered at the utterance of the word 'beating' and both Becky and Plessey caught it, shooting him a look. But nobody asked any more; everybody had nightmares. Everyone had something that stuck in their craw.

'The others, they'll want a demonstration,' Jane said, 'before we can even think about planning an exodus.' He stood up and began to get dressed.

'I'll nip over to HQ later today,' he said, and Jane thought, Yeah, right. Nip on up to Heathrow. It'll take you the best part of a day.

To Becky, Jane said, 'We should try some of Aidan's haunts. See if we can find out why he's not turned up for so long.'

Becky went back to her batteries. 'If Aidan likes it so much here then I'd rather be around when he turns up. I think I'll stay here for a while, if that's OK with Daniel.'

That Plessey didn't look at her when she said this told Jane it was already a done deal.

'Of course, my dear,' said Plessey.

Becky nodded. 'I've decided.'

'All right,' Jane said. 'And if I find Aidan I'll bring him over here, yes?'

'He's not my son, Richard,' she snapped, and flung a battery more forcibly into the bin. 'I'd prefer it if you stopped trying to compensate for . . . for . . .' She broke off. Her shoulders hunched; she put her head in her hands and began gently to shake.

Jane left her like that, unable to cope with her sudden change of mood. Plessey caught up with him just as he cleared the buffer of razor wire. Something had been in the market the previous night. Clothes and bones and almost an entire human skin were spread across the hall. The signs of a scuffle were drying into the poured-concrete floor, along with human blood, Skinner blood, Jane wasn't sure. It was black, there was a lot of it. A familiar sight, a familiar smell.

'She's a little raw, Richard,' Plessey said, taking in the devastation. Out of his cosy bolt-hole and with his balaclava off for the first time since Jane had known him he looked too pale, waxy. His hair was a beige scrim grafted onto a sweating pate. 'Aidan . . . it's not that she doesn't care. You can see that she does. But—'

'But she fears the worst.'

'I think so. I think that's the case, yes.'