One

'Plessey, I've been fearing the worst for the past ten years. But it's the not knowing that's the killer.'

'I'll pass that on,' he said. 'That will help, I'm sure. She'll come round, eventually. She's strong. People like her don't give up easily.'

Jane looked away, in the direction of Commercial Street. He thought there was trust, some love, even, between himself and Becky, but her dismissal of him, her preference for Plessey's nostalgic comforts indicated that there was no space for sentiment now. You took what comfort you could from people and you moved on. He supposed it was a kind of evolution. He would learn from it.

'What about you?' Plessey asked him. 'Where are you going?'

'I'll see if I can find Aidan at my Library.'

'You're carrying on with that pointless job? When we've got this cause for hope gifted us?'

'We have to make the effort,' Jane said, not believing it for a second. 'It's the decent thing to do. Some of us want to carry on. Some of us want to keep busy.'

He didn't mean it as a slight but he didn't doubt that was how Plessey would take it. 'Let me know what the Shaded think of the broadcasts,' Jane added. He started for the road, then thought of something. 'Plessey, one thing. The Skinners. Could they intercept those signals? Understand them?' As soon as the question was out he thought it witless. Of course they couldn't understand; they didn't speak, they moved as though they had the brains of dinosaurs. They were driven only by hunger. But something in Plessey's expression spoke of his not having even considered this possibility. Now he seemed to, and he began to shake his head, but the gesture was without conviction. They stared at each other, Plessey halted by the razor wire, his skin sickly white against the dark tweed of his jacket, a vampire in hawthorn.

19. FOETAL ECHO

The Library was wherever you wanted it to be. Jane liked to take his journals with him to Trafalgar Square. If the rain had paused he might climb to the top of the ENO building and sit under the dead neon letters of its tower, looking south past the amorphous, dissolving statue of Nelson on his column towards the great roads of Whitehall and The Mall. You could write anything as long as it was connected with the Event. Your experiences, fears, hopes. You were encouraged to write about what you knew of the Skinners, and the way they made you feel: reportage as therapy. You could write about how they killed, if you were up to it, or more prosaically, what your work had consisted of since you last were the Librarian. But you only had one day on the job. Someone had decreed, some psychologist manqué, that it was too damaging to dwell for any longer on the agonies of how you got here and what might yet come. There was a greater likelihood of burn-out this way, it was argued, than there was in cleansing the city of its corpses.

The words were designed to be a gift to whoever came after. A warning and a set of guidelines. How to survive. Parallel to Jane's Event work (he usually wrote diary entries expanded from brief notes he made at the end of each day), he continued with his letter to Stanley. He guessed it must be around five thousand pages long now. All of these he kept in a series of fireproof suitcases in the boardroom of a boutique hotel in Covent Garden, fully intending to pass them on to his son one day.

Aidan liked it up here too. But he was not on the rooftop today. Jane looked out across the ceiling of London but could spot no other figure. The possibility that Aidan had been taken was strong, but he doubted it, somehow. Aidan had grown to be a tough, resourceful young man, despite his sickliness. He knew places to hide that Jane would ordinarily have walked right by. He could melt away like shadows on a cloudy day.

The skies around London had lost definition. Where once there had been a strange miasmal fog as black as sea-coal and thick mammatus hanging from the base of vast storm clouds, and the teasing of crepuscular rays suggesting that the sun still hung beyond and had not forsaken the planet, there was now a featureless blanket. The cloud was not leaving, merely retreating into the heights, as if aghast at the behaviour of what lay beneath it. It was becoming dangerous now to travel across the city's ceiling. The persistent hungry rain had eaten away the waterproof outer layers and was tucking into less resistant parts of the rooftops. Already some older, less well-tended buildings had collapsed. Some of the warehouses on the banks of the Thames that had missed out on renovation were now little more than scruffy lines of brick dust on the wharves and dockyards nestling against the river. Fires were still breaking out in some buildings as gas pipes corroded and released pockets of fuel. Jane had been close enough to an explosion in a pizza restaurant in Waterloo East some years previously to have felt the ends of his beard crisp.