Vicious Circle

She sat me down, in a way that was impossible to resist, and then went and sat back down again herself on the other side of the desk. She handled nuance like a ninja: the greeting had been friendly and personal, but once I was sitting down this was a formal visit, too, and she could appeal to the book—regretfully, full of apologies—whenever she had to.

“I’ve dropped in a few times,” I said, “but you’re never around.”

She nodded, still smiling. “Yes, I heard. I was beginning to wonder if you were avoiding me on purpose. But here you are.”

Yeah. Here I was.

“So how’s it all going?” I asked, on the grounds that “I need to talk to Rosie, so hello and good-bye” might have seemed a little on the abrupt side.

Jenna-Jane shrugged modestly. “The unit’s still growing,” she said. “We’ve got a fine faculty now. A lot of genuine highfliers who’ve graduated from the European schools and come here to find out how it’s really done. I don’t think you’d recognize the names, because you’ve never been all that interested in the literature, but believe me when I say there are university proctors in Germany and America who spit when they hear my name.”

“I believe you, J.J.,” I assured her, meaning it.

She made a sour face.

“Please don’t use that nickname, Felix,” she said. “You know how I feel about it. So yes, things here are excellent. It’s such a strong team now, we’ve got to the point where they won’t be needing me anymore.” Her eyes gleamed as she said this: even as a joke, she couldn’t quite get that one out without an edge to it. As if she’d ever let go of her little empire without a good sprinkling of blood and hair on the walls.

“On the acquisitions side,” she went on smoothly, “we’ve got three loup-garous—including one who’s able to possess and shape insect hosts. The identical twin zombies from Edinburgh are with us now: that was quite a battle, but I was able to prove to the hospital board that we could offer them a higher standard of care. We can also chart their decay molecule by molecule with the CAT imagers, and see how far it follows a parallel course in the two different cadavers.”

“Unless the dead rights bill gets through its third reading,” I said. I couldn’t resist; it was too pat a straight line.

J.J. didn’t go for the stick, though. She passed her hand through the air in front of her face, pushing the unwelcome topic effectively to the sidelines. “I know a lot of people in Westminster, Felix,” she told me. “There’s no way the bill is going to pass. Not in this form, and not in this session. It would be chaos. Oh yes, eventually some measure of legal status will be accorded to the dead. There’s already talk of bringing me in as a consultant on the next bill, after this one hits the rocks.”

I almost laughed at that. Could we consult you on this sheep problem, Professor Wolf? Instead, I said, “So you think it’ll be voted out?”

“Timed out,” said J.J., with just a hint of malevolent satisfaction. “They’ve only set aside two days for the debate, and there are forty-seven amendments coming down from the Lords. The government won’t invoke the Parliament Act for something this contentious, so they’ll run out of time and shelve it until the winter session. And then the process will begin again with even less momentum. Trust me, this will run and run. And when they do finally agree on legislation, it will be drafted in a form that allows us to carry on with our work without fear of legal challenges. That, in fact, will be one of the primary desiderata of any act: the government doesn’t want anything to tie their hands at this point.”

“Which point would that be, Jenna-Jane?”

“The point where the dead have begun to rise in uncountable numbers, and when it’s starting to look as though the demons of hell are herding them.”

I shrugged. It was a theory, like any other: I’d heard them all in my time. “I thought the demons went wherever they got a whiff of fresh food.”

“I know what you think, Felix. We’ve discussed it on several occasions. You have a dangerous tendency—in my view—to underestimate the potential threat that the dead pose. In the past, that tendency was tempered by your professionalism: your ability to ignore all irrelevant avenues while you were working on a specific task. From what I hear, though, there’s been a certain . . . erosion of that quality in recent months.”

She was looking at me closely, appraisingly. She paused, as if she expected me to respond to the allegation.

“It’s good to know that you’re still taking an interest in me,” I said blandly.

“Always, Felix. Always.”

“Listen, Jenna-Jane.” I was trailing the field in the small-talk stakes, so I might as well cut to the chase. “I need to speak to Rosie. There’s something I want to ask her about.”