Chevie, who had at least theoretical experience in these situations, cut directly to the important question. ‘There’s always a demand. What is it?’
‘The Injun maid has put her finger on it,’ said Tartan Nancy. ‘They has a demand right enough and a strange one too.’
‘Anything,’ blurted Riley, already forgetting Nancy’s advice that he play his cards close. ‘Anything they want.’
‘They wants you, young fella,’ said Nancy, incredulous at the idea that this stripling could be worth more than shining sovereigns to anybody. ‘You seem like a nice chap, Riley, but I offered twenty sovs. I opened with twenty.’
Chevie’s soldier sense buzzed and something told her there was more going on here than a simple pay-off.
‘I don’t like it. How does this Lurker guy even know that you exist, Riley?’
Riley was not interested. ‘What do they want of me, Nance?’
‘Your person. In the cell. They will talk only to you.’
‘No,’ said Chevie. ‘Absolutely not. If Riley goes in there, he isn’t coming out.’
‘Once again, the Injun is spot on,’ said Nancy, looking Chevie up and down. ‘You ever think of apprenticing in the wheedle trade, miss? Your exotic appearance could be a real boon, throw the customers off balance. Perhaps you would consider a scatter of facial tattoos?’
‘Thanks for the offer, Nancy,’ said Chevie. ‘However, let’s concentrate on today. Purely in terms of bargaining power, it would be disastrous to let Riley into that prison.’
‘That is true,’ admitted Tartan Nancy. ‘But they is not giving a smidge on that front. It’s the boy Riley in the box, or go to blazes and the ginger fella swings.’
Riley squared his shoulders and frowned his best determined face. ‘I have to do it, Chevron. There ain’t no other way.’
Chevie thought that her friend’s determined face was pretty effective, and one look at it made it clear that his mind was not for changing.
‘ OK, pal. But if you’re going in there I’m going with you.’
Nancy wagged the pipe stem. ‘Just the boy, Maccabee said. And him alone.’
Chevie swatted the objection aside with her palm. ‘Yeah, well, Maccabee is going to have to learn to live with disappointment. This is a negotiation, isn’t it, Nancy? Give and take? Well, I’m going in there, so you can take that, put it in your pipe and smoke it.’
Nancy snorted appreciatively. ‘Strong tone. Good posture, not a sign of a bluff. If you makes it out of the Gate alive, girl, come see me. You’re a born wheedler.’
A born wheedler.
Chevie did not know whether to be flattered or insulted. She would, she decided, not worry about it as she was in a coma after all.
A born wheedler?
Which dark corner of her unconscious had that one come from?
Please, doctor, she broadcast as she followed Tartan Nancy towards the prison. Now would be a good time to resuscitate me.
Tartan Nancy Grimes led them quickly through the throng to the prison gate. Such was her grease in the Gate that the guards parted before her without so much as a challenge to the identity of her company and with only the most cursory of searches, for it was in everyone’s interest, from cook to warden, that Nancy’s commerce proceed unhindered.
They passed through a wrought-iron gate and then a reinforced door, both of which clanged ominously behind them, and Chevie could not help but worry that this was a one-way trip for Riley and herself, and the triple gibbet she had heard about would be full to capacity by morning.
Calm yourself, she thought. You have done nothing wrong.
It was, she realized, becoming difficult to hang on to the coma theory with the black stone of Newgate Prison closing in on all sides.
Riley must have noticed the anxious sheen on her brow as he sidled closer and whispered, ‘Fret not, Chev. These locks are cake to me. I got jemmies in me hair.’
Cake locks and jemmies?
Maybe it was a coma, after all.
Onwards they strode, hurrying to keep pace with Tartan Nancy’s pneumatic stride. She might have been a steam engine with the pipe as her funnel.
Nancy spoke as she walked, and the wheedler’s words drifted over her shoulder encased in puffs of smoke.
‘I’ll do the talking, boy.’
‘Yes,’ said Riley obediently. ‘Not a peep out of me.’
‘And no bawling neither,’ added Nancy. ‘As far as Lurky Boots is concerned, you don’t give much of a fig for this Tom fella. You is only here outta family duty, see?’
‘I see,’ said Riley. ‘Not a fig does I give.’
‘That way we keeps the price low.’
In truth, it was for keeping the price low that Riley did not give a fig. He would gladly fork over the last gold sovereign from Albert Garrick’s ill-gotten stash to see Tom free, but he knew better than to express this opinion to a wheedler like Tartan Nancy, as the shock could set her bell ringing, so to speak, and nobody wanted that in an enclosed space.
The corridor opened on to the main yard, where prisoners shambled about in fetters if they had not the price to have them struck off. Many of the interned lolled around the gate, scratching at festering blisters, their time served but without the exit fee demanded by the system. Each year many men and women died inside Newgate because they couldn’t scrape together the shilling to get out. The sounds and smells were cacophonous, overpowering and uniformly in the negative. Even the famously buoyant Cockney spirit could not stay afloat in such an environment.
I don’t belong here, thought Chevie, feeling the horror and historic grimness of the place push her close to panic. This is not my time.
In truth, nobody on earth belonged in Newgate, and Newgate did not belong anywhere on earth.
Mercifully, Nancy did not lead them through the yard but turned with marching-band precision into a doorway, marked out from the wall only by a marginally darker shade of gloom, and disappeared into the shadows beyond. Riley picked up his pace and Chevie had little option but to follow, even though her Quantico training buzzed in her skull like a trapped bee at the notion of waltzing into the black unknown, especially since her night vision was one of the qualities she seemed to have lost in the wormhole.
Chevie had noticed over the past few days that this latest jaunt through the time tunnel had affected her in many ways. Nothing big yet – no dinosaur parts – but she was a changed person. Her hearing was not as sharp as it had been and the chevron tattoo on her shoulder had become a straight-edged birthmark. She found running a little awkward and would swear that one leg was half an inch longer than it used to be. And the latest thing on her growing list of mutations was that a couple of times a day, though only for a second or two, she would swear that she had X-ray vision.
Dear Professor Charles Xavier, she thought. I am writing to you because I think I have what it takes to join the X-Men academy …
Curiouser and curiouser.
And then there were the headaches.
But later for these thoughts.
Now for surviving.
The dark swallowed them and Chevie made herself focus because, whether or not the coma theory was sound, everyone knew that if you died in your dreams you died in your bed too.
Dream deaths are just a wake-up call for people who aren’t ever waking up.
Which made zero sense.
Chevie disguised a bitter laugh as a cough. Sense? How long had it been since anything made sense?
Chevie realized that she and Riley were holding hands, and not in a young-love kind of way, which would have been weird, but in a white-knuckled, I-want-to-make-sure-my-friend-is-beside-me kind of way.
The poor kid doesn’t even know he’s dragging me along, she realized. That’s how much he wants to see his half-brother.
Chevie understood. What would she not do for one more day with her dad? One more shared bottle of orange cream soda?
Two straws, one bottle.
That had been their th
ing. Then a single spark in a leaky Harley gas tank and it was all over.
One in a million, the highway-patrol cop who’d come to their little Malibu home had told her. I ain’t never seen nuthin’ like it, miss.
One in a million, thought Chevie now. Those kinds of odds seem to beat me all the time.
But back to the prison corridor: Tartan Nancy, deadly danger and so on and so forth.
Nancy stormed ahead with the confident stride of the powerful or the bluffer, and Chevie wanted to call after her: Slow down. Don’t be so eager.
For they had no way of knowing what awaited them in that room. Whoever this Lurker guy was, he wanted something from Riley, something worth turning down cold hard cash for.
Chevie ran through the possibilities while they walked.