Chapter SevenSt Brendan's

The Halliday junction was full of hounds.

I'd known it would be. It was where Faisal had lost us just after three that morning, where the lights had gone out and the things had come up out of the road. But knowing it and seeing it are different. From the passenger seat of Medic Fourteen, through the hole where the windscreen used to be, I counted eleven of them before I made myself stop. Grey, wet, too long in the back, prowling between the stalled cars like dogs in a scrapyard. Every one of them had Hollow Hound floating over its head, and some of the numbers were bigger than two.

"Right," said Jonah. "Hold on to something."

"Jonah..."

"Rook said go through. We're going through."

He put his foot down.

Medic Fourteen is a big, boxy, diesel-drinking ambulance with a reinforced front, built to push through traffic. It had never been asked to push through hounds. It did it anyway. The first one went under the bumper with a thud I felt in my teeth. The second bounced off the bonnet and spun away. Behind us, Rook's crew came running through the gap we'd made, Marcus at the front with his shield up and Kieran at the back, walking backwards, knives out.

The third hound came through the windscreen hole.

It got as far as the dashboard. Then Dez, in the back, put his arm round its neck from behind and held on. It thrashed. Its jaws snapped a hand's width from my face. I could smell it, wet stone and old pennies, exactly like the first one.

"Steve," I said, and pulled my shears off my belt.

Under the jaw. Where the vessels run. I knew exactly where to go this time, and I didn't need luck, and the hound went still across the dashboard with its tongue out.

+1, said the System, and then, a little embarrassed, held.

Jonah drove the rest of the way across the junction with a dead hound on the dashboard, and didn't say a word about it until we were out the other side.

"That's twice," he said. "Twice in one day, that's a dead dog in my front seat."

"Sorry."

"Never mind sorry. Get it off."

Dez got it off. He'd been bitten on the forearm doing it, a deep bite, already bleeding through his sleeve. I closed it at the next corner while Jonah waited. +20. Held.

"Your hands all right?" Dez asked, watching me.

"They work." They did, now. The feeling had come back properly an hour ago, sitting on the stairs at Gale Street while Sam told me, again and again, everything he could remember about his mum's coat. "I'm saving the big one."

"For what?"

"I don't know yet. That's the problem."

Sam had wanted to come. Of course he had. He'd stood at the door of the radio room with his fists clenched exactly like Lily's in the cot, and said, very reasonably, that it was his mum and he knew what her coat looked like and I didn't.

"Long green parka," I'd said. "Fur on the hood, but the fake kind, and a bit of it's missing on the left because your dog chewed it. Pink pyjamas with clouds. Hair in a clip. You told me on the stairs."

He'd stared at me. "You remembered all that?"

"I'm a paramedic. Remembering things about people is literally the job." I'd crouched in front of him. "I need you here, with Mrs Adeyemi, so that when I bring her back you're the first thing she sees. Can you do that?"

He'd thought about it. You could tell.

"Bring her back," he'd said finally, as if he was handing me something to carry.

---

St Brendan's is older than Harbour General. It's a long Victorian building of red brick, with a clock tower in the middle and a modern A&E stuck on the front, all glass and steel, as if someone had tried to give it a new face and given up halfway.

The doors were open.

Both sets. The automatic doors of the A&E had slid back and stayed back, and beyond them the waiting room was lit and still. No moths. No lullaby. No soft, kind voice on the PA. Nothing at all.

We stood on the pavement in a little group and looked at it.

"I don't like that," Dez said.

"You don't like anything," said Priya.

"I liked the trolley thing. Nice and simple. Big bucket. On fire." He didn't take his eyes off the doors. "This isn't simple."

Rook had come because the hospital was on the way to Westfield Bridge. He'd said so at Gale Street, in front of everyone, in the voice of a man explaining why he'd done something sensible, and nobody had believed him for a second. He stood at the front now with his sledgehammer on his shoulder and looked at the open doors the way he'd looked at Ward 2, working out what it would cost.

"Floor boss," he said. "Must be."

"Then why isn't it talking?" Priya said. "Ours wouldn't shut up."

Nobody had an answer to that.

We left Jonah with the ambulance, engine running. As I looked back he was rubbing his temple again, slowly, with two fingers, the way you do when a headache has been there so long you've stopped noticing it. I told myself I'd look at it later. Then we went in.

---

The waiting room was full of people.

They were standing up. Twenty or so of them, spaced out between the rows of plastic chairs, facing different ways. A man in a dressing gown. A woman in a nurse's uniform. An old lady with a walking frame. A security guard in the same black fleece as Dez's. Every one of them was wrapped from shoulders to ankles in grey bandage, tight and neat, and every one of them had their eyes closed.

They were breathing in unison.

I heard Priya's breath catch. I heard Dez say something very quiet that I won't repeat.

"It's the same," I whispered. "It's the same as the children. They're kept."

"Then where's the keeper?" Rook said.

Marcus, who never talked, raised one gloved hand and pointed.

At the far end of the waiting room, past the reception desk, there was a set of double doors marked Lifts and Stairs. As we watched, they swung open, and a hospital trolley rolled through on its own. No. Not on its own. Someone was pushing it. But the someone was very hard to look at. My eyes kept sliding off him, the way your eyes slide off a word you've read too many times.

What I saw, in pieces, was: a porter's uniform, green, too big at the shoulders. Long arms. A clipboard tucked under one of them. And on the trolley, a kept man in a grey wrap, lying perfectly still.

The trolley crossed the back of the waiting room, through another set of doors, and was gone. There was a soft ding from somewhere. A lift.

None of us had moved.

"Where's he taking them?" Kieran whispered.

The answer, when it came, didn't come from any of us.

"Down," said a voice behind the reception desk. "He takes them down."

---

Her name was Dr Inês Ferreira. She was twenty-eight, an F2 doctor on her first A&E rotation, and she'd been hiding in the pharmacy behind reception for eight hours with a cleaner called Ray, a fire axe and the controlled-drugs cupboard. When she came out from behind the desk, she had the axe in both hands. When she saw my uniform, she put it down and burst into tears.

"Sorry," she said. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I thought you were... I thought nobody was coming."

"Me too," I said. "I mean, I thought that too. Earlier. About us." I am not good at comforting doctors. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Ray is."

Ray was in the pharmacy, sitting on the floor with his back to the drugs fridge. He was in his sixties, in a blue tabard, and his right hand was wrapped in a tea towel that had been white once. The Porter had caught it, Ferreira said, when Ray had tried to pull a patient back off a trolley at about five o'clock. Something in those long fingers had gone through Ray's palm like a staple gun.

I took the tea towel off. It was bad. Not Critical. But the wound was deep and dirty, and it was six hours old, and the hand was swollen to twice its size.

"I'm going to touch it," I said. "It's going to hurt."

"Everything hurts, love," Ray said. "Crack on."

I cracked on. Pressure Point, one point at a time, pushing the dirt out and closing it from the inside. Ray swore steadily, without repeating himself, which I respected. +20. Held. When I'd finished he flexed his fingers and looked at his palm for a long while.

"I've been a cleaner here thirty-one years," he said. "Never seen anything like that."

"Neither have I," I said. "And I've only been anything for three weeks."

Ferreira told us the rest while Priya and Kieran watched the doors.

It had started at three-twelve, same as everywhere. The countdown, the chime. Then, a few minutes later, everyone in the building had just stopped. Patients, nurses, doctors, porters, visitors. They'd stood up wherever they were and closed their eyes, and the grey had come up out of the floor and wrapped them.

"Not me," Ferreira said. "Not Ray. We were in here, in the pharmacy, doing the controlled-drugs check. The door's steel. I think that's why." She swallowed. "I don't know why. I don't know anything."

"Then the Porter came," I said.

"About four." She looked at the floor. "He came up from the basement and started taking them. One at a time. He's very gentle. That's the worst part. He checks the wristband. He writes on his clipboard. He lifts them onto the trolley and wheels them away, and they never come back up. Every twenty minutes or so. All night. All morning."

I did the maths, and didn't want to. Every twenty minutes since four. Twenty-odd people.

"Did a woman come in?" I said. "About half three. Blonde, coat over pyjamas. Looking for her son."

"Yes," she said slowly. "She came in through the main doors, shouting a name. Sam. I saw her on the CCTV." She pointed at the little monitor on the pharmacy wall, which showed a grainy picture of the waiting room. "I shouted for her to come in here. She didn't hear me. Everyone else was already wrapped by then. She walked straight past them, shouting, through to the wards to look for him." Ferreira's voice dropped. "On the last camera, she just stopped walking."

When I stood up to go, Ferreira stood up too, and picked up the axe.

"I'm coming," she said.

"You don't have to."

"I've been sitting behind a steel door for eight hours watching people get taken away on a monitor." Her hands were shaking. She held the axe tighter until they stopped. "I'm a doctor. Apparently. I'd like to do something a doctor would do."

"Okay," I said. "Stay next to Dez. He's good at being stood next to."

---

We went into the wards.

It was the only plan any of us had, and it wasn't really a plan. Find Claire Teague before the Porter does. Rook didn't argue. I noticed that. He just took the front, with Marcus, and checked every doorway the way he'd checked the corridors at Harbour General, and didn't once mention the bridge.

On the stairs to the second floor, I caught up with him.

"What's her name?" I said.

He didn't pretend not to know who I meant. "Ava."

"Fourteen."

"Fourteen in March. She thinks I'm an idiot. She's mostly right." He took the next three steps in silence. "She does this thing when she's angry with me. She goes very calm and very polite, like a receptionist. That's fine, Dad. Everything's fine. Means it isn't." His hand tightened on the sledgehammer. "Her mum's flat is two streets back from Westfield Bridge. Third floor. I could see the building from the car park at Harbour General, if I stood on a wall."

"You stood on a wall."

"Every half hour."

I didn't say sorry. I'd learned that much from him. I said, "After this, we'll look at the bridge. Properly. All of us."

He gave me a look I couldn't read. "You don't owe me that, Okafor."

"I know. That's not why."

The wards were the same as the waiting room. People standing, wrapped, breathing together. I looked at every face. I couldn't help it. A man with a beard. A girl younger than Priya. A nurse with her hair in a bun, her name badge still clipped to her uniform under the grey: Siobhan, Staff Nurse. All of them breathing in, all of them breathing out.

On the second floor, Priya stopped.

"Mo," she said. "Look at the windows."

I looked. Through the tall Victorian windows, you could see across the rooftops to the river and, beyond it, Westfield. The sky clock was hanging over the city, white and calm. 65:28.

But that wasn't what she meant.

As we watched, a kept woman on the far side of the ward, near the window, lifted gently off the floor, as if the air had taken her weight. The Porter was standing beside her. I hadn't seen him arrive. Nobody had. My eyes slid off him, again and again, like a hand off ice. He checked her wristband, wrote something on his clipboard, and lowered her onto his trolley, and pushed it away towards the lifts, humming.

Something cold went through the back of my head.

City integrity: 61% → 58%

It was only one line. It didn't tell me anything else. It didn't need to.

"Mo?" Dez said. "What is it?"

"I think he's not just taking them," I said. "I think he's taking them out. Out of the city, somehow. Out of whatever's keeping it together." I swallowed. "Every trolley, the city gets a bit smaller."

Rook looked at me sharply. "You can see that?"

"I can see a number."

"What number?"

"Fifty-eight per cent."

He didn't ask fifty-eight per cent of what. His jaw went tight, and he turned and looked out of the window, across the river, at Westfield, for a long second.

Then he turned back and said, "Find the boy's mother. Fast."

We split. I know you're not supposed to split. I said we should do it anyway, and nobody argued, and that was on me: two by two, Dez with me, because Ferreira had said the Porter came every twenty minutes and the twenty minutes were already running.

Dez and I took the east corridor. Side rooms, single beds, a day room with a television still on, showing nothing but blue. I looked at every face.

She was in the last room, by the window.

I knew her before I'd seen her face. I knew the coat. It was a long green parka, pulled on over pink pyjamas, exactly as Sam had told me seven times on the stairs at Gale Street. It had been wrapped in grey along with the rest of her, but the hood stuck out at the top, and a bit of the pink showed at the ankles.

Claire Teague. Sam's mum. Standing at the window, looking out towards the river with her eyes closed, breathing in time with every other kept person in the building.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, there you are."

I went to her. Of course I did. I'd promised Sam. This was the part where I kept it. I reached for the grey wrap at her shoulder, the way I'd reached for Lily's at the Children's Wing, ready to tear.

Then I saw her hands.

They hung at her sides, outside the wrap, pale and still. They were the wrong length. A centimetre, maybe two. But her fingers were too long for her palms, and too thin, and the nails had gone grey and narrow, like the nails on a hound's paw.

As I watched, very slowly, they got a little longer.