 
## The Children  
of the City

by

## H.T. Zetter

copyright © H.T. Zetter 2012  
This edition first published at Smashwords
**  
**Contents

**  
**Chapter 1 **  
**Chapter 2 **  
**Chapter 3 **  
**Chapter 4 **  
**Chapter 5 **  
**Chapter 6 **  
**Chapter 7 **  
**Chapter 8 **  
**Chapter 9 **  
**Chapter 10 **  
**

There are towers.

In the shadows of the towers, the city is without limit.

Endlessly repeating chapters that spread forever onwards, each a different mix of buildings mapped onto a grid-network of streets. Each containing at its heart a smoking tower and positioned always three blocks south, an education centre. Only the river that meanders through the city from unknown source to unknown mouth, the hill above the marketplace and the marble-white complex, above all the marble-white complex, are not mirrored throughout the urban sprawl.

The city is without children.

Except that every citizen is a child of the city. The council is the great patriarch to them all. But in the gardens of the city, in its streets, on its riverbanks, there are no sounds of childish play. The city's largest department store is stocked full with council-approved goods. Inside, citizens between shifts or on lunch breaks browse amongst fields of identical fashions and appliances and utensils. An inexpressive building stands next to the department store. It is education centre four. The children sit at neatly ordered rows of desks, eat at neatly ordered rows of tables and sleep in neatly ordered rows of beds. They have never seen their parents. At birth, babies are taken from the mother to an incubator. Vast rows of new life that are then assigned to an education centre in which they grow. Families are strictly forbidden.

The city is without history.

Along the city's roads, trucks rumble, laden with documents gathered from the collection bins. They are to be delivered to the storage silos and sorting office in the marble-white complex. The sorting office sluices and channels the documents into those to be archived and those to be destroyed. The written record of every life in the city is sorted. What would, if left unchecked, settle eventually into the strata of history. The council carefully cleanses history from the consciousness of the citizens. Only a little is archived. The vast majority of what comes in off the trucks is sent on to be crushed and packed, and then incinerated. History burns in the towers.

The city is without crime.

Guided by the council, untroubled by history, the populace identifies with the city. It is the city. It is the same vast, ordered perfection. One could no sooner commit a crime against another than he could against himself. Collectively the mind of the populace is perfect. Localised anomalies are quietly ironed out by the council and the city accepts that this is so. Individual minds can sometimes go awry, it is the way of things. But the combined mind is constant. The city believes in this faith.

The city is without a true concept of the past or of the future. The city simply is.

In the shadows of the towers, in the streets of the city, there is nothing but unblemished order.

*

Lazarus Cave turned away from the twelfth-floor window where he had stood naked, watching the sun break slowly over the eastern horizon. He padded heavily across the living room, flicking the switch on the kettle as he passed the counter dividing it from the kitchenette. In the bathroom, cold linoleum stuck to his feet, still clammy from the night's sleep. He lifted the lid of the toilet bowl and urinated loudly into the still water below. The large mirror above the bath caught his profile. He studied himself critically. At forty-seven his physical prime had long since deserted him. It showed its absence in a few extra pounds around the middle, a slight droop to the muscles around his breast and arms due to lack of use, a receding hairline which was accentuated by the way he swept his hair back and away from his forehead. The only thing moving in the whole composition was the golden stream of piss. And then that too ceased.

In the bedroom the carpet was old and did not quite fit snugly to the skirting board in places. Cave took a pair of scissors from a drawer and snipped at the beginnings of a frayed edge that threatened to disturb the neat order.

Outside apartment blocks rose from the carpet of the city. Above them, the towers stretched towards the sky. In the centre of the city, the tallest tower of them all from which the others radiated outwards, one in each chapter, soared heavenwards from the middle of the marble-white complex that housed the city council.

Cave opened his wardrobe. Half of it was filled with freshly-pressed blue shirts, the other half with crisp white ones. Below them, pairs of black trousers were arrayed on hangers. Cave selected a shirt and trousers and dressed himself. In front of the mirror on the chest he looped his tie and slid the knot precisely into place. With cream he slicked his hair back using carefully measured strokes of his comb.

Through the streets of the city citizens moved by droves as they made their way to and from work. The sky above was a pale grey in the early morning sun. The buildings were grey concrete and the murky exhaust fumes from cars filled the greyed tarmac of the roads. The people themselves were grey too. Only the brilliant white of the complex, the egg-yolk yellow sun and the thick greenery on top of the hill to the south-east broke the uniformity.

Cave donned a suit jacket and carefully swept his shoulders with a lint brush. Sitting on the edge of his bed he laced his shoes. Through the bedroom window the tree moved gently in the morning breeze and beyond that stared the blank face of another apartment block. In the kitchen Cave poured water from the kettle into a mug and stirred in coffee granules, taking note of the spidery way in which they dissolved. He blew on the coffee to cool it and gulped it down, screwing his face up at the acrid taste and the fact it burnt his throat as he drank.

He stepped out of the door at the front of the block and into the thrumming efficiency of the morning city. He turned right, walking in the direction of the nearest tower. An old red saloon was parked further down the street. Cave unlocked the door and climbed inside. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. It ticked over methodically for a while as he waited for a security van to make its unhurried way down the road.

The morning traffic was slow but untroubled. The masses of vehicles on the road slipped through the traffic lights, along the city's grid of roads in a controlled formation. The morning commute was an oiled habit and Lazarus Cave relaxed in the worn leather upholstery of the car as he drove. Advertising hoardings decorated the route, huge council-sanctioned images bearing down over the citizens below. Picture-perfect products and messages wallpapering the buildings and combining together to cement the existence of the utopian urban landscape.

At the gated entrance to the council compound Lazarus Cave slowed to a halt, wound down the driver-side window and showed his security pass to the sentry on duty. The sentry's eyes flicked back and forth between the ID photograph clipped to Cave's suit and the face of the man in the car. With an apparently satisfied grunt he opened his mouth to speak and Cave noted in approval the starch in his collar, the closely shaved stubble and the neatly aligned teeth that were displayed as he drew his lips back to form the words. "Thank you, sir. You have a good day now." Cave returned a nod of gratitude and proceeded under the rising barrier, closing the car window as he drove slowly forwards.

In the vast parking lot Cave made his way towards his assigned parking bay. Other cars beetled forwards with the same measured pace. People on foot moved along marked paths. Everything migrating inwards.

Cave parked up and killed the engine. It made mechanical popping sounds as it cooled rapidly in the uncommonly chill summer air. He climbed out and shut the door behind him, bracing himself against the cold. Overhead geese flew in formation, a vee of dark shapes standing out against the dull canvas of the sky. They came in from the southern edge of the complex, appearing from over the crown of the giant immutable oak that stood inside the council grounds and continuing in a straight line until they were lost behind the imposing marble façade of the Civil Security Advisory building.

The throng of staff making their way towards their stations began to disintegrate as it approached the separate buildings that made up the council's administrative body. As groups and bodies flaked off, Cave continued on past the CSA, the urban planning department, the sorting shed and storage silos that dominated the western portion of the complex. He watched as a truck made its way from one of the silos to a chute in the side of the sorting shed. Reversing up to it, the driver raised the rear section, released the tailgate and waited as a white cascade of documents poured down into the hoppers below. To his left the monumental, monolithic tower stretched upwards like a pillar supporting the canopy of the sky, the smoke from its top seamlessly mingling with the clouds. Its shadow in the low morning sun elongated until the tip lay at the revolving glass door of the archives.

Inside the archives the broad lobby was as encased in marble as the outside of the building. Cave strode across the cold floor to the bank of lifts. A tall, thick man in his fifties with a heavily developed paunch and second chin was waiting in front of them, studying the lights as they ticked along the scale of numbers above each set of double doors. He heard Cave's footsteps echo in the marble lobby but kept his eyes focussed on the numbers until he was confident which lift was approaching next. Cave waited for the big man to position himself in front of the correct lift before he spoke. "Morning, Sal."

Sal Bernieri looked at him. "Morning, Larry."

Bernieri was a friend or the closest figure that Cave had to one in the city. He was an amiable man and his slightly lazy appearance belied a warm energy that ran deep within him. He lived a few chapters away from Lazarus, with a woman named Marge, who was herself tall, thick with a heavily developed paunch and second chin. They went well together.

"Marge being good to you?"

The lift arrived. Its doors slid noiselessly open and the two archivists stepped inside. Cave pressed the button for the floor below. Bernieri patted his stomach. "She's up early every day. The woman knows how to cook a good breakfast." He chuckled.

The doors closed and the lift descended. There were three floors of the archives above ground and a further four that stretched below. Two were full of offices. The lower two were the archives themselves, cavernous networks of rooms without apparent limit that contained within them files and documents that formed precise records on every single motion in the city.

Cave had experienced Marge Bernieri's cooking once before, a monumental portion of stew, heavy with dumplings. She had drunk wine, which was unusual for the city. Sal had a glass; Cave didn't drink. The evening had been light and homely. They had discussed relationships, the way they coalesced around the shared faith in the city that ran through the entire populace. The faith that was at the heart of everything. Friendly hours had passed. Cave had asked if they had ever had children and Marge, who would have been talking and talking, fell silent. The Bernieris had shifted uncomfortably. Sal had explained. "Well, you see, truth is, Larry, we don't know. We might have done. It doesn't make sense from the outside – but think about it, the body, it's the only record we really have. We know better than most perhaps, you and me. Everything else is in the archives, or burnt more likely, gone. Your hair, take your hair. It's retreating. Soon it will be even further back." He had paused for a moment then with a smile, "my stomach. It grows. But pregnancy is different – there's a bump and then it's gone. Sooner or later the extra weight goes too. Or it stays and just becomes a part of getting older. Our hips broaden with age too so that becomes inconclusive. And the memories, bit by bit the memory goes. Our pasts are so expertly cleaved away – cleaved away by us, Larry – that we only ever have the bare present. Sure we talk about the past, the future too, we have words for them. But they're gone. And not just past but really gone, buried or burnt, either way they're gone and everything that has been held within them goes with them." He looked strained for a moment and then his normal easy-going demeanour returned. "I mean, I can't even remember how me and Marge got together. We love each other because we love the city. We know we love each other because we always have done. But was there a time when that love was growing? Or when we didn't love each other? Or when we hadn't met? Probably. But then it doesn't exist any more. Not in diaries, in photos. In memories even. So no there wasn't. We're Sal and Marge. The Bernieris. Same with children. Probably. But that doesn't mean anything, not without a past, so no. Even you who knows the archives, who's part of it all won't understand this. But ask any couple and they'll tell you the same. I guarantee it. But don't ask. It's not the done thing."

Cave had not stayed much longer after Sal finished. Marge Bernieri had remained muted until the goodbyes. Sal had reassured him that he had not been out of place and at work he remained warm and jovial but Cave had not been invited back again.

The lift reached the lower ground floor with the softest of jolts as it came to a rest. The lift shaft opened into the middle of a long corridor filled with electric light. Several large ventilators were used to circulate fresh air around the building. Time, which registered only vaguely in the passing of seasons in the city above, in the aging of bodies, down in the archives seemed to cease all existence.

Bernieri and Cave walked part of the way down the corridor and then turned right into a large open-plan office. They made their way to the far corner in front of a glass office with drawn blinds where four cubicles faced each other across low partition boards. Schmitz was already seated diagonally opposite from Cave's desk. Donald Schmitz was a year or two younger than Cave, but smaller and badly balding. The three men exchanged perfunctory greetings.

It was the role of the archivists to curate the endless repository of information that was not burnt. They trawled it ceaselessly, monitoring and making sense of the city around them. On the occasions when there were irregularities in the behaviour of citizens, it was the duty of the archivists to sift through the archives, searching for the strands of information hidden in the vast records that might lead them to an understanding of this behaviour.

*

The table in Landau Krauss' office was long, rectangular and made of dark wood. Seven people sat round it. Cave, Bernieri and Schmitz had been joined by Arthur Camras, the fourth archivist. Camras was somewhere in his thirties, a thin, quiet, precise man. The four of them flanked the table. At one end sat Tess Dalton and Carlos Waites. At the other, Krauss was finishing a one-sided telephone call. The head of the archives was a heavyset man in his sixties with thick gunmetal grey hair. Imposing eyebrows sat atop thin wire-framed spectacles. The others waited for him. At last the voice on the other end of the line ceased. As he returned the telephone to its cradle, Krauss signed off, "yes, councillor, of course. I understand."

He surveyed the group. Cave could see thin lines of strain creased across his brow. The conversation with the councillor had not been a pleasant one. "You all know Carl." As one the table inclined their heads towards Waites. "And Tess, these are my archivists: Sal Bernieri, Larry Cave, Don Schmitz and Arthur Camras." He counted them off in turn. "They'll be supplying the information you need. Tess Dalton joins us from Analysis."

Analysts interpreted the banks of files held within the archives. They differed from archivists in that they modelled vast swathes of information to produce data that described the patterns and behaviours of individuals, groups, sectors, industries, companies. On their computers was a perfect deterministic representation of the city, indistinguishable from the living, breathing physical reality itself. When it came to the city, the analysts were never wrong.

"The council is keen to see that we bring this event to a quick resolution. Carl will brief you in a moment. We know anomalies crop up. We've all seen them before. It's rare. It's even rarer on a serious scale. Mainly clerical errors; gentle hiccoughs. The council guides the people, gentlemen; sometimes there are individuals who seem intent on disrupting the harmony of the people. Carl, please."

Carlos Waites was head of the CSA, a hard-formed man not given to emotion. He leaned forwards and looked down the length of the table. Cave could detect the uncharacteristic nerves as he cleared his throat. "Landau's right. At the CSA we deal with one or two cases a year. Mainly diarists, often loners." He caught Cave's eye and did not look away as quickly as he might have done. "We detect; we deal. History is just a giant river; we can see where it flows. If it stops somewhere other than us, here, in this complex we just detect and deal. Four weeks ago we ran into something," he paused, searching for the right word, "...something. It's an anomaly. It's not a bureaucratic slip. We've had the analysts on this too and we can see the flow of history being siphoned off. But we have two problems. We're not talking a loner here. It's a pair. A couple. And we know that the history is being diverted into this pair. But it's not stopping with them."

Camras asked the question. "Where's it going?"

"Have you heard of Canscot?" It was Tess Dalton who spoke.

Camras shook his head. He looked round at the other archivists, each of whom was doing likewise. Waites resumed. "Neither had we. This couple are a male and a female, cohabiting. Two days ago my agents photographed the female depositing documents in a collection bin. They're still depositing most of their stuff. It's an exceptionally clean flow they're diverting, no ragged edges. Not one. No firm evidence that we can pin directly on them. It's smart. But one of the photographs showed a letterhead in the documents bearing the name Canscot. It's the only time the name's appeared. We think they're diverting everything into Canscot."

Bernieri raised an eyebrow. "You think?"

"As sure as we can be."

"Why aren't you certain? And where do we come in? Who are Canscot?"

"We don't know."

Carlos Waites looked at Tess Dalton who nodded confirmation. "My analysts have run everything we've got. Canscot doesn't exist anywhere in the models."

Lazarus Cave spoke next. "You're sure about this letterhead?"

Tess nodded again. "It's genuine. I've seen it. It will be in the archives this time tomorrow. There's something out there in the city that we can't account for at present."

Donald Schmitz had been sitting with his arms crossed over his chest. Now he unfolded them. "I can see why that would be a problem."

Landau Krauss leaned in. "The councillors are...concerned. It's impossible for something to exist that the council knows nothing of. Everything in this city is certain. We know this." He cast his right arm about himself. "Canscot's in here somewhere. Somewhere in these archives. You four are to trawl until you find it. Any mention of it goes straight to Tess."

Schmitz mulled this over. "Do we know why they're doing it?"

Waites shook his head. "Nothing conclusive. The CSA are monitoring them."

"Bring them in. If we know they're doing it, we should bring them in."

Again Waites shook his head. "We can't. They're clean as far as withholding history goes. As I said, it's smart. We can link them to Canscot. But we're stuck without details on what Canscot is. We can't bring them in for a link to something that, according to us, doesn't exist."

For a few moments nobody spoke. Only the hum of the air conditioning and Cave tapping his pen on the edge of the table disturbed the silence of the office. The scale of the problem settled on the archivists. Cave stopped the tapping. "I don't like this."

Sal Bernieri clapped a supportive hand on his shoulder. "Faith, Larry. The council knows everything. So we have to root it out. You heard Carlos. Detect and deal. So the detection's a little harder here. Faith."

Cave didn't respond. Instead Camras spoke next. "When do we report by?"

"Feed anything through to the analysts as it comes up. The CSA are keeping agents on the ground. The councillors want a report with full details on Canscot by five tomorrow afternoon. We don't have to like this. But Canscot's somewhere in here. History is the enemy of freedom. This city is blessed because it has us to absolve it of the responsibilities that history tries to impose. We haven't a single crime. Our citizens are perfect because, without the troublesome knowledge that history forces upon them, there is nothing else they can be. We won't let reckless individuals threaten this." Krauss cast his eyes around the table. All apart from Cave who sat studying the tabletop, met his gaze. "That's all for now. Tomorrow at five, gentlemen, I want a report on my desk that I can deliver to the councillors."

They all stood. Lazarus Cave was the last to rise. The news troubled him. It made him feel old. He probed his receding hairline with his fingertips as they filed out. There was urgency in the voices of the others but Cave remained silent. Bernieri laid an arm about his shoulders as they approached their desks and repeated his mantra. "Faith, Larry."

*

Half a mile from the eastern edge of the central complex, the ground sloped up away from the tightly packed shops and stalls of the city's main market. In the north-eastern section of the market, behind the bustling section where the butchers collected their stands, the heavy sentinel form of a tower stood at the corner of the hill. Some two hundred and sixteen steps led out of the marketplace, from near the base of the tower up to the expansive rectangular plateau at the top. Three more towers kept guard at each of the other corners, the smoke from the crowns rolling gently southwards in the early afternoon breeze.

It was the lunch hour. Halfway up the steps, Cave paused for a few moments on a bench that looked out over the market. Behind him, the top of the white marble dome of the research laboratory could be seen hanging above the crest of the hill. Below, the cobbles of the broad square were busy with people. Dark grey awnings, red-and-white coverings, white tarpaulins were all hung or draped over a scaffold framework that stretched around much of the perimeter of the market. In the centre of the square, a fountain bubbled pleasantly. Set in the ground around its edges, drainage holes took the excess water down into the vast old sewers that ran under the city. Traffic was not permitted entrance to the marketplace during business hours, but a security van slowly made its way through the crisscrossing citizens. Overheard, a cloud of white smoke from the tower behind the butchers' corner was trundling across the sky.

It began to rain as Cave walked across the top of the flat hill. Bedraggled roses with their thorns on show flanked the gravelled pathway. On the right there was a sculpture consisting of three great blocks of polished metal arranged as a corner of a cube. Up ahead, the imposing façade of the laboratory dominated through the light drizzle. There were other people up on top of the hill, couples and small parties come to visit the zoo that lay in the gardens behind the research centre.

As he got closer, Cave could see raindrops hanging like limpets on the marble columns. He pulled the collar of his coat up round his neck and strode up the long, low flight of marble steps leading up to the double wooden doors that were thrown open to the inhabitants of the city.

In the cavernous atrium, electric strip-lights fixed around the edges of the room made up for the wet light that was leaking in through the skylight in the top of the dome. From the inside, its enormous, smoothly curved sides and the circular pane of glass at the top made it look like a single huge eye. But if Cave was inside looking out, there was almost nothing to be seen apart from the thin tears of rain that trickled over the top of the roof.

On the far side of the atrium to the broad entrance doors an exit led out to the zoo. A steady flow of people moving in both directions passed Cave standing at the top of the ramp that led down to the enclosures. He watched the bodies around him. The women in the atrium and the women in the gardens were the same. The women by the monkeys and the women by the penguins. The men too were identical, with identical clothes and hairstyles and conversations. All perfect products of the perfect city. And everywhere women and men and no children. Cave smiled. He was a good citizen. And then he thought about his body, how it had looked in the mirror that morning and he felt again his hairline and the sensation of aging filled him so that in his mind he was a good citizen but in his heart he could feel only the strain of the steps he had climbed, the constriction of the fatty build-ups around the muscle and a beat that felt tiring and anxious.

The two towers standing at the northern edge of the hill were visible through the mesh fences of the animals' habitats. The rain had given out to a cold, wet unseasonal wind. Endless smoke bent in the breeze and continued to be carried southwards. There was a clear view over the rooftops of the city to his right, which he turned to face. Spreading out west, tall and small buildings rose and fell like a breath to the horizon. When the sun shone, Cave could see the twisting river shining as it curved south, but now there was a only a grey smudge where the flashes of light had come from. He rarely went to the chapters that lay to the west of the hill, although he knew their roofs in detail, the chimney stacks and guttering, and they way in which they formed endless patterns that forever shifted around and surprised him, like clouds. Lazarus Cave could sense the vitality of the buildings, and in them he knew that people lived as the soul of the city; and perhaps it was a change in the wind but his mind wandered as his eyes swam along the skyline and he asked himself what the souls of the people were, and what they would look like, and where they could be found; and maybe the wind changed again and took the answer away with it, but Cave could not respond to his mind, and he would have stood a while longer musing on this but a visitor bumped sharply into him, and a crow cried its harsh caw, and these events fixed his mind back in focus, and draw his gaze in from the western chapters; they caused him to forget about citizens and souls, and instead he apologised to the visitor who had collided with him and had now walked on, and turned his attention towards the zoo and, in particular, the rhinoceros.

The enclosures of the larger animals fascinated Cave. He meandered past the giraffes and bison and great apes; each specimen was a precise living representation of the illustrations of animals that were displayed in the education centres. A bulky hippopotamus stood in its soft mud. A pile of lionesses lay slumbering near a glass viewing window where a wall provided some shelter from the wind. Another lone lioness was lookout, alert on a raised section of the enclosure, steadily watching a group of women who pressed up to the glass to look at the cats.

The rhinoceros pen was as far from the research centre as the zoo stretched. The path that ran alongside it stopped abruptly at the edge of the hill and beyond it, the city continued to the north in another endless expanse of dwellings and commerce. The towers were great pillars planted into the ground around which the houses and shops and offices seemed to cluster. It looked as if they were exerting a pull over all that fell within their rotating shadows; they bound the buildings and streets and chapters together with careful precision. Without them, Cave imagined that the city and its inhabitants would simply float away, lost and directionless in an uncertain disorder.

There were several bodies already neatly resting on the viewing rail that ran past the two sides of the rhinoceros enclosure that fronted on to the tarmac paths that spread like a grid through the whole zoo. On the other two sides, the rhinoceros gazed out over the edges of the hill to the north and east. Inside the habitat there was a long, low trough of food, a sort of deep pond, towards which the ground on either side sloped, and a hut or shed towards the rear that was filled with straw and the sweet, nasty smell of a female rhinoceros not visible at this moment. There was also a rough dead stump of a tree against which the animal could scratch its tough hide. Piles of dung were scattered over the flat ground; even in cold rain they had managed to attract a few sluggish flies.

Information plaques were spaced evenly along the pen's viewing rail. Their primary subject was grazing stoically on a bale of hay by the edge of the pond. Cave sat down on a bench by the side of the tarmac path, from which he had a clear view between four bodies at the viewing rail; two couples, reading the short solid lines of information, mirror images of one another – the man on the inside, taller than his blonde-haired partner, with his arm pushed around her shoulders. Perhaps the male and female suspects came here. Maybe they were now in the zoo, with his arm pushed around her shoulders, walking along the tarmac paths laid out in a tidy grid, carefully cutting away segments of history and cauterising the telltale wounds as they did so in order that no errant thread was left dangling which could be pulled and unravelled to reveal exactly what it was they were secreting, and exactly why. The thought troubled Lazarus Cave and he dropped his focus from the matching couples and fixed it instead on the great bulk of the rhinoceros.

Its huge ruminating body was sewn into heavy folds of grey skin that rolled like great plates of armour when it moved. And when it did move, Cave wanted to feel the hill to which his bench was securely bolted shift and groan from the shock. A couple of hardy flies buzzed around its rear end, and it swung its tufted tail like a lazy whip to move them on. The enormous rump and shoulders were covered in wart-like bumps. Where its majestic horn should have sat like a crown on the end of its snout, there was instead a perfectly rounded knob, worn down over years of tracing the same steps, over and over, on a patch of raised earth in the heart of the city. When Cave looked into the beast's dark eyes he saw an expressionless black, and he could not tell whether the rhinoceros was looking at the grass towards which it lowered its head; at its attentive double audience at the viewing rail; at the bird that glided from the edge of the hill and into a mass of smoke from the nearby towers; or at Cave himself. Or at none of these, because Cave knew that the eyes of a rhinoceros could not see well, and maybe the taste of the grass was all there was, or the smell of the pale smoke, or the sound of the twin couples moving away, and two more stepping in to take their places. Or perhaps there was nothing but expressionless black, and the rhinoceros' eyes simply reflected this, and the rhinoceros knew that this was the case.

An old man with weathered features approached the bench and sat down next to Cave. He was wearing grey worsted trousers and a padded brown jacket, buttoned up around a woollen scarf. For a while both men watched in silence as the rhinoceros munched at the hay. Overhead the clouds began to gather in a more organised fashion, preparing for a storm. The replacement couples left, and another two arrived to fill in the gaps. The rhinoceros took two steps forward and lowered its grey mouth towards a mound of fresh hay.

"There's something kinda sad in that behaviour, don't you think?"

Cave followed the rhinoceros carefully, the lowering of the head, the movement of the jaw muscles, the shifting of the hind legs as the soft ground subsided. It was possible that the eyes of expressionless black could be the colour of sadness. "What else is a rhino in a pen going to do?"

Again the twin couples standing at the viewing rail moved away and two fresh pairs slotted into place.

The old man said, "I wasn't talking about the rhinoceros."

Lazarus Cave did not rise from his seat. He barely shifted as he switched from looking at the rhinoceros to looking at the two new couples who stood in front of the information plaques. In both cases the man was on the inside, taller than his blonde-haired partner, with his arm pushed around her shoulders. Moments passed as he looked at them. "I should tell you I work for –"

The old man interrupted him before he could finish. "Don't tell me. If you were going to report me, or look me up, or ignore me you would have left by now."

Cave twisted around to see who it was he was sharing the bench with. The old man was scrutinising him already and Cave examined the weathered portrait in front of him. What little of the neck that showed over the broad scarf and the chin above it were clean-shaven. The hair on top of the head was full but white. Although the skin was aged and leathery, the face was sharp and clear. Bright blue eyes like his own stared back at him.

"Who are you?"

"What makes you think I can tell you?"

"Your name? Where you work? What you do?"

"Oh, I can tell you what I am. A good and true citizen, that's what. Who I am? Other than my name? The who lies somewhere between the layers of what I am now, and what I was before that, and before that, and so on. But memories fade. I'm an old man and so my memory fades more than most. That who you ask about is whatever picture the separate whats create. But the city keeps our history, you know that, and with it, it takes away pieces of the puzzle. I know more about who that rhinoceros is than I do about myself."

The old man sounded neither happy nor sad as he said this, neither angry nor resigned.

"Your name then."

"I've lost everything else, I'm not giving my name away too."

"All the other information, the archives hold that."

The old man looked at Cave and laughed. "You think that's information they keep down there in their big storerooms?" He laughed until tears streamed from his eyes and Cave did not understand. "Information indeed! Those archives are nothing but a great repository of souls." He got stood up and moved off without looking back, still chuckling to himself.

*

It was past midnight by the time Lazarus Cave decided to leave the office. Half an hour had passed since Bernieri had left him by himself, trawling through the endless archives, hunting for a trace of Canscot. Nothing had yet been found by the archivists. He flicked the switch on the computer monitor and watched the screen disappear to a pinprick of light and then fade out from grey to black.

The strip-lights in the ceiling of the office and corridors buzzed and flickered as he walked out towards the lift. Cave could hear the low rumble of the air conditioning units gulping in great mouthfuls of air to be transported through the pipes hidden in the walls to the workers below ground level. Somewhere a switch on a cycle clicked on and whatever it controlled whirred briefly. As the doors of the lift closed behind him, a water cooler around the corner gave a muffled belch.

Outside the night air was clear and chill and Cave decided that he would walk home rather than drive. Yellow streetlamps cast pools of light over the cold pavements as Cave made his way westwards along the ambling boulevard of 3rd street. There were a few other citizens tramping silently along the road, thick overcoats drawn up closely about their necks. They were shift-workers most likely, or individuals making their way home from the bars scattered around the central chapters. The bars themselves were low-profile venues, single rooms mostly, located on the dim, narrow streets that connected together the broad carriageways such as 3rd street.

An old man with sad eyes passed Cave coming round a corner at the top of one of the constricted side roads. His breath smelt of whisky and he walked with an uncomfortable stiffness in his left leg as if he had forgotten how to bend his knee. Cave could see the bar from where he had come, its murky light spilling out from small windows. They were subdued places. In the sublime idyll of life within the city, Cave felt a seam of loneliness that ran through the populace. The bars were the places of the chronically lonely. Drinks were served to citizens for whom the constant presence of the council in their lives could do nothing to fill in the disconnection that they felt from themselves. In the midst of their unquestioning satisfaction with the city, of their happy acceptance of their fealty to the council, there was a tiny barren pocket into which, in place of a concrete realisation of self, fell long nights spent circling the bottom of whisky glasses. Drinking itself was a slow and measured activity, the bars careful always to never permit a customer to depart disordered. The bars were the grey vessels into which the uncertain needs of citizens could be decanted.

Cave continued homewards. He disapproved of the bars, had never set foot inside one. Any simple needs that arose within him were ably met by his determined faith in the council. In place of a vacuum, an aging belief washed through his idea of himself.

The tower that stood at the end of 3rd street was a huge dark monolith keeping a quiet watch over the sleeping city. In the late afternoon its shadow stretched back down 3rd street under the sinking sun. In the distance Cave could see the white smoke flowing from the massive tower in the centre of the council compound. Above him, the top of the nearby tower was dormant, colder and blacker even than the night sky it rose into.

The flat was cold as Cave opened the front door. He set some beans on the hob and stood at the window, overlooking the city. The 3rd street tower was visible from the living room. Sparse lights in homes and offices floated like boat lights on an endless rolling ocean, curiously disembodied lives drifting through the night on the currents. Emerging from the waters, the tower was a hard emblem of the power of the council.

The chessboard was in the gloom at a corner of the room that the weak bulb struggled to reach. He withdrew a crumpled envelope from his pocket. Its seal had been neatly broken and then taped back down. The tape bore the crest of the council; the correspondence of all city officials was monitored in this fashion. Cave went into the kitchen to fetch a knife with which to slit open the pre-read letter. An image of the old man by the rhinoceros enclosure idly entered his mind and paused there for a moment as he wondered what the monitors would do if they knew that he had failed to report the conversation. The reflection dissolved back in the lounge as he slipped the tip of the knife under the corner of the envelope and cut along the sealed edge. Inside a tatty piece of paper which had in black ink the stamp of the censor's office revealed the move he was to play out on the chessboard. Cave picked up black's defensive bishop and placed it where instructed. The air by the window was cold through the single pane of glass. Cave sat at the small chess table and rubbed his hands to keep warm. He stared at the board for a few minutes, attempting to decipher the move's coded intentions, before giving up on the task.

He ate the beans. When he had finished, he meticulously washed both saucepan and crockery. After a while he moved away towards the bedroom where a small oil-burning heater offered greater comfort.

A milky patch of moonlight fell across the pillow on Cave's bed. It was the only source of light in the room. The apartment block that sat across from his window was poker-faced in the dark. Grey-black shrubs waved in a night-time breeze around the base of a large tree, smudged against its gloomy backdrop so that its outline was sometimes here, sometimes there and never definable. Cave picked a framed photograph up off the chest and lay with his head on the pillow and the picture angled towards the moonlight.

There was a man and a woman in the photograph, they stood with their arms around each other, smiling from behind the brittle protective glass of the frame. The expression in the eyes was hard to decipher in the dim haze of the moonlight. It looked like pride, or something that was supposed to look like pride. Perhaps it was not even that; it seemed more like something that was supposed to look like something that was supposed to look like pride. Like an image run through a photocopier a hundred times. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Of a copy.

Cave carefully removed the back of the frame and lifted the photograph of his parents out so he could see it without the reflections of his own face caused by the glass. Exposed, their eyes seemed to change so the expression that was pride or something like it before, slid into love, then reproach, then command, before coming to rest in a distance that was almost so removed as to be less expression and more just a snapshot of a pose by two figures so perfunctory as to be without a soul. On the reverse side the photograph bore the printed logo of the city council. Cave's parents were the parents of thousands of other citizens. Identical framed photographs were displayed in countless homes, copies of that ambiguous expression staring out at the children of the city.

Rain started to fall outside again. Thick, heavy drops that soaked the air and pinged off the metal stairs of the fire escape that zigzagged down the back wall of the apartment block. Cave lay on his single bed, listening to the notes they struck as they did so. The light in the bedroom was turned off but the curtains were undrawn and Cave's eyes were open. The head of the bed was positioned by the sash window and he could see out over the back of the adjacent apartment block on 43rd street. In the night it was like a tall, dark face that gave nothing away.

A light switched on in one of the windows. The curtains were drawn but badly, and Cave could see a metre or two of floor space inside the flat. From his vantage point he was marginally above it, but not by much. Cave lay where he was but kept his eyes fixed on the gap in the drapes, waiting for a body to cross into the unguarded light. When she did, he smiled to see her again.

The gap between the two buildings stretched about sixty feet and the distortion created by the viewing angle made it hard to determine her features. She had red hair, shoulder-length and cut straight. Her posture and gait suggested somebody slightly younger than him. Without ever deliberately keeping a watch for her, Cave enjoyed her intermittent appearances. He had seen her once or twice walking down the strip of road he could see between his apartment block and hers. Most often though he came across her like this, at irregular times when her window would shine out of the sleeping array around it. Her appearance now both did and did not surprise him. Lying in the narrow dark he allowed himself to briefly love the unpredictability of her habits. Of course she worked in a job that involved shifts which, although apparently here and there, were laid out as any other by the council. The light in her living room window in the early hours of the morning was, had Cave known everything, to be utterly expected. But still he could not help himself but watch her until the apartment again fell dark. And when it did, he dreamt that her hair floated in the space between their buildings, and that he could irresistibly elongate his hand to reach out across the gap, and that his fingers could run gently through her red tresses with a touch that only dreamers could feel.
It is gone four in the morning. Lazarus Cave sits on the edge of his bed, his back curved and shoulders hunched forwards. He is wearing a white vest and undershorts, the same garments that he wears during the day under his neatly pressed shirt and trousers. He has his socks on against the cold, the oil-burner having long burnt out. The photograph and frame lie unassembled on the floor by his feet.

In the kitchen, dressed for work, Cave rests against the work surface eating pineapple rings from the tin and drinking supermarket coffee brewed from a jar with a po-faced brown label. Dawn is still several hours off as he closes the front door behind him and walks down the central stairwell, cold footsteps echoing off the dull walls.

*

The air down by the river where it curved westwards after passing the southern slope of the hill topped by the grand research centre was distinguishable from the rest of the city by its smell. Market scents drifted down during the day and hung around before mixing with those than floated north from a sugar refinery located somewhere in the chapters down that way. The resultant subtle tang seemed to permeate the water itself as it flowed slowly by. It was on these banks that Cave stood, leaning over the railings that edged the towpath and into the tarnished silver of the river below.

Inside the council compound he had seen the hellish glow of the furnace in the base of the massive tower, the city's icon. It burnt constantly, reducing records by the tonne into rolling, voiceless clouds of smoke. They too sometimes blew southeast to add an extra tinge to the river's odour.

Although it was barely past five in the morning, there had been the stirrings of activity already in the market square. Butchers and grocers were unpacking tables in preparation for the vans that would shortly arrive to deliver fresh produce. Cave had crossed its expansive cobbles, ignoring the sounds of traders, heading without really knowing why towards the oil slick of the river. Thickly the water passed by under his gaze. Colours without origin danced across its surface as stodgy wavelets broke and fell. Above, the clear sky allowed the moonlight to coat the river in its milky luminescence.

A long time ago he had seen a body floating by. It was an animal of some form and the water moved quickly then as if trying to pick it up and hurry its indecence away. Now it trundled almost listlessly, washing the city of its history, the constant surface over the currents below.

Cave shuddered. He turned and made his way back across the market place where the exhaust fumes of the first delivery vans condensed rapidly in the cold air. He thought about Canscot as he passed the fishmonger who was unpacking insulated boxes, arranging the fish inside on the trays full of ice that covered his stall. How could the records of a whole company slip undetected through the supposedly infallible grasp of the council and its many departments? It should not have been possible. Nothing like this should be able to happen. Every strand of activity within the city was bound together in an enormous web that like a spider's, reverberated to a hundred million frequencies, each tremor telling of a single moment in the minutiae of urban existence. The city was both the cause and effect of everything that transpired within it and the council, like the spider, sat in the centre, interpreting the endless signals, regulating where necessary, sometimes here, sometimes there, and governing, overseeing, administrating. Omniscient and omnipotent, they maintained the perfect order of life within the city. The council could not be broken, and as he braced himself against the stiff southerly wind Cave found this fact supportive.

But the anomaly of Canscot complicated matters. Cave ran his fingers along his hairline as he thought. This was something altogether different. It suggested the possibility that there had occurred an error or a loophole somewhere inside the flawless system. Refusal to cede records was an obstinacy of will that ignorantly sought in the individual the security and peace that only the council could provide. However, the existence of a company that did not according to record exist, that in the reality of the city did _not_ exist was uncomfortable, insidious. Destructive.

A little way from the Council complex, he nearly collided with Bernieri as he rounded the corner of 3rd street and 22nd. Cave's face was slightly flushed, the wet air by the river and the cold of the early morning giving his cheeks a ruddiness that brisk walking had accentuated. The presence of Bernieri had surprised him. It was still not yet six o'clock and he had not expected to encounter any of the other archivists until later on. Sal Bernieri's appearance had intruded into the gentle turmoil that had been his reflection upon the implications of the case they were handling. Cave did not want to seem flustered in front of his colleague, but it took him a moment or two to compose himself and partition and calm his thoughts.

"Sal...sorry about that. Up early this morning."

"Morning Larry. Krauss' deadline. I get the feeling we've got our work cut out with this Canscot business."

Cave acknowledged his agreement with a murmur and the two men fell into step together as they resumed walking in the direction of the complex.

For a while neither spoke. The silence suited Cave. His heart was still beating fast, as if Bernieri had glimpsed something private that he wished to cover up and sweep quietly away. He made no effort to provoke a conversation.

22nd street was a long road, but not an interesting one. The two archivists were travelling northwards up its expressionless pavements. There were no shops or restaurants around here, just high-rise blocks of apartments and offices crowded together in an endless strip along both sides of the road. They rose so high that in the morning and afternoon they blocked the low-lying sun and in the winter they turned 22nd street into a zone of almost perpetual dawn and dusk. At one point they passed an open manhole cover. Cave looked down into a big pipe, almost a tunnel, easily big enough for a crouching man. Along its curved base he saw flickers of light and could hear the sound of the sewer draining down towards the river.

As early as it was now, a regular flow of cars moved quickly in both directions, taking advantage of the lack of cosmopolitan bustle to bypass the more congested roads that lay to the west. Over the archivists' shoulders at the distant end of the road another monolithic tower was planted firmly in the ground like a great, ageless tree, its roots drawing the sustenance from the urban sprawl surrounding it. About half a mile ahead of them the road curved down for some distance so that where before there had been endless facades of grey buildings, there was instead a patch of grey sky, illuminated by streetlamps and framed by the last apartment blocks before the dip and so uniform of colour and rectangular in shape it looked as though someone had cut it from a patch of felt and stuck it there as drab decoration.

Shortly before the road descended, Bernieri and Cave turned right. Not far down the road, shining like a great white crown amid the absence of colour they could see the south-western corner of the marble wall surrounding the council buildings. They were close now, barely more than ten more minutes walk until they would enter the atrium of the archive house, at which point the silence and all it portended would be lifted by the promise of fresh investigation into the case. New priorities would arrive in both their minds and maybe this ugly walk they were sharing would be forgotten. Perhaps, thought, Cave, they could make it to those doors, he could place his foot into the sanctuary within without having to speak.

However, the hope, if seriously entertained, was soon dashed. They had advanced only a short way along the street when Bernieri finally broke the silence that had sat between the two men. The question, innocuous, polite, appeared to Cave to be an affront to the tacit pact of silence he imagined them to have entered. "What brings you over this way, Larry? Your flat's over that way isn't it?"

Bernieri indicated with his thumb a location roughly to their left and behind them, the opposite direction from which they had come. Cave looked at his companion, unable to hide the indignation that Bernieri had thought to disturb the equilibrium with such an ordinary question. Indeed, it was hardly a question, more a statement. Lazarus Cave knew that Sal Bernieri was perfectly aware of the address of his apartment. The inflection he raised in his voice at the end of the second sentence was little more than a creature of habit. It provoked within him an irrational passing impulse that Bernieri had somehow some how wasted the silence, that this was an act of treachery. All this passed through Cave's mind so swiftly he could not consciously separate one strand of thought from another. Likewise a quiver of emotion, a certain tightening of his expression that he could not resist, passed across his face without his full awareness. And Bernieri, although not able to extrapolate from what he saw as a momentary grimace a robust spectrum of emotions, nevertheless discerned in Cave's face a fleeting sense of discomfort.

"Trouble sleeping," he answered after a pause. A sudden gust of cold air, wet with the possibility of an encroaching fog that smelt of the river made both men shiver. Cave sniffed. His throat was dry and he coughed loudly into a handkerchief with which he then blew his nose.

"Is everything okay?"

Again Cave felt the pressing intonation of Bernieri's question, as if he was either stressing the validity of a pointless query or in some way wedging the question home so its roots took hold under Cave's skin as it burrowed towards a core of truth. Lazarus looked up at him. He brought an awkward smile to his lips and fought the urge to cough with a weak, tenuous laugh.

"Can't you feel it too?"

For a moment Sal Bernieri could not determine whether his colleague was referring to the bitter chill in the morning air or something else.

"We'll be there soon," he replied, indicating the entrance to the archives with a wave of his hand. By now the two men had entered the compound and were crossing the parking lot. Before Cave could acknowledge this latest piece of commentary Bernieri continued. "Canscot's nothing to worry about."

Cave started, his head jerked round in surprise. "I never said it was," he responded with a nearly stumbled immediacy.

They reached the edge of the car park and followed the footpath for the short curved walk to the main doors of the archives. Bernieri stopped for a moment with his hand on the door. He ignored Cave's defensiveness. "We'll have Canscot by the close of the day," Bernieri laughed, "how do they think they can possibly succeed when this is all here?" With his eyes he indicated the endless solid walls of white marble all around them.

As Cave followed him through the open door a torrent of rain came tumbling down from the dawn sky. Two drops of water, thick, heavy and cold caught Cave at the point where his coat collar parted slightly from his neck and they trickled uncomfortably down his back.

*

Landau Krauss sat behind the closed door of his office. His telephone rang intermittently, sharp peals that he cut off on the third bell by lifting the receiver cautiously from its cradle. Most of the time it was Tess Dalton, either calling with updates from the analysts, or else requesting them from himself. Once it was the councillor. Through the partially closed shutters that covered the large glass windows, he could see Camras, Schmitz, Cave and Bernieri hard at work.

Progress for the archivists was frustrating. It was approaching midday. They had run and re-run countless data sets. Vast swathes of the digital archives had been cross-referenced and there was not a single fleeting mention of Canscot anywhere in the mix.

There was a clock hung behind Schmitz, directly in Cave's line of view. He glanced up at it. The minute hand seemed to be speeding round far too fast. Already midday had advanced upon them, and soon it would be past and they would begin eating up the afternoon. He stared back at his computer screen, flicking rapidly, randomly through programs, scanning for a link or a connection or a pairing that had been missed.

Nothing.

"I don't understand it, this shouldn't be possible."

Donald Schmitz responded to Cave, "It isn't possible."

"Then why can't we find a single mention of Canscot anywhere? There's nothing here."

"If we haven't found anything yet, it's because we're not looking hard enough, or in the right way. We've got a huge amount of haystack to shift before we can find our needle."

"Don's right, Larry, you know that." Camras nodded in agreement with Sal Bernieri's words. Bernieri continued, "we know the system's perfect. It's everywhere, here, in this office, throughout the building, outside in the streets and the houses and smoke that comes from the tops of the towers."

"Every bit of that is based on our belief that the needle is in the haystack, somewhere. There's a heck of a lot hinging on that faith."

"Faith's got nothing to do with it, Larry," interjected Camras, "that needle's fact." He gestured broadly around himself, "and we're sitting in the middle of the bloody haystack."

Cave pushed his chair back from his computer and stood up. "Arthur, you're right. You too Donald, of course. I don't know...I'm going to clear my head."

As he strode out of the door, Krauss emerged briefly from his office. "Everything alright out here?"

Camras and Schmitz exchanged brief glances. Bernieri inclined his head to the affirmative, "we're working on it."

*

Lazarus took the lift up two floors, stepped through the spacious lobby and out through the main doors. The air outside smelt dank and used. Clouds were darkening overhead, heavy with the promise of rain. He wandered, subdued to the edge of the parking lot and stared at the city that grew up before him. For a while he rested on the hinged barrier that was across the entrance. It sank down a little under his weight and when he shifted his feet it creaked. The city was endless, a vast sprawling ocean with edges as seemingly flexible and impossible to define as the sea itself. At unfailing intervals the towers emerged from the teeming hubbub of buildings and people. Effortless, emotionless, they were the calm symbols of the council's unassuming, absolute power. It was the towers, the massive furnaces within them, that performed the essential maintenance of the city, executing the council's binding edict that compelled the citizens to scrub history from their lives. Every single minute cog of the city rested in a sublimely constructed system atop the twin facts of the council and the towers. A little way behind him, the massive unceasing tower housed within the complex grew upwards so that its dark grey smoke mingled with the clouds and it looked as if the weather itself was coming out of its crown. It was emblematic of the entire city, the embodiment of everything Cave believed in. Profoundly. But now, leaning on the entrance barrier, he was trying to suppress a tangible sense of doubt. Beneath the uncharacteristically blank eyes, he was wrestling with a hesitation that was needling him, constantly, carefully staying out of reach of the established fingers that sought to wring its neck. Of course Canscot would be found. If it wasn't, it threatened everything.

Drops of frozen rain started to fall. A chill wind whistling down from the north made him shiver. Cave turned back towards the archive building. He reached the impassive glass entrance doors as the sleet began to come down faster. Pushing through them, his troubled reflection stared back at him, seeming to ask the question of why was this affecting him so? The other three archivists searched on through the banks of data, supported by their steadfast faith in the world around them. For the briefest of moments Cave thought he saw another reflection standing behind his shoulder. The red hair of the woman he could see from his window seemed to be fleetingly caught in the glass but looking backwards, all he could see was the miserable weather outside with no one around.

In the elevator riding back towards the lower second floor Cave checked his watch. Half past twelve. He had been long enough outside; he ought to be heading back to his desk to resume the task in hand. But if the fresh air was supposed to blow the doubts from his mind, it had done little but whip his thoughts into further disorder. His own irresolution bothered him now nearly as much as Canscot itself did. The whole fact of his discomfort was edging towards assuming its own identity.

With a low chime, the lift reached its destination and bumped to a halt. The twin sets of doors slid open with a quiet hiss and the carpeted corridors and yellow lights overhead waited for Lazarus Cave to emerge. Inside the lift, backed into the far corner by the control panel, Cave stood motionless. Quietly the doors closed shut. He reached out and pushed the button to take the elevator down two more floors to the lower fourth. In the shaft that stretched the full way to the top of the building cables creaked and gently lowered him downwards.

Stepping out into the elevator lobby, the familiar noise of the air conditioning unit hummed slightly clearer than it did higher up. Oddly the air down here, even further from the surface, tasted cleaner, fresher, less recycled. Cave inhaled deeply and looked around. It was clear from the two healthy looking plants standing in deep ceramic pots on the floor that people came down here regularly. There was little other sign of active life, however. A long, straight passage led away from the lifts, bathed in crisp electric light. About halfway down there was a small door set into the left-hand wall, a janitor's closet perhaps. Cave walked past this without a second glance and continued firmly on towards the double doors at the end of the corridor.

Made of dark, heavy wood they were an incongruous addition to the vast marble building with its glass fixtures. Behind them was a section of the archives that lay largely ignored, dormant files stored on great racks of shelves neither part of the city's record keeping nor consigned to burning in the furnace of one of the towers. They were both part and not part of history. Housed within the archives, they were considered little more than clerical errors. Although carefully categorised and kept, they were not incorporated into the data bank that serviced the analytical department. Included amongst them were official forms that had been spoiled in some way, incomplete formal documents – anomalies that would disrupt or distort the data stream that the archives fed to the analysts. Also retained in the innumerable piles of defunct documents were extinct records, shapeless information that did not appear to form part of the recognisable boundaries laid down by the council, that for some lost reason were kept here amongst the city's apocrypha rather than having been reduced to ash.

Cave walked down one of the vast banks, running his fingertips along the riveted metal shelving. There was not a speck of dust on them. He was not at all sure what he would find down here. Stretching high up towards the ceiling, rows of boxes impassively filled all the space. Affixed to each box was a log of its contents. There was no computer system for all this grey data. Nothing stored in this spotless room had any counterpart in the living, breathing streets of the city above.

Canscot should not, therefore, be found in here – the letterhead was a tiny, undeniable proof of its reality. Its authenticity had been determined by the CSA immediately on discovery. Company goods could not be obtained without a business registration document held on the civic records. CSA agents had simply cross-checked the transaction between Canscot and the printing firm that had supplied the stationery and confirmed that proper procedures had been followed. It was proof from the system itself that the system was functioning correctly.

Cave walked along the aisles, searching for the section containing commercial business papers. Being in this dead archive troubled him. The evidence provided by the CSA showed it was undeniable fact that any details relating to the nature and activities of Canscot were to found within the city's official documented records. It was fundamentally impossible that it should not be. Bernieri, Camras and Schmitz believed as much. Krauss did too, presumably, and Tess Dalton also. Everybody, in fact, allied their faith with the city's voice, and in turn that voice, and the vocal chords of the council that spoke it, demanded, needed the absolute conviction of its enforcers, its amplifiers. It was dangerous for Cave to be down here, doubting.

But doubting what? The city? Himself? Cave found the section he was looking for at last and began to scan the catalogued contents of each box, searching through the alphabetical listings. He would not – did not – think it possible to fully divide himself from the machinery of the city. It was impossible that there should be any trace of Canscot in any of these files, but he had to see for sure, as his click of his shoes on the cold, hard floor echoed with each step drawing him progressively down the alphabet, through A and now onto B, he was driven on by the awful compulsion to see for himself the state of things.

Reaching the files marked with a C Cave slowed his step, reading each index with care. His heart slowed too, deep, paced beats in his chest, hardly daring to break the controlled hope he maintained that 'Canscot' would not appear on one of the labels in a neat, formal typewritten font.

*

Krauss sat behind his desk, rolling a pen around and around in his fingers, irritated. Outside he could see Sal, Donald and Arthur hard at work, glued to their computer screens. Where the hell was Lazarus Cave? It was gone four o'clock. The deadline was approaching. So far his archivists had produced nothing. In hours of searching they had failed to turn over a single lead in the endless sea of information. And his best archivist was missing, vanished, and not responding to his pager. The telephone rang. Krauss picked it eagerly off its hook, hoping it would be Cave calling in with revelatory news that would explain his absence. He was disappointed. At the other end of the line Tess Dalton's fraught voice asked him if there had been any developments. Krauss shook his head, struggling to bring the words out for fear of what they might mean if by five he and Dalton could still not deliver a definitive response to the council. "None at all," he said in a carefully measured voice, and carefully lowered the receiver back down, severing the line without waiting for a response from the analytical department. Cave gone, answers unforthcoming, and this relentless Canscot problem at the heart of it all. He leaned back in his chair and turned his face up towards the ceiling.

Krauss was still sat like this when the door to his office opened unceremoniously. Cave strode in, tossed a thin, buff-coloured file across the desk and turned straight back out without a word. Krauss moved to call after him but the name on the file caught his attention. In unmistakeable black type across the ID tag were the words, 'Canscot: extinct'. He pulled the folder open. Inside was a solitary two-part business registration form. Registering a company with the council was an uncomplicated process administered by the council's business and enterprise arm. The elegant simplicity of the requirements was supposedly the safeguard for the system against abuse. Part one of the form was both application and primary registration. The business applicant completed it, the authorities ran corroboratory checks on the information provided, assessed the application and logged it onto the public record, a process which took about a week. There were then four days for notice of ratification to be dispatched to the applicant, and for the applicant to return part two of the form, the acknowledgement of ratification and acceptance of the conditions under which businesses were permitted to operate within the city. Within those four days, the new business was permitted to conduct a limited range of operations, all restrictions being lifted upon return of the part two. Any failure to properly submit part two within those four days would lead to the voiding of the original application and the removal of the company from any records. The two-part business registration form was then filed in the extinct archive as incomplete paperwork, the company named upon it becoming termed an extinct business.

Krauss scanned the topmost sheet in the file. Red capital letters inked the word 'Void' over each sub-section, but clearly legible underneath it were the names of the two suspects and an application for an enterprise named Canscot. The form was dated eighteen months previously. He hurriedly turned over to the second part. As he expected it was totally blank except for a single diagonal line that had been struck through it and the several Voids stamped on top.

Trying to understand what this might mean, Krauss remembered the CSA confirmation for the order of the letterheads. He had a copy in his desk drawer and he grabbed for it impatiently. The voided business form was a rarity, but Krauss knew that in such an unlikely event strict protocols were followed to ensure that no unattributed transactions from the four-day interim period were left floating through the city's records. Quickly he read through the CSA material. At the bottom of the transaction page in a small, innocuous detail he found the answer – a request to delay the processing of an order for one batch of letterheads for a week.

Anger rose within him. He thumped his fist down on top of the document lying in front of him. Again the telephone went, its shrill tone piercing his rage. It was the councillor requesting news as the deadline approached. Krauss took a deep breath to calm himself and delivered a single line: "We've got them."

*

It was four thirty-seven when Landau Krauss emerged from his office. After speaking to the councillor, he had informed both Tess Dalton and his counterpart in the CSA of the breakthrough. Lazarus Cave was sitting in his chair, staring vacantly at his monitor. He had been utterly unresponsive to the queries of the other three archivists upon his return and with no knowledge of what Cave had discovered, they continued their fruitless searches for listings relating to Canscot in the official archive.

Cave hardly heard as Krauss broke the news, the words of relief, of congratulation directed at him, of reinvigorated confidence. Bernieri raised an eyebrow in askance towards the impassive Cave before joining Schmitz and Camras in celebration. Cave looked up at his colleagues. Cheering, backslapping, their faces were flushed with the knowledge that they once again had the upper hand against the two otherwise ordinary citizens suspected of storing history, of providing themselves with the potential to construct a narrative, a story at odds with the absolute unity preached by the council. Belief coursed through the archivists, Cave could feel it fill the office. And in the centre of it there was something missing. He could not connect with the emotion that buoyed the others. Rather, he could not fathom the enormity what he did feel. It struck him in the pit of his stomach where it felt as though the bottom had been removed and now he stood on the edge, too afraid to look in, too uncertain of what to expect.

Cave excused himself to the toilets, complaining of feeling unwell. Safely inside the bathroom, shut away from the sounds of affirmation ringing through the archivists, he gave himself over to the nervous panic within him. Shutting himself in a cubicle, he let his heart thump fast and loud against his breast. Slowly it calmed down. He sank onto the seat of the pan, loosening his tie. A cold sweat had broken out over his body, he could feel it beading on his brow.

Minutes passed, he couldn't tell how many. In clothes creased from the efforts of the day, Cave sat in a crumpled heap inside the cubicle, almost motionless. After a while longer the door opened and footsteps entered onto the tiled floor.

"Larry? You in here?" It was Bernieri's voice. Cave's feet were visible in the gap below the door, Bernieri wasted no time knocking on the right cubicle. "What's up with you, man? You've just saved our asses out there."

Bernieri could hear movement behind the door. The toilet seat clanked as Cave stood up. He exited the cubicle, flattening his suit with his hands and look squarely at Sal Bernieri.

"That file should never have been in there, Sal, you know that."

"What are you on about? If it hadn't been, we would've been totally screwed. C'mon, we were turning nothing up from the regular archive. It was inspiration itself to go looking there."

"Do you hear what you're saying, Sal? That's just it, we had nothing from the archives. We had nothing because there was nothing – but we didn't know that, we were sure there was something."

"And you found it Larry, which is why everybody outside is so pleased. And you're locking yourself in toilets, what's going on Larry?"

"Don't you see, Sal, I went to the extinct archive to _not_ find that file. It couldn't have been there. When I saw it I just wanted to rip it up, scrub it out...something. Anything but the fact it was there."

"What are you on about? It being there has given us the concrete link between Canscot and the people out there who are trying to disrupt the very things this city stands for."

"But it can't be concrete, Sal. It is and it can't be. If it's concrete, it means Canscot's real, in some way it's real...but that file was in the extinct collection. Canscot should be an extinct company, non-existant, nothing there. It's concrete enough though, isn't it? It's out there, in the city, but it's just not part of the reality that we create and stick by. It's a ghost, Sal, the whole thing's a ghost and there's nothing, _nothing_ in the archives, in the council, in the whole damn system that should allow a ghost to be possible."

"Larry, you've got to calm down. It's underhand trickery by enemies of the city. It's designed to do this, to get to you. You've just gotta relax about it."

"Whatever, Sal – it shouldn't be possible. The city's meant to be infallible, Sal, that's what we believe...it shouldn't be possible."

Cave paused for a moment, deflated, exhausted by the effort taken to force out thoughts he had not even admitted to himself. He looked down at his shoes and scuffed a toe idly along the restroom floor.

"I'm going home, Sal, I need to get out to the air. I'll see you tomorrow."

"You'll feel better in the morning, Larry. Get some rest, you're tired, emotional – we all are. Get some rest, you'll come round to what I'm saying in the morning."

Cave looked at Bernieri's face, saw the undiminished fervour in his eyes, felt the conviction in his words. "Maybe Sal, we'll see tomorrow."

He walked towards the bathroom door, pushed through it and let it swing shut behind him. Bernieri watched him go.

*

There are towers. They represent perfect, unadulterated, unthinking order.

Beneath the towers, in the streets of the city, walks Lazarus Cave. It is early evening. The sky is a dull gunmetal grey, the colour of mercury. These are the last fingers of sunlight, somehow hanging onto the city's skyline although the sun set over an hour ago. Darkness is closing in and Cave is making his way home towards his single apartment. In the streets of perfect order, while citizens with beatific smiles pass hurriedly by, Cave's mind is in total chaos.

*

On arrival at his flat, it was not yet late enough for the temperature in the main room to have dropped to the chill normally induced by the large windows and Cave switched the heaters on in order to conserve the warmth for a while.

Sitting at the small chess table, Cave could still not work out the intentions of the recently moved black bishop. The mug of fresh coffee grew steadily colder while he stared at the pieces on the board. There were still avenues open to him that an aggressive rook or knight might exploit but in each potential scenario he could not account for the plans of the bishop. He examined his own dissimilar bishops, one poorly placed and out of position as it was. They were of broadly matching dimensions, but where they should have had precisely corresponding features to become a pair, they did not. This one's mitre was higher and more pointed that that one's; one was a chiselled white plastic, the other was plastic also but faded and yellow like old enamel. But they did work; they worked as a pair, lines of an unseen field holding them together in relation to one another as they swept across the board in disparate diagonals. He had expounded this field theory once to Camras, himself an occasional chess player. Mutual lines connecting like pieces, obviously apparent in the subsequent loss of efficacy of one bishop or knight or rook if the other should be felled. Arthur Camras had nodded sympathetically then as he finished summarising his idea, chuckled and dismissed the notion.

But still none of this helped. Cave reached for the coffee, drank from the cup and cringed at the cold bitterness of the milky brew. Resignedly he got up without having moved a piece, the black bishop sitting smugly in its strange square. He poured the coffee down the sink. It was early still, not yet nine o'clock and he had not eaten, but he was tired and the thought of food after the tumultuous day did not come as an appetising one. Turning off the main lights he went through to the bedroom where the oil burner hummed pleasantly.

Once in bed, sleep did not come swiftly or easily. He lay for a while, ten minutes maybe – thirty? An hour? – studying the ceiling with unresting eyes. When at last his lids did begin to close, Cave's slumber was fractured and unsettling. Tossing and turning, in a half-daze he thought he saw a light come on in the next apartment block, but he couldn't tell whether it belonged to the woman with red hair or not. He tried to force himself awake to identify it, but his mind was so heavy that he could fix only the floor it was on or the number of windows it was in from the edge, but never both at the same time, and as soon as he did have one coordinate, he forgot it immediately upon searching for the second.

Soon he could not see any lights at all, but he could see her face. He could see it as he slept, it haunted him through his dreams, through the streets of the city he knew well, through the streets of other cities different to the one in which he lived that he had never seen before. Sometimes it would come before him and let him look upon it, its beauty; but in other cities it remained always to one side or behind him, sad or angry, leering, repulsed, all manner of unpleasant variations; and then there were cities that were like ghost towns, he walked through deserted streets and empty roads, entering and leaving unstaffed shops, and wandering into uninhabited houses and through laughterless parks, and the face in these cities was neither before nor behind him, nor to either side, but it appeared in the shape of the clouds, in the ripples of puddles, in the shadows of the buildings where they clashed and overlapped. In each city it was different and in his dream Cave tumbled from love to hate and from fear to desire, but in each city is was the same also for it was only ever just a face, not disembodied or detached – just a face with no further body.

At one point in the night Cave sat bolt upright in his bed and screamed. His skin was white and sweaty and as his heart slowed to a regular beat, he turned to the window and looked for a moment out into the deep black. There were no lights on in the next building now, none anywhere as far as he could see, just streetlamps and the odd passing headlight of a car, and away in the distance, across two or perhaps three chapters, raised up on a hill he could see the dancing orange speck of a fire at the base of a tower, loosely outlined, flickering, standing against the darkness of the night.
A cat slinks along the side of a low wall. Stealthy paws move forwards and its gaze is fixed upon the blackbird pecking at the ground beneath the thick, venerable oak tree that stands within the central complex. Slowly now it places one foot and then another, taking care not to crinkle fallen leaves under its soft pads. The blackbird pecks on, oblivious.

Loud steps come by suddenly and the blackbird, startled, flutters up into the safety of the branches. The cat twitches its tail and for a while stares thoughtfully at the treacherous legs receding into the distance, before suddenly dashing off in a different direction as though there is something else that cannot wait to be dealt with.

*

No one knew where the rumour of the child had come from. Lazarus Cave waited for the automatic barrier to raise and pulled into the council lot. CSA agents clustered ahead of him, some in small pockets of conversion, others making their way to and fro, loading up the four official vehicles sitting on the tarmac. Two of them were standard security vans, their interiors filled with sophisticated monitoring equipment. The other two were empty except for hard looking plastic benches along each side wall. Cave could see that the walls and door panels were reinforced with some kind of metal or fibreglass framework. He parked up his old red car outside the archives, away from the activity, and entered the office minutes later. Although it was only just gone seven, there were a number of staff already there and the muted voices that passed rapidly between them did little to mask the excitement of the occasion.

Arthur Camras and Don Schmitz were already seated at their desks, sharing an animated conversation in hushed tones. Cave sat down opposite them and with a curiosity that, temporarily at least, suppressed the disturbances of the previous day, questioned the two archivists. Camras spoke. "CSA agents were outside the suspects' apartment last night. The report came in a couple of hours ago, just after four," Camras nodded over his shoulder, "Krauss has been here all night. Nobody has any idea what it contains, there's nothing official from anywhere at the moment, not us, nor analysis – certainly not from the CSA. The word's leaked out though that the suspects have a child in the flat. It's impossible to know for sure what truth there is in that. Krauss' door has been shut since we got here. I thought I could hear him on the phone once or twice, voice raised, but most of the time its nothing but whispers. All we know for sure is that report has made its way directly to the councillors. We're waiting from there."

Schmitz pointed towards the door to Krauss' office. It had been opened a crack and behind the closed shutters they could see the dark shape of Landau Krauss' body. It was as if a seal had been broken and the archivists fell silent, waiting expectantly to see what lay within.

The time was seven twenty. Landau Krauss walked slowly out into the main office. Despite the dark patches of skin under his eyes and the unruly wave to his hair, he looked alert and focussed. The previous two hours had been ones of revelation and decision. Krauss looked at the three men seated in front of him. As he prepared to speak, Sal Bernieri appeared around the corner. Upon seeing his colleagues arranged as they were, he strode quickly over to the desk and took his seat. The full complement of archivists waited to hear what Krauss had to say.

"At three o'clock this morning, a CSA inspection team discovered evidence that strongly suggests the suspects in the Canscot case are illegally harbouring a young child, their own. It's believed to be aged between three and five months. We think that Canscot was a shadow entity being used to withhold documents and records for later use with the child. A security team is currently stationed outside of the suspects' residence. The CSA will be dispatching a team of agents to arrest the suspects within the next ten minutes. Lazarus, you go with them. I want thorough records. Everybody else, be prepared for when they bring them in."

*

It was not yet time for the roads to be filling with commuters. Driving full-speed through the sparse early morning traffic, the journey to the 111th chapter took less than fifteen minutes. Lazarus Cave sat in the lead vehicle. Six CSA agents were packed tightly into the seats around him. Three more vans followed behind in a speeding convoy, each with a trio of agents. As they tore eastwards along 261st street Cave looked out of one of the side windows. Everything – buildings, homes, offices, shops, pedestrians, trees, litter bins, flower pots, pigeons, the polished windows of cafes serving the city's breakfast – was smeared together into one endless smudge in a dingy organic palette. Still looking sideways, his stomach turned slightly as the driver wrenched the van into a left turn and soon after rushed them to an abrupt halt outside their destination.

In front of them another security van was parked, presumably the reconnaissance team that had been dispatched during the night. Sliding panels on either side of Cave's van flew open and the CSA agents rushed out towards this other vehicle. Only the driver and the archivist remained inside. Behind, the three other vehicles performed the same routine, the drivers pulling into the kerb and two agents sprinting out.

Moments later the remaining four agents exited via the drivers' doors of their vehicles and joined the group ahead. Cave remained where he was, notebook and pen, both stamped with the insignia of the council, two body-less hands clasped together, poised and ready to document the proceedings.

He couldn't hear what orders were being given to the CSA personnel, but he could make out the urgency that was being imparted to them. Their captain divided them into carefully defined groups. Two agents took up positions on opposite pavements, diagonally across from one another and level with the ends of the row of parked security vehicles. A further two stood guard in front of the main entrance door of the building, guns held in front of the long black overcoats that they wore against the February chill, and three others were dispatched to secure the rear and emergency exits. The captain and the remaining four agents entered the ground floor of the apartment block. The automatic light that attempted to splutter into life fell dark mid-flicker. Cave assumed it had been quickly fused.

There were lights on in most windows. In the privacy of their apartments, Cave knew that citizens would be eating breakfast, ironing shirts, drinking coffee – preparing to depart for work. Others would be at the other end of their day, returned from one of the numerous jobs that kept the city humming with background activity during the dark; cleaner, post-worker, one of the workers in the twenty-four-hour factories that operated through the night to meet the prodigious appetite of an endless city. Others still would be shaving, showering, standing naked in front of the mirror, forlornly contemplating expanding bellies and widening hips, or admiring curves and muscles. Human bodies were at the same time expansively universal and intensely private. And then there would be those involved in some kind of carnal act: urinating, defecating, copulating. Without moving from where he sat, Cave's imagination could guide the eye of the city into the most intimate acts of its inhabitants without their ever knowing.

He stared up at the one window in the building that mattered. A female face appeared in it and then sharply withdrew. Cave knew that she had seen the collection of security vans, the agents dressed in their dark suits, ties and overcoats standing impassively on the street outside. He knew that she would be turning immediately from the window to shout in panic for her partner; that he would drop his full mug of steaming coffee on the floor, the mug shattering, coffee splattering the kitchen walls. Barely noticing this, he would run to the bedroom where the woman would be standing over the crib at the end of the bed, gathering the now screaming baby up to her chest. For the briefest of moments they would look into each others' eyes with fear and love, and then they would run desperately for the front door. But Cave also knew that five dark-suited CSA agents would, at that moment, be reaching the top of the concrete stairs, looking for flat number 72 with a red front door. Parents and agents would meet in the stairwell. That was it; there could be no confrontation. Two minutes passed, then the front door opened. Flanked by agents, the two suspects, heads cowed, were bundled into separate vans. The captain, holding a whimpering bundle of blankets, climbed calmly into the final vehicle.

Cave knew that this was how it must have happened. As they returned through the beginnings of the rush-hour traffic, he read back the official record of events written in his own hand, a series of stark facts littered with timing marks. _0751: Agents enter apartment 72. 0759: All vehicles return._ The arrest had taken less than ten minutes. Even sitting inside the van it had been exhilarating. Seeing the suspects led from the building, handcuffed, defeated, was invigorating. Onto their hunched shoulders and bent necks Cave allowed himself to cast, with anger, the barrage of doubt that had welled up within him over the Canscot issue. Here they were, the engineers of his torment. If they had succumbed to the system, then the system could not surely have been so badly pierced as Cave had feared. He caught sight of the giant central tower of the council compound and his heart surged with joy.

Upon entering the walled complex they drove directly to the CSA headquarters building. A small group of agents were already waiting for them. Cave climbed out the van and took up a place half way up the steps leading to the great double wooden doors to the CSA offices. From the second van, the male suspect has escorted up the white marble steps towards the imposing building. Cave stared at the white line of his scalp where his hair was parted neatly down the middle. Agents either side of the female took her from the next van back and she too kept her gaze fixed firmly on the impassive ground. A slight wind played with loose strands of hair that hung down from her fringe. Out of the final vehicle stepped the captain, the baby in his arms still wrapped in blankets now silent.

The three of them walked in a heavily guarded line towards the open double doors. Cave could sense the tension in the air. In that small family, now broken, there was the essence of a revulsive attack upon the infallible values of the city, the values that the citizens whether public or private adopted for their own.

The marble steps were constructed with rounded overlaps at the edge of each tread protruding over the level below. The captain's front foot caught the first of these nosings, causing him to stumble. A shrill cry arose from the bundle he was carrying. Two frantic arms were pushed upwards, shaking the coverings from its head and Cave could see now its thin, fragile skull with a sparse covering of black hair. Eyes screwed up firmly against the world, the cries rose and fell in an arrhythmic wail.

Without warning, the female twisted sharply in the grip of the agents and threw herself back down the steps towards her crying child. With arms outstretched, she tried desperately to get a hold of it but her hands were restricted by the handcuffs she wore. She cried too, tears of rage streaming from her eyes as she screamed and fought with the agents trying to bring her back under control. At the top of the steps, extra hands rushed to take a firmer hold of the male to prevent him from seeing the struggle below. A cord of blanket that had come unwound from the child's swaddling swung now within reach of the female. With a lunge she grabbed it.

The blow that landed on her unprotected back sent her sprawling but she held on still, lying on the cold ground, blood from her mouth staining the clean white steps where she had connected with them.

It looked for a second that one straining fingertip had reached the warm body of her child but then the agent who had struck her was upon her and wrenching the blanket from her fist. Throughout it all the crying continued, a pervasive, anguished noise.

Then the struggle was over as swiftly as it had begun. Quickly the agents cleared the steps and shut the wooden doors behind them, and Cave was left standing there, staring at the bright red spatters of blood that were beginning to turn brown, with the sharp smell of a baby's soiled nappy lingering in the air.

In his ears he could still hear the haunting screams of the frightened child. Deep in his gut, he could feel the wrench of the previous day's disquiet. Hurriedly he made his way back towards the archives.

For the rest of the day, Lazarus Cave found himself unable to join in the atmosphere of celebration that filled the archives. After being debriefed by Landau Krauss, he sat subdued in front of his computer screen, working over the mundanities of archive maintenance. In contrast to Bernieri, Camras and Schmitz, all of who had removed their ties and released top buttons, Cave sat quietly, smartly with his tie neatly in place and his collar tightly fastened.

If anybody else in the office noticed, they did not let on nor question his reticence. It was unlikely Cave would have registered even if they had. Amidst the almost carnival atmosphere of his colleagues, those cries, the despairing, lonely cries of separation echoed in his memory. They carried sentiments that he understood. The shattering realisation of the imperfect power of the parent; the dismantling of the belief that every human is born with, that the one who nurtures it is limitless in time and knowledge, just as they are eternal sources of warmth and nourishment. The torment of the baby, although sharper, more keenly felt, was made of the same stuff as the doubts prompted by the failure of the system to carry a record of Canscot that had troubled Cave himself.

*

The sun was setting noticeably later as summer progressed. Despite the unceasingly miserable weather, life was flooding the city, and in time it might bring a renewed belief, perhaps.

Cave unlocked the door of his car and climbed into the driver's seat. The polish he used inside gave off the smell of factory-new upholstery, even though the seat fabric though not dirty was faded by exposure to sunlight. This was the first time he had been alone since the news of the arrests in the Canscot case, as it had semi-officially been termed, had been relayed to all the archivists.

He felt exhausted.

Peering upwards through the windscreen he followed the grey of the western sky is it progressed upwards, getting darker, through liquid mercury and powdery charcoal, forever tending towards the black of night, waiting for the earth to spin round far enough on its axis. Thin clouds the colour of dusk filled the higher reaches of the atmosphere. The wind blew cold and softly, probing at the seals of the car doors. If summer was truly here, Cave could not sense it. He found it difficult, from his position behind the large, three-spoke steering wheel to imagine that the clouds could ever lift. It was as if spring had never happened and everything seemed to be caught in an eternal winter where the amount of daylight was merely a variable that swung gently back and forth against the constant of the season. After all, change could be registered only in relation to the state of things as they were previously – historically. The careful and precise eradication of history from the city subjected it, surely, to an unbreakable stasis. Each new day could not be different from the previous day because the towers and the archivists had sterilised it and scrubbed it clean. No change meant no progress, nothing with which to mark the passing of time. The city felt like a timeless, limitless sprawl in which there was no conceivable way the gloomy coldness of now could ever make way for the fruits of the future and the nourishing warmth of summer.

For a moment, Cave fought the urge to shake the steering wheel and scream. Instead he unclipped the glovebox and reached inside for a boiled sweet. With his tongue he pushed it round his mouth, probing the conundrum of the city's existence. Still thinking, he turned the key in the ignition, listened to the engine grunt into mechanical life and drove with a low rumble out onto the streets of the city.

Canscot. Aimlessly he drove in looping circles round blocks of buildings, past the parks and gardens that sprung up all over the city, past the towers that held it together with unflinching regularity. Cave's destination was his apartment, but the route he took to get there hardly mattered. He felt like driving purposelessly, putting as much distance between himself and the events of the day as possible. Only when he felt the need to stop driving, or when he ran out of fuel, would be bring his meandering to an end.

At one point he found himself approaching the education centre in the 104th chapter. As he reached its first wall he slowed the car to a crawl and looked up at the building, and he found himself repeating this same process over and over again with other education centres until the sun had vanished completely and the lights in the dormitories had come on and gone off again.

He was outside the centre in the 2nd chapter when he pulled the car over to the side of the road and stepped out onto the pavement. An electronics shop with televisions on display was directly in front of him. On the screens he could see the official headlines broadcast by the official bulletin of the council-sanctioned news channel. There was no mention of Canscot, neither in the first, second nor third rung of stories.

The education centre was located across the road from where he had parked. Cave turned to gaze up at it. In every detail it was exactly the same as the education centres in every other chapter Cave had driven through so far. Each institution was prepared to exactly the same blueprints, and each was uniformly equipped within and without with identical equipment and facilities. Cave sat on the bonnet of his car and wondered which centre he had grown up in and graduated from. He ran his eyes over the unremarkable façade of the 2nd chapter centre. It _could_ have been this one, he acknowledged to himself, but then it could have been any of the other identical buildings he had seen that evening. He tried to think about his past, but he found that the past no longer existed for him. Even the memories of the life within their protective walls had faded into the uniformed beige in which the corridors were painted, and in which it so seemed that the corridors of his memory were also covered.

He scratched at his hairline and thought instead of the children lying in their beds in the darkened dormitories, heads and bodies cushioned between pillows, soft mattresses and thick duvets. The cry of the baby from that morning rang unbidden in his mind and he knew that the children in the education centre would never know the rift in feeling that could produce such a cry. By raising its citizens under its own parental auspices, the city never had to witness them undergo the breaking of the fundamental belief in the awesome power of the mother.

The older Lazarus turned to go. Reseated in his car, he started the engine and watched the dashboard come to life. A series of lights came on and went off again, leaving just the handbrake indicator illuminated. The needle on the fuel gauge twitched upwards and then settled just on the cusp of the red warning band that told him he was running low. In the central console, the green digits of the clock gave the time as nine forty-three. Over three hours of driving. Cave slipped the car into gear and accelerated gently in the direction of home.

Approaching the 111th chapter from the north, rather than the east as he usually did, Cave drove down unusual roads. There were few houses and shops around here. An enormous factory loomed up in the dark on his right-hand side. A vast structure, blacker than the lantern-lit night, it cut across the tops of several roads running north-south, creating a kind of massive island. The surrounding streets were full of storage depots, workshops, smaller refineries that took whatever was produced in the factory and turned it into more manageable materials. Only the occasional anaemic-looking block of flats, presumably home to some of the factory workers, interrupted the industrial landscape.

Cave knew roughly where he was; he had travelled through this area once or twice during the daytime, but he had little reason to do so often. As far as he could he kept his eyes fixed on the great monolithic tower located in the southern part of the chapter and headed towards it; somewhere on a straight line between here and there was home. Sometimes though he would have to turn a corner by a warehouse and then he would be hemmed in by the building's high sides and he would lose sight of the tower, momentarily unsure of his bearings before regaining sight of it in a gap between buildings.

Dark and deserted street fed into dark and deserted street. Jaundice-yellow patches of streetlight pooled like blood on the pavements. Bruised shadows fell in awkward joins between uncomfortable buildings. The city seemed ugly tonight, without another living being to share it with.

Driving swiftly down one long narrow road, with the guiding tower unsighted from anywhere along it, Cave was trying to escape the cloying atmosphere of the industrial quarter. Even breathing the air, it felt repulsive in his nose so that he could imagine himself choking on it. Distracted, he hardly noticed the small shape dart across the road until almost too late. Immediately he slammed his foot down hard on the brakes, wrestling the steering wheel to prevent the rear end from spinning out of control.

The eyes caught in his headlights had shone brightly in the dark; alarmed, frightened, like a stray dog. Cave sat for a moment, gripping the steering wheel, bringing himself back under control. Calmly now he stepped from the car, leaving the door open behind him and the keys in the ignition. The engine ticked over in neutral, the sound magnified by the close-in brick walls of the warehouses and the complete silence otherwise so that it seemed to fill the whole street. Exhaust fumes condensed in the cold night to form a thin white fog at the rear of the car. Taking a deep breath Lazarus Cave walked towards the young boy he had so nearly collided with.

The boy had untidy brown hair and white skin coloured grey with the city's muck. Lines of clear skin did show through where he had smiled or cried or wrinkled his forehead, a network of threadlike roads built by the muscles of his face and the dirt of the city. He pressed himself against the wall as Cave approached, petrified. Cave held his hands outwards, palm up in an attempt to reassure the boy. Whether it worked, or whether the child was simply too scared to coordinate his legs, he did not move. Cave bent down so that his face was level with the boy's. He looked even younger close up, barely more than eight or nine years old. Pale freckles spread over his nose and cheeks were almost indistinct from the dust and grime on his skin, his clothes appeared warm, once, but they were torn and frayed now, and he was painfully thin. But it was his eyes that Cave noticed most. They danced. Flicking from side to side, fixing upon his own, unsure, threatened, defiant – they sparked with a life Cave was not used to. Gold flecks seemed to shine from the dark brown irises, themselves almost impossible to make out clearly in the meagre light.

They stared at each other, an intense, unlikely pair. "Do you need a lift to your education centre?" Cave asked.

Surprise came into the boy's eyes and then was gone just as quickly. He shook his head.

"Do you need a lift anywhere?" Again the boy shook his head, slowly, solemnly and his eyes appeared to carry the same answer.

Cave looked up and down the road, they boy following his gaze with his own. There was still nobody else in sight. He strained his eyes. Not a sound. What was this child doing out, let along out here, _here_ , at this time? The nearest education centre was a good distance away. He would surely have heard if there had been a runaway. Canscot had dominated recently, of course, but a runaway was unprecedented, surely something of that scale would make itself heard. He brought his attention back to the child, placed a kind hand on his shoulder to try and reassure him. The boy flinched but did not move away.

"What's your name? I'd like to help you." Cave waited for a response.

The boy hesitated and then shook his head, not moving his vibrant eyes from Cave's own.

"You don't have a name?"

The boy confirmed by shaking his head again.

"Do you have any parents?"

Parents. The word was unnatural sounding, a concept that had no real place in language beyond the parental scope of the city and its council. Cave knew he was stalling, one step from the final question, hesitating like the boy had hesitated.

Once more he looked both ways along the length of the street. At the end furthest from him, on the corner, was the fuzzy halo of the light from a telephone box. Telephone boxes in the city were not for personal use, they were emergency items only. Cave knew that all he had to do was lift the receiver and he would be connected automatically to the council switchboard. He was at least two hundred feet from the phone, he wondered how he would get there and not lose the boy in the process. Stationary as the child was now, Cave could tell he was still terrified and should he, Cave, transform from unknown quantity into clear threat, the boy would undoubtedly kick and bite and struggle – all enough to make a two-hundred foot journey and subsequent telephone call highly difficult, if not quite impossible.

When he looked back at the boy he realised the child's eyes had not moved an inch from his face but when he opened his mouth to speak, the boy's entire body tensed under his hand and he knew that the boy understood why he had been looking down the street.

"Does anybody know you're here?"

The boy didn't move, didn't nod or shake his head, he stood perfectly still, every muscle strained and ready to run. Cave didn't need the boy to speak or indicate the answer with his head, everything he needed to know was written in the boy's eyes with their alarming quality of life.

For a while they held the pose, the boy standing, Cave crouched, his arm a bridge between the two of them. Then he relaxed the grip of his fingers and lifted his hand away from the boy's shoulder. Carefully the boy edged away, turned and began to walk rapidly up the road. Cave got back inside his car, pulled the door shut on the now cold interior and followed him slowly in first gear. A dark narrow alley that Cave hadn't noticed before in the dark night appeared in a cut between two solid walls. The boy turned into it and Cave brought the car to a halt opposite its entrance. It was a dead end as far as he could tell, all that was inside was a line of bins. There was just enough space between the edge of the bins and the wall for a grown man to fit sideways. The boy walked easily between them. Only when he had reached the end of the row of bins did the boy turn back and look at Cave watching him. For a moment he thought the boy was going to turn back; for a moment he thought he should get out of the car and follow him. Then the sound of another engine in a nearby street broke through the silent night. The boy heard it too. As Cave's attention was distracted by the growing beam of oncoming headlights that was forming at the end of the road, out of the corner of his eye he say the boy dart sharply behind the last bin.

Cave released the handbrake and accelerated away as a security van on patrol turned into the street. Car and van passed each other travelling in different directions in the dark of the night. Both drivers looked out of their windows but the vehicles were moving too fast and neither was able to see the other. Then, with their briefest of encounters over, they left the road at opposite ends. Soon after silence settled again like a blanket and there was not a living creature anywhere in sight.
Eight twenty-three in the morning. The alarm has been going off for half an hour, its shrill siren dominating the bedroom. The window is open and the curtains flap in a cool but not unpleasant breeze. Outside it is an uncharacteristically sunny start to the day. If Cave had got up as normal he would have heard on the weather forecast that the sun was predicted to last all morning and into the afternoon. A brilliant glimpse of summer. But he hasn't got up. He is lying on his back in bed, resting his head in the crook of an elbow. He is staring at the ceiling, not responding to the alarm clock. His eyes are red, it looks as though he has been crying, but then it could just as equally be the visible effects of strain and tiredness after the Canscot case, or maybe he is simply ill. He throws out his free arm, feeling for the snooze button on the alarm. Upon finding it he pushes it down forcibly, much harder than is necessary. The high-pitched beeping stops for another ten minutes; the sounds of the waking city rise up to take its place, but more distant and muffled. Birdsong from the gardens, collisions from industrial yards, the hum of commuter traffic on its way to work. The pager has not received any messages during the night but Lazarus Cave is not going to work today. It is eight twenty-five on a morning near the start of summer: another morning in the endless city caught in the infinite gap between two second markers on the face of a broken clock.

*

After it had sat for two-and-a-half minutes exactly, Cave carefully stirred the tea bag three full revolutions of the mug, pressed it against the ceramic side with the convex reverse of the spoon to squeeze out the full flavour from the leaves within, and then placed it in the bin. Dressed in a fresh-smelling blue-striped dressing gown, worn over white undershorts and vest, his feet nestled comfortably in brown slippers, Cave carried the mug of hot tea, held between two palms like something warm and delicate, through to the living room. He sipped it standing by the chess board in the corner, looking out of the window at the activity below. Clouds hung low in the sky so that they seemed to descend into the city itself, filling the streets and roads with a dull filter that muted sounds and forms. Bringing his attention back inside the room, he gave the chess pieces a short, considered glance and advanced the white knight in its customary L-shaped path up the board. In tidily printed handwriting, he made a note of the coordinates on a piece of notepaper and slipped it inside an envelope to be addressed and posted later on.

This done, Cave washed and dried his cup in the kitchen and then returned to the bedroom. Minutes passed. He re-emerged. He was dressed as if for work: light grey woollen trousers, precisely pleated, a crisp white shirt and a tie decorated with a houndstooth check. In his arms he carried a great collection of similarly plain, understated shirts and trousers. Depositing them in a shapeless heap on the worn settee, he disappeared again momentarily and made his return bearing a folding ironing board and iron, which he proceeded to erect in front of the pile of clothes.

The ironing lasted for several hours, Cave methodically smoothing down every inch of fabric and pressing it flat with the hot metal plate of the iron. He tackled the shirts first, lifting them by the hooks of their hangers, unbuttoning them and placing the hanger to one side. Starting with the buttoned side, he pulled the material so that the tapered end of the ironing board lodged in the top of the shirt where the shoulder was formed. With measured sweeps of the iron he coerced the cotton gently down into a creaseless plane, sometimes moving over areas just once, while other more crumpled zones required multiple passes with the burning iron. The back of the shirt and its opposite front panel were approached in a similar manner, the shirt itself being worked slowly over the ironing board, each time presenting a new, slightly disordered face to be evened out, the nose of the ironing board always used to anchor the shirt, tucking now into the shoulder, now the neck at the base of the collar, now the other shoulder.

All the time Cave kept his eyes fixed on the matter in hand, the city through the windows in front of him progressing about its business, unobserved. Behind him the television was tuned to the official news channel and manicured and coiffeured newsreaders broadcast sanctioned headlines to the populace, unheeded.

Having completed the main sections of a shirt, Cave turned next to the arms and collar, before slotting the now pristine garment back onto its original hanger.

Halfway through the pile of shirts Cave heard his pager sound from the bedroom. Three drawn-out, high-pitched sirens indicating that his absence from work had been noticed. He resisted the conditioned urge to read the pager's message, gripping tightly at the iron's handle, pressing it down harder onto the shirt beneath so that he risked burning through the thin material. The final tone died sharply away. Cave relaxed, swiftly lifting the iron away so that the shirt steamed slightly in the sunlight breaking through the window, but it had survived unharmed.

It was nearing the lunch hour by the time Cave had finished. Hung before him on the backs of chairs, over light fittings and door frames was a crowd of nearly identical outfits, dark trousers and light shirts punctuated only by more of the same. Where two items of apparel hung closely together, the shirt above the trousers, it looked like a person, flat and smooth with no depth or substance. Elsewhere, separated clothing could have been the dismembered parts of bodies sliced in two, except that there were of course no bodies to start with.

Taking care not to ruffle the freshly ironed clothes, Cave ferried them from the lounge back to the bedroom where he arrayed them in neat regiments inside his closet. A red light was flashing rhythmically on the pager. Cave knew his unexpected absence would be problematic. A stringent code of attendance governed council employees. This was the first time he had ever broken it. He read the message. It was an instruction to report to the nearest medical facility where an appointment had been made on his behalf. Severe ill health was the only accepted excuse for failing to notify the council of his whereabouts. The digital alarm clock on the bedside table gave a time ten minutes after the scheduled appointment. The surgery was a further ten-minute walk away, added to the fact of course that he was physically sound. Cave looked at the branches of the tree in the garden that lay between his building and the next blowing freely in the wind. He replaced the pager and stalked back through to the kitchen to prepare some food.

*

That afternoon Lazarus Cave sat with his back propped against the tree, facing out to the street with the tenement blocks rising up on either side of him. The tree's bark was gnarled and scratched at his back when he made slight adjustments to his position. Overhead, its branches shaded him from the sun and as he sat, he listened to the breeze riffling through the leafs like paper and caught the occasional sound of a bird perhaps, or a squirrel going about its business somewhere in the foliage. Underneath, the mown grass was cool and soft.

Cave was drifting in a semi-sleep and did not notice the figure approaching him from the street. Its footsteps were silenced by the grass and only at cautious "excuse me" did he realise that he was no longer alone and hurriedly blink his eyes until the figure's blurry outline and undefined features had resolved themselves into a woman, a few years younger than him, with red hair and a wary look on her face.

"Sorry?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose and his attention was now fully on the woman from the window.

"I said 'excuse me'."

"Yes?"

"You're in my spot."

"Your spot?"

She nodded. "Yes, I always sit here in the afternoon."

Cave pointed up in the direction of his flat. "I live up there," he said.

"Well, then you'll know I always sit here."

"I've never seen you." He paused, then added more for his own benefit than hers, "Sitting here, that is."

"Every afternoon. If it's not raining."

"I work in the afternoons."

The woman thought about this for a moment. "Why aren't you at work now?"

Cave cursed himself, then he wondered if he should tell her the truth. Maybe because he watched her, had seen her with her guard down, because too of her demeanour which carried an unusual warmth, he felt a ready liking towards her and a closeness that he wanted to convey.

She looked at him with her head tilted to one side. "Are you ok?"

"Of course." He shifted over to one side, exposing a greater part of the tree trunk behind him. "Would you like to sit down?"

She laughed a playful laugh. "With you?"

Cave nodded and smiled.

She smiled back. "I'm going to go indoors now," she indicated the building to Cave's right, the one across from his. "You can have my spot this afternoon." She turned to go.

"Wait!" The woman stopped, half facing him, half facing the street. "What's your name?"

"Evelyn."

"Evelyn," Cave repeated.

She nodded. "Evelyn Green."

"Lazarus Cave," he replied.

Evelyn smiled, still half facing, half facing away from him. "Pleased to meet you, Lazarus."

"I watch you in your apartment." Immediately he said it, Cave wondered why he had done so. A nervous sweat rose prickling beneath his collar as he waited for a response to his seedy confessional, hoping for anything but that she should turn on her heel and walk away in disgust.

And then she smiled her smile again, a winsome curl of a lip as she held out her hand. Cave rose and shook it. "Goodbye, Lazarus." And then she was gone again, walking quickly back across the lawn and rounding the corner of the apartment block, disappearing from view.

When she had gone, Cave too went indoors. The sun made its way across the sky and then down towards the horizon as the afternoon progressed. From the lounge window, Cave could see first a trickle then a growing stream until there was a river of commuter traffic in cars and on foot making its way across the grey landscape of the city. He thought ahead to the following day and the meeting with Krauss that he would surely have.

At stages in the course of the afternoon Cave contemplated reporting the existence of the boy. As a regular and true citizen he should. But each time he felt himself come to resolve that, yes, he would do so, the question would arise from somewhere, unbidden, how could he report the boy? There was no proof that he existed. He had absolutely no idea where he was. And resolve would give way to anxiety. Rather than admitting liability – fallibility – the council would more likely accuse him of having lost faith, of spreading untruths, of being a subversive element within the archives, of wriggling and insinuating and shifting attention from the fact that it was he, yes he, Lazarus Cave, who had not only been absent without cause from work, but had failed to report as explicitly instructed by the council to a medical appointment.

He would be finished before he had even started.

*

That night Lazarus Cave slept a dreamless sleep. As he slipped into unconsciousness, he was unaware that the familiar window in the block of flats on the other side of the stretch of communal garden in which a loose wind waltzed through the branches of a solitary tree lit up. He did not know that a woman with a sad face of an indeterminate age somewhere in the thirties, with shoulder-length red hair had at that moment walked into the apartment with the window. A low, empty snore escaped his open mouth with a gust of warm air as she undressed in front of the backlit window, lingering over each item as she did so, watching but not watching out of the corner of her eye up at the window across from hers, perhaps two floors up, where, despite the difficult viewing angle, she saw sometimes the shape of a man in the window and she liked to think that this was her strange neighbour that she had met earlier, that he was watching her, that she was being watched, noticed, that perhaps she wasn't quite as alone as the bare walls of her neat and ordered flat suggested. Lazarus Cave knew none of this whilst he slept, so free from dreams that he did not even dream of nothing.

*

Two of the three archivists were already at their desks when Lazarus Cave walked into the office. Sal Bernieri and Arthur Camras raised their heads and uttered cautious hellos before returning to their work. Landau Krauss was in his glass office; Cave could see his dark bulk through the half-closed venetian blinds that covered the walls.

Cave had been expecting it when Krauss's large, balding, severe head appeared from behind the partially opened door. He entered the office which was dark and gloomy. Despite the semi-shut blinds, Krauss was using only his desk lamp and flickering computer screen to illuminate the work area. He was direct and to the point.

"You were not in work yesterday."

"No, sir."

"Would you like to tell me why?"

"I didn't feel able to, sir."

"And you're aware you received an instruction to attend a medical facility because of this?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then why did you not attend?" Krauss' voice remained almost impassively level. There was the faintest of stresses on the 'not' but the volume and speed were threateningly consistent throughout.

"I was asleep at the time, sir."

"Asleep?"

"Yes, sir."

"And were you also asleep when the message was received?"

"Yes, sir."

"I own a pager, Lazarus, I have heard it receive orders before – orders that I always follow – the sound it makes is quite piercing."

"Yes, sir."

"And you didn't hear it?"

"No, sir."

"Where was the pager at the time?"

Cave paused for the briefest of moment before he answered, it was an offence for a council employee to be out of vicinity of his or her pager, but the truth at this stage, important as it was, mingled uncomfortably with the lies he was giving.

"On the bedside table, sir."

For the first time Krauss looked up at Cave's face with raised eyebrows as if to really ask a question. Up to this point he had kept his focus fixed downwards at a sheaf of papers in front of him. Krauss considered the archivist standing before him, drumming his fingers softly as he did so. Then he folded them into a steeple beneath his chin.

"Your work on the Canscot case was exemplary, Lazarus."

"Thank you, sir."

"Do you have anything to say in mitigation for your unacceptable absence yesterday?"

"No, sir."

"Very well. Consider this a formal warning. A note will go on what had hitherto been a spotless file. You may go." Without a word Cave turned and walked out of the office. He pressed the door shut behind him until the metal catch clicked home.

The computer screen gave him access to banks of information that corresponded to just about every living breathing facet of the city Cave could care to imagine. He sat there, trawling through it, clicking from one screen to the next, letting reams of numbers and letters flicker before his eyes. Everything that was supposed to be connected to some tangible counterpart on the streets above felt completely divorced from its source. Banks of numbers seemed to float past, separate from any equations that may have given them reason and being. Words themselves dissolved as Cave stared at them so there was nothing but letters, endless chains of letters. He let his eyes slip out of focus and the numbers and letters became more indistinct still. Black marks on the screen and white spaces between them, inside them, around them until the black marks were like specks of dirt that sullied the space behind the words. Was it just white that Cave could really see? White screen, white light, white noise. Everything thrown together in one stream so that nothing was discernable and all that there was, was just a faint tingling hum like the sound made by the strip-light in the ceiling above his head, or the computer hard disc as it whirred around inside the machine. There had to be something solid behind the words, a working model of the city, otherwise Cave could feel himself swimming through the whiteness as he might swim though a white sea with no land in sight.

Around him, archivists worked with the same fervour that until so recently had been his own.

Cave clicked randomly onwards.

Something in the bottom left corner of his screen caught his attention. Here the black letters were legible still. He rubbed his eyes and blinked rapidly. The whole screen switched back into focus, but Cave concentrated only on the corner, wondering what the words were that punctured through to his attention. It did not take long to find them, two words sat amongst a thousands or more others. Her name.

Cave clicked on through a chain of information, much of it irrelevant. Her name was of passing reference only in a larger archival record. But it was there, and Cave thought of the previous day's conversation, and the connection he had felt at the time and he felt it again now. It was like watching her from the window, and as then, the record had provided a glimpse only and as the details of what he was reading grew more irrelevant still, Cave conceded with resignation that she had passed from his view.

He checked around to see if he had given any outward signal of his discovery. Still the other archivists worked furiously, not paying him any attention. He let out a slow breath and relaxed. He considered his options. There was no way he could search for Evelyn's name directly, repeated specific searches would undoubtedly attract attention. Carefully he began to type. He pushed the enter key and waited for the results to show up. Eagerly he scanned them. Nothing. Not deterred, he tried again, selecting oblique terms that he thought might lead him ultimately to her. Cave pictured her as the centre of a target, and his approach was to start somewhere out in the peripheries and slowly work his way inwards by concentrating on bands of information that ran in ever-tightening circles around the focal point.

In his mind he pictured the actual city like this, limitless bands and he on any arbitrary one at a far remove from the pure white origin where she sat, her back against a tree, untroubled by the warming sun in a leafy garden.

Again his search returned nothing. Nor the third, nor the forth, nor fifth. Patiently he continued. At last the sixth search returned some more promising results and he burrowed down through the strata of information until at last he found her name again on his screen. He was meticulous in his reading, committing every last detail about her to memory.

This subtle scouring of the archives for tantalising scraps of information took all afternoon until Cave's eyes hurt from staring at the flickering cathode tube of his computer screen. He realised the passing of time only when Schmitz, Camras and Bernieri in turn powered down their machines, stood up and made their way to the elevators to ascend once more from the archives back into the streets of the city that rested upon them. Cave too switched off his computer, rubbed is eyes, gathered his coat and briefcase and left for his car. In his mind, he carried fragments of a person, cradling them softly in his concentration like the pieces of a broken vase so that he should not forget one and lose it.

As a fumbled with the key in the ignition, Cave heard a loud rap on the passenger window of his car. He looked up. Sal Bernieri's large face filled the glass. He was making a winding motion with his right hand and Cave lowered the window.

"Need a lift Sal?"

Bernieri shook his head. He was breathing deeply and must have been running to catch him before he drove off. "What? No, Larry, thanks." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "My car's parked over there. It's you. The meeting with Krauss. Is everything ok?"

"That? Yes, everything's fine. Thanks Sal."

"Where were you yesterday?"

"Didn't feel up it. Look, Sal, sorry to rush you but I've got to go."

Bernieri looked confused. "Where do you got to go to in such a hurry?"

"Please, Sal, another time. Not now."

Bernieri finally caught his breath properly and his first deep exhalation in the conversation was the sound of a man deflating.

"Everything with Krauss is fine? You're sure?"

Cave nodded firmly.

"OK, Larry. Look, I don't know, I worry still. Marge'd kill me if she knew we'd had this chat and I just let you drive off now. Next week, you and me, we'll go somewhere," he cast his hands theatrically about, "wherever you want." He leaned his bulky frame against the open window of the passenger door. Cave felt the suspension sink on one side of the car. "We can go to the zoo."

Cave cursed his friend silently. Distraction was threatening to upset the carefully catalogued pieces of Evelyn he was carrying delicately in his memory. He shook his head, "can't do next week Sal."

"Larry, come on, don't make me beg! The week after. No refusals. We both know you're free."

"The zoo? Really?"

Bernieri nodded, each firm movement sending shockwaves rippling over his chins.

"Whatever you say Sal, I'll see you there."

Bernieri stepped back and the car righted its balance. Cave, relieved, drove off, too focussed on retaining the precious facts in his head than to worry about any unwanted attention he might be attracting, whether from a friend or not.

*

It took Lazarus Cave an hour to write down everything he could remember about Evelyn from the archive records in a notebook he had taken from work for the purpose, and not until he had read and re-read it two or three times was he happy that he had not left anything out.

When he had done, he took his briefcase through to the kitchen, laid it on the counter and selected the sharpest knife from the rack. Opening the case, he removed the contents and arranged them in a neat pile to one side. The lining inside was a cheap, utilitarian pale material with a worn sheen to it. Cave nestled the point of the knife into the creases of the material in one half of the case where it met at walls and ran it the length of the briefcase. The material made a gentle tearing sound as the knife passed. He did this four times and then using the tip, he levered the side panel up and away from the rest of the briefcase. It was made of stiff card and held in place with glue which left sticky trails on the underside. Using four thin pieces of wood which he had acquired for the job, Cave made four ribs running from the top of the briefcase down to its base, which he attached to the inside of the leather outer with a few squirts of glue. Between the two central ribs, he left a larger space than between them and the outer ones, and into this he now placed the notebook containing the information on Evelyn. Looking at it for one ceremonious moment, he then proceeded to add more glue to the exposed side of the wooden ribs and, after a second, a layer too to the underside of the removed panel. This done, he pressed the panel back into place, taking care to make sure that all the severed material was tucked into the new, marginally higher join, and completely concealed. The effect, he was pleased to see when he examined the inside and then closed the briefcase and inspected the exterior was near flawless. Hoping that the glue would hold firm, he placed it on the floor by the front door.

Back in the kitchen, the clock on the wall said half eight. Cave opened the fridge. A few half-drunk cartons of milk and juice on otherwise empty shelves. He shut the door again, put on a coat and went out into the cold night, stealing a glance at the briefcase in the hallway as he did so.

Turning left, Cave walked up the road away from the nearest tower, heading into the endless streets that lay nearby to seek out a restaurant.

The bright neon sign of a pizzeria down a narrow side street caught his attention and he made his way towards it. Twilit buildings hustled in close on either side of the road, broad brick walls with few windows set into them. Nearing the restaurant, Cave noticed a dimmer pool of light falling on the pavement a little further up. It came from a low, dark, faceless building.

Walking through the door of the bar, he encountered a dimly lit room, few drinkers, a low murmur of sound as drinks were ordered and consumed. There was nothing threatening about the place, but it was hardly sociable either. Cave surveyed the mismatched collection of customers. These were the dispirited inhabitants of the city he would previously have avoided. As citizens they were undemanding, resigned to remaining anchored to the solid lowest rung of society. In the evenings, after work, they sat and drank to fill the void left by an absent sense of self, unable to supplement it with anything else.

Cave ignored them all with nothing stronger than disinterest and turned instead to the bar.

The barman poured out the whisky without a word and replaced the bottle on the shelf. Cave stared at the ice cubes floating in the rusty coloured liquid, knocking against the side of the glass with faint rings. He had never drunk before and the whisky stung his nostrils as he inhaled its smell.

Down one end of the bar, to Cave's right, a customer was picking morosely at the tatty label of a green beer bottle. He looked the other way. To his surprise, an old man had taken the stool two down from his own. He too had a whisky in front of him and he raised the glass and bowed his head in acknowledgement to Cave.

Slightly perturbed, Cave returned to his drink. Affecting casualness, he swirled the whisky in the glass, raised it to his lips and sipped. The searing burn of the alcohol on his lips, his tongue, as it slipped down the back of his throat came as a shock and Cave had to forcibly override the reaction to splutter everything back up.

"Stings, don't it?"

The old man had a familiar sounding voice, although not one Cave could place. He nodded in agreement.

"That's life."

"What?"

"Water of life. It's what they call whisky."

Cave bent his neck and took in his companion's profile. Old and hunched, he wore a hat with the brim pulled close, disguising much of his face. Still, Cave got the same sense of familiarity as he had done with the voice.

"Do I know you?"

The old man downed his whisky in one. "I don't think so, son."

"I do – you were in the zoo. We watched the rhinoceros."

Cave was swivelled in his seat now, watching the old man who remained staring resolutely ahead.

"I don't know about that." The old man tapped the bottom of his glass on the counter, twice. "Why don't you drink up and we'll have another one together?"

Cave paused a moment and then did as was suggested. The second swig burnt like the first, but Cave was expecting it this time and his throat no longer objected to the harsh liquid. The barman came over, whisky bottle in hand. He refilled the first glass and at a nod from the old man, refilled Cave's also.

"So what's a good council man, an archivist," he rolled the word out in clipped syllables, "doing in a dive like this?"

"What are you doing here?"

"Me? I'm just a regular true citizen, feeding a human foible."

"And why are you talking to me?"

"Who else might I engage in conversation in this place, do you suggest?"

Cave pointed back down to the other end of the bar where the lone drinker was still fingering the label on his bottle with a melancholic air. For the first time the old man moved his head, looking in the direction Cave indicated. Somewhere behind them one of the dim ceiling lights flickered, causing shadows to jump about the walls.

The old man turned to Cave. "I don't rightly think he'd give me the best of conversations, with no offence to the man. Whereas you, on the other hand, a good council man indeed. He's here because he's a poor old sod. But still he has love in his heart for this city. You, do you have love?"

Cave turned the whisky glass between is fingers. "Isn't love somewhat intangible?" He drank down his second drink.

The old man raised his glass and followed suite. He tapped the base of it twice on the bar. "Intangible? Look around you, son. This city has no history. Do you think tangibility really matters? Without history, reality – what's 'tangible' if you like – is what we make it, here and now. And right now, I'm saying that man has love, and that love gives him belief."

The barman refilled their glasses and stepped back into the shadows under the shelves laden with whisky.

"Isn't it belief that gives him love?"

The old man shrugged and took a sip from his drink. "Could be. Don't really matter to me. As I said, I'm just a regular true citizen. It's not up to me to divine these greater things."

"Will you tell me your name now, regular true citizen?"

"I could, but it is my own and I plan to keep it that way. And what about you, archivist, do you have a name?"

Cave now sipped from his drink. "Lazarus."

"Lazarus?" The old man sounded genuinely surprised. Then he chuckled to himself. "Lazarus. You poor bastard." He turned and beneath the hat brim, Cave could make out a twinkling blue eye. He lifted his glass, "to Lazarus, your health."

Cave, in spite of himself, lifted his own glass and together they drank down the rough whisky. Tap, tap. The barman poured them a fourth each. "Steady gentlemen." The old man tipped his hat with his forefinger.

Behind them the door swung as a customer made his way back outside. A cool draught of air rushed in. Cave sniffed at his drink. He found that his head was feeling muffled, his thoughts not quite straight. His tongue was large and loose in his mouth. They sat in silence for a few minutes before Cave spoke again, his words slightly slurred.

"Does life really sting?"

"Hmm?"

"Life. Does it sting?"

"How do you mean?"

"That's what you said."

The old man shook his head. "Water of life," he drank to indicate, "whisky."

Cave's head swam as thoughts tried to make themselves heard. He found himself speaking.

"But what if he doesn't exist? What does that make of life then? Is it just intangible? Tangibly intangible? You can poke him, you know, but he's not there."

"You've lost sense, son. Whisky does that to you." Again he finished his glass in one go. "Who knows, perhaps life does too. Not for a regular true citizen to say. Definitely not for a good council man to say."

Cave finished his whisky too. The barman poured them two more. "Last ones, gentlemen." The old man tipped the brim of his hat once more, "whatever you say, Horace."

Cave didn't hear the exchange, he was lost in his own thoughts momentarily, and then he spoke. "You know what doesn't make sense? None at all? Last night I didn't dream. I always dream. Even if I dream of nothing. But last night, no. And then earlier today I have this memory of last night of writing notes to myself, on squares of paper I use for chess... like this." Cave tore a square from the paper napkin on the bar in front of him. "And then I fold them up as small as possible," he folded the square of napkin as he spoke, "and hide them around the flat so no one can find them. You know, under floorboards, in jars of honey, cracks, nooks, niches. You see, these notes are memories, the only real ones in existence anywhere in the city. In my flat. And here's what doesn't make sense, and I know I didn't dream writing these last night, this evening when I get in from work, I check these places but nothing. Not a scrap. The notepad is still just as fresh, my pen hasn't moved. Nothing."

The old man didn't say anything and Cave carried on talking. For the remainder of the evening until the bar lights came on bright and then went off altogether, until Cave had paid for the whiskies and turned to say goodbye to the old man, only to find that he was no longer there and the whisky drops left in the empty glass two stools down had dried to nothing, until he was back on the cold, unfamiliar streets of the city, walking unsteadily towards the docks, Cave talked, in fits and starts, rolling around a recurring chorus line, what if he doesn't exist, verses spiralling out of control until what he said didn't make sense, or made sense only in parts, a language breakdown, a redundancy of speech so that words were just noise and when he formed these strange, slurred alien sounds with his whisky-addled mouth and lips and tongue, he didn't know if they were the truth or lies, or whether it was even worthwhile thinking about truth and lies in the infinite noise of a city where no one lived near the edges that did not exist, although surely they must? Even the endless must finish somewhere. And all the time, until the end of the glass of whisky, until all of the water of life had been drunk, that same unanswerable question.

*

The docks were cold and whipped with a wet wind. Cave's head rolled with the whisky that pitched about his stomach. Gentle black water lapped against the concrete banks as Cave stepped onto the main quayside. One weak streetlamp cast a thin yellow light over the area. Just across the river on the far bank, a great black tower silhouetted against the clouds that hung in the night sky. There was no one down here, not a single movement or footstep, no one to hear the loud, impotent bellow that tore from Cave's mouth and was whisked away on the current of the river.

He staggered forwards and as the wind filled his ears, he did not notice the cough of an engine start up somewhere close by in the dark. A black saloon pulled quietly away as Lazarus Cave leant back to gain some leverage before stepping forwards and with a snap of his right shoulder, swinging a fist at the air itself.

He whirled, off balance, stumbling for his footing. The air was like a brick wall made of nothing; at once parting to let his fist through and at the same time as unyielding and impregnable as the breath of the council that maintained the city in its impeccable order.
A warm breeze flows across the hilltop and through the enclosures of the zoo. A lioness stretches sleepily. Idle monkey chatter barely breaks the peace. The rolling behind of a large bear disappears into its musty den. Only the cawing and calling of the birds can be heard throughout the zoo. A carnival coloured parrot leans its head back and screeches. A few enclosures away a penguin, its quiet monochrome cousin, shuffles towards an icy pool. It pauses for a second at the water's edge, small black eyes peering down either at its own reflection, distorted by small ripples, or at something underneath the surface. Then, with a sort-of-grace, it pitches into a headfirst dive and the water closes immediately over, penguin ripples combining indistinguishably with the rest of them.

*

Lazarus Cave awoke the next morning with a pounding headache, a dry mouth and an uncomfortable feeling of nausea that seemed to wash around inside of him. He was covered in a clammy sweat that smelt like whisky.

Hungover, unstable, he hauled himself out of bed and trudged through to the shower where he tried to wash the unpleasantness from his body.

Next he dressed himself in clean clothes and moved through to the kitchenette where he sat at the breakfast counter grasping a cup of black coffee between his hands. The mug trembled as he sipped from it. A spent blister pack of painkillers lay beside him on the worktop.

Slowly his headache began to subside. But although his body was cleansed and gradually rebalancing itself, Cave could not dislodge the creeping canker of doubt that had taken root in his mind. Looking around at the familiarity of the flat, of the view from his twelfth-floor window out over the city, he wondered if any of it was real. His hands were still shaking, but now he wasn't sure if it was the aftershock of the toxins or of the sudden isolation he felt.

Cave stalked over to the lounge window. He tried to remember the details of the previous night but nothing came clearly. The face of an old man with bright blue eyes hovered in his memory but when he sought to recall what they had spoken about, he got only the garbled sounds of voices speaking all together like the interference of crossed radio stations.

He peered out of the window. The city unfurled to the horizon in the grey early morning light. Down in the street below a few people were walking along the pavements. Across the road he noticed the distinctive shape of a security van parked by the kerb. He looked closer. In the cab he could make out a CSA agent, idly smoking a cigarette. For a few moments Cave stood there, staring, perplexed, and then he withdrew.

Instinctively he went to check on the briefcase in the hallway. It was still there, untouched, its secret safely hidden within the lining. He finished his coffee and donned his jacket. Then he returned to the lounge window. It was still there, waiting, watching. Cave wracked his memory. Had it been there when he had staggered in last night? He couldn't even remember coming home though, let alone what cars had been positioned opposite his flat. He thumped his hand on the kitchen counter and cursed. Then with a determined swiftness, he picked up his briefcase and left the flat.

As he walked down the road to his car, Cave could feel the eyes of the security agent boring into his back. Without checking behind, he unlocked the door and climbed into the driver's seat.

Commuter traffic moved slowly but smoothly through the city. Cave sat behind the wheel of his car. He was sure the surveillance was for him. He was alarmed, of course, but something else also, an odd sense of disconnection. The city, it seemed to him, had turned against him and he and his doubt had been cut adrift to bob untethered upon uncertain currents. Did Landau Krauss know about the security van? Cave could not see why he would not, but there did exist above Krauss, above all the directors of the council agencies, a board of twelve faceless councillors overseeing everything. Could the erratic behaviour of one council employee have caught their attention? He wished for the second time that morning he could remember what he had said to the old man, but again his recollections where blocked by the chattering sound of nonsensical voices.

Cave pulled into the council car park. Preoccupied by the emergence of the fact that he was now under scrutiny, although of what precise origin he was not certain, he made his way into the expansive lobby of the archives and down the lift to his desk.

Once underground, he breathed easier. In the corridors, the air conditioning thrummed its regular thrum. Some of the concern that weighed down on his shoulders lifted. If Krauss was aware of the security van, he gave no indication of it at all as the morning passed uneventfully.

As he worked, Cave felt that from his vantage point in the archives he was an observer. But an observer of what?

During the afternoon Evelyn crept back into his thoughts. He could feel the notebook in the case under his desk, something reassuringly solid against the uncertainty surrounding him, and he longed to see her again. For a brief moment he resolved to go to her flat that evening and knock on doors until he found hers, but then the image of the security van returned and Cave knew that he could not risk implicating her in whatever suspicion now lay upon him.

Unable, however, to shake her from his mind, he returned to searching for her in the council records. As the minutes ticked past into hours in the unchanging air of the archives, Cave trawled through business records, personal notes, agendas, reminders, memos, receipts, love letters, doodles, artwork, documents, prescriptions, shopping lists, bills, notifications of payment, jokes, speeches, reports, plans, rotas, rosters, menus, timetables, maps, accounts, journal entries. It was the last of these he found hardest to understand; there were few admittedly, but still some citizens took the time to carefully transcribe their thoughts and events, only to faithfully scissor it from whatever notebook they had used and deposit it for destruction in one of the council collection bins.

*

When Cave returned home that evening the security van was positioned conspicuously in the same place as before. The same CSA agent sat within, or perhaps it was a different one; the low summer sun glinted off the windscreen making it difficult to see inside with any certainty. Cave entered the apartment block and headed straight upstairs. Inside his flat he went into the bathroom and urinated loudly with the door open, the stream of piss long and uninterrupted as he relieved himself. He ate dinner at the chess board, scattering crumbs across the chequered squares like the debris of war. With his fork he accidentally knocked a white rook across the board. He struggled still to recall whether that was his own colour or that of his opponent. Never mind. He committed the coordinates of the portentous move to a scrap of paper and found an envelope in which to seal it.

Carrying it with a ritual solemnity across the living room, he paused for a moment by one of the large windows. An energetic wind swooped through the city's twilight, tumbling clouds across the sky with the promise of rain. Seized by the moment, Cave threw the window open and held the envelope out as far as his arm could stretch. The breeze caught the edges, fluttering it like a white flag until the moment when Cave released it. He watched it fall and then catch in the gusty draughts, dipping up and down and following the paths it made through the air, a tracer that pointed out the invisible fingers of the wind.

*

In the following days, Cave took to inventing reasons that, in the early evening upon leaving work, would lead him on meandering, aimless drives around the factory district. He was searching for the boy, as if needing his presence as an anchor to something more substantial than the world in which he now found himself.

Hours spent trundling through the setting sun in a low gear.

No sign of him anywhere.

And at night, when he would finally arrive home, his movements noted by the watchful CSA agent, Cave would spend increasing amounts of time sitting waiting for Evelyn to appear in the flat opposite. Most of the time he would be in the dark, all lights in his flat switched off, but every now and then, on a whim, he would turn on the light in the bedroom so his presence was advertised, displayed as if on a screen, and he thought about people watching him and wondered if that this was what other people in the city did.

Evelyn's appearances during the course of the week were unpredictable. On some nights, Cave would stay awake for hours but she did not show. On other occasions, he would barely have been waiting five minutes before her shadow would fall across the curtains in her window. Once she appeared with the curtains open and the lights turned on. She undressed completely and Cave could see everything: her red hair the light skin over her collar bones, the full shape of her breasts, the curve of her hips, the dark smudge of pubic hair at the top of her legs in the centre, and when she turned around, the roundness of her buttocks. That night she came to the window, as if realising only then that she had not shut the curtains, and as she looked out into the night, Cave speculated as to whether she could see him, if despite his darkened room, from the outside his pale white skin still hung ghost-like at his window. After that he awaited her presence with an added thrill, but it was those nights when she did not materialise as a figure in a gap in the curtains, or as a shadow behind them, that he felt simultaneously both the least fulfilled and the most complete.

*

The following week, Cave went to the zoo as planned to meet Sal Bernieri. The market with the fountain in the centre was alert with life and business as Cave made his way across it. Ascending the steep steps set into the side of the city's grand hill, the sun was warm on his face and he felt obliged to remove his jacket as a result of the exertion in the fine weather. Cresting the top of the hill he looked about himself. It was a weekend and plenty of people had been enticed out by the fine weather. Everything was dry, warm and filled with a natural radiance. It was all so very different than it had been in the wet. In the corner-shaped sculpture that lay in the ground before the research centre a couple was kissing. Blooms adorned the rosebushes that grew from the flowerbeds; the cruel thorns of exposed winter were hardly visible beneath the delicate white petals.

Cave made his way up the entrance steps and into the public atrium of the research centre that acted as a gateway to the gardens and zoo beyond. Sunlight streamed in through the great glass dome that capped the circular room, blinding anyone who tried to look up to the sky above. Columns cast their shadows in regular patterns on the stone floor, creating alternating bands of light and shade that gave the appearance of an enormous grate.

It was warm in the atrium and Cave could feel a sweat beginning to develop under his shirt. There was no sign anywhere of the research activity that took place behind the impassive, imposing doors set into the curved walls, but the air was tense with its unseen reach.

A cool wind was rippling across the exposed top of the hill immediately outside the rear doors to the research centre. Cave sighed into it, allowing it to soothe the lingering atmosphere of the atrium from his skin. About twenty feet of cropped green grass separated him from the first enclosures of the zoo. Bodies sat on the ground, relaxed, untroubled. Heads were tilted back, faces directed upwards to absorb the warmth of the sun. Cave wiped a bead of sweat from his retreating hairline and ran his hand over his head.

Bernieri was waiting for him outside and he waved enthusiastically as Cave appeared.

"Larry! Over here!"

Cave ambled over, feeling oddly uncomfortable as Bernieri clapped him warmly on the shoulder.

"How you doing, Sal?"

Bernieri patted his great stomach and mopped his brow. "Beautiful weather's killing me, Larry."

Cave laughed despite himself and the two men started on a slow stroll around the animal enclosures.

"How about yourself Larry? Marge's been asking after you."

"She has? Tell her I'm fine. And thank you."

"I told her how you were the other week. She's a good woman. She worries. She cares, you know? So what do I tell her?"

"That I'm fine," Cave said firmly. "Honestly. She needn't worry."

"You look tired."

"I don't feel it."

"Well you do. And at work. I can see it in your eyes, Larry. And I know you're not telling me something." Bernieri paused. Cave could see he was weighing something up. "You go driving round the factory district. Every day for the last week. Just driving, slowly, as if you were looking for something. What's going on Larry?"

"How do you know that Sal?"

By this time the two men had walked past the lionesses, giraffes and elephants. They reached a fork and consulted the sign. To the left it pointed towards the rhinoceros enclosure. To the right lay the reptile house. Cave led them down the right-hand path.

The backs of the two men, side by side, both dressed in a light shirt with hands clasped behind them, proceeded down the pathway. They looked casual in the sunshine, but the gentle sweat on Cave's forehead was a mix of both heat and nerves as he waited for Bernieri's answer, unsure what his friend had discovered, in what immediate circles his actions were under discussion.

"I followed you Larry. I kept seeing you go the wrong way out of the car park, away from home. And that time I invite you here, you have to get off somewhere. I didn't know what was going on. I thought maybe you had a woman you weren't telling me about. You know, tired at work, being evasive," he gave Cave a knowing jab with his elbow, "I wanted to get a look at her. Is she good enough and all that."

They entered the cool confines of the reptile house in which snakes, lizards, turtles spent their days and both men together let out a sigh at the temporary relief from the sun. They continued on in the gloom. Cave felt the nervous sweat die away too.

"I didn't see you Sal. Stealthier than you look."

An affronted expression crossed Bernieri's face and then dissolved into a laugh. "It's not stealth – you're an awful driver Larry. You should check your mirrors once in a while."

They paused at a large container with a tree and other vegetation walled off with glass to try and spot the chameleon. After a while Bernieri pointed up into the branches. "There he is."

Cave squinted until he too had made out the dusky brown scales of the lizard.

"Anyway, so I follow you, expecting you to lead me to a lady's apartment somewhere, or a restaurant or something maybe. But no, we drive, and you don't look in your mirrors, and I find myself turning into the factory district. Now there's definitely never a woman over that way, not in the evening at least. In fact, there's never anyone in the evening. Just deserted streets Larry. You drove for two hours in deserted streets."

Bernieri paused for a moment as the two men stopped walking side by side and filed through the narrow exit door back into the bright sunlight.

Cave's tone was carefully measured. "What do you want Sal?"

"What am I supposed to tell Marge? Do I tell her you're fine now?"

They walked on in silence for a few minutes, pausing to admire the zebras and antelope that were penned together.

Up ahead was the monkey enclosure. A group of five people had gathered in tightly to admire the inhabitants. They passed a bag of grapes amongst themselves and chattered enthusiastically. Attracted by the fruit, one monkey had cautiously made its way to the perimeter fence. A thin strip of ground, little more than four feet across separated the viewing rail from the wire fence. As Bernieri and Cave looked on, small monkey-fingers stretched through the mesh. The human group cooed in delight.

"Are we watching the monkey or the people?" asked Cave.

Bernieri laughed and the two men moved on, a more relaxed atmosphere descending over them.

The monkey enclosure was at the far side of the hill from the market square and the archivists rested their forearms on the rail that encircled the zoo, gazing out over the city. Towers connected to each other like giant beacons binding the whole view together. Smoke rose from their crowns.

"Know what I think, Larry?" Bernieri shifted his considerable weight from one foot to the other as he spoke.

Cave shook his head. "Tell me Sal."

"I think you're scared of death."

Cave run his hand over his receding hairline. He was surprised to find in this unbidden observation a hint of truth, or something like it. "Aren't we all?"

"We're all mortal Larry. No use fearing it."

Cave cast his arm in front of them, gesturing to everything that lay within their view. "This isn't Sal. This is immortality. But you're right. One day we'll die. But the citizens will live on whilst we end up like so much used history in a crematorium, ashes scattering to the wind, colouring the buildings grey. Everything's built on dead people you know."

Bernieri shook his head. "Not here. The dead never existed you know. Like children," he gave Cave a pointed look and Cave thought of that evening at the Bernieris long ago, and then he thought of the boy and alarm rose in him as he wondered what Sal Bernieri was referring to, but Bernieri moved on, apparently oblivious to any secondary suggestion his words might have held, "there's only the citizens."

"And the council."

Bernieri patted him on the back. "Exactly. The city. We are its children and not even death can change that."

*

Lazarus Cave had left Bernieri in the marketplace. As he walked home in the setting sun, he did not notice the black saloon with tinted windows suddenly peel out of the rush hour traffic and swing sharply down the side road he was about to cross, blocking his way as it did so. It stopped in front of him so that he was level with the driver's door, attracting a few honks from other cars until they swiftly smoothed over the disruption it had created and continued to flow as uninterrupted as before. The driver's window lowered with an electric whirr. Cave looked into the sunglassed eyes of a CSA agent. "Get in."

Cave was stuck, unsure whether to run or obey. Then a second CSA agent got out of the front passenger door, walked around the car, opened the rear door and indicated that Cave should enter. He did so. The agent pushed the door firmly shut and resumed his seat.

As Cave fumbled for a seatbelt, he heard the locks click shut on the doors. He looked around himself in alarm. A solid screen separated the front of the car from the rear compartment, which was much roomier than it appeared from the outside. Through the tinted windows, the city's regular grey appeared more muted still. It was quiet too and no engine noises made their way to his ears. On the floor there was a proper carpet. In place of normal car seats was a thick, plush leather bench. The whole effect exuded a lotus-like predatory calm that did nothing to allay his growing fears.

A cough startled him. He followed the sound with his eyes. At the other end of the leather seat was a woman, sitting with her right leg crossed over the left. Cave wondered how he hadn't seen her. She had red hair, like Evelyn's, and was about the same age, but there resemblance ended. High cheekbones and precise dress gave her a mix of cold beauty and power that caught the questions in his throat and forced him into silence.

"Welcome to my car, Mr. Cave. I am Dr. Pincus."

Cave nodded slowly but did not say anything. He could not stop staring at her merciless face. It was compelling, even as the fear mounted.

"It is customary to return a greeting, Mr. Cave. Hello, Mr. Cave."

Cave swallowed. "Hello."

Dr. Pincus raised a solitary eyebrow.

"Dr. Pincus. Hello, Dr. Pincus, I mean."

"Good, you learn fast Mr. Cave. Now you needn't be alarmed. I am simply here to give you a lift home after your day out with," she made show of checking her notes and then smiled, "ah, Mr. Salvatore Bernieri. Your friend, I gather?"

Cave nodded again. "Yes."

"A fat man, but a good one. Relax now, it's just a lift. Along the way I might ask a few questions, and if you cooperate as you are now, I'm sure you'll find the journey very quick indeed. My driver knows some excellent shortcuts."

Cave nodded, carefully this time. The surge of panic was subsiding. In its place was a steady fear. He waited to see how the questions would proceed, alert to anything that might trick him into saying more than he wanted to.

Dr. Pincus eyed her subject in silence, taking him in. The car rolled gently left and then right. Cave wilted under her stare, averting his gaze and trying to figure out which direction they were taking. He looked out of the window, but the tinting turned everything to an unidentifiable dusk. He craned his neck to try and make out the skyline. Dr. Pincus coughed again and Cave turned round, as if on a reflex, having been unable to spot any landmarks.

"I do not wish to keep you, Mr. Cave, in my car for longer than I have to." As he shifted his sweaty back, Cave was unsure whether this was for his benefit or hers. "I shall be to the point. You were observed twelve nights ago in a state of degradation and disorder down by the docks. Whatever you may say in your defence, this was disgraceful behaviour for an employee of the council. Indeed, it is disgraceful behaviour for any citizen."

The surprise on Cave's face was evident. He opened his mouth to speak but was cut short.

"I have not asked a question, Mr. Cave. If this little journey is to benefit you, you would do well to speak only when I ask. I am not interested in anything you may have to say in justification. You were drunk, of that I am well aware and you will find that the bar you visited that night is no longer in business. You are unhappy too, which I would naturally think odd in an archivist whose work on the Canscot case was of the highest order. You see, Mr. Cave, I know things about you. But there is something I do not know. A black mark appears on an otherwise spotless record. Why? I think you've been hiding something, Mr. Cave. A thought perhaps, it need only be a thought. And I want to find out what it is. Tell me, Mr. Cave, what is it that you were thinking that night, down by the docks?"

The car slowed to a stop as Dr. Pincus finished speaking. Cave tried to look of the window behind her head but a tree trunk blocked his view. He had lost all sense of direction as the saloon weaved through the back streets of the city and he hoped fervently that the cause of the stop was a traffic light.

"Well, Mr. Cave? What were you thinking? I am not trying to determine fault here, Mr. Cave, I am trying to understand and to help."

Cave thought hard. He knew instinctively that he was not a good enough liar to fool her. But what could he tell her? That he honestly could not remember what he had been thinking? That looking back on it now, there was nothing except a doubt, a loneliness and then a nothingness itself?

A minute passed in silence. He wondered how long a traffic light could stay red. "Mr. Cave, I do not have all evening and if you do not answer my question, you will find that neither do you."

Dr. Pincus' voice was mellifluous yet threatening. A fresh panic prompted him to speak. "Nothing. I thought of nothing."

The car rolled gently forwards once more and began to accelerate.

Cave felt a brief touch of relief.

Dr. Pincus inspected him thoughtfully, probing him with her stare, searching for a lie.

"Nothing?"

Cave nodded dumbly.

"As you fought your own shadow down by the docks you thought nothing?"

He nodded again. "Nothing. Or I wanted to think nothing. I don't know, except that I can only think about thinking nothing."

The car continued. Cave estimated that if they were heading towards his apartment they must be nearing it soon. Dr. Pincus smiled.

"Most helpful, Mr. Cave. Not thinking about anything and yearning for it are two quite distinct propositions. The desire for nothingness can never be achieved by the individual. As a concept it's far too abstract to be incorporated into a human life. Nothingness is about control, it's about the destruction of mechanisms that seek to interfere with the absolute direction of an entity. The individual can never succeed in achieving a state of nothing; it's a level of control simply outside the limits of our power. It is within human nature to fail, Mr. Cave, that is why the city provides such rigorous support, to catch us when we fall. But we fall only when we've been led to believe that that which we reach for is somehow attainable, that for some reason despite everything we know to be true, we are somehow special and outside of the normal rules of governance."

The car swung slightly to the right and then pulled to a stop. Cave heard a front door open and then slam shut.

"You have been most helpful, Mr. Cave."

Behind him the lock clicked in the door and then it swung open. He stepped hurriedly out. The CSA agent closed it after him and then climbed back into the front of the saloon. After a second, the rear window where he had just been sitting rolled down a little. Through the gap he could see Dr. Pincus' piercing eyes and sharp cheekbones. "Goodbye, Mr. Cave."

Without waiting for a reply, the window wound up and the car pulled away and sped off.

Across the road, the agent in the security van watched impassively as Cave dithered on the pavement for a moment before turning and with a half-run, entered his apartment block.

Only upstairs, with the front door locked behind him, did Lazarus Cave begin to shake. He brewed strong coffee and took the mug with him to the bedroom where he drank it sitting upright on the bed. Outside the sun had dipped below the horizon and the half-light of dusk was rushing in.

Slowly, Cave began to calm.

He stared out of the window at a pool of dirty yellow light cast by a streetlamp on the pavement that lay between his building and Evelyn's. The dark grew and the murky lamplight grew brighter.

He sat there for about half an hour, sipping at the coffee, preoccupied with thoughts of Dr. Pincus. Eyes fixed on the light, he wondered how much trouble he was in.

At first he did not notice the two figures that stepped into the yellow glow. They registered only once they had stood there for a while, the one with its back to him mostly obscuring the other so that he could see neither of their faces. Cave watched them with an idle curiosity, glad of the distraction. They were in conversation, or so it seemed to him, and he saw the occasional arm move as if to make a point. Then he saw the one with its back to him bend down as if to pick something up and seemingly offer it to the other figure. The movement caused long strands of hair to fall away from her shoulders, clearly distinguishable in the murky lighting. It struck Cave that they were standing outside Evelyn's block of flats and he wondered if it could be her. However, without turning to reveal her face, she stepped to one side out of the light and then was gone.

Disappointed, Cave would have collapsed back on the bed, all reason for interest in the scene gone, except for the fact that the figure now left alone was strangely small, childlike almost in stature. As he looked on, unsure of what he was seeing, the figure raised its head and as the streetlamp fell clearly across its face, Cave recognised immediately the same boy that he had encountered previously.

Jolted fiercely into life, Cave dropped the half-drunk coffee on the bed, jammed his feet into shoes and scrabbling at the lock with his keys, wrenched the door open and dashed from the flat. From a window in the stairwell he caught sight of the security van keeping its permanent watch. Uncertain, he darted back inside the apartment. Running to the bedroom window he looked out. The boy was loitering on the edge of the pool of light, glancing all about him as if unwilling to leave in the knowledge that he couldn't stay. Then he turned and walked slowly from Cave's view.

Alarmed that he was on the brink of losing the opportunity to speak once more to the boy, Cave cast his eyes wildly about, looking for an answer. He found one. Stapled to the outside wall almost directly beneath the bedroom window was an old weathered fire escape out of sight of the surveillance van.

Carefully levering the window open and lowering himself down, he let himself drop the couple of feet onto the iron platform. A dull metallic echo rung out and Cave crouched still for a second or two but nothing happened. He tore down the steps, grabbing at the hand rails as he spun round at each turn. The steps came to an abrupt halt about fifteen feet from the ground. There was a bush more of less directly underneath where they finished. Without thinking, Cave hauled himself over the end railings, aimed for the bush and jumped.

The bush broke his fall with a cracking of branches. Quickly he picked himself up and sprinted to where grass met pavement, past the tree where he had spoken to Evelyn. His legs were scratched from the fall. They stung when he ran but did not impede him too much. He looked searchingly up the street in the direction the boy had gone. About fifty yards up a small figure was turning left and out of sight. As quickly as he dared to move without attracting attention, Cave set off after him. Fortunately the boy was walking slowly and as Cave reached 42nd street, he could see him not far in the distance, making his way down the length of the road.

As he loped from streetlight to streetlight, flickering in and out of clear vision like an image watched through bars, Cave could hear the distant rumble of traffic. Here though there was little activity and he was aware of the soft pounding of his feet on the pavement.

The gap was still around fifteen feet when the boy heard him. He was running almost before he had looked over his shoulder to see Cave's bulk bearing down on him through the night. His turn of speed caught Cave by surprise. The boy was fast, and he was not used to running. Burying his head down he drove his feet forwards, glancing up to see the boy swerve to the right and then the left. Determinedly he followed him, forcing his knees into the tight corners at speed, feeling his heart struggling to keep up with the demands he was placing on it.

Buildings flew past as they dashed through one neighbourhood and then another. Now they were in the industrial district, the area where he had first met the boy. A factory loomed up ahead of them. Cave struggled to draw in a great wracking breath as his body cried out for oxygen.

He was unfit, but the boy was frightened and was risking throwing himself off balance by continuously checking on his pursuer. It was as he turned another corner that his left foot slid out off the edge of the kerb, flinging him into the road with his arms flailing. Somehow the boy managed to find some extra purchase with his feet and throw himself forward two or three extra staggering, stumbling steps into a gaping alleyway as the car zipped past just a fraction from his trailing leg. Cave, who had caught up and saw what was happening with a sickening horror watched with an open mouth as the car continued down the road, an orange indicator lighting up and flashing before it disappeared to the left.

The boy sat with his back to a brick wall, hugging his bloody knees tight to his chest. Cave could see that he was breathing fast and shallow, his eyes wide in the dark with fear. Another car passed by the end of the road but did not turn down it. Overhead, the dark silhouette of a crow cawed.

Cave crossed over and approached him slowly. Up close he could see that he was trembling. "I'm not going to hurt you." The boy said nothing, although the trembling subsided a little. Cave waited until the boy was completely still. Apart from the occasional crow's call, the only sounds to be heard were the boy's nervous breathing and Cave's deep rugged panting as he tried to bring his heart back under some kind of control and stop it from splitting his ribs wide open as it seemed intent on doing.

Gradually it returned to something resembling its normal rhythm. "Do you know who I am?" This time the boy nodded his head. "Then you know I'm not going to hurt you." The boy shook his head.

Cave let a low thoughtful breath escape. A bead of sweat trickled down to the corner of his eye and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. He looked at the child sitting in the patch of yellow light in front of him. It was definitely the same one as before, a boy not more than ten years old, dirty and matted. Back at the entrance to the alley, above the city and its towers a full, bright moon sat high in the sky.

He looked harder, examining the experiences etched across the small unkempt face. Now that peered closer he could see that there were differences in the boy's appearance, chief among which were the more pronounced cheekbones, the hollower cheeks, the thin collarbones that jutted sharply underneath the tatty worn jumper whose original colour was hidden by the filth and grime of the city and something else that smelt terrible. Through the shredded jeans, the boy's knees had stopped bleeding and Cave could see small pieces of grit in the cuts.

It was clear that the boy was scared. In truth, so was he. He hadn't checked over his shoulder as he tore through the streets after the child. He could have been spotted by any passing security van. There could be men now at the head of the cul-de-sac down which they had vanished. The boy remained frozen still, pressed back under a low curve in the brickwork, silent.

Several minutes passed and nobody appeared. They were alone, hidden from the main street. For the first time since he had caught sight of him, Cave thought about what the boy's reappearance meant, and he let himself half slide and half collapse to the floor, resting his back against a rusting dumpster.

For a while they exchanged wary glances. Cave needed to find a way of extending a bond of trust to the boy. He nestled his back into a more comfortable position, making it apparent he was not going to leave the boy any time soon.

Moonlight crept into the alleyway. The boy grew agitated. Cave could see he did not want to be caught away from whatever cover he normally used for this length of time. He refused to move from his position propped up against the bin however, he was not prepared to simply give up this chance.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

Perhaps stirred by those words repeated again, the boy at last unfolded from his drawn-up crouch. Nervously he shuffled towards Cave's feet, where he stopped. Then he pointed at the ground in front of him, as if wanting to get at something Cave was obstructing. Cave retracted his legs and pushed himself up into a standing position. His muscles were sore and cramped after running and then sitting for so long and he grunted with the effort.

As he stamped his foot on the ground, trying to get the circulation back into his left leg, the boy lifted an iron ring from where his feet had been, gripped it tightly and braced his back. With a strength that Cave would not have expected from his thin frame and narrow arms he hoisted the manhole cover from the cobbles and edged it away from the opening, taking care to move it in small intervals, lifting and placing it so that the metal did not drag noisily on the stone. It did not take him long and he left it with a small portion of the cover overhanging the rim of the hole. Without looking at Cave the boy lowered himself down into the hole and disappeared from view.

Cautiously Lazarus Cave peered down over the lip of the circular hole. Not far below he could see the boy looking up, his eyes big and white in the gloom. A flimsy looking ladder led downwards. Glancing round, Cave made sure that no one was watching him as he stepped down its rungs and into what was apparently...what? A home? A lair?

The circle of moonlight with one section bitten into by the curve of the cover was only a couple of feet or so above his head. The boy shimmied up the ladder and using the same manoeuvre as before, but this time from the underside, he worked the manhole cover back into position. It was dark down here, but not quite as pitch black as Cave had expected and his eyes could make out in the grey half-light a large curved chamber that was clearly inhabited. In the middle was a sad looking mattress and a soiled sheet covering it. There were tins too, tins everywhere, some full of water, others of beans and soup still unopened, and even more of them in a partly collapsed stack against one part of the wall. He looked round for the source of light. He saw them set into the roof, grates of drains from the gutters above letting alternate trickles of dirty water and moonlight down into the sewers.

Everything was pervaded by the smell of stale water. And it was filthy. Cave ran his fingers along the brickwork of the wall. It was damp and crumbling. He looked at his fingertips. They were black and felt oily. A shudder ran through his body. It was gross down here, beneath the solid perfection of the city above.

The sound of a match being struck caused him to turn around. He had almost forgotten about the boy and now he saw him, standing before him, lighting a candle. He held the lit wick up, illuminating Cave's face, sending shadows jumping off his own and the sewer walls. Cave took a step back so that the flame did not glare so much in his eyes. The boy stood there, holding the candle. No sounds dripped down into their damp recluse. He seemed to be waiting for him to say something.

"You do know me?"

The boy nodded.

"And I'm not going to cause you any harm, okay?"

The boy nodded again.

Cave breathed deeply, inhaling the disgusting smell all around him. He walked over to the mattress and sat down. It squelched. Underneath the sheet were some large, torn plastic bags, presumably to keep the damp from rising up to the sleeper. He looked round the room at the mountain of cans.

"Where do you get all of this?"

The boy opened his mouth to speak. His voice was thin and cracked like a broken flute. It carried across the foetid air of the sewer with an eerie otherness that shocked Cave nearly as much as the words themselves.

"The red-haired lady."

Cave hoped that he meant Evelyn.

"The lady who lives near where I chased you?"

The boy nodded. Cave let out a sigh of relief.

"Did she give you something tonight?"

The boy looked surprised for a moment but then reached behind himself and handed Cave a plastic carrier bag of the type used by supermarkets. Inside were two tins, a loaf of bread, some cheese and some milk. Cave lifted the tins out and the boy pointed over to where some other unopened ones were sitting. Cave placed them down. A sudden darting movement caught him off guard as the boy snatched the bag back. Hungrily he bit into the bread and cheese, swallowing great alternate lumps, pausing every now and again to wash down the thick mouthfuls with milk. Cave waited patiently, fascinated by the heaving motions of the boy's entire body as he crammed the food inside as rapidly as possible. When he had eaten his fill, he placed the uneaten remainder back in the bag and stowed it neatly in a small alcove in the chamber wall. The boy resumed his position, looking at Cave to see what would happen next.

"Does she give you food often?"

The boy nodded, wiping milk away from his lips with a ragged cuff.

Cave wondered what to say next.

Sensing that the questioning had come to an end the boy licked his lips and opened his mouth once or twice, soundlessly before speaking again.

"You want to meet her?"

Taken aback, Cave nodded, unable to utter a reply.

There was a pause during which a car, a security van perhaps, drove overhead, the rumble from the road carried down and away through the underground walls. Then, emboldened by the reception of his last question, the boy raised a small, grubby finger and beckoned. Cave stood up. The boy blew out the candle and stood still for a minute or two while both their eyes adjusted to the renewed darkness.

With a lilting, "Come", the boy set off down a hitherto unnoticed tunnel leading off from the chamber they had entered. As they wound through tunnels and sewage pipes in the drains beneath the city, crouching for stretches, their way was lit by the moonlight that flickered down through the drain lattices above.

"Where are you taking me?"

The boy halted and craned his head round to look back over his shoulder. "Council."

It was said in a something approaching a whisper that Lazarus Cave could barely hear and yet the word rang loudly and clearly once his ears had transferred it to his brain. Incredulity held him to the spot and a nauseous fear that rose in the pit of his stomach both pulled him backwards and urged him onwards. The boy, who was by now further on down the tunnel, turned to see why the noise of the man moving behind him had ceased. Having seen Cave's motionless form, he continued on without waiting. Cave followed.

At last they entered another chamber, similar to the first but smaller. Various tunnels radiated out from it and a stream of dirty water connected two of them. There was a lot more traffic overhead here and Cave could believe that they were close to the central complex with its busy surrounding roads. Directly ahead of them was a much narrower tunnel positioned at about waist height in the wall. It was towards this that the boy pointed with a twig-like finger.

Lazarus Cave looked at the boy, who nodded. He nodded in return and made his way over to the pipe, taking the stream of sewage in one large stride. The boy jumped over after him. He knelt before the opening and dipped his head inside. It was even narrower close up and as he moved forwards to test the width he found it only just wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. Ducking back out he looked at the boy, who nodded again and clambered up into the tunnel, indicating with an onwards motion of his hands that this was the route they had to take.

The curved walls of the pipe felt tighter still once Cave had his whole body inside and was wriggling along like a snake, accompanied by agonised twinges in his complaining muscles. Along the bottom a thin trickle of cold water ran in the opposite direction to them. There was no way he could turn around in here, and trying to back out would probably only get him stuck or bring on a panic attack. It was difficult enough as it was to prevent the germs of claustrophobia from building up, but if he craned his neck painfully up at points, he could at least see where he was going. Ahead of him, the emaciated figure of the boy slipped down the length of the pipe with ease.

It was about thirty yards long overall and exhausting work. Cave emerged from the other end drenched in sweat, his body furious with what he subjected it to. Standing up was painful and he did so with the aid of the wall of the small square area they had reached, letting his joints slowly unlock and find their correct positions once more. It was deathly quiet in this section of the sewer. Light came from another drain directly overhead, but there were no vehicles to be heard anywhere and the only noise was their breathing echoing off the walls.

In front of him the boy stood still with a finger held to his lips, urging silence. With his other hand he pointed up to the wall opposite the tunnel exit above his head. Cave followed the shaft of his arm with his eyes.

Set into the wall, about six feet off the ground, was a small grille. Cave looked back from it to the boy who was staring at him intently, a sudden life awoken within his dark pupils. He looked back up at the grille, suddenly nervous to turn his back on the boy. He had no choice though but to do so. Levering himself up on tiptoe and stretching upwards he brought his eyes to the level of the thin slats. He stared through them intently, the breath caught in his throat. On the back of his neck, the hairs prickled. What he could see was both utterly terrifying and elating. Leaning away he gulped down the half-breath, eyes fixed on the grille in wonder. And then he was breathing deeply, retching, suppressing manic laughs of triumph. He had looked upon absolute power, secretly, and in doing so he had mastered it.

Overcome and almost unaware of his own movements, Cave turned back towards the pipe he had dragged himself through. The boy was still there, waiting patiently.
It is early in the morning. Sal Bernieri steps from the shower, water pouring from his huge body. He wraps a towel round his large waist, wipes the condensation from the bathroom mirror and runs a comb through his wet hair. Stepping into the hallway he can hear to his left the city awakening and to his right, in harmony, the crack and sizzle of eggs being broken into a frying pan. He towels himself dry and dresses in the bedroom. By the time he is done and standing in the kitchen doorway, Marge is slipping the eggs onto pieces of hot toast and draping bacon over the top. Sal Bernieri steps around her, lifts the kettle from the stove and pours them both coffee. He adds cream and brings them to the table where Marge is now seating herself. Placing one in front of her, he bends down and kisses her on the forehead. Marge smiles and squeezes his hand. They have each other and the city has both of them. Sal Bernieri bites into a forkful of breakfast and warm yolk runs in yellow rivulets down his chin.

*

A grinding noise came from under the bonnet of the red saloon as Cave drove it into the petrol station. It juddered to a stop beside the pumps. Outside evening was falling about the shoulders of the city. Cave caught sight of a tower, its top shining in the last of the day's sun. The towers were the first in the morning and the last in the evening to feel the sun's touch. Inside the car on the dash, the needle on the fuel gauge was jammed firmly past the zero mark. Even when Cave turned the engine off and back on again just to see, it refused to jump even the tiniest fraction. He got out of the car and started to fill the tank.

There were two other cars in the station at the same time. In the teller's hut at the end of the forecourt, Cave stood in a queue. In front of him was a slim, attractive middle-aged woman with rusty blonde hair. In front of her was a fat woman who was holding the other two customers up by ineffectually fumbling through her small purse with podgy fingers for the correct change. Cave did not wholly mind though as the delay afforded him the chance to keep an unobserved critical eye on the curves of the woman in front.

Finally the fat woman gave up trying to find the right coin and paid instead with a banknote. The middle-aged woman was much quicker, and then Cave too had paid and was outside again, walking back to his aging car.

There was something tucked under one of the windscreen wipers. Cave pulled it out, a filthy piece of tatty paper. He unfolded it. In scrawled handwriting was a message to meet the red-haired lady in two days' time in a park somewhere over near 371st street. His heart skipped a beat. As he read and re-read the note he felt that he was being watched, but when he lifted his head and looked about himself, he could see only cars whizzing by on the road, an empty petrol station forecourt and the attendant behind the cash desk looking bored. Nothing else. Whoever or whatever it was, if there had been something there, had gone.

*

Cave sat in the sterile air of the archives. The uniformity of every corridor, the unchanging electric light, the steady temperature, sealed off from the vagaries of the weather, appeared to him to be a trap for time. The clock on the wall above the archivists' desks was immobile as if the hour to go to the park would never come, would always be two days from the now he found himself stuck in.

The problem, Cave thought, was that there was nowhere for time to pass into, no bottomless past where it could be tossed away like used rubbish. It was a thing forever in the present, the tick of the hand from one second to the next as it passed round, just a single moment being repeated forever for eternity.

Eventually the city relented and time resumed its trickle.

An ornate iron arch decorated with interwoven iron branches and twisting iron leaves topped the gateway to the park. The area near 371st street was tucked away from the business districts of the city and during the summer it was a popular destination for citizens on their days off.

Lazarus Cave was early. The persistent rain had stopped at last and now the sun shone continuously in the bright blue sky. He strolled down a gravel path, admiring the lush, mown grass and colourful flowerbeds well tended by gardeners.

He had driven to the park, using the side streets, doubling back on himself, alert to the vehicles in his rear-view mirror. He had left his car some distance from the park and taken a route on foot that led him in and out of shops and across junctions busy with cars and people. He checked over his shoulder now and again as he walked but the mass of bodies in the park relaxed him and he was confident that he was not being followed.

He checked his watch. The meeting time was closing in and he wondered how he would find Evelyn amongst the crowds. As he turned a corner at the end of the path he stopped dead in his tracks. Up ahead, facing slightly away from him was a woman with an angular body and high cheekbones. He panicked. Had the boy tricked him? Was the child merely a tool of the council? Before he could think to move away, she looked directly at him and it was with relief that he realised that it was not Dr. Pincus, that only a chance viewing angle had led him to believe that it could be.

The angular woman moved on, uninterested in Cave. Behind where she had been standing was a bench and Cave's relief gave way to joy when he saw Evelyn sitting upon it.

She hadn't seen him yet and he took the opportunity to watch her from much closer vantage point than his bedroom window offered. From their one previous meeting, he realised that he could remember little of the fine detail of her face and he took it in carefully now, curious grey eyes, the same colour as a winter sky, a thin, attractive nose and red lips that stood out on her pale skin.

He walked over to her and sat down. She recognised him immediately and smiled.

"You got the note I see."

Cave returned the smile. "It wasn't from yourself I don't think."

Evelyn smiled and shook her head. "Thank you for coming, I didn't know if you would make it."

"Why not? I'm happy to see you again. I've been wanting too, since that first time we met under the tree."

"I've seen the security van, you know. I know it's watching you. I would have come and found you before now but it scared me and I couldn't." She looked at him in concern. "What have you done, Lazarus? It is you they're watching isn't it?"

He nodded, carefully though. Evelyn's red hair made him think of Dr. Pincus again and the easy warmth he felt with her tightened slightly. He studied her thoughtfully until he could tell his scrutiny made her feel awkward. "Why did you want to see me?"

"Didn't you want to see me too?" She sounded taken aback and the personal nature of her response, her genuine affront, allowed him to dismiss his doubts.

"I did. Of course, I did. Desperately. It is me they're watching. It was why I couldn't find you either."

"But what did you do?" she asked again.

Cave smiled at her, sadly and through the strain that showed in the lines about his eyes, and the tired pouches that were beginning to develop in his jowls, she say a face that looked like his own, like he owned it. His eyes seemed alive and although he was older than she was, comfortably so, Evelyn warmed to him and felt glad of their closeness on the bench.

"I'm an archivist. But I found something in the archives that shouldn't have been there. I don't think the council would have minded if I hadn't, but I do, and they've taken an interest in me."

It was Evelyn who now looked unsettled. "You work for the council? In the complex?"

He nodded. "It's alright, I'm not here to hurt you." Cave laid a hand on her shoulder, the same shoulder he had seen slip out of a dress in the night, in reassurance. He felt the tension in her back fade away.

At the foot of a tree to the right of the bench a small bird hopped around, searching for food in the grass. Evelyn was watching and he followed her gaze. They both saw it tug at an earthworm and then flutter upwards to a crook between two branches in the tree where a small untidy nest of twigs and leaves had been built.

"Where do you work?"

"Me? In an education centre. Number twenty-three. I'm a cleaner there."

"Good job?"

"Hmm? The job?" Evelyn shook her head, "the cleaning, no. But I like being near the children. They're just so free, you know? The young ones especially. There's never any fear, or mistrust. They look at you like a mother. It's not until later they learn that the city is their mother, and their father. The older ones are harder. To them you're just a cleaner. But the younger ones, they smile when they see you. It's freeing for me to be around them."

"You think there's fear and mistrust in the city? I thought that was just me."

"Not on the surface. How could you not love the place? I doubt anyone would ever step out of line. Not seriously. But I don't think it's because we're perfect. We're people, even as citizens I doubt we can. Fear is so rooted though, so buried in the place we just react to it without even knowing its there. This city is built on fear."

"I claimed once it was built on the dead." Cave laughed, and then was serious again. "So what makes you think otherwise?"

Evelyn looked him in the eyes, her own flicking back and forth as if searching for something in his face. "We both know the answer don't we?"

Cave thought for a moment before he realised what she was referring to. "The boy?"

She nodded. "They don't know about him do they? The council I mean."

"No, they don't. I thought I was the only one who did until I saw you both the other night. You should be careful in the street you know."

"I know. But sometimes I find people don't see what they don't want to."

"How did you find him?"

"I caught him once, when he was younger than he is now, rummaging in the bins behind the kitchen of the education centre. I was shaking a broom out," she smiled at the memory, "I thought he was a fox at first, then when I realised he was a boy I didn't understand."

Above them the bird hopped around the nest edge, trying to find the best purchase and angle in order to regurgitate the food down into the gaping mouths of the chicks below. As it flitted from one side to another, a small blur fell from the tree. Evelyn looked down and clapped her hand to her mouth to hold in a shriek. Cave looked quickly behind him and saw the lifeless body of the fledgling five feet or so from where they sat. Up in the tree, either the parent hadn't noticed or had too many other demanding mouths to feed to care.

"Oh, that's horrible." Evelyn was visibly shaken.

"Do you want to move?"

She looked at the dead chick lying in a heap on the ground and shook her head. "No, sorry. I'm ok. It's just... Sorry, please go on. Oh," she smiled ruefully, "I was talking. What was I saying?"

"The boy, you found him. But you didn't tell anyone, no?"

"Well it took me a while to find out for certain the truth about him, but no, even when I knew, I didn't tell anyone."

"What stopped you?"

Evelyn was quiet for a moment, then when she spoke it was with a calmness borne of some deep resolution.

"I had a child once. Just over nine years ago I lay in a hospital while council doctors plucked him from me. I saw his face just once as they carried him away. He was screaming. I cried out, or I tried to, but they had drugged me and I could only watch, powerless as they walked away with him. I had forgotten it all. He makes me think of him. He makes me remember. The city teaches us to forget. There is no other way. But when I met him, I remembered. Everything. I remembered everything. Do you know what that's like? How that feels? We all forget and the past and the trauma of yesterday are forgotten. It's why today is forever perfect. No one remembers. None of us have a past to deal with. He's about the same age my boy would be."

Evelyn finished speaking and for a while they say and said nothing to each other as groups of people passed in front of them in a constant procession along the gravel pathways. Cave thought of the baby from the Canscot case. The weeks between then and now seemed so very distant. He was suddenly keenly aware of just how much had changed.

"There was a couple who kept their baby, you know. The council never knew it had been born." Cave broke the silence.

"What happened?"

"They were found out. They were caught withholding documents and the child was found in their flat. I think they were going to use them to teach the child as it grew up. Teach it its history."

"How old was it?"

"Only three or four months when they found it."

"And what was in the documents they kept?"

"Really nothing that special. Photos, a journal, news clippings. Just the humdrum stuff we burn every day."

"Did you find this all out at the archives?"

Lazarus Cave fixed his eyes on hers and gently held her stare. "I was there. I was at the arrest. I guess I wasn't actively part of it – I was there to record it all, not to clap on the handcuffs – but I was there. I saw that family torn apart. I was there when it happened."

He waited whilst she digested the information. He could see that it was hard for her. "Do you remember it all?"

He nodded. "All of it. Everything about it. I understand why people have children," he swept his arm in front of him to capture the city, "it's because they love this. They believe in this. Everyone does, even the cold and the lonely who don't think about it. It's easy to believe in, I mean, why not?"

"Why don't you believe?"

"I used to think it was something else. But now I wonder if perhaps it was that child all along. The mother made a grab for it at one point, and fell. She cut herself. And now there's the boy of course. He shouldn't exist. The city can't account for him. When you think about that how can you believe? We believe in it because its perfect but it's not perfect anymore." He smiled at her and she smiled back. "It's just that we're the only two who realise that."

"Whatever happened to them?"

"The child was young enough to go straight into an education centre. The parents...I don't know for sure. They'll be separated certainly. The CSA runs re-education courses. The courts will have assigned them to the courses I would think. It's not discussed though, not even in the council buildings. Especially not in council buildings." People were walking past them as they spoke and Cave's words were low and hushed. He waited as a group of four women passed. "The courses are unpleasant. It's brainwashing. In a way it's the same as everything the city does to us anyway, but with none of the niceties. It's where they'll send us if they find out about this conversation."

"I'll write to you. I'll ask the boy to pass you messages."

Cave understood. "It's going to be difficult to see each other again isn't it."

A lone midge had settled on the skin of Evelyn's exposed neck. Cave looked at it in disgust. Evelyn hadn't noticed it. Feeding, it sat there and then, disturbed, took off suddenly. Cave watched its mazy chaotic flight as it skated through the air, up then down, side to side, forwards and then back the way it had came. Evelyn swatted at it as it flew close to them. It settled on the back of Cave's hand. He felt only the faintest of tickles as it bit down through to blood below. Before he could do anything, Evelyn darted out a hand and squashed it where it lay with her thumb. Cave shivered at her touch. She wiped her hand on the bench. There was still a mess on his own. "Sorry," she said.

*

Evelyn had left Cave sitting on the bench. He had watched her go, swallowed into the sea of people and then as the waves parted momentarily a brief flash of red hair before she was completely gone.

On the way home Cave took a more direct route, keeping to the main roads and for now, ignoring his mirrors. As he neared his flat, he took a slight detour that allowed him to approach it from the direction that would take him past Evelyn's block. Driving slowly, across from the heavy blue entrance door he noticed with alarm another security van parked opposite. It had a clear view both of Evelyn's entrance and also of the flattened bushes beneath fire escape on the back of his own building.

Had he been seen? Did they know about her? He hoped that his searching for her in the archival records had not been unearthed, as he knew it must be if a thorough investigation was ever carried out. Nervously, Cave parked up and went indoors.

At shortly after six that evening he left his apartment again. He walked to the shop that sat at the end of the road on the corner of 11th and 302nd street and bought a bag of apricots and a pack of ten plain-looking cigarettes. Their small card box was brown and faceless with 'Cigarettes' stamped across it in uncomfortable letters. He walked out of the shop with his purchase, paused for a moment and then turned around to face its small front, dirty bricks and large, streaked windows laden with objects for sale. He went back inside and asked for a box of matches, paid and left, marching resolutely homewards.

Daylight dwindled and night fell. Cave cooked and ate dinner. It was a big meal and it took him a long time to finish. In between mouthfuls of food he drank hungrily from a glass of water that he kept getting up to refill. On the chessboard the cigarettes and matches posed like two invaders, the other pieces unnerved by their presence.

Food finished, he abandoned his dirty crockery on the table, picked up the cigarettes and matches and took a seat on the sofa with the bag of apricots balanced on the arm. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of the inescapable silhouette of the massive central tower. He laughed to himself and the pointlessness of it all. Down in the street below, the security van held its station, the light in the cab providing some relief from the night for the lone watchman.

Raised to eye-level, Cave held the cigarette angled upwards. A thin wire of smoke curled from its tip and Cave inhaled deeply. The bright red life of the cigarette flared and the paper crackled into action, diminishing as it did so. He tilted his head back and exhaled, a jet of smoke spilling from his pursed lips and blossoming into a sparse cloud that drifted away, absorbed into the air until only its smell remained.

Cigarette finished, Cave bit into an apricot. When he had eaten it, he ate another and placed the stones side by side next to the bag. He had not received a chess move from his opponent. Or perhaps the city had failed in its duty to deliver his move entrusted to the wind and his opponent, who by now may have been waiting weeks, for Cave still could not remember whether it had been his turn or not in the first place, may have simply decided that he, Lazarus Cave, had given up or passed away, and had packed away his chessboard or maybe started a new game with someone else.

Nevertheless, opponent or no, the game in Cave's flat was unfinished and he was determined to do something about it. Selecting one of the apricot stones, he took at aim at the black castle. The stone struck firmly on the crenulated top, knocking the piece over so that it rolled forwards. Carefully observing where it came to rest, Cave placed it on the nearest possible square for a legal move.

Pleased with the result, he took the second stone and pitched this one at a small cluster of white pieces surrounding the king. A pawn was hit. He moved it forwards. Satisfied, he scribbled down the two moves, tucked the pieces of paper into an envelope and rested it on the mantelpiece.

A while later Cave stalked through to the bathroom with a freshly lit cigarette hanging from his lips. Seven or eight spent butts lay on the floor of the lounge where he had flicked them. Thirst and a smoke-dry throat were troubling him and, unused to the fumes, his head thrummed lightly where an ache sat behind his temples.

From the bathroom cabinet he took down a glass he normally used for mouthwash, held it under the cold tap and spun the faucet. There was a deep strangled, metallic gurgling noise, and then nothing happened. He closed the tap off and tried the hot one. The same thing happened. Cave replaced the glass in the cabinet and slammed the door. He looked at his reflection in the mirror, a picture of frustration. Then he punched the palm of his hand into the mirror and the broken glass fell like chiming raindrops into the ceramic sink.

Leaving the mess behind him, Cave stalked through to the bedroom. The framed photograph of his council-issue parents beamed down at him from its position on the chest. He snatched it down and flung it out of the open window where it fell twelve floors soundlessly into the hungry garden. He tossed the cigarette out after it.

It was then that the power went and the flat plunged into darkness, lit only by the dim glow of the city.

That night Lazarus Cave wrote to Evelyn by candlelight. Working from the notebook, the letter included all the information that he had gathered from the archives – that she liked red jumpers and asparagus, that she always paid her bills early, that she bought lots of cleaning products and that before she worked in the education centre, she had worked in a toy factory. He told her all this and much more until nine sides of letter paper had been filled.

As he wrote, he thought of the boy and his childish innocence. For a moment he felt a humbling recognition of the council's ability to prevent the citizens from realising that the veil of innocence had ever slipped so that the pervasive world of adult experience insinuated itself right through the fabric of the city, down to the end of the cold steel forceps with which the doctor removed the baby from its mother. It was a trick they managed to pull off with such a deft sleight of hand that no one realised anything was simply illusory. Even those power symbols, the soaring towers, had been recast in the city's mythology as supporting columns. A premise that hinged on the fact that in the seamless, ordered perfection of the present, no one would be compelled to question what it was exactly that the towers so resolutely supported. Again Cave thought of the boy and just how important he was as the key with which he could unlock the illusion. With the proof of the boy in his hand, he could stand before the citizens in their multitudes, knock on the sky and let its hollow echo fall down upon their ears. He could show them too the room he had seen from the sewers that lay beneath the council compound.

When he had done, he placed the letter along with the notebook into the lining of the briefcase and resealed the panel.

*

The following day, Cave left the office at precisely five thirty in the afternoon. He walked swiftly back up to his car, the briefcase banging against his knees. For the whole day he had not let it out of his sight for fear of discovery. As he drove to the exit barrier of the car park, at last he was free.

The indicator clicked rhythmically. Cave turned left out of the complex's parking lot. He drove quickly down 1st street, rush hour traffic humming all around him. Avoiding it where he could, Cave drove to a small restaurant over in the 57th chapter. It took him just over twenty minutes to get there. Upon arriving, he parked his car outside, drawing to a stop with a metallic rattling of the engine.

He walked inside and took a table by the window. Here he could see the road, the citizens making their way to and from wherever it was they were going or had been, the clouds merging overhead like a blanket brought own by the bowing sun, and the security vans crawling around the area. If he stooped low enough, he could create enough of an angle in which to see the huge looming corona of a tower based in the next street. Smoke issued from its head. Cave lit a cigarette and ordered some food.

He smoked contentedly, ate slowly when the food came, and then lit second cigarette afterwards. The habit was bad for him and damaging to his body and perhaps he enjoyed it because of this.

Midway through the meal, he rose from the table and, carrying his briefcase, went into the toilets. Locked inside a cubicle, he deftly removed the panel, slipped the letter into his jacket pocket, stuck the panel back in place and returned to his table.

He resumed eating at a leisurely pace. By the time he drank a short black coffee and paid the bill nearly two hours had passed. Outside the city had reached mid evening.

Night came up stealthily as Cave drove onwards, as if it had been a car trailing at a distance that had now overtaken him and dropped close onto his bonnet. The dark air gathered in around him and he kept the windows open due to the easy warmth of the atmosphere. Unhurriedly he made his way towards the industrial quarter.

He had no trouble finding the boy's alleyway once more. Checking the there was no one else around, Cave rolled the car to a stop at its entrance, got out and pocketed the keys. The narrow, high brick walls shut out all but a sliver of the dull moonlight that was showing through a gap in the clouds. He felt his way down the passage, the cobbles underneath his feet, guiding himself past the bins with outstretched arms. At the end the manhole cover weakly glimmered where it had been scratched through its corroded surface. Cave paused. He had not thought this far ahead and he wondered what the best course of action was. Should he knock; should he just tuck the letter in the gap where the cover did not fit flush to its housing? He did not like the latter idea. The envelope felt conspicuously white in the darkness and left out in the open anything could happen to it.

A couple of minutes passed while he paced around, trying to decide what to do. Then, behind him, came the rough scraping of metal on stone. He turned around to see two filthy hands, almost indistinguishable from the surround grime, twisting the metal disc up and to one side. When the gap was sufficiently enlarged, the boy's head appeared, apprehensive eyes staring up into his own. Neither moved. With great deliberation Cave reached inside his jacket, withdrew the creased note and held it out. The boy took it and tucked it into the waist of his torn trousers without looking at it. Still he waited, half in, half out of the sewer. Cave could see his sunken cheeks and scrawny neck in the dim light. He tried to think of something to say. Then he remembered that Evelyn gave the boy food. His felt suddenly awkward; he had nothing to give. He thought back to the restaurant, to the scraps of food and almost untouched bread roll he had left on his plate to be cleared away. He opened his mouth to speak, unsure what to say. "I'm sorry," was all he could manage.

The boy understood. He lowered himself slowly back down into his hideaway without a word.

"Next time, I promise."

The manhole cover slid back into place with a muffled clang.

Cave walked back out of the alleyway, preoccupied with the guilt of not bringing any food for the boy. Distracted, he walked around to the driver's door and got back into his car, failing to notice the security van cruising along a little way down the street. Fishing in his pocket for the car keys, he was working them into the ignition when there was a hard rapping on his window. Startled, he looked up into the blinding light of a torch. He wound the window down, shielding his eyes and blinking rapidly.

"Sir, please get out of the vehicle."

Cave did so. This was not good. He cursed himself for being so careless, for not checking the road before stepping back out onto the pavement. With shifting eyes he looked round for something he might be able to use as a weapon. He could not let the security officer to examine the alleyway.

"What were you doing in the alleyway, sir?"

"Taking a piss. Sorry, officer."

"You were urinating?"

"Yes, I'm very sorry, I got caught short."

Cave felt nervous. He fervently hoped that the security officer did not decide to investigate the truth of this claim for himself. The walls of the alleyway were covered in a uniform dirt and it was quite obvious, even to a casual inspection, that no wetness had disturbed that just now. The security officer was young. Cave hoped that he was inexperienced too. One a little older would not have believed him for a moment unless had seen him in mid-flow, trousers unfastened, at which point there would most likely have been just as much trouble, if for other reasons. With his face as calm and innocent as he could hold it, Cave waited to see what the response would be.

"Caught short?" The officer wrinkled his nose at him in disgust. "What's wrong with you? Can't you just urinate at home like every other decent man does in this city?"

"Caught very short. So sorry, officer."

The security officer flicked his eyes over the black mouth of the alleyway, as if weighing up whether or not to make his way down it to investigate. For a long drawn-out moment the situation shook with tension. And then the officer looked back, the desire to go searching down in the filth of the passageway for another man's urine seemingly off-putting enough for him.

"What's your name?"

"Lazarus Cave."

"Home address?"

Cave gave it to him. Keeping the flashlight trained on the man before him, the security officer punched the details into a small handheld device. A moment later he looked up again and laughed unpleasantly. "You'd better be getting home, Lazarus, you'll be missed. And don't let me ever catch you urinating in public again. Understood?"

Cave nodded vigorously.

"Now go."

Cave watched the security officer turn heel and walk back to his patrol van. With relief he climbed back in through the open driver's door, closed it after him, found the keys still in the ignition, turned them and departed for home. The security van followed him for a few streets before turning off to the left and disappearing down a broad road.

*

It was late by the time Lazarus Cave returned home and the lights were out in the stairwell. He wearily rode the elevator up to the twelfth floor.

A crack of light shone from underneath his front door. Cave cursed quietly, the light would have been on all day. In the dark outside though, the key was difficult to get into the lock. It was with a growing irritability that Cave finally opened the door, deposited his briefcase in the hallway and headed for the lounge to turn off the light.

In the doorway, he froze. Seated in the chair next to the table with the chessboard on, with her right leg crossed over the left, was Dr. Pincus. She stared at him impassively and bit into a half-eaten apple that she was holding in her left hand.

From behind, a burly CSA agent emerged from his bedroom, blocking his exit. Cave felt as though he had suddenly found himself caught in the lionesses' cage at the zoo. Dr. Pincus took another bite from the apple without removing her eyes from her prey.

"Your flat is a disgrace, Mr. Cave."

The statement, although true, he had to admit, surprised him. "Sorry, what?"

"A disgrace. I have never seen anything like it, Mr. Cave. There, on the arm of the sofa," she pointed, "you have a bag of bruised apricots, with their stones scattered here," she pointed again, "on your chessboard. There are cigarette butts on the floor. In your bathroom, there is glass everywhere. We found this outside," she held up the photograph he had thrown from his window, "and on your bed sheets there is a stain which I am led to believe, and fervently hope, is coffee. A disgrace, Mr. Cave, a disgrace."

A strange combination of surprise, terror and confusion rendered Cave nearly speechless. "What?" he stammered again, "I'm sorry."

Dr. Pincus did not seem to have heard, or if she did, she didn't care for his apology. "I cannot abide disorder, Mr. Cave. And in addition to this slovenliness, you have taken these past couple of days to visiting new places without reason and driving round the factory district of this city at night time, urinating in alleyways. Routine, Mr. Cave, structure. Order. These things seem to have vanished from your life. And I thought we had had such a productive little chat the other day, Mr. Cave, I thought we had understood each other, that you had understood me. But this disgrace," she indicated his entire flat with a gesture, "would suggest otherwise."

Cave thought of Evelyn and of the boy and wondered if he had led the suspicions of the council to them too. He waited for whatever was to come next.

Dr. Pincus took another bite of apple, then rose and dropped the core into the kitchen bin. She leaned on the counter top.

"Do you know what happened to the couple you helped arrest in the Canscot case? The sweet couple with the baby?"

Cave shook his head. "I assume they were sent to a correction facility."

"You're right. They were. Separately of course. You see they were responding to very basic urges. The council understands this. Understanding is important, Mr. Cave. A lack of understanding is a failure to appreciate something properly. In their case, most likely a poor education for one reason or another. So the council decided that they should have the chance to be re-educated."

"How did they do?"

"I see, Mr. Cave, that you are now the one who wants to ask the questions. Why are you so interested all of a sudden, I wonder? But, since you ask, the male is doing very well. It's a short process, but an intensive one. He is conditioned, you might put it. I prefer enlightened. It is an education system designed for the adult mind. The adult mind is a lot harder to engage with than a child's. The education is firmer, I wouldn't recommend putting yourself in its way, Mr. Cave. But he is responding well. He should be out within the month, a balanced, ordered individual. A good and true citizen. Canscot an episode which, if all goes well, he will have no recollection of at all."

Cave swallowed nervously. Whatever it was the Dr. Pincus wanted him to understand, he understood what she was saying now very well. "And the female?"

Dr. Pincus say back down in the chair next to the chessboard and crossed her right leg over her left. "The female, Mr. Cave, did not fare so well. She was found hanged in her room by the bedsheets before re-education could even begin."

"Hanged? Suicide?"

"Hanged, Mr. Cave, and we have no reason to suspect it was anything but. You see, Mr. Cave, she hanged and the city won. He succumbs and the city wins. The city always wins, Mr. Cave, and you'll find that a little structure, a little routine will mean that you can join in the victory. I hope, by now, that we understand each other, Mr. Cave."

"Ok, I understand."

Dr. Pincus smiled a thin smile with her lips only. For a moment she studied the chessboard, before selecting a black bishop with her slender fingers and moving it diagonally up the squares. With the smile still on her face, she walked past him into the hallway, pausing over the briefcase with the CSA agent behind her.

"Goodbye, Mr. Cave. Thank you for your hospitality and I hope very much that we will never meet again."

And then she was gone and the agent too, their footsteps echoing fainter and fainter on the stairs.

Cave shut the door behind them and slid the security chain across. Then, when he was sure they weren't coming back, he slid down, his back against the front door, the briefcase at his feet.

Outside in the dark street, the black saloon with tinted windows revved its engine and pulled away into the night and the agent in the security van watched it until its red brake lights flared, swung to the right and disappeared.
In the market square, the fishmonger unpacks the last of the fresh catch from the ice boxes. Arrayed on the stall in front of him is a selection of fish, sleek and wet as they would have been when alive. He stands behind a small counter on which there is a set of scales and a cash register. All around him, fellow stallholders are putting into place the final bits of produce or the handwritten signs declaring the day's prices. Everything new and ordered. Already there are people coming into the marketplace, handling fruit and vegetables, leaning in to inspect cuts of meat, cheeses and other goods.

Overhead a clear sky indicates a good day of business. He counts the money inside the till, checks over the prices, aligns the plump trout, whole with their heads still on and turns his attention back to the swelling customers in the square. It is time he started now and as if all stallholders are attuned to the same precise clock, a chorus of calls rises in a wave from around the marketplace. The fishmonger joins in, his bellow reaching out across the cobbles. "Fresh fish! Fresh, fresh fish!" A few bodies wander by and within minutes he has made his first sale, two thick cod fillets, and the day has begun.

*

The thick summer air was heavy with the premonition of a thunderstorm. Cave could feel the closeness everywhere in the city: the sterile atmosphere of the archives, the sticky heat of the streets, the scrutiny he was under in his own flat. The smoke from the towers no longer seemed to dissipate, but instead hung in the air, throwing a sickly grey pall over the city. Even the water in the river ran more sluggishly than normal. In the central complex, white marble glared viciously in the sunlight and the central tower seemed to add to the heat of the day.

Cave sat in a café, sipping from a glass of iced water and smoking a cigarette. Already there were three dead butts in the ashtray in front of him. Under the table was the briefcase. He never went anywhere without it now, unwilling to let it out of his sight, even – especially, he thought – in his apartment.

Above his head, a fan sliced slowly through the air, barely creating enough of a flow to disturb the flies that buzzed around it. It was as muggy in the café as it was on the streets outside. The blades cut shadows that fell rhythmically across Cave's face, sweat trickling down the side of his nose.

A fortnight had passed since he had arrived home to find Dr. Pincus sitting by the chessboard, but still the rain did not come. Dust coated the city. Cave felt the oppression of the atmosphere. And the routine. He took a drag on the cigarette. The routine was the worst. It felt as though the will of the entire city was enacting the words of Dr. Pincus, routine bearing down on him, hemming him in, setting his path.

He finished the cigarette and drained his glass. And this heat. Stifling. As though the weather had buckled to the will of the city and was now in cahoots with it.

Cave picked up his briefcase, dropped some coins on the table and left. He would be glad when the summer was over.

When he reached home, he swivelled the blinds on the lounge windows shut as had become his custom. Lines of bright daylight fell on the wall opposite where the slats didn't quite meet. In the dim room, he lit another cigarette and removed the panel from the briefcase. Behind it, hidden with the notebook, was a bundle of letters tied with string, six or seven in total, each one in the same neat, meticulous handwriting.

He re-read the one the boy had given him that morning. Then he checked the cupboards in the kitchen. They were bare. He would have to buy more food before writing a reply and seeking out the boy again. Cave thought of him. He admired the way in which he seemed to be able to slip through the city undetected, the uncanny knack he had of always finding him, Lazarus Cave, in the endless streets of the city, of pressing a folded envelope into his hand or pocket and then melting away, often before Cave had fully realised what had happened. He envied the boy, who seemed both outside of the city and master of it.

*

It was six weeks since the arrests had been made in the Canscot case and Landau Krauss had called a meeting of the four archivists in his office. They sat in front of him, the bulk of Bernieri on one side and the thin shoulders of Arthur Camras on the other. Lazarus Cave and Donald Schmitz sat in the centre. Krauss surveyed them through his spectacles, his eyebrows bristling. He clasped his hands in front of himself before speaking.

"Gentleman, I wanted to thank you all, again, for your recent combined work on the whole Canscot affair." He chose his words with care. "Frankly, it was one of the more delicate operations I have been involved with during my time in these archives and I know the fallout has not been the easiest. The council is aware that what happened was outside of the norm. As we all know though, we live in a vast city. There are countless citizens, and there are complexities and subtleties all around us, most of which we are not even aware exist, and all of which we certainly cannot hope to understand by ourselves." Krauss was delivering this speech to all the four men assembled before him, although as he passed his eyes from face to face, his gaze would harden a little, pause for a little longer each time it reached Cave and Cave himself was under no delusion as to the focus of the words he was hearing. Krauss continued, "The councillors extend their gratitude and support to each of you and to the archives as a whole. We should proud, gentlemen, we should be proud."

The four archivists each gave a low expression of thanks, and waited for Krauss to go on.

"And as a result of your fine work, the council has asked me to inform you of recent developments, that as of earlier this week, the two citizens who we helped arrest have been released back into the day-to-day routine of the city. Separately of course, in quite different locations, but even if they were to meet, they would have no recognition of one another, no shared memory – no memory at all actually – of Canscot or anything associated with it. The re-education courses are state-of-the-art and they have both been completely rehabilitated. Good and true citizens once more. Congratulations gentlemen, we should be proud."

As the line was drawn under the Canscot case, the huge ventilation fans powered down and it was a few minutes before they started up again, the air conditioning now at a pitch a fraction lower than what it had been previously. To Cave's ears it sounded as if the background noise of life itself had been slightly shifted, although no one else seemed to notice a thing. Soon, however, he too forgot what the old pitch had been and the archives resumed their air of changelessness.

For the first time now in a month, Cave did not use his computer to sift through the archives for further details on Evelyn. He had filled the notebook from cover to cover, both sides of the thin paper covered in his black spidery scrawl. It was hidden in its usual place in the briefcase by his feet, and for now, in a wait before he started a second book, it would be complete. Instead he found himself lost in thoughts as he tried to find a way out of the dead end in which he found himself.

He considered his options. Number one, he could capitulate, like the man, or, if he believed Krauss rather than Dr. Pincus, like both the man and the woman, to the will of the city, fold under its pressure and allow the waves to wash over his head as he sank back into its routine and structure. Maybe he would rediscover his old belief, the perfection he had enjoyed, the way in which each day would beat on like a heartbeat from the central compound where the tower, tall, majestic, rooted to the city's concrete, stuck straight up into the sky as a fierce emblem of the council's unquestionable authority.

Maybe.

Or he could fail in his belief, but allow himself to be guided and supported by the city's structure anyway, complicit in his own fate.

Cave swiftly decided against number one.

Number two, he could kill himself. It was not a serious suggestion at first but he was alarmed at the attractive simplicity of suicide. To be gone, and not just gone, but gone into a past that didn't exist, a history that would never be written. Forgotten by the city within an hour of his passing, free, truly free, from its confines and constraints, from its insistent offer of a perfect existence.

But then there was Evelyn. And it was with a surprise similar to alarm, although much more pleasant, that he realised the strength of the effect her name had on him. The snatched views from his bedroom window, the letters, the notebook, the shared knowledge of the boy all combined to give a depth to the relationship far beyond what just two meetings alone could have offered them.

The boy. And then there was the boy. Cave imagined him down in the sewers, his scrawny body in a long pipe, with the just the whites of his eyes showing bright amongst the filth and he wondered did the boy ever get lost in the tunnels, in the darkness, or was there always another passage located somewhere in the gloom down which he could disappear?

And when he could think of the boy and Evelyn no longer, and when he was tired of turning over in his mind the two escape options, neither of which he could take, Cave thought of nothing. He thought of the nothing at the heart of the city, that rose from tips of the towers and spread out, always spread out until it was indistinguishable from the air and it descended and was breathed back in by the city's inhabitants until the towers became just a part of the great constant inhalation and exhalation of this beating urban creature. And he thought of the nothing that he felt at the heart of himself. He wondered whether what Dr. Pincus had said was true, that nothing was an abstraction beyond the attainment of individuals. Could he be resolutely sure, therefore, that this nothing of which he thought existed, or was it a lie, a sham, simply a delusion that he had pulled about himself? Of all the caveated glories of the world, nothing was the most wilfully futile of them all.

*

The heat brought with it a calmness to the city, a summer lull, as if the energy of its streets and people had been hidden beneath a layer of dust. In the sky, the sun cut a cloudless path above the towers. Amongst the citizens nothing was happening. The security vans watched him day by uneventful day for the course of a week. Cave was wary of the sudden peace.

During the course of the week he returned, alone, to the park near 131st street. There were fewer people in it than before. He sought out the bench that he had sat on with Evelyn. Everywhere the dust. The leaves of the rosebushes were speckled with it and the petals of the flowers were parched and delicate in the heavy heat. Only the grass was vibrant and watered.

The bench was not hard to find. Gravel crunched beneath Cave's feet as he approached it. To its left as he looked at it was the same tree as before. Cave ran his hand over the rough bark. Craning his neck, he could see the nest in the fork higher up. Standing still, he listened. No sounds save for the faint chatter of passers by.

Making sure that nobody was watching, Cave lifted his leg to where a small knot of wood jutted out from the trunk. He stretched for a low branch with his left hand and, contracting both leg and arm muscles simultaneously, hoisted himself three feet or so from the ground. This much higher up he peered closer at the small nest. It looked untidier than before and as he began to distinguish one stick from the next he could see that there was a rent in the side of it. Scuffed feathers were caught on the ends of some of the broken twigs and the nest was now clearly abandoned. Cave lowered himself back down.

A small figure made its way along the pathway. Somehow it slipped between the people in the park, curving, twisting, not bumping into anyone and entirely unnoticed.

Lazarus Cave did not spot the boy as he ambled towards the park gates until they were almost within touching distance. Before he could think to stop him though, or greet him, the boy swiftly pressed a piece of crumpled paper into his open palm and continued on past without breaking stride.

Conscious of the possibility that he was being watched, Cave kept walking too. He stopped at the next bench. Sitting, he followed the boy's route, weaving unnoticed through groups and couples, the citizens seemingly shutting from their mind a sight their eyes suspected might be wrong. Theirs was a world created from within the mind, with senses as adornments, helpful but open to being tricked. Cave wondered if he too suffered from the same affliction. He did not know. It was possible.

Back in his flat he unfolded and read the letter whilst he smoked. As always, it had the day's date in the top right corner. It came as a surprise to Cave, who had lost track of the days in the unchanging heat, that it was his forty-eighth birthday.

He grimaced slightly. A birthday marked the anniversary of the date a citizen was registered at an education centre. Even the emergence of a new identity into the world was administered by the council. Cave thought of the two or three days between actual birth and registration in which as a helpless baby lying in a hospital incubator somewhere, he had nevertheless enjoyed a freedom and independence which he now sought to recapture. His mind wandered to the boy who still occupied this grey netherworld. Deprivation, hardship, isolation. Maybe even soul.

Out of long habit, Lazarus Cave stalked through to the bathroom and took in his reflection in the one unbroken mirror of the cabinet, trying to determine the changes that had occurred between this year and the last.

Midway through the assessment, an idea took him and he abandoned the mirror. From the notepad he tore off some sheets of paper and began to write an immediate response to Evelyn's letter. In it he documented the aging of a body. He accounted for the continual retreat of his hairline; the growth in his waistline; the accentuation of lines around his face; the renewed glint in his eyes; the absence of any new aches in his joints (although his back still gave him trouble at times); the sagging of his breasts; the rude health of his penis.

Cave wrote all this and he wrote too that as he grew older, he knew that one day he must die. He thought of the conversation on the hilltop with Sal Bernieri and he drew to a close with lines that professed his selfish want that people remember him after his death, but how could they in a city that seemed so eternally whole? His presence was now simply a part of that perfection; his departure would not disturb the balance by one drop. The transition between the two states, alive and dead, was so utterly seamless as to really be no transition at all.

*

The following evening, Cave delivered the letter to the boy with a carrier bag full of tinned pork, tinned beans, tinned stew, tinned fruit, chocolate bars, fresh milk, toothpaste and soap. He handed this over first and then the envelope almost as an afterthought. In the alleyway he watched the boy hold the bag close to his frail body, wide-eyed with gratitude.

The sudden drop in air pressure fell like a shockwave across the whole city. A low rumbling followed, building rapidly and then a fierce gust of wind came screeching down the alleyway. Within seconds, large drops of rain were splatting into the dusty streets, filling drains, spilling over guttering, washing the buildings in cold torrents of water.

Immediately the boy darted towards the open manhole cover, beckoning Cave to follow him. As the iron disc was slid back into place, Cave could hear hailstones the size of small pebbles pinging off it.

Down in the darkness, Cave looked around him. Water poured through the drain grille and the stale air was cold and wet. The boy was drenched and Cave could see that he was shivering. From his briefcase, he took a scarf and wrapped it around the boy's bony shoulders.

Overhead, the rain fell relentlessly and further away in distant tunnels he could hear something like the sound of dead men whispering where the wind above forced its way down through the gratings to howl faintly through the sewers. He did not want to exit the comparative homeliness of the boy's sewer den and fight his way back through the growing storm outside. Yet he knew that he must return to his flat before too long otherwise his absence would be noticed by the surveillance teams.

A tunnel in the corner caught his eye. He thought of how the boy had led him through the sewers before and pointed to it. "Do these tunnels lead all over the city?"

The boy nodded his head.

"Do you know where they all go?"

Nod.

"Can you take me to my flat through them?"

Again the boy nodded, "okay."

Cave smiled. "Thank you. Not right to it. To an alleyway nearby. There's one about two hundred feet directly south of it."

"Okay."

Together they set off down one of the passages, the boy confidently leading them onwards through the tangled network of sewer pipes. Cave switched on the penlight he kept in his case, the thin bright beam of light waving along the old brickwork as they walked. It soon became apparent though that the boy did not need additional light of any sort to navigate his way and so he turned it off to conserve the battery.

They passed all kinds of different pipes, some too small for even the boy to fit down, some large enough to drive a truck along. All around, water streamed down from the gutters. Overhead, Cave could hear the rain falling almost as one massive sheet rather than individual drops and the wind tearing through it, twisting and lashing it against the city. He could hear too the vicious crack of lightning and the rolling boom of thunder that reverberated down through the enclosed walls about them. If there was any traffic up there, even that could not make itself heard above the almighty storm that beat down mercilessly.

It was just over half an hour later when the boy brought them to an abrupt halt. Cave fished out the torch and shone it upwards to where the boy was pointing with a thin, grubby finger. Directly above them was another manhole cover, a circle of water trickling in around its edge. Cave looked down at the boy. "This is the one?"

The boy nodded in affirmation.

"Thank you."

Cave wished he had something else to give to the boy, but the scarf had gone and he clearly had no use for the torch. From somewhere within he felt the urge to reach out and place has hand upon the boy's shoulder, but when he tried awkwardly to convince himself to do this he found he could not and instead simply reached up to scratch his head. The boy meanwhile just stood there, perhaps waiting for Cave to do or say whatever it was he wanted to so that he could return the way they had come. Feeling at a loss, Cave faced the boy and tried desperately to find a way of extending a sentiment.

Eventually he nodded to the boy.

The boy smiled and nodded in return.

Cave spoke first. "Okay?"

"Okay."

The boy turned around and left. Cave listened to his footsteps splashing through the sewers until the sound had retreated into the all-embracing crash of the storm.

Lifting the edge of the manhole cover, Cave carefully peered out. He could see just enough beyond the water splashing on the ground in front of his eyes to confirm that he was indeed positioned below an alleyway. Struggling out of the sewer as quickly as he could, he hoped it was the correct one. By the time he had replaced the cover and put up his umbrella, he was drenched.

At the end of the alley he checked both ways down the fortunately abandoned road and stepped out onto the pavement. He was exactly where he had hoped to be. At a quick walk he set off in the direction he knew his apartment to be in, although he could barely see where he was going.

The umbrella was flimsy and almost completely ineffectual in the driving wind. Cave leaned forwards clutching the briefcase to his chest, trying to prevent the umbrella from turning inside out on its frail ribs. All around him flailing trees were pulled this way and that by the wind. He walked past a park where the flowers were already lying crushed and broken under the onslaught of the weather. Everything around him was lit with the same type of eerie unnatural dark light. He knew it was somewhere around half eight in the evening, and although the sun should not yet have set, it had been blotted entirely from a sky that in places seemed blacker than night. Regular flashes of lightning illuminated the empty streets of the city under attack.

Turning into 11th street, just yards now from the escape of home, the entire city seemed to be suddenly shot through with a fearsomely dazzling white light. As it faded to the blotched pattern of seared irises, a single awesome thunderclap ripped through the city, the air, the very sky itself, tearing the fabric of the world apart as it did so. All down the street, yellow electric lights wavered in the windows of peoples' apartments.

Cave fought onwards against the wind. Across the road the security van opposite his front door flashed its lights at him. He cursed under his breath and struggled over to it. The agent wound the window down just enough. "What are you still doing out when everybody else is indoors?"

Cave pointed behind him to where his car was parked. "I had to walk home from work, sir. I was trying to shelter along the way." He had to shout to make himself heard.

"It's not going to stop any time soon."

"That's what I figured, sir."

"What's in the case?"

"Just my pager, sir, some work papers."

"Show me."

"It'll get soaked inside."

"I don't care. Open it. Show me."

Reluctantly Cave opened the clasps. He hoped fervently that the glue holding the panel in place hadn't been loosened by any leaks that may have seeped through. Without checking he opened it towards the security van. The agent nodded. "Get indoors before it gets any worse." He wound the window back up.

Inside Cave stood dripping profusely onto the floor. He hadn't realised as he had run up the stairs but he was trembling. He clutched the briefcase tightly, unwilling to put it down anywhere.

When he had steadied himself, he walked over to the sofa, sat down, and opened the case on his knees. Within he saw all that the agent in the security van would have done – papers stamped with the seal of the council, cigarettes, pager, a lining stained with rainwater. Nothing more. He breathed a sigh of relief and with difficulty, lit a soggy cigarette.

Setting the briefcase to one side for a moment, he fetched the sharp kitchen knife. Lifting the case to the counter, he prised the panel free, exposing the bundle of letters. They were wet around the edges and the ink had run slightly on those closest to the leather.

Cave carried the letters and knife through to his bedroom, the cigarette smouldering damply. Getting down on his hands and knees, he shuffled over to a corner away from the window in which there was no furniture. With the sharp blade he cut down through the carpet where it joined the skirting board. Tugging at the loose flap, he pulled it away and the underlay with it to expose the floorboards. Folding the carpet back, he tested the boards until he found one that was looser than the others.

Patiently he worked away at the loose floorboard, wiggling it around until he could gain enough purchase to lift it to one side. Beneath was a shallow cavity cut across with structural beams. Cave checked all the letters where bound together and carefully slid them into the hiding place along with the notebook. When he was satisfied that they were secure and out of sight, he replaced the floorboard.

As he was about to roll the carpet back into place, an odd bit of colouring between two of the other boards caught his attention. He picked at it with the knife. It was a folded knot of paper. Curious, he unfolded it. He recognised the paper immediately, it was the same as that in the notepad he had used for writing down chess moves. In the bottom right corner where the initials 'LC'.

Without reading it, Cave went immediately back through to the living room where he held his cigarette light to the paper's edge with shaking hands. Pinched between thumb and forefinger, he let it burn to ashes until the flame extinguished itself on his skin. Then, throwing the window by the chess table open to the chaotic storm, he relit a cigarette and leaned out into the rain.

The storm raged.

*

Lazarus Cave woke in the morning to beaming sunshine and a pure blue sky that gave little evidence of the upheaval of the previous night.

In the lounge the window was still open and there was a damp patch of floor in front of it. Strewn across the floor were the thirty-two chess pieces where the table had been toppled by the wind. The chess board itself had been flung into the fireplace where it had snapped into two.

Cave left the mess as it was. He drove to work through streets filled again with eager commuters, flocking once again following their desertion in the face of the storm. It was as if no one wanted to quite admit what the weather had done to them. In some gutters water flowed along in narrow rivulets, unable to drain into the flooded sewers below.

The approach to the council compound, always busy, was logged with cars to a near standstill. Cave was restricted to an intermittent crawl, long periods of stationary cars separating the small advancements.

Only as he at last turned into the road running down the edge of the complex did he see the reason for the delay. Flung across the pavement like a careless twig, the majestic old oak that grew within the compound's grounds had been uprooted and toppled by the storm. Debris was scattered out into the road, spilling from the massive rent it had caused in the marble wall.
A lit cigarette is balanced on the edge of an ashtray. The paper curls and browns as it burns. Little by little a column of ash forms on the end of the cigarette. The cigarette burns, the glowing cherry making its way through the tobacco, and the ash column grows, white and grey. The cigarette is about a quarter burnt when the ash column begins to droop. One by one, the connections holding it to the cigarette break and the droop becomes more pronounced until it can support itself no longer and under its own weight, falls to the base of the ashtray and disintegrates into an untidy pile. The red of the cigarette, exposed once more to the air, burns brighter, the paper curls and browns and a new ash column begins to form.

*

Not long after the storm, once the river had run higher than normal for a few days, most of the water had drained from the streets of the city. Only the area around the market and the cobbled square itself were affected for the longer term. Located in a shallow depression at the base of the hill with the research facility and the zoo, once the sewers beneath it had flooded, it was a natural basin for the rain water. The traders' stands and materials that were stripped down and left each night had been ruined by the flooding. As a result, it currently lay in a state of abandonment, drying out.

Elsewhere the city carried on as if the storm had never happened. When Lazarus Cave arrived at the archives on the second morning following, the compound wall was standing once more, as faultless as before. He inspected it once he had parked his car. Even the dark veins running through the marble were perfectly aligned.

Where the giant oak had stood, the council had demolished every last trace. The roots had been dug up, leaves swept, ground filled and levelled and the grass relayed over the top of it. All over the city, like surgeons, they had grafted a new skin onto what had been damaged areas until they became patches that were old in their newness, that had never been anything other than what they were now. The flat green grass inside the complex had always been as such. It was a great physical ablution that the city underwent, a shedding of recent events like a snake shrugging off a damaged skin.

The citizens too under their own volition moved to strike the storm from the record. Within a week of the damage, windows had been replaced, gardens replanted, broken fences re-erected, water damage dealt with.

In the discourse of the city, the storm was simply non-existent. From the tittle-tattle of citizens to the official sanctioned news reports, there was no mention of it at all. A steadfast denial settled across every aspect of the city.

Beforehand – before Canscot, before the boy – Cave would have seen this as nothing unremarkable. Indeed, he would have been amongst the vanguard of the suppressive force that had swept almost unbidden over the city, a natural product of the perfectly managed system that held it intact. Now, however, as he filtered through the streets and chapters, he found the irrepressibly cheery defiance in the face of the chaotic storm shocking. The reaction did not pull the teeth of the storm, it simply turned the city's exposed, defenceless back on its frightening disorder to look across an unstained, regimented vista.

Cave refused to turn with them. The broken chess set sat arrayed across the top of the mantelpiece like a shrine. As he stared back into the disruption of the storm, Cave uncovered the hidden cogs that worked to drive the city away from the memory of the storm's upheaval; he saw amongst the human denial the hospitals forbidden from treating citizens wounded in the storm, he saw amidst the unacknowledged damage the insurance companies prohibited from paying out compensation, he stood by the river and saw great raftloads of debris, floating away, unobserved. He saw in the good-looking faces and polished teeth of the newsreaders not a cover-up of the weather, but a treacherous goodwill that with a poisoned smile erased the storm so that the citizens could not question that attitude of the hospitals and the insurance companies who could, after all, hardly attend to the victims of a storm that had not happened. And so the raftloads of debris floated down the river like mirages. Cave saw all this in the soulless cunning of the city and the soulless complicity of its inhabitants.

Cave thought of the boy often in the week after the storm. He thought in particular of his thin form receding down the tunnel as he stood there underneath the manhole cover to which he had been led. He thought too of the flooded sewers he had passed in the storm and the morning after. Had he been wrong to sacrifice the boy's relative safety in the chamber beneath the factories for the sake of his own comfort? Cave desperately wanted to see the boy again. He desperately wanted to contact Evelyn also as she was the only possible outlet with whom he could discuss the storm, its devastation, the council's response, without having to tiptoe round it like a taboo puddle.

It transpired he need not have worried about the boy. Nine days after the storm, early in the morning commute, Cave drove down the long stretch of 3rd street with the warming late-summer sun shining in through the open window onto his bare arm. The traffic moved slowly but steadily as always, halting periodically in a smooth line to wait at a red light. As Cave sat still, looking across the road to where summer shirts like the one he was wearing were on show in the display front of one of the big department stores, he saw from the corner of his eye something shoved through the crowd of pedestrians and in through the driver's window of the car. Without stopping to examine it, Cave swept the envelope behind his back so that it was hidden from view and watched in the wing mirror as the boy cut and weaved through the thick grey forest of suits and skirts.

Once at work, Cave headed immediately for the ground floor toilets to read the note before descending to the belly of the archives. Written in Evelyn's handwriting was a request that he meet her at the given date and time in the market square. Having committed the appointment to memory, Cave stepped from the cubicle, exited the toilets whilst straightening his tie, and rode the lift downwards.

If the atmosphere up in the city was remarkable only in its unremarkable nature, an ordered calm following so soon after the storm, within the council compound and, Cave felt, down here in the archives in particular, it was ridden with a subtle unspoken tension.

Arthur Camras was sitting stony faced at his work station when he entered the office. Cave sat down at his own desk diagonally opposite, exchanged a strained greeting and booted up his machine. As it whirred into life, Sal Bernieri appeared, his usually more cheery demeanour dampened by the unspoken – by the unspeakable – knowledge of the storm. Official decrees had come from the councillor on the same morning that Cave had found the council's defensive wall torn apart that no mention of the storm was to be made to any citizen, no admission, no recognition, no concession that anything untoward had happened. They were forbidden too from discussing it amongst themselves lest it foment any unhelpful memories. But it was not the prohibition that prevented the archivists from bringing it up in conversation. It was the same impotent fear experienced by the councillors that they had witnessed things fall apart before them; perfect order had been cast asunder and the forces that had done so had been alien and unstoppable. It was a challenge to their mastery from some unseen foe and they could do little else now but resort to propaganda and fine craftsmanship to paper over the cracks. Lazarus Cave wondered if any other council employee dared to think behind the subtle repairs to see what lay in the gaps beyond.

By nine o'clock, all four archivists were at desks. At five minutes past nine, Landau Krauss stepped from his office and summoned them inside. Cave looked about as they walked together. Elsewhere across the broad office floor, other groupings were heading into similar offices.

Krauss waited until all four of them had taken a seat, then he pushed the glass door softly closed until it clicked shut with a loudness that accentuated the wary silence that the archivists had brought with them. He walked round them and returned to his seat, the broad wooden desk spread as always before them. He spoke to them in the carefully paced manner he used when relaying the edicts of the council.

"Gentlemen, you are aware of course that there are at present enforceable guidelines levied against any conversation you may have either with each other or with the any member of the general citizenry. This is not, of course, designed to be a punitive measure. We are simply conscious of buoying up citizens' morale, as we always are, and any requests placed on discussions with colleagues are simply to ensure that we practice what we preach, as it were, that a good example all round emanates from the archives, indeed from the entire council body. We are proud to serve this city. We must, therefore, do what the city needs and expects of us. It is because of this desire to do what we can for those who rely upon us that the councillors have decided to run through the city's machinery with a fine toothcomb. We do not, do not, expect for one moment that we will find a single footstep out of place. The city exists only as a product of the perfect order of the systems upon which it is founded. The archives are part of those systems. All we want to do is provide the citizens with a proof of reassurance that every aspect of those systems is intact, well-oiled and running smoothly. Of course, we never expect that any citizen shall ever actually need to question such a thing, but in light of the current situation, we – the council that is – consider it prudent and in the spirit of responsible management that a thorough internal investigation of every council department is conducted at the shortest possible notice. The archives will be under inspection four days from now. Rest assured that there is nothing discriminatory afoot here; everyone from the lowest to the highest ranked employee will be vetted. Disruption of the daily routine will be kept to a minimum. Much of the work will be conducted remotely. The whole process will naturally be swift, thorough and accurate. Justice, where and only if necessary, will be clinical. We are facing interesting times, gentlemen. Order will be restored."

_Order will be restored_.

Cave sat in front his computer and mulled the words over. Was this a tacit acknowledgement on behalf of the council? A threat? A slip in the rhetoric that belied the fear that was coursing through the councillors? He couldn't be certain that it was any, all or none of them. Whatever it was, it was of serious concern for him. For the rest of the day there was a heightening hum of constant nervous activity throughout the archives, people constantly rushing everywhere, the entire department quite unable to keep still. Throughout it, Cave sat resolutely where he was, methodically working through documents. The signed confessions of the city. The same repetitive thought rolled round and round his mind. He had taken care to cover his tracks in delving into Evelyn's history from routine checks, but he had no chance of maintaining the deceit against a thorough survey.

Order will be restored.

That night he watched the dark cityscape from his lounge window. Through the dread anxiety that almost smothered him inside, thin rays of a calm like he had never known before struggled to force their way through. It reminded him of the weeds that had started to grow up through cracks in the pavement outside his apartment block where the wild winds had caught hold a lamppost, tugging it from side to side and disturbing the smooth concrete at its base. There was a decision that had to be made, and he knew what the answer was even before the question had made itself fully apparent.

The dark shapes of the buildings presented a geometric regularity, the lights of apartment windows plotting the constant lives of the citizens within. Cave wondered whether each individual person could have any idea of how they looked mapped out like this on a form of universal blueprint. And he breathed in the night of the city with a deep reverence he had not felt for a long time. He marvelled that the city which looked so exactly the same as it always had done and always would do, so perfectly unaltered across its singular passing of time without any true presence of a messy past, could appear so fundamentally altered. It was like looking at a blue shirt in which every single fibre had been replaced with identical threads whilst it had been on the wearer's back. Even now it seemed utterly impossible. Where did the power come from that could have affected such a change in the very fabric of the city? Or was it he rather than the city that had changed, and what difference, if any, did it make?

_Order will be restored_.

Cave withdrew Evelyn's note from his jacket pocket where it had hung like lead all day, rolled back the carpet, lifted the floorboard and stowed it away with the others. His hands shook whilst he did so. He could not bring himself to look across to her flat.

That night he dreamt of her. He dreamt that they were walking hand in hand in a garden, that as they strolled without a care in the world they chanced upon a great fallen tree about which fresh grass had begun to sprout up to cover over the wound it had left in the ground. As he moved forward to inspect it closer, he saw that it was the same tree that had stood in the grounds of the compound. Except that it wasn't. It was different somehow. When he looked at it this way it was another tree again, the one that grew in the green space between his apartment block and Evelyn's, and from another angle it was yet another tree, this time the one from the park that had housed the bird's nest. He walked around it, trying to catch the fallen specimen from every angle possible and with each new vantage point it became another tree, and another, until it was every tree he had ever known or ever seen from tall, slender conifers, to willowy birches, to sprawling oaks and thick, imperial chestnut trees. When he had examined it thoroughly like this, he was standing on the other side of the monolithic trunk to Evelyn, yet when he reached his arms up and out towards her, she took hold of his hands as if there was nothing larger than a twig laying between them. And then they were standing on the trunk that was both vast and tiny, holding hands and dancing, dancing a jig along its length, and round its fallen leaves, and beneath its upturned roots that bared themselves like some distorted crown to the earth and the sky and everything else.

*

On the day that Cave was due to meet Evelyn in the park, he rose early, showered, dressed and left the flat just after sunrise. Walking through the streets at that time meant that he saw them fill with commuters as if a tap had been switched on, and then watched them gradually drain away into offices and shops, studios and restaurants. He walked slowly, trying to take in the city as it stood in front of him, and not the city his mind handily conjured up as he rushed around with the rest of the citizens, too busy, too unaware to notice that reality and belief did not quite match up. The differences that he saw were small, but when he spotted them he wondered how he had never done so before; a window in a small café that was kept spotlessly clean but had in its lower right corner a spider-work crack where a pebble thrown up by a passing car had struck it, the dull grey department store that in crevices showed flashes of its original white that lay hidden in broad daylight underneath a coating of fumes from car exhausts that mingled with smoke from the towers, railings around parks that needed fresh coats of paint, uneven tangles of brickwork in walls, in pavements, in buildings. Was this the real city – in need of repair? Or perhaps he had simply switched from one image within his mind to another. It was impossible to tell whether the dissimilarities made anything any more genuine and even by just existing once, now, they had many years of absence to compensate for.

Lazarus Cave checked his watch. He was running an hour or so early. He smiled, this was exactly what he had planned for. Ahead of him he could see over the rooftops the crest of the main hill and the outline of the research centre on top of it. The zoo was almost a distant memory and he wanted to visit it again before meeting with Evelyn. As it overlooked the marketplace, the location was ideal.

Cave paused when he reached the end of the road. He didn't want to draw attention to the deserted marketplace by walking across it an hour before he was due to meet Evelyn there. Instead he would have to ascend the hill from the other side, that way he could enter the square without turning into it off a main street. For this, taking the right turn would lead him on the southern loop of the hill's base and down past the river, left would take him around the northern approach. He turned left.

The steps that ascended the hillside from the non-market approach were steeper than those on the other side. Cave laboured as he climbed up them. At the summit he was surprised to find that a recently erected gate was locked, barring access to the hilltop. Either side of it fencing stretched for about ten feet.

Cave stood for a moment, bemused. No announcements of the hill's closure had been made in the archives. Curious to know what he was being blocked from, he checked behind himself to make sure the no one else was ascending the steps. He listened hard in order to detect the distant echo of any footsteps. They were completely clear. The angle of the hillside meant that he was hidden from anybody passing by the base.

Taking a grip on the bars of the fence, Cave edged cautiously out onto the steep rough slope. His feet struggled for purchase as he half-pulled himself along the length of fence. When he reached the end he ungainly hauled himself up and rolled onto the level ground where he lay on his back, panting at the exertion. Gingerly he got to his feet. A gentle breeze wafted over the plateau, bringing with it the faintest acrid smell of early morning tower smoke. Without the hustle of the marketplace, it was quieter than anywhere else in the city. Cave breathed in the fresh isolation he felt up here. He felt invigorated by what he deemed to be the conquest of the council's defences. He looked about, wondering what it was they so suddenly needed to defend.

Nothing in particular seemed out of the ordinary. Roses had grown up in neatly tended bushes around the metal sculpture of the corner of a cube. Cave considered it with interest. As it sat it was clearly the inside corner. But turn it over as one might do in the mind and it was the outside corner instead. Was this possible, that it could be two things at once? Even if that was not logically remarkable, it seemed likely that the sculpture had been cast with the intention of producing either an interior or an exterior subject, but perhaps it didn't really matter what the intention was. At least, there was nothing he could do to prevent his mind from juggling the sculpture and the ground it rested on so they cycled through every configuration he could think of.

The first thing Cave noticed when he got closer to the imposing bulk of the research centre was that the great double wooden doors that were always open were shut. As he got closer he could see that a heavy chain and robust padlock were ensuring that they remained shut. He rattled it anyway to make sure if hadn't been accidentally left unclasped. The resounding of the padlock on the doors as he did so suddenly made him worry that there might still be officials inside who would be attracted by the noise and would open the doors to find him, Lazarus Cave, trespassing on the hilltop. He waited for two minutes that seemed like an age rooted to the spot where he stood. Nobody came. There seemed to be no life up here at all. The thought made him shiver.

Cave walked back down the marble steps that led up to the front entrance. As he stepped off the bottom one he heard a loud crunch under his right foot. Stepping quickly back he saw the tangled remains of a wristwatch that somebody, one of the scientists perhaps, must have dropped when they vacated the research centre, whenever that was. Maybe they had all been simply swept off it by the vicious power of the storm.

Along the left side of the research centre a narrow path led to the zoo at the rear of the building. Cave edged slowly along it, overhanging the steeply slanted side that led down to the hard cobbles of the empty market below. He was thankful that it was not windier up here on the exposed height of the hill. At last he reached the end of the research centre and stepped around its hard marble corner and onto the safe expanse of the ground leading to the first enclosures of the zoo.

The wind came whistling through the high mesh surrounds of the paddocks and cages. It was eerie up here with no human activity. There was a heavier silence in the air though that suggested that something else was remiss also. Cave saw what it was as he reached the enclosures. Every single one was empty. He hurried from one to the next, past signs advertising giraffes and elephants, emus and egrets. All were deserted.

Cave stood in the centre of the zoo and whirled round, bewildered. He had no idea what was going on. Why had the archivists not been told about what had happened here? Did the citizens know? Certainly there had been no crowds around the steps leading up the hill as there normally were. But how would a message have reached the entire city yet bypassed himself? He felt sick up here, exposed and naked. The lazy wind rolled gently through the zoo, lifting and dropping the broad leaves of palm trees. Everything was in perfect condition; structured pathways and meticulously planned enclosures dutifully absorbed the growing early morning warmth, devoid of life.

Cave just wanted to get away from it all. The entire zoo hung in some kind of horrible balance between natural and unnatural. Perhaps it had always been like this, but it took the absence of animals and people, observers and objects, to scrub away the pleasantry of the non-inquiring mind. He wasn't sure; he didn't particularly care either as he went swiftly back along the narrow track leading to the manicured gardens in front of the research centre before pounding rapidly down the steps that this time led to the market place, grabbing at the metal hand rail for support as he did so.

At the bottom, he bent double, hands on knees, heaving for breath. He was crouched like this for two or three minutes. When he straightened up, Evelyn was standing before him. She looked at him with curiosity.

"What's up there?" She raised her gaze to indicate the hilltop, on which the great domed roof of the lifeless research centre was visible.

Cave shook his head. "Nothing." He moved to change the subject. "You wanted to see me?"

"I needed to talk to somebody about the storm."

Cave nodded in sympathy. "Everyone in the council departments has been officially banned from acknowledging it ever happened."

"Same here. We can't talk about it at work, can't answer any of the children's questions. The older kids are getting the hang of it all and have stopped asking. But the younger ones, the small ones, they can't understand what's happening. There are little four- and five-year-olds who just contradict you when you tell them that there wasn't a storm and get upset when you keep telling them they're wrong."

"I hadn't thought of them. I've just been amazed how quickly every single citizen has fallen into the new way of things. It's as though they were all just waiting to be told what had actually happened, rather than trusting what they had seen for themselves. And when they were told there had been no storm..."

"I heard of one dormitory where the children were terrified when the matron told them there had been no storm, it was only a dream. They wanted to know who had been making them all dream exactly the same thing. There were some who didn't sleep for days after that. I don't know what happened to them, I think they were removed from the dorm though."

They walked slowly along the perimeter of the square as they spoke. When she told him about the children and their fear of dreams, Evelyn slipped her arm through Cave's and they walked on like that for a few paces, each in their thoughts.

"I suppose it's not surprising when you think about this city."

"Why do you continue to work for the archives?"

"What else can I do? Nobody leaves the compound to join the outside. You get hounded by the CSA for it. We're all trapped in there one way or another. It's just that nobody sees it."

"Why should they? There's no reason for anybody to look about themselves and say 'hey, wait a minute'. We have to give up our history every day. We've got no reference points. We've got no idea who we really are. All we know is the perfect life around us, every day, perfection, pure relentless perfection. Why should anybody think that there's anything else to be seen?"

Cave felt mollified. "What makes you different?"

"Because I met you. My child, the boy, they helped. They paved the way perhaps. It was because of them that I didn't run shouting to the CSA to turn you in."

"I'm the renegade archivist then."

"You know, on my way into work the day after there was just so much evidence of destruction. Things strewn everywhere. Other things tossed around and broken. But when I walked home later that night, it was all pretty much gone. Even the rose bushes were standing in one of the parks again."

"That's the citizens. I guess nobody wanted to admit anything had happened so when the council said sweep it under the carpet, they swept. There's no history to record anything. The day after it happened, the storm never happened."

"You're right, I know. That's not the most disturbing thing though."

"What is?"

"That all the things that were affected, they were just all over the place. But they didn't seem it at the same time. As if the storm struck us randomly, but it smacks of deliberateness at the same time. It's like all that chaos was really just a mix up of hundreds or thousands of tiny patterns."

"If it was deliberate, it had good aim."

"What do you mean?"

"The oak tree. Uprooted."

"Which oak?"

"The one in that stood in the compound. You could see it over the wall. The storm uprooted it, sent it through the wall of the compound out onto the street outside."

"Are you being serious?"

"You didn't know?"

"I haven't been past there since. And nobody will talk about anything to do with the weather at the moment."

"The storm's noticeable because it's not there."

"The opposite to something not being noticed because it's always present."

"But the tree. That's the most difficult thing about all this to reconcile. I mean, I can understand why it's being forgotten so swiftly. I would have done the same thing previously. Before this. But even to me that tree had always been there. It was just a part of the fabric of it all. Of course, to everyone else the fabric is now a green grassy hollow that's always been there. There must have been something there before the tree. It was so old though its age gave this kind of subtle hint of the past. That this was something established."

"A sapling probably would've just bent and survived."

"I thought that age was pretty much all we had left. That seems to be being torn apart as well now."

They had walked nearly halfway around the outside of the marketplace by this point. Evelyn raised her face to Cave's. In her eyes there sparkled a blend of playfulness and sad understanding. Her eyes ran down his hairline. She reached up and plucked a hair from his high forehead. Cave winced and looked at her in surprise. Between her thumb and forefinger she held a lone grey hair up to a crease at the corner of her eye. "We're still growing old."

Lazarus Cave smiled. He turned his gaze downwards and looked along the lines of precisely set cobbles. "Sometimes perfect order seems more disordered and unnatural than anything else."

After another couple of paces, Evelyn stepped smartly round in front of him and stopped them both where they were. Face-to-face they stood, his hands on her hips, hers higher up around his shoulders. She looked at him searchingly. When she spoke, her voice mingled together an uncertainty with the hint of a challenge.

"What do you plan to do about it all?"

Cave held her stare. With his left hand, he brushed a strand of hair from her face where the wind had blown it and tucked it behind her ear.

"You should be careful. I think you could be in danger."

"Why? What's going on?"

He shook his head. Evelyn glanced furtively around her. As she scanned to her left Cave felt her freeze rigid in his hands. She turned back slowly.

"We might be being watched."

She slid her eyes to the side to indicate across the empty marketplace.

Cave stared out, trying to detect any soft indication of movement. He felt Evelyn twist suddenly from his grip and he heard her heels clatter quickly on the cobbles as she rushed from the square.

For a while Cave did not move. His eyes strained as he scoured the shadows on the northern side. Several times he thought he had nearly seen something or someone, but he could not distinguish a form absolutely. From the sky a single drop of cold rain landed on the back of his neck, trickled under the collar and down his spine. Then he too turned and went.
Deep in the archives themselves, shelves rise upwards in cavernous rooms. They are filled with countless boxes containing countless records. This is the history of the city, pure, undisputed and unseen. Strip-lights in the ceiling illuminate the walkways between the shelves. In some undisturbed corner of the archives there is a rustling noise that is nearly lost in the vastness of the room. In the bottom corner of one of the filing boxes there is a hole, roughly chewed. From the hole, a small brown-grey head emerges, nose twitching for unusual smells in the sterile air. For a moment it pauses and then a mouse darts out and away, down the shelving and across the floor until it has scampered into the shadows and disappeared. Back inside the filing box, through the roughly chewed hole, amidst the torn up shreds of records used by the mouse for nesting material, a litter of still-blind pink mouse pups chirrup in the dark for their mother.

*

There were new faces in the archives. A state of nervous uncertainty hung in the machine-conditioned air. CSA agents dressed in their unassuming grey suits and crisp white shirts stalked through the corridors. Cave recognised Tess Dalton as she strode past him, stony faced.

At intervals, a pair of burly agents would escort an archivist to the elevator and step in with them. By noon Cave had noticed that some archivists would return after just a few minutes, some a little longer. A handful did not reappear until two hours or more had gone by. One or two not at all.

A movement to his left disturbed him. It was Bernieri returning to his desk with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He sat down and momentarily disappeared from view before his head resurfaced above the low desk partitions. He made a show of drinking the unpleasant coffee and grimacing, then looked conspiratorially over at Cave.

"Do you know where they take them?"

"Who?

"They. Them. Apparently there are rooms on one of the levels above ground. Not sure what they're doing with the ones who don't make it back down here again. All part of the promised great inspection it would appear. We're all being vetted."

Cave didn't say anything. He felt sick. He wondered if the colour had visibly drained from his face. He gave a grunt of acknowledgement.

"Is that all? I've seen you glancing up at them all morning. You can hardly keep your eyes off them. Don't have anything to hide now, do you Larry?"

Cave could see that Schmitz was by now displaying an obvious interest in the conversation that was unfolding between himself and Bernieri. Somehow he had to bring this to a swift but natural close. Everything felt constricted, it was hard to think and he feared that talking was only going to reveal the jangling nerves beneath his skin.

"Of course not. But you can't deny it's unsettling."

Bernieri relaxed back into his chair as if this was the answer he had expected to hear all along. He laughed. "You're right. It is. Even you, Donald, must be a little hot under the collar. It's the knowledge that suspicions exist with enough force to bring those damn agents down here in the first place, even if we've actually done nothing." He leaned forwards again. "At least it looks like we're last on the inquisitor's list."

Bernieri nodded to the far side of the broad office space where the agents were currently at their densest. As Cave watched, one archivist rose from his seat and was marched away through the nearest door by two grey-suited agents. There were another sixty archivists at least sat between the agents and himself. Bernieri was right, it would take time to reach them. Time in which he desperately needed to form some kind of plan. Cave had little doubt that he would be one of the select few archivists who did not return to their desks, and he had little interest in discovering where exactly it was they were taken to.

An hour ticked slowly by. Cave tried his utmost to create the impression of being deeply involved with his work. All the while he wracked his mind, but the pounding of his heart and the relentless throb of the ventilators were proving to be deafening.

Thirty minutes later he looked up from his computer screen. To his alarm some CSA agents had advanced past the halfway point of the buffer of archivists. He had hoped to have until four o'clock or so in the afternoon by which to have come up with an escape route. Now he checked his watch and hurriedly totted the elapsed minutes up. An hour, perhaps a little more, that was all the window he could reasonably hope to have left.

He allowed another twenty minutes, long enough he hoped to be able to gain some kind of control over his racing mind. Much longer and his body would most likely have given the game away with sweating and shaking.

Cave stood up. Arthur Camras looked at him. So did the other two archivists.

"I need a drink. Just going to get some tea. Does anybody else want one?"

The last part, he hoped, added a note of realism to his voice as he strained to keep it away from a fateful trembling. Now Camras stood. "I'll come with you."

"No, no. It's okay, really."

"Don't be a fool. You'll need a hand at least if you're getting drinks for us all."

Schmitz spoke. "I'll have a coffee."

Cave looked down at Sal Bernieri. He had to now. Bernieri shook his large head. "Nope. Nothing here, thank you."

Near the elevators was a crowd of CSA agents. There was no way he could leave the building by the normal route. Together Cave and Camras walked down the corridor in the direction of the drinks machine. Shoulder to shoulder in the narrow passage, neither said a word. At the machine Cave pressed the button for a milky tea. He stepped back, leaving the space for Camras who moved forward, giving him an odd stare as he did so. Camras selected two coffees, one with sugar, and they made their way in silence back to the desks. Passing the door at the far end of the office Cave could see that the CSA agents were now just one bank of work stations away from his own. He had to do something now.

Just before the two of them reached their doorway, Cave stopped suddenly. Camras stopped too.

"I just have to go piss." Cave indicated down a corridor to their left where the toilets were located. Camras seemed to stall for a moment or two, uncertain of what to do.

"Don't take too long. We're due to be interviewed soon. I doubt the CSA will respond well if they come to your desk and find you're not there."

Cave gave him a grin that was distinctly more casual than he felt inside. "Don't worry about it. Won't be a minute."

Camras nodded and moved onwards.

Quickly Cave stepped into the side corridor. He ducked into the toilets where he disposed of the weak, rapidly cooling tea in a bin. From the taps he splashed some cold water on his face. In the mirror in front of him the man that looked back seemed distant and strange. The real Lazarus Cave opened his mouth. It was the reflection that whispered back. "You have to do this."

Seconds later Cave stepped from the toilets. He set off in the opposite direction to the office, turning first right then left down new corridors. Round here he did not know the archives so well. There was little reason to venture this way usually. But he did know what he was looking for. Twice he found himself having to double back having taken a wrong turn. At one point, four stern looking CSA agents suddenly appeared marching down the corridor towards him. With no escape route on either side, Cave continued cautiously onwards, desperately hoping that either the agents he was running from had yet to reach his desk, or that if they had done, the message had yet to be relayed that he was missing. Not until the group had passed him and he had emerged from the far end of the corridor did he dare to let out a sigh of relief.

One more left turn and then ahead of him there lay an unassuming looking door set into the uniform beige wall. Cave noticed with relief that there were no CSA agents guarding it. Thankfully there was nobody else around in the immediate area either. Quietly he partially opened the door, slipped through and shut it softly behind him.

Above his head, flickering strip-lights were fixed to the slanting ceiling. In front of him a long set of barren concrete stairs led upwards. At the top he could just make out a small landing and another door with a murky green light above it. On tiptoe he ascending the flight of steps, making as little noise as possible. The strip-lights hummed. Blood thrummed in his ears as his heart continued to work overtime, adrenaline rushing to it to keep it jackhammering away in his chest.

He reached the top of the stairs without incident. Underneath his feet here were the same rough carpet tiles found in the corridors below. On the door was a dusty sign that read Fire Exit. Beneath it was another that stated simply, This Door Is Alarmed. Cave cursed under his breath. On the other side of the door, he knew, lay fresh air and freedom. If he triggered the alarm though he would have little chance of ever knowing more than a few feet of freedom before a team of CSA agents would be upon him.

At the foot of the stairs he thought he heard voices behind the door. He froze. The deeper voice hung in the air like a threat and then they both passed.

Frantically he looked about. It would not be long before somebody thought to look for him here. Perhaps they were on their way already. The small landing he stood on was roughly square. It was featureless, just the same dull beige paintwork as elsewhere although it looked even more pallid and sickly with the dim green-tinted light. Then to his right he noticed a second door, flat to the wall and not immediately obvious in the gloom. There was no warning sign on this one. Cave opened it cautiously. High on one wall there was a window and sunlight filtered through its grubby film. He stepped through and closed the door behind him. It was a maintenance closet of some kind, there were brooms in one corner and buckets by them. Under the window stood a rack of tool shelves that were largely empty save for some cans of paint or varnish or similar. Cave stood as far back as he could and tried to judge the size of the window. It was small, perhaps too small, but he could think of no other way out. He couldn't risk the fire door, and there was no way he wanted to head back down the stairs and into the belly of the archives.

The stack of shelves seemed stable enough when he shook it. Tentatively, Cave put his right foot on the first shelf, taking care to avoid the metal tins arrayed along it. Slowly he lifted his left leg until he was sure the structure could manage his weight.

There were six shelves in all. At the top he was about eight feet off the ground and now that the unit was distinctly top-heavy, he felt considerably less secure as he leaned forward to reach the window. The window frame was square, less than three feet across. It looked as though it was tightly jammed shut. Cave stretched forward and gave it a shove. The shelves wobbled dangerously underneath him. As he suspected, the window didn't move.

This was going to be difficult. He cast his eyes about him, trying to figure out a way in which to generate enough force to push the window open. If it was too tightly closed, any sustained shoving from would only serve to send the metal shelving clattering to the ground, and the sound would surely carry down the stairs and out to passing ears in the corridor of the archives below. He needed something with some weight behind it.

As he twisted, his feet knocked against the paint pots. Reaching down, Cave lifted one or two, testing them for weight. Once he had found what seemed to be the heaviest of the lot, he lifted it carefully, held it to his chest and in a short, sharp jab thrust it forward towards the corner of the window frame where it met its casing.

The impact made a loud crack. Cave waited, breath held, for the rush of footsteps to come running up the stairs. Nothing happened. Silence hung so completely that he could even hear his pounding heart. Nothing had happened to the window either, but encouraged by the fact the noise had gone undetected, he swung the paint pot again and then again. Now he felt the window begin to budge, just a fraction but enough to cause some grit held in the join where it closed to tumble down. When he had the bottom corner sufficiently loosened, Cave turned his attention to the top one. He waited before he struck it, again just making sure that no one was coming to see what the bangs were emanating from the storeroom.

Aiming carefully, he hit out with the paint tin. This time there was an almost imperceptible movement with the first blow. By now the paint pot was dented from the repeated impacts and it was harder to find a robust enough edge with which to attack the window. A bead of sweat crept slowly down his brow which felt dusty from job in hand and the general disused air of the closet.

Three minutes later, Cave had the window open and grinding back and forth on its rusting hinges. With care he replaced the metal tin, hiding it behind some others so that its deformed base wasn't immediately apparent. The window opened past ninety degrees and he pushed it as wide as possible to create as much room as he could in which to squeeze out. It looked just about wide enough to drag his body through. For a moment he thought of the boy, his thin, lithe frame would be able to slip out without a problem. However, Cave did not have the same luxury and instead had to decide between struggling through feet or head first. The latter would mean he could see where he was going, but there being no way in which he could turn around, it also meant that he would most likely also descend to the ground below in the same fashion. There was no real choice, therefore, as he opted for the former.

As he manoeuvred into position with an undignified shifting motion, the shelving unit trembled alarmingly below him. After some uncomfortable contortions he managed to seat himself on the very top of the shelves with his legs pointing forwards and out of the open window. This was it. Once he had gone through the window there was no return, no going back. Perhaps he had taken the decision a long time ago. But sitting here now, with his feet suspended over an unknown drop, the moment captured a kind of symbolic summation of the situation. With a deep breath, Cave eased himself forwards, twisting round to lie on his front so that with a final wriggle he dropped, leaving the metal shelving rocking gently to and fro in the storeroom before it came to a safe rest. In the corner, unseen, a broom fell over.

For Cave, it was now that gravity took hold, pulling him sharply down towards the ground where he landed in a crumpled heap at the point where a downwards grassy slope met the hard marble wall of the archives. Fortunately round here he was at the rear of the archives, near where another of the great council departmental buildings soared upwards. Out of sight, sandwiched between the two vast white walls, he stood stiffly upright, smoothed down his suit and with some difficulty took his bearings.

Keeping close to the perimeter wall, Cave loped round the compound, past the great smoking tower, until he was close to the parking lot. In amongst the other cars, he could see the old red bonnet of his own. Driving would get him home quicker, but it would be too much of a risk. If they were looking for him, and they surely would be soon if not already, there was no way his car registration would go undetected as he made his way across the city. Instead he ducked underneath the exit barrier and stepped as calmly as possible into the bustling streets of the city outside.

He opted for a route that kept him to the main roads as far as possible. Down these there were larger crowds of people into which he could blend, hiding out in the open. When he saw a security van, he slipped into the thicker parts of the throng, or turned to face the display window of a shop, watching the van move past in the reflection.

Progress was slow and cautious down the long stretch of 3rd street. At its far end, its tower stood like a giant threat. It preyed on Cave's mind that in its sight he was under a kind of perpetual observation. As he neared its great, grey concrete bulk, the gates in the wall surrounding it opened to admit dustcart filled with the city's relinquished history. He watched as it reversed up to the opening in the base of the tower, its shrill warning siren beeping as it did so. Hydraulic arms lifted the truck's rear end. The tail flap levered open and Cave could see the white mass of paper tumble down towards the eager furnace. His forehead glistened with an anxious sweat, as if the heat of the flames had touched him. The truck lowered itself with a metallic hiss. Lazarus Cave's mouth had gone dry. Faced with the relentless might of the tower, he wondered exactly what it was he planned to do. From further down the road a security van approached. Cave withdrew behind the corner of a building and waited as it passed. Inside he felt his resolve strengthen and his mind began to revolve through various different options. Somehow he had to avoid detection but he could only do so for so long. He thought of the boy and the sewers. He needed a course of action, urgently.

*

Cave opened the front door of his apartment and closed it quickly behind him. Inside his eyes fixed upon a scene of chaos. The entire place had been ransacked. Across the lounge floor lay the cushions from the sofa and armchair, torn open with their stuffing strewn carelessly about. Drawers and cupboards had been flung wide in the kitchen, crockery and cutlery wrenched from where they sat. Cave picked his way over the debris. Wide-eyed trepidation filled him completely and as he moved from kitchen to bathroom he felt sluggish and numb. In here the cabinet had been pulled from the wall and discarded in the bathtub where it lay with the top of the cistern and the side panel from the bath itself. The remaining mirrored door had been broken and shards of glass cracked under his feet as he trod.

With a jolt, Cave snapped from his torpor into a sudden panic. Abandoning the bathroom, he dashed into the bedroom. Amidst the desecrated wardrobe and clothing and the shredded mattress and bedding he saw that the carpet had been rolled back and the loose floorboard pulled to one side. A fierce terror caught him as he threw himself to his knees and scrabbled desperately in the hollow space beneath the flooring. The notebook and sheaves of paper, the cruel damning evidence that ensnared not only himself by Evelyn as well had gone. Frantically he tore up the floorboards around the hole. Only wires and pipes, the building's innards, stared mockingly back at him.

Cave stood up, his head swirling. He drew deep breaths, willing a calm to descend upon him. At least now he had a clear objective to follow. Before the CSA reached her, he had to get to Evelyn. Now that they had the letters and his own research into her life, she was in serious danger.

He clambered across the wrecked bed and looked out of the window over to her flat. Everything looked lifeless. She must be at work. He checked his watch. It was quarter past three. Education centre 23 was on 51st street. Quickly he calculated how long it would take him to get there. Fifteen minutes if he ran. He had no idea though what time her shift finished. It could theoretically be any time between now and ten o'clock or so that evening. It was unlikely agents would be sent into the education centre. The preference would be to avoid any kind of indication that anything was amiss. There would certainly be no actions taken that would risk causing a public spectacle. Cave's eyes alighted on the security van that was posted to monitor the rear of his own building. It also had the perfect location for surveillance on the front of hers. Perhaps they would simply wait for Evelyn to return to her flat and then quietly slip up after her, let themselves in and arrest her there, well away from the view of the citizens. It was a possibility but Cave couldn't be sure. Even now he could already be too late; he had to get to the education centre as fast as possible if he was to intercept her before the CSA reached her.

Cave was halfway down the first flight of concrete steps when he heard the main door of the apartment block swing shut. Leaning over the banister, he peered down the central stairwell. Ascending from the bottom he caught the unmistakeable glimpse of three council figures dressed in grey with their distinctive white collars. Shit. He had tried to sidle past unnoticed, but the security van positioned outside must have spotted him and radioed in for additional agents. There was no way he could exit the building that way, he wouldn't stand a chance of bursting through three trained CSA agents.

He spun around and darted back inside the flat, rushing through to the bedroom where he clambered out of the window and dropped onto the fire escape with a loud metallic clang. He was about to speed down that way when he looked at where he was headed and saw another three agents making their way to the rear of the apartments. Walking in a precise file they were dressed in the same fashion as the three men coming up from the front. One of them carried a ladder.

Without thinking Cave wheeled about and sped up the fire exit taking the ridged metal steps two at a time. At its top the fire escape stopped about ten feet short of the roof. Cave looked down to see the neatly pressed grey-suited leg of the first CSA agent emerging from his bedroom window. There was nothing else for it. Twenty stories up, Lazarus Cave carefully hauled himself up onto the narrow railings that guarded the edge of the fire escape. With his left hand pressed against the rough brickwork for purchase, he leaned with his right out towards a length a drainpipe that led up to the roof. A stiff breeze nearly dislodged him as his mind swam with the precarious balancing act that was preventing him from plummeting to his death.

The drainpipe was just close enough for him to grip it tightly with his right hand. Above his head was a thin metal rod sticking out of the side of the building. In a jerking motion he swung his left arm up and hooked his fingers round it, his whole body rocking unsteadily in the wind. As quickly as he dared, Cave hauled himself up via a series of improvised handholds and the drainpipe until he was able to finally reach over the lip of the building and pull himself onto the flat roof.

Up here, exposed without even the side of the building to offer any shelter, the wind was stronger. Around him was a strange world of chimneys and aerials, air ducts and other protrusions that led down into the flats beneath his feet. Not far above the black shape of a bird circled in the afternoon sun. Over the edge of the building the view was breathtaking, the city stretching out in a magnificent panorama. To the south Cave could see the sun glinting off the sinewy river. Far beyond that the city stretched and stretched and stretched. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw for a fleeting moment something right on the horizon, concrete and separate from the vast reaches of the city but when tried to focus on it, the city simply bled back into the horizon until it was no longer distinguishable from the sky itself. Over everything, the towers towered, staking out their claims to the souls of the people who scurried as tiny as ants beneath them.

From below the hard pounding of six pairs of footsteps on the fire escape broke through Cave's brief distraction. The sound seemed to send a renewed shot of adrenaline rushing through his body and without a second's hesitation he turned to the left and began sprinting down to the end of the building.

There was a six-foot gap between the roof he was on and the next. With the wind buffeting him he took off from his right leg, landing and tumbling in an undignified rolling heap on the other side. He checked of his shoulder as he tumbled, just catching sight of the torso of the first agent rising above the edge of the roof behind him. Desperately he fought for grip with his feet, trying to propel himself upright and onwards. He managed to do so, swerving at the last moment to avoid a chimney stack that suddenly appeared in front of him. In his chest, his heart tore with sheer fright, frantically forcing him onwards and away from his pursuers who were now in full-paced chase. His mouth, his palms, his throat were all dry as he gulped down lungfuls of cold air. As he sped along, Cave began to feel his forty-eight years, his paunch, the lack of use in his muscles.

Ahead of him was another break in the line of buildings. Down at street level they were dark, narrow gullies between the buildings. Up here they were yawning chasms waiting to swallow him down to their hard cobbled bellies. Behind him he could feel the agents gaining. The road ran to his right. To his left he caught sight of a treetop waving idly in the breeze ten or twelve feet below him. Without thinking, he veered sharply left and threw himself from the edge of the roof.

Cave clattered into the branches just as a stronger wind ran through the leaves, causing the disturbance he had made to be lost in the waving of the rest of the canopy. Flailing for a hold he bumped painfully down the abrasive limbs until he came to a jarring halt in a fork in the thinker branches, some four feet or so below the leaves. From his prone position he could see his pursuers hurdle the gap between the two buildings, one after another, and then carry on sprinting until he could no longer hear them.

With difficulty Cave lowered himself down. As he laid his foot on the ground the stiff breeze subsided. He winced at the impact. His body ached all over where it had been bruised and battered in the fall. He took a few aching steps forwards. His shirt clung to his side and when he looked down at it, he saw that it was torn and sticky with blood. Gritting his teeth and focussing his mind on the situation, Cave strode onwards, ignoring the physical discomfort.

*

In the mid-afternoon the sun shone brightly. Thin clouds blew gently across the vast blue curve of the sky. A faint breeze slipped through Lazarus Cave's thin hair where he stood like a nervous sentry on a street corner. Either side of him the balustrades of a large ornate doorway hemmed his body in protectively. Across the road was the great grey expressionless face of the education centre in which Evelyn worked.

A growing tide of people began to fill the pavements, citizens trickling at first and then like the onset of a monumental human flood streaming in both directions, swirling, eddying. Cave looked at his watch. Four o'clock. It was around the time that council-operated shifts of all forms – teachers, cleaners, doctors, firemen, builders, clerks, attendants, carers – underwent the changeover from the day to the evening duties. Hundreds, thousands of people hurrying too and from work, starting and ending their days.

Through the thick bodily miasma, Cave tried to catch a glimpse of Evelyn with one searching eye. With the other, he cast around for any signs of danger. The CSA agents, he presumed, would have by now given up their roof-top chase, it having become clear that somewhere amidst the chimney stacks their quarry had given them the slip. Word would have got out to all security patrols to be on the lookout for him. He was wearing a lightweight summer jacket over his bloodied shirt. Carefully, but with little effect, he turned the collar up in an attempt to obscure as much of his face as possible.

In the next street to the right, Cave could see at periodic intervals a security van rolling slowly along. It seemed to be scanning the crowd. Whether it was specifically looking for Evelyn though, or himself, or just monitoring the streams of citizens, he couldn't be sure. But it was there, consistently passing through his field of vision like an ominous threat and he knew that its present road was on the route home that Evelyn would be most likely to take. Dragging his eyes away from it, loath as he was to do so, Cave squinted harder into the crowd, trying to distinguish Evelyn's face from amongst the sea of identical features that marched on by him, one after another, citizens as carbon copies of each other, the same dark clothing, the same respectable haircuts, expressions of benign thoughtlessness on their faces, skin colours melding together so that one was indistinguishable from another and men and women likewise could not be told apart but instead walked past, little packets of citizen criteria rolled out and precision cut so that they looked like things off a factory assembly line.

The minutes passed. Cave anxiously checked his watch. The steady torrent of commuting bodies in front of him was thinning out in places now so that he was passed by almost distinct groups, some still tightly packed, others much more rarefied, rather than one continuous gush. They were, he thought to himself, rather like the peaks and troughs of a series of waves, the interference pattern in light projections, each individual just a little photon swerving its way forever onwards, unchanging.

And then he saw her, at last, step from the doors of the education centre. In her distinctive long white coat she looked like a speck of foam cresting along the crowd. She was heading towards the road up and down which the security van was still proceeding, quite oblivious to the danger. Cave slipped immediately into the throng of people and followed her as best he could. She was on the other side of the road and although there were fewer people now, the pavements were still thick with bodies and his view was often disrupted. Using glimpses of the swishing white coat and guessing her speed, Cave tracked Evelyn in nervous spurts down the road, scanning frantically back and forth for a break in the traffic that would allow him to cross.

The truck full of waste from the city's document collection bins broke his visual contact with her for nearly a half a minute. It stopped at last at a red light, the traffic signal enabling Cave to dart across the road. Looking to the next street he saw the security van make its way once more along its length. There was little doubt to his mind that it was now scouring the crowd for the sight of one or the other of them. Cave felt his heart quickening as he sought for a glance of Evelyn. She was not where he thought she might be and he cursed under his breath through a mouth dry with rising panic. Perhaps he had hurried too quickly and she might still be behind him but as he whirled round, buffeting those citizens to either side and causing the ones behind to come to an abrupt halt before they parted round him like water flowing past an obstruction, he could not see any sign her in the oncoming crowd. He spun back and forced his way forwards, hoping desperately that he might still find and reach her before she presented herself unwittingly to the alert eyes of the security van.

A single dollop and thick cold rain fell from the sky and landed on Cave's forehead. It rolled smoothly down his nose, clung for a moment to the tip and then continued its downward journey to the paving slabs below where it broke into a miniature crown that settled straightaway into a dark stain on the concrete. Cave looked up in surprise, continuing to push his way onwards at the same time. Overhead a dark grey cloud had crept into the previously clear sky and it was from this, presumably, that the raindrop had descended.

He struggled a further six feet forwards as more raindrops, wet and heavy like the first, began to fall more rapidly from the sky. In unison the entire mass of people seemed to stop, reach for an umbrella – from their bags, their pockets, crooked under their arm, used like a walking stick – unfurl it and extend it shield-like to the sky. In this momentary calm Cave caught sight of Evelyn just a few steps ahead of him, a white-clad figure fumbling with a large black umbrella.

With his right hand he took a firm hold of her left elbow. At his touch he felt her start and tense. She turned, ready to scream or strike, but paused in surprise somewhere between the two when she perceived Cave, wet and flushed, shaking his head vigorously and holding a finger to his lips. Unable to say anything anyway, Evelyn let herself be steered out into the next street, moving with the direction of the crowd under a massive black canopy that hid them from view.

Cave listened for a moment to the rain drumming on the taught material of the umbrella and hoped fervently that the sudden shower would continue for long enough to get the both of them somewhere safe and less exposed.

"We're in danger here," Cave whispered urgently as they hurried along with the quickened crowds, "we've got to get somewhere else."

He could see the alarm and fear in Evelyn's eyes as she turned her face to him.

"Why? What's happened?"

Cave shook his head. "Not now. I can't tell you now. We've got to get somewhere safe first and I'll tell you then."

Evelyn paused for a sudden moment, causing the umbrella-wielding mass directly behind them to collide into one another with a collective cry of protest. Then to Cave's relief she walked on again with her eyes still pinned wide open in fright but nodding her head in acquiescence to his strange demands. At the end of the road the stream of people split into two and they turned left with the larger flow, marching onwards beneath the slick grey tower that stood peering down into the crowd below.

"We should go to my apartment."

Cave shook his head. "We can't. It's not safe."

"Then where?" she demanded.

Cave thought for a moment. There was only one place he could think of in all the city that could possibly be considered safe, or temporarily safe at least, tucked away from the prying eyes of the security patrols. There was a manhole cover up ahead and he cursed silently within that he did not know how to reach the boy's den through the sewers themselves. They were five blocks or so away from the industrial district though. He looked to his right, down 202nd street. It was much less crowded down there, but it was the quickest way to go. Without hesitating he pulled Evelyn sharply out of the crush of bodies.

"Follow me. I know somewhere."

They hurried on, just the two of them now with the umbrella pulled down low so that they could barely see where they were going. Every now and then Cave would duck down and look out from under the brim to check their progress. Up ahead he could see the road off which ran the boy's alleyway. All around them high factory sides loomed like prison walls and the angry sky was as solid and impenetrable as a cell roof. At least the rain was still continuing to come down hard. Cave checked on their exact location again. Not far at all now, ten steps maybe, fifteen at most and they would surely be at the mouth of the alley. In a neighbouring street he could hear the predatory growl of the engine of a security van. He swallowed nervously, his dry mouth wet again from the rain. It must be close for him to hear it above the steady tattoo being beaten by the water above.

A beam of headlight appeared from around the corner as they reached the passage entrance. Without warning, Cave pushed them both inside, propelling them along and throwing them hard on the ground behind the line of large, rusting bins. A hot sharp pain surged through his body as he landed heavily on his injured side. Instinctively he pressed his hand down to the wound, drawing it back to see it stained with blood. He lay on the hard, unforgiving cobbles, pressed low to the ground as he stared out from under the bins. Four wheels rolled slowly along the road and then they were gone. They waited a minute, Evelyn crouched, pressed against the wall with the umbrella held in trembling hands low over her head; Cave exposed to the rain that he hardly noticed, trying his best to stem the blood from his side and regain control of his heart that was beating like a drill through his chest on the cobblestones so that he was sure if the boy was in the space below he would surely hear the reverberations echoing through the dank ceiling and walls. When he was satisfied that the vehicle had gone and was not returning, he stood, wincing, and as Evelyn watched him he wrestled the iron cover from the manhole and ushered her down into the gloom of the sewers.

As soon as they were both below ground and the cover firmly in place once more, the eerie metallic light that had filtered down through the drain lattices from the leaden sky changed to a softer gold as shafts of sun broke through the thick cloud. Overhead, the rain ceased its hammering and the two of them paused, listening for a moment to the sudden, rich silence.

Holding his side, Cave carefully made his way over to the soiled mattress in the middle of floor and lay down on it with a grunt of disguised pain. Evelyn looked about herself, less affected by the grime of the place than bewildered as to where exactly they were. Testing a pile of bricks for cleanliness and stability, she sat down on them and faced the prone figure of Lazarus Cave.

"Where are we, Larry? Why are we here? Why can't I go to my flat?" Her voice built up as the questions came from her lips. "For goodness sake, what has happened?" And then quieter, "tell me, Larry, please. Tell me what's going on."

"It's my fault. I'm sorry, Evelyn. I'm sorry. At the archives. We have all the records of the city. All of them. All those that matter anyway. They know I've been finding out details about you. You'll be under suspicion too. Everyone in the entire council complex has been so paranoid since the storm, they started doing these more detailed reviews. I only just got out in time, and then came to find you as soon as I could. They've done my apartment over already." Cave paused. "They've got the letters." He gritted his teeth together in pain as he said 'letters'. "I'm sorry, Evelyn. I'm sorry."

He lay back, breathing deeply, a clammy sweat beading on his forehead. Nausea washed over his body and he swallowed to keep himself from throwing up.

Evelyn leaned forwards and Cave could feel her warm breath on his stubbled cheek as she spoke. "Don't be sorry." She laid a hand on his forehead and withdrew it in surprise at the feverish sweat. "Are you hurt?"

Cave shook his head weakly. "It's not serious."

"Let me see."

Slowly he withdrew his hand from his side. The shirt was matted and filthy with blood and the filth from the mattress. Evelyn peeled it from his side and stared in shock at the wound. "Oh shit...how did you do that?"

"It happened earlier. I reopened it I think when we hit those cobbles."

Without saying anything Evelyn stripped off her trench coat and manoeuvred it under Cave's prostrate body. Taking each loose arm of the coat, she pulled it tight against his side and knotted it firmly to press the gash closed. Once done, she stepped back. A crimson bloom began to spread across the white fabric, a mark of ugly beauty that made her think at once of love and death.

"How's that?"

Cave nodded. "Thanks."

She listened a moment to his deep, painful breathing. "You need to wash that. Where are we anyway?" She indicated towards the mattress. "Who lives here?"

Cave tilted his head round in surprise that she had not guessed. "The boy."

At this Evelyn froze. She checked her watch. "Oh no! No, no. I was meant to meet him today outside my flat. Ten minutes ago. If it's being watched they'll get him. I've got to get to him."

Cave too started in alarm. "If they have him, we're not safe."

He tried to rise but groaned in discomfort and collapsed back to the mattress. The bloom expanded a little, grew a little darker.

As he recovered his breathing, Evelyn was already climbing the ladder to the covered exit. "I'll go. You stay still."

Cave nodded weakly. "Be quick. Don't try and get into your flat, whatever you do."

The manhole cover fell back into place with an echoing thud. The light through a drain grille was broken as Evelyn walked across it. Cave drew in a pained breath, rolled stiffly to his good side and puked onto the grimy, foetid floor of the sewer hideout.
Somewhere in the limitless city a child dreams of a never-ending garden. There is a cloudless sky. She has never seen a sky so empty before. In the city, plumes of smoke are ever-present. Underfoot the grass is crisp with dew and cold on her feet. She is happy and she skips across the green expanse. Overhead the sun shines, warming the ground and evaporating the dewdrops.

The dream is soundless. She tries to laugh and laughter fills the air. She raises a finger to her lips and shushes and the laughter subsides. She has never heard a world so silent before but now as she listens she discovers that it is not silent, that it has its own noises distinct from those stirred by the permanent activity of the city.

In the dormitory of the education centre she rolls in her bed. Other children shift and stir. The matron appears silhouetted at the doorway, checking on the sleeping children. Through a gap between the blind and the base of the window she can see the orange glow of a furnace in one of the towers. All is peaceful in the dormitory and she moves on to check the next one.

*

It had stopped raining. Aside from the wetness on the ground and the gutters heavy with water and debris it may never have done so. The late afternoon sun sat low in the sky. As Evelyn proceeded cautiously through the streets of the city, the buildings threw out chasing shadows that grew ever longer the closer she got to their ends. All about her hundreds of commuters still streamed in the opposite direction, like rats fleeing. The air seemed to thicken into a golden haze up near the tops of the buildings where the smog from the exhaust fumes of cars gathered together and spread out slowly blanket-like across the city until even those people sitting in the green gardens would look up at a sky that seemed softer than usual and the burning smudge of a sun printed upon it and couples would draw closer, dog owners would stroke their pets and even strangers passing would catch each other's eyes, smile, nod and exchange pleasant remarks on the beauty of the sinking sun.

She approached the road with her apartment block on from the opposite way to normal, taking care to avoid 11th street which she knew would be under heavy observation by the security vans monitoring Cave's flat. Instead, she kept to as many main roads as possible, seeking anonymity in the mass of suit-clad bodies. Although the sun was warm on her face, she wished that it was still raining so that she could have again raised the shielding umbrella above her head.

It did not take her long to reach the top end of 14th street. Evelyn edged along a row of trees that kept her largely hidden. As she passed from one to another, slinking low behind a line of parked cars, she caught broken views of the security van sitting patiently by the side of the road opposite the green space that separated her building from Cave's.

About thirty feet from the van she paused. The line of trees had come to an end. Another one started again not far away, only ten feet or so, but she did not dare to attempt to cross the gap. Checking to make sure that no one was approaching from either end of the road, she withdrew back into a narrow alley between two buildings. From there she could see both the security van and along the pavement towards the entrance to the flats.

Time passed. There was no sign of the boy. Evelyn checked her watch but the face had struck on something without her noticing and cracked and the hands below buckled and unmoving. Footsteps coming down the street from the end she had entered by made her freeze. Her vantage point was hidden from the security van but heavily exposed to anybody walking down the pavement. The rhythmic padding froze also. Evelyn held her breath but the sudden silence held, stretching itself second by second, a minute point spreading itself outwards moving towards breaking point.

It was Evelyn who snapped under the pressure. Inhaling loudly, she loosened her muscles and spun round to look back up the street. Standing glued to the middle of the pavement was the boy, his legs caught in mid-stride, his eyes transfixed on a gap in the cars through which the security van could be seen.

She hissed loudly, hoping to attract his attention. On the second hiss, he looked straight at her and Evelyn beckoned him into the alleyway. He followed her down the length of the passage until they were no longer as conspicuous to any passing pedestrians. She put her hands on his shoulders and patted his arms, as if making sure that it was indeed the right boy, that he was real and really there.

"Did anybody in that van see you?"

The boy shook his head and although fear ran in his eyes and his face was pale and frightened she could see too that he was telling the truth.

Overhead the sun sank a little further and the alley grew a little dimmer. Evelyn knew that now she had the boy safely they should get back to Cave. But when she thought of Cave she saw him lying in the squalor of the sewer den with the wound to his side and she knew that without treatment and in such surroundings preventing infection would be almost impossible. The boy stood unflinching under her grasp as her mind raced, his face turned up in askance, patiently awaiting whatever it was the she was going to direct them to do.

There was antiseptic and bandages inside the flat. There was food too and blankets, a torch with batteries. Getting inside was an impossible task though. The entrance was under the watchful eyes of the security van. Like Cave's building, hers had a zigzag iron fire escape too but there was no way she could climb to reach its lowest point, certainly without attracting attention.

A car swished by fast, stirring a little dust eddy at the far end of the alleyway in the slowly dying sun.

Manhole cover. Evelyn thought of Cave lying down in the sewers, she thought of what he had told her about the boy's method of travelling through the sewer pipes. There was a manhole cover outside of a ground-floor window in a side of the apartment building screened by thick bushes. She thought hard. What lay behind it? A hallway, perhaps. She couldn't be sure. Maybe it simply led into someone's flat. Probably it would be locked. But it was there, and the manhole cover was there. And there was no other option.

The boy was still looking up, patiently, into Evelyn's face as she turned down to him. Air breathed slowly in and out and she braced her arms on his shoulders, steadying herself on his small, slight frame.

"Can you take me into the sewers? There's an exit the other side of the building I live it. If we can get there we can get food, medicine. Do you know it? Can you take me there?"

The boy nodded.

Evelyn stared at him for a moment and then she smiled, laughed a little, squeezed his shoulders with her hands.

"I can't lift it."

The boy was pointing. She followed his finger down and saw the rusty iron disc that was standing on. Quickly she moved off it, stepping smartly to one side. The boy dug up the corroded ring and pulled, straining with his knees, his back muscles. Evelyn could see his child arms stretched out like tiny cords. He stepped back shaking his head. "I can't lift it."

Evelyn stepped forwards. She did what the boy had done, prising up the rough hoop, tucking her fingers around it as best she could, working her feet into a solid base, tensing her muscles, ready to pull.

At her first effort the cover did not move. She tried again. A third time. The stiffness gave a little, shifted a fraction as rust scraped past the debris caught in the gap between metal and metal.

She paused, listening to see if the grinding sound of the cover as it had risen and sighed back down had carried out of the alleyway.

The noise of a motor. Another car zipped down the road, its headlights standing out in the greying remnants of the day, fast disappearing. Then there was a deeper sound. Another motor, a diesel, a truck, approaching. It grew steadily louder and Evelyn waited in her braced position over the manhole cover. She heard it slow, whine and then grunt as the truck turned into the road. As the noise rebuilt, decibel laid on decibel, she heaved with everything she had. With an angry grinding and then a reverberating thump the manhole cover gave up its position of guard over the entrance to the sewers.

Then suddenly the diesel engine shifted quickly back down and stilled to a predatory growl, stationary. Evelyn looked back over her shoulder. At the end of the alleyway the truck had stopped, the cab level with the entrance. Although the dusk was settling in rapidly, she and the boy were not yet lost to the shadows. Their bodies, dark and substantial gave would give away their presence should the driver look to his left. Slowly she reached out, still in a bent over position, and groped for the boy, pulling him quietly to her. Unresisting, he stepped backwards into her nervous hold, his own eyes transfixed on the hulking side of the cab of the fuel truck that waited for an unknown reason little more than twenty feet from where they crouched.

And then there was the sound of another engine, a car, slowing then proceeding slowly and then speeding up again. As the smaller motor receded, gears shifted within the body of the truck, diesel ran through the engine and with an inexorable slowness it moved off, dragging its great fuel-laden trailer behind it. Evelyn wiped a film of panicked sweat from her brow. The whole process had lasted thirty seconds at the most. It had felt like an entire history played out, a infinite series of possibilities, each cut off and extinguished now except for the one that left Evelyn and the boy holding each other for reassurance in the alleyway, frightened, relieved, there and unseen.

*

In the cramped dark of the sewers, the boy led and Evelyn followed. In her hand she the loose end of her belt, the other end of which was looped around the boy's wrist. Instinctively, without sight or sound or touch he moved onwards, deftly taking corners that she did not even know existed until she had followed him round them. Less than five minutes later the boy came to an abrupt halt so that Evelyn nearly bumped into the back of him, stopping just in time in response to the sudden cessation of sloshing footsteps in the thin trickle of water that lay in the curved base of the pipe. Her eyes adjusted to the almost-black until she could make out the solid mass of the boy. It was only after a moment that she realised that the faint light needed for even this detection was emanating from a pale halo above her head. The boy spoke briefly. "We're here."

Stretching her arms above her head, Evelyn reached up and pushed. This time the manhole cover moved easily, silently. She worked it to one side and let it drop into the muffling grass. Cool evening air tumbled slowly in, dispelling the closeness of the sewer's atmosphere. Cautiously Evelyn hoisted herself up and poked her head above ground. A sigh of relief. As she had hoped they were away from the side of the building she knew to be under observation and well shielded by two large, dense bushes on the side that was open to the road.

Once they were both out of the sewer, they lay on the grass for a few moments and then Evelyn stood and walked over to the window. Pressing her face up close she looked hard through the hindering reflections of the darkened glass, managing to discern behind the panes a long hallway, a flight of stairs, the communal walls in their dull beige paint that was deathly and grey in the dim light. No movement could be seen.

With the palms of her hands she rattled the lower half of the window in its casing. To her surprise it juddered more than expected. Squinting through the window again she saw that the catch was not properly fastened. Adjusting her grip so that it was as firm as possible, Evelyn levered the window upwards, pushing one corner then another, keeping an eye on the gap at the base as it grew by tiny increments.

The boy joined at her side. He too found a grip on the window frame and pushed upwards, trying to force the loose lock. Half a finger's width the gap was now and the two of them strained, paused and then tried to shoot the window upwards with a sharp jolt. Bit by bit they freed it, bit by bit and then the gap at the bottom widened sufficiently for Evelyn to curl her fingers underneath the frame and inject the full strength of her shoulders into the effort.

With a snap that shot down the empty hallway the window catch popped free and now the frame could be slid easily upwards, opening up an entrance in the side of the building through which Evelyn climbed and then lifted the boy who half stepped over the sill and half allowed himself to be carried over.

Together they stood in the darkening hallway and then moved stealthily forwards with softened footsteps. Shadows flicked across the wall, silhouettes in a cave and Evelyn and the boy trod carefully onwards, mounting the stairs, moving as quickly and as quietly as they could. Noises seeped through the blank wooden doors to the other flats in the building, clattering pans, the sounds of chatter muffled by the city, the occasional shrill peal of a pager. Evelyn and the boy were noiseless as they ascended, noiseless and apart from the early evening life of the building. Through the windows Evelyn could see a tower, growing watchful, foreboding as the darkness encroached.

They reached tenth floor at last and Evelyn could feel the muscles in her legs, tense and sore from the strain of producing silent footsteps. The boy stood behind her and although he was silent also, his thin chest rose and fell with the exertion of the climb. Now she opened the door, they both slipped in and softly she pushed it to behind her, the gentle click of the catch popping in the stillness.

On the wall by the door were two light switches. She saw the boy snaking his hand towards them and she hissed, low and sharp and shook her head. The boy understood and withdrew his hand.

There were rucksacks in the bedroom, two of them. Evelyn fetched them and pattered smartly through the half-light of the flat, picking out of the greyness a torch and batteries, candles, matches, warm jumpers. She looked longingly on the plush quilt that lay across her bed and then turned away, focussed on what they could actually carry.

The boy meandered through the small flat, looking in awe upon the domesticated interior. He picked things up and them down again. Sometimes he picked up two or three things at once and then replaced them exactly where he had found them with a kind of reverence. He wandered from room to room and seemed to enjoy the sense of touching everything.

From the kitchen Evelyn seized tins of food and filled empty bottles with water. The rucksacks were beginning to grow heavy and she wondered if the boy would be able to manage one, or if she would be able to cope with two. She placed peaches and beans, hotdogs and ravioli inside the bag in near identical tins. She added a tin opener and then after a pause three spoons. She tested the weight of the bags and decided against adding bowls to the load.

Outside it grew subtly darker and she moved through to the bathroom to add medical supplies to treat Cave's wound. In the bedroom she could hear the sounds of the boy lifting and replacing objects on her dressing table, examining in turn hairbrushes and makeup, perfume, jewellery.

The medicine cabinet was a small, white unit mounted on the wall. Evelyn opened the double doors and tipped two packs of sticking plasters into one of the rucksacks, a roll of bandage, scissors, tape, a bottle of antiseptic. She picked up a pack of painkillers and added them also, then shut the doors and turned to survey the bathroom, its clean white tiles, white enamel sink and bath, the white shower head. She surveyed them all, the white towels hanging on a white radiator, everything clinically ordered and precise, ghostly almost in the last of the dying light.

And then she froze. Her fist instinctively gripped down tight on the handle of the rucksack, flushing the blood from her knuckles. Her eyes transfixed on the toilet where it sat, expressionless but with its lid raised where an unknown man had left it, she backed out of the bathroom. Once her foot met the carpet in the hallway outside she tore away from the scene and cast frantically about for the boy. Like a swimmer caught beneath a deafening wave, silence washed over her from all sides.

She dashed from the lounge to the kitchen, back into the hallway. As she passed the open door of the bathroom again she fought within herself to control her breathing, to dampen the surging panic that was fogging her mind and body.

She found the boy in the bedroom. He was standing stock still before the full length mirror that stood in the corner of the room, his back to the door. He didn't see her as she appeared in the doorframe and then for a moment Evelyn forgot the urgency of the moment and stopped to stare at the boy. The early evening coloured the room in greys and the reflection cast by the mirror of the boy standing, his face caught somewhere between expressionless and fright, something disturbingly embryonic, was eerie to see. The boy's reflected eyes moved almost imperceptible upwards and Evelyn knew that she had been spotted, although he did not turn to her.

It was her who broke the distant silence first. "Come along. We have to go."

"That's not me." The boy was pointing at his reflection, which in turn pointed directly back at him, mouthed the same words.

"What do you mean?"

The boy shook his head. The reflection shook its head.

"Of course that's you. Come on now."

Reluctantly the boy stepped away from the mirror and took the hand that Evelyn proffered to him. As they stepped from the bedroom he twisted his neck round to steal one last look at the mirror. Shadows played across its glass, although whether they were shadows on the glass or reflected beneath it he couldn't tell. Glad of the warmth of Evelyn's hand they hurried on, shouldering rucksacks and quietly letting themselves out via the front door.

*

At last they re-entered the sewer hideout in which Cave lay hidden. By the light of the torch Evelyn laid candles out in a circle and lit them wick by wick until a ring of jittering light filled the dark emptiness of the sewer.

Lazarus Cave lay on his side, a dark bulk with the cream coat still pressed tightly against his side. A sheen of cold sweat lay across his forehead. The dancing light of the candles edged its way into his consciousness and he struggled to roll over, wincing as his side shifted and blinking his eyes until the blurs before him gradually lost their fuzziness and became distinct bodies of Evelyn and the boy.

Evelyn moved out of his field of vision and the boy sat down between two of the candles, his knees drawn up to his chest, watching him. From behind him he heard the sounds of Evelyn rummaging through something and then he heard her footsteps on the damp stone floor and felt her hand slide underneath his head as she raised it upwards to where she held a bottle of water with the other hand.

Cave stretched his mouth forwards and let her pour cool water onto his dry lips. He drank slowly but deeply, feeling the liquid course through his body, flushing out the druggy residues of sleep and the weakness that his wound caused. Refreshed he tilted his head back and saw Evelyn's face looking down at his own, concerned.

"Thanks."

She smiled. "Lay still, I'm going to take a look at your side."

Cave did as he was told. Evelyn moved down his body until she reached the knotted arms of the overcoat. With difficulty she pulled and tugged at it with her fingers, unable to properly see the stiff loops in the candlelight. When it was undone at last, she peeled the coat slowly back. A low moan escaped Cave's lips as it drew back from the direct contact it had made with his bloody side.

Evelyn pulled the torch from her back pocket and shone it on the cut. It displayed back a series of angry colours, purples, reds so dark in places that they were nearly black and elsewhere dead already and white and ghostly against the living blood.

"How does it feel?"

Cave paused while he tried to send instructions to the nerves to transmit specific information back to his brain. "Sore. Very sore."

"It looks nasty. But it's not infected and it's not so deep it won't close by itself. I'm going to put some antiseptic on it and bandage it for you. It's going to sting but it will be okay. You'll heal up good. You've lost a lot of blood but not too much. You'll heal okay."

The burning pain of the antiseptic shocked him even though he was braced and ready for it. As it splashed down over his side it penetrated the wound, trailing with a tail of fire that seemed to sear his flesh. For a moment Cave thought he was about to pass out and then came the cooling water washing the wound clean, diluting the antiseptic, extinguishing the roaring flames of the fire until just the embers remained, a cleansing burning that drove the unclean from his body and purified him again. With the scissors Evelyn snipped away the dead skin from around the gash and then she cut a long length of bandage, dabbed it with fresh antiseptic and with difficulty wrapped it around Cave's abdomen, drawing it in tight against his side so that it kept both sides of the opening closed over. Once done she tied off the ends and stuck it down as securely as possible with tape.

Cave swallowed two painkilling tablets and sighed deeply. Evelyn sat back. The boy had fallen asleep where he sat between the candles, his head slumped down between his knees. For a while Cave and Evelyn slept too.

When Lazarus Cave awoke a few hours later the candles had burned down some considerable way. They sat now in slowly oozing pools of wax which were spreading themselves across the ground. He looked at the candles and tried to estimate for how long he had slept. Three hours, perhaps four. He searched for the glint of the night stars shining through the drainage grill set into the sewer's ceiling. His eyes roved through the shifting dark. There they were at last, a little slatted rectangle, darker than the rest of the ceiling and showing through the rungs cold pinpricks of light. It must have been around midnight.

By candlelight he peered down at the bandage, lifting the tattered shirt to reveal its clean whiteness. The centre was a darkened though where blood had soaked through, but there was not as much before and the pain had diminished to a duller throb, less keen than previously. In the dark he fumbled for a water bottle and the painkillers. He swallowed to of them and washed them down with a swig of water.

Now he was hungry. Tentatively he tested the range of his movement, stretching his body before levering himself stiffly upwards. He was sore and when he walked each step jolted uncomfortably, but bearably.

Evelyn had piled the food supplies over to the side, neat towers of cans arranged according to their contents. Cave walked slowly over to them. Bending down was difficult. It pulled at the muscles in his side and the mouth of the wound yelled at him as he pulled on it with the movement. He grunted with the effort and the discomfort, clasped the round metallic top of a can and stood upright again. He looked at the can, raising it close to his eyes to decipher the unassuming packaging in the fragments of flickering light from the candles. Beans. He smiled. Beans were good.

Seated on the hard ground he worked at the top of the can with the opener until the lid was prised off and laid carefully to one side. Cave pulled a candle close to him and held the can over the weak flame for several minutes until he burnt his fingers. He stuck an unburnt finger into the mass of beans to test for temperature. They were stone cold to the core.

Cave frowned a put the beans down by the candle. Now he was aware of the dull calling of his bladder. He groaned and cursed the body that seemed to be at loggerheads with itself as he hauled himself back upright, ignoring the protestations from his side.

The passages leading off from the main chamber were pitch black. Through the intermittent drain grilles stars twinkled like cold diamonds in the chill night sky. Cave stumbled a little as he made his way down one, his feet slipping on the damp bricks underfoot. When he judged he was far enough down he unzipped his trousers and let his muscles relax as he urinated into the empty darkness. For a while all he could hear was the splattering of his piss on the sewer's walls and the acrid smell blent into the musty sewer air.

When he was done he turned to head back up the tunnel but both ways he looked a wall of blackness stared impassively back at him. Cave spun slowly around, unsure of which way he had come. He took a few steps in one direction and then stopped, turned and came back the other way. Three steps and then stopped again. He could feel his pulse quickening and breathed deeply to suppress the alarm he felt within. A thin, faint scraping noise of metal on stone came from behind him. Cave turned again and followed it, ears strained for more although nothing was forthcoming.

The first subtle shadow on the wall, an almost imperceptible fluttering of a grey amongst the black was as welcome and as promising as the dawn sun coming over the horizon. The ache in his side subsided as he strode quicker towards it, running almost as he burst back into the main chamber.

On the mattress the boy was sitting and nearby Evelyn was slowly stirring to wakefulness. Cave looked on the foetid domesticity of the scene and smiled. The blood on the bandage darkened a little but did not grow any larger.

Together they sat and ate the cold beans, passing the can and spoon between them. Time ticked away, seconds synchronising themselves with the drip, drip, drip of water somewhere close by, unseen. The boy shivered and Evelyn pulled him close, wrapping her arm around his shoulders. He leant his body into hers.

"He's cold. We need to do something to keep him warm."

Cave looked at her with feeling in his eyes. "We'll think of something. Here," he rose and fetched the bloodied coat, "wrap this around him."

Evelyn did so, ignoring the cold that she felt herself in the damp air.

Time dripped away until Cave was running the spoon around the empty base of the can of beans collecting the last residues of the tomato sauce. He laid the can to one side and looked down at Evelyn. "Are you still hungry?"

Evelyn glanced at the still shape of the boy nestled against her side and nodded without looking at Cave. "We've got to do something. We can't just sit here."

"We're thinking."

Now she looked at him. In her eyes Cave saw the touch of fear and then something else, deeper, hidden in the flecks of gold that shot through her irises with an iridescence that shone even in the gloomy candlelight. Into her eyes he looked, the wrinkles of her faced dulled with the perspiration of the city. Evelyn nodded and echoed his words. "We're thinking."

"What colour is the city?"

Evelyn shrugged. "All colours. Red cars, yellow ones. The white walls of the council. The gardens are green. Orange fire in the towers. I've only seen an exposed furnace once, burning orange and yellow."

"Then why can I only think of grey? When I try and imagine what it's like outside, I get grey. Every time. For everything. Grey buildings. Grey roads, grey skies, grey gardens. Not green anymore. Grey."

"The smoke from the towers is grey."

Cave nodded. "The smoke. Right. It seems to get everywhere. But down here there's grey and," he pointed at the stain on his bandage, "red. Or brown now." He rolled up his trousers to reveal his socks and held them close to the dancing flame of a candle. "And green. Grey trees outside but down here my socks are green."

He laughed and reached for a can of peaches. He opened them and spooned a half peach into his mouth, syrup running from one corner and down his bristled chin. He passed the can to his right. Evelyn took it, biting her peach in half and then taking the other half neatly drawing it in and licking her lips with a pink tongue. The boy stirred when the can was passed his way, drawing it back into his body and eating the peaches, two, three halves, directly with his hands. The can made its way back down the little line and they ate the yellow peaches in silence.

Then they slept again.

Cave awoke with the first exploratory fingers of light making their way down through the drain lattices. In the new day he saw Evelyn already sitting upright. The boy was curled asleep with his head in her lap. In the ceiling the loose rim of the manhole cover where it didn't fit flush to the edges was lit up by the morning sun like a halo.

Evelyn spoke first. "What shall we do?"

Cave propped himself up on his elbow. He winced and shook his head. "I don't know."

Evelyn looked down at the boy's head in her lap. The expression on her face was one of a curiosity as if she hadn't noticed it lying there. "We're only really free when we're asleep."

"Not even then. Not really. Our dreams aren't free."

"Are we ever free then?"

"Last night I dreamt of a flower. Just one. And it was beautiful. The most amazing flower you've ever seen. It was in a garden and in the whole garden there was just one flower, this red bloom against all these shades of green. But the more separate it looks, the more you realise it's inseparable from the plant, from those roots that live in the soil. So I look down at the roots and there's some bug, something like an overly-large woodlouse but disgusting laying eggs into a cavity it's made in the bottom of the flower's stem." Cave glanced around at Evelyn and then looked down self-consciously. "Do you think it meant anything?"

Surreptitiously he looked back up at her. She was shaking her head. "Dreams don't mean anything. Even when things seem like they should do, they never do. There's nothing for them to mean. This city and everything in it is just an eternal moment. Nothing can possibly mean anything."

"What do you think we should do?"

Evelyn stroked the boy's head. "Him. He's free. Really free. So free. The way he can move around without any light. You know, at my flat he just looked in the mirror at his reflection and said, 'that's not me'. What do you think he meant?"

She didn't look at Cave and he didn't look at her. He shrugged his shoulders. "We can't go back outside."

"You know, I don't even know if anything exists outside of the city – even if there is an outside."

"We can't stay down here."

"Why not? He can."

"He's different from us though. He's off-record. There's no one always looking over his shoulder, making sure he hands his history in every day to have it burnt."

Evelyn sat still and thought for a long while about what Cave had said. She kept her eyes fixed sadly, fondly on the face of the sleeping child. "I don't even have a picture of him."

A heavy silent note of expectation grew in the confined space of the sewers and Lazarus Cave could feel it as it surrounded them.

Evelyn spoke again. "Maybe we should make it so we can have our own histories."

Now she looked up and Cave was staring back her already, in love with the impossibility of the thought. Their eyes met and they held each other's gaze. Neither uttered a word, afraid that the spell might break. Evelyn bit her lip, worried the soft flesh until she could no longer hold back the quiet question.

"If the towers came down...what do you think would happen?"

Cave knew the answer instinctively. "The council would fall...the city – the citizens – would be free. All of them. Like him."

The talking woke the boy. He opened his eyes and twisted slightly in Evelyn's lap. She stoked his hair and asked him if he was hungry. Cave eased himself upright and fetched a tin of ravioli and one of fruit cocktail. He opened them and handed them to Evelyn. She took them and raised the boy into a sitting position, resting him against a wall so that he could eat. Then she stood up herself and moved to stand next to Cave.

"Larry," she paused. Breathed. "Do you think he could be?"

Cave shook his head. "It's impossible you realise."

Evelyn nodded.

*

The day passed slowly. They spoke little to each other, engrossed in their attempts to come up with something to do, afraid that if they admitted to each other that they were thinking about one thing and one thing only then the structure and its beauty would come tumbling down like a sculpture of whispers caught by the wind and lie incomplete and broken on the sewer floor.

Only once was it alluded to by Cave as he paced the perimeter of the chamber. "We'd need explosives, you know. And even if we had them we could only have one target." And then he kept striding.

In the late afternoon Cave sat on the filthy mattress whilst the boy dozed nearby. Evelyn was standing beneath a drain, head tilted back, looking up at the grey clouds through bars. He sat on the mattress and looked around him, at the boy and Evelyn, at the small stack of cans that was smaller now already than when Evelyn and the boy had brought them, at the waxy stubs of candles and the limited supply of fresh ones. They did not have long, he knew, and they would be being looked for, relentlessly above ground. It was only a matter of time before someone thought to check beneath the city.

He sat and he thought and only Evelyn moved occasionally to shake the crick from her neck as she watched the outside, a prisoner everywhere.

"It has to be the one in the central complex."

The words seemed to take their time to travel through the thick air of the sewer, to reach Evelyn's ears and impart their meaning. Slowly she turned to face him. The boy lay unmoving but awake with his eyes open. Cave continued. "It's the only one that's always lit."

"It's impossible to get to. It's inside the council compound for goodness sake!"

Cave looked at her steadily. "If the wind can break through those walls, we sure as anything can."

"That's suicide. We'll never get close."

Cave nodded in agreement. "It's the only one that brought down by itself will have the impact we want."

Evelyn walked over to the pile of tins and selected three. The reserves dwindled a little further; there were eight cans left now.

"One tower?"

Cave nodded. She removed the lids from the tins and handed rice pudding to Cave and the boy, keeping one for herself.

"Are you sure?"

Cave nodded again. "Yes."

Steadily they ate the rice pudding. When the boy had finished his he got up and approached Evelyn until he was standing directly before her. She looked down at him and for a second or two it was as if he was struggling with something. His thin high voice when it came filled the room. "Fuel."

Cave ate from his tin, not tasting the sweet rice as it passed over his tongue and down his throat. Evelyn was knelt in front of the boy and between them passed a low conversation that he could not hear. At last Evelyn raised herself to one knee and looked over at him. She indicated the boy and pulled him close into a hug. She spoke simply, with a trembling calmness that belied her fear and excitement. "He knows what route the fuel trucks take."
Daylight rises swiftly outside. First it lights up the zoo, filtering down through the tropical vegetation and the stiff electrified wire until it wakes the animals sleeping below, or sends the nocturnal ones to bed. Birdcalls ring across the flat tableau of the hill in the quickening dawn.

Next it strikes the tall tips of the towers, turning the concrete a burning red so that it looks like they were standing on end, burning at the top and belching the ashes of history back down into the fabric of the city.

As the sun rises higher it catches the roofs of buildings and then flows down into the streets and finally down into the folds and corners of the city, down dark alleyways, under thick brush in the gardens, trickling along the gutters and down through the drains into the sewers.

Light like thick water. The city bathes in light.

The towers bathe in light, and the buildings, and the streets. Sunlight unbroken by the moving bodies of people on the ground. The sparkling river undisturbed by the cutting prows of boats. The open expanse of the sun-drenched marketplace. Across the city the only activity is the unceasing bustle from the central complex that shines hard and brilliant in the daylight, and the gentle purring of distant motors through the deserted roads as security vans patrol the barren streets and other council vehicles go about their essential duties.

*

Cave led Evelyn and the boy cautiously along the empty roads, creeping along by building walls as they sought to make themselves indistinguishable from the grey city itself. Cave's shirt billowed around his shoulders in a fresh breeze and the loose ends of a fresh white bandage flapped against his good side. On his back he carried the blue rucksack that Evelyn had brought back from her flat. It was heavy.

They walked past an electronics shop, information screens piled high in the display window. All relayed the same message, a kind of hypnotic flickering grid. Lazarus Cave and Evelyn Green have gone missing. A council official, pretty and prim in a smart grey skirt and suit jacket informed the camera that officials believed an accident had befallen them somewhere. Subtitles scrolled across the bottom of the screens. Cave and Green watched transfixed, each holding a hand of the boy between them. The woman on the screen continued, ten, twenty, thirty times over. The same face and the same mouth speaking the same words. The council is, of course, terribly concerned for the welfare of its citizens. If any citizen has seen the missing couple, please inform the authorities immediately.

And then back to the beginning, a snare-like loop and only the tugging of the boy could drag them away from the horror of it.

They walked on a little further. The boy led them now. After another four blocks they stopped. Cave looked around them. They were in a narrow road. On this side was a blind corner. He looked down at the boy who nodded.

Breaking away from the cover of the buildings, Cave darted out over the road, stooping low. On the opposite side he hid himself behind a line of parked cars so that he couldn't be seen from the road. There he crouched.

Evelyn and the boy pressed themselves back against the façade of the building, hidden from anything approaching the corner.

Cave eased the rucksack from his shoulders, placed it by his side and unzipped it. Inside were three bricks. He took one out, hefting it in his hand and closed his fingers around its abrasive edges.

Motionless, hidden, they waited for the throaty rumble of a fuel truck.

The noiselessness of the city spread through its streets, carrying bird calls, running water across the vacuumous spaces where citizens would normally have been. Somewhere in the distance the faint hum of an engine drew closer. Cave's throat tightened. And then it grew dry. The engine was too high-pitched to be a heavy diesel of a truck. The light whine of a security van patrolling the nearby streets moved up and down as it zigzagged closer. They held their breaths, the boy too. They were hidden from anybody approaching the street from the side but painfully exposed to a van patrolling down the full length. The sound of the engine drew closer and then when it seemed as though it must surely be upon them, it peaked and began to fade, stretching away to the north until it dwindled and died completely.

Again silence settled back over the city. The wind had withdrawn. Evelyn looked at the boy as if for confirmation. He nodded at her and smiled, a timid childish smile that showed his teeth, still white against the grime on his face.

By the time they heard the approaching fuel truck Cave's legs were starting to cramp. He shifted his weight uncomfortably between them, readying himself. Across the road Evelyn adjusted her pose. Her heart beat solidly inside her and she was glad of it. In the eerie stillness of the unspeakable order that shrouded the city it was an affirmation of her presence there where she no longer belonged. She breathed in deeply to calm her nerves. The jump in front of the fuel truck had to be timed to perfection. Fifteen tonnes of machine bearing down on her and she did not dare contemplate the consequences of misjudging it, of catching the force of one of the vicious wheels, of leaping too close and making contact with the harsh metal bumper. Of the truck driver not seeing her. Still the deep throb of the truck drew closer until the throb was a roar and she imagined she could feel its wild breath on her face.

All three of them heard it shift down the gears, the hiss of pneumatic brakes, the drop in pitch of the whirring mechanics as it slowed for the upcoming corner.

As the nose of the truck edged around the turn and began to gather speed once more Evelyn leapt, eyes closed, rolling and tumbling into the path of the truck until the sunlight was snapped away and darkness fell over her sensitive eyelids. With a screeching exhalation the truck stalled to a juddering halt. Evelyn barely heard the door of the cab open and the driver descend over the blood pounding through her ears. She barely heard the sound of quick footsteps lurching from the other side of the road, of the cry, of the thud of the brick, of the second thud, of the soft hard thud of the driver's body hitting the tarmac so close to her own. She opened her eyes and through the tears she barely saw the underside of the nose of the truck inches away from her face, she barely saw the daylight coming in under the truck in greater and greater chunks as the body of the driver was heaved out of the way.

Her head swam. She rolled over onto her front to make it easier to wriggle out from under the truck. On her stomach she slithered backwards. She felt her foot connect with something warm and unyielding and then she heard the body dragged a little further back still. Lying on her front under the truck she vomited and the tears fell silently from her eyes. With difficulty she wiped her eyes and mouth. With difficulty she struggled backwards. When she was out of the truck she raised herself bravely to her feet and took a deep breath. She did not shake and she did not cry anymore.

Cave was crouched over the fallen driver when she emerged. He stood up as she was pulling herself upright, sliding his arms into the short uniformed jacket as he did so, putting the peaked cap on his head, holding triumphantly in his right hand the keys to the truck.

"Do you think you can manage?" He did not indicate the body that lay to the side of them.

Evelyn nodded and immediately she beckoned the boy over. Together they worked the dull heavy body to the side of the road and rocked in back and forth in an attempt to wedge it out of sight under a parked car. Cave watched them.

"You did well."

Evelyn paused with what she was doing, the boy did too. "Do you think you can manage?" She inclined her head towards the truck.

Cave nodded. He walked to where they were, reached down just past them and swung the bag with the remaining bricks up onto his back. The bloodied brick with which he had struck the truck driver lay in the middle of the road but he pretended he had not seen it.

Awkwardly he placed his hands on Evelyn's shoulders. She reached up uncomfortable and held the side of his neck, cupped the bristled base of his jaw. He wanted to kiss her but instead drew her close and lay his chin in the crook of her neck and shoulder. She did the same to him and together they stood there, unwashed curves fitting into each other, arms clasped tight behind the other's back. The boy looked up at them wonderingly. Cave ruffled his hair. Evelyn bent back and touched his nose with hers. Their lips hovered close to one another but they did not touch. Cave's moved first. "Be safe," he said.

Evelyn did not look him in the eyes. "Take everything," she replied. "Leave nothing."

Lazarus Cave kissed her dirty forehead, the untidy hair that ran across it, stuck to the dirt in little straggles. "I'll see you on the other side of nothing."

Evelyn bowed her head. With her left arm she pulled the boy close. "We'll see you there."

*

Raised up high in the cab of the truck, Cave turned the key in the ignition. The engine heaved. The gears were stiff and he had to force the stick into place. Slowly he depressed the accelerator. A cloud of dirty exhaust coughed from the exhaust pipe and the truck moved ponderously forwards. Carefully Lazarus Cave moved the fuel truck down the length of the road, the watching shapes of Evelyn and the boy growing smaller in the large wing mirrors.

At the end of the road he paused. After a moment's hesitation he turned left on the main road that ran directly towards the central complex. He was exposed here, but he had no idea where the security vans were on the back roads. At least out on the main carriageway he could see around him. And he could get there faster.

It was slow to build up speed at first. The gears were even harder to change when moving than they had been stationary. Gradually the needle on the truck's speedometer began to move round faster. Cave took a deep breath and pushed the accelerator to the floor. Speed built until it was rushing past the cab in a blur, buffeting the top of his head where one window did not properly shut.

*

The truck ploughed through the barrier to the compound flanked by three security vans. Ahead and just to the left Cave could see the central tower. The thick metal doors to the incinerator at its base lay folded back on their hinges, the flames within awaiting the next batch from the endless cycle of documentation to be burnt.

Cave brought the front of the truck round so that it was pointing directly at the open mouth of the incinerator and surged onwards across the flat tarmac. Each frantic heartbeat lessened the distance. A greedy orange glow radiated from the tower's roots.

From the rucksack Cave eased the two bricks. Lifting his foot slightly from the gas he slowed down as much as he dared. Around the truck the three security vans still stuck fast, tracking the great beast, probing, searching for a way to stop it in its tracks.

They were no more than sixty feet from the gaping tower now. Withdrawing his foot completely from the pedal, Cave placed the two bricks in its place so that the accelerator was pressed flat to the floor. The truck gave a jump forwards, forcing itself in its reigns.

Lazarus Cave did not need to stop and think about what he did next: the manoeuvre, how he would do it, how he would fall had been turned through his mind repeatedly. As the fuel truck began to relentlessly gather pace, Cave wrenched open the door of the cab and threw himself towards the speeding tarmac below. The onrushing ground barely registered before it met his body, his feet making contact first and then his thighs and torso as the momentum spun him round and just out of reach of the wheels of one of the security vans. His elbow caught the asphalt with a crack and Cave was crying out in pain, his other arm protecting his injured flank which he managed to keep somehow off the ground, as his shoulder followed suit, pitching him forwards so that the skin from his cheek was torn forcefully from its place.

And then his feet finally caught ground that was not twisting and turning beneath him and with staggering steps he forced himself upright and began sprinting as fast as he could away from the truck, away from the tower.

It took less than two and a half seconds from entering the funnel of sandbags that led to the incinerator before the truck disappeared into its fiery belly. One security van blindly followed it in. Another had crumpled into the sandbags, the officers inside bloodied and unmoving. Cave could not see the third.

He had managed only ten or so desperate steps before the explosion. The intense heat igniting the load of fuel sent out a blast that solidified the air and then made it collapse as the concentrated mix of sound and shock erupted with a force that Cave had never heard before. The heat punched him in the back, urging him onwards. He could see other people now emerging from the surrounding buildings. Some were running like he was towards the exit, others simply stood, bewildered, gaping at the thick oily flames pouring from the foot of the tower.

The second explosion came without warning. The incinerator's gas supply pipe ruptured violently sending a corona of flame out from the summit of the tower. As Lazarus Cave ran, his side ached and his chest strained. At the exit from the compound he stopped running and bent forwards, hands on knees, breathing deeply. In front of him, over the barrier, the city lay placid under a pale blue sky in its dying moment of innocence.

Slowly he turned. The tower was already crumbling and disintegrating, the crown caving inwards and the base rolling out in a cloud of rubble and flame. Soon it would fall and Cave knew that when it did the fires would rage. He opened his mouth and whispered his thoughts to the people who now tore past him in panic, to the unheeding council and the unwitting city, "Will anyone put them out?"

*

In the days that followed the first tower coming down, others were also attacked. For a week there was chaos. At night the whole city seemed to be alight. Lazarus Cave, Evelyn Green and the boy sat together on a bench in the gardens watching the towers burn, the evening sky blackened by the flames. Solemnity filled the air between them.

"How have we fallen so far?"

Somewhere in the dusk a blackbird twittered and flew unseen past their heads. A tree shifted its leaves in the breeze.

"We're not the ones who have fallen."

On the last day of the week the chaos subsided and the dust was allowed to settle into a dreadful calm that spread throughout the city like cold water, binding the citizens together in a collective apprehension as they remained indoors and awaited the retribution of the council.

It did not come. The people lay expectant, inviting almost, but still it did not come. For two days the city paused. No one moved. The streets and gardens hung peacefully in the still air.

On the third day the front doors opened and people stepped cautiously outside. The roads were empty. No security vans patrolled their dark grey lengths. Uncertainly people took aimless steps, unsure of what to do or where to go. They looked at each other, afraid to talk lest the taut limbo should be broken. The doors of the education centres opened too and the children stepped foot into a city mysteriously different from the one they had been taught.

Slowly pairs formed, and then small groups as the citizens gradually coagulated. An unspoken impulse jumped from one small group to another across a synapse of common awakening into an unknown, an unknown heightened by the familiarity of the city, of its buildings, its smells. Only the towers had disappeared from its cityscape and where they had been, great expanses of lumpen debris broke through the close envelopment of grey walls and freed the areas of the city in which they had stood.

There was no conscious choice that filled the disparate collections of citizens until they were all moving in the same direction, individual groups swelling and merging until they were tributaries flowing into a river of bodies that poured towards the hallowed white walls of the central complex. Cave, Evelyn and the boy were part of one of these streams, wordlessly swept forwards.

Outside the complex the great crowd, men, women and children pooled to a stop. Still no one spoke.

It was the boy who pushed to the front, slight frame and sharp elbows creating an easy path through the tightly packed bodies as Cave and Evelyn struggled to keep up with him. Bursting through the final line they came up against the single red-and-white-striped barrier that was holding the entire citizenry at bay.

Cave turned around. Those who could see what was going out stared back at the three of them with hopeful expectation filling their eyes.

"You should show them."

With his back turned to them, the boy's quiet voice barely reached the front row of the endless sea of citizens. A murmur rippled back through the crowd as his words were repeated. Cave looked down at the boy who continued to gaze steadily across the compound to the ruins of the great tower.

"You should show them," he said again so that only Cave and Evelyn could hear.

Cave nodded. He looked back at the uncountable citizens arrayed in front of him. His voice when he spoke was deep and steady. "Follow me."

Half trailing the boy, half leading the people of the city, Cave and Evelyn marched deliberately across the open expanses of the complex, through the ornate doorway of the main building in its brilliant white marble uniform, and down deserted corridors until they stood before the polished brown doors that had printed in gold letters council chamber. Cave knew these corridors well but had never before seen the doors. Its sudden presence caused him to halt and he looked down again at the boy who kept his eyes fixed firmly at the doors and nodded his head.

As the heavy doors swung silently back on their hinges the people behind them craned their necks to see inside. Cave entered the room. The chairs around the long central table had been pulled hurriedly back and left awkwardly positioned. The table itself had notepads and pens on it and a jug of water and twelve glasses arranged at one end. Thick dust that spoke of years of abandonment, if anybody had ever been there at all, covered everything in sight. In front of one chair was a porcelain mug, half full of tea. Cave touched it, leaving finger marks in the dust. It was still warm. Next to it the ash fell from the end of a burning cigarette.

*

The changes in the city were so gradual that their precise moment of emergence could not be pinpointed with any accuracy but there arose within the collective knowledge of the inhabitants an understanding that certain areas, the market, the docks were best avoided after dark. Elsewhere pockets of desirability established and then moved to protect themselves. Divisions that had never before existed sprang up like weeds finally breaking through a cracked pavement. The gardens bloomed more luxuriously and the river ran cleaner and swifter than ever before.

In the sky the constant summer sun shone down on the city. In the haze of an afternoon, Cave, Evelyn and the boy strolled together through the zoo. Cave on the left, his arm around Evelyn's waist and the boy's hand in hers. At the perimeter of the hilltop, they paused by an empty rhinoceros enclosure and read the placard kept in honour of the absent occupants.

The stray bullet came seemingly from nowhere, fired out of love or lust, gluttony or want, avarice or poverty. Too far away for any gunshot to carry. It struck the boy in the chest. He collapsed with a hollow breath, Evelyn falling with him, catching him in her arms, a scream rising in her throat, in her stomach as his blood seeped through her pale white fingers where she had placed her hand on his wound. Cave too dropped to the ground, barely hearing Evelyn's screams now that pealed one after the other, deep ragged breaths fuelling their distress. He clasped at the boy's hand, without knowing what to do or say. Evelyn cradled his head, stroking his soft brown hair. Tears began to flow in rivulets from her eyes as the screams subsided into a repeated wordless pleading. The boy lay unmoving, his breathing growing weaker, thin and laboured, his eyes staring unseeing between the two of them.

As the boy lay dying in Evelyn's arms, Lazarus Cave stood and walked away from them to the edge of the plateau. From behind the anguished sound of pain and loss came to him. Inside himself he felt something wither, a solitary wet tear rolled down his stubbled cheek, and then unbidden into its place there rose an ecstasy which permeated him until he was held in its sheer grip.

In front of him, Cave looked out from the zoo in the fragrant gardens, out over the reborn city in all its beauty and its ugliness. Its simple, inescapable, impenetrable existence.
