“Mr. Beauchamp, I don’t mean to abandon you, but I do need to go now. I was just about to consult again . . . with the constabulary . . . and I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to . . . delay?”
“No,” Beauchamp said, nearly spitting. “Oh, the park force has dawdled quite enough.” He breathed hard through his nostrils, and added: “And I can’t do much with my squad if we don’t have proper police control of the situation, can I? Go!”
A picture-perfect quintessence of assholedom, she thought with some satisfaction.
There was, abruptly, a tremendous “knock” and a shattering-glass sound, very definitely from inside the zoo. Everyone gathered on the Broad Walk—the autonews producers, the freelance writer, Beauchamp, Astrid—looked in the same direction.
They heard a man cry out, “DRYSTAN! DRYSTAN!”
“What the bloody munkers was that?” Beauchamp said.
“I don’t know. It’s not a ‘what’—it’s a man, surely. Still,” she managed to say, her voice quavering a bit, “we’ll need more backup, just in case, and I better get on the comm-port, right? I need more support.”
Beauchamp sniffed at this. “Yes. Support,” he said with a simpering nod. “And we’re not going to forget the animals, are we? Don’t forget that. Yes, go. Go, go. Nip along, please!”
ASTRID DASHED BACK to the Paladin, where she found Atwell and Dawkins in the backseat, talking in friendly tones and warming themselves a bit, outwardly unmindful of the chaos around them. She wondered why Omotoso was taking so long to get back.
She tapped on the imagiglass. Putting her lips to its warm, tickling, invisible force field, she explained to Atwell, breathlessly, that—with jackals on the loose, the automedia out in force, the zoo’s AnimalSafe Squad assembling, and two potentially endangered people (Dawkins’s sister Una and a vagrant) still in the zoo—the operation was necessarily going to be expanded. They would need to summon more PCs from the constabulary, and escalate with the Met, too, who still hadn’t arrived.
“What we need now is air support,” Astrid said. “Everything is moving too slow. The Watch have eyes in the sky. The autonews have them. The officers in charge? We have David bloody Beauchamp.”
“Has Omotoso got back?”
“Still . . . no,” said Astrid. “I’m a little surprised. Perhaps he knows already, and he knows something we don’t. I don’t know.”
Dawkins asked, “When am I getting my Diet Vanilla Coke?”
“Patience,” Atwell said, “pa-tience,” lengthening the syllables in soft susurrations.
“Oh god,” said Astrid, shaking her head at Dawkins. “Like it or lump it, you’ve got to wait. Will you cut us a break?” Turning to Atwell, she added, “Perhaps the guv’ll try to keep this whole operation small and nimble. I wouldn’t be shocked if he says manage this yourselves and tell the media to give public affairs a bell in the morning.”
Atwell said, “I hope you’re right.”
“Inspector,” Dawkins said sheepishly, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean anything when I was on about you lot and that crazy bloke’s cheekbones. It’s just doing me head in a bit, Inspector—this night.”
“Hasn’t it already been done in quite properly?” teased Atwell.
“I know,” said Astrid, trying to reassure Dawkins. “It’s OK.”
But she’d begun to wonder more about this stranger in the zoo. There was the faintest feeling of connection.
“Drystan?” she said to herself. “What a . . . name?” Something about “Drystan” sounded mysteriously familiar as well as beautiful and natural, too, like a dark soil she could push her hands into—dark soil, and speckled with gold. She didn’t know why, but Astrid felt a new, peculiar sense of duty, too—something that went far beyond her professional obligations—to look after the man, whatever that might mean. And he was desperate, plainly. She didn’t want to embrace the feeling, but she looked at it, with surprise and a respectful distance, as one might upon seeing, in a walk through an English forest, an otter.
the next two seconds
AS ASTRID STOOD BESIDE THE PANDAGLIDER, Chief Inspector Omotoso at long last contacted her via Opticall audio. She wanted privacy, so she quietly stole behind a mottled green-and-white plane tree, hunching down to take the call. (Since WikiNous implantation and corneal electronics had first become a public right, then the law, humans had developed a seemingly instinctual, distinctive way of “ducking” to answer Opticalls, colloquially called the “OptiDip.”)
“Inspector? Are you there?” Omotoso said. “Inspector? Astrid?” His voice wasn’t groggy at all. It was as if he’d been up for hours. (As a matter of fact, he had been awake for exactly twenty-two minutes, and he had been fielding the most outlandish series of Opticalls of his professional career.)