For a while, Muezza and Cuthbert walked together toward the pretty notes, and then the cat slunk away to his ivy-covered secrecies of Sufi dreams.
“I’m not any savior,” Cuthbert slurred aloud, thinking the cat was still beside him. A hideous self-pity filled him. “I’m not al-Mahdi. I don’t know why my gran had to tell me about any focking Wonderments. I’m a Black Country fool, and I’ve accomplished nothing.”
But he had achieved something: five jackals, three sand cats, and one black leopard were now free.
five
alarm at the seamen’s rest
WHEN THE ORANGE-FREQ ALERT WENT OFF IN INSPECTOR Astrid Sullivan’s eyes that night, it was just about the last thing in the world she felt able to cope with. After years of a relatively happy recovery from Flōt addiction in Flōters Anonymō, Astrid was one of the few Britons to make it to the agonizing second-withdrawal from Flōt, which typically occurred around a dozen years after first withdrawal. She hadn’t been able to get over to Highbury’s public pool that day for her usual soothing, salutary swim, and she felt especially bonkers. As a senior constabulary officer, she was allowed to set Optispam and adverts to “off,” but she couldn’t stop King Henry’s official bulletins (no British subject could)—and she couldn’t stop a fucking bloody orange-freq.
The freq’s flame animations lashed across her corneas. The alerts were meant to shock officers to attention, and they worked. A steady accompanying pair of eeps and zungas screamed and clangored into the auditory ganglia, so directly they turned eardrums into minuscule audio speakers. If one stood beside a recipient of such orange-freqs, one could hear the victim’s ears. The sensate assault on Astrid’s skull could hardly clash more with the familiar damp basement kitchen of the old Seamen’s Rest, where she was making—trying to make—her famously vile tea for her Flōters Anonymō meeting.
Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!
“Can’t,” she said, nearly whimpering. “Can fucking not. Not now.”
She put her fingertips up to her eyes and flicked off the alert’s text without reading it. She could get fired for that, but she just didn’t care. The digital fire in her eyes stopped, but the noise wouldn’t until she read the bloody thing, and soon it would transform into a steady chittering shriek. Should she read it? No, no—not yet.
Eep, eep, eep, eep! Zunga-gunga-gunga!
The basement had a badly cracked cement floor painted the color of rotten oysters. A small SkinWerks panel squawked with SkyNews/WikiNous in the background. A seaweedy, salty smell hung in the air.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
“Fuck!” she gasped, trying to tune the noise out. It was a skill she was growing fairly adept at, along with her newly acquired compulsion to swim laps at Highbury pool, which often seemed to be the only way she could settle her mind and body. She got on her knees to reach two enormous steel teapots on a lower shelf, ancient pots, greasy things with decades and decades of orange-black flame marks up their sides and their Bakelite handles in spidery cracks.
THAT THE POLICE OFFICER tasked with after-hours alarms at the London Zoo was herself a Flōter might seem a mordant coincidence. But so pervasive was the desire to “get up,” few institutions lacked their share of active addicts, and the Royal Parks Constabulary was no different. If you were Indigent or middle class, and not yet living under a Nexar hood at a Calm House or in soybean-farm serfdom, the defining Scylla-or-Charybdis quandary of the mid-twenty-first century was how to survive the attractions of Flōt versus the milky-sweet promises of the suicide cults.
What made Astrid special was that she was one of a few hundred Flōters in the country who had managed, for now, to break the addiction.
But only just. After eleven years dormant in FA, the dragon of second withdrawal was upon her. Astrid felt incensed it had come to this. She’d done what was suggested. Despite attending meetings semiweekly, volunteering often for tea duties, working with newcomers, relapse and death genuinely threatened her. She couldn’t sleep, her muscles hurt, and she endured a daily yearning to push her thumbs into her eyes and gouge out her prefrontal cortex. There were the Flōt cravings, too, of course—cravings that hooked up from the belly like a long silver claw.
THE SEAMEN’S REST, operated by Methodists, was in a forgotten All-Indigent corner of the Isle of Dogs. It was a place she felt she’d consciously condemned herself to in London’s struggling Flōters Anonymō community.
She heaved the two pots onto the steel sink counter.