“Impressive. That’s firepower! We send, what . . . two at a time? How are we going to win against the republicans, like that?”
Astrid glanced behind her and looked at the door where the caretaker was pretending to watch a tiny SkinWerks screen—god knows how he, as an Indigent, could afford it—he’d sprayed over his tremoring, skinny forearm. Astrid knew his telly-watching was partly an act. He was just waiting for her to try to pocket one of the church’s own teaspoons, or to burn the place down. They went through the same thing every week. The sobriety of FA members meant nothing to the suspicious Sykes, who may well have been a Red Watch informant. Henry IX, it was said, generally tolerated FA and other older self-help fellowships, but that didn’t mean he trusted them. If they kept English souls out of the suicide cults, and cost no Treasure, he would endure them. Meanwhile, people like Sykes stood ready to inform on them for the slightest sign of sedition.
Sykes shook his head, pretending to be outraged at whatever rubbish he was watching on his stingy-small screen; he met Astrid’s eyes with his own for an awkward second, then turned back to his flesh-telly.
“Lights,” she whispered to herself. It was surely not a big problem. It was an odd one, however. But what if it was a B&E?* Then what?
She realized that she’d forgotten to get out the artificial sweetener, a product called Smile invented in the 2030s. It came in tiny dissolving sheets you pulled from a pastel-green dispenser, and it tasted like bitter orange-blossom honey. The Flōtheads loved it. She bent down and reached far back into the cupboard, but there was something in the way.
She had to slide out a small, obstructing wooden box. It was a strange old thing she’d noticed before, designed to resemble a ship—the HMS Victory—with a profile of the famous yellow and black vessel painted on each side. She looked at it more closely. There was a tiny, rusty little padlock on it. The lock unclasped when she instinctively pulled on it. Broken, she thought. Figures. She threw open the box.
There was a miniature bottle of Bacardi rum—half-empty. There was a likely unplayable, century-old audiocassette tape with BOB MARLEY scrawled in pink on its label. There was also a large bag of Bassetts Jelly Babies, torn opened. Someone had eaten all but the black currant jellies, and those were smashed and decomposing. The Smile was there, too, in the wrong place, its minty-green dispenser pried open, with only a few sheets left.
“Weird fucks,” she said. “Who does this shit?” She picked up the bottle and turned it in her fingers. It was tempting, but she knew it was far too little to do anything but torture her. Only Flōt would scratch the itch she felt. (And Sykes was watching, of course.) She grabbed the Smile, closed the box, and shoved the HMS Victory back into its cupboard.
Astrid knew she would not be able to relax now. The zoo was normally the single bit in the royal parks that the constabulary never worried about, especially at night. Being on call for the zoo was normally tantamount to a free night. The zoo staff did safety drills, of course, semiannually—but these posited daylight emergencies. There was already a built-in guard, of sorts, an Indigent night keeper with a small apartment fashioned into the old Reptile House. Astrid had met him once, long ago. Dawkins. A strange, very fat young gent with a narrow head and obsessed with a passé steampunk magazine called Hiss. He was, she’d heard, weirdly possessive of the Reptile House.
And now this. Lights on at the zoo?
She counted out ten Typhoo tea-spheres and set them aside on the counter. They were about half the spheres needed for a pot, but tea’s price was up to ￡20 a box. She touched her fingertips to her brow again—an Opticall-related tick many experienced. Before FA, she had been getting sloppy on the job, she remembered, and not handling her Flōt too well. And there had been a sexy man in Houston, too, a topiary shop manager with full lips and long thighs, a man who was as cleverly tidy about pouring an orb of Flōt as he was with fica shrubs. Astrid had wanted to impress him—and look what happened. She’d disgraced herself in Texas. So here she was, several years into a second chance, back in Blighty. Was she getting sloppy again?