Kraken by China Miéville

bundled Billy on. “No way I can take them,” Dane said. “I only got him ’cause they weren’t expecting anything. Plus there was …”
    Dane ran them an intricate route until they emerged from the brick maze. They were by a park, the only figures in the street. By the silhouettes of massed trees Dane unlocked a car and shoved Billy in.
    Billy wore a beard of blood, he realised. His shirt was stained with it. At some point, the night’s rough handling had split his lip. He dripped.
    “Shit,” he mumbled. “Shit, sorry, I …”
    “One of his knuckleheads.” Dane said. “Put your seat belt on.” Something filthy scudded from the wall across the deserted road, out of a gutter into the car. The squirrel, coiling under a seat. Billy stared.
    “Shtum,” Dane said. He pulled out and drove, fast. “If it weren’t for little sodding nutkin I wouldn’t have found you. It got onto Goss’s car.”
    They turned into lights, reached a street where there were shoppers and drinkers by late cafés and amusement arcades. Billy felt as if he would cry, to see people. It felt like the breaching of some meniscus, like he had entered a real night at last. Dane passed him a tissue.
    “Wipe your mouth.”
    “Leon …”
    “Wipe the blood. We don’t want to be stopped.”
    “We have to stop, we have to go to the police …” Really? Billy thought even as he said that. You’re not there anymore .
    “No,” Dane said, as if he were listening to that monologue. “We do not.” You know that, right? “We’re just going to drive. Wipe your mouth. I’m going to get you out of here.”
    Billy watched a quadrant of London he recognised no more than if it were Tripoli go by.

Chapter Thirteen
    “W ELL THIS IS BLOODY FABULOUS, ISN’T IT ? T HIS IS BLOODY perfect.” Baron stomped around Billy’s flat. He shook his head at the walls, folded and refolded his arms. “This is just how it was supposed to go. This is peachy.”
    He stamped past the team powdering for fingerprints. She had her back to them, but from where she stood examining Billy’s doorway, Collingswood got gusts of their resentment.
    She could not hear thoughts. So far as she knew, no one could: they spilt from each individual head in too many overlapping and counterflowing streams, and the words that part-constituted some of those streams were contradictory and misleading. But irritation that strong communicated, and knowing it to be mistranslation, she—like most of those with any knack at all for that kind of thing—automatically translated into text.
    whos this twat think he is
    wankers shd fuck off let real coppers work
    y r we leting that litl bitch smoke
    She turned and spoke to the thinker of that last fragment. “Because you been told to let us do whatever we want, innit?” she said, and watched the blood leave his face. She stepped over dropped books and followed Baron. She picked up the post on the table.
    “Well?” Baron said. “Any ideas?”
    Collingswood unlistened, focused on the traces of Billyness. Touched with a fingertip the doorframe, where stains of Billy’s attention read to her like messages squint-seen through a broken screen.
    whats this she did that girl
    cant get in
    shes fit i wouldn’t mind
    “What are you bloody smirking at?” Baron said. “Got something?”
    “Nothing, boss,” she said. “You know what? No. You got me. This thing was still primed when I got here, you know? That’s why I had to let you in. No entry without invite, and you saw Billy boy—he was way too chickenshit to let anyone he didn’t know in after what we told him.”
    “So what’s happened? He’s hardly just gone for a bloody walk, has he?”
    “Nah.” She shrugged at the signs of scuffles. “Someone’s took him.”
    “Someone who couldn’t get in.”
    She nodded. “Someone who didn’t get in,” she said.
    Vardy emerged from the bedroom, where he had been examining Billy’s bits and pieces. He joined them in the