'Apparently by request.'
Well well. Stranger things had happened, Harker supposed. Like the only woman he wanted disappearing through a hole in the world.
'The two of them are advising a special team on how to use the computer. We've already intercepted a couple of enemy messages. One of them was about an attack on Nottingham. That computer saved lives, Harker. It might even lead to a turning point in the war.'
'Glad to hear it.'
Her skin looked tight and pale. He knew she was thinking the same as him, that the one life that mattered was the one he hadn't saved.
'She can't forgive you, Harker. Wheeler. It hurt her all the more because she'd always championed you.'
'Making an example of me, isn't she?'
Saskia nodded.
'I ain't going to ask for your forgiveness, Sask. I don't deserve it.'
Her knuckles were pale. 'You didn't make her go with you. Charlie and Banks were very clear on that. They followed voluntarily.'
'But still. I shouldn't ...'
'Shouldn't what? Have gone after the woman you loved?'
Her face was tight with pain. Harker wondered if he'd have done the same for Saskia as he had for Eve. Wondered if he'd ever really loved Saskia all that much.
'Tallulah was a soldier,' she said, and there was the very tiniest tremor in her voice. 'She knew the risks. And I ... oh, Harker, I wish'
Her voice broke, which for Saskia was like a fit of hysteria. Harker waited until she'd composed herself.
'I couldn't influence anyone's decision on your sentence,' she said. 'I don't want you to die.'
'Makes two of us.'
'But I ...' She looked down, then back up again. Her eyes were wet. 'I never hated you, you know.'
'You ought to. I would, if I were you.'
'Well, I suppose I'm a better person than you,' Saskia fired back, and Harker gave her half a smile.
Saskia stared off down the corridor for a long moment, then back at him.
'If there was a way for you to be with Eve, would you do it?'
He was sitting there waiting to be shot in the morning for what he'd done for Eve. What did she think?
'She,' he said, 'is the only thing in the world that I want. But she ain't even in my world any more.'
'Very poetic,' Saskia said.
'Yeah, I thought so. I'd say put it on my headstone, but I don't get one now, do I?'
'No. You're going to be shot in the tunnels where Tallulah died,' Saskia said, her face displaying what Daz had called Officer Blank, but which Harker suspected Saskia had perfected long before she joined the army. 'Wheeler gave me the choice.'
'S'pose that's poetic, too,' Harker said.
'They're going to be collapsed immediately after.' She watched him carefully. 'I supervised the positioning of the charges myself.'
'Did you?' Harker said, without much interest, and then what she'd said penetrated his brain, and he looked up. She gave an infinitesimal nod in the direction of the cigarette packet.
There was a tiny folded piece of paper in it.
What was she planning? Some final degradation, an act of revenge? He looked up at her, her face cold and aloof. He'd taken from her the last thing she had left, the person she loved most in all the world.
'Have you decided whether or not to wear the hood?' Saskia asked.
'Not yet,' he said cautiously.
'I'd advise that you do.' She met his eyes, and Harker told himself it could all still go horribly wrong. He didn't even know what she was planning.
Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and Saskia straightened. 'I'll see you tomorrow, Major.'
'Thanks, Colonel. You've been a great comfort.'
She gave a wry smile, and turned to go. Then she stopped, turned back, and said, 'Good luck in your next life, Will.'
'Thank you,' Harker said, and watched her go. Then he read her note, before burning it, lying back, and wondering if she was going to be able to pull it off.
Wind whipped at Eve's hair as she stood on the bridge, staring out at the dirty Thames. Past the bulk of HMS Belfast she could make out the new, boring, London Bridge, squatting over the river like a concrete toad. I wouldn't need rescuing from there, she thought. There were no narrow arches and wooden piers to thrash the tide into a frenzy. The only thing about London Bridge that could possibly kill someone was the sight of it.
There wasn't much separating her from the water. Just a waist-high barrier and a drop that wasn't nearly high enough to kill her. Eve glanced up at the high walkways above the road. Falling from there might kill someone.
'Don't do it!'
Eve closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again to see Jen, her newly acquired assistant, smiling at her own joke. But behind the smile was faint concern. She really thinks I would.
'I'm not going to jump,' Eve said, turning her back to the water. 'Well, not unless the album flops.'
Jen smiled. 'Come on away from there before a pappersnapper gets you and runs an Eve Contemplating Suicide headline.'
Eve allowed herself to be tugged away, her mind a hundred-and-fifty feet up. How high was I when the sky changed? she wondered. Where did I fall through the hole in the world?
How could I get back up there?
Morning came, with what he had overheard Eve, standing over Martindale's grave, call a glooming peace. '"The sun for sorrow will not show his head",' she'd added, mostly to herself.
Today I die, Harker thought, either way, it all ends today. And he wasn't afraid. They were beating some damn drum as he walked out to the wagon, and he was mildly disappointed that it wasn't a tumbrel. Officers weren't often executed, so a reasonably large crowd had turned out to watch.
No one saluted him. Without headgear, weapons, or even his jacket, he wasn't in uniform and couldn't salute back.
A path had been cleared along the centre of London Bridge. Harker sat in the wagon, smoking his last few cigarettes and ducking the rotten vegetables occasionally thrown his way. General Wheeler was waiting at the entrance to the tunnels, and she marched ahead of him into the torchlit darkness.
'Very dramatic,' he said, following, and was ignored.
In places, the tunnel walls had collapsed in and been re-dug. As part of his trial Wheeler had insisted on coming to see the exact spot where Tallulah had died and Sholt and Eve had gone missing.
At least that bastard was dead. Some good had come out of that horrible night.
He recognised a few faces in the guards standing around the slightly larger cavern where he'd last seen Eve. Only of course he hadn't last seen her there she'd been through a portal, on the platform of what Harker had eventually worked out was something to do with a train. Eve had talked about trains, and Daz had animatedly passed on information gleaned from his American books. Some metal monster moving faster than light. Harker hadn't believed them, but now he'd seen proof. Real proof of Eve's world. Now there was a wall of earth there instead, impossible to shift, according to engineers, without destroying the whole tunnel.
There was Coop, standing half-hidden in the shadows, and as Harker nodded at him he was suddenly yanked into the darkness, a hand over his mouth, and someone else was shoved out in his place, a man whose head was covered by a hood.
A prisoner from Newgate, according to Saskia's note, one condemned to die anyway. Harker watched, still and silent, as he was led out to the approximate spot where Tallulah had died, and as the firing squad trooped out and took position, someone shoved a private's jacket and helmet at Harker and jammed a gun into his hands.
He pulled the helmet low, lurked back in the shadows, and watched as Saskia herself gave the order to fire.
Through it all Wheeler stood stiff and straight, but she flinched ever so slightly when the prisoner fell.
She gave a nod and said to Saskia, 'I am sorry, you know.'
Saskia looked down at the dead man Harker hoped like hell he'd at least deserved it and said, 'Not as sorry as I am, sir.'
Then she ordered all the men out, and Coop murmured under the noise of marching feet, 'You stay here, sir. Reckon we're even now, eh?'
If it wasn't for you, Mister Harker, I wouldn't have nobody to marry.
'Thank you,' Harker mouthed, falling back into the shadows and waiting for the cavern to clear. Saskia remained, along with a couple of men who lit the fuses as she directed. Then they went, and she followed, lingering in the cavern entrance to set down her lantern and say, 'Goodbye, Will,' without looking at him.
Something good should come of all this, she'd written at the bottom of her note. She really was a better person than him.
Then she was gone, and Harker hit the ground as the first charge went off. When he opened his eyes, he was looking at a hard, flat platform and a circular tunnel with tiled walls. He rolled through the gap, just as another charge went off, and another, cascading earth down through the hole and sealing it again.
The ground was hard beneath him. The air was warm, with a slight breeze and that strange metallic smell. His last match illuminated a maintenance hatch in the tiles above.
For the first time in a month, Harker smiled.
It was harder with one hand mostly useless. Everything was. Constantly afraid she'd fall before she found the hole in the sky, and even more afraid someone would see her and try to bring her down, Eve stood on the roof of the Tower Bridge walkway, and looked out across the river to London Bridge.
High up here. Very high. The wind was fierce. Dropping to her knees to steady herself, Eve unfastened her bag with frozen fingers and took out the first of many pebbles.
She threw one up high, into the air, and watched it fall to the river below. Then she threw another, a little higher. How high was I? And how far over to the side?
Below her, the traffic moved on, unconcerned. Eve threw more stones, her teeth chattering. How many more did she have? Enough?
Maybe the portal wasn't there any more. Maybe it moved, and she'd never find it again. After all, if it'd been there a hundred-odd years ago, surely some of the men building the bridge would have found it?
Desperation mounting in her, Eve didn't pay attention to the shouts or the sirens until the loudspeaker got her attention. First a policeman, then a negotiator who gave his name as Tristram. Eve ignored them both.
Her phone rang. Her personal, up-to-the-minute, shiny pink, un-military phone.
'Eve, when I said don't jump, I was joking, I mean, I didn't want to put ideas into your head,' Jen babbled.
'I'm not going to jump,' Eve said. At least, not until I've found the right place to jump through. And figured out how to get that high.
I probably should have thought this through more.
'But ... what are you doing up there?'
'I'm just looking for something.'
'But that's what the walkways are for, that's why'
'Not that kind of something,' Eve said, distracted. 'Look, Jen, tell them to go away. I'm not going to jump. They don't need to worry.'
'They're sending someone up to bring you down.'
'No!' Eve yelped, because she still hadn't found the doorway. 'Not yet.'
'Eve'
'Jen, I'm busy,' Eve said, and ended the call. She threw another pebble. It fell down to the river. Her phone rang again, and she switched it off.
Below her, a fire engine rumbled into place. Great, now they were going to bring her down and probably stick her in an asylum somewhere.
I'm not crazy. I know where I was. I just want to get back there.
Something whirred, the hydraulic lift, she supposed, a cherry-picker or something, or did they have those extending ladders? Maybe if she talked to them nicely, they'd extend it out over the water, and she could see if the hole was there.
Although people would follow her. Nosey people. Journalists and scientists. The Untied Kingdom would be swamped with people from this world, like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster. Like Stargate or something. They'd try to clean it up and probably fail horribly. Armies of big men with guns, politicians who never listened, packs of tabloid hacks who wanted to see Queen Diana. It would be a huge mess.
But if she found Harker, it would be worth it.
The cherry-picker whirred closer, and Eve's shoulders slumped. No, it wouldn't. She couldn't let anyone else find that world. What good would interfering do? Banks, and Charlie, and Tallulah's grieving family; they'd turn into fairground attractions. Come and see what Britain would have been like without the Empire! Look how sorry we'd all have been! Marvel at a country with no television!
You've never had it so good!
Eve could almost hear Harker's voice saying her name. If she brought that upon the country he loved so fiercely, he'd never forgive her.
She threw one last pebble, and turned.
And nearly fell off the roof.
'Eve,' said Harker. He was black with dirt, eyes blazing, clothes tattered. Harker, standing next to a fireman in the bucket of the cherry-picker. 'For Christ's sake, don't jump.'
Eve's head whipped around. She hadn't found the hole, how had he got here? How had he found her?
Snapping her gaze back to him, she opened and closed her mouth half-a-dozen times before she managed to get her brain wired back in. Eventually, without taking her eyes off Harker, she said to the fireman, 'Excuse me, do you see a tall man with black hair and extremely dirty clothes standing next to you?'
Looking a little nervous, the fireman nodded. 'He said he knew you. Said he could bring you down.'