Dee sidestepped the bent streetlamp, uprooted from the pavement, pausing—the way the lady on the pirate broadcasts said—to hit the CCTV's lens with a spray of black paint. The estates where she and Mellie had holed up for the last few days were already tagged with the eye symbol that meant no cameras and a neighbourhood on the alert for drones and troops, but this far into the heart of the Regime, the cameras never stayed sabotaged for long.

Westminster wasn't safe by a long shot, but Brixton and the warehouse bombings were reminders that nowhere, and no one, was safe anymore. The Resistance lady might talk too much, but she was right: there was nothing to lose anymore that couldn't just as easily be lost sitting in one's own flat minding one's own business, and much to be gained rummaging through the smoking aftermath of a skirmish.

Mellie, up ahead, hissed, "There're bodies."

Dee almost caught up with her. "Weapons?"

"Shitloads."

Dee reached the corner. The Resistance had won this round, she thought, going by the ratio of grey-clad corpses to black ones, and good on them. She had no faith that the Resistance, given the slightest whiff of power, would be less bloody-minded than the Regime, but they weren't the ones razing entire tower flats now, were they? So she was rooting for them in the offhand way one might place a small wager on Madron FC against Man U. You didn't actually expect them to win.

She'd held a job, once, until the economy went down the shitter and even unpaid work experience was hard to come by. The woman she'd been then might have flinched at the sight of a body ripped open by semiautomatic fire, clothing and skin flayed from muscle and organ, bits of skull and brain dissolving into the torrents of cold rain that raced along the concrete into the gutter. These days, she didn't blink, and there was more money in scavenging than benefits had ever provided.

The two women went about the work of divesting the dead soldiers of their rifles (valuable) and identification cards (fucking priceless, if you knew the right people, and Dee did) before a moan from the alley caught her off guard.

Mellie's head whipped to one side. "Too. Fucking. Dangerous," she said. "No."

Dee crouched above the fallen rebel, peeled back her mask. The woman was young. Pretty. Unconscious, but breathing; there was blood smeared over her face from where she'd bitten her lip.

Mellie had a point. The roving gangs of yobs would pay far more for their salvage than the Resistance would, and smuggling a terrorist anywhere naturally carried the risk of being mistaken for one. If she'd had a conscience, three years of bare survival under the boot of the Regime had squished the life out of it.

So what she did next, she'd chalk up to a momentary lapse of reason, as afflicted everyone, now and then.

Sam dreamt, fragments of memory blurred at the edges like old film—the alley, her fingers sticky with her own blood, the faces in the windows, the women, swaddled in bulky anoraks, standing over her as her vision grayed—and woke with a searing agony in her leg and Miriam Atherton's name on her lips.

She was lying on a bunk behind a tattered curtain of sheets that cordoned off the end of the row of beds. Light from the oil drums bled through the rotting fabric in ochre and red; silhouetted in front of it, Malcolm, gaunt and bleary-eyed, might have been deposited at her bedside directly from Hell itself.

"You look a mess," Sam muttered through cracked lips.

He rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "You look like a Heather Mills charity campaign," he replied, then reached down to part her hair back from her face. "Fuckin' madwoman. I said I needed a distraction, no' cunting V for Vendetta. What the fuck were you thinking?"

Sam tried to sit up—catching a glimpse of Sundeep at the foot of her bed, draped across a chair and snoring—before a shock raced up her nerves and she stifled a scream. She fought to think past the pain, to remember; there was something she had to tell him, some message crucial enough to deny her a martyr's death.

"The USB," she said. "Emma, did she—"

Malcolm stared at the wall above her head. "She didn't," Sam said, sparing him the indignity of having his voice crack. "Ollie?" He shook his head, still refusing to meet her eyes. "Oh Jesus. I'm—I'm sorry, Malcolm."

"You've nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart. I should have stopped you."

She took several long breaths, pushing down the burning in her eyes and the dryness in her mouth, telling herself that she'd mourn for Emma—for Ollie too, even if he'd been a self-serving little prat—at some later date, when she had the luxury of grief. She caught his hand where it smoothed her hair—felt the minute tremor there, God, she didn't want to think about what could make Malcolm tremble now—and clutched it against her cheek.

"There was a name on the file." In the flood of remembering, she tried to move again and her leg wrenched. She balled a fist into her mouth, bit down on her knuckles until she could breathe properly. "Miriam Atherton, the Chancellor's daughter."

"We know." Jamie's head pushed through the curtain, deranged and brimming with the vitality that seemed to have abandoned Malcolm. "Hey, I heard ye fucked up DoSAC worse than Hugh Abbot did."

"Piss off," Malcolm said. "The puir girl needs rest."

"She needs a hospital." That was another new voice. A woman, middle-aged and a head shorter than Jamie, squished in beside him. "But I'd settle for peace and quiet, which she won't get with the two of you having a carry-on."

"This is Abby," Malcolm said. "She saved your life. And possibly everyone else's, though she took her sweet fucking time about it."

"Abigail Nkeng."

"Young Miriam Atherton's private nurse."

Sam coughed, squeezed Malcolm's hand as tightly as she could. "You need to tell me what's going on."

It was hard, through the splintering, all-consuming pain, the tears that threatened to overcome her at any moment, the sheer exhausting sorrow of it all, to draw the story out from the three of them, but somehow it came, in pieces: how the White Death attack three years ago had spared Miriam's life but taken everything else, how her desperate father, the most powerful man in Great Britain and the architect of the Regime, was determined to keep her alive at any cost. How he'd kept her hidden away, even from his own cabinet, with only a skeleton staff—Abby among them—to attend to her needs. How he'd created the nation's new order, its ruthlessness and near-total control, from his own anguish, a vast apparatus of borders and checkpoints and prisons, all because he hadn't been able to protect her when it had mattered.

How very different, Abby said, he was from the man on the screen when he came to see her, with his kindness, his tears. Miriam, she claimed, was the secret Lowell had been after at DoCR, the secret that Ollie and Emma had died uncovering. The Chancellor's greatest love, his only weakness, and the carefully guarded exception to every one of the Regime's rules.

"They would kill her, the others would," Abby said. "Or experiment on her, to see why she survived. Kept alive like this—" She made a disgusted face. "—she's a drain on the system. A non-person."

"Right," Malcolm said. "All of you, out." Sam didn't miss, as Jamie turned to leave, the look that passed between the two men. The instant he was gone, Malcolm seemed more restless. She lifted her hand to touch his cheek; it was burning, as though beneath his skin was some raging inferno that his emaciated body couldn't contain. He looked miserable, so absolutely lost and distraught that had he been anyone else—had she not been in so much pain herself—she'd have been compelled to hug him. "I don't do touching bedside vigils," he grumbled. "There's fuckin' work to be done."

"I know," Sam whispered. "Do what you have to, I'm not going anywhere."

For a moment the mischievous glimmer that had once so charmed her, that still made her determined to follow him no matter what, flickered in his eyes, and he gave her a small half-smile. He leaned in close enough to murmur, "Whatever made you think I could do without you? That this revolution, this omnishambles clusterfuck, could survive with you gone?"

It was an effort to push words through her parched throat. "It'll have to," she said. "Malcolm, I don't remember anything. How'd you find me?"

"I didn't," he admitted. "It was Glummy Mummy and her fuckin' Fourth Sector Pathfinder bollocks. Find a wallet on the train, take the time to turn it into the police. Find a dying revolutionary near a bombing site—"

"Track down an underground network of terrorists to bring her home."

"Something like that. Yeah."

"Her latest address…"

"We are each other's eyes and ears," Malcolm quoted in a not-unconvincing English accent, unable to disguise a note of sarcasm. "Sentimental blag wins the day, but not, alas, the war." He patted her hand and stood, walked over to the foot of the bed where Sundeep had somehow managed to sleep through the commotion. Shaking the younger man awake, he added, "And because of your act of heroism, it's now down to me and Jamie to save the fuckin' country from the fascists. Thanks for that."

Sundeep was at her side immediately, the thin growth of stubble along his jaw and the purple bags beneath his eyes enough to tell her that the sleep he'd gotten in the chair had been his first in some time. "Hey. Make sure she doesn't go running off again," Malcolm told him.

For the longest time she watched the curtain, and his departing silhouette, and told herself that whatever it was he was off to do, it had to be for the best.

Malcolm got as far as the opposite end of the tunnel before turning at a stairwell, slamming the door, and falling into a fit of coughing that Jamie had the un-fucking-comfortable task of pretending not to hear.

"Worse?" Impromptu, underequipped surgery on Sam's gunshot wound hadn't been enough, apparently, to satisfy Abby's professional instincts. He ought to have been grateful, he was, of course, exceedingly fucking grateful, but she seemed insistent on shining a clinical light in dark corners that he'd just as soon keep hidden.

"It's nothing, the flu, it's been going around." That was more than he'd admitted to anyone out loud, and probably more than Malcolm had admitted to himself. Jamie definitely hadn't heard Tim suggest that Malcolm sequester himself in the quarantine tunnel (though he'd enjoyed the lengthy bollocking that followed), and just because he'd seen blood on the rag that Malcolm wore over his face didn't mean that it was actually there. "The waterboarding fucked up his throat. He always sounds like that." Jamie squeezed his eyes shut, wondered, briefly and suicidally, whether he should go after him.

Definitely worse.

Abby's hand floated by his arm, like she wanted to touch him but was, not unjustifiably, afraid that he might bite her. "There isn't anything wrong with him that a course of antibiotics wouldn't fix."

"Yeah. Well. We dinnae fuckin' have those, do we?" He silently willed Malcolm to resurface before the conversation went in a smashy direction, preferably with a brilliant plan to put a swift end to the war so they could all fuck off home.

Behind the door, Malcolm had gone silent. Jamie tensed, but he could hear the Darth Vader wheeze of Malcolm's breath so it wasn't time to barge in, yet. He'd expected—needed—Malcolm to take out his ever-present wrath on someone's, anyone's inevitable fuck-up, but beyond the frenetic hours between Sam's reappearance and Abby's assurance that she'd probably live, he'd barely said a word. He'd absorbed the confirmation of Ollie and Emma's deaths, courtesy of a bombastic pre-recorded broadcast by Weber, whereupon he'd instantly aged about a thousand years, muttered a stream of terrifyingly-subdued-by-his-standards vitriol, and gone off to sit wordlessly at Sam's bedside until she woke.

It wasn't that Jamie was worried, exactly. Before he worried, he'd have to first accept that the miserable auld mingetunnel was mortal, and he'd fellate Piers Morgan before making that concession.

The remnants of Nicola's inner circle were already waiting for them when Malcolm re-emerged, limping, his watery eyes fixed in a red-rimmed glare. Nicola looked nearly as tired; she'd been blubbering for the man who'd effectively ended her political career, and Jamie envied her ability to retain some semblance of normal human reaction in the wake of the latest hard-right turn into utter shitastrophe.

Still, he thought, they ought to have been at least a little hopeful. They'd a chance to strike a painful, if not crippling, blow to the Regime, effective immediately, and, decades from now, no poncey Poxbridge scholar could claim that the Resistance had passed easily, without a proper fuckin' fight, from the stage of history.

"So it's to be blackmail, then?" Nicola said. "Resign or we'll expose the existence of your severely disabled daughter? You've murdered half a million people but what's worse, you're a hypocrite?" She pressed fingertips to temples. "We can call it Gassing-Victim-Gate."

"I'd prefer a good rent-boy scandal," Malcolm replied. "But it'll do. You'll go up to the surface with Tim, whatever bits of the Angry Brigade we've got left, and Sundeep's wee pet drone, and demand the botoxed cunt's immediate and unconditional surrender. Take over a news station if you can manage it. Let them know you mean business."

"He won't do it, you know," Tim said. "Atherton's got secrets. So what? It's not enough to bring down the Regime. He resigns, and Lowell's right there with some other vicious bastard in the wings, ready to take over." He glanced around the table. "You do see it, don't you? We're playing right into their hands."

Barry added, and it must have cost him some of his pride to do so, "Tim's right. Nicola, it won't work."

Jamie'd been quiet throughout the whole discussion, his knee bobbing under the table, waiting, just waiting for Malcolm to say something, but what was left of him, the patchwork scraps of rag and bone held together by malevolent, stubborn force of will, didn't need to tell him when it was time for him to speak.

"He didnae say 'resign,' did he?" Jamie said.

"Unconditional surrender," Malcolm echoed. "While it's still in his power to do so." He rose and made a dramatic show of punching in digits on the much-abused mobile. "Yeah," Jamie heard him say, unsteadily making his way for the door. "Ross, mate. We have the fuckin' girl. We know everything. Still wannae deal?"

Jamie gave himself a few moments of feigned, blessed ignorance, enough time to bark, "Well, get to it," at the others, before he fled to the plant room, where he knew Malcolm would be waiting.

"We're no' exposing her existence tae an outraged public," Jamie said, his voice carrying over the drumbeat of the ventilation fan. "Are we?"

Malcolm looked over at him, gave a slow, reptilian blink. The kerosene lamps, arranged in a circle around what had, in the past few days, substituted for a private office, did nothing to render his appearance less Mephistophelian. "No."

"Does Nicola know?" He regretted the words immediately. "Of course she doesnae. Sam?"

"Don't be a fuckin' twat. Sam's all that's pure and good in the world, not tae mention that she's my Ten Year Plan. She can hardly have blood on her hands if she's to be the future PM, can she?" He took several steps in Jamie's direction, and fuck, he looked ready to keel over; for all that they were gearing towards a friendship-and-whatever-else-they-had-ending row—the scale of which would likely eclipse the landmass of several continents and Malcolm's own inflated ego—Jamie's every instinct was to reach for him. "Just you."

"Malc…"

"I'd do it myself, you understand, but—" He held up his bent, twisted hand, the crooked silhouette of a barren tree in winter. "Not to mention I've not actually held a gun before. They can't be shamed, Jamie. And I can't see another way out."

"She's nineteen," Jamie said. "She's no' her father; she's done nothing wrong."

"She's a fuckin' vegetable. It's a mercy killing. She won't even know the difference." He repeated the last, softly, to himself, as if he were still unconvinced. "But he will."

"And if I say no?"

Malcolm circled, bloodshot eyes never leaving Jamie's face, close enough that he'd probably have cowed anyone else into submission with the sheer electric force of his presence. "This isn't the time tae second guess me, son. I don't need a conscience. I need a soldier. You are a soldier, aren't you?"

"Fuck's sake, Malc, no. I willnae terrorise and fuckin' murder a girl on the off fuckin' chance that it'll destablise the Regime."

He felt both of Malcolm's hands on his shoulders, backing him into the wall; he could have easily knocked the other man away but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Malcolm's breath, ragged and quick, whistled by his cheek and he wanted nothing more than to throw him on the mattress and kiss him senseless, as though the entire context of their lives, politics and God and power and everything they'd longed for and never acted upon, mattered less than Jamie's hopelessly jessie need to just touch him.

"You've killed before."

"Not someone innocent."

"A million Iraqis, Jamie, or have you forgotten? You think some of them weren't bairns the age of your puir wee girls? That we didnae leave grieving parents then?" Slowly, deliberately, he dragged a broken finger along Jamie's face. "Neither of us has a right tae be squeamish, darlin'. We sold that off a long time ago."

He broke away to curl into a hacking fit, and Jamie took the second of reprieve to pretend that Malcolm might suddenly grow a moral compass and change his mind.

The second passed.

"There won't be guards at the hospital; he can't risk that." Malcolm went on as though it was already a fait accompli—which it was, Jamie knew even now that there was only one course of action left, spread out before him like a cokehead prozzie on a hotel duvet. He thought briefly of running to Sam, rousing her from her sickbed in the hopes that she'd manage to look disappointed enough in Malcolm to make him reconsider, but she didn't deserve that, she'd suffered enough, and he wasn't entirely sure that Sam wouldn't side with Malcolm anyway. "Wait a few hours. Nicola will make the demand, and then you call him. Convince him that he surrenders or you kill the girl."

Ten years ago, five years ago, before the Nutters, before the Regime, when he'd been Malcolm's faithful attack dog, he'd have done it without hesitation, and if he'd changed since then, he wasn't certain it was for the best. "Your brilliant plan hinges on the Chancellor deciding that his brain-damaged wean is more important than rights for whites and keeping out of the EU."

Malcolm shrugged. "It's a great fuckin' sympathy ploy if he lets her die. But he might not. I'm counting on not."

"You think the bastard who had my family murdered is gonnae show mercy?"

Impassive, Malcolm replied, "I think he's a better man, by a cunt-hair, than I'd be in his position."

Jamie shook his head. Paced. Pulled at his own hair, fighting the restless urge to scream and knock over the lanterns and pound at the wall until Malcolm relented and saw reason. "Send someone else, then. Someone who isnae going tae look in her face and see—"

"Oh, grow a pair, ye mimsy shiteheel, that's why it has tae be you. Someone else, someone who hasnae had his life ground to paste by these fuckers, might actually fuckin' hesitate, and he has tae know you mean it, that he slaughtered Aileen and Kayleigh and Tara—" Jamie might have killed him for daring to speak their names and dragging their perfect, blessed memory into his ugly realpolitik. "—that you're out for revenge. Someone else might be weak."

He shoved Malcolm away, and Malcolm lashed out to catch him up in his spindly arms, somehow managed to keep hold of him despite Jamie's struggles. He murmured, low and dangerous, "Want to know what it's like to drown?"

Jamie swung out, catching the edge of Malcolm's jaw. It wouldn't have knocked an actual opponent off balance but Malcolm didn't see it coming; bounced off the side of the fan hard enough to dent the casing. He lunged at Jamie, battering at him with the wrong fist, but there was no force behind it; he wanted Jamie still, wanted him broken and his heart burst and bloody on the stained concrete floor, but not hurt. Jamie grabbed him by the wrists and hurled him—for the safety and security of the country, not to mention his own fuckin' protection—into the mattress on the floor, where, crumpled in a heap, he glared up with crazed eyes and bared his teeth in a feral snarl, ready to strike one last, fatal blow.

"Not the fuckin' fairy tale I told ye before," Malcolm spat. "They wouldnae died right away. They'd have fought for each breath, Jamie, like I did, and when they saw the gunboats approaching they probably thought they were being rescued."

His voice died with the last few words, consumed by choking coughs. Jamie dropped to his knees beside him, wanted to claw him to shreds and instead pressed his forehead to Malcolm's and cradled the back of his head in his palm. Both of them were still breathing heavily—Malcolm with considerably more effort, his skinny chest heaving with exertion and sweat beading over his skin—but the maelstrom had lifted, left them both battered in its wake. Finger-sized bruises were beginning to bloom on Jamie's arms; Malcolm would probably look worse in an hour or two, but it wasn't, in the end, about any physical wounds they could inflict on the other. He stroked the damp tangles of Malcolm's hair over a token grunt of protest until the other man could speak again.

"In the entire world," Malcolm whispered hoarsely, "ye tragic, barely housebroken cunt, you're the only one who's ever understood what needed tae be done."

Jamie drew back just enough to meet his eyes, suddenly, strangely calm. Malcolm was right about that much. He'd never seen much point in agonising about the correct course of action.

"If I do this, and live through it, and we win like you say." Jamie spoke as a judge pronouncing a hanging. "I'm done. Away. Back to the priesthood, properly this time."

Malcolm snorted. "You'll last a fuckin' week."

"I went three years before your shrivelled arse dragged me back here."

"You like cock too much to much to be a priest. Wait, no, that wouldnae actually be—"

"Malcolm." Malcolm's mouth twisted, first into a smirk, then into a puzzled frown, finally settling into a contemptuous sneer, while his in all other contexts quicksilver brain worked out what Jamie was telling him. "There couldn't be anyone else, you know. Not after." Which had been the case since his twenties, through a tempestuous marriage, a string of affairs, and an overstuffed Rolodex of coke-addled civil servants, opportunistic journalists, and passionately idealistic young staffers with clever tongues; having existed, however impermanently, in the shadow of Malcolm's bright sun, he'd not be able to move on, then or now.

It wasn't as though Malcolm didn't care. To the extent that he was able to care about anything beyond a Party that had ceased to exist, Jamie was quite certain that Malcolm cared about him, might even have loved him if he were capable of it. But none of that mattered, not when the price of saving the country had plummeted to just the life of one girl and the soul of one man.

The truth was, while he—like every other human being on the planet—was expendable to Malcolm, the reverse didn't exactly apply.

Malcolm said, "Well, I've no' driven anyone tae celibacy before."

"Stop acting a massive tit for five seconds," Jamie snapped. "I'm leaving."

"Right, Father Dougal. Go. Fuck off to the seminary if they'll have yer sad, poncey arse back, but I need you tae end the fuckin' war for me first."

"Fuck London," Jamie said. "Fuck your revolution, and your bloody fucking games. And fuck you." He twisted a hand into Malcolm's hair and kissed him.

Malcolm's instinct was, as always, to draw away before reciprocating, to turn it into a battle for dominance, but Jamie laced his fingers around the back of his neck and kept him in place, tongue exploring the terrain of teeth and broken lips, tracing fingertips over the bones of his skull, the back of his neck and the sharp outlines of his shoulder blades, and Malcolm, sensing an opportunity, stopped fighting him and tugged off his jumper, would probably have torn Jamie's shirt off with his clumsy left hand if Jamie didn't manage to shrug out of it first and hastily get to work on the buttons of Malcolm's.

The singsong Teletubby voice in the back of his head issued a mantra of bad idea, bad idea. Malcolm's skin felt clammy under his touch, perspiration-slick with just the effort it took to shimmy out of his clothes, and in the unforgiving exposure of the kerosene light, he looked far worse than he'd let on during their brief, frantic shagging sessions, a ruined landscape of scar tissue and starvation. It was enough to almost kill Jamie's raging arousal, left him just wanting to fold Malcolm up in his arms and make him drink tea, but Malcolm did nothing by half-measures and, dying or not, seemed intent on bending Jamie to his will by fucking him into oblivion.

For the longest time, Jamie could do nothing but stare. Wasted away to almost nothing, skin stretched spare over jagged bone, he still possessed a striking, austere grace, and Jamie was determined to burn into his memory each stark angle, every harsh protrusion and imperfection to carry with him, whether he lived or died, into a post-Malcolm existence.

"What the fuck are you gawping at?"

Futile as the demand might be, Jamie muttered, "For once in your life, Malc, shut the fuck up," and covered his mouth with his own to push away the nagging worry that if Malcolm so much as said a word now, if, naked and vulnerable and half delirious with fever, he lost his mind and begged Jamie to stay with him, he'd not be able to refuse. "If ye have tae fuckin' talk, scream my name."

Malcolm shoved him on the mattress, clambered over him, and, to his credit, stayed silent, his tongue tracing whorls and spirals over Jamie's body, mapping the outline of ribs, teeth dragging across gooseflesh-prickled skin. His nose bumped Jamie's hip; Jamie squirmed and Malcolm's hands closed around his legs to hold them still while he licked at the crease at the top of his thigh, the skin behind his balls, the inside of a kneecap, everywhere but where Jamie needed him to be. He wanted to snarl at Malcolm to stop being such a fucking cocktease, but every second the unhinged bastard wasn't pushing Jamie to the edge was a second closer to the time when he'd be out of Jamie's life, forever.

"You'd have to want this now," Jamie muttered, and yanked Malcolm's curls until he finally slid his lips around Jamie's cock, and of course he'd fucking withhold his considerable oral skills until the worst possible time, despite their existence being obvious to anyone who'd ever spent an unhealthy amount of time watching his mouth. (Which, Jamie'd long known, was everyone who'd ever met him.) It was only another coughing fit—which, fuck—that gave him the opportunity to haul Malcolm off of him and exact some sort of revenge.

Malcolm might have been a deranged, impossible cataclysm of a human being, but he was hardly a mystery in this respect. In his real life, beyond this shared madness, it'd take him two hours to drink a pint, so determined was he to avoid relinquishing even the smallest amount of control. Here, with one of Jamie's arms circled around him, holding but not restraining, his long legs spread to let Jamie stroke him to unbearable hardness before pushing a finger up his arse, he was a writhing, shuddering disaster. Jamie barely had the presence of mind to be overwhelmed by how exactly much trust Malcolm had in him, let alone to reconcile it with how quickly Malcolm'd steamrollered over his conscience when they'd had clothes on.

He ignored the surge of Catholic guilt; it felt like sticking his cock into a furnace and he was convinced he was hastening Malcolm's premature demise, but Malcolm clung to him, bit his throat and moaned his name like something forbidden and profane, like an invocation, and Jamie didn't have the testicular fortitude to let go until they'd taken each other apart.

He timed it by his own heartbeat; minutes, and Malcolm was up, hastily pulling his clothes back on and kicking Jamie's trousers at him. "Are we gonnae talk?" Jamie asked.

"What's to talk about? Nic'la will be on soon; you've got to go."

Jamie slipped off the filled condom and flung it at the overflowing bin. Malcolm looked nauseated. "It's nothing," he said. "Just…I thought ye might have gae a fuck there, for a second."

"It wouldn't make a difference if I did," Malcolm replied wearily, and didn't so much as indulge Jamie in the appearance of regret.

"Right." Jamie dressed quickly, putting as much deliberate aggression into every movement as possible, well aware that he was being childish and melodramatic. He found his rosary in one pocket and tossed it at Malcolm, who rolled his eyes. "There's enough of these where I'm going," he said. "You can throw it in the cuntin' rubbish for all I care, but I'd rather ye didnae."

"Jamie," he said, so quietly that at first Jamie thought he'd imagined it.

"There's got to be a better way to save the world."

He turned, determined that his last sight of Malcolm not be of him sagged against the wall in a rumpled shirt with the buttons done up wrong, pale to translucency. The strap of the rifle was twisted, digging into his shoulder, but he didn't bother fixing it—or hesitating, or looking back—as he marched out the door and slammed it behind him.

Outside, the world had ended.

In the dwindling hours before night, the sun anemic in a sky as colourless as Cliff Lawton's political career, the shops were shuttered, the offices dark, and the law-abiding cowered in their flats. The rest—a vocal minority, at the very least, on the day that the Regime fell—bided their time until darkness afforded them a modicum of safety. He thought of faded news footage from the 70s, decayed streets and blurred rifles and dust scratches floating on a camera lens, his childhood belief that the violence of a crumbling world was containable inside the little box in the living room. The temperature had crashed and icicles, blanketed in ash, dripped from the skeletal remains of double-decker buses and crushed cars.

He was being followed. Ollie's signal jammer had died in a grenade blast along with Ollie, Emma, and half a dozen Regime expendables (Jamie wouldn't envy him for living a twat and dying a fucking hero by the side of someone he loved, or, well, he'd not admit to doing so aloud), and so he was resigned to the more conventional forms of sneakiness, to shadows and black clothes and an idiosyncratic, maddeningly slow course through the city with the lizard hindbrain of routine insisting the whole time that he might just call a ministerial cab and be at the care home inside of an hour. He didn't look behind him—the Regime would have put a bullet through his head by now—just leaned against the wall and waited for Ella to catch up.

"You shouldn't be out here alone," she said, before he could tell her the same.

He shrugged. "Stealth mission."

"You're shit at it."

Which was true enough, but here they stood nonetheless, small and insignificant in the empty street, and she reached across the space between them to clasp his hand with a woolen mitt. "Can I come with you?"

He shook his head even though his treacherous shit of a tongue was already saying yes. She wouldn't have been his first choice for backup, but the need to have someone, anyone, at his side, outweighed any qualms he might have had. The girl at least knew how to be silent, a shadow padding heel-to-toe over deserted streets, and as long as she intended to play sidekick, he'd not be the last ghost moving through the devastated city.

So long, he thought, as he didn't look at her face. She wore a balaclava, but it didn't conceal the unwarranted admiration in her eyes; he wouldn't accept it or admit that he gave a steaming shit about what Glummy Mummy's crotch fruit thought of him. When she looked at him like that, he prayed that the soldiers would gun him down before he'd a chance to prove that after all, he was nothing more than Malcolm's semi-tame psychopath, a mindless weapon to be used and discarded, while he remained, to her, the ridiculous hero who'd saved her in a riot. Before he had to put a bullet though the skull of some other wee yin who'd had the misfortune to be saddled with a murderous prick for a father.

Somewhere close by, a tank rumbled, treads tinkling over ice and the blown-out glass littering the street, and had he not been gripped then by a sudden, animalistic urge to live, to see this through, he'd have thought wryly on God's choice, from the paltry selection of his prayers, of which one to answer.

"You shouldn't be here," Abby said.

Malcolm gave her a sidelong glance above the rim of the cloth wrapped around his face before returning his attention to Sam. She was sleeping, dark hair fanned out over the pillow, the lines that pain had etched in her face softened by unconsciousness and a not inconsiderable quantity of moonshine. Sundeep had propped one of the tablets, tuned to the drone's broadcast, on a table by the bunk so that he and Malcolm—and Sam, if she woke—could watch it without leaving her side. "Yeah," he said. "I'm a fuckin' miracle, or so I've been told."

"No," she insisted, "I mean you shouldn't expose her. She's stablised, for now, but she's hardly out of the woods."

"I'm fine," Malcolm said. "She'll be fine. Or there'll be seven thousand kinds of hell to pay."

"She's right, Malcolm." Sundeep, for the hundredth time, adjusted the thin sheet covering Sam's shoulders. "When was the last time you even slept?" At Malcolm's glare, he added, "And where did Jamie go?"

"I don't keep him on a leash," Malcolm muttered, which was the wrong thing to say. It reminded him of Ollie, who hadn't been his friend, wasn't competent enough to be his enemy, hadn't even properly been his protégée since they'd both known from the beginning that all the little twat wanted was to take over—and yet he still felt like a father who'd buried his son. He curled over in his chair, fighting off another spell of vertigo, aware that he was coming unmoored, the only ones capable of holding him back now far beyond his reach. He had nowhere to run, no move left but to sit, watching the screen, and wait. He longed to pace, to expel some of the restless energy thrumming through him, but he was convinced that if he moved now, he'd vomit. He wanted to tear himself from the morbid deathwatch around Sam's bed and the flickering screen, to scream and hammer at the world until it reshaped itself before his rage, reach into its bloody, dripping miasma and just fucking sort it; felt himself on the verge of bursting free from the battered shell of his failing body to wreak havoc on the butchers who had brought them all to this.

The bunks swam in and out of focus. Needle-bright pain danced a staccato rhythm over his skull, and he fought to stay awake. He knew, without anyone having said it, that he was dying and it ought to have scared him even a little, but he'd shriek defiance with his last breath, determined, if he was to die, to take the Regime down with him, to be there watching when it fell.

The amorphous phantoms on the screen resolved themselves, at last, to a mask, Nicola's eyes. The shot was too close for him to identify the location. Someone had pinned the Union Jack behind her as a backdrop.

"Am I live?" she was asking. She seemed nervous. Even now his instinct was to reach for a mobile and get someone, preferably Jamie, to bollock some sense into her, but no, this was good, wasn't it? Made her seem approachable, human, made the Regime seem all the more fragile if it could be fuckered by the least competent figure in the history of British politics, and besides, Jamie was gone, Jamie was out there, somewhere, doing his dirty work, burying the bodies like always, and then he was shaking again. Fuck, Jamie, hurry up and put an end to this, I don't know how much longer—

"I'm on," Nicola said, cleared her throat, and pulled off her mask. Hair askew from static electricity, no makeup—good choice that, he'd forgotten to tell her—she'd summoned fire from some secret source and she looked ready to fight, ready to win in a way he'd not seen in years. "Right. I'm on. This is happening." She looked down, off-screen, then straight ahead. "My name is Nicola Murray, MP, elected representative of the people, and leader of Britain's Resistance." A pause; a sliver of triumph crossed her face. "And I have a message for the Chancellor."

"Run," Jamie hissed, shoving Ella ahead of him, but the daft girl just reached for her own rifle and stood back-to-back with him, braced against the first wave of soldiers spilling out from behind the tank.

"Not a fucking chance."

He edged out of the alley and opened fire into a wall of plexiglass, aiming for the narrow window between shields and helmets. The turret roared in response, and the ground in front of him erupted in a cloud of broken pavement and dust. He caught a breath, wiped grit and blood from his face, and one hand on the rifle, the other flailing for Ella, ran back down the alley.

There were soldiers everywhere now, a lock-step tide accompanied by the mosquito buzz of the drones. He hoisted himself up on the lid of a bin to get a better look. He entertained, briefly, the prospect of climbing up on the rooftops before he remembered that he was an underfed chain smoker in his forties and not cunting Daniel Craig. He'd never really stood a chance.

A voice in the back of his head—one that sounded irritatingly like Malcolm's—whispered that if he really believed in God, his heart wouldn't race like this, he would carry his faith wrapped around him like a shield as he walked, unflinching, into whatever awaited him.

Okay, he thought, you win, you bastard, you're fuckin' right after all. Hope you're happy.

A bright flash nearly blinded him; it took him a second to process what he was seeing. It was followed by another, and a clanging, arrhythmic cacophony that vied for dominance with the marching beat.

People, throngs of people, standing at windows and doorways, flashing makeshift reflectors made out of tinfoil, pounding on pots and pans and bins until the chorus drowned out all other sound. At the cross-street, a trickle of cars, all that was left of rush hour traffic, slowed to a halt before the tanks, honking horns and clogging the lanes to a standstill.

Night was falling and they'd emerged, yobs and rioters and regular Wombles too tired to fear anymore, louder than the guns, more numerous than the soldiers, a sea of joyous desperation that would swallow them both. He swayed against the wall, slid to the ground and slung an arm around Ella. She grinned up at him, and the crowd folded around them, absorbed them into its midst. He wondered, if they'd all known what he had planned, whether they'd still agree to hide him.

By the time the bullets started flying, they were safely away and standing amid overgrown shrubs, before a frozen stone fountain, in the care home's courtyard.

"This is where I go on without you," he told Ella.

She crossed her arms over her chest, the rifle dangling at her side. "Why? What's here?"

"Something ye dinnae need tae see, lass." Though he supposed she'd find out, eventually. Still. "You know how to jack a car?" She nodded. Good girl. "You know how to drive one? Okay, I need you tae go do that, now, and wait for me outside. If I'm not back inside the hour, or if there's any sign of the soldiers, any at all, you fuckin' go, right? You run."

She hesitated, and he thought he'd have to club her over the head with his rifle or some action film heroic wanker bollocks, but then she threw her arms around him. He felt her lips press against his cheek through the balaclava, loathed himself all the more for her admiration.

No one stopped him as he pushed through the glass doors, crossed the lobby and ran up the steps to the third floor. Abby was down in the tunnels; the night nurse hadn't started her shift. Miriam Atherton, left alone, a puddle of piss collected beneath her chair and a delicate gold necklace around her throat, was as still as the dead by the window in an otherwise empty room.

He stood before her, his own breath and her echo of it the only sounds. Were it not for the rise and fall of her chest, he'd have thought he was too late.

She gave a shuddering heave and flopped on the floor, her body twitching, face down, and he rushed to lift her, felt her spasm in his arms, vomit running from the corners of her mouth. She was choking, drowning in it, dying like his weans had died, like Malcolm almost had, and he'd come to kill her but instead he pushed her back up onto the chair, bent her head forward so that the sick spewed over her hospital gown and his coat.

He murmured, "Sorry sweetheart, fuck, I'm so fuckin' sorry," held her against him, her blind eyes imploring him, condemning him, signifying, he told himself, exactly fucking nothing.

Slowly, as if moving through brackish water, he knelt beside her, his gun to her ear, and opened the mobile. Snapped a picture, his face, unmistakably familiar to the Regime's surveillance apparatus, by hers, blank, uncomprehending, bone white. He found Atherton's number among the contacts.

Held his breath and hit send.

History—much later—will commit the following images to the collective memory of that day:

Nicola Murray, in what had been the London Studios, speaking directly into the camera. Picadilly Circus, where the crowds are gathering despite a heavy troop presence, every head turned to the projection across the LED screens. The atmosphere is tense, anticipatory. There are still some windows left un-smashed; by the following morning, there won't be any.

The Chancellor's arrival in a limo, flanked by guards and a canopy of microdrones, speaking into his mobile. The still that would be on the cover of every newspaper around the world (outside of the American press, which was largely focused on Bieber's latest drug-fueled breakdown), where he stood across from Murray, in the moments before his surrender on a live feed. He looks resigned, ancient; she, as he accepts her terms without argument, looks shell-shocked.

The street celebrations, of course, and the riots, and the liminal spaces where one can't be differentiated from the other. The obligatory images of the Chancellor, torn from walls and set ablaze. Effigies burned in the streets—there aren't many, but it makes for a great cover photo.

Owing to the efforts of Sam Cassidy, acting Press Officer for the provisional government, footage from within the Resistance's shelter itself, if it existed at all, is never made available to the media.

"Did he just say that? Did he just fucking say that?"

Malcolm raised his head. He'd drifted off again. There was shouting from somewhere down the corridor, and his first thought was that the Regime was invading. Every breath stabbed knives into his lungs; if they came, he decided, he'd be grateful for the sweet release of a bullet in the head.

Sam was awake, looking better than he felt. She grabbed his wrist, her fingers ice, as Sundeep rewound the feed on the screen.

He squinted at the Chancellor, still muttering into his mobile, at Nicola, the semi-circle around each of them with guns trained in a détente, the whole studio ready to explode into an HBO splatterfest at the slightest provocation.

Heard the words as they were spoken, but his fevered brain wouldn't accept them as truth.

"Shit," Sam whispered. "I think we just won."

"Oh," Malcolm said weakly. "Fuckin' fantastic."

And crumpled to the floor.

When he opened his eyes again, it was Sam's turn to sit a concerned, sleepless vigil by his bed. There was a crutch propped up against her chair, faintly outlined in the dim light. He noticed it, for some reason, before he noticed that he was soaking wet, and cold, his jaw itching with a growth of stubble, and lying in a proper bed instead of the thin, lumpy mattresses in the shelter.

He tried to speak, but his throat was parched and there was an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, She responded immediately to his distress, shushing him and stroking his shoulder, which, anyone other than her or Jamie, but he grudgingly conceded that she'd earned the dubious right. "You're okay, you're fine, the fever's broken." She hit a button on the arm of the bed, which was when he realised that he was in an actual hospital, and the pea soup fog in his head was some kind of chemical cocktail and not the dementia of the near-dead. "Christ, Malcolm."

His eyes followed the line of an IV. His hand was in a cast; the crushed bones hurt, in a dull, abstract way, as though the pain belonged to someone else, and his chest still felt like Fat Pat was sitting on it, but his breath, while shallow, came easier now. It was a relief of sorts, the matter of his own life or death now in the hands of some detached professional.

Sam, great PA that she was, brought him up to speed. "You're in a field hospital. It's all a mess out there, but they've let the Red Cross through the blockade. The UN's sending a peacekeeping taskforce. Half of the Regime officials are on the run, they strung up Weber from Tower Bridge—yeah, I thought you'd appreciate that—and the Chancellor's under house arrest." The girl, he thought, he should ask about the girl, but no, he'd ask Jamie about her when he got back. "There's still fighting; it's not over, but—" Her voice faltered. When she'd collected herself, she rattled off a laundry list of the various afflictions, malnutrition and pneumonia and plain exhaustion, that done their best to kill him, but he was already drifting, his attention on the faint draft from the window, like a cool hand against his face.

It was dark outside. He was accustomed to darkness, after four years without daylight, but something had changed. It was London come alive again, released from its prison, petrol exhaust and rain on tarmac that seeped past even the antiseptic stench of the ward and the sharp note of oxygen; the sky, through the streaked glass, empty of searchlights.

Right before he slid back into unconsciousness, it occurred to him to wonder where Jamie was.