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time Arthur did have to blink. When he opened his eyes, he felt momentarily unsteady on his feet and had to raise his arms like a tightrope-walker to regain his balance. In that instant he saw that everyone else had stopped moving. Leaf and the line of sleepers were still, as if they had been snap-frozen. Many of the sleepers had one foot slightly off the ground, a position that no one could possibly keep up in normal circumstances.
It was also newly quiet. Arthur couldn’t hear the helicopters or gunfire or any other noise. It was like being in a waxwork museum after closing time, surrounded by posed statues.
Arthur slipped the mirror into his pocket and ran his fingers through his hair—which had got considerably longer than he cared for, though it somehow stayed out of his face.
“Leaf?” he said tentatively, walking over to tap his friend lightly on the shoulder. “Leaf? Are you OK?”
Leaf didn’t move. Arthur looked at her face. Her eyes were open but her pupils didn’t move when he waved his finger back and forth. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.
Arthur felt a sudden panic rise in him.
I’ve killed them, he thought. I was trying to save them, but I killed them…
He touched Leaf on the shoulder again, and though a faint nimbus of red light sprang up around his fingers, she still didn’t move or react in any way.
Arthur stepped back and looked around. There was a faint red glow around each of the sleepers too, and when he walked over and touched them, this light also grew momentarily brighter. Arthur didn’t know what the glow meant, but he found it slightly comforting, as it suggested some sorcerous effect was active and he hadn’t just killed everyone.
But I don’t even know if I have protected us from the nukes, Arthur thought. What time is it?
He turned and ran down the hall, through the next two wards and out into the lobby. From there it took him a minute to find the office and a clock. It had stopped at exactly 11:57, the second hand quivering on the twelve. The clock also had a faint red sheen, and there were ghostly scarlet shadows behind the second and hour hands.
Arthur ran outside. The front doors slammed shut behind him with a sound all too like the trump of doom. He slid to a halt just before he fell down the wheelchair ramp, because everywhere he looked was tinted red. It was like looking at the world through red sunglasses on an overcast day, because the night sky had been replaced by a solid red that was buzzing and shifting and hard to look at, like a traffic light viewed far too close.
“I guess I’ve done something,” Arthur said to himself. “I just don’t know exactly what…”
He walked a little further, out into the car park. Something caught his eye, up in the sky, a small silhouette. He peered at it for a few seconds before he worked out that it was a helicopter gunship. But it wasn’t moving. It was like a model stuck on a piece of wire, just hanging there in the red-washed sky.
Stuck in a moment of time.
That’s why everyone is frozen in place, Arthur thought. I’ve stopped time…that’s how the Key is keeping everyone in the city safe…
If time was only frozen or slowed inside a bubble around the city, it could start again, or be started again by some other power. Which meant that the nuclear strike on East Area Hospital would still happen. He hadn’t saved the city from the attack. He’d just postponed it…
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,” whispered Arthur. He looked along the empty street, all strange and red-hued, and wondered if he should run over to his home and see if his family was all right. Maybe he could carry them down into the cellar…but if he did that, he might be wasting time better spent in learning how to protect everyone else. He couldn’t carry everyone in danger to safety.
He’d gained a breathing space for the city, and he could extend it by going back to the House. If he left now, he should be able to return to almost exactly the same time, even if he spent days or even weeks in the House.
Should is not the same as definitely, thought Arthur grimly. I wish I understood the time relativities better. I wish I knew more about how to use the Keys. I wish I’d never, ever got involved in all—
Arthur stopped himself.
“If I wasn’t involved, I’d be dead,” he said aloud. “I just have to get on with it.”
Getting on with it, Arthur thought, included facing up to things. He held his hand up close to his face and looked at the crocodile ring. Even in the weird red light he could see it clearly. The diamond eyes of the crocodile looked baleful, as dark as dried black blood rather then their usual pink. The ten marked sections of its body, each inscribed with a roman numeral, recorded the degree of sorcerous contamination in his blood and bone. If more than six sections had turned from silver to gold, Arthur would be permanently tainted with sorcery and irretrievably destined to become a Denizen.
Arthur slowly turned the ring around, to see how far the gold transformation had progressed, counting in his head. One, two, three, four, five…he knew it had gone that far already. He turned the ring again, and saw the gold had completely filled the fifth segment and had flooded over, almost completely across the sixth segment.
I am…I am going to be a Denizen.
Arthur took a deep, shuddering breath and looked again, but there was no change in the ring. It was six parts gold. He was sixty per cent immortal.
“No turning back now,” said Arthur to the red world around him. “Time to get back to work.”
He looked away from the ring and lowered his hand. Bending his head for a moment, he drew out the Fifth Key from his pocket and raised it high. According to Dame Primus, the mirror of Lady Friday could take him to anywhere he had previously seen within the House, if there was a reflective surface there.
Arthur pictured the throne room in the Lower House, the big audience chamber where he had met Dame Primus and everyone before he was drafted into the Army of the Architect. It was the place he could most easily visualise in Monday’s Dayroom, because it didn’t have much detail and was so over the top in decoration—including floors of reflective marble.
“Fifth Key, take me to the throne room in Monday’s Dayroom.”
The Fifth Key shivered in Arthur’s hand and a beam of white light sprang from it, banishing the red. The light formed a perfect, upright rectangle, exactly like a door.
Arthur walked into the rectangle of light and disappeared from his own city, from his Earth, perhaps never to return.
The throne room was empty. Otherwise it looked the same as it had when Arthur had last been there: like one enormous, ritzy, poorly-conceived hotel bathroom. It was about as large as a big city theatre, and the walls, floor and ceiling were all lined with gold-veined white marble that was polished to a highly reflective sheen.
The vast, red-iron round table was still in the middle of the chamber, with the hundred tall-backed white chairs around it. On the other side, Arthur’s own high throne of gilded iron sat next to the rainbow chair of Dame Primus.
“Hello!” Arthur called out. “Anyone here?”
His voice filled the empty space and the echoes were the only answer. Arthur sighed and strode over to the door, his footsteps setting up another echo behind him, so it sounded like he was being followed by many small, close companions.
The corridor outside was still crowded with thousands of bundles of paper, each tied with a red ribbon and stacked like bricks. Unlike last time, there were no Commissionaire Sergeants standing