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  “There’s nothing to see here!” Mace was chorusing to the cafeteria in his American cop voice. He’d turned back to his friend and wiped his nose. “Did I ever tell you about the Lazeria map?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he plunged into a wide-eyed account. “Under the North Pole—it’s been proved, this has—I’m one hundred and thirty percent serious, brotherman—there’s a nine-hundred-yard-deep canyon into which meltwater drains. The earth under Alaska is actually hollow, and the United States government … ”

  Preston had put his head in his hands. “Mace,” he’d said wearily.

  Mace had faltered for a second or two, then brightened. “What about the Ellwood kid, then?” he persisted. “A genuine Manchester mystery.”

  Preston sighed. Mace had tried this tale before as well. “It’s yesterday’s news now,” he’d said then, swatting it aside. “Just another missing person case. Leave it.”

  Mace had given an indignant choke on his breakfast. “Just another missing person? Not when it’s a politician’s kid that does the vanishing. It’s unsolved is what I’m saying.”

  The two of them had fallen silent then and eaten hash browns together for a moment, sharing the last of the hot chocolate. Then Mace had said, “We really pissed her off, didn’t we?” his face empty of its usual mischievous glow.

  The memory felt suffocating. A squall of rain drummed at his window, but Preston opened it and gulped at the air. Cars were hissing through the puddles, past Victoria station toward the outline of the Strangeways jail in the distance. Somewhere below, a neighbor’s radio was tuned to the news.

  “Greater Manchester Police have issued a recent photo of missing Manchester schoolgirl Alice Wilde,” it said, “and have appealed for witnesses who may have seen the sixteen-year-old girl between nine and ten o’clock on Friday evening. One witness claims to have seen the girl on Deansgate … ” There was a scratch of white noise as the station was changed, then eighties music. Preston felt his heart lurch and then sink.

  Alice on Deansgate, Friday night. Just hours after she’d left the room he was standing in now, swinging her schoolbag over her shoulder, wound up tight as if she was waiting for something to start. “Will you promise me something? If the cops come, don’t tell them about this.”

  Preston looked at his marked hand.

  What if I went night-walking and didn’t come back?

  There was something he couldn’t quite remember, he knew—it was hiding in his head somewhere. Something that had happened to him.

  Teeth like dice in a plastic cup, he thought. Lift your eyes. Goggles like saucers. Sleep tight.

  “And I woke up in my clothes,” finished Preston with an empty shrug.

  He’d told Elliot Mason everything he could remember. The two of them were drinking chocolate milk and kicking about in Mace’s bedroom, waiting for the night. Mace’s parents’ flat was out on the edge of the Green Quarter behind the movie theater and casino: a galley kitchen, three bedrooms, and a TV room. A balcony with potted plants and a view of Strangeways. The place was small and warm and smelled of cooking. It was Monday evening, a cold and drizzly end to a gray day. Mace’s mum was making them something for dinner. Later, they were going for a night walk—together.

  Mace’s folder of theories was out. He’d been regrouping the material. There was a pile of UFO-related stuff, Preston could see—Area 51 and the Roswell incident prominent among them.

  “But you remember being in the center of town, yeah? Walking in the rain. Back Half Moon, you said? M.I.S.T.?”

  Preston shrugged. “Yeah.” In truth, his memory had been coming back in parts during most of the day. Back Half Moon Street, the fire escape, and the kink in the alleyway ahead that took it around a corner into darkness. The high fence. Shattered teeth rattling in a plastic cup.

  Mace grinned. “That’s what I thought. Look at this,” he said, closing his bedroom door more firmly and carefully than usual. “This is secret societies and groups.” He knelt on the floor, leafing through a collection of printed documents.

  “Please,” Preston said with a wry smile, placing his palms together in mock prayer. “Don’t give me the Illuminati lecture again, right?”

  Mace flipped him off and flashed a grin. “I’ve been looking into M.I.S.T.,” he said, clearing his throat. “And there’s very little information out there.”

  Preston sat on the floor, his back to the radiator. “Go on,” he said. “Surprise me.”

  “It’s an acronym: the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. M.I.S.T. It specializes in”—here he checked his notes, flicking back and forth among the scribble—“Ah! ‘Technological prototyping and development for criminal justice,’ it says here.”

  Preston remembered the light on in the high window. “Criminal justice—like DNA testing, or something?”

  “Could be,” said Mace. “I thought of that. But I can’t find anything specific on their website.” Mace’s laptop was open on the floor among the research material. He rattled the space bar until it sprang into life. Preston scrolled up and down, clicked his way through a couple of pages. The M.I.S.T. website was as bland and unhelpful as a company could be without appearing secretive: an impenetrable mission statement that finished with an italicized slogan, Making our cities safer; an Executive Board Members section that amounted to a list of hyperlinked names that meant nothing; a series of photographs of laboratories with happy-looking white-coated staff. Even the Contact Us section was sparse: a single telephone number and email address.

  “Is this a front?” Preston found himself asking.

  Mace clapped his hands together. “The skeptic is convinced!”

  “Nowhere near. It’s a crappy website. Thousands of companies have those.”

  Mace raised a finger. “There’s something else.” There was an edge to his friend’s voice. He leaned over the laptop and brought up another tab. Preston recognized it immediately: satellite images of the city.

  From above, Manchester looked like a dropped plate. As if it was held together by masking tape and glue, as if two cities playing chicken had crashed into each other, crushing the River Irwell between them. An instantly recognizable chaos unlike any of the places Mum had written articles from. There she was, back in his mind suddenly—smiling, leaning against a fountain somewhere or looking out over a Mediterranean bay. Preston hid his eyes a moment, pressing a palm across them. Grip it.

  He shrugged. “And?” he said, swallowing hard.

  Mace zoomed in.

  As the city drew closer it crystalized. There was the broad stroke of the Deansgate road, the bland hull of the shopping center, the big wheel in Exchange Square, the gun shops up in the Shudehill district. The Midland hotel, where the New Conservative politicians would gather, and Manchester Central, the big convention center; the streets and squares and postal districts packed tightly in around the River Irwell and the Ship Canal—all present and correct.

  “I don’t get it. What am I looking at?”

  Mace said quietly, “Here,” and tapped the screen with the tip of his pen. Preston recognized Half Moon Street—the section circled in Alice’s notebook. Then he realized why Mace had fallen so strangely silent.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “That’s not possible.”

  But it was. He was seeing it with his own eyes.

  The screen displayed Half Moon Street all right—but it was a stunted little alleyway that petered out at the edge of an empty lot. No bend left into the darkness, no high fence, no sunken garden or gated parking lot, no labs. Just a derelict patch of waste ground.

  “Could this be out of date?” he tried, peering at the screen for an explanation. By way of answer, Mace pointed at Chetham’s and Victoria station, both recently reconstructed. Building work had finished only a matter of months ago, but there they were, fresh and new. And yet, half a mile up Deansgate, there was a hole where M.I.S.T. should be. “But that’s impossible,” Preston found himself fruitlessly repeating. “How can you do
that?”

  Mace, for once, was short of suggestions. “GPS was developed in the States in the nineties,” he said with a shrug. “It’s relatively old tech. But there’s a European equivalent—the Galileo satellite navigation system. It’s possible that we might be using that to feed historical data into search engines to keep things concealed.”

  “So—we’re seeing Half Moon Street ten years ago?”

  “Five or ten, something like that. Basically, images could be overlaid so that we see the past, not the present.”

  Staying over at Mace’s place was a phrase that had been used to conceal all sorts of things over the last few years. Trying to sneak into a club on South King Street? Staying over at Mace’s place. Going to watch Gilligan’s crappy punk band and having a secret drink with Quinn afterward? Staying over at Mace’s place. But staying over at Mace’s place had never been cover for breaking into a government building. And that, surely, was what M.I.S.T. was, Preston thought as he gazed up at the fire escape toward the roof at the side of Back Half Moon.

  Who else could arrange for satellite images to be doctored or removed?

  “Christ,” exclaimed Mace, looking back over his shoulder. “I’ve never noticed this street before. It’s like Narnia.”

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Preston said, thinking, The unwatched life. “The fence I told you about is just round this corner.”

  Mace fumbled for his phone, tapped an app open, and started speaking. “A Monday night in October,” he said, his voice low. “Approaching twenty-three hundred hours. Light rain. This is Back Half Moon Street, off Deansgate, Manchester.”

  “Mace. What the hell?”

  Mace pulled up. He indicated the phone. “Voice memo.”

  “I figured that. What for?”

  “Brotherman,” said Elliot Mason with mock patience, “we’re on the edge of a major discovery here. I want it captured. Do you mind?” He held the phone up, raised an eyebrow, and spoke into it. “Cloud cover light. Visibility good. The alleyway is crowded with bins and detritus … ”

  “Detritus?” Preston laughed. “What do you think you’re in, Planet Earth?” He stopped suddenly and the words dried in his mouth. There was something happening in the sunken garden.

  The area was still huddled down below them in a cloak of darkness beneath the white face of the M.I.S.T. building, punctuated by a succession of half-illuminated floor lights. But this time there were people in the garden. Preston sought the cover of the alley wall and pressed himself against it.

  Mace drew up at his shoulder. “What?”

  Preston nodded down into the dark space below. His memory was returning clearer than ever. “Last night,” he whispered, “I saw a boy here. He had goggles on.” Preston found his breath came out at a tremble.

  Mace regarded him seriously. “So who are these guys?” He squinted. “Three men,” he said into his phone. “Two dressed in dark colors.”

  Those two looked similar to the man with the wasp in his gloves. They were checking the steps. The other one seemed to be a lab technician, white coat over a light-blue shirt, dark tie, white hair, and a wide nose. Preston couldn’t be sure but they looked to him to be in the exact spot he’d seen the kid with the goggles.

  “They’re checking the place where I saw the dead kid I told you about,” Preston said, and as he did so, more memories returned. The chattering teeth of the boy, the curve of his shuddering shoulders. This is no place for a schoolkid. “I have to find out what’s going on,” he said, almost to himself. Preston shuffled forward to the fence and crouched. He was pretty sure he couldn’t be seen.

  Behind him from the safety of the alleyway, Mace hesitated for a moment, kicking his sneakers at the corner of a puddle. “Dammit,” he said eventually, and crept forward to join his friend.

  Preston stayed low and pressed his face against the rain-streaked struts of the fencing. The conversation seemed to be drawing to a close. One of the men was already inside; the man in the lab coat still held the fire door open. Preston wondered what rooms might be beyond the door. Labs? Storage facilities?

  Mace tapped a couple of tabs of chewing gum into his palm and threw his head back, pressing his cupped hand against his mouth. Preston glared him into silence. Mace chewed, raised both hands—calm down—and crept close. “Did I ever tell you about … ” he began.

  “Jesus, will you give it a rest?” Preston hissed. The man at the top of the stairs had his eyes fixed on the skyline of the buildings up above their heads. If he dropped his gaze to the mouth of the alley and they were seen, they’d have some explaining to do.

  “Those guys down there are putting in some serious late shifts,” Mace whispered, “keeping their jobs pretty damn secret, don’t you think?” He held out his phone, switched on his camera. “I’m going to get some footage.”

  They both watched the sentinel figure of the man in the lab coat for a second. He seemed to be concluding a conversation with the other figure and beckoning him inside. There were low lights on within the building. The figures had moved indoors, but the fire door was still wide open. Preston caught a glimpse of something inside before it swung shut. Something metallic. Something big.

  “Got it!” Mace said, drawing back into the alley.

  “Got what?”

  “I’ll show you. Let me slow it down.” They huddled around the screen of Mace’s phone. The picture was poor. It wobbled and in the foreground the bars of the fence kept blocking the view. The fire door pixelated and blurred.

  “See?” Mace said, jabbing an index finger against the screen. “Machinery.”

  Whatever it was, it was the full height of the room, a squat gunmetal-colored chamber with huge industrial-looking iron joists bracing it. It reminded Preston of one of those haulage crates you see on long trains. There was a glimpse of banks of computers, just beyond it, before the door swung shut.

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t like the look of it, brotherman,” Mace said. “There’s gear just like this holed up in the Nevada desert. I’m one hundred and thirty percent serious. The American military is—”

  “We have to check it out,” Preston said. “Whatever it is.” Alice’s message wouldn’t leave his mind. Sorry. Going in. He’d tried to reply to it twice since the interview with DCI Sinclair. But the messages wouldn’t deliver. Preston couldn’t figure out why. Or what she meant. Going in where? He squinted at Mace’s jittering footage again. There was definitely something beyond that door.

  “Are you crazy?” Mace was saying. “If we go down there, they’ll see us for sure.”

  “Maybe there’s another way,” Preston said. Lift your eyes, he thought. Over the rooftops, clouds eddied and rolled, city lights turning their bellies yellow. Farther up, a plane scored a straight line of vapor across the night. Before all that, though, was the fire escape.

  Preston studied it. “Follow me,” he said.

  At the top of the fire escape there was a chest-high wall, beyond which was the flat roof of the M.I.S.T. building.

  Mace panted and chewed gum as he joined his friend after their climb, looking out along Deansgate toward the Beetham Tower. He had his phone out again, covering times, dates, cloud cover. “The city skyline is dominated by creaking steel rigging,” he was saying, looking out across it, misty-eyed. “Manchester. City of cranes and rain. Cranes lifting towers floor by floor, block by block, from Castlefield to Gorse Hill. Cranes beyond the goods warehouses and the conference center in Barbirolli Square. Stands of cranes over by Salford … ”

  “Can we get a move on?”

  Mace scowled. “My colleague Preston Faulkner also present,” he said.

  The air was chill and fresh up on the roof, and the noises of the night echoed: the high-pitched hum of electric streetcars, the wail of cop cars and ambulances, the shriek of drinking girls from the street pitching in and out of taxis. Up beyond the pollution, stars glittered like diamonds in dust.

  “How is this going to work, exactly?”


  Preston paused, assessing their options. The roof was windy and wet, but walled. There was a doorway, again with a security strip, across the other side of the roof. Something caught his eye, and he padded across to the door.

  Even in the darkness, the tag was visible. Preston leaned in close. It had been sprayed onto the brickwork using a stencil—an open hand with long twisting fingers and an eye in the center of the palm. The Jupiter Hand. Preston traced the image with the tip of his fingers. This meant Ryan’s crew. And where Ryan went, Alice did.

  Ryan. Maybe he was at the heart of all this.

  After the notebook incident. A half-decent game of football had broken out on the backfield—a rarity—and Preston was watching it, hands in pockets, waiting for Mace to bring him some chips from the cafeteria.

  Ryan was at his shoulder without him noticing. When he spoke, Preston had jumped. “Shitty thing to do,” he’d said, “looking through other people’s stuff.”

  Preston hadn’t known what to say. He’d been angry. It was none of Ryan’s damn business. What gave him the right to pass comment on the way they conducted their friendship? He might have moved out of his parents’ place and gotten all grown up, but he’d only been going out with her for a couple of months. They’d known her for years. He’d boiled in silence for a moment, glaring at Ryan’s floppy hair, his earring, then he’d said something childish.

  “Hey,” Ryan had said, mock impressed. He’d blown his bangs out of his eyes and folded his arms. “Big man. Stop, you’re scaring me.”

  Preston had squirmed with embarrassment but tried not to show it. He hated that tears seemed to come to his eyes at times like this. “Well, if you hadn’t stolen my closest friend … ” he’d said, but then stopped himself.

  Ryan had grinned. “Stolen your friend? Jesus, Faulkner, you’re such a kid.” He shook his head, watching the footy. He’d smelled of cigarettes. “Go get dead,” he’d said.