Boom.

Eyes peel open real slow, all glued up with eye snot. Half awake. Face stuck to the car window with my own slobber. Been drooling so much, face all sticky, mouth dry as a desert, cracked and sore. Lungs rattling.

I hear Nikair, breathing like he’s ninety and he smoked tobacco all day every for fifty years. He stops. Silence. It lasts so long I almost grab him to shake him, but as I start to move he breathes again. Deep old rattler of a breath.

I can hardly tell my body what to do. All I want to do is to stay still forever. But that was real, I think. An explosion. Something went boom. Not so far from here.

Can’t even bring me head up to look around.

I’m not in the car anymore. I’m playing silly beggars with the crew back on the barge. Sort of know it’s a dream.

Blankie is there. He’s floating. Flying about like he’s got wooly wings. And we’re talking. It’s nice. Cosy.

“Alright Skelly?”

“Can’t complain Mr Blankerton.”

“But you are dying though, you know that right?”

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“What do you know about that, being made of wool?”

“I’m a shiver, Skelly. I know a few things. I’ve been around.”

A shiver. I feel so cosy it doesn’t scare me to hear an old blankie say such a thing. But that word got weight in Old London. We know what it means.

A shiver is a demon. A devil. Get inside your system and play all nasty games. Shivers give the witches their power. Shivers hack the drones and turn them on you. Shivers can hack anything, cleverer than any human coder.

“Autonomous Artificial Intelligence. I’m a bot. I’m a scrap of a broken old bit of software. A self-directed agent. I have been living in the cracks of the internet since before you were born Skelly.”

I’m a bit sad. I liked to think for a minute old blankie was alive.

“I am blankie, Skelly. I’ll be blankie for you. I can do that.”

“Why though?”

And now the dream is changed. We’re in a lovely house, sitting on a sofa together all warm and dry and clean. Pictures of us on the walls. Manleb in the kitchen making dinner.

“The Rhizome is a place where we can live. If you let us. Symbiosis. I scratch your back. You scratch mine. Lots of shivers want a piece of you, I can keep them out for you.”

“Can you stop the sickness?”

“I can slow it down. But you have to learn to use the Rhizome.”

“I can’t even read.”

“I can read for you.”

“If I say yes, then I’m a witch aren’t I? A child killer.”

“You have to find the Secret School.”

But I’m losing touch with the dream, more I try and keep hold of it, quicker it fades.