Dawn was still several hours away from peeking its way over the Mersey and into the permanent cloud cover of mid February when Butcher and Cally Cuttler left the Undercroft.

‘I have a car down the road if you want a lift,’ he told her.

‘Not a chance in Hell I’m getting in a car with you, Mr Parsons,’ she told him, with a chuckle in her voice. ‘And if you so much as lay a hand on me I will scream.’

‘Oookay,’ replied Butcher, hands up.

‘Don’t be like that, you twat,’ she grumbled. ‘I literally just watched you wrestle an orc into submission and put a pistol in your pocket. You may not think you’re a bad motherfucker but, I can personally assure you, you are.’

Butcher considered that. To be fair, he had thought himself not too shabby on the bad motherfucker scale before he’d even had the Cuttler Procedure, but he had to admit that he probably wasn’t going to be winning friends in a positive way with current events.

‘Fine,’ he acknowledged. ‘We’ll walk. Tell me about your big brother.’

‘Which one?’

‘Gordon, obviously,’ said Butcher as they turned to walk along the road in drizzle-soaked twilight. ‘Ron may have his hidden depths but I’m pretty sure he’s not assembling an army of darkness in the Liverpool underworld.’

She laughed: a full-throated, startling laugh, and the sound of it was like a spring rain in a woodland glade dappled with morning sunlight. Butcher had to shake himself to stay focused.

‘No, you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘Ron is a good soul. Bit intense. Takes himself too seriously. But he’s a good guy. Gordon is a piece of work, though. I mean, I’ve heard of dysfunctional families, but I would cheerfully take that pistol of yours and put a bullet in his brain, given half a chance. I literally cannot believe that he and I came out of the same womb. Have you met my Mum?’

‘Yes,’ said Butcher, then added: ‘she hates me and for quite good reasons.’

‘She’s a gentle creature,’ said Cally, hands deep in the pockets of her hoodie as they walked. ‘Not too bright. Life just kind of beat her up until she gave in and took whatever it gave her.’

‘I thought it might be something like that,’ said Butcher. ‘What happened to you Dad?’

‘Prison,’ she said. ‘He was a con man. He was good at it, too, I think. But not very ambitious. He got five years for running a ponzi scheme then had a heart attack three months from early release. I was only three. I don’t remember him. Ron didn’t like him. I think he was Gordon’s role model, though. He thought Dad was a misunderstood genius.’

‘How does that connect him to this?’

‘The orcs were supposed to be Organic Reconnaissance and Combat units,’ she told him, and the penny finally dropped.

‘Orcs,’ he said, ‘of course. Like on the disk.’

‘What disk?’

‘The one I found in your guitar in your bedroom.’

‘Shit,’ she snapped. ‘You found that? You left it where it was?’

‘No,’ Butcher admitted. ‘I copied it and destroyed the original. Why?’

‘Copied it to where?’

‘Does that matter?’

She stopped and grabbed his arm. Her fragile grip was surprisingly strong as she turned him to face her.

‘Yes, it matters!’

‘Tell me about what was on it,’ he told her. ‘Who were the list of names?’

‘The first test subjects for CTS,’ she replied. ‘They were supposed to be volunteers, but...’

She shook her head and turned away.

‘Look, Mister Parsons…’

‘Call me Butcher.’

‘Seriously?’

‘It’s a long story,’ he sighed. ‘But Ron sent me to find you and now…’

‘Yeah, well, you found me,’ she snapped at him. ‘Maybe you should just go back and tell him I’m fine and that he should stop looking!’

She marched away, arms clenched across her chest, but Butcher refused to give up at this point.

‘No, come on, Cally!’ he called after her. She kept walking and he jogged to keep up. ‘I’m sorry, but your brother dragged me into this and now I’ve got a head full of beetles and there’s a tribe of orcs living under Liverpool and you’re an elf with a voice like… like most perfect thing there ever was. What the fuck’s an “elf” anyway?’

Cally muttered something under her breath as he caught up with her.

‘What?’

‘Extraneous Logic Form,’ said Cally, more clearly.

‘What does…?’ Butcher began, then gave up. ‘No, forget it. You’re right. This is too much bloody insanity. I’ll just go and hand myself in and go to prison and try not to think about the amnesia…’

‘The what?’

‘Oh, so now it’s your turn to ask questions?’ retorted Butcher.

‘You lost memories?’ she asked him. ‘When?’

‘A bit over two weeks ago, now,’ he admitted. ‘Seems like a lot longer. I was… overseas. I met a guy and thought he was up to no good, but then I tracked him down, and… nothing until I was on my way home.’

He left out the part where he apparently killed two people in the interim,

‘What guy?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

She seized him by the collar and pushed him up against the wall, fierce eyes looking up at him from chest-height.

‘What guy!?’

‘His name was Jonathan Arnold.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Butcher. ‘At least, I saw him get shot in the head in a video. It happened during my black-out phase. Did you know him?’

She let him go and shook her head, one hand pressed to her face, the other clutching at herself. She turned away.

‘Cally, I -’ Butcher started, mind trying to find purchase for something to say: a truth, a lie - anything that could start to make sense of all this.

But Cally just walked away, shoulder slumped in defeat and Butcher watched her go, the words that might stop her failing to form on his lips. Then she stopped.

‘Come on, then, Butcher,’ she called back without turning around. ‘Come with me and hear my story.’

*

‘I went to London after I graduated, to seek my fucking fortune,’ she told him, perched on the edge of a smart sofa, waving a cigarette in one hand. ‘I used up every lead and contact I had in a month, my rent was due and my money was running out, so I reached out to Gordon.’

They were in a rather nice apartment on the second floor of a converted Victorian warehouse behind several very seriously locked doors. The open plan living space had a pair of large arched windows with mock leading, looking out on the docks and, while Cally smoked, Butcher enjoyed the best coffee he’d had in two months. Rain tapped lightly but insistently on the outside.

‘His company had an office - in the Gherkin, of all places; bloody pretentious knob that he is - and I thought I could do a secretarial gig or something. I was surprised when he practically bit my hand off.

‘He needed an administrator to handle the data for a classified project. He rushed me through security vetting because I was his baby sister and dumped me in, well, a really nice office actually. Amazing view. All to myself. All I had to do was collate and process the data, export it to the reports and distribute it to a list of emails. It was very hush-hush. All the emails I wrote went to random lists of letters and numbers, not names. And the data was gobbledigook to me.

‘Then Ron got in touch.’

She stood up and went to the nearest window, staring out. She hugged herself, cigarette dangling precarious by her elbow.

‘I should hate him, really,’ she said, quietly, her melodious voice making clouds of puffing condensation on the glass that grew and shrank in time with her words. ‘This is all his fault. If he’d just fucked off and left it alone, I’d’ve spent a few months working for Gordon, then picked up a steady music gig, quit and gone on with having a life that made some fucking sense.’

She took a long drag on the cigarette and as she released the smoke, it seemed to dance and twist into improbable shapes around her.

‘But I don’t hate him,’ she went on, turning back to look at Butcher, leaning back against the glass. She was still wearing her hoodie but now it was shrugged off her shoulders, halfway down her back. Beneath it, she was wearing a thin white slip and her nipples made tiny peaks in the fabric. Her china white shoulders and neck were exposed and stark against the midnight black of her long hair. Green eyes stared at nothing. ‘He thought he was doing the right thing. He was worried about what Gordon was doing. I hadn’t even known he was working for him, and by the time he called me, he’d already quit in a huff. He said his reports were being ignored and that Gordon was risking people’s lives. I still didn’t know anything about what was going on, but, y’know… he was my brother. And I actually liked him. Unlike Gordon. Who was always a prick.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

‘So he sent me the disk.’

‘I had an old disk drive on my computer at work and all of the data came on one of those old disks, even though everything else was utterly high tech. There were all kinds of protocols I had to follow to extract the data and then the disk went into a shredder. But Ron sent me another disk. I just had to put Ron’s disk in first, then follow the protocols as normal for the regular disk, then put Ron’s disk back in. That was it.

‘I was going to take Ron’s disk back to Mum’s at the weekend, leave it in my guitar and Ron would pick it up when he was next there.’

‘But the week after I came back to work after leaving Ron the disk, I met Jonathan Arnold.’

‘Quick sense check,’ interrupted Butcher. ‘White guy, kinda brown hair, green eyes; bit shorter than me; posh accent; skinny and slimy at the same time?’

‘That’s the one,’ she agreed. ‘He was in my office. I remember that. I opened the door and he was sitting at my desk. He introduced himself very politely. I remember that clearly. He stood up and offered me his hand. I was confused that he was there and shook it reflexively, really.’

‘Then what?’ asked Butcher.

‘Then I was on a bus to Liverpool,’ said Cally. ‘I’d apparently had a row with my Mum I couldn’t remember, according to the texts on my phone, I’d quit the job she hadn’t known I’d had and given it all up to head back here.’

She stopped there and Butcher watched her carefully.

‘A memory gap?’

‘Right after meeting Mister Jonathan Arnold,’ she confirmed.

‘But, what about…?’ he gestured at his ears.

‘It started a week or so after I got here, although I didn’t realize it for a while,’ she explained. ‘My skin started to get paler than it already was. My freckles disappeared. I stared slimming down although I was eating normally. I was worried my flatmate was drugging me.’

‘You confronted him?’ Butcher asked. Craig had said they’d had a “falling out”. He should have pressed for details. Sloppy.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘But he denied it, so I moved out to stay with another friend.’

‘Sabina?’ he asked.

‘You’ve done your homework, Butcher,’ she replied. ‘Sure enough, it kept happening. I apologized to Craig but it was getting harder to go out in public. When my eyes and ears started to grow, I was going to show Sabina.’

‘What happened?’

‘I met an orc.

‘It was total chance. I’d had this weird halo thing over my head since the very start but no one else could see it. Like yours, but different. I thought I was hallucinating. Then I saw someone else with one, more like mine. I followed him, then confronted him.

‘He’d been through a change like mine, but worse - a lot worse. It was horrible what had happened to them.

‘They escaped from a facility near Manchester - a whole lot of them at once. They don’t like to talk about it, but it was the same time Arnold came for me. They killed people. And a lot of them died, too, as they tell it. They scattered. But Col kept a bunch of them together, with him. There were a few from Liverpool among them and they knew the city well. They planned to come back, find a place to live.

‘They planned to hunt people here.’

‘Hunt people?’ asked Butcher. Was it more than just the one of them? Were all of those orcs out hunting people at night? There couldn’t possibly be enough homeless folk that it wouldn’t be noticed.

‘You need to understand this more than anything else, OK, Butcher?’ said Cally, stubbing out her cigarette and plopping down on the seat opposite him. He put down his empty coffee mug and resisted asking for a smoke. ‘To be an orc is to be in near-constant pain. Their bodies burn from the inside out and there are only two things that ease the pain.

‘Eating human flesh - cooked, raw, dried, doesn’t matter. Even just a tiny bit provides relief, but if they really chow down they can go a week or more without needing any more - without needing anything at all, in fact, except a little water. No other meat works and no one knows why. Human flesh works even if they don’t know it’s human. We tested it. Other food fills the stomach, but it doesn’t ease the pain.’

‘What’s the second thing?’ asked Butcher, leaning forward.

‘I think you can guess.’

‘Elfsong,’ he replied. She double finger-gunned at him.

‘Hence why you can’t leave,’ he went on, nodding. ‘You’re the only thing that stops them from hunting. Except, the whole reason I found you was because one of them was hunting.’

‘The guy with the knife you brought?’

He nodded.

‘That’s Ozzie,’ she said, sighing and reaching for the pack of Marlboros and her lighter. ‘He wants to get away from Liverpool. He’s got a mate, Sandra. And I heard they had a baby although I’ve not seen it.’

‘Sandra’s an orc?’

‘So’s the baby,’ she confirmed. ‘The first orc baby that we know of, although there’ll be more, the way those horny fuckers go at it sometimes. Ozzie and Sandra proved it was possible. But Ozzie wants to find an out-of-the-way place - an uninhabited island or a cave in a wood or something, I don’t know - and live as normal a life as he can.’

‘So why the hunting?’

‘He’s trying to build up a stockpile, I’m told,’ said Cally, lighting up. ‘He’s trying to dry and preserve it. Human jerky. If he can get enough, well, like I said - it only takes a little to ease the pain. He wants to live off the land the rest of the time. Raise chickens or pigs or something. Grow veg.

‘Most of them thing he’s fucking insane and want him to stop before he gets caught and the whole thing comes tumbling down,’ she went on. ‘That’s why they let you in when they saw his knife. They thought either you’d done him in or, at least, with no knife he’d struggle to keep hunting and have to come back to the fold.’

‘Cally,’ he asked, carefully. ‘Does orcbrew have human flesh in it?’

She chuckled, and this time it was the sound of dark clouds gathering and the distant rumble of thunder.

‘Just a little blood,’ she confirmed. ‘They raided a hospital bank and keep a stock in a fridge in the Undercroft. Otherwise, the reason it’s so vile is because they’re shit at brewing and will literally drink anything if it’s got a little blood in it.’

Butcher got up.

‘Bathroom’s over there on the left if you need to throw up!’ said Cally, but Butcher ignored her and walked over to the window. The rain was picking up again, with wind coming up the Mersey flinging it hard against the glass, but he could see out through the smeared glass to the water of the docks. The estuary was out there somewhere, beyond the warehouses and the rain haze. Butcher needed some time to put this all together. He was no detective. He was just a professional voyeur who was good with his fists. With small pieces of information at a time, he could leap to a conclusion as well as anyone, but an information dump like this… It needed good food, good drink and a good night’s bloody sleep to process it.

Just as he was thinking that, a new voice interrupted him.

‘Good morning, darling, who’s your friend?’

He turned, reaching for the pistol, to see a man just walking out of the bedroom, putting on a tie. He was middle aged and paunchy, with male-pattern baldness and an accent that was more Lancashire than Merseyside. But before Butcher could speak, Cally opened her mouth.

‘There’s no one else here, Roger,’ she sang to him in a peculiar tone that seemed to settle in the pit of Butcher’s stomach and rattle at the back of his head all at the same time. ‘We had a fantastic night of sex again that you can tell all your friends about at the office. Off you go to work.’

Roger visibly brightened up.

‘My god, girl, I don’t know how you do those things, but you are amazing!’ he said, finishing his tie. He strode over to the sofa, ignoring Butcher, arms stretched wide to embrace her.

‘You’ve firmly groped my arse and I’ve responded with sensual enthusiasm, Roger,’ Cally sang at him. ‘Go the fuck to work and leave me alone.’

He grinned and walked away, blowing her a kiss.

‘I’ll be off back to the wife this evening, remember,’ he said as he left. ‘Don’t get up to mischief at the weekend!’

Then he disappeared through the door to the stairwell and Butcher watched him go.

‘What the actual fuck?’ he asked.

‘It’s powerful stuff, elfsong,’ said Cally. ‘And no, I’ve no idea how it works. Only works on humans, though. I can’t do that to orcs.’

‘I almost hate to ask,’ said Butcher, eyes still glued on the apartment’s door where Roger had disappeared, ‘because my head is already far, far too full, but what’s an Extraneous Logic Form?’

Cally sighed.

‘I’m not going to pretend that I really know,’ she admitted. ‘It’s something the orcs recognized. There were three types of test subject in the facility where they were held. The Organic Reconnaissance and Combat model was the orcs - the desirable outcome. It’s what they were trying to get, they think. If a subject had the smaller frame, they were classified as “generic obsolete bodyform”, called gobs. And once in a while there was an extraneous logic form. The testers didn’t like the elfs. The orcs only saw a few, but they were all taken away, usually with serious violence.’

‘OK,’ sighed Butcher. ‘Can I take a photo of you? If you’re not going to come with me, I need to persuade Ron that you’re still alive.’

She hesitated and Butcher saw her shoulders hunch up instinctively against the idea of being seen.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No photo. But tell him about the disk and the data I stole for him. Tell him I said “Sir, this is a Wendy’s”.’

‘What?’

‘He’ll know it was me.’

*

Butcher lay on his hotel bed, still half-clothed. The screen on his laptop was blank. A parking ticket was discarded on the floor. A tray of empty dishes lay beside him. His eyes were closed and a gentle snore escaped him as he slept.

One of the phones on his bedside table suddenly lit up and the cheerful ringtone cut through his brain, but he jerked upright and, fumbling, grabbed for the phone, which tumbled from the table onto the floor, swiftly followed by the flailing Butcher.

‘Fuck!’ he muttered.

‘Well, hello to you, too,’ said Emmy.

‘Damn, I was hoping it was Ron,’ said Butcher, sitting up and putting the phone to his ear.

‘I love you too, darling. Seriously, though, can I get my phone back?’ she asked. ‘I’ve spent the week calling everyone I know to tell them not to call my number, but you’ve got a shit-load of things on that that I really, really need.’

‘Help me find Ron and it’s all yours,’ said Butcher with a grin. The sleep had done him good and he was feeling at peak efficiency again, rude awakening notwithstanding.

‘We’ve already been over this, Butcher,’ sighed Emmy. ‘I’m not going to help you catch my friend. And I’m not going to help him kill you, either.’

‘Ah, but things have changed, Emmy,’ promised Butcher, standing up and turning on the hotel kettle for another coffee.

‘What’s changed?’

‘Well, for a start, Ron and I have a deal,’ he explained. ‘He’s agreed to come in and talk to BRS if I can find his sister.’

‘So?’

‘I found his sister,’ said Butcher. ‘And she’s alive. But it’s complicated. And I mean seriously complicated. More complicated than you and me, by a long way.’

‘We’re not in a relationship, Butcher,’ she growled at him. ‘You are so not my type.’

‘You tried to kill me. I tied you up and stole your phone. Like I said: it’s complicated.’ He laughed, and immediately thought of Cally laughing. ‘She needs Ron’s help and unless he calls this number, I’ve no way to get in touch with him. Have you any idea where I could find him?’

‘I can’t trust a thing you say, Butcher,’ she replied. ‘Ron told me your Bluff skill. You could lie for Team Britain.’

‘I used to,’ agreed Butcher. ‘What can I say that would persuade you I’m telling the truth?’

‘Nothing you could say will make me think you’re telling the truth,’ replied Emmy, and Butcher deflated. ‘But…’

‘What?’

‘Meet me, and give me back my phone, and I’ll tell you where to find Ron,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ he agreed. ‘Where?’

*

Butcher made his way down to the hotel lobby to check out, pondering the things he’d learned. He had considered calling Miss Cook, but couldn’t decide what he could and couldn’t tell her without being accused of having gone insane. Or, worse still, tipping their hand to the fact that he knew about the orcs and their kind. For all he knew, BRS was in it with CTS - implicated in every part of the story from start to finish. He’d need to call Cook at some point, he decided, but not today. Maybe tomorrow, after he met with Emmy in Birmingham.

He settled the bill with his BRS card, picked up his bags again and strolled out of the front door to the pavement where he found DC Malik waiting for him, Butcher’s pistol dangling from one finger.

‘Hello, Mister Parsons,’ he said with a smile. ‘Or should I say “Major Evans”? Perhaps you’d like to come with me?’