Julius’s body floats gently on the water. Thomas expected it to sink. He was surprisingly heavy to carry, each withered limb a deadweight swinging on its joint. Once they lower him, however, the Soot is as though magnetised by him, dresses and shrouds him, like a sodden sheet, so that the whole pool becomes one with his lean figure. They leave Thomas to fetch the blood. Charlie is sitting on the pool’s edge, his hands and feet in the water, holding on to Julius and supporting his head as though it is important that he does not drown. Livia, in turn, has her hands on Charlie’s shoulders, to reassure him and help him up, when the time comes. And so Thomas goes to retrieve the blood in its little beaker, swishes it around like wine in a glass. How easy it would be even now to hurl it across the room, let it shatter in a dirty corner; or stumble, fall, as though by accident, and crush it under his weight.

They assemble at the pool’s edge. Charlie sitting, Livia hunched, Thomas upright. It would make a good picture, Thomas thinks; the black of the pool, the dull, pulsing light of the lamps overhead. Charlie’s expression has changed in the past few minutes. The fierceness is gone; there has been time to think. He has opened some door inside himself, it flashes through Thomas, and doubt has crept in. Perhaps, then, he will recant. Thomas is surprised to find he is disappointed as well as relieved.

Charlie looks up at him, too honest to mask his doubt.

“We can’t have it, can we? Just a little Smoke. Enough to make us human?” He pauses, frowns, corrects himself. “But that’s just it, isn’t it? How much is enough?”

He moves his hand through the dun liquid, scoops some up, holds it next to Julius’s charcoal cheek. Thomas thinks he understands what troubles Charlie. It is wrong, somehow, that evil should be a question of proportion; that this much Smoke should be the weave of life, and that much produce murder; and that no Smoke at all should produce a cruelty of a different sort. Charlie has a tidy mind: he must feel there should be more system to life. All at once Thomas wants to comfort the friend he was ready to fight before.

“Two, three weeks during which Smoke takes over the world,” he muses. “Maybe longer. A carnival of passions. Black rain and all that. Do you think, Charlie, this means we won’t have to go back to school?”

ф

The smoking starts halfway through their giggles. It rises easily, naturally, articulates their tension, their fears, the feeling of standing on a precipice, toes in the void.

We don’t know what we are starting.

No. But we do know how things are at present.