"Guerrillas found him." The Juden's voice was flat and far away, the voice of someone reciting something they'd replayed so many times it had worn smooth. "Sold him to slave traders. For tobacco. I didn't see that part — I had already gone."
He pressed both hands over his face.
"I should have stayed. Watched him walk the whole way. Made myself look."
The silence in the hut had a specific weight. Constantine put a hand on the Juden's shoulder — briefly, without words — and then the shaman made a slow gesture with one hand: enough, go. They went.
Outside, the sun had finished setting. The sky above the desert was the deep indigo of late dusk, and the silhouettes of the rocks were black and jagged against it. Their own shadows stretched enormously behind them across the ground.
"I never want to do that again," Jude said. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. "My body was somewhere else, my mind was scattered to pieces, I couldn't have defended myself against anything — and I had to watch myself do all of it and couldn't stop."
Constantine lit a cigarette, moving with the slightly careful deliberateness of a man whose legs were not entirely reliable. The herbs were still working through him, clearly — each step had a small amount of extra calculation in it.
"You know why I said never look back?"
Jude glanced at him.
"Because I've got too many bloody ghosts walking behind me already." He exhaled. "That's why."
He turned to look at Jude properly, something measuring in his expression. If it hadn't been for the tears on the man's face back in the hut, he would have thought the root hadn't touched him at all. Jude was walking straight, stride even, apparently fine.
"Is your stomach not churning? Are your legs actually working?"
"I'm physically resilient." Jude considered how to phrase it. "You might think I look thin. But I'm considerably stronger and faster than I appear."
"What, are you a super soldier? Some government serum programme? Alien with a human face?"
"Nothing so dramatic. Just enough to survive Gotham for two years." He paused. "Which brings me to the actual question — what happens now?"
"Now?" Constantine shrugged. "Now you transfer the rest of the fee."
Jude had no objection. The contract had been clear-priced from the start, the work was done, and the money was owed. He pulled out his phone and sent it.
"Done. And now?"
"Now everyone goes home."
Jude looked at him.
"Your commission was to investigate the origin of the calamity," Constantine said, with the reasonable tone of a man who had thought about this and was comfortable with his position. "The origin is now clear. You've also, I notice, given sweets to the children in the village, so your curiosity and your conscience are both satisfied." He took a drag. "What more do you want?"
"What I want," Jude said, "isn't really the point. Mnemoth is still out there. Lester released Him — which means Lester is probably already being hunted. More importantly: back in Africa, Mnemoth was capable of devastating a village while He was still limited. Now He's loose in London, and His power is growing. At this rate it won't be a village next. It'll be a town. Then a city." He held Constantine's gaze. "You have to deal with this. Not because I'm asking you to — because if you don't do it quickly, you'll be dealing with something considerably worse than what we're facing now."
Constantine was quiet for a moment.
Then he grinned. "You're right, obviously. I was going to handle it anyway. Which means I can only charge you forty thousand dollars."
"Byd, Constantine." Jude laughed despite himself. "Are you actually this short of money?"
"Not short of money. Just still thinking about that five-hundred-dollar cold drink."
"Fine. Next time it'll be five thousand."
"You wouldn't."
"Try me."
The flight out of Africa climbed through air so dry and clear that the sky was a shade of blue Jude had no word for — cloudless and enormous, the kind of sky that made the earth below look small and definitive. He looked down through the window as the plane rose and watched the figures on the ground — small, dark-skinned, moving slowly across cracked pale earth — shrink until they became specks. Then smaller than specks.
"Humans are like insects, aren't they," he said.
Constantine was looking at the same view. "That's just the world," he said. "It doesn't change itself for us."
"Very profound. Are you going to eat your airplane food or just stare meaningfully at Africa?"
The airplane food, it emerged, was a real source of distress — Constantine had left in enough of a hurry that he'd forgotten to grab anything at the airport. He looked at the tray in front of him with genuine suffering.
Jude produced a hamburger from his bag and began eating it.
Constantine watched this happen and said nothing, which was probably the most restrained he'd been in two days.
London again. The flight back took most of the day. They went from the airport to a restaurant, and over the meal learned that the fat man from the incident Jude had witnessed — the first London victim — had regained consciousness in hospital, and had immediately caught a flight to New York.
"Of course," Constantine said. He didn't sound surprised. "That's why Midnight called. It's already started over there."
"Because the bottle went to America."
"The bottle went to America," he confirmed. "And wherever the bottle is, that's where He wants to be."
He sent Chas home, and then the three of them — Constantine, Jude, and a Lester who looked relatively human compared to forty-eight hours ago, with no flies clustering around him — said a brief word to Mrs. M, packed what needed packing, and got to Heathrow in time for the New York flight.
Jude watched Lester during boarding and noticed the absence of insects. He couldn't tell whether it was Constantine's flat that had some kind of working barrier around it or something else entirely, but the man was intact and present and walking under his own power, which was more than could have been said three days ago.
On the plane, Jude glanced at Constantine in the seat next to him and found the man somewhere else entirely — staring at nothing, lit by the pale overhead cabin light, still caught on something that had happened twelve hours and a continent ago. It struck him as strange. Constantine's entire performance since they'd met had been one of calibrated indifference — a man who navigated the terrible as a professional matter, who'd long since made his arrangements with the fact that the world contained horror and continued on through it anyway.
Maybe he's more conscientious than he looks, Jude thought. And then: or maybe it's just that some things don't stay in Africa.
Thirty-six hours after leaving London, a yellow cab crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and the radio came on.
"— and we go now to our developing story. This afternoon, Bruce Parker, a jeweller on 57th Avenue, reportedly swallowed several gemstones in his own shop window before collapsing. Meanwhile, reports from Midtown suggest that a business owner attempted to — we want to stress, attempted to — consume his own secretary during a board meeting. Friends, we say this every week, but only in New York. Stay with us for continued—"
Jude turned to the rain-streaked window and watched the city come into view on the far bank — enormous, lit up, completely unaware. The lights of Manhattan reflected in the black surface of the river below the bridge.
In two days, Mnemoth had fed well.
At this rate, Jude thought, this whole city becomes His feeding ground. Not in weeks. Not in days.
He looked at Constantine in the seat beside him. The man was staring at the Manhattan skyline with an expression that was, for once, entirely unguarded.
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