Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

25 - Victory in Sight

 Two lines had been drawn into the dust on the splintered, half-exposed floorboards of the flat. One ran straight across a corner of the room, parallel with the gaping gaps between the floorboards, the other intersecting it at an acute angle before coming to a dead stop. The intersection was Holborn Station which, just as Victor had told me days previously when he talked me through the Underground map he had defaced in the name of war, was the only tube station with connections to both the City and the West End. The two lines drawn in the dust – which I had called ‘Oxford Axis’ and ‘Acre Axis’ respectively – symbolised these connections as they existed both above and below ground. The two lines drawn in the dust – the closest thing we had to a map of London around here – provided me with a base map to plan a path to victory, to plan one final offensive; after three long years, the end was in sight.

  Lyle had told Victor and I all he knew. According to him, Victor’s theory that the origin of the Faceless was located close to St Paul’s Cathedral was correct; now, though, we had an exact location. A red-brick building stood on the banks of the River Thames, next to the remnants of the Millennium Bridge and only a sprint away from the Cathedral and St Paul’s Station; this, Lyle had informed us, was the building we would need to attack in order to rid London of the Faceless threat for good. This building, a small dot formed by my index finger in the dust, was the next feature to be placed on the map.

  Lyle informed us of the red-brick building on the Thames after his admitting that he had a connection to the Faceless in the past had prompted Victor to consider the two ICL circuit boards; one of which had been found, then swiftly torn out of, Lyle’s head; the other of which had been recovered, supposedly from a Faceless corpse, by Jamieson after our victory at Piccadilly Circus. The evidence was too strong to deny that the two boards had a connection to the Faceless at this point; as soon as Victor had discussed this connection, he had begun to devise his own theory.

  “Lyle,” I began. “Is this why you wanted to keep the circuit-board intact? Did you know about the connection?”

   “I didn’t know, but I could make a pretty good guess,” he told Victor and me. “I thought you would have deduced all of this, Nox, just after you removed it from my head.”

  “Deduced what?” inquired Victor and me in unison.

  “That the circuit-board you pulled out of my head gave me a connection to the Faceless,” Lyle replied. “I didn’t know who or what ICL was, but it became pretty obvious after you left exactly what purpose its circuit-board had. I told you I could hear voices clouding my head before you took it out for me. What’s more, that little – I don’t know what to call it – moment we had after you found me hiding behind those doors at Holborn Station – when my eyes lit up in that golden colour and I whispered ‘We will find you’ in your ear – used to happen to me every other day, and it would usually be accompanied by an attack on wherever I happened to be living the next day.”

   “That explains the reason why the Faceless attacked Holborn,” Victor interjected. “I can’t be certain, but I reckon there’s a signal linking all of the Faceless together. That would, at least, explain why you suddenly ‘became’ Faceless while you were with Nox on the mezzanine at Holborn, why the Faceless always had a way of finding you and why there were voices clouding your head.”

  “I always thought that the Faceless couldn’t talk, though,” I said. “I mean, Lyle could talk, but surely you could assume that the circuit-board in his head was malfunctioning. After all, his eyes weren’t always yellow, unlike all the others. He didn’t look or act like any of the other Faceless most of the time.” I addressed Lyle directly. “Can they talk?” I asked.