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Tuesday. The day that Garfield always referred to as "The armpit of the week". Too long after the last weekend to remember the fun you had, and not close enough to the coming weekend for anything to be anticipated.
It's a Tuesday. It is twenty to five. It is too late to start anything new, but too early to
leave. The figure sits at her desk, idly fiddling with some pieces of paper, all marked
"URGENT", and all dated sometime mid-January. On the windowsill are three potted plants, all in the last stages of dying from dehydration, and several dead flies. Beyond that, the small square of sky she can see is a hazy, miserable grey. The rest of the airing cupboard sized office is taken up with an immense dusty bookshelf, where generations of previous occupants have left folders full of documents which they once deemed to be important. No-one has even touched the bookshelf for nearly two years now.
Sitting in her uninspiring surroundings, her mind begins to wander...
The sky is a glorious blue as she pounds along a dappled lane, the sunlight flashing through the leaves overhead. On the tandem, they reach the crest of a hill, and burst out into full sunshine for a few seconds, before starting the descent down the wooded hill. The road twists and winds, but the tandem is under perfect control, elegantly evading a pot-hole here, bracing for a bump there. "Nearly there" cries the stoker, looking at the map pinned to the captain's orange T-shirt. It had been a long journey, what with the misunderstanding about motorways and rivers ("Well how was I supposed to tell the difference? They're both blue aren't they?"), and the incomprehension over the fact that it is possible to go North without going uphill. But they were nearly there. The cake shop. It was a rough joint, there was no denying. Only last week, there had been a knifing over a matter of an abused apostrophe, and as for that matter of Chuffy nearly bringing about the end of the universe as we know it... Nevertheless, the place had a certain charm. It was hard to tell if it was the company, the malt loaf, the scrumpy, or simply the fact that the Cake Stop Shop was never in the same part of the country twice. (Ravenbait had a theory about this involving Ley Lines, but it was rather hard to understand without a couple of pints of scrumpy. Come to think of it, it was rather hard to understand after a couple of pints of scrumpy, but then it didn't seem to matter so much).
A building comes into view, strangely looking much smaller from outside than it was inside. The tandem comes to an abrupt halt, and the riders dismount, grinning happily about the braking power of their steed, and holding a loving marital debate ("I still say, if you'd gone left when I said left, we could have saved..." "Left? You only said left after the crossroads, what did you expect me to do?"). However, on entering the Cake Shop, the happy smiles and thoughts of Death By Chocolate fade, as sitting in their favourite seat, they see a strange satyr-like figure.
"Clare? Who's he? What's he doing here?" she hisses. "And why is he in our window seat!? We always have that seat, so that we can keep an eye on Her from it!"
* * *
Ravenbait surveys the damage with a Lara-like, knowing, wry smirk. Her gloved left hand reaches up and flicks a concealed switch in the arm of the Rudy Project Freons that had been specially customised for her by her old friend Wayland ("I don't just shoe horses, you know.") Invisible from the outside, a display flickers into life on the inside of the silver lenses. She scans the ruins, automatically taking in the lines of information and code flickering across her vision.
"Dammit," she says. She steps carefully across the blackened floor, lifts aside a
smouldering beam, retrieves two partially melted, squashed and sorry looking packets and stands there holding them with reverence. "I didn't think they would dare. I knew the speed camera thing would annoy, but this?"
Resolutely, she turns and exits the torn and charred remains of the malt loaf factory. This time she notices the yellow tape of the police cordon, but they still don't notice her as she pulls enough of an A-Time shift to walk through the tape without disturbing it. She looks up, scanning the skies, makes a cross face, gets back on the bike. Fingal can tell that she is upset and angry, and remains subdued and quiet as they move off slowly down the road. She continues to scan the sky every so often until finally she pulls over into a lay-by.
Two big, black birds appear as dots in the sky, tumbling and careening in the wind. She watches them impatiently as they take their time getting to her, her resting foot tapping on the tarmac. In a flurry of feathers and chatty squawking, the two ravens land; one on the aerobars, the other on the shoulder of the bars.
"Braaak!" says Thought. He pokes the CatEye OS with the end of his beak. The computer display flickers and rearranges its pixels to read "Have a nice ride!"
"Yes yes," the woman says. "I need you to get a message to Aeroflash. Tell him Sophie wasn't wrong."
"Bugger that," says Memory, hopping to the very end of the aerobars. "I remember what happened when we told Appollo about his bint and that other fella."
"And look what happened with Noah and his flood," Thought continued. "You'd think that the fact we found some nice carcasses to eat so didn't bother going back would have been clue enough. You'd think they'd have been able to work out that if there was nowhere to go we'd have been back sharpish."
"Well, look, I'll give you a note and you can pretend to be a passenger pigeon. I'm pretty sure they're Red List."
"They're bloody extinct, mate," says Thought.
"Even better," says the woman, scribbling furiously. "Just go, will you? And try not to get distracted by Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way." She attaches the piece of paper to Memory's leg with a piece of micropore tape from her first aid kit. "And you, you need to go find Gunner," she says to Thought.
"Oh very nice," the raven says sarcastically. "I get all the bird and elbows jokes, do I? Have you any idea what it's like being around him when you're a bird with feathers?" The woman rolls up another piece of paper and shoves it sideways in his beak as if she were feeding a sprat to a puffin. The raven croaks and hoots grumpily.
"I'll get you some nice, fresh sheep's eyeballs later. I don't have time to do this myself, I have to get to the Temple and check the supplies."
Both birds launch themselves into the air and heave themselves upwards. A few small feathers drift down, but by the time they hit the ground, the woman has already gone, leaving nothing but a faint scent of vetiver and opoponax.
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