She didn't know the town's name, or how far she'd run. There had only been brief snatches of sleep, grabbed wherever she could find somewhere to hide as she fled from the burned-out shell that had once been her home and those who sought to finish what they'd begun there. The pendant thrust into her pocket was at once a burden and a lifeline, for all that she was tempted to toss the wretched thing into a hedgerow, or a lake.

She realised with mild surprise that she'd wandered into the car park of one of the numerous light industrial premises in this area, some sort of chemical plant by the looks of it. It seemed like as good a place as any to stop for a while; there would be a washroom where she could freshen up a bit, and if she was lucky a vending machine or something.

He finished torsioning the plastic ties around the pallet of containers and lifted his safety glasses to rub weary eyes, glancing at his watch. Only another hour and a half to go, thank Christ, and if he was lucky he might get most of the way home before the arrival of the rain that had been threatening all day...

Movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned sharply. “What the-?”

Nothing. “That you, boss?” he called out, stepping out from under the awning covering the deionised water filling point and looking down the yard.

Another flicker of movement, this time from within the web of pipes and cables surrounding the towering storage tanks. “Oh, shit...”

“You alright lad?” called out one of the forklift drivers.

“I think I just saw some bloody kid larking about down by the tanks!”

“You sure?” the man asked, looking the same way.

“I saw something, and it wasn't in high-vis.”

“Come on then, let's take a look.” They headed deeper into the yard.

There was no vending machine but apparently the company provided a free supply of supermarket own-brand teabags and bargain-basement instant coffee, with a water heater over the sink and a couple of pints of milk in the fridge. The accompanying selection of mugs and spoons was even reasonably clean. She knew without even taking a sniff that the coffee would be absolutely rank, but the tea turned out to be fairly palateable, and took the edge off her appetite for the time being.

I might just bed down here for the night, she mused. It's not as if there's anything in here worth locking up for.

“Nothing. If I'm not just seeing things then they've legged it out the back way.”

“The shadows in here can be funny like that,” the forklift driver replied. “Never mind; you were right to check.”

“Yeah.” The young man rubbed his eyes again, and took of his classes to clean them on the lapel of his overalls. “Early night tonight, I think,” he said to himself.

He hauled another shrink-wrapped pack of 25-litre deionised water bottles off the stack in one corner of the yard and dragged it to the filling point, hacking off the plastic wrapping with a lock-knife. One more pallet of these and he would, mercifully, be finished for the day.

There was a loud bang from the direction of the car park. “That'll teach you to sneak off home early,” he snorted, assuming it was a bursting tyre.

Two more bangs in quick succession, followed by the sound of breaking glass. “Oh, Jesus Christ...” He darted for the relative safety of the huge stack of spare 25-litre bottles; they were stacked about sixteen bottles deep, and would probably stop a small-calibre pistol bullet. Not that those bangs had sounded very small-calibre...

He peered cautiously around the stack of bottles, reaching into his pocket for his mobile phone, and gasped. A forklift had veered across the yard, a chysanthemum of blood overlying a web of cracks in the cab window. He ducked back behind the stack and frantically dialled 999.

“Emergency services. Which service do you require?”

“Police, please.”

“Connecting you now.” An agonisingly long pause. “Northants Police, what assistance do you require?”

“My name's Matthew Baxter, and I'm at the Univar tank farm in Wellingborough,” he replied, his voice sounding surprisingly level in his own ears. “We have an intruder with a firearm, and I think he's just killed somebody.”

“Can you tell me exactly what you've seen and heard?” the operator replied, in the tone of a man just realising that his job has suddenly become very complicated.

“One single shot and one double-tap, might have been from an automatic pistol but I can't be sure. I can definitely see a forklift with blood all over the cab window and shit!” He ducked as someone he couldn't see fired down the yard. There was a jet of flame, presumably from another forklift's propane tank. “I take it you heard that?” he remarked dryly.

“Alright, stay on the line and don't panic. Armed response units are on their way.”

Matthew tore off his goggles and stuffed them into his overall pocket; they distorted his vision, and the health risk presented by the tank farm's stock didn't seem terribly relevant at this point. “Can you tell me what kind of chemicals you handle at Univar?” the call-taker asked, having evidently been talking to someone else in the room.

Matthew smiled without much humour. “Corrosives, solvents, a few dry chemicals; there's probably the ingredient list of about half The Anarchist's Cookbook in here somewhere.”

“Oh, bollocks...” the call-taker murmured, professional detachment slipping for a moment.

“Yep, that about sums it up--” He dropped the phone and spun on his heel as someone rounded the stack with a firearm.

“Bloody hell-!” The gun came up but Matt grabbed for the man's wrist and twisted it savagely, digging his thumbs into a pressure point. The gun cracked three times then fell from its owner's fingers, and Matt drove his knee into the man's crotch for good measure. He folded up with a grunt and collapsed, curling into a foetal ball and gasping with agony. Matt allowed himself a moment of grim satisfaction as he regained his breath, then turned to pick up his phone.

It was in a hundred pieces, hit by a stray bullet. “Oh, fuck you, God!” Matt hissed, picking up the fallen pistol and rolling its previous owner onto his back with a hefty kick. His eyes narrowed as he got his first decent look at his assailant. The man was pale and rather delicate-featured, with white-blonde hair down to his shoulders, and wearing a poorly-tailored grey suit with some kind of heraldic device on the left breast.

The overall effect put Matt in mind of a minor character from a second-rate cyberpunk webcomic, and he had yet to form any terribly advanced conclusions when the man's eyes flickered open and he lunged upright. Matt lashed out with a boot and caught him neatly under the chin. There was a sickening crack as the steel toecap met bone, and the mysterious elfin thug sprawled backwards, his eyes rolling up into his head. Matt took a cursory look to make sure he was still breathing, then snatched a spare magazine out of a pouch beside the shoulder holster the unconscious man was wearing for his pistol.

And that was pretty strange-looking as well, now he had a chance to examine it. The magazine housing and breach were well forward of the pistol grip, and the magazine itself was too big for a normal pistol bullet; it was closer in size and shape to the one belonging to the old .303 service rifle he'd fired once at a gun club with his father. The barrel was thick and heavy, and there was a thumb-switch on the right-hand side that appeared to offer the option of burst or fully automatic fire, though each position was labelled only with a single letter that apparently corresponded to words in a language other than English. There was no obvious maker's mark or serial number, and he guessed it to be one of the weird and wonderful machine-pistol designs that came out of the Balkans from time to time.

There was a flurry of shots from the other end of the yard. Matt pocketed the spare magazine and sprinted down the slope into the yard proper, ducking behind a teetering stack of old chemical drums for cover.

The yard was set up around a single roadway, with filling points for the various clusters of storage tanks on either side. A narrow side-road branched off around the back of one such cluster and led past a semi-automated filling point for small containers of some chloride or other and the apparatus for washing out returned chemical drums, and ended at a large concrete outbuilding containing a small machine shop and the site messroom. Spare pallets and chemical containers of various shapes and sizes were stacked wherever there was space, affording Matt a modicum of cover as he made his way towards the sounds of gunfire.

There were two of them, standing out in the open and taking occasional pot-shots through the messroom door. Their resemblance to the one he'd clobbered was quite distinctive.

“Come on, Princess,” one of them sneered. “You can't hide in there forever, you know.”

Matt crouched down behind a parked forklift and held the magazine of his newly-acquired pistol up to the light, discerning through the semi-translucent plastic that it was nearly full. He took careful aim at one of the men from behind the forklift, then flipped the fire-selector forward to what was either Safe or Burst and pulled the trigger. It declined to move. Matt made a mental note of this, reset it to single shot and fired.

The recoil was fierce, but not unbearable. His target went down like a felled tree, and Matt was already shifting his aim as the second gunman whirled around with a startled yell. The second shot went high, and Matt got a whole clip lobbed his way for his pains, most of them going at least six feet overhead; he added 'goes through a whole mag in about a third of a second and has a kick like a firehose on full automatic' to the list of useful things he knew about these guns, and came up from behind cover while the guy was still reloading.

“Throw the gun down and put your hands on your head!” he snapped. “Take two paces back from the weapon and kneel down!”

“Fuck you!” The man slapped a new magazine into his weapon and reached for the cocking handle. Matt put a round into the concrete a yard from his feet. “I said drop the gun!” he snarled. “Last warning!” The gun clattered to the ground. “Good boy. Now what the hell is this all about?”

“None of your business,” the man replied with an arrogant sneer.

“Look, sunshine,” Matt snapped, “you and your mates have just shot up half the yard and killed at least one of the workers. Do you really think the cops are going to ask me very many questions if I hand you over without your kneecaps? Now lose the fucking attitude and answer my question.”

“The cops?” The man began to laugh. “Oh, you poor stupid kid-”

There was a horrible, squishy sort of crunch, and the man pitched forward, blood spilling out from under his hairline. “Sorry,” said the girl standing behind him with a large pipe-wrench in her hands. “He was really starting to get on my nerves.”

Matt carefully lowered his weapon, sighing inwardly as the surrealism of the day's events went up a few more notches. She was perhaps five years younger than himself and rather pretty in an elfin sort of way, with slightly curly chestnut hair in a ragged ponytail. She was wearing what at one point had been a good party dress of dark green silk cut in a slightly medieval, Wiccan style, though it and she were both rather bedraggled. She also had the poshest voice Matt had ever heard outside of a costume drama or a documentary on the Royal Family, with a distinctly Gaelic accent that might have been Scottish or Irish.

“Erm...”

“Look, thanks awfully for the help, but I really ought to be going. There are probably more of them, and Laughing Boy here was right; the police won't be very much use.”

“Now just a minute.” Matt stepped around the forklift. “I saw you earlier, didn't I?”

“Yes. I've been in here all the time since, but none of your colleagues could see or hear me.” She picked up the dropped pistol. “There's a reason for that, but you wouldn't believe me if I even tried to explain.”

“I wouldn't have believed that a bunch of Sephiroth lookalikes in cheap suits were going to shoot their way in here in pursuit of a girl who looks like an extra in a Dragonforce video either,” Matt pointed out dryly.

“I look like a what?” She pouted, and examined her reflection in one of the messroom's last few intact windows. “Ugh! I see what you mean.”

“I never said you didn't carry the look off very well indeed,” he added quickly.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” she replied. “And if you let me use your home phone and give me a decent meal and oh Goddess please let me take a shower, I'll not only answer all your questions to the best of my ability but have at least three of your babies.”

Matt pocketed another spare magazine from the man he'd shot, and ejected the clip from the fallen gun as an afterthought. “I'll hold you to the last one,” he warned with a wry grin.

She snorted, and was about to reply when two figures in grey suits appeared at the top of the yard. “That's the girl! Get her!”

Matt fired a couple of rounds in their direction to keep their heads down. “Over the fence!” he barked. She nodded and scrambled up a stack of large steel containers placed against the fence. Matt fired once more, then stuffed the pistol inside his overalls and followed her, jumping over the barbed wire and landing in an awkward crouch.

“Come on!” the girl whispered urgently from behind the row of old ballast wagons parked on the branch line beside the southbound tracks. Matt jogged across the line and climbed over the buffers, landing heavily and nearly twisting his ankle. Catch me moaning about how dull this job is again, he thought fleetingly.

“Station's a quarter-mile this way,” he whispered. “There should be a train going somewhere pulling up in the next five or ten minutes.”

“Anywhere but here sounds perfect-” A shot rang out, hitting the side of the wagon with an ear-splitting clang.

“Move!” Matt yelled, straightening up and firing a wild snapshot at the gunman clambering over the fence. The bullet caught him in the chest and pitched him backwards out of sight. Matt put away the gun and bolted.

Wellingborough station had been a lot bigger once, with five platforms and a small shed for a station pilot. Platforms 4 and 5 were long-disused, the track lifted, and Platform 3 was served only by a seldom-used branch line leading to some engineering sidings. It was on this line that the ballast wagons had been parked, and it was onto Platform 3 that Matt scrambled.

“I think we're safe for now,” the girl told him quietly, offering her hand. “There can't have been more than five of them unless they had another car, and they'll want reinforcements now we're armed.”

Matt nodded, and pulled himself upright with her help; she was a lot stronger than she looked. “The one I decked up at the other end of the yard won't be going anywhere in a hurry; I think I broke his jaw. Turn round a minute, will you?” He unfastened his overalls and high-visibility vest and wriggled out of them without taking his boots off, then shoved the pistol into the waistband of his jeans and covered it with the hem of his sweatshirt. The barrel was warm, almost uncomfortably so, and Matt was glad he hadn't tried it on full automatic. “There's a train for Nottingham in two minutes or one to St Pancras in twenty,” she told him. “Can we get the London one? I've got family down there.”

“Suits me,” Matt replied. “I need to get some cash out first anyway.”

“Better get as much as you can now; the people who hired those thugs are going to start playing detective the minute they realise I had help.”

“I don't suppose you'd care to tell my why they were chasing you, by any chance?”

“Later. Oh, how terribly rude of me!” she exclaimed. “My name is Ariana Lestrange, possibly Countess Lestrange depending on who's still in the land of the living.”

“Matt Baxter,” Matt replied. “Kingsman Baxter, Duke of Lancaster's Regiment if we're going for titles.”

“I'd rather we didn't. Oh, and you may wish to have your mobile phone out or you might look rather odd.”

Matt gave her a curious look, but fished his Bluetooth earpiece out of his hip pocket and put it on. “Better?”

“It makes you look like either a yuppie or a chav, but at least you're not talking to yourself.” Matt favoured Ariana with a look so old-fashioned it might have belonged to the Piltdown Man. “Long story. This might not be the best time...”

Matt made a helpless gesture. “Yeah, you're probably right. Tell me about it when I have access to alcohol.”

He crossed the footbridge and walked out of the ticket office with the half-dozen travellers on the Nottingham train and headed straight for the cash machine by the bike sheds. Mindful of Ariana's advice, he withdrew the maximum three hundred; even if her mysterious pursuers didn't get hold of his name and account details, the police certainly would, and they were likely to ask him questions to which he would have trouble giving satisfactory answers at this point. Better to lie low somewhere until he'd got a clear idea of exactly what he was mixed up in.

Three tens went into the ticket machine for two Saver returns to London St Pancras. Matt shot a nervous glance at the CCTV monitor visible through the ticket windows. None of the four camera pictures seemed to have a clear view of Platform 3, and the resolution was poor, but it might serve to give their assailants an idea of where to start looking for Ariana and himself if they thought to obtain it.

Nothing I can really do about that, Matt thought resignedly. If Ariana's got family down in the Smoke they'll be expecting us there anyway; just have to use the crowds and hope they're still on the back foot.

He put a fiver on a sandwich, a chocolate bar and a Coke, guessing that his enigmatic travelling companion was in need of something to eat. He'd guessed correctly, as Ariana tore open the sandwiches and nearly inhaled them.

“You are an absolute saint,” she said somewhat indistinctly, then swallowed. “Haven't eaten anything since the day before yesterday, and that was just a few nibbles.”

“You're welcome,” Matt replied, settling heavily on the bench beside her. “Here's your ticket.”

“Thanks. My family won't forget this, Matthew, and neither will I.” Ariana's face fell. “Assuming any of them are left...”

“What happened to you?” Matt asked carefully. “Why were those men chasing you?”

“My family has many enemies,” she replied. “Other families who disagree with our vision of the future, or covet... things we have.”

“I don't understand...”

“You wouldn't. All this... it's part of another world, Matt. One that shouldn't have reached into yours like this. I'm sorry I got you involved.”

Oh, don't tell me I'm mixed up in a bloody mob war... he groaned inwardly, then shook himself; whatever the hell was going on, he had no business letting Ariana beat herself up over it. “You didn't,” Matt said firmly. “I didn't have to run down the yard to confront those two thugs; I could have run the other way, hidden in the car park and waited for the cops to arrive, but I didn't. It was my choice to help you and I don't regret it, alright? Now shut up and eat your Twix.”

Ariana looked at him oddly for a long moment, then started to giggle. Without really knowing why, Matt found himself laughing along with her, and soon they were leaning on each other to stop themselves toppling clean off the bench until the paroxysms passed.

“Feel better for that?” he asked, once he'd regained most of his breath.

“Much, thanks.”

“Good.” Matt glanced at the electronic sign above their heads. “Train'll be here any minute.”

“Right. When we get there- oh shit, that's their car!”

“Go to the Ladies and stay in there until I say you can come out,” Matt replied, watching the blue saloon car pull into a vacant parking space. “I'll keep an eye on the entrance; I'm pretty sure they didn't get a decent look at me.” She nodded once, and dashed into the toilets.

Matt stood up with forced casualness, placing one hand on his lower back as if he'd found the bench uncomfortable. The pistol was still in place, canted at a slight angle so the magazine wouldn't snag if he had to draw it. Which I probably won't, he told himself, fighting to keep his nerves under control. Shooting up a sparsely-staffed tank farm on the outskirts of a windswept industrial estate was one thing, but they could hardly start a gunfight here; the station was on the edge of a residential area, with a row of council houses actually overlooking the car park, and they must at least suspect that the police were already on their way...

And what the hell's keeping them anyway? Matt wondered, watching as a harried, angry-looking man in the same uniform as his pursuers burst onto the other platform and looked around wildly. He peered at Matt for a few seconds, showing no sign of recognition, then turned towards the footbridge. As the familiar earsplitting screech of supercharged diesel engines heralded the arrival of the next train to London, he began to run. Ariana peered around the door, and Matt waved her back just as the man half ran, half fell down the steps of the footbridge and dashed around the other side of the buildings between the platforms.

The train had just come to a halt, and Matt hit the button to open the door and almost yanked Ariana off her feet in his haste to get them both aboard in time. There was a loud crash behind them, and they ducked out of sight behind the luggage rack as their pursuer ran through the door he'd just kicked open.

The train's interior was rather poorly laid out, the seats misaligned with the windows. This worked to their advantage today, though, and Ariana huddled in a 'window' seat that offered an inch-wide sliver of view between a blank bulkhead and the seatback in front of her. Matt sagged into the seat beside her, feeling as if he'd just run a marathon.

“Sorry I manhandled you a bit back there,” he remarked breathlessly.

“All in a good cause. Don't worry about it.” She managed a weak smile. “But if you're feeling guilty, get me a vodka tonic when the bar opens and we'll call it even.”

“It's a deal,” Matt replied wearily. “Once I summon the energy to move...” The adrenaline was starting to wear off, and already he could feel his hands beginning to tremble. A stiff drink sounded most attractive.