The Heist of Hollow London, page 27
“The only person who can confirm that for you is Miles,” said Nadi.
“And he’s never going to make contact with you again,” said Loren, “because he doesn’t want anyone to connect him to us, ever. That was the point of you being involved in this.”
“And you don’t want anyone connecting him to you.”
“Look,” said Arlo, kneeling by the chair where Karyn sat, “you just have to file debt cancellation forms for each of us and that’s it. You never need to hear about any of us, or any of this, ever again.”
“But … couldn’t I sell you and make some money?” Karyn said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get another job anytime soon, and I could really use—”
“Karyn,” said Loren, marching over to her, “we’ve been fucked around a lot. A lot. There were five of us, you remember? You saw the documents?”
Karyn nodded.
“The other two aren’t here and that’s not because they’re off having a fucking pedicure, it’s because they’re dead. And you”—Loren jabbed a finger at Karyn, using the hand that held the can of M:Pyre; some of the soda splashed on Karyn’s face—“what you’ve been involved in is some deep criminal shit. You understand that?”
“Y-yes.”
“If our debts don’t get canned, we stop giving a fuck what happens to us. We’ll go to the cops and tell them you were in this up to your neck. So you open up a window right now and file those fucking forms and then we can all move on with our lives. Okay?”
* * *
The important part had been not to mention the money to Karyn. If she knew they had the money, she could have claimed it as part payment of the debt, without their permission. But once the forms were filed, anything in their possession was their own. They were free to move as they wished, and had almost as many rights as a nat. They went for cocktails to celebrate. The money wasn’t as much as they’d expected, but it was a head start.
And they weren’t just celebrating getting free. Nadi and Loren could finally focus on each other, and how they felt about each other. It was a relationship that had been forged in very strange times for them both, and so much was still uncertain—but Nadi hoped that would only bond them more strongly. She’d spoken to Loren of her anger at her old life, how it had kept her from discovering what she really wanted—but Loren was more philosophical. Yes, they had both been ill-treated, but their paths would never have crossed any other way. “So I can’t be too mad about it,” Loren said. “I’ve tried, but when I imagine my life being different, you’re not there. And I don’t like that.”
Nadi still felt this let too many people off the hook too easily, but it was a sweet sentiment. Arlo was in the bathroom during this conversation, and the sentiment would not have struck him the same way, so when he returned they changed the subject.
“Do you think we’d have got libbed?” asked Nadi. “If we’d just done the job and handed over the money, I mean?”
“Yeah—or got a share of the money, such as it was?” said Arlo.
“Nah,” said Loren. “I think Mia would’ve either sold us or killed us, on his instructions. And I think Miles was so paranoid about the money he’d have destroyed it.”
“I did love that idea of buying Mia’s personality.”
“’Course you did. We were meant to.”
“If we had the money we thought we were getting,” said Nadi, “I’d have said let’s buy it anyway and make a go of it ourselves.”
“What, set up a company of our own?” said Arlo.
“Yeah. Do it our way.”
Arlo thought about this—then shook his head. “I think maybe it’s over, that whole way of doing things. And if it’s not, maybe it should be. I don’t think you can change it from the inside.”
“I’m not talking about changing it,” said Loren. “Just living.” They smiled at Nadi. “We’ve got lives now.”
Nadi smiled back, then turned to Arlo. “What are you gonna do?” she asked.
Arlo considered for a moment. “I don’t know.” He laughed wearily. “Being free’s harder than I expected.”
* * *
They were staying in a hostel by the docks. No one was hiring, but Loren was putting it around they could fix janky systems, and there seemed to be a shortage of such skills locally. Nadi got some temp work loading and unloading. They made a strange but charming couple, and insisted they didn’t mind Arlo being around, which was nice but made him feel like their adult son who hadn’t left home.
They were very kind and patient with Arlo when he suffered a horrific psychological crash shortly after arriving here, as the reality of Drienne’s death hit him. Nadi had listened while he’d talked of how he wanted to find out if Drienne really was one of the New Orleans vague kids, and if so, whether her family was still around. It felt like too big a task, and he felt too tired to take it on; but he also felt like he was failing Drienne by not doing so.
“Well, I’m gonna track down that girl I found in that restaurant,” Nadi told him. “Still feel bad about that. We can work on your mystery too.”
Arlo didn’t necessarily share her optimism, but he appreciated it.
He and Loren hadn’t fully addressed the odd tension between them during the job. Arlo had tried to apologize, though he wasn’t sure precisely what for, and Loren had brushed it off. Once they’d got past that, Loren turned out to have a remarkable, earnest clarity about things that made it easy to be open with them. Not in the way he’d been open with Drienne, but nevertheless, it helped.
“I got her killed,” he told Loren. “I convinced Mia to buy her for the job and I led those soldiers to you.”
“I mean,” Loren replied, “yeah, you can look at it like that, I guess. But she took that risk for you, not telling you what was going on, because she knew how much you needed to be free, and she didn’t want you to lose your chance of it.”
“I suppose.”
“And we got it in the end. I’d have just gone along with the plan if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have questioned it. And we wouldn’t be free. But now we are. She won that for you.”
“So did you. Come on, you did a lot.”
Loren grinned. “Yeah, I did. But what I’m saying is, don’t fucking waste it moping around that you got her killed. You didn’t shoot her, did you. End of.”
“I know, I know. I just don’t know what to do now.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“Well,” said Loren, “you did have that incredibly detailed plan to open a bar.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, that’s what she’d want you to do. Right?”
Arlo couldn’t believe this hadn’t occurred to him. He didn’t feel ready to do it yet, and he didn’t know how he’d do it. But he would. As soon as he decided this, he felt a tiny bit better.
Arlo needed to save his share of the money toward this project, but he spent a little of it on one indulgence: a box from RookDivest. Loren had noticed they were selling these “Lucky Dip” boxes of clothing and homeware and worked out what they were and how they’d been serialized, and identified the one Arlo needed.
When it arrived, he opened it up and the scent of Drienne’s perfume rose from the clothes inside. All her possessions from Shaw Apartments were there: her scented candles, her animatronic budgerigar, her coffee mug, the Brand Ambassador of the Week award she’d stolen from Roman. Arlo laid all her things out on the floor and felt so sad, he wished he’d never bought it. But the thought of someone else having it made him even sadder.
Their kind was not unique, by definition. And yet he’d never find anyone like her.
He set the animatronic budgerigar singing, and he sang along.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks as ever to my editor, Lee Harris, and all the staff at Tor who helped this book along the way.
Thanks to everyone who chatted through the ideas with me, particularly Andy Diggle. Very late in the process, Laurie Penny asked me a question about how the cloning process works, which was easy to answer but no one had asked it before, and it triggered a train of thought that led me to the idea for what went wrong at Sunglow, enabling me to replace an idea that I knew wasn’t working.
Mia’s backstory has its roots in a Future Shock I wrote for the British comic 2000 AD, which prompted regular reader Russell T. Davies to get in touch with me out of the blue to say he really liked the idea. So I made a mental note to revisit and expand on it one day.
Biggest thanks of all to my wife, Catherine Spooner. This would have been a different, and inferior, book without her feedback; in particular she saved me from killing off a character who really shouldn’t have died. I’m very relieved the original version didn’t go out. I must have been in a terrible mood when I wrote it.
ALSO BY EDDIE ROBSON
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words
Hearts of Oak
Tomorrow Never Knows
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Robson’s previous novels are Tomorrow Never Knows, Hearts of Oak, and Drunk on All Your Strange New Words. His short fiction has appeared in Uncanny magazine. His scriptwriting credits include the BBC Radio sitcom Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully, the Audible rom-com Car Crash, and episodes of animated series such as Sarah & Duck and The Amazing World of Gumball. He has written numerous spin-offs from Doctor Who and nonfiction books on film, TV, music, and video games. He lives with his wife and two children in Lancaster, UK. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. Panic! At the Sponsorama
2. Change Management
3. The Operative Word
4. Flying Blind
5. A Faint Smell of Marzipan
6. Eugénie?
7. Some Sense of Ownership
8. The Shopping List
9. Things Would Happen because She was Here
10. Secretly French
11. Any Questions?
12. a Cross Between a Trash Fire and A Toxic Swamp, Literally
13. Stalking is Less Suspicious
14. A Pep Talk and Some Positive Productivity Statistics
15. A Scented Candle Salesman Hits Town
16. Scrap-Brain Zone
17. Famous Beach Ball
18. A Good Time to Get Lost
19. The Big Serve
20. Birmingham Wouldn’t Have Her
21. The Man Who Failed Sideways
22. More Than She’s Saying
23. An On-Brand Carpet
24. New Tricks
25. An Invitation to Reapply
26. Fifteen Years, Two Months, Twenty-Seven Days, Five Hours, Ten Minutes, and Fifty-Three Seconds
27. Did I See What?
28. Leave To Leave
29. It’s Fun to be Creative
30. The Dead-Waste Yard
31. Large Green Arrows
32. Leave a Label of an Owl On the Bench
33. Just Like Floating Away
34. Easy to Say in Retrospect
35. Stupid Enough to Walk the Derelict Streets Shouting Her Name
36. A Hot Morning at Sunglow
37. This Plan was My Plan
38. Lucky Dip Box
Acknowledgments
Also by Eddie Robson
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE HEIST OF HOLLOW LONDON
Copyright © 2025 by Eddie Robson
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Alex Eckman-Lawn
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates / Tor Publishing Group
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New York, NY 10271
www.torpublishinggroup.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-37206-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-37207-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250372079
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First Edition: 2025
Eddie Robson, The Heist of Hollow London
