Reality snap

Contains swearing and Holland

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Lola Styles has returned, albeit changed following a violent attack by a creature called a vaen’ka. Clarke and the others are still digesting all that they’ve heard…

Addis Ababa.
1980. February.

The silence was profound. An acknowledgement that there were no words that would be appropriate, no turn of phrase that would be equal to the task. Lola listened to the soft whirring of air conditioning from the ceiling. She’d had years to consider her telling of what had happened. It was only once they’d captured the Atlantic portal and had been able to receive news from Mid-Earth that she’d discovered Clarke and the others had escaped, and were not in jail. Her first task was to find them, and here they were: Kaminski, Chakraborty, Clarke, Holland. She hadn’t expected Holland. No Bakker, though. Perhaps they’d see about that at some point. The story had been curated, of course: she’d left out the more salacious moments. But otherwise, they now knew the truth of where she’d been, of what had happened to her.

Inevitably, it was Frank Holland who spoke first.

“You fucking tough son of a bitch,” he said, staring at her, then pacing the room. “Fuck me. No word of a lie?”

She rolled up the sleeve on one arm and showed him the seam, where the skin colour changed.

“Motherfucker,” Holland said, as if escalating his curses in pursuit of one that would properly encapsulate the moment. He stopped his pacing and stared at her again. She couldn’t work out what was going through his head. “Fuck me. I thought you were a spoiled little girl.”

Lola raised her middle finger. “Well, fuck you.”

The man stared, his stare so intense, so fixed upon her that she wondered if he’d ever break away, or would be forever locked onto her. Then he broke into a massive grin, bellowed a laugh and pointed at Detective Birhane. “You!” he said. “Birhane, whatever your name is. Can we get something a bit more than this mud coffee? We need to celebrate this bad ass motherfucker back from the dead former colleague who I completely fucking underestimated the entire time I was working with her.”

Impressing Frank Holland hadn’t been on Lola’s bucket list. It felt somewhat dirty, as if she must have done something seriously wrong to have won his approval. While Holland went to hassle Birhane for the directions to the nearest bar, she was distracted by Chakraborty approaching suddenly and flinging her arms around her.

“Nisha,” said Lola, hugging her in return. “It’s OK.”

“Why are you telling me it’s OK? Jesus Christ, Lola. I’m so sorry. It must have been so difficult.”

“It was. But I had good people helping me.”

“I know I don’t look like it,” Chakraborty said, stepping away and fanning her face with her hand, “but I’m so happy to see you. It feels like a dream, or something.”

Chakraborty seemed well. She looked rested, more than she’d ever been back in London. The sunken eyes were lifted and bright, the smile seemed less forced.

Across the table, Kaminski sat, hands jittering in front of him, eyes lowered. He was frozen in place. That was fine; she’d give him time to figure out how to react.

There was a noise, and she looked over to Clarke, also still sat, his face covered by one hand. She moved around to him and pulled up a chair. His shoulders shuddered and he looked away from her. He pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, then looked back. His eyes were red.

“I should have been there,” he said. “I should have been there. I’m sorry, Lola.”

“It’s OK.”

“No.” His voice louder perhaps than he’d intended, more forceful. “You shouldn’t have had to go through this alone.”

“I wasn’t alone, I had friends.”

“But not us.” Another deep, cracked breath. “Not me. I wasn’t there.”

She held his hand. “Right. But I thought you might be here. And that was enough.”

The Addis portal station was a statement. It was Ethiopia declaring we can do this better than you. London’s hub seemed paltry by comparison, almost primitive, yet it remained the centre of the Triverse. There was a time Holland had disliked the general concept of other places. He was born in London, lived in London his whole life, worked in London. He knew the streets, the people. London was a shithole, but it was his shithole, and it was the best place on Mid-Earth. One of the problems of having to leave London was being faced with mounting evidence that he’d had it all backwards. It had taken him years to admit it, but it was true: for all its bluster, London was falling behind, and clearly had been for decades. The Kingdom of Great Britain powered on through its own sheer momentum, rather than innovation. It had the world’s biggest power stations, the deepest coal mines, the strongest industry and manufacturing, the broadest coalition of nations across every continent. But it was old, and slow, and stubborn.

Addis Ababa, by contrast, felt like the future. And not a Max-Earth, AI-driven hyper-future, but a warmer, more human mix of innovation, technology, culture. Holland had found it distasteful and odd on his first visit, five years ago, when they were running for their lives. Returning, after years circling the drain on Max-Earth, he could see it with clearer eyes.

At the very least, he’d spent the previous half-decade pleased with himself for doing the right thing. He knew he was an arsehole, but he’d always been good at his job. When it mattered, he’d made a choice. He had to cling to it being the right thing, because the alternative was far worse. That choice, to turn on Miller and hand the evidence to Bakker, had resulted in Miller’s death and their exile. Bakker’s fate was still up in the air; word was that he’d ‘retired’, but that could mean all sorts of things, few of them good. He’d done the right thing, and they’d entirely failed.

If he’d stuck with Miller, he’d still have his job. He’d still be in London, carrying on as normal. Clarke and Bakker and the others would be in jail, most likely, but they were grown-ups and they’d made their choices.

Holland wasn’t interested in the path untrodden. Regret wasn’t an indulgence he allowed himself. He waved at the bartender, took the two bottles of champagne, then headed back towards the conference room, past the botanical gardens and the fountains that filled the portal station.

That sacrifice he’d made, of choosing Bakker over Miller, of condemning them all to exile, had at least confirmed that he was the man. Nobody messed with Detective Frank Holland. Nobody manipulated him, or got to tell him what to do. He was the tough cop, the one who got the job done, who didn’t much care for the rules and put bad guys away. He’d kept to that promise, had followed his gut, as always. He’d taken a bullet for it. At the end of it, he could say with certainty that he was one tough son of a bitch.

And then Lola Styles had returned, in all her Frankenstein glory, and had put them all to shame with her trials. They’d been having fucking garden parties compared to her. Lola Styles, the tiny blonde thing that had shown up in the office on Stamford and Coin, there to replace Callihan after his death. Jesus, John Callihan. That was a name he hadn’t thought about in years. That’s where it had started, for all of them. He’d died chasing phantoms, and the rest of them had run a little too close to danger, time and again. Sooner or later, it’d get them all.

He took a breath at the door to the conference room, then shouldered it open. Holding up the champagne bottles, he declared a celebration, putting on that tough guy face. The man. The ballsiest fucking cop in London. Nobody messed with Frank Holland.

But after this, he was out.

---

References

• Holland’s big decision did of course go down in ‘Unintended consequences’ (March 2024) and ‘Loyalties’ (April 2024). Wow, that was a while back, but doesn’t feel like it.

• The entire incident with Lola’s injuries was in ‘The Vaen’ka’ (November 2024).

• Lola’s arrival at the SDC, when she joined the other detectives, took place waaaay back in ‘Traffic’ (October 2021).

• John Callihan’s fate was sealed a few weeks earlier, in ‘The koth’ (October 2021). I was still a young man back then.

Meanwhile.

Zuckerberg’s recent announcement to make Meta’s products be more like X reminded me of the discussions between

Brad Guigar

and Dave Kellett on their (excellent) Comics Lab podcast. They’ve recently been discussing the relative usefulness and impact of different social platforms, dispensing with all the usual politics and weird corpo-identity stuff¹ to focus purely on the practical:

Is this platform useful for creators?

It’s an increasingly simple calculation. If you can’t link out, or if external links are in any way suppressed, it’s no good. If you can’t leave and take your audience with you, then it’s a temporary tool rather than a business foundation.

Point is, choose carefully where you spend your time, especially if you’re a creator trying to build something that’ll last.

On to some fun things!

• On Monday I’m doing a live stream chat with

  John Ward
  (not that one) and
  Ben Cohen
  . This is exciting and I’m very much looking forward to it. 2pm UK time, or ‘9am EST’ if you’re on made-up time:

• I’m also heading along to a very different live stream on Saturday, 5pm UK time, for a retrospective panel discussion about the classic and covertly super-influential² 2000s-era filmmaking community FXhome, of which I was a part. If that means anything at all to you (hi

  Mike Miller
  ), I’ll see you there:

• Lots of other things going on, which I’ll hopefully talk about soon. Of which, for inside scoop stuff I’ve started doing Footnote articles for paid subscribers. You can check out the one from last month here:

One goal for me for 2025 is to start delivering more value for paid subscribers. More on that soon.

Right, let’s get into the author notes and the nitty gritty of what was going on in today’s ,mouthy chapter…

Author notes

Until Triverse, all of my previous books were more-or-less YA-aimed. A Day of Faces has some swearing (which I’d probably remove if I converted it into a paperback), but otherwise my previous books have all been written with a broad readership in mind.

Triverse being crime fiction, and dealing in some more complex and unpleasant topics, I knew from the start it was going to be more violent, more coarse. There would be more sex, more swearing. Ideally nothing gratuitous, but the stories I’d be telling required a different type of writing.

All of this is to say that I still feel slightly awkward when Frank Holland is in a scene. There’s still a part of me, as I sit here aged 44, what if my mum reads this? It’s very silly, but there it is.

Thing is, and this is why it’s all worthwhile, having a wider repertoire of character types and vocabulary does open up interesting opportunities. Here, for example, we have a two-hander, starting from Lola’s POV and then shifting over to Holland’s. Except even in Lola’s section, she’s primarily interacting with Holland. And he’s all bluster, and swears, and obscenities, and insensitive. But beneath that there’s a lot more going on: we sense that he’s genuinely impressed, and shocked, and startled that he so utterly underestimated Lola.

In the second part, from Holland’s POV, we get the extra insight. The alpha male in him raging against his fears. That being shot has stayed with him, that he harbours secret fears. That he thinks they’re all in way over their heads, and that it would all have been easier if he’d just towed the party line. That ‘doing the right thing’ doesn’t come naturally to him, but has to be almost forced.

All of that, I hope, is more interesting precisely because of his boorish behaviour. His overt, semi-comedic masculinity and classic 1970s London Cop offensive behaviour, juxtaposed against this confused, anguished, rather lost individual.

And yes, I did interject this chapter into the middle of the ‘Vanishing star’ storyline. We’ll be back to that one next week. Hey, it’s my serial, I can do what I want!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

1. Which, by the way, is incredibly daft. Please don’t tie your politics and identity to advertisement-powered products designed by huge corporations. Regardless of how you like to vote, it’s just an unhealthy way to approach companies who absolutely do not care about you, beyond being a line in a spreadsheet.

2. Seriously, you may never heard of this place, but it served as a community hub for many very young people who went on to highly successful creators, one way or another: Sam and Niko from Corridor Digital, producer Freddie W, US cinematography AJ Rickert-Epstein, fight designer Chris Cowan (Shang-Chi, Acolyte, etc), VFX artist Matt Plummer, cinematographer Nils Crone, stuntman and choreographer Adam Kirley, ActionFX founder Rody Polis, Swiss director Marco von Moos, Austin directors Andrew and Ben Adams, LEGO associate creative director Geraint Abbott — I mean, the list just goes on and on and on, and there’s absolutely a ton of people I’ve missed because I’ve not been in the filmmaking scene for a decade. If you were there, you were there, man.