Chapter 15: Nox Tells the Truth About Gran

The bus stop materialised at twenty past midnight, the same way it always did — not appearing so much as becoming perceptible, the way a word you've been trying to remember suddenly surfaces in the moment you stop reaching for it. The pole was there, and then it had always been there, and the shelter beside it had a bench and a crack running diagonally across its back panel and a small rain-proof notice listing destinations in a typeface that did not belong to any Transport for London signage standard Mara had ever seen.

ELSEWHERE (ALL STOPS), the notice read, and beneath that, in smaller print: via the bits that remember themselves.

Mara stood under the shelter with her hands in her coat pockets and Brekke on her shoulder. It was cold in the specific way of London at this hour — not harsh, just insistent, the cold of a city that has been awake since the Iron Age and found it tiring. The map had brought her here from the park without ceremony, updating its routes with the usual uncanny tidiness and declining, as always, to explain itself.