Chapter 19: Brekke's Wager

The canal was still glittering when she got back to Peckham. She had walked most of it — Hackney Wick to London Bridge, London Bridge south and west through streets that smelled of exhaust and cooling chip-fat — because the night bus wasn't running on this route, or if it was she couldn't find the stop, and she had needed the cold and the pavement and the specific rhythm of one foot after the other to organise what she was carrying.

She had not taken the flame. She had not been able to take it, not without understanding what that meant, and now she was understanding it, and it felt like swallowing something with edges.

Brekke was waiting on the windowsill. He had been there when she left; he was there when she returned, which should not have surprised her and somehow still did, the way a lamp in a window always surprises you when you've been out in the dark. She got through the front door and up the stairs and into the flat without turning on any lights, moving by the amber seep from the street, and he watched her cross the kitchen and sit down at the table with the particular quality of attention that she had come to understand was not stillness so much as concentration. As if she were a thing he was still in the process of reading.