Chapter 20: Nox Opens the Doors She Never Opens

The bus stop did not exist at midnight. By half past it had materialised between a dry cleaner's and a shuttered off-licence on a street that Mara's map showed as something older than its current name — a track, once, before the track became a road and the road became a postcode and the postcode swallowed everything before it. The map had been rewriting itself since they left the flat, new lines appearing while she held it, the city's underlayer rising through the surface of the page like words on a letter read under heat.

Asha stood very still beside Mara on the pavement, which Mara had come to understand was not patience but economy. The war-goddess did not fidget. She had the absolute stillness of someone who has waited centuries for things far more consequential than buses, and who has learned that the body that fidgets is the body that diminishes itself.

Brekke was on Mara's shoulder, which was where he was now, she had begun to think of it simply as where he was, and she had stopped remarking on the weight of him the way you stop remarking on the weight of a coat.