Chapter 5: The Temple Between the Laundrette and the Pho

The laundrette was called Sunshine Wash and had been there since 1987, which Mara knew because someone had scratched the year into the plaster above the door in numbers that had been painted over so many times they'd become topographical. The Vietnamese restaurant next to it had no name she had ever been able to determine — the sign above it read something in careful brushstrokes that she didn't have the language for, and no one had ever thought to add a transliteration, which she had always found either respectful or indifferent depending on her mood. It was perpetually full. She had tried to get a table there once, three years ago, and been told there was a forty-minute wait by a woman who looked at her with the particular patience of someone who knows the wait is not forty minutes.

She had never tried again. She thought of this now, walking south from the Tube with Brekke a dark comma on her shoulder and Asha half a pace ahead of her, moving through the Friday lunchtime street with the unhurried authority of someone who has walked every version of this road that has ever existed, which, Mara reflected, was probably literally true.

"The window is two minutes," Asha said, not turning around. "We will not be late."