Chapter 8: Nox and the 237 to Nowhere

The bus stop appeared at half past midnight.

Mara had been walking for two hours by then — north from London Bridge, then east along the river, then turning away from it along streets she didn't recognise though she'd lived in this city her entire life. The map had been guiding her in the way it always guided her now, with adjustments rather than directions: a thread thickening here, a junction blurring into irrelevance there, the paper reshaping its own logic with the quiet insistence of water finding a route downhill. She had stopped questioning it after Bermondsey. She had stopped questioning most things after the crow started talking, but Bermondsey had finished the work.

The stop was on a pavement she was fairly certain didn't exist in the daytime. The road behind her was one she knew — a proper road, with a Coral and a fried chicken place and a Polish grocery still lit at midnight — but twenty steps along it had become something quieter, something that felt like the city breathing through its teeth, and then there was the stop: a red pole with a white sign, the number 237 in clean black numerals, and below it a listed route that read, as best she could make out in the orange lamplight, something like: Limehouse — Wapping — Rotherhithe — elsewhere.