Chapter 10: Aldgate's Drowned Platform

The map did not take her east in any straightforward sense.

It took her east the way water takes the lowest route — doubling back twice, insisting on a specific bus rather than the one that would have been faster, marking a turning off Commercial Road that smelled of a fishmonger who had closed some years ago and left only the ghost of the smell behind. Mara followed it without arguing. She had learned, in the space of a week, that arguing with the map was like arguing with fog: technically possible, completely pointless.

Brekke rode her shoulder and said nothing, which had come to feel like a companionable silence rather than a pointed one. That struck her as a development she hadn't agreed to, but there it was.