One

Something Fielding had said about hoping Skinners had invaded the warehouse chimed with deep suspicions of his own. He thought of the rats piling into the room. An aspect that had needled him. There was a hole in the door, but it had not been there when he went to sleep. Surely. He always double-checked the doors, made certain they were secure. Maybe fatigue had caused him to miss this, but he doubted it. He didn't know what that might mean.

Jane folded the map and tucked it into his bible; he stowed everything in the backpack and shouldered it. The wind was hardly heard in here. It was a surprise sometimes, not necessarily a happy one, to be able to hear the labour of your breath, or the riot of your own thoughts. But the moment you considered the wind, it was there in the background, like the breath of a baby in a cot, as if inspired to increase its volume by virtue of your mind snagging upon it. It moaned in the gaps of the houses and called out from the open mouths of flues. It carried the grief of the city's destruction.

Walking those sagging, abject streets you could almost begin to take the damage for granted. Years of listening to the glass crunching underfoot and the groan of battered timber finding alien positions in which to settle softened your reaction to it. Like the stone edges of buildings dissolved by the rain, you became blunted, you curved away. You kept your eyes on the pavement while the jagged fingers of scaffolding and fence posts and foundations beseeched the sky. He was no engineer, but he knew they could not stay in London indefinitely. It was a muscular city only for so long as its pals stuck around to help out: the Thames Barrier, for example. Who was maintaining the flood defences now that most of the capital's population were so much rat food? He woke up in cold sweats thinking of overheated rods in nuclear power stations melting concrete and spewing tons of radioactivity into the shattered sky. Would they even notice?

Jane closed the jib door and checked that the edges were concealed. He trod through the house to the back door and let himself into the garden. He waited, assessing, gauging.

Eventually he moved back along the side of the building to the road, the aches in his legs reawakening already. He walked south, skirting Primrose Hill on the west side. He was back in Maida Vale without realising his feet were taking him that way. He stood outside the house and called softly to Stanley, staring up at his window. He could still see that cheeky face with its arresting green-brown eyes. There was no effort in his recalling it; he seemed to wait, a good little boy, at the edges of his Dad's thoughts until he was needed.

He waited for a while, feeling his hair whipped by the wind and filling with grit. The foul cake mix of the sky folded in scoops of cobalt and charcoal. He thought of the raft and wondered who had begun it – either the building of it, or the baseless rumour – and imagined himself sitting in a crude boat next to Stanley, holding hands, heading on gentle swells to a gap in the clouds where the sun was peeking through. He took that image with him, empty-handed once again, back onto the A5, ghosts clamouring, that hopeful road upon which he had entered the city ten years before, straight as an arrow shaft, cutting through his fear and doubt, slamming into a bull's-eye so insubstantial that the arrow was still in flight, looking for a target. Anything.

He turned left onto Crawford Street and walked as far as Upper Montagu Street. The windows looking in on the children's area of the library at the end of the road were boarded up. He could just make out the play of candlelight in the cracks around the chipboard. A side door was nailed shut with thick planks. On Marylebone Road he hurried up the steps, feeling woefully exposed in the twilight, and gave a patterned knock on the heavy main entrance. A woman wearing glasses with thick scratched frames let him in. He swept across the marbled hall and down the stairs to the children's library. Becky was sitting in the corner drinking from a tin cup. She rose when she saw him, spilling her drink across her sweatshirt. They embraced and he felt her heart through their clothes, beating hard enough for both of them.

'I missed you,' she said. He nodded and smiled, kissed her. He missed her as soon as he was with her. It seemed to catch up with him. It was difficult when you were in the city. You were so busy trying to avoid Skinners, assess bolt-holes, keep a step ahead of the tripwire of your own dark thoughts that there was little time or space for others to share.

'Is there any food?'

Becky shook her head. 'No, wait. I saved you something. I haven't seen you for days.' She led him away from the small bookshelves furred with dust into the staffroom. He didn't like the children's library. It was too close to what he was all about. She dug out from her pocket a tablet of chocolate wrapped in silver paper.

'What about you?' he asked.