And she was about to say something sarcastic, but she grabbed her purple clutch bag, kissed him on the cheek, and left instead.

“You didn’t wish me luck with my date!” shouted Cormac behind her.

“No, I didn’t,” said Kim-Ange, whose opinion of Yazzie was unsisterly, but it was too late, as Yazzie was already standing there, her large eyes looking at Kim-Ange tremulously. Kim-Ange decided, again uncharacteristically, to suddenly take the stairs.

THERE WAS SOMETHING about standing in a very long queue that was not conducive to a good date, however beautiful Yazzie looked—which she did, in a long orange dress that perfectly set off her dark braids and huge dark eyes.

London was still ridiculously climate-change hot, and people were walking about in shorts, red-faced, an aura of vaguely suppressed threat in the air. They walked past the skateboarders under the Royal Festival Hall, who shouted and entranced children cheek by jowl with expensively dressed older people on their way to concerts and the theater; frozen-still mimes standing in the middle of the street, balancing on poles and getting in the way; art and books for sale; hawkers; jugglers; people yelling and handing out leaflets—the whole noisy cacophony of life. The smog hanging above the water and the great towers of the east took on a pink tinge in the early evening.

The air smelled of food vans and garbage and fuel, and he felt stuffy and hot in his best checked shirt, which had made Kim-Ange pretend to vomit but then decide was good enough after all. No designer borrowing tonight, he noticed.

Yazzie was chatting about someone she’d seen on her ward rounds, and he listened cheerfully enough, as they dodged and weaved around the hundreds of other people on the narrow bridge that cut its way up to Charing Cross station, next to thundering trains on the track beside them, above gray water filled with pleasure boats and dredgers, odd flat structures covered in cement, and a lifeboat station. The clouds seemed to seal the heat to the ground. He accidentally bumped into one group of tourists, fell back, and jostled a large man who looked furious with him and swore under his breath.

His newfound fondness for the big city was muted tonight; he was thinking about how the fair was always such a fun time. He’d normally go a couple of times. Jake would get in with the St. John’s Ambulance ladies, who got free passes to everything but never wanted to use them—it was obviously a scam, they should have gone to a much more deserving cause, but Jake had the gift of the gab and that was that.