Can you meet me Kings X station? Got some shit going on.

Emil accepted the cryptic invite with a line of girls in tutus. Steffi went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Her pupils were dilated; a bit of colour had risen in her normally pale face. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. She was surprised to have invited Emil into this; she was surprised to find herself in any sort of drama. But here it was, and she could hardly just pretend it wasn’t happening – that she hadn’t read the message. She’d get those jeans off the floor, go back out. And see where this took her.

She was worried for James, however passive their relationship. The guy couldn’t be well. He needed help. She was worried for herself, too, because never mind what he said: if he did turn out to be dead, her life was surely going to get all kinds of complicated. She felt the prickly edge of guilt that he had cried in front of her not long ago, and she had taken it as a mere bad night rather than a sign of something more significant.

But there was something else, as she looked in the mirror, some other emotion stirred up by the bizarre turn this night had taken in the past half-hour. Here, at last, was something that was not a game. Steffi felt bad admitting it to herself, but the feeling was a little like excitement.

7

LONDON–EDINBURGH TRAIN, 00:49

Branches, like gnarled old trolls’ nails, scratched at the train on its way past; small handfuls of rain were thrown at the windows. The train didn’t sound like it was enjoying it. It was surprising, James thought, how noisy sleeper trains were, given that you were meant to sleep on them.

He’d always loved buses, planes, trains. A train barrelling past, a plane swooping as close as a bird as he negotiated the M25 interchange with some important client: getting right over their heads, so they could see the underside of the fuselage, the little marks in the metal. As children, James and Sally had a whole series of books in which animals bustled around a town, putting out fires or teaching kindergarten classes of smaller animals. The junior-level computer games he wrote as a nerdy child were always about things like being an air-traffic controller (‘press A to reroute the flight; B to never compromise with terrorists’). Even when he first met Karl, he was working in idle moments on a game called ‘National Rail’, where you had to get around the country as fast as possible using real train routes – something Karl had found hilarious. ‘You’re making a game about something that isn’t even fun in real life? What’s next, Jamie, a game about getting your central heating fixed?’