But she had not answered, had sat still while the train waited, then moved slowly, picking up speed and rattling in a regular rhythm, squeezing from one of the station’s pores. It wound to the north of the Spike, under two sets of skyrails, looking out over Cadnebar’s squat, barbarous circus. The prosperity and majesty of The Crow—the Senned Gallery, the Fuchsia House, Gargoyle Park—was riddled with squalor. Lin gazed into steaming rubbish tips as The Crow segued into Rim, saw the wide streets and stuccoed houses of that prosperous neighbourhood wind carefully past hidden, crumbling blocks where she knew the rats were running.

The train passed through Rim Station and plunged on over the fat grey ooze of the Tar, crossing the river barely fifteen feet to the north of Hadrach Bridge, until it picked its way distastefully over the ruinous roofscape of Creekside.

She had left the train at Low Falling Mud, at the western edge of the slum ghetto. It had not taken long to tread the rotting streets, past grey buildings that bulged unnaturally with sweating damp, past kin who eyed her and tasted her in the air and moved away, because her uptown perfume and strange clothes marked her out as one who had escaped. It had not taken her long to find her way back to her broodma’s house.

Lin had not come too close, had not wanted her taste to filter through the shattered windows and alert her broodma or her sister to her presence. In the growing heat, her scent was like a badge for other khepri, that she could not remove.

The sun had moved and heated the air and clouds, and still Lin had stood, some little way from her old home. It was unchanged. From within, from cracks in the walls and door, she could hear the skittering, the organic pistoning of little male khepri legs.

No one had emerged.

Passers-by had ejected chymical disgust at her, for coming back to crow, for spying on some unsuspecting household, but she had ignored them all.

If she entered and her broodma was there, she thought, they would both be angry, and miserable, and they would argue, pointlessly, as if the years had not gone by.

If her sister was there and told her their broodma had died, and Lin had let her go without a word of anger or forgiveness, she would be alone. Her heart might burst.

If there was no sign . . . if the floors crawled only with males, living like the vermin they were, no longer pampered princes without brains but bugs that stank and ate carrion, if her broodma and her sister had gone . . . then Lin would be standing pointlessly in a deserted house. Her homecoming would be ridiculous.