She rushed from body to body, feeling sick and ashamed of herself for leaving them as soon as she realised they weren’t her son. She couldn’t stop until she’d found Ledjo. She couldn’t even help the people who had heard faint, whispering voices and were racing to move the broken pieces of walls and desks on top of them. Any one of them could have been her son, but something inside her told her they weren’t.

Valera reached a large slab of wall that had tipped over, jutting up into the air at a perilous angle. Half-torn posters of colourful Cyrillic letters were still pinned to it, fluttering in the gentle wind that had been stirred up by the city wrenching itself apart. She was in the ruins of a classroom. Jagged metal and glass blocked any other path than the way she’d come.

‘Ledjo! Ledjo!’ she finally screamed. ‘Where are you, Pikku?’

She had to keep going, keep searching. The only route she could take was over the wall. She didn’t know how she was going to scale it, but she knew she had to. She told herself it might even have saved Ledjo from the brunt of the blast, and he was trapped just on the other side of it, waiting for her to rescue him.

She looked for a foothold, something that would help her up onto the wall so she could test her weight. But another flash of red caught her eye almost directly beneath her. It was tiny, barely visible through a gap between two chunks of wall that hadn’t survived the blast, and almost smothered in dust. But as she focused on it she saw the intricate, abstract pattern of triangles and squares that covered the fabric.

‘No. No, no, no,’ she whispered as she pulled away shards of glass and broken plaster. She dug, and dug, and dug. The wall began to creak and shudder as Valera shifted its new foundations, but she didn’t stop until she uncovered the bruised, soot-covered face of her son.

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

After a very short and very cold shower, Knox made himself a very strong coffee. He had no food in the flat for breakfast. This wasn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, his cupboards were usually bare beyond a bag of coffee beans from the Algerian Coffee Stores, the shop on Old Compton Street that had been supplying caffeine addicts with their domestic fixes since 1887.

This morning Knox took his coffee short as he got dressed. He didn’t like suits and only owned two that he’d had made on Savile Row several years ago for special occasions, like disciplinary review boards. Day to day, he preferred clothes that didn’t obviously mark him out as a government servant.