Charlie watches the feeding. The boy won’t handle the spoon himself but he will sit there, mouth open, and allow Grendel to deposit a spoonful; will chew it slowly and sigh, world-weary, his eyes screwed up and cold. When the bowl is nearly finished the boy holds a dollop on his tongue then suddenly bends forward and spits it at Grendel’s feet. It is deliberate, a test: the small brown face insolent, the body tense, ready to bolt. Grendel kneels, cleans it up, offers another spoonful from the bowl. But the child has moved away and wrapped himself in blankets. All this Charlie sees from the keyhole. When Grendel turns to leave, the boy looks after him. A curious look. Suspicion mingled with the dawning of trust. Charlie rises just before Grendel pushes open the door.

“Can I go to him?” he asks, but Grendel shakes his head. “Mr. Sebastian does not wish it.”

“Why do you follow his orders?”

“The boy is scared,” Grendel says. “You are kind, but you will scare him. With me, he knows I won’t smoke. Even when he bites. He can sense that I’m harmless. Down to my bones.”

Charlie understands what he means. Grendel radiates something. Holiness; an absence. A man estranged from sin.

“Then Livia is right. You are an angel.”

Grendel hesitates. “I fear I am one of those who stood at the edge of heaven, looking down. Dreaming about their Fall.”

ф

Thomas returns late. Finding the sewer entrance proved harder than he thought, his hand-drawn map of the underground and the city’s streets impossible to match. In the end he chanced upon an Ashton engineer in a company cab and ran behind it until it led him to a work site. Thomas snuck into the sewer for several hundred yards before being thrown out by a foreman. What he saw was a maze of tunnels and a mechanical pump the size of a house, pumping water down a giant bore. He got nowhere near those giant pools marked in pale rectangles upon his map.

“We are running out of time,” he keeps saying. “It’s been forty-eight hours since they infected Mowgli. Another day and he’ll start changing. We must find out what she is planning before then.”

“Then we will go tonight,” Charlie suggests. “We must take him along. In case we don’t want to return.”

Thomas and Livia are quick to agree. They are all fed up with waiting. One might start a revolution, it comes to Charlie, or thwart it, just from this, a hunger for movement, for action.

“Mowgli is locked in,” Livia reminds them. “But Grendel has the key. I will talk to him.”