The real change, though, happened far from us. Somewhere there, in the east of London, where the river widens and begins its journey into the sea, something blew up. I have no better way of saying it. A column of Smoke reaching up into the sky, its borders clean, defined near the ground then fraying into a thousand threads and dispersing into the clouds. God only knows what caused it. Perhaps that’s where Sebastian engineered the sewers to release the flood. Perhaps Julius drifted there, borne along by strange currents, and only there released the full brunt of his pyre. Or else the Quickening found a repository of Soot so rich as to make Sebastian’s pools look like puddles. Spit in the ocean. Out of the cloud, rain is forming. We are too far away to know whether it’s black.

Charlie turns to me. At some point during the night he managed to smear Soot over his lip in precisely such a way that it looks like a moustache. It suits him. Soots him. I almost smile. His hands too remain stained from where he pushed Julius under the waterline. The devil, washed of his sins in infected blood.

Charlie was his baptist.

“We should run for the hills,” he says now. “Get above the cloud level. Wait the worst of it out.”

I know he wants to protect me, that he is worried what might happen to me and my volatile blood. But I shake my head.

“Above the cloud level? In England? No, Charlie, we made a choice. Pandora’s box. We opened it. Now we have to brave it out.”

I take his hand again into my aching right one, take Livia’s into my left. We have been walking like this most of the morning. A storm is gathering. I may be headed for madness, the world for the abyss.

I have never been happier in my whole life.

Charlie, too, looks happy.

“Do you know what theatre is?” he whispers, not really asking, musing aloud. “A boy at school told me about it. Grown people acting out a story. Love, revenge, the fall of kings. For more than two hundred years now, it has been banned.” He smiles, almost shyly. “Do you think there’ll be theatre again, after the Smoke?”

And then he goes on, still smiling, but sadder now, thoughtful: “It won’t work, you know. It cannot work. Us three.”

“Why?”

I see him struggle to put it in words.

“We are more than friends. We love one another. And when people love one another, there is Smoke involved. Here,” he raises the hand that joins him to Livia, “but also here,” he raises the hand that joins him to me. “Livia can’t marry both of us,” he adds shyly then is surprised when she stops him and tells him off.