He raises an eyebrow. ‘Puts Transport for London to shame.’

* * *

It has stopped raining by the time we’ve wrangled the trackers onto each of birds and set them free. O usually lets me throw the bird up in the sky since I don’t mind them crapping on me as much as she does. It’s always fun but today feels especially excellent. I’ve spent far too much time asleep lately. Now I feel like a woman of action. Whee.

Once they’re airborne, I run inside and watch the tracking display with Roman. He has superimposed a map of London on the skyline beyond O’s window. We are at the centre, and each bird appears as a flashing light as its tracker registers with the satellite. Anticlimactically, all of the lights blend into a single blob for quite a while as the birds circle around above O’s building. After a bit of zooming-in, Roman starts to pick out individual signals. One detaches and goes south. Four go south-east, two go south-west, and the last settles on a nearby rooftop and stays there.

‘Bloody useless!’ I say to the display. ‘Fly!’

‘Maybe she’s kept that one too long and it’s getting homed to this building,’ Roman says.

‘It’s probably just lazy. I shouldn’t have fed them so much.’

‘Never mind. Let’s just track the others. Look at these two – they’re flying right over the Westway. I’ll get someone on them.’

The excitement soon fades. It’s super boring watching the pigeons’ slow progress and my mind begins to wander. I check my news feed and the first thing I see is sponsored content.

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