Her earlier thoughts came back to her, how Gym Bro had been something modern, sleek, dangerous like a gun or a fast car, whereas this man…was a Stig.

She thought about dinosaurs, and other, more human things that might not be so lost to time as they were supposed to be.

“She told you, come with me?” Stig asked. “She told you, do what I say?” His voice was accented, a citizen of nowhere Lee had ever heard of. A nice voice, taken in isolation, rich and resonant like a classically trained actor’s.

“She didn’t,” Lee said, seeing his brow wrinkle: an expression that was identifiable as frustration, yet not quite the way a normal human face would have expressed it. “But she said you were her friend.”

“Hrm,” said Stig, as though he wasn’t necessarily convinced of that himself. “They are outside. Keep going down. We are going down. We are going out.”

“Down? Into the cellar? Where’s out from there?” Khan demanded, obviously liking none of this.

“There is a door. There will be a door. We are making one now. Please.” He smiled again; it transformed his face from horror movie to broad comedy, but Lee could see that he was desperate to get them moving.

He could just go for us, she thought. He was obviously strong enough. And yet he didn’t, and that went the final step to convincing her.

“Lead on, Stig,” she said.

He grinned and ducked out of the room, leading them down—leading them, hopefully, out.

She thought down had meant cellars, but Mount Pleasant was hiding more than that. They came out at a platform, a girderwork-vaulted tunnel stretching off into the darkness.

“What the hell?” Lee said.

“Mail tunnels, love,” Khan said from behind her. “Used to shunt the post across London with these.” At Lee’s bewildered look, she added, “Had a soirée here once, all posh gov types and Tory party donors. Fucking awful black tie thing. They let us ride the little trains, though, so there was that.”

“Come,” Stig insisted, already down by the rails and at the mouth of a tunnel. At the brink of that ersatz cave with darkness at his back, he looked even more like a Stig. Then there was someone else with him, and Lee skidded to a halt before realizing it was another Stig.

She wore a similar mismatch of shabby used clothes, in this case a mauve woollen cardigan straining at the shoulders, a paisley blouse with missing buttons and a pair of dreadfully stained tracksuit trousers. The two of them together were disconcerting in the way that Stig alone wasn’t, no longer an anomaly but a people.

“Come!” Stig said.