She looked up as Lee approached: she had a strong, aristocratic-looking face, and the lines on it suggested that under other circumstances she was the life and soul of the party.

“You haven’t got a fucking light, have you?” she asked hoarsely.

Lee didn’t smoke but enough of her friends did, so she was able to ferret out a cheap plastic lighter and hand it over. The expression of gratitude she received was like a shot of distilled good karma, but then she had to steady the woman’s hands as she lit her cigarette. Lee held a respectful silence as the woman took a long, shuddering drag.

“Fuck,” she said, almost reverently.

“Was that your house?” Lee asked.

There was a flash of suspicion from the woman, but then she inhaled another lungful from the cigarette and mellowed. “My flat,” she admitted. Her hands started to shake again, and she clamped one around the wrist of the other.

“Did you…?” Lee’s eyes were wide. This woman seemed slight and the victims she’d seen had been huge.

The woman stared at her blankly, and then let out a single hack of horrified laughter. “Me? Take on them? Did you see them?”

Lee nodded. But the woman could be a ninja or a HEMA quarterstaff champion as far as she knew.

“I don’t know what happened,” the woman said hollowly—and, to Lee’s ears, not entirely convincingly. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain this. Fuck.” She scowled at her smoke, and Lee passed the lighter back to her. The remaining ambulance crew were bringing another body out.

“I’m Kay, by the way,” the woman told her.

“Lee.”

“You ever get the feeling there are cracks in the world?” Kay asked, straight out, as blunt as that.

Lee choked and stared at her, as though the woman had scooped out all her ready responses with a spoon, leaving only the crazy she’d been sitting on for four years.

Her response, or lack of response, tightened something in Kay’s face. Lee recognized defences going up.

“You’d better go,” Kay told her. “Or they’ll want to talk to you. I don’t think you’re anything to do with this. But they’ll want to check. Thanks for the light.”

“What about you?”

“Well I want to talk to them, so that’s okay.” Kay smiled. “But go.”

Lee backed off, and sure enough there was someone angling towards Kay: a dark-haired man in a long coat who looked…determined.

You ever get the feeling there are cracks in the world? And the answer to that was “Yes.” The answer to that was “My girlfriend fell into one somehow.” She suddenly wanted to run back, to find Kay—if the woman hadn’t already been bundled off by her gloomy-looking minder. She wanted to demand answers: What had she meant? What cracks? Where did Mal go?