She was in the dark still, knowing only that she didn’t know.

Then she reached Camden Town, and at least one area of uncertainty crystallized, because the metal lattice gate was drawn shut and she’d missed the last Tube. It seemed impossible for that much time to have fallen out of the bottom of things, but her phone told the same story. She tried to think how long it would take her to walk to Euston.

When she turned away from the station, Mal was there.

Lee made a sound she’d otherwise only expect to hear from someone dying: a guttural cough. There was Mal, fifteen feet down the pavement, the immovable object that the handful of other late birds were weaving around. She wore a grimy padded jacket, dull orange under the streetlamps and too big for her. Her jeans were torn, not artfully for fashion but ripped down one leg from the knee, and with a jolt Lee saw something underneath, a dark bandage. Her hair was long, like it hadn’t been since she was fifteen, tied back and mouse-coloured, no more platinum or peroxide.

Her face hadn’t changed. Oh, it was older, and there was a scar down one cheek—like a fish hook had caught there and been yanked free years ago. Those years were in her eyes, too, and in the hard lines about them, as though she’d lived through a decade while less than half that time had passed for The Girl Who Stayed. And there was a new expression on her face, or else it was a new lack of expression, a closedness that she’d never had before. Hardly the same woman at all. Except it absolutely was. Lee wouldn’t mistake her, not now, not ever.

Her heart seemed to have seized up.

Then Mal opened her mouth, and Lee expected…anything: the secrets of the universe, the keening of a hawk, the blind data sound of an ancient modem, anything, so long as it matched the strangeness of a four-year absence with no word at all.

And she said: “Has anyone talked to you, about me?”

“What?” Lee gaped.

“Lee, listen,” Mal snapped. And her voice was hard, now, far more so than memory supplied. She darted closer, moving oddly, as though flitting around objects Lee couldn’t see. “I don’t have much time. Has anyone else been in touch? Police? Or people saying they’re police?” It wasn’t that the coat was too big, Lee saw; Mal was too big. Wherever she’d been, they had a gym. She was broader across the shoulders. The hand she reached out with had scarred knuckles and unfamiliar callouses.

“Mal, I waited!” Lee told her, shrinking back. “What…How can you just come back and ask…?” And she had waited: hours in the cafe and years in Hemel, in the real world. “Mal…”