They formed a tunnel. A smooth spin of vision showed him that it led straight down. There was a hole in the world. Oh. He was on top of it.

Sefton laughed in joy as he fell down it.

He fell into a wide open space. He couldn’t see it, he couldn’t see anything, but he could feel it. His giddy joy turned to fear. He had to reach out into the darkness with his senses, not with his body. He had to find a way to do that or he’d keep falling in darkness, forever. He was aware, distantly, of his real body, still moving, perhaps doing something different to dancing now, not as warm. In fact it was cold. He concentrated on the pain and the cold, solidified himself around grief and fear.

He felt his way into London and saw it slowly resolve into vision all around him. He felt all the people who made it. The buildings were incidental to the people. The buildings were like a bouncing line on a mixing desk, flying up and down according to the needs and wishes and secrets of the people who pushed and pushed at the metropolis around them. The people made the buildings. He stepped out into what they’d made. He walked along a thousand balconies, hopped from one to another, ran along a line he was making as he went, association to association, along a tightrope across libraries and post offices and spires, the line springing to the beat that he felt all around him. He stopped and looked down at the metropolis around him and felt the compass points, from the big to the small, to the infinity of minuscule ones in between them. He felt how roundabouts and temples of all kinds produced eddies, how big malls created deluges, all to the unconscious will of the people, all manipulated deliberately by those who knew how.

He could feel the orbits of the outer boroughs. He looked up and decided to see them. He found he could. There were lots of them, up and out of the plane of the M25, and down below it, all swinging about Centre Point at their different angles.

The Centre Point building itself wasn’t at the centre, but a little off it, so the wheel of London turned with a continual pulse beat thump around that hub. It was turning the wrong way. Anticlockwise. It was turning as if it had been set in motion with one big push. It wasn’t going in the direction it was meant to roll.

Sefton tried, just for a moment, to set his strength against it, becoming a chalk hill figure on the South Downs and heaving at it, but only for a terrifying instant before he realized that its accumulated momentum would crush him utterly if he tried.