I hang about in a nearby doorway and check the street both ways, pushing my cap down low over my eyebrows as a pair of Black Marks in their belted and buttoned uniforms march past, their attention on a Cerel cart up ahead that’s hit a rut in the street and lost half its load of cabbages. Quickly, I make for the door, shove it open and duck inside. I relax now, sauntering along the narrow, dark and smelly corridor that runs between the two buildings, gliding my fingers along a wall of sandy brick. Echoes of sounds reach me from above, although there are no windows that open onto this passageway. It’s like a tunnel, with a streak of sky at the top. Then I reach what would appear to a stranger to be a dead end. It was once a throughway to the next street, but it’s bricked up these days. Lifting up the manhole cover, I lower myself inside before pulling the cover back, my boots ringing on the metal ladder in the wall. It’s our hidden entrance, a secret way into the basement of the building.

Through the ruined basement – too ruined even for us Cerels to use, all broken bricks and piles of rubble – and I clatter up a flight of steps. Then I make my way along the ground-floor corridor, past the doors of small apartments in various states of disrepair, but habitable. The building is like a rabbit warren, and full of Cerels. I pause to poke my head out the doorway that opens onto the inner courtyard with the veggie gardens, and look up at five storeys of blank windows, some of them broken and patched.

Ours is one of the many buildings that were ransacked by the Black Marks in the early years. I remember Nanna telling me how, back in the days when Cerels were a normal part of Ursa, the house had a fine stone frontage with a winged angel on either side of the main entrance. The Black Marks broke in from that side, said Nanna, from Newbolt Street. They came with sledgehammers and malice, breaking holes in walls for the sheer hell of it, smashing furniture and plumbing. On their way out, they knocked off the heads of the angels.

Since then, the Newbolt Street entrance has been boarded up with bricks and mortar. If the Black Marks ever come back, they won’t bother to come that way. It’s nothing now to them; a void. Just like everything else they’ve been told to wreck.

At the end of the corridor where the stairs hug the wall, a woman with thick dark hair greets me as I take the steps two at a time. “Hello, Therei,” I say in passing, and she flashes me a grin.

Somebody else standing in an open doorway calls out, “Leho!” and I raise my hand without stopping.