“Hey, can you hear that?”

“What?”

“It’s the sound of me playing the world’s tiniest violin.”

“Yeah, laugh it up, you’re not the one freezing your balls off. Why didn’t they send a time mage?”

“You know how many incidents we get called out to per day?” Caldera asked. “Have a guess. Then have a guess how many time mages we’ve got on retainer.”

I was silent. “Here’s another question,” Caldera said. “You think you’re the first guy who’s noticed that some of the jobs we get sent on probably aren’t going to accomplish much?”

“No.”

“You have to search an empty station,” Caldera said. “Given what usually happens when you’re around, you ought to be happy.”

“It’s still a shit job.”

“This is not even close to what our really shit jobs look like. Now, are you going to do the work or are you going to keep being a whiny little bitch?”

I sighed. “Fine.”

“Because I’m not running out there to hold your hand.”

“I get it.”

“Besides, I’ve got a pint waiting for me and it’s nice and warm in here.”

“I hate you so much.”

“Sucks to be you. Later.” Caldera hung up. I glared at my phone and shoved it into my pocket. Another gust of freezing wind swept across the platform; the air was damp and even without my magic, my London upbringing was telling me it was going to rain again soon.

I had another try at finding a witness, but after fifteen minutes of searching I was forced to give up. The closest guy I could find was one lonely security guard still on duty at the construction site, bundled up in a booth with a space heater. He was several minutes away, had no line of sight to the platform, and from his body language didn’t seem to be interested in anything except trying not to freeze. It was theoretically possible that some other construction workers had been on site when whatever-it-was had happened, but if they had they hadn’t called 999, and I had absolutely no idea how I would find the right individuals out of an indeterminate-but-almost-certainly-large number of construction workers who (a) had gone home for the night, (b) would probably be disinclined to talk to me, and (c) were unlikely to have seen anything useful in the first place.

In the end I was forced to fall back on my divination, which was ironic given that I’d just been complaining at Caldera about how useless it was. But while divination isn’t really designed for CSI work, there are a few tricks you can pull which kind of do the same thing. In particular, it’s good for searching. If you’ve already decided to search an area, you skim through the possible futures of yourself doing the search and look for ones in which you find something. It’s not all that reliable, mainly because it’s hard to tell the difference at a casual glance between “future in which you find something useful” and “future in which you find something that looks useful but turns out on closer inspection to be irrelevant or worthless.” But it beats turning over rocks with your bare hands.