I leant back and stared out of the window, wondering what to do. From above the rooftops, stars shone down from a clear sky, and I knew that it would be a bitterly cold night. It was hard not to feel hopeless. I was struggling and clawing to become a Keeper auxiliary, working for weeks and months at a time to gain a tiny bit more favour with the Council. Meanwhile, Richard and Morden between them had more power than I could gain in a hundred years. They could have us all eliminated at any time and place of their choosing, probably with no more than a phone call. Was I really accomplishing anything? Or were all my efforts with the Keepers and with finding a teacher for Luna just a way of passing time?

Then I shook my head. This isn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe working with the Keepers would help and maybe not, but I’d chosen my course of action and all there was to do was stick with it. In the meantime, if I couldn’t do anything about Richard or Luna, I might as well concentrate on something more productive.

All day long, in the back of my mind, I’d been puzzling over that focus I’d found last night and the question of how it had got there. Without it, I could have written off the 999 call as a waste of time. With it . . . well, focuses don’t get left lying around for no reason. Why had one been sitting by the train tracks of an all-but-empty DLR station?

The bottom line was that I’d been told to find out what had happened, and I hadn’t. Yes, I’d followed orders, but I didn’t really want to leave it at that. Part of it was a sense of professionalism, but part of it was just simple curiosity. When you’re a diviner, you have this constant urge to stick your head in for a closer look, and when you don’t, it bugs you. If I wanted to find out what had happened at that station, how would I do it?

The easy answer was time magic. Time mages can look back into the past of their current location, playing out the events before their eyes like a video recording. It’s a very useful ability, which naturally means that the supply of helpful time mages never meets the demand. I do know one time mage, a guy called Sonder, but we aren’t exactly friends anymore and I didn’t even think he was in London at the moment. That just left the mundane way. What would I do if I wanted to find out what had happened at a particular place and time and I wasn’t a mage?

The obvious answer was CCTV. London has the dubious distinction of being the most spied-upon city in the world, with more security cameras per person than anywhere else on the planet. I couldn’t remember if the station had had any cameras, but logic suggested that the answer was yes. I glanced at the clock to see that it was ten P.M. Trains would still be running.