“Oh, shit,” the woman said. “You want me to call an ambulance?”

“Might not be the best idea.” Now that I was out of combat, my side was really hurting. I didn’t think it was going to kill me, but it was deep. Not good.

“I’m calling 999,” the woman announced. She pulled out a phone and started tapping.

There was a thump from above, echoing through the carriage. It was hollow, and heavy. It was, in fact, exactly the kind of noise a grown man would make when landing on the roof of a train.

Shit.

The passengers in the train looked upwards. They looked confused rather than worried; I had the feeling that wasn’t going to last. “Hello?” the woman was saying. “Ambulance.”

I held still, scanning futures. The people around were making it harder, their actions tangling with my own. What was this guy going to do, smash his way through the windows?

“Hello? Yeah. There’s a man here, I think he’s hurt . . . I mean, yeah, he’s definitely hurt . . . what? Marie Gilman . . . Yeah, my number’s, wait a sec . . .”

I couldn’t see any futures in which the air mage broke in, but it was looking like he wouldn’t have to. Up ahead, the lights of the shopping centres were getting brighter and I could see what looked like a platform. The next station was barely a minute away. And it was the terminus, which would mean everyone would be getting out . . .

“No, the DLR,” the woman was saying. “What? Hang on, I’ll check. How old are you?”

It took me a second to realise the woman was talking to me. “What?”

“I think about thirty?” she said into the phone. “Oh. Okay . . . Do you have any existing medical conditions?”

I stared at her.

“They want to know if you’ve got any existing medical conditions,” the woman said. “Oh, she was asking if you’ve got any chest pain?”

“No, I have a pain in my side, because someone just stabbed me through it. And you might want to forget that call and get out of here, because the man who did the stabbing is probably on the roof of this train.”

“What?”

The train was pulling into Stratford and the doors would be opening in twenty seconds. Stratford’s not Pudding Mill Lane: the station was well lit, skyscrapers rose up around us, and another train was waiting to go on the other side of the platform. We were still at the edge of the station, but there would be staff farther in—the closer I could get to the main floor of the station, the more pressure there’d be for this guy to back off. Why was he even after me? The only explanation I could think of was that he wanted that focus I’d picked up last night. Maybe he’s planning to take it off my corpse.

The train stopped with a hiss. The passengers got off, filing out through the doors, heading for the stairs down. I followed them, hands in my pockets, head down. My side was hurting badly, but I didn’t let it show and I didn’t look up. It’s hard to pick one person out of a crowd, especially from the back. All I needed was for this guy to hesitate for a few seconds and I’d make it out. I scanned through the futures—he wouldn’t be aggressive enough to attack me right in the middle of a bunch of commuters, right?