I reached to the keyboard, scrolled right. A series of photos went past, different angles, different places. Alone, none of them was a perfect match, but putting them together . . . “It’s him.”

“You sure?”

“Ninety percent.”

Caldera nodded. “Jean-Jacques Duval, thirty-four years old, mage name Chamois. Born in Lyons, travels all around Europe as a freelance battle-mage—he works for Dark or Light, anyone who’ll pay the bills. Suspected assassin but he’s never quite made it onto the wanted list. He uses France as a base and does all his dirty work out of the country, then stays on just good enough terms with the French Council to get away with it. Pretty tough reputation. The people who want to talk him up call him Silence, or The Silent.”

“Yeah,” I said. I’d found the video of the battle in Stratford station. It was grainy and low quality, but it wasn’t hard for me to recognise myself. “I think I know where that came from.”

We watched the fight play out. I saw myself jump away from Chamois’s implosion spell. “You run fast when you want to, don’t you?” Caldera said.

“Practice.” On the video, Chamois leapt onto the train and disappeared from view. “How long’s he been in the country?”

“His passport’s not registered as having entered,” Caldera said. “Not that that means anything.”

“Any other sightings?”

Caldera shook her head. “He probably gated out as soon as that attack failed.”

“Huh.” The video ended and I searched quickly through the folders. “Where’s the video from Pudding Mill Lane?”

“Yeah, well, that’s the bad news,” Caldera said. “You know those cameras you saw at Pudding Mill Lane, the ones you went back to take a closer look at? All dead. Early Thursday evening, they lost the feeds from platform and approach CCTV.”

I looked up at her sharply. “That’s the same time that report was called in.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What killed the cameras?”

“‘Electrical failure,’ whatever that means. Not like a bunch of TFL engineers are going to know what to look for in a magic attack.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing we can rule out coincidence.” I thought for a second. “When did the feeds go?”

“Between six twenty-three and six twenty-six. The call-in was seven-oh-four.”

“Not collateral damage, then.”

“Safe bet,” Caldera said. “So someone decides to do some business around the station, and they don’t want anyone watching.”

“Why would they pick a station?” I said. “Why not somewhere private?”

“Maybe they didn’t want somewhere completely private. Picked a place that was away from the public eye, but public enough that it’d discourage a fight.”

I tried to picture it in my head. Two people, maybe more, coming to that station to do . . . what? A meeting, an exchange? I remembered what Xiaofan had told us. A younger boy and a man, and the man had held the focus only a little while. Maybe the data focus had passed between the two of them, given or taken. Then the man had lost it, for it to fall into the gravel beyond the platform . . . but how?