Something about that bothers me. I’d have trouble putting my finger on exactly what it is, but I don’t like the idea of ending up like that. So I take public transport and go shopping in Sainsbury’s and skim the news on the internet. It’s part of the reason I run my shop too. I don’t know if it really accomplishes anything, but I do it all the same.

The address Chalice had given me was just off Uxbridge Road. I walked down the side streets, hearing the rush and noise of the main road fade away behind me. The sky had cleared a little, and a half moon shone down brightly through patches in the clouds. Stars twinkled above and to the east; we were far enough away from the centre of London that the constellations were a little easier to see. I came to a halt one street away and scanned ahead.

The address was a house, small and cheaply built, with a concrete drive for parking at the front. Red-brown peaked roof, two floors with no basement, square windows looking out onto a curving street. It was the kind of house you find all around the suburbs of London, duplicated a hundred times in this street and ten thousand times in this borough. More streets like this one wound away to the east and west, with a small park to the north. There were no real landmarks; a couple of small tower blocks rose up a mile away, but for the most part the area was flat and unremarkable.

In a way, places like this are the real London. When most people think of my city, they think of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and Liverpool Street, the parks around Buckingham Palace, and all the other tourist spots that show up on TV and in the movies. But if you marked all those places on a map, you’d find you’d dotted only a tiny little patch in the middle of a vast sprawl. London is huge, and most of it isn’t tall historic buildings; it’s streets like the one I was standing in now, row after row of suburban houses that all look pretty much the same. For most Londoners, these are the places that matter—the school around the corner where they spent their childhood, the council estate where their friends live, the high street where they go to work. The landmarks at the centre of London are where people go to visit, but streets like this are where they live.

I sensed Caldera coming a long time before I saw her; like me, she’d made the last part of the journey on foot, though she’d probably used a gate to shortcut the journey. I waited on the pavement for her to approach.

Caldera turned the corner onto my road, walked up, and looked at what I was wearing. “Expecting trouble?”

“Let’s just say I wanted to be prepared this time.” My armour is a full-body suit of coal-black mesh, moulded plates covering vital areas. It doesn’t exactly look like most people’s idea of what armour’s supposed to look like, but it sure as hell doesn’t look normal either.