fainter, unfamiliar, harder to tangle our fingers in and command to our use. It was, in short, exactly the kind of place where you might stand a better than usual chance of killing a sorcerer.
We should have taken the gun from Mr Umbars’s house.
As it was, I took a few precautions. I rummaged in my satchel for my penknife and, feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane, stuck it in my right sock and pulled down my trouser over the bulge. I put a torch in my coat pocket, not wanting to risk a possibly futile effort in summoning a light so far from a reliable source of neon. I pulled my gloves off and stuck them in the bottom of my bag. We didn’t know anything about fighting with fists, but if worst came to worst, ignorance was not going to stop us.
And then, because she had guns, and I didn’t, I texted Oda.
HACKNEY MARSHES, NAVY CADETS. DANGER. SHARPEN YOUR KNIVES. SWIFT.
She didn’t text back, so I went in search of Ms Smith.
The Navy Corps building was a corrugated-iron shed whose great-great-grandfather might once have held the Titanic. It was now little more than an iron curve over a bit of concrete floor, but it was still an interior, among the dank grasses of the marsh, and above the battered wooden door a battered old wooden sign declared:R YAL NA Y CADET
O EN 14-21 YRS OL
BE T E BEST
I knocked at the door with the knuckles of my scarred hand.
The wind went through the reeds, the thin waters of the tamed river dribbled and stirred in their uncanny paths. A druid might have found it beautiful, magical, might have breathed deep of that cold, slightly muddy air and from it summoned the lightning. I could see how such things were possible. Life is magic. It just wasn’t the kind I liked.
No one answered, so I kicked the door until it opened, half falling in when it swung back suddenly on its rusted old hinges. The inside of the iron building consisted of four rooms, each one as low, grey and unimaginative as its partner. One might have once been a kitchen, with great rusted pots in which litres of baked beans had been boiled at a go. One had been a dining room, the tables kicked aside; one a bathroom, the sink long since broken, the taps too depressed even to drip ominously in the dark. Broken bulb glass was on the floor, the mirror cracked from a single smashed point. The last room had, once upon a time, been a place for people to feel proud. Pictures still hung on random hooks across the wall, showing beaming boys (and some less so) and stretching back generations to the days when stripy knee-length socks and rounded caps were considered the height of fashion. Here they proudly waved from on top of a canoe; there they sat in sombre rows, their captain holding a battered football, their coach with whistle clasped firmly in hand. Wooden panels had been nailed into the walls on which were emblazoned the names of extra-special boys who had done such and such a deed while serving in the Navy Cadets, the little silver shields now tarnished faint green, the little flags, proclaiming victory at this game of rugby or honourable inspection by such and such a rear vice admiral, now drooping limp, threadbare. There would be rats living in a building like this, hiding away innocuous in the dark. Rats we could work with.
There was no one else in the building.
We were early.
A brown sofa in one corner had had its cushions stolen, revealing the thin veil of fabric beneath. We sat down in it, stretched out our legs, folded our fingers behind our head, feeling the thick scab of the cut down the back of our skull from that night - however many nights it had been - when the telephone had rung and it had all begun - and waited. We were usually very bad at waiting. Tonight it was the most thrilling boredom we could ever have conceived.
There was no risk of sleeping, regardless of how tired we felt.
Weight, not fatigue, was the symptom of our restlessness; a great shallow pressing down on our heart and chest.
Not sleeping, we heard them coming a quarter of a mile off, feet rustling through the reeds while the wind whispered its sad resentments over the marsh.
More than one set of footsteps; we half-turned our