in the flames, awake for weeks or days. “What are we waiting for?”
“Finch,” Mia says. “It’s at least another hour before he’s done. He drives us back.”
Julian’s head bobs forward. Feeling her gaze on him, he shakes to stay alert.
“You got nowhere to go,” she asks. It’s not a question.
“I got nowhere to go.”
“So come back with us. We have room. The more, the merrier. Come back.”
What Julian wants is for her to go with him. Come with me, Mia. Come away with me. Away from this madness.
But come with him where, the hospital in Scutari, the demon fire, the deepest ocean? “Are you sure?” he says. “You look pretty full up at Bank. And your boyfriend doesn’t like me.”
“Can you blame him?” Mia smiles, self-aware but jokey. “Don’t worry, you’ve made a friend in Wild. You’ll be fine. He loves the girls but doesn’t usually take to the boys like he’s taken to you.”
“There’s no place for me,” he says.
“Sure, there is,” she says. “At night, you’ll be with us, and during the day you can sleep in Robbie’s bunk. He leaves for work at seven.”
“What about you, where do you sleep?”
“Who wants to know?” She smiles. “Just kidding. You saw where. One of the top bunks is mine. All the girls are in the top bunks.”
They exchange a glance. “For safety?” he asks.
She nods. “At Bank, we haven’t had any problems with assaults and whatnot—touch wood, as Mum would say—but other places have had some trouble, and it’s always better to be safe.”
Always better to be safe, says the fragile girl whose life has been threatened and snuffed out up and down the centuries, now sitting in the rubble caused by high explosives, the rubble to which she has traveled out of her soul’s own free will.
“You don’t have a house in London,” Julian asks, “a family?”
“I had both,” Mia replies. “The house got bombed, the family left. Of course I could go to a proper rest center up on Old City Road, but they’re overcrowded, and I don’t want to stand in the street all day with my blanket, queueing for a space. Finch and I did that back in September. Bollocks to that, we said after a day.” Mia takes out a cigarette, offering one to Julian. At first he refuses, and then accepts. Why not? They light up. Her lighter says sad girls smoke a lot.
Mia concurs. “I’m not sad. But the girl who died, she was sad. It was hers.”
“Why was she sad?”
“Because she died.”
He likes the camaraderie of smoking with his beloved over bombed-out ruins in a war. In the war. It’s not the worst thing they’ve shared, by far. “None of you has a home?”
“Robbie has a home,” Mia replies. “In Sussex. Liz has a home in Birmingham. But those places are getting hit pretty hard. Phil Cozens has a home, but he doesn’t sleep there, because he’s paid to be on call at Bank. It’s not too bad at Bank, really. You’ll see. They’ve spruced up many of the Underground shelters. Bank is like a fine hotel. There’s even a refreshment center.” She smiles wistfully, glancing down the street for the refreshment truck that’s long left.
“Do you work?” Julian asks. “Or is this your day job, too?”
Mia has a different day job. She works at the Lebus Furniture Factory on Tottenham Court Road. She sleeps until ten or eleven in the morning and then goes in. Her boss doesn’t mind; he knows why she is up all night.
“Do you work?” she asks, looking inside Wild’s cloak at Julian’s well-made suit, now dusty.
“I did. I had a restaurant on Great Eastern Road. It’s gone now. Along with my flat right above it.”
“Restaurant? I’m so hungry,” she says. “What kind of food did you make, Cornish pasties? Shepherd’s pies?”
“Beef noodle soup. Squid with garlic. Shrimp rolls.”
“Tell me about it. Don’t spare any details.”
When Finch spots them sitting on the broken pile next to each other, he looks upset, even at a distance, even in the early light. But Julian takes the cue for how to behave from Mia. She doesn’t move away from him. So he doesn’t move away from her. Julian is not the keeper of her relationship with Finch. If he’s overstepping his bounds, she’ll let him know. But Julian doesn’t think he is overstepping. Something about the way she kissed him back when they pretended to be Cecily and