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Or maybe not. Maybe he’s for somewhere else entirely. There’s no one around who’ll ask, fewer who’ll care, not for a man like that. He makes people uncomfortable. He seems to like it. That’s basically assault, that is. That’s £125 for the initial crime plus £50 for malicious intent and…

Two men are on the verge of hitting each other over a taxi. The driver sits, meter running, unperturbed, as the men scream “I was here first I was here it was me I was—”

“He answered my flag it was me I waved him down didn’t you see are you blind?”

Both men are heading towards Maida Vale. If they could just stop shouting for a minute, they could probably share the ride.

They went to a café. The café served coronation chicken, bacon and egg, egg mayo and cheese and pickle sandwiches. If you wanted anything else, the woman behind the counter tilted her mighty brow down and stared up from beneath its shadows, daring you to stick to your convictions. When you backed down, she tutted and exclaimed that you were being absurd and made it anyway, righteously going out of her way for the difficult customer despite their protestations that egg mayo was fine honest, and guessed at the price, which was usually £6.99. The woman used to be a teacher, but her students complained that she gave them too much homework, and one day she hit a boy who had punched staples into a girl’s arm and couldn’t afford to pay the indemnity, and here she is. Theo bought coffee. He used what cash he had, and as the woman fussed with the till, he slipped the battery from his phone and tried not to stare back over his shoulder as Dani settled at a beige Formica table carved with messages of love and abuse from strangers, scratched with the prongs of a fork.

He sat opposite.

Drank coffee.

Dani said, “So there was”

And the man called Theo replied, “It’s been a really long”

She cut in: “I’ve been on the patty line.”

They sipped coffee in silence. It was far too hot and better than he’d expected. In the silence Theo whispered sorry, I’m sorry to hear that, that sounds…

…but his mouth was smarter than his brain, and he looked down at his tea and said nothing at all.

“After you left… the town, there was—I mean, the factory closed. And there wasn’t much of nothing else left and I got

it got bad.

I had to

I mean, yeah, you’re not supposed to say that, you never had to. You chose to. You chose to steal, that’s what they always said, but I couldn’t see any other way to

Look. That’s not what matters. I’m out now. I got in, and things got bad, and I’m clean now. I’m clean and

so.

So.”

She ran the curve of the teaspoon over a bowl of sugar, flattening the surface to a smooth plateau, then heaping it up into a hill, then squashing the hill back down again. He watched, waited. In a moment of decision she drove the spoon down into the centre of the bowl, standing tail upright, and stared into his eyes.

“I’ve got this boss,” she announced, tumour-factual, tombstone-hard. “Gatesman. He’s my probation officer, but he also gets 5 per cent of whatever I make. It’s how they motivate him to try real hard to get us girls jobs. Best jobs are sex, but I got the dirt on him. Embezzling. Not from us—we’re fair game. But from his bosses, naughty. I got dirt, and now he’s fucking scared of me. He’s scared and I can ask for any job I want, and I said—I want into the Ministry. Get me into the Ministry, or I’ll… but he did. He got me inside. I’ve got this thing I need to do, and it’s hard but it is…

And then I saw you. You and your stupid pudding face.

And I thought…

So. Your name is Theo now. And you work for the Ministry.”

In the half-light of the candles burning on the kitchen counter of the narrowboat called Hector, the woman whose name now is Neila squats down before the man called Theo as you might hunker down to seem less frightening to a tiny, cowering cat, and hands out, fingers open, murmurs, “I read somewhere that you shouldn’t change the dressing, just put more stuff on top until it stops bleeding.”

Drinking coffee from a dirty cup on a dirty table, the man called Theo looked up and met Dani’s eye for almost the first time in fifteen years, and knew that his world was probably going to end. “What do you want?”

“You have access to stuff. With your job, with computers, you can find things out.”

“I don’t just…”

“There’s someone you gotta find for me.”

“Why?”

She smiled, tiny teeth flashing between pale lips. “Cos I’m your oldest, bestest friend, and I’m asking.”

“You can’t ask me to look at secure documents.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer. She turned the spoon, once, a hard twist through sugar, picked it up, dug it back in, deeper. “Theo Miller,” she mused. “Who the hell even is Theo Miller?”

“I am.”

“Right.”

“I buried it all, Dani. There’s nothing. You won’t find a piece of anything to prove…”

“So what? Who the fuck needs proof, these days?”

Theo half-closed his eyes, pinched his index fingers together at the bridge of his nose. The smile twitched at the edges of Dani’s lips. She waited.

“Who are you trying to find?” he grunted.

“Lucy Rainbow Princess.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s her name.”

“That’s a name?”

“She was franchised to a party company when she was four. Ads. Princess costumes, unicorns, blonde hair and plastic crowns—that sort of thing. They changed her name.”

“Why do you need to break into the Ministry to find her?”

“Cos I’m a patty-line whore who isn’t worth shit to the guys who do the paperwork, and cos she’s in juvvy. You think women like me get to ask questions like this?”

“And if I can’t find… Rainbow Princess?”

“Her birth name was Lucy Cumali. She’s fifteen years old, born March 11th in Shawford by Budgetfood.”

Silence a while.

In the street outside, a garbage truck creaked to a halt by overflowing black bins. Two men climbed out the back, orange parole tabards across their chests, parole company logo stamped on their hands, their trousers, their lives.

Overhead a helicopter rushed towards a landing pad, while the passengers texted, eyes averted from the city below, OMG u wont believ wat i jus heard…

Behind the counter of the café, hot steam blasted into a tannin-stained mug, and bread burned in the toaster.

Theo stared down into the depths of his coffee cup and could only see the past, not the future, in its blackness. For a moment he considered refusing. The fantasy stretched out for a few seconds towards prophecy, before dissolving into disaster.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

Chapter 8

In the beginning of all things

fifteen years before hot coffee and blood on the canal

fifteen years before time became a little…

              …and it seemed to the man called Theo that past and future were not that different really and that all things came back to a point where…

In the beginning.

The boy who will become Theo lay on the beach with Dani Cumali at the centre of the universe, and listened to the stones being dragged into the ocean, and was fundamentally deeply uncomfortable and really rather cold, as is the nature of most beaches that face the North Sea. He was a flabby skinny boy. There were no muscles on his body; he hated sports, hadn’t even looked at the footie pitch since the day his dad was…