‘What about trains?’
‘There won’t be any, not at this hour.’
They climb a steep bank, slippery with snow, following a well-worn path through the brambles. Going ahead of them, he lifts the stiff wiry branches free of her path. Coming to the top, they crawl through an opening cut in a mesh fence.
‘There’s a warning sign here about the tracks being charged,’ she says.
‘That’s ancient,’ he says, kicking the snow from it with his foot. ‘We wouldn’t have been able to do this when they still ran electrics, but there’s no danger now.’
She follows him out onto the network of lines. Overhead lights above the distant station platforms cast a ghoulish glow.
The rails are nearly invisible, no more than mounds under the snow. She catches the toe of her shoe, wrenching it off, and he holds her elbow to steady her as she slips it back on. After that, they lift their knees high at each step in a prancing motion. He is out of breath by the time they reach the other side and she is reminded of her own dwindling power level. From the ordeal in the apartment to this journey through the night, she has never consumed energy at such a rate and she was not fully charged at the outset.
If we don’t make it, we’ll be stranded and left on our own to perish, Simon observes.
I know that, she replies. Although to be honest she hadn’t thought about it in such bleak terms.
Daniels brushes the snow from the top of a metal box and, sitting, reties one of his laces. ‘How’re your shoes holding out?’ he asks.
‘Wet, but it’s not a problem.’ The bottoms of her trousers are soaked through too and flap around her ankles.
‘Iz will have something you can borrow.’ He stands up and bangs the snow from his coat. Icicles hang from the scarf below his mouth like a beard, turning him with his large grey silhouette into some kind of phantom.
‘Daniels,’ she says, ‘my energy levels are getting really low.’ She gazes up at him helplessly. She feels like a foolish child laying its problems on an adult at an inconvenient moment.
‘Okay,’ he says, ‘how long can you keep going?’
‘Maybe another couple of hours.’ She feels embarrassed discussing such a personal matter.
‘Presumably you charged yourself up last night – I thought you could last a day or two easy.’
‘When I was new, maybe, but nothing like that now for years.’ She has gone quite red, although he won’t be able to see that in the dark. ‘If we walk more slowly it will help me conserve what I have.’
‘Once we’re back across the river and we’re off the beaten track, it’ll be safer and we’ll be able to take it easier.’
‘Maybe I can lean on you a bit as we walk,’ she says, wondering how far she would go in exploiting his generosity to preserve herself – she suspects she would be prepared to be quite shameless – but then it is the relationship he signed up for.
‘If it comes to it, I’ll carry you,’ he says, adding with emphasis, ‘I won’t be leaving you behind, not under any circumstances.’
They cross Tower Bridge ten minutes later. Passing under the first of the huge old towers is like entering a gothic castle. The snow on the roadway is unmarked; not even a single set of prints.
Evie looks west back down the river, hoping to see her apartment building in the distance, but the view is obscured by a cluster of massive grey blocks, shrouded by fog.
Below, a barge loaded with coal chugs along the centre channel. The pilot, military cap dragged down over his ears, stands hunched in the stern, one hand on the tiller, the other gripping the glowing ember of a cigarette.
Beyond the bridge, they find themselves negotiating a chicane of concrete barriers and electrified razor wire, with 360-degree cameras revolving on the heads of steel poles. The road is lit from the Tower walls by racks of lights casting hard shadows over the blinding snow.
Daniels maintains a steady pace but his anxiety is mounting and as a result hers does too. Negotiating a reinforced slab substantial enough to stop tanks, they come face to face with a camera on a motorized trolley. It stares unblinkingly at him before turning to her. It lowers its telescopic arm, focus ring whirring, until its lens is only a few inches from her nose.
Daniels’s hand closes around her arm and, drawing her to the side, he steers her behind it and through the gap between the final barriers.
The camera trolley is mounted on caterpillar tracks suited to the soft snow and turning in a tight circle it follows quickly, its telescopic arm stretched forward, the camera held steady as it jogs along.
Daniels pulls her across the pavement to a set of steep steps that lead down to a narrow alley.
In the quiet shadows, he draws to a stop. She can feel the beat of his heart through his fingers. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, looking over his shoulder back up the stairs, and she glances behind too, half expecting to see the machine descending on its tracks. ‘I didn’t realise it had got this bad. We should never have come this way.’
‘Did it know who we were?’ she asks.
‘I don’t think so. It’s the Tower. With the king moving in, the security has gone crazy. Hopefully that’s all it was.’
He is still out of breath and she checks her own energy level to find that it has dropped sharply again. At this rate she may be obliged to make him keep his rash promise to carry her.
As they turn the corner of the building, the space between the warehouses opens up into a harbour with elegant yachts moored to pontoons. New snow lies on the decks of the boats, their furled sales and the network of wooden walkways.
‘Ideally I wouldn’t have brought you this way either,’ Daniels says, ‘more cameras, but this time at least they’re here merely to protect rich people’s property. Just don’t touch anything, or you’ll set alarms off.’
They skirt the basin, criss-crossing the water via little bridges, giving as wide a berth as possible to the ghostly sail ships and bobbing motor launches.
In theory, Evie has only seen such things in the picture books kept on the bottom shelf of her husband’s library, acquired for her to learn about the world. But she has also a second and stronger association – a nagging feeling that she once sailed on such a yacht. In the memory, she is entrusted with the boat’s wheel and clings to it with a small hand while not letting go of her bonnet with the other. The responsibility terrifies her as she must steer without assistance, while tall figures, silhouetted against the bright sun, do complicated things with the rigging. With the sails fixed, a woman climbs down to sit beside her in the stern, the light gleaming on her beautiful face as she presses Evie to her and strokes her hair. Evie cradles the moment in her mind now, keeping its glow alive like a candle behind her palm, drawing from it the warmth she can. It is the only remembrance they gave her of a mother.
She knows of course that it can’t be an actual memory because in it she is in a child’s body – it is an implant based possibly on something Evelyn herself once experienced. That knowledge doesn’t make her recall of the boat’s nauseous chopping motion, nor the blinding blue of the sky, seem any less real.
Beyond the harbour, she and Daniels move through narrow streets lined with dishevelled shuttered shops. It is a couple of hours since they set out and dawn is breaking, bringing people out of stairwells and doorways – a wagoner trundling the morning milk, a brickie with his empty hod sloped against his shoulder, a yawning nurse in a tall white cap wheeling an electrocycle… but these bleary-eyed early risers have enough to worry about keeping the freezing air from creeping under their clothes, without paying attention to strangers.
On the corner of a wide highway, where the wheeled traffic slips and slides, a vendor sells sugared tea from an urn at the rear of a horse-drawn cart.