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We walked on, and though people were giving me plenty of room, no-one even glanced at me. Privacy is greatly valued in the Nightside, if only because so many of us have so much to hide. The traffic roared past, never stopping, rarely slowing, always in such a hurry to be somewhere else, to be doing something somebody else would be sure to disapprove of. There are no traffic lights in the Nightside. No-one would pay them any attention anyway. There are no official
street crossings, either. You get to the other side of the street through courage and resolve and intimidating the traffic to get out of your way. Though I'm told bribery is also pretty effective. I looked at Joa
"You said this wasn't the first time Cathy ran away. Why does she keep ru
"I try to spend time with her," said Joa
"Do you enjoy your work?"
"Sometimes."
"Ever thought about trying something else?"
"It's what I'm good at," she said, and I had to nod. I knew all about that.
"No stepfathers?" I said casually. "Or father figures? Someone else she could turn to, talk to?"
"Hell, no. I swore I'd never make the mistake of being tied to a man again," Joa
"Even from you?" I said quietly. Joa
And that was when the world suddenly changed. The living city disappeared, and abruptly we were somewhere else. Somewhere much worse. Joa
past. Something bad had come, and stamped it all flat.
It was very dark now, with all the street-lights and the glaring neon gone. What light there was had a dull, purple cast, as though the night itself was bruised. It was hard to make out anything clearly. There were shadows everywhere, very deep and very dark. Not a normal light to be seen anywhere, in any of the wrecked and tumbledown buildings; not even the flicker of a camp-fire. We were all alone, in the night. Joa
It was quiet. Very quiet. No sounds at all, save for the shuffling of our feet and our own unsteady breathing. Such utter quiet was eerie, unsettling. The roar of the city was gone, along with its inhabitants. London had been silenced, the hard way. I only had to look around in the awful purple light to know that we had come to an empty place. The heavy silence was almost overpowering, until I felt like shouting out... something, just to emphasize my presence. But I didn't. There might have been something listening. Even worse, there might not.
I'd never felt so alone in my life.
All around us the buildings were squat, deformed, their shapes altered and the edges softened by exposure to wind and rain. Long exposure. All the windows were empty, every trace of glass gone, and I couldn't see a single doorway with a door; just dark openings, like eyes or mouths, or maybe wounds. There was something almost unbearably sad in seeing such a mighty city brought so low. All those centuries of building and expanding, all those many lives supporting and giving it purpose, all for nothing, in the end. I moved slowly forward, and puffs of dust sprang up around my feet. Joa
It was cold. Stark and bitter cold, as though all the heat had gone out of the world. The air was still, with not even a breath of wind blowing. Our footsteps seemed very loud in the quiet, loud and carrying as we walked down the middle of what had once been a street, through what had once been a vital, thriving place. We were both shivering now, and it had nothing to do with the cold. This was a bad place, and we didn't belong here. Off in the distance, broken buildings stood blackly against the horizon in jagged silhouettes, shadows of what they had once been. The city, inside and out, was over.
"Where are we?" Joa
"Not... where," I said. "When. This is the future. The far future, by the look of it. London has fallen, and civilisation has come and gone. This isn't even an epilogue. Someone closed the book on London and the Nightside, and closed it hard. We've stumbled into a Timeslip. An enclosed area where Time can jump back and forth, into the past and the future and everything in between. Needless to say, there wasn't a Timeslip here the last time I came this way. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows enough to avoid Timeslips, and they're always well sign-posted. If only because they're such arbitrary things. No-one understands how they work, or even what causes them. They come and they go, and so do whatever poor bastards get sucked up in them."
"You mean we're trapped here?"
"Not necessarily. I've been using my gift to try and find us a way out. The physical area of a Timeslip isn't very large. If I can just locate the boundaries, crack open a weak spot..."
"Not very large!" Joa
"Things aren't always as they appear. You should know that by now." I kept my voice calm and light, trying to sound knowledgeable and reassuring, and not at all as though I was just guessing. "While we're in the Timeslip, we see all of it; but the actual affected area is comparatively small. Once I can crack
a hole in the boundary, and we walk through, we'll snap back to our own time. And I'd say we're only half an hour away. Easy walk. Assuming, of course, that nothing goes wrong."
"Wrong?" said Joa