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“Have you ever been to London?” I asked.

“No,” said Ash. “I’ve never even been in town before. Our dad doesn’t hold with that sort of thing.”

“Don’t worry, it’s basically just like the country,” I said. “Only with more people.”

Apparently he was a bit of a connoisseur, having been introduced to Verdi soon after having risen to the rank of commander. A sudden attack of culture snobbery is a common affliction among policemen of a certain rank and age; it’s like a normal midlife crisis, only with more chandeliers and foreign languages.

“You shouldn’t make jokes about these things,” she said. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.”

“It’s got all the best questions, though.”

As a typical Londoner, Gurcan had a high tolerance threshold for random thoughtlessness; after all, if you live in the big city there’s no point complaining that it’s a big city, but even that tolerance has its limit.

There we continued the time-honored tradition of brazenly lying through our teeth while telling nothing but the truth.

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.

“Do you have another plan?” I asked.

“No,” said Leslie. “I just want you to be careful. Just because you think you know what you’re doing doesn’t mean you actually know what you’re doing.”

“I’m glad we clarified that,” I said.

“Ashes, how did you do it?”

“I’d like to say it was all my own talent, but cats are naturally modest.”

“The strongest don’t always get what they want,” she said to Ending. “Not when the weak can work together.”

It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.

Nobody had a clue what had happened, so the pundits were out in force, explaining how the riot was caused by whatever sociopolitical factor their latest book was pushing. It was certainly a searing indictment of some aspect of modern society—if only we knew what.

Magic, you’ll find, is nine parts dull to one part excitement, and the exciting bits usually hurt like the blazes.