She blinks, as they abruptly leave the motorway, entering London's maze. Streetlights coming on.

After Tokyo, everything here feels so differently scaled. A different gauge of model railroad. Though if asked, she'd have to admit that the two do have something mysteriously in common. Perhaps if London had been built, until the war, primarily of wood and paper, and then had burned, the way Tokyo had burned, and then been rebuilt, the mystery she's always sensed in these streets would remain somehow, coded in steel and concrete.

To her considerable embarrassment, and confusion, they have to wake her when the Hummer pulls up outside of Damien's.

Boone carries her bag to the door. "I'll go in with you."

"It isn't necessary," she says. "I'm tired. I'll be fine."

"Call me." On the plane, approaching Heathrow, he'd tapped his various cell numbers into her phone. "Let me know you're okay."

"I will," she says, feeling like an idiot. She unlocks the front door, manages a smile, and goes in.

On the landing, she sees that the bundles of magazines have been removed, and with them the black bin liner.

She's up the last flight and almost to Damien's door, the second German key in hand, before she realizes that light is showing, from the crack at the foot of his door.

She stands there, the key in one hand, her bag in the other, hearing voices. One is Damien's.

She knocks.

A young woman, taller than she is, opens the door. Enormous cornflower-blue eyes, tilted slightly above extraordinary cheekbones, regard her coldly. "Yes? What do you want?" the blonde asks, with what Cayce assumes is a stage accent, some aspect of a joke, but as this woman's mouth, with its perfectly outlined, extravagantly full underlip, sets itself in grim distaste, she realizes that it isn't.

Damien, stubble-headed after a recent shaving and for an instant quite unrecognizable, appears behind uber-bones and playfully squeezes her shoulders, grinning over one at Cayce.

"It's Cayce, Marina. My friend. Where on earth have you been then, Cayce?"

"Tokyo. I didn't know you were back. I'll go to a hotel."

But Damien will have none of that.

- /

Marina Chtcheglova, whom Cayce quickly gathers is Damien's Russian line producer, is not the first of his girlfriends to have taken an immediate dislike to her. Seeing the torsos of the robot girls again, she remembers that the one from whom those had been so fetchingly cast had been the most vicious of cows—till now, anyway.

Fortunately she and Marina are almost immediately separated, conversationally, by Voytek, whose presence here Cayce initially accepts as a function of the Great Whatever of multiply impacted jet lag, and by Fergal Collins, Damien's Irish accountant and tax advisor, someone Cayce knows from several previous occasions. Voytek re-engages la Chtcheglova in whatever rant he must have embarked on prior to Cayce's arrival, this conducted in what Cayce assumes is Russian, and with a tempo and apparent fluid assurance very unlike his delivery in English. Marina doesn't seem to like this, particularly, but seems compelled to listen.

Voytek wears his usual orphaned skateboard gear, but Marina is wearing what Cayce is trying not to admit to herself is probably this season's Prada exclusively, everything black. Her cheekbones actually make Voytek's look relatively non-Slavic. It's as though she somehow has an extra pair folded in, behind the first set; Caucasian in some primordial, almost geological sense.

She looks, Cayce decides, like a prop from one sequel or another of The Matrix; if her boobs were bigger she could get work on the covers of role-playing games for adolescent boys of any age whatever.

Fergal, some genially carnivorous species of businessman draped in the pelt of an art-nerd, works mainly in music but has been with Damien for as long as Cayce has known him. "What's it like in Tokyo, after the devaluations?" he asks, seated beside her on Damien's brown couch.

"It's more the way it is now than it's ever been," Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower's that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer. Fergal frowns slightly. "Sorry, Fergal. I was hardly even there. Has Damien finished his film?"

"Would to God he had, but no. He's back to re-up financing, collect three more cameras and additional crew, and, I think," he lowers his voice slightly, "because herself fancied a visit to the capital."

"She's his line producer?"

"We call her that but really it's more post-Soviet. She's the blat girl."

"The what?"

"Blat. What the old boys in your country called juice, I think. She's connected, Marina is. Her father was the head of an aluminum plant, back in the dreamtime. When they privatized, somehow he wound up owning it outright. Still does, and a brewery and a merchant bank as well. The brewery's been a godsend, actually. They've been trucking beer to the site since the day we started shooting. Makes Damien a very popular fellow, and otherwise they'd be drinking vodka."

"Have you been there?"

"For an afternoon." He winces.

"What's it like?"

"Somewhere between a three-month 1968 rock concert, mass public grave-robbing, and Apocalypse Now. Hard to say, really, which is of course the big draw for our boy here. Do you know that Pole, there?"

"Voytek."

"Who is he?"

"An artist. I've been staying here, and when I went to Tokyo I left the keys with him."

"He can certainly occupy Marina in her native tongue, which keeps her out of ours, but do you think he's chatting her up?"

"No," Cayce says, seeing Voytek produce one of his notebooks from his pouch, "he's trying to get her to fund a project." Marina makes a dismissive gesture and goes into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Voytek crosses to the couch, smiling, notebook in one hand, bottle of beer in the other. "Casey, where have you been?"

"Away. Have you met Fergal?"

"Yes!" He sits on the couch. "Damien calls me from airport, asks me to meet here with keys and tandoori and beer. This producer, Marina, she is very interesting. Has gallery connections in Moscow."

"You speak Russian?"

"Of course. Magda, she was born there. Myself, Poland. Our father was Moscow civil engineer. I do not remember Poland."

"Christ," cries Damien from the kitchen, "this khoorma is heaven!"

"Excuse me," Cayce says, standing. She goes into the yellow kitchen and finds Damien transfixed with joy, half a dozen foil dishes open on the counter in front of him.

"It's not fucking stew," Damien says. "At the dig we live on stew. No refrigeration. Stew's been simmering for the better part of two months. Just keep tossing things in. Lumps of mystery meat and boiled potato in what looks like gray Bisto. That and bread. Russian bread's brilliant, but this khoorma—"

She gives him a hug. "Damien, I can't stay here."

"Don't be silly."

"No. I'm pissing off your girlfriend, being here."

Damien grins. "No you aren't. It's her default setting. Nothing to do with you."

"You aren't making a lot of progress in your relationship choices, since I last saw you, are you?"

"I can't make this film without her."

"Don't you think it might be easier if you weren't in a relationship as well?"

"No. In fact, it wouldn't be at all. She's like that. When are you coming'?"

"Where?"

"The dig. You have to see this. It's amazing."

The tower of gray bone. "I can't, Damien. I'm working."

"For Blue Ant again? I thought you said that that was over, when you e-mailed me about the keys."

"This is something else."

"But you've just gotten off the plane from Tokyo. You're here, there's a bed upstairs, and I'm back tomorrow. If you go to a hotel, we won't see one another at all. Go upstairs, sleep if you can, and I'll deal with Marina." He smiles. "I'm used to it."