Burton shook his head in disbelief.

This isn’t real. It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t look real. It’s like a desert mirage, seemingly solid, seemingly close, but when you try to reach it, it moves away from you. What is going on here? What kind of Jahannam has the Empire become?

Up Charing Cross Road to Tottenham Court Road, and there the vehicle came to a halt, stopping among many similar machines in a rectangular plot of land beside an extraordinarily tall cylindrical edifice that appeared to have been constructed from diamond-shaped windows and little else.

“What ho! What ho! This all feels oddly familiar,” Swinburne noted as he clambered out.

“New Centre Point,” Bendyshe said. “Built on the site of the old one, which was bombed during the uprisings. It’s a monitoring station.”

“What does it monitor?” the poet asked.

“People.”

Odessa Penniforth leaned out of the vehicle and said, “I’ll wait for you here. Enjoy the revelation, everyone.”

“I wish I knew what was going on,” Swinburne exclaimed. “My hat! Do they still have public houses in 2130?”

“They do,” Bendyshe confirmed. “The government came close to making them illegal but then realised that people speak before they think when under the influence.”

“Must you keep calling upon your hat, Algernon?” Trounce complained. “Confound it! Why does no one wear them anymore? I feel naked without my bowler.”

Farren looked this way and that, frowned at the hissing traffic, and muttered, “Is that music?”

“I hear it too,” Herbert Wells said. “In the background.”

“Muzak,” Bendyshe said. “Ubiquitous, bland and characterless.” He said to Farren, “You thought rock and roll would conquer the world. It didn’t. Muzak did. It’s the universal temper suppressant. An insidious tranquilliser.”

“A horrendous hum,” Swinburne added. “A detrimental drone.”

Bendyshe nodded his agreement. “A puerile pacifier.”

Farren gritted his teeth and fisted his hands. “Oh man,” he growled. “What I wouldn’t give for a Deviants gig, right here, right now!”

“You’d be shot dead on the spot,” Bendyshe said.

Farren suddenly relaxed and chuckled. “Yeah, that was always the risk when I got on stage.”

Staying close together they moved away from the minibus and joined the pedestrians flocking into Oxford Street. To Burton, it felt just as if they were joining the protest again, except the people—rather than being a noisy and colourful gathering with a purpose—were nothing more than innumerable and near-silent citizens squeezing along a highway too narrow for such a dense crowd.

Sadhvi walked at his side. Wells and Swinburne were just in front; both small, both squeaky-voiced, both looking eagerly back and forth, weathering the assault on their senses. Behind the king’s agent, Trounce and Farren made quiet comments to one another; an odd combination, a police detective and a proto-revolutionary, united by a mutual disapproval of this confusing future world.

Guided by Thomas Bendyshe and jostled by the city’s denizens, they shouldered past glass-faced shop fronts and comprehended nothing of what was displayed within, saw peculiar vehicles slide by and had no understanding of what their function might be, read signs and posters the words of which signified nothing to them, and were, without respite, subjected to the steady beat and sinuous melodies of soft and relentlessly insipid “Muzak.”

Burton looked into the faces of the people and observed an incongruous mix of contented smiles and shifty eyes. Some, who were either tall or short or thin or fat, somehow left him with the impression they were just the opposite of what they appeared, as if a slender passerby was secretly obese, or a diminutive person a covert giant. This, together with the unaccustomed cleanliness of the city, gave the sense that he was among actors and moving amid a stage’s cardboard scenery. There was no depth. No connection. No meaning.

Why was the traffic moving at such a sluggish velocity? Why did the quiet hiss of the vehicles, the subdued murmur of the pedestrians, and the steady low drone of the Muzak, amount to so much silence? Where was the life?

“The shadows,” Sadhvi whispered.

“What about them?” he asked.

“They don’t match.”

She was right. The many electric street lamps, cutting through the permanent gloom at the base of the towers, endowed every individual with multiple shadows. For the most part, due to the crush of people, these couldn’t be seen separately, but occasionally there came a break in the crowd and the shadows were made visible. Burton saw them and was horrified. Most were normal but many were misshapen blots or spiked puddles or stringy smears or snarled scribbles—not at all the contours of human beings.

“By Allah’s beard!” he hissed. “What are we looking at?”

Wells glanced back at him and made a gesture, obviously having noticed the same. Burton responded with a curt nod and swallowed nervously.

They walked on. The king’s agent kept feeling things bumping against his boots, as if the pavement was as littered as those of the old East End, but when he looked down, there was nothing there.

Now and then, he became aware of apparently sourceless sounds—creaks and snaps and groans, the clip clop of horses’ hooves, the clank of a misaligned crankshaft, a hiss of pressurised steam—as though noises from his own London were somehow penetrating into this.

It’s my expectations, he thought. They’re imposing what I’m familiar with onto this wholly unfamiliar city.

He was unnerved and disoriented. There was a lump in his throat. He longed to see top hats and canes, parasols and bonnets, hansom cabs and horses, chugging steam engines and wobbling velocipedes.

Where has my London gone?

That struck him as a very uncharacteristic thought.

For all his life he’d felt an outsider. He’d cursed the ways and mores of his native land. It had rejected him, considered him too unorthodox, too untamed, and too unsophisticated. Society damned him for admiring the Arab and condemned him for mixing with African savages. Ruffian Dick! Beastly Burton!

Yet, how he wanted to be back there.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he felt helpless, and he felt humility. He realised that he had, in the past, conducted himself from a position of self-appointed superiority. Yes, he’d been an unwavering proponent of Arabic culture; yes, he’d dispassionately observed tribal societies; but he’d done so as a wayward son of the Empire, knowing that, though it looked askance upon him, it was always there as a measure by which to judge.

Fool! he thought. Fool to think that you somehow existed outside of its confines. It made you!

And now he was, at one and the same time, home but as far from it as he’d ever been.

As they shoved their way around the corner into North Audley Street—a much different junction to the one he’d seen in ’68—he remembered his parents, how they’d dragged him from one place to the next, from Torquay to Tours, from Tours to Richmond, from Richmond to Blois, from Blois to Naples, from Naples to Pau, from Pau to Lucca, always moving, always compulsively restless, never giving him a moment to stop and form attachments, never a moment in which to simply belong.

He felt anger and sadness, resentment and self-pity.

Isabel. Isabel. Isabel. You were my hope, my foundation, my stability. Only through you could I be me. Why did you have to die?

In his mind’s eye, he saw her, waiting in a garden, with a tea cloth over her arm.

You’re going now? she asked. Supper is almost ready.

Yes, he replied. But don’t worry—even if I’m gone for years, I’ll be back in five minutes.

“Damnation!” Burton muttered to himself. “Are my memories no longer my own?”