Let’s go check on the nightlife in Teesprawl, he thought with a smile. Something tells me Zeta-ImpChem might have some interesting data on this. Come on, boys. Time to make money.

It’s the middle of the twenty-first century, but the November fog is not so different from what it was in fin de siecle nineteenth-century London. The soup may not be quite as thick, but it boasts a more powerful cocktail of pathogens and chemical pollutants. The famous fog also still provides cover for those who want to slip unseen into the shadows, especially closer to the River Thames, where most of the street lights have been shot out.

At three-ten in the morning, the thermometer is still hovering around zero. Blood is beginning to seep through the floorboards of a room in Whitechapel and soon it will begin to show on the ceiling of the chamber below. That won’t worry the girl asleep downstairs; she’s a trancer. The drugs won’t wash out of her system until a police doctor arrives after the constables smash down her door later on. A young constable, the one who is first on the scene upstairs, will be vomiting uncontrollably in the street outside. The police photographer will be very, very glad he never takes more than coffee for breakfast.

So it begins.

2

Serrin woke with a start.

Seven-thirty. The familiar and unchanging BBC voice, anonymous for generations, was reading off the mundane litany of disaster that comprised world news. The only good thing, the elf thought groggily, was that the BBC was less parochial than the American broadcasts he was used to. You actually did get world news and not just what happened in your city, tribe, or state in the previous twenty-four hours.

He yawned and stretched his whole body until his hamstring gave him a twinge, reminding him not to push it too far. That thought had distracted him from the first part of what the BBC voice was saying about some five murders in London last night, somewhat above the average.