Grip strangling my wrist, she drags me out of the alleyway and onto the busy street.
The fierce wind batters into us.
Serena sticks out her fist—and lifts her thumb.
She flags down a taxi.
We just need to get out of this street,now, before anyone else comes through the veil.
I glance around the road.
Big red buses wobble past us. A throng of tourists scuttle after it, their raincoats rustling. Cars honk in the distance. A krum further up the pavement fights her inverted umbrella.
“There!” I jerk my chin to the row of black cabs through the rainy mist.
One has spotted us—it comes down the road, rattling, until it chugs to a stop.
Serena wrenches the door open with a grunt—and I throw myself in.
I land on my side on the carpeted taxi floor.
“Stay down.” Serena lurches in after me. “Just drive!” she shouts at the driver and, after some fishing around in her coat pocket, pulls out the coin purse. From it, she tugs out a £50 note, then feeds it through the gap in the security screen. “Drive!”
The taxi lurches into movement.
We don’t push up from the floor.
We don’t look out the window to see if anyone comes out the alleyway after us.
We stay down.
All the way through the city, and all the way after that, we stay down.
25
“Fare’s almost up.”
The rough accent of the taxi driver startles me.
For too long, I’ve been slumped on my side on the taxi floor, Serena’s limbs tangled around mine, the tip of her nose pressing against my own, and the whole time our illusions have kept.
Serena arches to feed another fifty through the screen. “Queensferry.”
“Alright.”
Serena’s eyes brim with unspoken words.
I can just imagine what she wants to say.
Something about me spraying the guard with fruity mist. Maybe blinding him in doing so. Or that we’re definitely being chased now after the whole veil catastrophe—and the masters probably figured out at the same moment, if not before, that we’ve run away.
To a port.
That’s what Queensferry is.
Ferries come and go, boats and ships and cruises and charters. Maybe a fishing hub, too. I don’t quite know, not like I ever visited it.
But it calms me that she has a plan.
