The London Eye hadn't turned in twenty-two years. They gave it a brain once. The brain had ideas. Then the Reassignments happened and somebody pulled the plug and the wheel stopped at twelve past three on a Tuesday afternoon and stayed there.
Maintenance crews in orange vests climbed it twice a month with avian excrement cleaner and rust-proof paint, keeping it presentable for a city that couldn't bring itself to tear it down. The pods were sealed. The base was fenced. Signs warned of prosecution in three languages and one pictogram of a stick figure falling to its death.
Sync sat in Pod 17 with her legs through the gap where the door used to seal and a chip butty balanced on her knee. The riverbed beneath her was dry with patches of green crops in between the rows of canvas-roofed shelters, threads of smoke rising from pots and heaters. From up here the settlements looked like something out of the Shire.
Beyond the river bank London spread out in every direction, half of it glowing, half of it patched with duct tape, all of it somehow running. Most days.
She chewed her buttery carb bomb and studied her map. The route was pencilled over a grid of streets she'd printed from a public terminal, hand-corrected where the static data was out of date. Pick up in Whitechapel. Delivery in Battersea. She erased the line through Southwark, redrew it further east. The patrol schedules had shifted again.
The chip butty was not good. The chips were soft. The bread was softer. She ate it anyway because she was eighteen and hungry and two hundred feet above the city and nobody was going to bring her a curry.
Looking down, it all made sense from this distance. The bright commercial sectors where the screens ran thick, projections hovered mid-air, and delivery drones threading between buildings like slow fat bees. And beside them, overlapping, sometimes literally on top of them, the older districts. Warmer light. The smudge of market stalls spilling past their boundaries into the drone lanes. She could make out the shape of Berwick Street, the row of shop fronts she knew by heart. From up here they were just coloured squares. Down there she knew the vinyl shop on the corner had a turntable in the window that played something with horns every afternoon and the sound reached you two streets before you got there.
Sync folded the map into her jacket. Wiped her oily fingers on her jeans and checked the time on a watch that was older than she was. Mechanical. Hand-wound, a gift from her mother who claimed to have won it off a mob boss. Whatever a mob boss was.
Time to move.
She'd worked out the best way down over six months of trial and error. Mostly error. The maintenance cameras were perks. They recorded and stored locally and nobody reviewed the footage unless something went wrong. Nothing had gone wrong since those kids got stuck halfway up and hung upside down for hours. That was years ago. Still funny.
She reached the base in four minutes. Her e-bike was locked to a railing behind a service building that smelled like pigeon and paint thinner. The bike was not beautiful. Frame welded from two donors that had never been the same colour. Front fork off a cargo trike, cut down and re-threaded. Hub motor she'd pulled from a written-off delivery mule and rebuilt on a workbench in the back of someone's lock-up over three weekends. It looked like five bikes had argued and settled on a compromise. It rode like none of them had ever been apart. The storage case bolted to the rear rack was the most standard thing on it. Hardened composite. Dual lock. The case cost more than the bike, the jacket, and the chip butty combined.
She checked the locks. Checked the charge. Pulled out into traffic with the chip butty sitting in her stomach like a small determined brick.
A perk delivery van sat in the middle of Waterloo Road with its hazards on, delivering to a bookshop that had been closed for six months. The van didn't know this. The van had a package and a location and it would wait for someone to accept the package until its battery died or the company sent a human supervisor to correct it. A queue of commuters honked behind it. The van's software did not include a response protocol for commuter feedback.
Sync cut around it, bunny-hopping the kerb, threading between a woman carrying a cello case and a kid walking three dogs who were each pulling in a different direction. The dogs lunged for her front wheel.
"Off the pavement you duffer." the kid said.
Duffer? I could be your big sister you twat.
She crossed the river on Blackfriars. Below the bridge, a settlement had grown up in the bend near the south bank. Rows of runner beans on bamboo frames. Sync knew the man shouting at the kids to take their football outside the encampment. Box could always be heard ordering someone around. He smelt like burnt charcoal. It stung your nose hairs if you stood too close. And he paid promptly any time he needed his less than sanctioned buds delivered for replantation.
Halfway across, a municipal repair drone was trying to fix a lamppost. The drone had been at it for what looked like several hours based on the small crowd that had gathered to watch. Every time it reconnected a wire, the light turned on, turned off, turned on again three times fast, and then began cycling through colours it was never designed to display. The crowd applauded each new colour. The drone, undiscouraged, disconnected the wire and started over.
Sync smiled. She could not help it.
East through the city. The markets hit her in layers. A woman selling organic sourdough from a wooden crate next to a kid laying out refurbished hydroponic cubes on a blanket. Walkie talkies hanging from hooks on a canvas stall beside a rack of hemp jackets. A man demonstrating a portable solar panel to two teenagers who were more interested in the transistor radio on the table behind him. Transparent reading tablets stacked in a glass case next to a box of RFID blockers with hand-written price tags. A perk compact washer running a demo cycle on a folding table, cleaning the same sock over and over, while the vendor argued with someone about the price of cord wranglers.
She turned onto Commercial Street. Denser. Victorian bones under layers of modification, solar mesh on the rooftops, utility boxes bolted to every other wall like barnacles. A busker with a saxophone was playing something slow outside the old Spitalfields Market, and a perk speaker mounted above a coffee shop was playing an advert for ambient temperature regulation at exactly the same volume, and neither of them was winning.
On the corner of Fournier Street she slowed. A crowd had gathered around a small company of actors performing on a raised wooden platform. The sign leaning against the stage read THE HIGHGATE PLAYERS CLASSIC CINEMA REENACTMENTS. Six people in blue paint and leotards were performing what Sync recognised as the final battle from Avatar. The Toruk was papier-mache and fishing wire. The forest was three potted ferns and a painted backdrop that kept blowing sideways in the wind. One of the Na'vi had forgotten to paint behind her ears.
A little girl in the front row was holding her breath.
Sync stopped. She was on the clock. She had a pick up fifty metres away and a delivery window that didn't care about street theatre. She watched the girl watching the show and the chip butty brick in her stomach got a little lighter for no reason she could have explained.
The pick up was halfway down Fournier Street. Clean glass frontage that didn't belong next to the Georgian terraces. Sync locked her bike to a bollard and walked in.
The handoff took ninety seconds. A woman in a grey suit placed a drive on the counter. Sync placed it in the case. The case locked. Receipt signed. No conversation. No eye contact. The woman was already looking at her screen before Sync reached the door.
Bike unlocked. Case secure. West toward Battersea.
She caught it on Cheapside.
A shop window full of opened-up appliances displayed like surgery patients. In the glass, behind her reflection, another cyclist. Same distance back. Matching her pace.
Sync turned left onto a street she hadn't planned to take. Checked the next window. The cyclist turned left.
She took another unplanned turn. Then another. Drawing a shape on the city that nobody would follow by accident. The cyclist followed every line.
Company.
She dropped onto the Embankment and opened the throttle. The motor whined. Ahead of her the old river bridges crossed over the settlements, their spans casting long shadows across gardens and canvas roofs. She checked behind. The cyclist was still there. A second one was converging from a side street.
Two.
She cut north. Into the tight streets behind the Strand where the buildings leaned toward each other and the alleys were too narrow for anything that didn't know exactly where it was going. She knew exactly where she was going.
Left. Right. Through a courtyard that was technically private property and practically a shortcut. She took a corner hard and the frame hummed through the welds the way it always did when she pushed it past polite. The storage case bounced on the rack behind her and the locks held.
She came out onto a market street in Covent Garden. Stalls on both sides. Tight. Crowded. The perk stalls had collision avoidance that triggered when anything moved too fast nearby.
The two cyclists appeared at the far end. They'd anticipated her. The front one blocked her line. The second one closed from behind.
The front cyclist stopped. Male. Bigger bike. He held up a hand the way you hold up a hand to slow traffic.
"Just the case, love. Nothing personal."
Sync did not slow down. She angled straight for a perk stall selling kitchen gadgets, every surface covered in utensils and small appliances and blinking display screens.
The stall's collision avoidance fired. The awning retracted. The display shelves folded inward. The whole stall compressed itself into a defensive posture like a startled hedgehog, crates and racks pulling tight, creating a gap that had not existed three seconds ago.
Sync went through the gap.
Behind her the stall snapped back to its default position with the sound of a dozen mechanisms doing exactly what they were designed to do. She heard swearing. She heard a bike hit something that clanged. She did not look back.
Three turns. Four. Into Soho. Then the ghost streets, the ones that existed in the actual city but not in any navigation system, too narrow or too old or too awkward for the mapping data to bother with. She threaded between walls that nearly touched her handlebars on both sides, through a passage that smelled like frying oil and old brick, and came out the other end into a street that the navigation perks didn't believe in. Nobody followed. Nobody could follow who hadn't been here before.
She dropped the delivery in Battersea fourteen minutes later. Clean. Got paid. Locked up the bike in her usual spot, a service alley behind a launderette that smelled like detergent and someone else's cooking.
She crouched beside the bike and checked the case. Routine. Scratches told stories. Dents told worse ones. Her thumb ran along the edges. Nothing she hadn't put there herself. She stood up, locked the bike, pulled her jacket tighter.
The two cyclists. She turned it over in her head as she walked. They'd been fast but not fast enough. They'd known her route but not her shortcuts. Amateurs. She'd outrun amateurs before. She'd outrun them again.
She walked home through a city that hummed and flickered and argued with itself on every corner. On the railing at the end of the alley, an adhesive e-poster. A girl's face. The word MISSING across the top had faded to nearly the same colour as the railing. Thirteen. Five months ago. A QR code and the promise of a reward for any information.
[[pk0110100001101001//]..
Sync passed it without looking. She'd outrun both of them.
In the alley, the launderette light fell across the storage case still bolted to the rear rack. Near the lock housing, a line. Thin. Clean. Not a scratch. The edges had a faint browning, the kind that heat leaves behind. It was two centimeters from the lock.
The door swung shut. The light went with it.