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found what he was listening for, the small mosquito whine of the Nahn.
    Everett M followed the Nahn buzz down Roding Road on to Northwold Road. For a moment he lost it in the music of car radios and mobile-phone chitchat. Jogging up anddown, breathing out great clouds of steam, Everett M banged his gloved hands together for warmth and skipped over the treacherous extending leads of the dog-walking-service woman. So, she was a feature in this universe as well as his own. There. Faint, but once he picked it out, there was no mistake. The Nahn-thing had dodged the drive-time traffic along Northwold Road and crossed into Stoke Newington Common. The park was a triangle of darkness among the street lights. People, cars, homes, shops were only a few dozen metres away but Everett M felt alone and isolated.
    Movement. Snuffling around the back of a park bench. Everett M flicked up his night vision. Dog: a bull-terrier cross, the kind you could buy for two hundred pounds at the Guinness Trust flats to make you look hard, was rooting around among the discarded fast-food boxes. A bull-cross. On its own. It was trailing a leash.
    Where was the owner?
    The dog looked up from its rummaging. It looked Everett M straight in the eye. Everett M looked the dog straight in the eye. And he saw not big, sad, soft dog eyes, but the hard black speckle of insect eyes. The dog growled. Everett M thought power down his right arm. His palm opened. Metal and clean white Thryn nanoplastic unfolded like a cyborg flower. The dog gave a yelp and fled. In a thought, Everett M was after it. The dog could go through shrubs and railings, but Everett M was faster. The dog burst fromStoke Newington Common and raced up Rectory Road. It zigzagged through the nose-to-tail traffic on Stoke Newington High Street.
    Everett M had encountered the traffic on Stoke Newington High Street before. It had been painful. He still carried its scars.
    ‘Not this time,’ Everett M hissed through his teeth. He opened both EM pulsers and with a burst of power repeated the trick he had played on Fat Jennings’s car. Every engine on the street went dead. Everett M threaded himself through the stationary traffic to see the dog slip through the railings into Abney Park Cemetery. ‘Okay then,’ Everett M said. ‘If that’s what you want. Battle of Abney Park, round two.’
    Forty cars were stranded on Stoke Newington High Street, but the drivers were too busy shouting and phoning people and banging horns that didn’t work and looking under hoods and standing in the cold asking each other,
What what what happened there?
to notice the teenager in the running gear point a finger and a brief, brilliant spike of laser light cut through the chain locking the gates together.
    And in.
    The cold and dark closed around Everett M like a fist. His night vision showed him the destruction that had been caused when he had fought his alter here. Stone angels were reduced to headless, wingless bodies; cherubs blasted to pairs of legs. Tombstones and Victorian memorial pillarslay in shattered chunks. Tree branches littered the ground. A dumpster stood half full of shattered wood and stone, as if the contractors had given up in despair at the size of the job.
    Everett M wasn’t proud of any of it.
    He tuned his Thryn sense to listen for any traces of Nahn activity. A trace, fainter than a fly’s heartbeat, but enough for Everett M to follow.
    ‘I can see you,’ he said. The trace led him off the main path into the winter-killed brambles and dead bracken. It wove between tombstones and tree trunks choked with ivy to a circle of Victorian grave markers – pillars, cherubs, ornate stone scrolls, weeping angels. The dog lay on its side in the centre of the circle. Everett M opened the pulsers in the palms of his hands and went cautiously up to the animal. It was not breathing. He poked it with the toe of his running shoe. The dog collapsed in on itself. It was an empty shell, sucked dry of