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can provide.”
     
    Chester wanted to hug the walls as they walked through the capital’s deserted streets. McInery kept to the centre of the road. But she, Chester thought, was someone who could find a shadow in a noontime desert. He made an occasional show of peering through the windows of shops and cafes, ostensibly looking for supplies. Judging by the broken glass outside some, and board covering the windows at others, he wasn’t the first to have had that same idea during the long weeks of rationing.
    Conversation between the two of them was sparse.
    “We should find a car,” McInery said when they reached Oxford Street.
    “Too noisy. What about one of those pedal cabs?” Chester suggested when they got to Holborn. He regretted it almost immediately. He knew full well which of the two of them would end up doing the pedalling.
    “No,” McInery finally replied, just as they rounded a corner and saw Farringdon Station up ahead. “You know what we need? We need a bus.”
    “Okay, and I can see that there’d be a pleasing incongruity in driving a double decker through an abandoned city, but how exactly is that better than a car.”
    “Think, Chester. The new ones were electric. All we’d need is to find one of the charging points, rig that to a battery, and charge that from a magneto powered by a stationary bicycle.”
    “Ye-ah,” Chester said slowly, his eyes taking in the abandoned station. He started walking towards the entrance. There had been a coffee shop inside, and with the stations closed, there was a chance it wouldn’t have been looted, nor the owner able to go in and take the supplies for themselves. “Of course, it’ll be me who does the pedalling, and I say the following with that in mind, but why not take the engine out of the bus and use it as a generator? I mean, if we’re staying in London, why do we need to bother with the wheels and chassis?”
    He tugged on the gates. They were locked, of course, with a padlock at the top and bottom. Chester peered through the gap, trying to see inside. He thought, though he couldn’t be certain, that he could make out a jar of silver-foiled packets on the counter next to the till. The padlocks were cheap, generic models. Easy enough to pick, and even easier to break, but he would need a bag to carry the food and somewhere to carry it to. Until then, that padlock might keep out other scavengers.
    “The Garland Hotel.” McInery pointed at the roof of a fourteen-storey building poking up above the cluttered Victorian rooftops. “Five-star luxury in the centre of the city. That will do us very well for now.”
    “Sure,” Chester nodded. “Then we can see about finding some food.” And they could do that separately, which would give him some time to think. And perhaps during the night, he might… he didn’t know. The trouble was that McInery was right. They couldn’t go to an enclave, and he wasn’t sure where else was left.
    Cutting through narrow streets laid down long before the age of steam, they headed towards Smithfield’s and the steel and glass of the hotel beyond.
     
    “You hear that?” Chester asked.
    McInery turned her head.
    “That’s… something,” she murmured. “But what?”
    There it was again. That odd sound. Familiar yet at the same time out of place.
    “It’s a cow,” McInery stated, firmly.
    “What? Really?”
    “It must be from the city farm,” she said. Chester’s expression was blank, but only because he was trying to keep the confusion from showing. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never been. It’s been there for decades. Didn’t your school ever take you there on outings? You could pet the lambs, see the cows, and smell the pigs up close. It never made sense to me. If they wanted to encourage city kids to choose a life of farming, the least they could have done was douse the place with an air-freshener first.”
    “Didn’t really go to that kind of school,” Chester muttered, meaning that he’d not