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No, he’d seen something else … To the right, the scaffolding had ended, and a swath of the south bank had come into view. Joan gasped.
Near the London Eye, there was a new landmark: a half pyramid with a low-sloping side that sparkled, diamond-like. And beyond that, an unfinished tower—a narrow column with jutting pieces that almost looked climbable from this vantage.
Back in 1993, there’d been too few buildings, but this skyline was just as uncanny: a mouth with too many teeth.
Joan imagined scrambling to the top of the new tower for a better view of the city. She’d been thinking of the world as largely unchanged. Now, she was struck with the feeling she’d had when she’d jumped into the past. This wasn’t her London anymore.
‘We travelled in time,’ Nick breathed, shaken. ‘I mean, I knew that we did, but …’
‘Now, it feels real.’ Joan understood. It was one thing to suspect it—to see a date on a train ticket—but a new skyline was undeniable.
‘This is real,’ Nick agreed. His eyes returned to the strange view over and over until they found the staircase and descended. Until the new buildings vanished from sight.
On the riverside walk, between the two Blackfriars bridges, London looked momentarily like its old self again. The great red pillars of the old bridge were still here, rising from the water in their familiar lines: ghosts of Victorian London.
It was more crowded here, and the narrow path slowed their pace. As they walked, Joan began to notice Nick’s effect on people.
Back at Blackfriars Station, Joan had thought about how crowds reacted to Aaron. Now she saw for the first time that they reacted to Nick too. He didn’t ask for it, didn’t take up more of the pavement than anyone else—but he seemed to command the space around him. People’s heads lifted as he passed, as if they’d sensed some charismatic presence among them. Their gazes weren’t the admiring desire often directed at Aaron, but something just as primal. People looked at Nick the way a compass pointed north. Joan watched the ripple of it: how it affected everyone, from schoolboys to joggers to briskly walking office workers.
Had Nick always had this quality, she wondered. Or could people somehow sense who he’d once been?
‘You coach your brother’s team?’ Joan asked. She should have been keeping more distance between them, but she was curious about his life. Her own Nick had only mentioned his family a few times and had always tensed when speaking of them.
This new Nick actually relaxed. ‘I coach my little brother’s and sister’s teams.’ His eyes softened. ‘They’re both really good,’ he said. ‘Better than I was at their age.’
‘You’re really good,’ Joan blurted. The team won all the time now.
‘You’ve seen me play?’ Nick said, sounding a little surprised.
Joan felt herself start to flush. ‘Well …’
Nick’s gaze roved over her for a moment as he took in the flush. He bit his lip, the corner of his mouth quirking up. He started to say something self-deprecating. But then he hesitated and said instead, a bit shyly, ‘I love the game. I love playing with the team.’ He said it like a confession. Like he’d never told anyone that before.
Joan’s chest constricted. She’d never heard the other Nick express pure enjoyment of anything. I’ve always put the mission first, he’d told her once. I never allowed myself anything more.
‘What about you?’ Nick asked. ‘What do you like?’ He sounded as curious about Joan as she was about him.
Joan concentrated on the path in front of them. Her face still felt warm. ‘I’m kind of a history nerd,’ she said without thinking. ‘I like the really old stuff.’ As soon as she heard herself, she tensed, but to her relief, her senses stayed sharp and unmuted.
‘I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was small.’
‘You did?’ Joan said, surprised. They’d met volunteering at a historic house in Kensington, but he’d been undercover at the time. She’d assumed later that he’d had no actual interest in the work they’d been doing.
‘There was a dig near our place growing up. Used to watch through the fence.’ He smiled slightly. ‘Never saw them excavate anything but dirt.’
‘I did that,’ Joan said, surprised again. ‘I used to drag my dad over to a dig at Bletchley.’ She hadn’t thought about that in years.
They passed the pier, and the south bank came into view again—this stretch was just as altered. The last time Joan had been here, the Shard had stood alone: a single glass tower with only the chimney stack of the Tate Modern competing for the sky. Now another skyscraper rose between them: a spire with a golden top. More construction was in the works behind it. The new cluster made Joan think of skyscraper cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai. Would London eventually look like that?
They walked past the Millennium Bridge, elegant and spindly after the rivets and iron of Blackfriars. There, everyone on the path turned left, away from the river; the river walkway had ended.
Joan leaned against the embankment wall and craned her neck. The dock had to be just up ahead, but she couldn’t see it. She thought about the Serpentine Inn. It had been part of a complex: a miniature village of shops, houses, a market—all hidden away behind walls and accessible only through nondescript black doors. ‘We’re probably in the right spot already,’ she said, realising. This whole area was a maze of buildings—a monster neighbourhood could easily be hidden among them. They needed to start checking alleys and looking for plaques with—
Her eye caught on something beside her hand. On the stone cap of the embankment wall, there was a square black tile the size of her thumbnail, with an image that had been hand-painted before the tile had been fired. Joan bent to examine the picture, and then went still. It was a sea serpent wrapped around a sailing ship.
‘What is that?’ Nick said.
The tile was oriented with the ship’s prow facing west. Joan turned in that direction and spotted another black tile—this time on the ground, grouted between bricks as if it had been there since the path had been laid. The new tile was oriented differently, the ship’s prow pointing north, toward an alley.
