The litter passed beneath the rusted iron arches of the upper tram interchange. Then, Len Vey was struck by the ugly, almost violent brightness of the unroofed world.
For five days, every nerve in his body had been tuned to a survival shape of strict, micro-measured perimeters. He had learned to read Rookvale not in leagues or miles, but in three-foot circles of copper light: the green cone beneath a town street bracket. The sixteen-inch pool of amber grease-light from a miner’s animal fat lantern. The six-inch outer edge of greasy yellow safety thrown by a hand-held horn lamp. To step four inches outside that circle was to invite the cold, static prickle of an emergence. To let a shadow fall behind your spine was to leave a doorway open for a creature that wore your sister’s face. Then she carried a butcher’s knife.
Now, there were no perimeters.
Sunlight was everywhere—uncontained, unpressurized, and indifferent. It poured straight down from the zenith, bouncing off whitewashed plaster, flashing off stale puddle surfaces in the gutters, lighting up the peeling lead paint on tavern signs, and piercing the deep, grease-stained recesses of alleyways that had not seen a ray of natural light since the third year of the Great War.
