London in winter, so overexposed as to be almost monochrome. Neith walks into a perfect blindness, searing light reflected on frost, in window glass, and the pearlescent paint of cars. The sun is so low that it seems to shine horizontally along Piccadilly, making the street into a tunnel of white. Commuters stripped of their faces, their clothes thick with strange retinal artefacts as her pupils contract to their minimum dilation, flow past her in endless anonymous succession, competing for walking space with tourists seemingly no more tangible than the pattern of waves scudding across a river bottom. She looks back along her route, and sees a shining avenue slashed with impenetrable lines of darkness, a throng of golden statues walking. Then she turns a corner into shadow and as her vision adjusts, revealing a violent surge of colour and detail: red leaves and blue sky, grey stone and green paint, human visages in various states of animated discourse or silent contemplation. Rickshaws, these days driven remotely by some taxi company’s mainframe, dither by the side of the road as they wait for a fare. The newer ones have rain canopies that can extend all the way over to protect passengers from London’s modern flash flooding. As always, they remind her of a school of nervous fish feeding on a reef.