London has very few bad areas left, but the house she is looking for is on the border of one of them: an ugly valley of brutalist estate buildings stained like decaying molars and arranged around central courtyards only ever destined to be battlefields. The overarching problem with them is not, to Neith’s eye, how they were laid out, but what they were intended to do: they are boxes for the storage of surplus persons. The message of uselessness in the stones is not hard to unpack, and the inhabitants read it as soon as they saw where they were put. From there, the project ground itself down into a slurry of low expectations and simmering rage. The old century produced a lot of these slow-cooking anger farms, and the heat they have built up is soaked into the earth and the people so deep that even the System cannot immediately take it away. Detractors—like the subject of this present investigation—point to this as evidence that the System is not all it’s cracked up to be, but Neith can read history, too, and would like them to name a society that has done as well with what it inherited from the past. Certainly the remedy is not the previous, nominally representative iterations of democracy, which spawned this mess in the first place.