Her body remembering to lean into the turns, hugging what she took to be a strong thin girl, definitely breasts in there, through layers of armored Cordura. Very little she could see, past the smudged plastic of the visor, under wing-beat strobings of streetlight. Ahead, the yellow of the rider’s helmet, scratched diagonally, as by something with three large claws. To either side a blur of abstracted London texture, as free of meaning as sampled skins in a graphics program. The awning of a Pret A Manger, brick, possibly the green round of a Starbucks sign, more brick, something in that one official shade of red. And most of it, she guessed, in the service of evasion, a route no car could follow. At least there seemed to be relatively little traffic now.