Ash piloted them toward Hampstead, where Netherton’s parents had taken him to a schoolmate’s party, when he was ten, to spend the afternoon within a length of clay drainpipe, buried under a cast-iron bench, a space strung with tiny colored lanterns, where costumed mice had sung and danced and staged mock duels. The hands of his homunculus had been crude and translucent, not unlike those of the patchers. As he remembered this, Ash was telling Flynne of the waterwheels turned by the rescued rivers, but nothing of any preceding history, times prior, darkness.