In the damp underbelly of the city, where light surrendered and only stubborn smells remained — burning oil, human breath, forgotten water — Chamcha drifted like a ghost.
The Whisper Markets were gone.
Vanished, as if they had never been.
No cracked staircase behind the bakery.
No oil drum bazaars.
Only a locked steel door, bolted and silent.
Had he imagined it?
Had London itself conspired to erase it from his mind?
His pocket was heavier, though.
Chamcha reached inside and drew out the object he hadn't remembered taking: a tiny, brittle mask.
Paper-thin, almost weightless, yet it seemed to pull at his soul like an anchor.
The mask bore his own face — or rather, one of the thousand faces he had glimpsed in the cracked mirror — grim and defiant, with blackened eyes.
"You are the mask," the air seemed to whisper, "and the mask is you."
He stuffed it back into his pocket, heart pounding.
Above ground, London crawled on.
Buses coughed and rattled.
Women in headscarves laughed outside a halal butcher's.
A man with a Union Jack tattoo shouted drunken obscenities at a group of Indian boys in crisp suits.
A ragged street preacher proclaimed the end of the world in three different languages.
Chamcha moved among them unnoticed, another ghost in the machinery.
---
Across the river, in the brutalist grey of a council estate, Gibreel moved through a different kind of dream.
The procession he had seen — the one of silent pilgrims carrying green flames — had led him here. But now they were gone, and only a thin, bitter mist remained.
The buildings loomed above him, monolithic, their broken windows like watching eyes.
Everywhere: graffiti, layers thick enough to tell whole histories.
A child's chalk drawing of a horned man.
A slogan: "No gods here, only survivors."
On a cracked basketball court, he found them.
A group of men and women, hunched around a fire built inside a stolen shopping trolley.
Their faces were gaunt, carved from hunger and stubbornness.
Their clothes were patchworks: army surplus, designer knock-offs, religious robes faded to anonymity.
They did not speak English.
Or rather, they spoke a language older than any border — the tongue of the salted earth, of uprooted lives.
One of them, a woman with scarred hands and eyes like smoked glass, stepped forward.
She handed Gibreel a bundle wrapped in newspaper.
Inside: a pair of shoes.
Ordinary, battered trainers — but on the soles, carefully stitched by hand, words:
"Walk until the ground remembers your name."
He looked up to question her, but the group was already dispersing — slipping back into the cracks of the city.
Only the smoke of their fire remained, rising like a question mark into the bruised sky.
---
Chamcha dreamed that night.
Or perhaps he did not dream, but fell — down and down through layers of a London no map could contain.
He saw cathedrals stitched from broken televisions, mosques built from melted Coca-Cola signs.
He saw children with coins for eyes, trading their tongues for silver jewelry.
He saw faceless bureaucrats — bloated and blind — stamping papers that bled red ink.
And everywhere, whispering through the dream:
"Change is coming."
"Change is already here."
He woke before dawn, gasping, the brittle mask pressed against his chest like a brand.
He understood nothing.
Only this:
The city itself was changing — mutating beneath the weight of its exiles and dreamers, its forgotten prayers.
And somehow, so was he.
---
Later, in a café filled with grease and ghosts, Chamcha sat across from Dr. Uhuru Simba — the exiled poet and activist who once led riots that rattled palaces halfway across the world.
Simba stirred his tea with a bent spoon and said without preamble:
"You think your enemy is the white man, my friend. Or the bureaucrat. Or the copper with his bloody dog. But listen: your real enemy lives here."
He tapped his chest, hard.
"He wears your skin like a suit. Speaks your language better than you. And every time you bow, every time you swallow your anger — he grows stronger."
Chamcha said nothing.
Simba laughed — a bark, not a song — and leaned back.
"You'll see soon enough," he said.
"When the mask won't come off anymore."
Chamcha touched the pocket where the tiny mask rested.
It burned against his skin.
Outside, London's fog thickened, swallowing landmarks, erasing roads.
Nothing was fixed anymore.
Not faces.
Not borders.
Not even dreams.