Broken Homes

I gazed at the not-really-a-tuned-mass-damper that hung down the centre of the tower. Stromberg had designed Skygarden to soak up vestigia from its environment, and if it had done its job then that power had to have gone somewhere. We’d assumed that the whole grandiose scheme had failed because it hadn’t been channelled up and out of the Stadtkrone on the roof. But what if the power had accumulated, but hadn’t been released?
    What if it was still stored in the thirty-storey length of plastic hanging over there? I ignored the lift doors as they opened behind me.
    Power that could be drained off into the metal plates stacked neatly in the garages that surrounded the tower. The Faceless Man didn’t need the staff technology Nightingale was teaching us – he’d adapted the demon trap technique to create vessels for storing the power – dog batteries.
    This was not a real-estate scam, I realised. It was a heist.
    I turned to rush up to the flat, but the lift doors had closed now and I had to wait for it to come back down again.
    When I let myself into the flat I found that the living room was full of bodies.
    The curtains were drawn and the lights were off. In the gloom I could make out at least three people lying on the sofa-bed and another five or so on the floor. They all seemed to be men and, judging from the smell of spilt beer and the layer of crisp packets and takeaway cartons, they were sleeping off a serious night in. I noted the donkey jackets with the high-viz strips and made an educated guess as to who they were.
    I slowly pushed open the bedroom door and peered inside. Stromberg had carefully designed the master bedroom to be too narrow for a king-size bed placed across it and, when placed lengthways, to provide a mere fifteen centimetres of clearance between bed and wall. The width of the end wall was taken up with a sliding patio door and the length precisely calculated so that you could have a wardrobe, but only if it blocked access to either the patio or the rest of the flat. It was for such attention to details that Erik Stromberg was once described by the Guardian architectural correspondent as emblematic of modern British architecture at its most iconoclastic.
    Zach lay face down on the bed naked except for his bright red underpants and, despite his eating habits, I couldn’t help noticing that he was skinny enough for me to count every vertebra on his back.
    Carefully, I crouched down until I could put my lips a couple of centimetres from his ear and shout, ‘Police!’
    The results were instructive. Not only did he leap at least a metre upwards, but he was already twisting like a cat so that he came down on all fours with the bed between us.
    ‘Shit,’ he shouted, and then slapped his hand over his mouth.
    ‘Why have you filled my living room with Quiet People?’ I whispered.
    ‘Community outreach,’ whispered Zach. ‘I’m trying to get them used to interacting with the surface world.’
    ‘You took them on a pub crawl, didn’t you?’
    And Zach claimed it had worked, too.
    ‘One of them ordered a souvlaki up Green Lanes,’ said Zach. We’d retired to the kitchen for coffee and conversation in something close to a normal voice. ‘Brought a tear to my eye, I was that proud.’
    ‘Why did you bring them here?’
    ‘It was late. This was the closest.’
    ‘You got any tea?’ asked a figure in the doorway. He was short and wiry with that bantamweight boxer aura of density and strength. His face was long and pale, his eyes were huge, grey and beautiful. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and resonant but barely louder than a murmur. He looked me up and down and stuck out a hand.
    ‘Stephen,’ he said. His hand was strong, the skin as rough as sandpaper.
    ‘Peter,’ I said. ‘We’ve already met – you buried me under a platform at Oxford Circus.’
    Stephen shrugged. ‘You needed the rest,’ he said.
    ‘How was the pub crawl?’ I asked.
    ‘Mildly successful,’ he said. ‘Better if we could have slept in, but the drilling keeps waking me up.’
    Me and Zach listened, but we couldn’t hear anything beyond distant traffic and the kettle coming to a boil.
    ‘What drilling?’ I asked – thinking about the council contractors downstairs.
    Stephen put his hand against the outside wall of the kitchen and closed his eyes. ‘Downstairs, about thirty feet. Half-inch masonry drill bit going six inches into concrete. The good quality stuff,’ said Stephen and rapped the