Katrine took the week to teach me about the fae. She made some calls to some people she hesitated to call friends and identified seventeen courts that attached themselves to London. Some were too esoteric, some were famously anti-human, some just didn’t seem to have any interest, so she’d settled on one, called the Lower Court of Londinium.

“Why not go to the Upper Court?” Jodie had asked

“I asked the same thing, my informant just laughed at me” Katrine responded, “I’m not risking it.”

I’d been focusing more on working with my designs. Lucille’s had been a goldmine, it had three different Components in it. The first was a scrying bowl, it needed some kind of electrolyte to work, it specified seawater. Katrine and I had spent nearly thirteen hours thinking it over, our best guess was that it was intended for people who couldn’t do magic to use.

“It specifies taking it to the woman of the woods,” Katrine had translated, “or is it the Three Women? Chloe, plug Kvinne i Skogen into google translate, my Norwegian is sloppy on a good day.”

“Uhh, yeah, ‘woman in the woods’ is right.” I’d let my phone fall onto my face and make a farting noise

“Oh come on you’re not that tired, And get your feet off my desk.” She’d meant it jokingly

“Does Norwegian mythology have dryads? Any specific fae connections?”

“No idea, but either way it’s irrelevant. Norway was Christianised centuries before this was written, whatever gods were in Lucille’s mind, they weren’t Norse.”

Finding a silvered bowl to put everything in was a chore, I’d sent Jodie around antique shops for a week and come back with nothing that fit the specifications, but Katrine didn’t lose a minute on picking it apart. She had me design a kind of battery cell for magic energy. It was surprisingly similar to a regular battery, a lattice of silver triangles, about the size and shape of a hundred and fifty millilitre drink can, filled with saltwater. vigilems, welded to each edge, held the magic in and two prongs on the end would flow it into any magical circuit.

The other two had been relatively easy to replicate, both standard welding jobs. One of them had a space in the middle where someone could sit, and while they were they could only tell the truth, or get blasted by a wave of pain. Jodie ran as our test subject by claiming her socks were purple and nearly fainted. The other was essentially a toy, it was simplistic and the instructions said to make them out of wire and sell them on street corners. It was supposed to give you good dreams.

Addie and Sid were staying back in London, Addie needed to look for the next job and Sid didn’t like the idea of being an emissary. Finally, three weeks later, Katrine, Jodie and I were ready to visit the fae realm.

“So what do we do, is there like a word you say?” Jodie asked, pulling a coat around her to keep the wind out. She was always good to find abandoned places, but the old car park wasn’t the most protected from the weather

“I have absolutely no idea.” My ring was cold to the touch, and I realised that Saghir had never given me any instructions for using it. It couldn’t be another round of drugs, could it? She’d said it would open a gate. Thinking those words made her voice echo in my head like she was there, I couldn’t think of her words in any voice other than her own. The way she spoke was strange, literal but obvious, almost. If I was going to work it out I had to think at face value. If the key opened a gate, all I had to do was just that.

I squeezed my eyes out and put my hand out, forcing my mind to imagine metal bars in front of me, cool to the touch and finished with flaky black paint. My ring snagged on nothing and a moment later I was holding cold, sleek iron. I held my eyes closed for fear of losing it, but the floating greens and pinks behind my eyes slithered into form, an arched gate with bars. It felt like the colour silver. “Are you guys seeing anything?” I turned my head to face where I assumed Jodie was

“Aside from you using the force, you mean?” Jodie very clearly didn’t.

“Shh, let her work” Katrine said with just a hint of annoyance.

“Try closing your eyes, focus on your eyelids, look at my hand.”

They were silent for a second, then I hear Jodie mumble to herself, then louder, “What the-”

I couldn’t help but grin slightly, and twisted the gate open

My vision refocussed in a field of tarmac and overgrowth. It was uncomfortably hot, and everything crumbled underfoot. I stopped walking and looked back. Jodie was staring at a half-eaten granola bar in her hand and Katrine was wiping some gravel-like substance off her hands. They met my gaze, with confusion written on their faces as if someone had taken a marker.

“So just to be clear” Katrine started after a moment of stunned silence, “neither of you remember anything past the last few seconds either?”

“Nope.”

“Nothing.”

“Fantastic.” Katrine pursed her lips in frustration. “Jodie, check how many snack bars you have left, you usually get through one every forty-five minutes on trips, don’t you?”

“More when I’m hungry, but yeah.” Jodie took off her bag and pulled out a fistful of wrappers, then another. She dumped them on the ground next to her. “That’s more than I brought.”

Katrine started pacing. “Count them.”

“Time doesn’t work properly in the fae realm,” I started, “we don’t know if’-”

“Count them. Chloe, how long can we stay here before we’re trapped? Ballpark figure.”

“The first time I was only here for a few seconds, the second time can’t have been more than an hour before Saghir pushed me back.” Katrine didn’t look at us while Jodie checked each wrapper. “She said I was separating myself from my body, and that was the risk. If we’ve come here physically, it could be a lot longer.”

“Forty-three wrappers. I brought twelve. Most of these aren’t even branded.”

“Forty three by forty five makes about thirty hours. If there’s a time limit we’re probably skirting it. From what I can tell the Lower Court have an outpost in Hyde Park, real-world a mile south from here.”

“Then why didn’t we just teleport in at Hyde Park?” Jodie pulled her bag back up and checked her gun, more for comfort than anything.

“Too many people, too exposed. If anyone saw we’d land back in the middle of an army of police, or worse, RWHS. Now, how do we work out directions?”

I was busy looking around to notice she was talking to me. If I focused on the details, this place looked like the abandoned car park we’d left; a yellowed turn sign, the lines on the floor, a vine that latched around a post, but looking at it as a whole, it was more overgrown, more out of repair, much bigger. Like an incomplete memory.

“Chloe?” Katrine asked, “how do we get to Hyde Park?”

I thought back to every method I knew of navigating things. Compasses, orienteering, the stars, all the things I hadn’t paid attention to in Duke of Edinburgh Bronze.

“I really don’t think any real-world navigation is gonna work here, so I guess we just ask? Keep walking till we find something, someone?”

“That seems incredibly dangerous-”

“You said that the fae world was like, a really shitty mirror of our world, right?” Jodie interrupted

Katrine stopped pacing and started speaking, faster than she usually did, “Well, it’s not that simple but-”

“Yes, basically it is.” I stepped in before Katrine took the next hour explaining.

“So if there were a really shitty mirror version of hyde park, it would be next to a really shitty mirror version of Kensington, right?” I looked over at Jodie, she’d broken off from the two of us and was on the far end of the structure.

“If we’re looking for Shitty Mirror Kensington, that looks like a good place to start.”

The building she pointed to crested the trees that surrounded the car park by a lot. It was built like a fortress, but far bigger than any fortress had the right to be, and it was a smooth pearlescent grey like it had been slicked with oil. If I squinted I could see figures in the distance, in windows and on parapets, moving in lockstep, like they were listening to the same drum, beating impossibly fast. I pinched myself for never looking up, and looked at Katrine. Her lips were moving with calculations, thoughts, questions being asked and answered in fragments of moments. All that existed for the moment was her and the fortress. Jodie was less invested.

“It looks pretty far away, we should get going.”

We gave Katrine a few more moments to wonder.