The street was on the edge of an unremarkable south London estate. Sorrow looked up at the building that Number Seven had led her to. It had an industrial look. Most of the rest of the street was on its way from one use to another but this building looked neglected.

There was something familiar about it. Particularly the doors. Tall, wooden double doors, padlocked together. A smaller, human sized door inside the right hand door. That one locked with a Yale lock.

Seven unlocked the smaller door but Sorrow stopped him with a hand on his wrist.

'Let me check it first.' She let the door swing open a crack and sniffed the air. 'It’s fine,' she said.

'How can you tell?' said Seven, following her through the door.

'I can smell about six weeks’ worth of undisturbed dust and just a trace of that aftershave lotion you use. You’re sure none of the other Blanks knows about this place?' She didn’t mention the other smells. The smells lying underneath the scent of him. The smells she knew that she remembered from somewhere.

'Of course I’m sure,' said Seven. 'What’s the point of an emergency bolt hole if you tell the very people they’ll send after you?' He flipped a light switch.

Sorrow blinked in shock at the unexpected rush of nostalgia. In front of her was a large classic car, a dark grey Bentley of some kind, that was midway through serious automotive surgery. She understood the half remembered smells now. The faint scent of engine grease, Swarfega and old leather upholstery. She thought back to all the rainy childhood summer days spent watching her father at work, bent double over engines like this. Fixing intractable machinery with a combination of percussion and swearing.

At the back of the garage was a flight of metal stairs leading up to a mezzanine floor that was little more than a glorified balcony. Number Seven led the way up the stairs.

At the top of the steps was a living space. A sink and washstand, a small fridge, a chest, a coat rack and a desk with an ugly folding chair. There was a double bed, already made with military precision, and covered with a clear plastic sheet. It was butted up against the balcony rail, using it as a headboard. Seven pulled the rustling dust sheet off the bed and threw it to the bottom of the stairs where anyone climbing up would have to walk over it.

Time to get you out of those wet clothes,' said Seven.

'The cold can’t kill me. Let’s get you out of those wet clothes. And you can tell me why you’d rather trust me than your own boss.'

Seven grabbed an electric kettle from the largest desk drawer, filled it and plugged it in. 'Short answer? You’ve gone to more effort to keep me alive these last couple of days than she has the entire time I’ve worked for her. And if you wanted me dead I’d be dead,' he said. He hung the high vis jacket on the coat rack and shivered as the cold air hit his still damp suit.

'How about the long answer? We’ve got all night.' She helped him out of his wet jacket then threw it into the corner. It was ruined and there was no point trying to dry it out.

'I wasn’t completely sure that I could trust you until the conference room. I’ve seen you fight. You could have killed everyone in that room before the Boss had finished speaking. But you showed restraint.' He pulled his shirt over his head and threw it next to the jacket. 'You’re a soldier. If you want someone dead you don’t mess around, you don’t torture them, you don’t treat them to a short speech and you don’t wait for them to wake up first. You just kill them. This wasn’t done by a soldier. It was done by someone like me.'

The kettle boiled. Seven dropped his trousers and kicked them into the corner beside his shirt and jacket. He poured the boiling water from the kettle into the sink and topped it up with cold from the tap. Sorrow watched as he did his best to scrub the filthy river water from his body and hair with a sink full of warm water, a face cloth and a bar of soap.

Seven towelled himself dry. Sorrow watched some more. There seemed no point in hiding how much she enjoyed looking at him.

'What I really need to know is... how many Ravens are there?' He pulled a woollen blanket from the chest and wrapped himself up in it.

'What do you mean? There’s just me.' Sorrow grabbed her maintenance kit from the side of her Bergen, took her belt off and sat down at the desk to clean and dry her kukris.

'I know three things,' he said as he refilled the kettle. 'There’s a Raven killing the Blanks. You are the only Raven I know of. You are not trying to kill me and didn’t kill the others. Therefore there must be at least one more Raven. So how many are there?' He pulled the blanket tighter around him and sat down on the bed.

'I don’t know,' said Sorrow as she dried the blades. 'As far as I know there’s just me but any woman could become a Raven given the right circumstances. If I saw her while she was wearing the mantle of the Goddess I’d recognise it but if she’d dropped it, like I do when I’m asleep or getting dressed, then I wouldn’t know.'

'What are the signs? Can anyone see them?'

Satisfied that she’d removed all the water from the kukris, Sorrow moved on to drying the inside of the scabbards while she talked. 'The skin gets pale. Paler the stronger you call on the Goddess. They tell me it’s caused by blood moving away from the skin and into the muscles. The hair gets darker and starts to stand on end. The eyes get darker at first but then turn yellow. She will stand up straighter and take on more dominant body language. She’ll look taller and broader and the smaller she is to begin with the more impressive the change will be. Her voice will get deeper and harsher.' She stopped speaking while she found the oil from her kit.

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'As long as she wears the mantle she’ll be stronger and faster. Wounds will be less serious and will heal quicker,' she said as she oiled the blades. 'But the moment she takes the mantle off it all goes away. It’s possible to walk around with a mortal wound for hours and then die the moment the mantle drops. But none of it explains the feathers.'

'What about the feathers?'

'Maybe they come from me but I don’t know how that works. We need to talk to someone who knows more about this than I do. But we’ll need to wait till morning.'

'Why the kukris?' said Seven.

'Because you’ve got a gun. If we need any shooting done you can do it. You’re probably a better shot with a handgun anyway and guns draw too much attention. Besides, it's a lot harder to chop wood, slice vegetables and open cans with a gun.

'You didn’t have them yesterday,' he said.

'That you noticed. I had a folding blade with me.'

'And today you had those. Why?'

'I had a feeling this morning like everything was slipping away from us.' She was shivering. She couldn’t hide how cold she was any longer.

'Your turn to strip. Maybe the cold can’t kill you but I’m getting colder just looking at you. Let me help.'

Sorrow tried to take the boots off but the wet leather wouldn’t co-operate and she’d lost all feeling in her hands. Seven crouched in front of her and tore at the buckle on the ankle straps. With those undone it was easy to get the zips down and the boots off.

She stood, unfastened the trousers and wriggled and squirmed until she’d got both trousers and underwear over her hips.

'You’ll have to lie down,' said Seven.

Sorrow lay on the bed and he grabbed the hems and pulled the trousers all the way off.

Seven filled the sink with warm water while she took off her top and grabbed her spare wash bag from the emergency Bergan.

The warm water was heavenly against her freezing skin as she scrubbed off the memory of the river. Seven half filled and reboiled the kettle while she scrubbed. He added cold water from the tap, tested the temperature, and helped her wash the worst of the grime out of her hair.

Before long she was warm and clean but the cold air threatened to steal all her body heat.

'You know the best way to stay warm?' said Seven.

Sorrow grinned. Of course she knew. Sharing body heat was one of the first things anyone learned about survival. 'Get in the bed then,' she said as she slipped under the covers.

The bed was a double but it was still on the narrow side for two large people and one set of wings. Sorrow lay on her side. Seven put his arms around her and pulled her face to his chest. She couldn’t resist tracing the edge of the huge granulated scar on his left shoulder with her fingertips.

'I’ve never seen a scar like that before and I’ve seen a lot of scars.'

'That’s roof rash,' he said.

And roof rash is?'

'Like road rash but with a roof. I had to leave an airship in a hurry. I fell 15 feet onto a sloped roof, dislocated my shoulder and slid down the slates. Tore off my shirt and scraped the skin raw. I ended up hanging from the guttering waiting for Number One to come and get me.'

'An airship? When was this? 1930?'

'Two years ago. It was experimental. It might have changed mass transport as we know it if it hadn’t blown up.'

'Which I’m sure had nothing to do with you.'

'How could it have anything to do with me? I was hanging from a roof thousands of yards away when it exploded.'

'I know what this is,' she said, touching a faint line across his throat. 'That’s a garrote scar. Jude has one of these, though his is a lot deeper. It’s why he wears the Nehru jacket. The collar hides it.'

'Mine was nearly a lot deeper,' he said. He showed her the side of his left hand. There was a deeply scored scar on the base of his little finger. 'I got my hand under it. Nearly cost me the finger but saved my life. How did Jude survive?'

'He played dead. Someone grossly overestimated how often a person with reptile ancestry needs to breathe.'

'Jude is a reptile?'

'He’s only a tiny bit reptile. His family tree is complicated and most of his relatives are a bit… interesting.'

Seven shifted slightly and Sorrow felt his chin against the top of her head.

'How much thought have you been giving to my scars?' he said.

'I did get as far as trying to work out the calibre of your bullet wounds.'

'And?'

'This one,' she touched the round, puckered scar on his right shoulder, 'looks like a 7.62 rifle round from maybe 250 metres. Went right through and came out here,' she touched the larger scar on his back.

'That was Three. He had to shoot through me to take out the target behind me. Good thing it missed my lung.'

'This one,' she touched the scar low on his left side, just above his hip, 'was a 9mm pistol. I don’t see an exit wound so I’m guessing either a ricochet or something slowed it down first.'

'Close. 8mm from an antique Roth-Steyr M1907 because he just had to be a special snowflake. You’d be amazed at the number of billionaire psychopaths with antique weapon collections. I took cover behind a wall and still got shot. Not that it helped him much. I was only there as a distraction. Number Five was already in his vault stealing the… items we’d been sent for.'

'Did you kill the special snowflake?'

'Technically the explosion killed him.'

'And you had nothing to do with the explosion.'

'Of course not. Five and I were in the swimming pool when the building blew.'

'Was that because you had to jump into the pool from the top floor windows?'

'Third floor balcony. The jump from the top floor would have killed us.'

She reached for his left arm and felt for the scars on either side of his bicep. 'This one was a small calibre round, high velocity, went right through and barely slowed. Maybe a 5.56 rifle, maybe a .22.'

'Never found out. It did come from one of a professional sniper team though.'

'A team of snipers shot at you and they got you once, through the arm? No wonder they call you Lucky.'

'Don’t call me that. They weren’t shooting at me. They were shooting at Number Four. I was her protection. Number One was our eyes. Four was working on a Swiss accountant with ties to organised crime and a schoolgirl fixation. She had him in the palm of her hand. He thought he was in love and she had most of the information we needed to cut the family off from their own secret bank accounts. But the family was getting suspicious. They didn’t know who we were but they thought Four was after the money. So they tried to have her shot.

'We knew there was some danger but we couldn’t put her in body armour without tipping our hand. So I was wearing it and playing the over-protective big brother. When One spotted the snipers I just had to throw her down and keep her safe. They hit me 8 times. That was the only bullet that missed the armour. It missed her too but we were both bruised for weeks. Number One got one of the snipers and Five got the other on his way to steal the last password we needed.'