On Sunday morning, the train station was packed. Not just with mourners in their black crepe and veils, but men and women from every class in London who had come to gawk at the Necropolis Railway full of the living dead, like they’d never seen a train before and hadn’t been staring at the bodies on display in the Southwark Morgue for weeks. The coffins were lined up on a barge with its back to the station, bobbing in the black water of the Thames. The day was appropriately gray, with heavy swirls of clouds so low they masked out the industrial smoke.

Loki and Amora stood on the platform with the queue of passengers waiting to board. They were both dressed in black, high-collared jackets and donned dark glasses in spite of the overcast day. No one looked twice at them. The mood on the platform was making Loki jumpy. With a crowd gathered around to witness a grizzly spectacle yet again, there was the same mismatched jumble of emotions as outside the morgue. The same merchants who had been hawking their wares at the morgue were here, offering bags of toasted chestnuts and postcards for sale. A group of children were running wild between the passengers waiting to board, their shrieks of laughter drowned by a bell from the station. He didn’t like the mix. He wanted one feeling, one emotion, one face for him to read.

The policemen milling around seemed to share his discomfort. They had their truncheons out, or one hand resting upon them on their waists, prowling the crowd unsure of what trouble they’d have to quell. Loki shifted his weight on his flat shoes. He missed his heeled boots. He missed his black nails and his tunics, and he missed Asgard, he realized. He missed his home.

The line edged forward, and as Loki moved with it, someone knocked into his shoulder, hard enough that he stumbled. On instinct, he grabbed the man, keeping them both upright, and felt the hard tip of a cane smash into his toe.

“Sorry,” the man said, and they both looked up.

It was Theo.

His eyes widened when he saw Loki, and then he let out an astonished laugh. “You.”

“Theo—” He reached out, not knowing what a consoling touch could offer, but Theo batted his hand out of the air.

“You are bloody relentless, aren’t you?”

“What are you doing here?” Loki asked.

“Mourning,” Theo replied, and his voice cracked.

Loki glanced at the barge, still heavy with coffins. “Is Mrs. S....” he started, but the words died in his throat as Theo’s eyes narrowed.

“How did you know she died?” he asked, but it didn’t sound like a question. It sounded like he already knew what Amora had done. What Loki had done.

“I...” Loki started, but a sharp whistle from the conductor cut the air. “They’re boarding.” He went to step past Theo and join Amora on the platform, but Theo stepped into his path, slapping his shins with his cane. Loki stopped, startled.

“Did you kill her?” Theo asked, and he sounded so tired. “Please, tell me you didn’t...”

“I didn’t,” he said. His heart was twisting like a rag wrung dry, but he snapped before he could stop himself, “Though I don’t suppose you believe me, do you? What was it your book called me, father of lies?”

Amora appeared suddenly at Loki’s side, taking him by the arm. “Come on.”

Theo let out an astonished laugh. “Oh, good, you’re here, too? What a pair you are.”

“Stay out of this, Mr. Bell,” Amora said, her voice quiet. “This is not your concern.”

“I’m not letting either of you on this train.” Theo grabbed Loki, yanking him away from Amora, then reached suddenly into the pocket of his coat and drew out his wallet. He thrust it at Loki and, perhaps out of surprise or confusion, Loki took it. “Help! Police!” Theo shrieked, and Loki started. “I’m being robbed.”

“Theo, wait—”

“Help!” Theo shouted again, loud enough that the crowd around them seemed to shrink away in unison, creating an unmistakable perimeter. “Help! I’m being robbed!”

Loki tried to pull away and dropped the wallet, but Theo grabbed him by the front of the shirt, pinning him in place against him. His cane fell between them with a clatter like a gunshot, and several people jumped in surprise at the sound.

Amora was melting into the crowd, her head tipped down so that the brim of her bonnet obscured her features. “Don’t—” Theo started to shout after her, but Loki called over top of him, “Get on, I’ll find you.”

A police officer shoved his way through the crowd toward them, a middle-aged man with sagging jowls and a thudding step. “Is there a problem, gentlemen?” he asked, pushing up his hat with the end of his truncheon.

“This man just reached into my coat and tried to grab my wallet!” Theo said, shoving Loki away from him and pointing an accusatory finger.

Loki quickly decided the best way to extract himself from this situation was to appear to be the far more rational and less hysterical of the two of them, so he pinned on his best approximation of a warm smile for the officer, though he had very little warmth left in his heart. “Sir, allow me to explain.”

But Theo pressed on, limping up to the officer and grabbing his arm. “You can’t let him on the train, he’ll probably rob everyone on board blind. Can you imagine what sort of wickedness it takes to rob mourners?”

This was becoming a scene. The line was stalled behind them, and people were craning their necks to see what was happening. Several women nearby clutched their purses against their chests, like Loki might suddenly snatch them.

The policeman shook Theo off his arm, then held out a hand to Loki, gesturing him back toward the train station. When Loki didn’t move, the officer seized him by the shoulder and dragged him down the platform, away from the train. “All right, there, mister, let’s you and I go for a walk.”

“Please, there’s been a mistake—”

The officer didn’t let him go. “Well, then, this shouldn’t take long.”

Panic rose in Loki’s throat. The clock above the rail station struck quarter to eleven. Fifteen minutes until the train departed. He looked around for Theo, but the crowd had already funneled back into the space they had created around them and he was gone.

The officer dragged Loki into the station and shoved him into one of the chairs near the ticket desk. Curious, the ticket clerk looked up.

“All right then, friend,” the officer said, holding out a hand. “Let’s see your ticket.”

Loki handed over the boarding card, and the officer examined it carefully, then held it up to the light. “Want to explain what happened back there?” he asked, still squinting at the ticket like he was searching for a flaw.

“Just a misunderstanding,” Loki said, already half standing in preparation for bolting toward the exit. “I wasn’t watching where I was going and I bumped into that, uh, young man and he misinterpreted my intentions as malicious. That’s all.” Out on the platform, he heard the train whistle. He could still make it.

“And his wallet?” the officer asked. “If you just knocked shoulders, how did it end up in your hands?”

“It wasn’t in my hands,” Loki replied. “If you’d been observing the actual scene and not just the hysteria of it, you would have seen it on the pavement between us. He must have dropped it.”

“Let’s just make sure it didn’t happen to fall into your jacket, shall we?” The policeman reached for Loki’s pockets to pat him down, but Loki slapped the policeman’s hand out of the air hard, grabbed his other wrist, then dealt him a sharp uppercut to the chin. The policeman reeled backward, a thin dribble of blood trickling from his nose. Behind the counter, the ticket clerk let out a little shriek, and when Loki looked at him, he fumbled a door open at the back of the booth and disappeared.

The officer shook his head a few times, then pressed two fingers to his nose. He swore, eyes darting back to Loki. Loki leaped for the door, but the officer grabbed him by the collar of his coat, dragging him backward in a sharp, unexpected tug. Loki lost his footing and crashed into the officer, sending them both tumbling to the ground.

The officer was fumbling for a silver whistle hanging about his neck. Loki swatted for it, but the policeman dodged and gave it a sharp blow. A single high, piercing scream straight in Loki’s ear. Loki drew a knife from his sleeve, then rolled off the officer and to his feet. The officer was clambering up too, his boots clomping heavily on the tile. Standard issue, probably given to him with the rest of his uniform. They looked too big for him, judging by his size and the sloppy gait.

Loki aimed and threw the knife, one precise blow into the toe of the man’s boot. The man cried out—not in pain, but surprise—as the toe of his boot was skewered to the ground, pinning him in place. He tried to yank it from the floor, but the Asgardian steel stuck fast. He reached for his whistle again, but Loki grabbed the chain before the officer could and ripped it from his neck, then tucked it into his own pocket.

There were more police on the platform. They would have been alerted by the noise of the whistle. The clerk at the ticket window had disappeared as well, likely to call for help. The knife wouldn’t hold this man for long—the blade would stay embedded in the soft tile, but the officer would likely think to take off his boot after a few more minutes of that hard tugging, once his panic had quieted. Loki wasn’t sure where his train ticket had disappeared to, and he wasn’t going to hang around to find out. He took off toward the back of the station building. There had to be a door, something for staff, somewhere people could exit discreetly if needed.

He picked a hallway at random, trying to find windows and follow the sallow light. When he finally located a back door, it opened onto the dock behind the station, where the barges brought caskets in from the city to be buried. There were still a few dozen waiting to be loaded onto the train, a handful of dockworkers lifting each coffin between them and hauling it up the steep stairs leading up the riverbank and to the platform where the train was waiting.

How cruelly ironic, he thought as he ducked behind a shipping container and waited for the next gap in the workers. He’d be leaving Earth the same way he’d arrived: in a box.