Morning in the cell was a gray light through a slit near the ceiling. Ed woke on the straw mattress with no memory of having fallen asleep, which meant he hadn't—not properly. He had simply stopped and started again, the way a machine stops and starts, the way a mind goes quiet and then doesn't. His neck ached. His back ached. The air in the cell was cold and carried the sour smell of his own exhaustion.

The door opened at half past eight. A constable with a gray mustache told him to follow. They walked through a corridor that smelled of boiled cabbage and floor polish and emerged into a room with a long wooden table, three chairs, a window that looked onto a gray courtyard where a policeman stood with his hands behind his back, staring at nothing. The courtyard was paved with small stones, worn smooth by generations of feet. A single dead tree stood in one corner, its branches like dark veins against the pale sky.

Sit.

Ed sat. The chair scraped against the floor, a high harsh sound that echoed briefly in the room's close air. The table was scarred with decades of marks—cuts, burns, initials carved by men who had sat here before him. J.P., 1947. He traced the letters with his finger, feeling the groove they had made in the wood, the small violence of a letter opener or a nail file pressed hard enough to leave a mark. Four years ago. He wondered where J.P. was now. He wondered if J.P. had gotten out, or if he was still here, or somewhere worse.

The door opened again. A man came in wearing a gray suit that fit him as if he'd been told what suits looked like but had never seen one. The cloth was good—wool, probably, a charcoal gray that would have looked dignified on someone who knew how to wear it—but the tailoring was wrong, the shoulders too square, the sleeves a quarter-inch too long. He carried a folder that contained, as far as Ed could tell, nothing useful. He sat across from Ed and opened the folder and looked at it.

"Edward Morgan," he said. "California. Arrested in Marylebone at twenty-two hundred hours. No passport. No travel documentation. No record of departure from the United States. No record of arrival in the United Kingdom."

"Yes," Ed said.

"The Consulate cannot help you."

The words hit him like cold water. "You have to help me. I'm an American citizen."

"You are claiming to be an American citizen. The documentation does not support the claim."

"My driver's license—"

"Is a California document. It means nothing here. It is not a travel document. It is a piece of paper with your name on it, and there are many pieces of paper with names on them."

Ed stared at him. He had known this—on some level. But hearing it said aloud, in this room, by this man with his ill-fitting suit and his folder of nothing, made it real in a way it hadn't been real before. He was nobody. A man without a history, without a country, without a place in the world that anyone would recognize. The paper in his wallet—the California license with its faded photograph and its promise of validity until 1954—was a relic from a life that had ceased to exist the moment he stepped through the crack in the alley. He was a ghost who had not yet learned he was dead.

"What am I supposed to do?"

The man—Attaché Whitfield, according to the card in his breast pocket, the card slightly crooked, the text slightly faded—leaned back in his chair. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had stopped expecting this job to make sense a long time ago. There were bags under his eyes, small and dark, and his hair was thinning in a way he had not yet accepted. He had been doing this job for fifteen years, Ed guessed. Fifteen years of men who appeared from nowhere with nothing, men who claimed things they couldn't prove, men who needed help that the Consulate was not equipped to give.

"You could have your family cable the Consulate with verification. A week, perhaps two, if the cables are fast. Then we could issue an emergency travel document. But that assumes you have family who will answer. And that you have the money for a ticket home."

"How much?"

"To San Francisco? Roughly one hundred and twenty pounds."

Ed had three dollars. At two dollars to the pound, that was one and a half pounds. Not nearly enough for a cup of tea.

"Is there any other option?"

Whitfield looked at him for a long moment. Then he slid a form across the table. The paper was thin, almost translucent, the kind of paper that was made to be filed away and forgotten.

"This acknowledges your temporary presence in the UK. It is not a visa. It does not make you legal. It simply states that you have presented yourself and that we are aware of your situation. It allows you to remain without immediate arrest, provided you do not take employment or claim public funds. Valid for thirty days."

Ed read the first line: This document acknowledges the presence of the above-named individual within the United Kingdom and makes no representation as to the legality of his entry or continued residence.

Thirty days. Thirty days to find a hundred and twenty pounds, to find a way to prove who he was, to find a way back to a life that no longer existed. Thirty days was not enough. Thirty days was a cruel joke, a door opened two inches and then held there, a promise that was also a sentence.

"And after thirty days?"

"Then you either have documentation, or you do not. If you do not, you will be subject to removal proceedings."

"You want me to live for thirty days with three pounds in a city where I know no one and cannot work, and then come back and admit I still have nothing."

"I want you to do what you can, Mr. Morgan. I cannot invent solutions that do not exist."

He stood. He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the frame. He was not a cruel man, Ed could see that. He was a man who had learned to deliver bad news so often that the delivery had become automatic, a routine as meaningless as the words themselves.

"The desk officer will give you three pounds. Sign a promissory note. It is not charity. After that—" He shrugged. The shrug contained multitudes: frustration, sympathy, resignation. "After that, you are on your own. That is the best I can do."

He left. The door closed behind him with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence. Ed sat at the table for a long time. The form lay in front of him, signed and witnessed, a small blue carbon copy that the Consulate would keep in a file somewhere—a record of his existence that existed only because he had made it exist. It changed nothing. But it was something.

He signed the promissory note—a promise to repay money he had no way of repaying, a debt that assumed a future he could not see. He took the three pounds—three worn notes, green and soft with handling, smelling of other hands and other pockets, other men who had needed money badly enough to sign pieces of paper and accept the conditions that came with it. He walked out of the Consulate onto Grosvenor Square.

The American flag hung above the entrance, limp in the windless morning, barely moving. Ed looked at it. He thought about what the flag was supposed to mean: a country, a citizenship, a belonging that meant something in any city in the world. He thought about how that meaning dissolved when you had no papers, no record, no way to prove that the country was yours. The flag was red and white and blue, faded slightly by the weather, and it hung there like a question he couldn't answer.

You are the only country I have, he thought, and it has abandoned me.

He walked north.

The streets were already moving with the morning crowd—women with shopping bags, men with briefcases, children in uniforms walking to school in clusters, their voices high and sharp in the cool air. Everyone had somewhere to go and a reason to be there. Ed moved among them like a ghost, invisible in plain sight. He passed a shop window with a display of hats—fedoras, bowlers, the kind of hats that men wore when they knew who they were—and he caught his reflection again and looked away.

He needed an address. He needed food. He needed to understand where he was and how to survive here, in this city that did not know him, that had no reason to care whether he lived or died.

He needed to think, but thinking was a luxury he couldn't afford. He needed to act.

He walked north, toward what he hoped was the center of the city. The streets changed as he walked—the buildings getting older, the shopfronts getting shabbier, the crowds thinning and then thickening again as he moved through neighborhoods that had their own rhythms, their own sounds, their own particular quality of light and shadow. He smelled bread from a bakery, and coal smoke, and something sweet he couldn't identify, and the ever-present damp that seemed to be the baseline atmosphere of this city, the medium through which all other sensations traveled.

He found a pub—the Durham, with a painted sign of a lion and a unicorn, the paint cracked and peeling, the animals frozen in a moment of heraldic conflict—and went in and ordered a pint of dark bitter. The beer was warm and flat. It was exactly what he needed. He drank it in silence, standing at the bar with his back to the room, watching his own face in the mirror behind the bottles. He looked older than he had six months ago. He looked like a man who had been worn smooth by something he couldn't name.

He tried two more pubs. In the third, a man with a Cockney accent and a face like crumpled paper told him: "Bloomsbury. Try Bloomsbury. There's always rooms there for people who don't ask too many questions."

Bloomsbury. Ed didn't know what that meant, but it was a direction, and direction was all he had.

He walked. He walked through streets that grew quieter, leafier, more residential—past mews houses with paint-flecked doors, past garden walls covered in ivy, past a church with a square tower and a notice board with announcements written in careful copperplate. He walked until he found a street that looked like it might have rooms to let—a row of terraced houses, some with cards in the windows, some with the particular vacancy of a house that was waiting for someone to move in.

He stopped at the first house with a card in the window. A woman answered the door—middle-aged, sturdy, with sleeves rolled up and flour on her apron. She looked at him without suspicion and without particular interest, the way a person looks at someone who might be a customer or might be wasting her time.

"Do you have a room?"

"I have a room," she said. "Three shillings a week. Shared water in the hall. No cooking."

"I don't have much money."

She looked at him—really looked this time, taking in the sport coat and the American shoes and the expression of a man who had lost more than he was willing to say.

"How little?"

Ed reached into his pocket and showed her the three pounds. It was everything he had. It would last him three weeks if he was careful, and then he would have nothing.

"Five weeks," she said. "If you pay on Monday. I'm Mrs. Porter. I don't ask questions and I don't want trouble. You seem like a quiet sort."

"I am."

"Good. Second floor. There's a key under the mat."

She closed the door. Ed stood on the step for a moment, holding three pounds and a future he couldn't predict, and he understood that this was the beginning of something—maybe not the beginning he had wanted, but the beginning he had, the one that was real and available and his to take or leave.

He picked up the key from under the mat. He opened the door. He went inside.

He walked.