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dystopias because the social order was unraveling so fast as to render their creation nugatory – it was a miracle that a book filled with visions of these positive imaginary worlds was permitted to exist at all.
    He had given her a sideways look and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. Saying, “Read it and weep,” before adding, “It’s from my own collection.”
    She shivered from the cold breeze that came off the river and turned away from the red-rimmed horizon before going back into the apartment to switch off the television; not wanting to hear about the reports of violence and looting for a moment longer. Once inside she slid the glass doors shut, drew the curtains and settled down on the sofa to read her book.
    After twenty minutes she put it aside and slipped into a light sleep. Lorna was an adept at the technique of lucid dreaming and this time, as many times before, she allowed her dream-self to explore the unfolding narrative of JoKanu. A prescient and synchronistic element of the self, retrieved from the lost highway connecting trans-dimensional worlds, and able travel between multiple dimensions in his craft. An all-seeing eye painted on the prow and his hawk circling high above, picking out the ebb and flow of good and evil and guiding Lorna safely between the parallel worlds that quantum physics now argues are the prima material of the universe. Of course JoKanu had always known this, as had Lorna. They did not seek or require any validation from guys in white coats.
    Operating through the senses of her dream avatar she found herself out in mid-stream, on a rising tide. The Thames was far beneath the windows of the Ice Tower but it also flowed in her meta-memory: from source to ocean and from ocean to source, a ceaseless turning of tide and time. And on the absolute margins of her consciousness she felt the synchronistic snapping of synapses and the balancing of trans-hemispheric neuron pathways, as JoKanu and his hologram familiars harvested golden data and channeled it to Lorna Z.
    The Lorna Z: a sleeper in the realm of the Brotherhood of the Serpent , late of the Parish of Mortlake. Lorna Z: fervid opponent of the shadow parasites who were spawned from the Cult, bleeding the life force from the good and the true, replacing those civilizing aspirations with a dark meanness, a cruel intervention that split the one world into alpha and beta, and now ruled the beta world with a deranged psychopathy. Now known simply as the Blake Oranisation and with their own army of sentinels and Stasi – creeping around the corner, stealing in the night through the neighborhood, searching for Lorna Z and her kind; holding Lorna a captive in their inverted world – and slowly circling her hiding place, implacably hunting her down, a process which, for all her alliances and powers, she was unable to circumvent.
    Lorna awoke with a start , on a low table at her side was the book she had been reading prior to falling asleep. It had a plain parchment-colored binding and as she opened it on the title page she saw a scrawled signature, the book had been signed by its editor. As she flicked through the pages she caught a glimpse of underlined text and backtracked to find the location. The highlighted section was a song lyric that had somehow been included in the collection – the song detailed a meeting between two lovers at sunset by Waterloo Bridge. Just the one line was underlined. In that moment Lorna had strong feeling of epiphany and leapt to her feet in order to act upon it.

Chapter 5
THE VIOLET HOUR
     
    Detective Z was late. He had become tied-up in his role of organizing the investigation; real police work as he had called it. But his meeting with Darren Sprawl had played on his mind. Firstly because of his own hunch that the victim was of Russian origin and secondly because he had scanned the police’s own intra net to discover that another young woman had shown up dead and unclothed in Stratford, East