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below. “Bugger. Come on, let’s be somewhere else. I’ll head over there first, I can’t do us both at once. Wait for my signal, shut eyes, run. No hesitating. If you stop, you fall. Let’s go.”
    He pulled his hand away, turned, ran. A few lithe steps over nothing and he was on the roof opposite. He held out a hand, grin devilish.
    Ben shut his eyes and pushed himself forward, and this time he didn’t stop. There was a slight give to whatever was under his feet, a sense of something that would not hold him for long, but the consuming terror that it wouldn’t hold him at all was a great deal stronger than any urge to investigate. He crashed onto the roof opposite, and Jonah’s arms closed round him, falling backwards against the pitched roofline and onto dry-slimy tiles.
    He was over Jonah, with those strong arms around him, and his face buried in Jonah’s chest. He smelled of himself, of sweat and spunk, of something Ben thought might be sandalwood, an unfamiliar scent. He was gripping Ben’s shoulders, thighs moving apart as if to accommodate the man on top of him, and Ben gasped and opened his eyes.
    Jonah was looking up at him, bruised face unreadable in the moon shadows. Ben stared down. There was a long, impossible moment, when neither of them knew what to do, and then Jonah gave Ben a gentle push.
    “Up you get. Come on, up. I won’t let you fall.” Ben made it to his feet, and Jonah gripped his hand once more. He didn’t resist. “This row meets another, so it’s just a stroll now. On we go.”
    Ben would not have called it a stroll, slipping and sliding over the roofs of house after house, not looking down, feet cramping with the awkward angle, clambering over attic windows and around chimneys, but at last Jonah stopped. “Up here.” He tugged at Ben’s hand, and something shoved under his feet. They clambered up, and Ben found himself sitting on a rounded roof ridge, back to a chimneystack, as firmly lodged as it was possible to be on a roof three stories up.
    “There.” Jonah crouched to sit on the ridge tiles a little further along, and winced as he lowered himself. “Ow.”
    Shame, staining pitch-dark shame, washed over Ben in waves of heat. “Are you—are you hurt?”
    “Well, I’m going to know about it tomorrow,” Jonah said. “It’s fine.”
    “I…” Was he sorry? No, he couldn’t be. Jonah had deserved it, and worse. He’d betrayed him.
    Betrayed him, and saved him.
    “I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it. How did you—why—”
    “Ssh.” Jonah shifted closer, tapped Ben on the arm, pointed. “Look.”
    Ben looked, not sure what he was indicating, and saw London.
    The roofscape stretched out in front of him for a mile at least, swards and hills of brick and tile and slate, jaggedly topped by slanting rooflines, pierced by spires and chimneys. The dome of St. Paul’s rose molehill-like in the distance. A dark city, huge beyond imagination, made stark and silver by the moon.
    “Just look at it a moment,” Jonah said softly. “Not many people see this.”
    They sat, looking out over London in silence. Ben knew he should be shouting, accusing, pushing the bastard off the roof, but that earlier burst of violence had left him feeling hollow and limp, and he was trapped in this suspended moment above the city, not yet ready to break the quiet and the spell.
    Nothing had changed, nothing to remedy his pain and anger and hate. Jonah was a thief, a liar, an accessory to murder. But he had said “Score me a try”, and the words had stabbed Ben’s heart with sweetness.

Chapter Three
    Last April
    “Oh God, I have to get up,” Ben muttered, looking blearily at the daylight through the heavy brown curtains. “It’s past nine already.”
    “Why…oh, rugby.” Jonah rolled onto his side, running a hand over the sparse hairs of Ben’s chest. He was much hairier, surprisingly so, with a thick wiry tangle of black over his pectoral muscles, his forearms and