Dedicated to those who burned away to ash and were never remembered
Prologue
Many years later, when I tried to recall it all, I realized that memory was not a river, as people liked to say. It was more like ash: fine, dry, and impossible to keep out. Things you thought you had long forgotten could seep through the cracks in a single moment, staining every memory the same color.
The color of ash.
London's ash was no ordinary ash. Ordinary ash was dead matter: burnt-out charcoal, crushed earth, disintegrating fibers. But London's ash was different. It was too light to have fallen from the sky, yet too heavy to ever be exhaled once inhaled. The old people said it welled up from the heart of the earth, because humanity had sinned too much and even hell could no longer contain it, so it spilled through the cracks in the ground. The younger ones said it was poison left over from the war, the drifting embers of weapons whose names were forbidden, detonated somewhere out of sight.
No one knew the truth. It didn't matter anymore.
Only one thing mattered: the ash never stopped falling.
In the morning, a thick layer covered the windowsills. Take a nap at noon, and you would wake with fine powder on your lips. At night, lying in bed, you could hear the ash settling on the rooftops. It wasn't like rain. It was lighter, denser, as though countless invisible fingers were slowly kneading the world into powder, bit by bit.
In a world like this, living was simply a matter of delaying the moment you turned to ash.
But I was still alive.
