The Surrogate

Chapter Three: Hello, London

The night was still young, though I felt anything but — as busy and overstimulated as the airport itself had been. We were parked outside arrivals when a tall, handsome man walked up to the cab, smiling like he already knew everyone inside it.

"Hey — Marcus, right?" the driver called out, checking a name off some list on his phone.

"That's me," the man said, folding himself into the seat beside me with an ease that suggested he did this kind of thing often. He glanced over and smiled — the easy, practiced kind that comes standard with certain faces — and I smiled back, a little, careful not to give away more warmth than I actually had left after the day I'd had.

"Sorry, immigration queue was so long," he said, mostly to the driver, though I nodded anyway, as if the apology had been mine to accept.

He didn't say much after that. His phone lit up almost the whole ride, one call bleeding into the next, texts thumbed out at red lights. I watched London slide by the window instead — wet streets, red buses ghosting past in the dark, streetlights catching the drizzle at an angle that made the whole city look lit from underneath, like it was glowing from something buried beneath the pavement rather than the sky above it.

It was 10:40 p.m. by the time we pulled up outside the hotel, a narrow building with a revolving door and a lobby too small for the pile of suitcases already crowding it.

Check-in was mechanical, the kind of thing you do on autopilot when your body has stopped keeping accurate time. I got the twin room, sharing with a girl named Priya — I recognized her instantly from the group chat, the yellow-backpack profile picture finally attached to an actual person. She was by the window, deep in conversation with a guy who'd apparently wandered into our room like it was already common property.

"Hi — so you're my roommate," I said, dropping my bag by the free bed.

"No, we are," Priya said, and for one disoriented second I actually believed her — my stomach dropping at the thought that whatever female-roommate request Ravi had filed had simply gone unheeded.

The guy laughed and shoved her shoulder. "She's kidding. I'm leaving, don't worry." He grabbed his jacket off the end of the bed, grinning at me on his way out. "Good night. Fifteen days, starting tomorrow — try to survive us."

Then he was gone, and it was just Priya and me and two narrow beds and a heater that clearly hadn't been serviced this decade.

I didn't have the energy to ask who he was. I brushed my teeth and fell into a sleep so complete I didn't dream, or if I did, I didn't remember it.

Morning came, but not the sun. The last week of October apparently didn't believe in mornings the way I understood them — the sky outside the curtains was a flat, uniform grey, no clouds distinct enough to name, just a ceiling of light with no visible source. I stood at the window a second, coffee-less and unreasonably disappointed, before Priya knocked something off the nightstand and the day officially began.

We met the group in the lobby at nine — thirteen names becoming thirteen faces all at once, too many introductions to hold onto properly. The guide, a wiry man in a green rain jacket who introduced himself as Govind, spoke with the rehearsed cheer of someone who'd said the same jokes to a hundred different groups. He herded us onto the pavement and toward the Tube like a man for whom this had long since stopped being a job and started being a personality trait.

Our first stop was the London Eye, and I hadn't expected it to hit me the way it did. From a distance it looked almost delicate — a thin, pale ring balanced against the grey — but standing beneath it, craning up at the capsules creeping along its rim, it was enormous in a way photographs never manage to convey. We queued for what felt like an hour, breath fogging in the cold, and when our capsule finally lifted off the ground the whole city seemed to unfold itself in slow motion beneath us. The Thames cut through everything like a grey ribbon, boats crawling along it the size of toys. Rooftops in every direction, church spires poking up between them, the whole skyline hazy at the edges where the fog hadn't quite decided to lift. I pressed my palm against the glass without meaning to, the way you do when you want proof, later, that you were actually there and not just imagining it.

Marcus stood near the opposite side of the capsule, phone out, filming a slow pan of the skyline. He caught me watching the city instead of the view he was filming and gave a small, knowing nod, like he understood exactly what I was doing — memorizing it instead of capturing it.

From there we walked toward Westminster, and it rose up out of the grey like something that had been waiting for us specifically.

I'd seen it in a hundred photographs, the way everyone has, but nothing about a photograph prepares you for the sheer density of it in person. Every inch of the facade carved, gothic spires clawing upward into a sky that couldn't decide whether it wanted to rain, the stonework so intricate up close it stopped looking like architecture and started looking like lace — if lace could weigh a thousand tons. I craned my neck back so far I nearly lost my footing on the wet pavement, and I didn't care. There was something almost absurd about how much effort had gone into it — every gargoyle, every ribbed arch, every tiny decorative flourish thirty feet above ground level where almost no one would ever look closely enough to notice. Someone, centuries ago, had cared that much about a detail nobody would see. I found that unbearably moving, standing there in the cold with my hood slipping off my head.

Big Ben rose beside it, mid-restoration, scaffolding wrapped partway up the tower like a cast on a broken bone. Even half-obscured, it anchored the whole skyline, gave the eye somewhere to land. The clock face, what I could see of it, was gold and black and improbably delicate for something so enormous, its hands moving with a patient, unhurried certainty that felt almost rebuking, given how frantic the last twenty-four hours of my life had been.

Govind recited dates and facts — the fire of 1834, the rebuilding, the number of steps to the top that none of us were allowed to climb — and I only half listened, more interested in the way the wet stone seemed to shift color depending on where you stood, pale grey sliding into something almost gold when the weak sun tried and failed to break through.

It was somewhere in the middle of all that — neck craned back, mouth probably a little open in the unglamorous way people look when they're genuinely awestruck — that I felt someone looking at me.

I turned, and it was him. The guy from the room. He wasn't looking at Westminster at all. He was looking at me looking at Westminster, and when our eyes met he didn't glance away fast the way strangers usually do when they're caught — he just held it a second longer than was strictly necessary, something amused and a little curious in his expression, before Govind said something that made the group laugh and the moment dissolved back into the crowd.

I turned back to the building, feeling warmer than the weather had any right to make me.

From Westminster we walked along the edge of the park toward Buckingham Palace, the crowd thickening the closer we got, tourists five and six deep along the railings, all of us waiting for nothing in particular except the chance to say we'd stood there. The palace itself surprised me with how flat it felt in person compared to how grand it looked in photographs — long, symmetrical, almost restrained, gold detailing catching what little light there was along the balustrade. The guards stood motionless in their tall black hats, and half the group spent ten minutes trying to get one of them to blink, which felt like the most tourist thing any of us had done yet, myself included.

"It's smaller than I imagined," Priya said beside me, sounding almost personally offended.

"Everything's smaller than you imagine until you're the one who has to walk past it," I said, and she laughed, and somewhere behind us I heard Marcus laugh too, at something someone else had said, and I found myself glancing back before I'd decided to.

We regrouped near a coffee cart afterward, huddled against the wind, and Govind pulled out a printed sheet to confirm everyone had made it through customs, through cancelled flights, through whatever version of last night each of us had survived.

"Sirisha?" he called, scanning the group.

I'd been distracted, watching a pigeon attempt something structurally unwise on a statue's head, and it took Priya elbowing me to realize he meant me.

"That's me — sorry, yes, here," I said, raising a hand.

"Sirisha," he repeated, marking his sheet, already moving to the next name.

Across the huddle, I caught the guy from the room mouthing it once to himself, like he was making sure he'd have it ready the next time he needed it.