It's dark. Coupled with the damp of the last rain, that's enough to keep people off the roofs – they'll all be down the crowded tunnels, and one of them likes it down there, with the constant distant rumbling of machinery and trains, but the other one wants to feel the wind ruffle his hair in spiralling eddies through the night. It's impossible to shine in the tunnels, pressed up against a million people who don't care what you could become until you've shown them, and even then ...
But when he's up here on the rooftops, he feels like all the world is his to see, and with the lights of the towerblocks glimmering up through the floodwater, he feels like all the world is looking back – like he's something amazing and everyone else must know it.
There's no-one there to know it; no-one to see him shine, however much he might wish it. But even with Number Nine clicking away in his spine and his skull and his stomach, here he feels alive.