Katerina sat on the bench and pondered. She felt safe in this busy street but it was still barely afternoon and the daylight was strong. She needed somewhere safe for the night. She could break into her 'safety net', a small amount of cash she had brought with her to London, and get a night at a hostel as she had done the first few nights after she had arrived. But hostels used the money up fast and she still had no idea how to get a job. She'd gone to agencies but the questions they asked were too hard: what's your name? where do you live? give two references? what work experience have you had? She was a person that didn't exist. Not really. She had a passport but as far as a past went, that was pretty much it. She had dropped out of college to look after her foster mother and then come to London after her foster mother had died without ever having had a job and with no qualifications. She'd hoped that she would be able to get by in the beginning by reading the cards. She had hoped to rent cheaply until she had built up a clientele but rents had turned out to be astronomical, way beyond the limited means she had bought with her, and reading cards wasn't the self-contained employment she had supposed. It turned out that you needed a license to sit somewhere in public and charge people for something.
     Katerina considered her plight miserably. Petar and Jelka had been right, she was a goblin. Only a goblin would end up on the streets with no friends and nowhere to go. But she couldn't have stayed at home. There was altogether too much pain there; she'd had to leave. Now she had to find work. The back streets were full of small hotels; perhaps she could just go in and ask. And she had to find somewhere safe to sleep.
     The first hotel told her that they only got people through an agency and they gave her the name of the agency. The second hotel said that they were fully staffed at the moment. The third hotel said that the person dealing with hiring staff wasn't in today but she could try tomorrow. Katerina made a note. The guy in the fourth hotel conducted Katerina into a private office and made a pass at her. At the fifth hotel a well dressed young woman looked at her disdainfully and gave her an application pack for a reception job which they were currently advertising and which, Katerina later discovered, had fourteen pages and a job description which expressly required two years previous experience. And so it went on as the sun dropped slowly into the afternoon of a bright, slightly misted sky.
     "How are you doing, pretty?" said a voice just beside her as hyena-man appeared from nowhere. "Got a job yet? I've got a job for you."
     "Get away from me!" Katerina ran.