Mirren was too drunk to pilot his flier; it would have detected the alcohol in his system and shut itself down. Otherwise, buoyed up as he was, he might have taken the risk. He considered the irony of dying in a flier accident mere days before he was due to flux again. They passed through the arched exit and walked into the heat of unprotected Paris. It was four o'clock in the morning and the temperature was still in the eighties. The Church was two kilometres away, in the run-down Montparnasse district, but for once Mirren didn't mind the walk. They passed through the respectable, well-kept streets bordering the centre, but the farther they progressed towards the outskirts, the more neglected and disreputable the streets became. They passed shop-fronts at first barred, then boarded up - though the premises were still in use - then derelict and vandalised, and finally given over to the alien creepers which marked a district as beyond redemption. In one area, as they progressed down an avenue whose buildings on either side were solid banks of vegetation, he and Dan were the only things visibly of Earth in the landscape.
