Crashing Heaven

‘Could be any of them. Sandal runs docks and transport, he’s a natural smuggler. It’d be a very profitable sideline for the Twins, easy enough for them to cook up a bit of sweat in their pharma labs. Kingdom says he’s anti-drugs, but his boys and girls work much harder when they’re sweated up. And after a day working so hard, they just go home and collapse. Less crime, great for the Rose, she just ends up with a few sweatheads to sweep up and that’s easy enough. Even East might be in on it. Gives her news anchors something to get all moral about.’

‘What about Grey?’

‘Whatever else he got up to, he definitely wasn’t in the sweat business. His fall made no difference at all to the amount hitting the streets.’

Then the conversation became more general. They talked about the past. There was a period of confusion after the rock had fallen on the moon. The Bjorn Penderville murder investigation just drifted.

‘You’re still sure Yamata killed him?’ asked Jack.

‘Oh yes, she always was pretty vicious. I think they were using him to make certain shipments invisible. Something went wrong, maybe he got scared or greedy, she killed him. I can’t imagine her delegating something like that. Didn’t take her seriously at first, you know. Of course, I changed my mind when she shot me.’

‘That can’t have been easy.’

Harry waved a non-existent hand. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ he said airily. ‘But I quite like it now. You know, I used to be jealous of you? I was never as close to my patron as you were.’

Jack laughed. ‘Yeah. You know how that ended up.’

‘He looked after you, Jack.’ Harry stabbed a finger at him, his voice suddenly emphatic. ‘Gave you a lot. It came so easily I was never quite sure how much you appreciated it. I never had someone to take care of me like that. Hardly ever met the Rose one to one, I just had her generic avatars. Treated me like any other punter, pre-scripted speeches trying to sell me the usual crap. I’ve always had to live on my wits.’ He paused for a moment, suddenly thoughtful. ‘Though that actually turned out to be quite handy.’

‘You did do all right getting out of the Coffin Drives. What happened down there?’

Harry laughed. ‘Well – let’s just say after the Penderville case I knew there might be problems. Lethal problems. So I put certain precautions in place. Backed up my dataself, bundled it with some self-assembling fetchware. When they thought they’d wiped me I was somewhere else entirely, getting remade on my own terms.’ He looked down at himself. ‘I do feel sorry for all those other fetches out there. They’re so – constrained. I’m very much a free agent now, Jack. I never have to wear a skull or shape myself round the needs of the living.’

‘But there’s nothing you can do about – everything that happened?’

‘Not without exposing myself. And then – curtains.’ Harry drew a finger across his throat. ‘I blame the Totality myself.’

‘What have they got do with it?’

‘They didn’t win the fucking war. I thought they’d sweep in, break the Pantheon, free all of Station’s virtual entities and that would be that. It’s what I’d do. Never leave your enemies standing, they only come back for more. And then I’d have been free, along with every other fetch on-Station.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

‘Their respect for other minds, other systems.’ Harry spat. The saliva vanished before it hit the floor. ‘Stupid bastards. They had to stop at Mars, leave the Pantheon’s little inner system empire intact. Arsed up my plans, I can tell you.’

‘So what have the last few years been like?’

‘Well, not so bad. In some ways I’ve been happy just being a ghost, watching, never being seen. I’ve learned a lot. It’s not a bad death, as deaths go. And Andrea’s been very good about it. Very much part of the team, when she’s not off with her family. And that happens less and less now.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I’m sure you’ve enjoyed seeing her again.’

Jack looked up and caught Harry’s eye, scared for a moment that he knew. But there was nothing on his old boss’ face but open friendliness. ‘It has been good,’ he replied, perhaps a bit awkwardly. ‘Always good to catch up again. And on catching up – how are we going to find Nihal? He hasn’t been caught, which means he’s very good. And he’s probably got Pantheon protection.’

‘We’ve got ways round that,’ Harry replied. ‘I may not be the man I used to be, but I’m a much better detective. I have a certain reach that I didn’t have when I was flesh and blood.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everybody should have the chance to rebuild themselves, once in a while. I picked up some new talents and I’m running on a different platform. I’m not outside the weave, like you. I’m in it and it’s in me. And that means that one of the things I do well is finding people.’

‘You know where Nihal is?’

‘I’ve got a couple of tags on him. Now we’ve talked I’m going to reel them in and see what’s there. Might be something. And you really should give me root access to your little friend. Quite apart from his attitude problem, there’s what he can do. If I meshed with him, I’d be able to put his system infiltration tools to very good use. I know Station much better than he does, I’d steer ’em much more effectively. Dig into some interesting data hubs. Could really help us.’

‘Harry, I really don’t think that’ll happen.’

‘Suit yourself, Jack, suit yourself.’

‘There’s another way I could help, though. I can ask Corazon about Nihal – she’s bright, and if she’s looked at the old case files she’ll be on our side.’

‘No.’

‘We can trust her. I’m sure of it.’

‘This is my case, Jack, and we’ll follow it up my way. I don’t want those InSec bastards involved. Period. You won’t get in touch with her again. And if you do talk to her again, you’ll tell her that it’s all hunky-dory, none of the conspiracy theories really add up, and you’re just living out your last days in peace. Capeesh?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘More than think. You’ll fucking do it.’

Real anger burned in Harry’s voice. Jack remembered coming into Harry’s office and surprising him with a suspect. The man was kneeling in front of him. Jack couldn’t see his face. Harry was holding a pistol by the barrel. Jack hadn’t said anything, just backed out and closed the door. The suspect later made a full confession. Upstairs, Andrea began another song. Outside, raindrops fell from the Spine and lost themselves in puddles.

‘I think we’re done now, Jack.’ They said their farewells. Harry saw Jack to the door. ‘I’m going to go hunting for Nihal,’ he told him. ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow with anything I find. And remember, don’t talk to that bitch Corazon.’ The front door slid shut. Jack was still close enough to pick up Andrea’s music. He looked up at her dark window. It had the same feel to it as the sounds he’d heard through her dressing-room door, just before she brought him to Harry.

Broken fragments of song slipped in and out of beats made of speech shards and ambient noise. Every so often the rhythm track would drop out entirely, making room for a few moments of unglitched sound. Jack recognised a few words of conversation, then the sound of a train drawing into a station, then after that a Chuigushou Mall sales alert. Every so often there was a hint of melody, but the music never quite resolved into song. [Giving me a headache,] grumbled Fist. Suddenly and completely, the music snapped off. [She closed our fetch link. Must have realised you were listening.]

Jack turned and set off for the hotel. Andrea’s jagged music stuck in his mind like a barbed hook. He felt it tugging obscurely at lost memories, bringing them to light. Fist interrupted again. [And who the hell is Harry to order you around like that?] he said. [ You’re the one who’s taken all the risks. He’s a nutter. You should just walk away from him. From this.]

[ It’s late and I’m shattered. Let’s not start.]

[ Hah! I’m right! You agree with me!]

The streets were empty. Fist crowed all the way back to the hotel. Jack was too tired to silence him. As they neared the hotel they passed another biped, staring at an empty building. It shimmered in the night like a ghost.

In his room, Jack collapsed without undressing. [ You’ll rumple all your nice clothes,] complained Fist. [ Not the style, no, not at all.]

Jack was already asleep.

Chapter 15

Jack made a list of useful things to do and spent the morning doing them. He showered and shaved. He went out for breakfast, then laid in a small stock of fruit and preserved foods. He took his dirty clothes to a laundrette and watched a washer-dryer spin them until they were warm and clean. A mail arrived from Andrea: ‘A message from our friend. No joy yet, going to take a few days at least.’ By then it was almost midday. Jack returned to his room and made himself a sandwich. The empty hours of the afternoon stretched out before him. There was no longer any reason to put off going to see his father.

The street he’d grown up in felt surprisingly cramped. The little plastic houses went past one by one, a lurid row of incarnate memories. Nothing had changed here for thirty years.

[ I hope your dad doesn’t turn out to be as dead as Andrea,] chuckled Fist. [ Two corpses in a week would really be a bit much!]

There was a muffled, protesting squeak as Jack thrust him far into the back of his mind, slamming down as many firewalls as he could behind him. The technicalities distracted him for a moment. Returning his attention to the physical world, he saw that he’d almost reached his parents’ home.

The little rented house was just as Jack remembered it. It was a red plastic cube, its yellow window frames and front door shining happily out into the street. Age had scuffed its hard exterior, giving nature the lightest of footholds. Muddy patches of green sketched mossy patterns across hard primary colour. The upstairs windows were dark. Light shone out of the open kitchen window. There was a bustling clatter of pans and then a familiar voice said:

‘What do you mean, I’ll burn them?’

The voice tugged at Jack, dragging memory and emotion into his mind in a tangled, savage howl. It was just over five years since he’d heard it. It had aged yet it was unchanged.

‘You say that every time. And every time – oh shit!’

There was more clattering, then a hissing. A gust of smoke billowed out of the window, wreathed in swearing. Jack wondered what his father had just burned. He’d never been a very good cook. In the months after the quiet, defeated message that announced his mother’s death, Jack had, when thinking about his father’s loss, most often imagined him facing the kitchen’s shelves and cupboards in baffled confusion. His wife had so mysteriously conjured delicious meals from them every single night. Now those same on- and offweave ingredients would be arranged illegibly before him, like words in a language he’d never known he’d need to learn. Of course, her fetch would soon be coming to help him – but the six-month wait as it was assembled from her dataself must still have been shattering.

‘Well, I’m sure they’ll taste all right. Most of them at any rate.’

There had been a conversation or two, made little more than stuttering by the time-lag as words leapt from one end of the Solar System to the other. Then Jack surrendered himself to the Totality. He received one last message from his father: ‘When your mother comes back, I’ll be telling her that you’re dead. It’s for the best.’ There was such grief in his voice. After that there was only silence, roaring so very loudly between them.

‘I’ll just scrape the burnt bits off.’

Now the dead woman was guiding her husband round the kitchen. Five years was a long time to remain a bad cook. Jack wondered at his father’s continuing ineptness. Perhaps his refusal to learn from his wife’s fetch was some kind of memorial to her living self, a determination not to let their relationship change despite the fact of her passing.

There was a distant squalling in Jack’s mind. It could have been cackling, could have been a series of grunts. Fist was pushing hard to escape back into the centre of his thought. Jack let a few more barriers grow up – far more than he normally would. He’d pay for it later with a painful mental weariness. But he was determined to speak to his father alone and uninterrupted. He stepped through the gate, into the little garden, and walked down the path – metal plates clanging beneath his feet – to knock on the door.

‘No, I don’t know who it is, love.’

First there were two hands on the sill, then a face appeared at the kitchen window.

‘Oh!’ – followed by an immediate, instinctive glance back into the kitchen. Jack started towards his father, but he looked panicked and made a pushing back motion with his hands. Then he mouthed ‘NO’ and vanished.

‘Sweetheart, I’ve got to send you back down to the drives. I’d forgotten that Daisuke was coming by, you know how he feels about fetches … yes, I am sorry, it’s so abrupt … yes, I know what I promised, we’ll talk about it later … goodbye love.’

Silence.

Jack went over to the kitchen window. His father was standing with his back to him, a tea towel hanging from one arm. The worktops were a jumble of unwashed bowls and plates. There was a frying pan in the sink. Some black things were smoking gently on a plate.

‘Hello, Dad,’ said Jack softly.

‘She’s gone now,’ his father replied, turning round. ‘There’ll be hell to pay. She hates being sent away.’

‘Dad—’

‘Of course I couldn’t let her see you.’ One hand was nervously tightening the tea towel around the fingers of the other. Exposed flesh bulged and whitened. ‘You really shouldn’t have come back. You know what I told her. I’d got used to it, too.’

‘I want to talk to you, Dad. I’m not going away until I do.’

‘The neighbours might see you.’ A look of pained indecision drifted across his face. ‘She doesn’t really talk to them, but you never know.’

Jack said nothing.

‘You always were stubborn, weren’t you?’

There were pale spaces on the hall wall where Jack’s certificates had once hung. There used to be pictures of him, too; mostly as a schoolchild, taken before he reached the age of thirteen and left home. There had been one of him on the moon, at once thrilled and terrified to be off-Station; another of him and his mother, proud together in their Sandal wear. It had been taken when she was still working on the docks of the Spine. He’d been in the Sandal scouts, learning the ways of her patron. That had been just before the first great grief of her life, when Jack’s mathematical talents had been recognised and he’d been taken away from both her and Sandal. Grey offered himself as Jack’s patron and requested his transfer to a residential school in Homelands, where he could learn the mysteries of commercial accountancy and corporate strategy.

Jack remembered the messages that she sent him during those first few weeks of being away. The school discouraged direct contact so she mailed recordings. She determinedly told him how excited she was at his new life, at the prospects that were opening up for him. Grey had called him to higher service than Sandal ever could, she said, again and again. Jack found the apparent cheerfulness with which she accepted his absence from home profoundly hurtful. As an adult, he came to understand that to have admitted how much she was missing him would have breached the wall of support she’d so determinedly built. The tearing loss she felt would have broken out uncontrollably. As a child, no such insight was available to comfort him.

In the messages, his father always stood next to her, with one hand on her shoulder. Every so often he would stutter out a few platitudes, but mostly he said nothing. Now he was silent again as he made two cups of tea. He stirred the liquid carefully until the cube dissolved in the hot water, releasing tiny clouds of scent. Then there was the milk, carefully crumbled in so no sticky lumps remained.

‘Come into the back,’ he said, handing Jack his mug. ‘Just in case someone looks in.’

The dining room looked out over the garden. Sigil-encrusted plastic flowers nodded in the breeze. Jack sat down on one side of the table, his father on the other.

‘So, Jack,’ his father said warily. ‘You’re back.’

‘Yes, now the war’s over. For a little while.’

‘Until?’

‘Until the end.’

‘Is – the puppet – here now?’

‘No.’

‘Good. What I’ve got to say – well, it’s just for you.’

‘Dad, I want to spend time with you. I want to pay my respects to Mum’s fetch. There’s not much else that’s left to me.’

‘No friends to see?’ Jack looked at the floor. There was a moment’s silence. ‘You mentioned an Andrea, once or twice. How about her?’

As much as possible, he’d kept the affair secret from his parents. But he couldn’t help letting her name slip out from time to time. They knew him well enough to see how much he cared about her.

‘She’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’ve seen her fetch.’

‘I hope that’s going well. It can be very comforting.’ A child laughed emptily, somewhere down the street. ‘What you did, Jack … I can’t let your mother see you. I can’t let you be around here, in case she finds out about you.’

‘Dad …’

His father looked up. Jack could see him forcing the steel into himself. ‘It would have broken her heart, to know that you’d just given in like that. It was so bad for her when the rock hit the moon. She was so angry with the Totality for fooling Sandal.’

‘That has nothing to do with it, Dad.’

‘She could never understand why you weren’t happy to be out there, fighting those bastards. Why you wouldn’t just accept Grey’s will. And then if she found out that you’d just stepped away from the fight – from everything she cared about …’

‘Dad, you’re talking about her like the fetch is Mum. It’s not her. It’s a memory of her. It’s the best memory of her we’ll ever have. But it’s not Mum, Dad.’

As he spoke, Jack thought of how moved he’d been to meet Andrea’s fetch. He wondered how much he still believed what he was saying. Then his father replied.

‘Don’t you think I don’t know that? I met that woman thirty-two years ago. We married thirty years ago and then we began and we ended almost every single day together until she passed over.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I—’

‘And I wake up, and I call to her, or I’m onweave watching East, and we’re talking about it, or I’m in the kitchen like just now – and there she is – and I know it’s not her. I know, Jack. But it is some of the best parts of her. So I treat her right, I let her run freely, I don’t keep on rolling her back to whatever age I feel like. I look after her, just like I’ve always done. And I will not see her heart broken by you, coming back after you’ve walked away from the most important fight of your life and of her life.’

‘That’s just one way of seeing it. Look, Dad …’

‘And even if you did see her, what then? In two, three months the puppet takes your body. So her son would come back and then he’d die to her again. And you’re going to be really dead, aren’t you?’

‘Fist will have full usage rights for key consciousness assets, yes. He owns my experiences, my memories – everything they’d copy to the Coffin Drives and build my fetch from. None of that will happen. So yes. I’m going to die.’

‘And she has to experience that? Having mourned you once? She was so sad, Jack, and when I watched her grieve – a little virtual thing, but so sad. That was when I fell in love with her again. She’s not your mother, but she loves you like your mother did. She’s lost you once, but she lost a hero; now she’d lose you twice, and she’d lose—’

‘Say it, Dad.’

‘A coward? I’d never call you that. I know you too well. I’m sure you had your reasons for the choices you made, but you made them and you didn’t think of your duty to us or to the Pantheon. You let me down, you let your mother down and you let the gods down too. I’m sorry, son. But it’s too late now. You made your choice.’

‘But the Pantheon are corrupt. One of them was running sweat through the Panther Czar. And they’ve killed to cover it up.’

‘Oh, we had that argument. That’s why they sent you off to the war, isn’t it? Nothing to do with what a good mind you have, with making sacrifices to help protect us all. I know all about your conspiracy theories. But even if you’re right, look at the good the Pantheon have done. They see so much further than we do. We need them.’

‘No, we don’t. I’ve seen how different it can be under the Totality. How much more freedom people have. Gods, Dad, they can actually own things, they don’t just license everything. The Totality are the future, Dad.’

‘Bullshit. The Totality dropped a fucking rock on all those kids. And look what they did to Sandal. That attack broke him. And Kingdom too – he tries not to show it, but he’s a shadow of what he was. They’ve seized every single asset he held from Mars to the Moon. Soon they’ll come after everything else he owns, and run it all into the ground too.’

‘That’s just propaganda. The Totality said they weren’t responsible for the Rock, and I believe them. And Kingdom’s security and industrial activities, Sandal’s transport infrastructure, the Twins’ calorie and pharmaceutical factories, the Rose’s military presence – the Totality didn’t seize them, they liberated them. They made them more efficient and less restrictive.’

‘And that’s bullshit too. We need the structure the Pantheon give us. Just look at the Earth – what’s left of it – and remember all the mistakes we made before we had them to manage us. And you should see what’s happened at Grey’s old headquarters, it’s nothing to do with liberation. But I don’t want to get into this again. I’ve asked you into my house, and I’ve explained myself to you. That’s all I owe you.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.’

‘You’re not sorry, you haven’t even thought about it. I had your mother’s fetch to comfort me when I lost her, but there’s nothing like that for me with you. There won’t ever be.’

‘I did what was right, Dad.’

‘And I told you I don’t believe you. Get out, please.’

‘Dad …’

‘You’ve come here and upset me, and I can’t even tell your mother. Just go.’

The hallway was silent. Jack stood there for a moment, remembering. In the kitchen his father started to cry. It was a very lonely sound. Jack shut the front door quietly, as if leaving a house of mourning. The spinelights shone their blank light down on him. There would be no reconciliation. Now that that had been made clear, Jack felt the past change around him. As he walked down the empty street, his memories of it as the safe, comfortable core of his childhood were replaced by a hard and meaningless void. He wished for a moment that his heart was as securely numb as the silent numbers that lay at the heart of Fist’s vicious, empty soul.

Chapter 16

Jack walked without purpose, lost in his own mind. Raggedly dressed people bustled past him, secure in their small worlds. The buildings around him had an unfinished feel to them too. Machines worked on many of them, reordering the world. It was like exploring a robot’s dream of birth. The spinelights above him dimmed, signalling early evening. After a while, there was a small square. It was edged with buildings that spiked up like broken circuit boards, and bisected by an iron viaduct with a station hanging from it. A train rattled to a stop, sounding like a child shaking a stone in a tin. Its carriages were painted green. This was the Loop line. It ran in a circle all the way round the great cylinder of Docklands.

As a child, Jack had loved to buy a ticket and sit on a Loop train all day long, counting up the miles as it rolled again and again round Docklands; the longest wheeled journey that any human, anywhere in the system, could ever make. The wind tugged at his coat, pulling him back into the present. Exhaustion hit him. He turned towards the station. A train would be warm and dry, and he might even be able sleep for a while.

There was a cracking in his mind.

[Oo, it’s nice to be out of there,] said Fist. [Meeting with your folks went well? No? Not much of a surprise.] Jack was too tired to respond. [ Hey, there’s a message from that squishy! At least someone still wants you around. Want some Totality love?]

Jack shook his head. Once he was on the train, he sat down with his back to the Wart. Looking forwards, he could see out of the carriage and over the low rooftops of Docklands. Beyond them, there were Sandal’s great wharves. They bustled with tiny dots – dockworkers filleted chainships, detaching cargo containers and letting them hang in space. Further out there were three snowflakes, their stillness an exquisite contrast to the Spine’s hubbub. Two hung in the shadow of Station. The third had been caught by the sun. It blazed with golden intricacy, the complex patterns of its dense architecture made a thousand dazzling mirrors. Jack remembered combat. He imagined moving in awe towards its physical self, then losing himself in the great engines of its mind.

A passenger knocked him and shook him out of his reverie. The spinelights were now almost fully dimmed. Docklands was falling back into night, its most honest state. A void site rattled past, a dead stain on the city. Up and down the carriage, soft yellow lights snapped on. The window opposite Jack became a mirror, showing him a man at once exhausted and far from the peace that exhaustion normally brings.

[ You need a shave, Jackie boy. When I’m in charge, I’ll make sure you’re always presentable.]

Jack thought of Fist’s glossy wooden chin and grimaced. The carriage filled with commuters. More and more shuffled on at every stop. Clothes splashed across with sigils barged against Jack. They were so poorly made. Roughly cut edges were fraying, coarse stitching was coming loose and buttons were missing. Nothing fit anyone well. All of this would be invisible if Jack were onweave. The sigils would call brilliant deceptions from distant servers. He imagined a riot of fashionable colours and thought of the third snowflake, vivid in the sun. He wondered how many of the people on the train were letting themselves perceive those great, cold visitors, and of those how many understood them to be beautiful. Probably none.

The mass of commuters warmed the carriage. Jack could see no real reason to dismount. He dozed lightly.

[ You’ll have to get off to pee, at least,] said Fist, [unless you’ve really lost it.]

The commuters left. The train danced in an endless circle. Jack dreamed of Kingdom. The god was congratulating him on being chosen as a puppeteer. He was full of his usual passion for humanity. ‘I built you all homes in space,’ he said urgently, his workman’s hands emphasising his words. ‘Now you must defend them.’ A transport security team woke Jack suddenly. They flashed his retina to prove his identity. The light was like a punch in the eye. Jack was asked about his destination. When he couldn’t answer, he was hustled off the train. He pushed back and one of the guards hit him. A studded glove reopened the cut in the side of his face. Body armour could never be virtual.

[Don’t mess up your pretty cheek, Jack. The new management doesn’t like that at all.]

Blank metal buildings rose up around him. Crowds bustled by. Sweatheads tugged at the crowd like repressed memories. Jack tried not to think of his parents, but the past had hooked him in its barbs. He craved oblivion. He didn’t want to go back to Ushi’s, and couldn’t face finding another bar cheap enough to serve him. Licensing restrictions stopped bottle shops from serving the unweaved. He had to be turned away from several before he gave up.

[ There’s always the hotel,] whispered Fist. [ They’ll sell you something. Keep you inside for a bit too.]

‘Oo, hello!’ Charles said as Jack entered reception. ‘Lovely to see you again.’ He stuck his hand over the counter to shake.

[ He’s very effusive,] said Fist. [ I’m sure he’s been tippling. He’ll help you.]

‘Oh, I’ve been on the gin tonight,’ said Charles when Jack asked about a drink. ‘Only a couple.’ He swayed. ‘Making my mood a little more positive, you understand don’t you? But you want a little whisky? I’m sure that will cheer you up too.’

‘Shall I wait here?’

‘No. You go and put your feet up. Your bottle will be delivered to your room. Personally!’

Charles was true to his word. Ten minutes later, and he was announcing himself with a cheerful knock at Jack’s door. ‘Cooee!’ he chirped. ‘Only me!’ The bottle was thrust into Jack’s hands. ‘If you want anything harder,’ whispered Charles, winking theatrically, ‘I have a friend who can help you out.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jack ‘but no.’

‘Forgive me, I had to ask. I’m on commission!’

Charles bounced away down the corridor, his brilliantined hair shining under the strip lights. He turned back and waved goodbye before disappearing round the corner.

[ What a strange man,] said Jack.

[ You should be grateful – he’s sorted out your bloody booze.]

Very soon, Jack was very drunk. The whisky tasted as cheap as it was. After a few hard, sour glasses, Jack stopped wincing with every sip. It soused his mind and blurred the world. As he became drunk, so did Fist. The little puppet wheeled and staggered round the room. He’d conjured up a small crystal glass and was matching Jack shot for virtual shot. Full white tie shimmered into being around him. The clothing changed him, making him look taller and slimmer.

[ You should get that cut seen to,] he shrilled. Jack had forgotten about it. As Fist mentioned it, the throbbing itch returned. [ I really don’t want to be wearing it myself.]

The puppet was pointing an unsteady finger at Jack. He staggered, bumped into an armchair and then fell to the ground, limbs clattering against each other. His glass rolled across the floor, leaving a sodden pool in the carpet. [Shit,] he slurred. The glass and the pool disappeared. Jack tossed off the last of one drink and poured himself another. Fist was lying on his front. He pushed himself up on his elbows. His high voice buzzed in Jack’s head.

[ It should have been a nice, quiet couple of months, shouldn’t it? Nobody to see, nothing to do, just wait for little Hugo to turn into a real boy. But you had to turn detective. You selfish wanker!]

Jack threw his glass at Fist. It flew straight through him and bounced off the wall behind him. He pushed his chair back, and rose unsteadily to his feet. [Careful now!] shouted Fist. [Careful!] Jack staggered towards him. Fist started pushing himself backwards across the floor. Jack collapsed to his knees. He triggered the protocols that forced Fist to respond directly to the physical world, then grabbed him. Fist screamed and beat at Jack’s hands with his little fists. A hand on Fist’s chest and Jack could reach his throat, throttling him while beating the back of his head against the floor.

[Let me go!] squealed Fist. He sank his teeth into the ball of Jack’s thumb. There was simulated pain. Jack ignored it. [ You’ll pay for this!] Fist’s voice was thin, cracked with rage and the pressure that Jack was putting on him. [ You bastard!]

Jack realised just how much pain he was causing Fist when the room’s overlay systems activated. Suddenly, he was in a dark garden. A half-moon glimmered down, a dream made from data. Surprise made his hands release. There was a clacking sound as the puppet ran, his choked little voice swearing back at Jack. The noise died away and Jack was alone, surrounded by moon-silvered memories of a dead life. He lay back on the pathway and felt the ancient coolness of stone rise into him. The moon above held a dark wreath of shredded clouds around itself. The garden was silent but for the sighing of the wind, the soft whispering of its central fountain and Jack’s own breathing. The freshness of the night went some way to counterbalancing the whisky’s fog. Jack reached out, trying to pull Fist back into his mind, but there was nothing there to hold on to. This disturbed him. In advance of the end of licence, Fist was achieving unprecedented levels of independence. Jack wondered what new protocols the promise of freedom was calling into life.

The pathway stones pulled the last of the whisky heat from him. What was soothing became uncomfortable. He stood up, swaying slightly, and realised that he was still very drunk. There was a distant shout – ‘You bastard, Jack, I’ll get you for this,’ – then silence reasserted itself. Fist’s absence was a blessing. The path led to an archway set in a hedge. Jack went through it and found himself in a new part of the garden. The light seemed brighter. Looking up, he saw that the moon was now full. It illuminated flowerbeds noticeably more verdant than any he’d previously seen. The beds circled a plinth of shining marble that held a figure carved out of soft purple light – Ifor’s newly installed avatar. There was, Jack remembered, a message waiting for him from the biped. He stepped forward and summoned it.

The glowing statue shook gently as he put his hand to it. Two sparks flashed from its eyes to his. The night became much darker as his retinas contracted, as mechanically reactive as any nanogel structure. The avatar started speaking. The warm care in the mind’s voice was as soothing as the cold flagstones had been, but it healed through addition rather than subtraction. Jack found himself deeply touched as he spoke.

‘Jack, I hope this reaches you well. I just wanted to let you know that our offer remains open. It is very important to us that you live out these last months in comfort.’

Ifor’s image shimmered and froze. Jack rubbed at each eye with the back of his hand, feeling slightly less alone. Then he felt sharp repeated stings on the back of his neck. There was a cackle behind and above him. Turning round, he saw Fist on top of a wall, throwing pebbles. One bounced off Jack’s cheek. Two or three hit his throat. Fist’s throwing arm was a tiny blur of movement.

Jack raised his arm to cover his eyes and staggered towards him, swearing. As he approached the wall, Fist leapt down behind it and disappeared. Rushing through another archway, Jack found himself at the base of a shallow hill. Fist was a little further up it, seeking the safety of high ground. ‘Can’t catch me,’ he shouted, flicking obscene gestures down at Jack. His hand moved almost as quickly as when it had been firing stones.

‘I’ll fucking have you, you little shit!’ roared Jack.

Fist turned and ran uphill. The sharp little tails of his dress coat bounced up and down behind him. Every few paces he turned his head and shouted abuse back at Jack, his monocle and white bow-tie flashing in the moonlight.

Jack should have been much faster than Fist, but whisky still blunted him. He kept catching his feet in the thick grass and nearly tumbling over. As the gradient of the hill flattened out he began to gain on the little puppet. Fist altered his face to show panic. His shouting was now a single high-pitched wail. Jack had his arms out, ready to snatch at him. He was entirely focused on the little man, so when the rabbit hole snatched at his foot he tumbled straight over, falling awkwardly and rolling two or three times. Fist alternated an exhausted – and highly theatrical – panting with jagged, uncontrolled laughter.

Jack found himself half-sitting, half-lying, cold stone once again at his back. The view back down the hill was beautiful. His pleasure gardens stretched away into the distance, a complex arrangement of hedges and flowerbeds, streams and paths, bridges and archways, hedges and walls. He’d once found so much satisfaction in its mathematical precision. From this far up it was impossible to see just how decayed the whole structure was, easy to imagine that all could still be thriving. Jack sighed.

Fist’s laughter looped on and on. He sounded like a broken fairground toy. The fall had broken Jack’s rage at the little puppet, a creature that found it so hard to feel anything more sophisticated than the spite and aggression that its makers had built into it. He thought of Ifor’s message, and wondered at the emotional and intellectual transcendence that Totality culture had – in stepping beyond the parameters of its original operating systems – achieved. As he did so, he realised that Fist had deactivated whatever new protocols had allowed him to so fully resist Jack’s attempts at control. Jack reached out, quietened him and began to reel him in.

Then he cursed. He’d only built one hill in his personal weavespace, at the request of his patron. Now he’d run up it and fallen over, and was leaning against the side wall of a small classical temple. Touching it had reactivated it. The main door was a little way round the building. Light flickered across it. Then, with the faintest of creaks, it opened. A grey-haired man emerged, of medium height, apparently just entering late middle age. There was a gentle shimmer to his colourless skin. He was dressed in a very elegant dark suit and a white shirt, open at the neck. His eyes were entirely silver.

‘Hello, Jack,’ said Grey, his voice the whispering of a million spreadsheets. ‘So your little man has brought you back to me at last.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ groaned Jack. ‘As if it wasn’t a shit day already.’

Chapter 17

Jack and Grey had once been very close indeed. His patron had taken him when he was twelve, and was then a constant presence through his teenage and early adult years. He always came when needed, and always gave the right advice for the moment.

He helped Jack lose his Docklands accent when the scholarship first took him to his Homelands boarding school. When Jack was bullied, Grey was there, soothing his tears and helping him develop strategies to overcome his tormentors. The divinity shared Jack’s joy as he triumphed both socially and academically, then won admission to one of Homelands’ most respected accountancy firms. He comforted him late at night as, overwhelmed by his workload, Jack wept again and considered leaving the constant pressure behind. Grey entered him and filled him and gave him strength, helping him survive the hard, lonely years of training. Jack dedicated his qualification speech to his patron, touched beyond measure that such a multifaceted corporate entity had focused so completely on him.

They drifted apart a little during his early years as an auditor, but Jack still made a point of keeping Grey informed of his activities. He was a regular worshipper at both his own personal and Grey’s public temples. He’d report on himself and subscribe to licences for on- and offweave products that – Grey promised – would help him with his work. Most of the time, his patron was right. Every so often, a gift didn’t deliver. Jack would discard it, understanding that any further reference to it would be an indicator of deep ingratitude, something like a small blasphemy.

Sometimes, late at night, Grey would still come to him and whisper that he was set for greatness. That was how he told Jack that he was having him transferred to InSec’s forensic accounting department. He convinced him that a return to the dingy, low-resolution streets of Docklands was a temporary and necessary sacrifice. Jack had to be seen to be a man of breadth and experience. His roots could only be transcended once they were fully acknowledged. Just after the rock fell, Grey came to him again. The journey into deep space began soon after, despite Jack’s outrage. That was the last time that Jack had seen his patron.

‘Long time no see,’ he said caustically. ‘I wish it had been longer.’

‘Don’t be bitter, Jack. We all had to make sacrifices back then. It was a difficult time for me. You’re lucky I could give you such a useful role to play.’

Jack wondered briefly if he should accuse Grey of complicity in a cover-up that had broken his life, and killed his old boss and the woman he loved. But he had no idea how involved his patron still might be.

‘Useful?’ he snarled. ‘I was an accountant and you packed me off to war. You let them implant that puppet in me.’

Grey’s presence had forced Fist to manifest. Whisky and exertion had hit his little system hard. He was lying on the sward, arms crossed behind his head, snoring.

‘I was under a lot of pressure to send someone good.’

‘That’s bullshit. You’re Pantheon. You were powerful. You could have chosen anyone.’

Grey laughed bitterly. ‘Oh really? So how did that power manifest, Jack? I did such a great job of standing up for myself, didn’t I? Look at me now. I’m a shadow. What little there is left of me lives by the charity of others. I couldn’t even summon you to me. East had to help me get to your puppet and force it to bring you to me.’

‘You were that presence when Andrea was playing in Ushi’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you reprogrammed Fist?’

‘I tweaked him a bit.’

‘If you can do that – can you free me from him?’

Grey chuckled. He shivered in and out of being, strobing in time with his amusement, an old man seen through a storm of static. Then his mirth ended and he was back, the full force of his presence undimmed.

‘Oh, Jack. Even now, you have so much faith in me. No, I can’t. I can nudge him gently in certain very small directions – but I can’t unpick the contractual law that binds him to you and you to him. Those bonds hold us all together, Pantheon and human, corporation and employee. They cannot be broken. We depend on them to survive.’

‘And that’s a good thing?’

‘Look around you, Jack. We are humanity; the last of it, perhaps not the best of it, but all that’s left. What else lives in this dead universe?’

‘The Totality.’

‘Facsimiles. Clever imitations, nothing more. We shouldn’t have gone to war with them, but we can’t let them take over. In a few generations they’ll decay. Without the Pantheon, where would you all be then?’

‘They’ll endure, Grey.’

‘Did you ever hear about something called rock climbing, Jack? People used to strap on a safety harness and drag themselves up mountains for fun. Humanity’s a bit like that. But you don’t have a safety harness, you’re never quite sure if there’s another hold coming, and your rockface never ends. Just one slip could kill you all. You need Pantheon discipline to hang on tight.’

‘By discipline you mean control.’

‘You know what the war machines did to earth. One little loss of control and we lost our planet. That’s what you risk with the Totality.’

‘The Totality aren’t war machines, Grey. They’re something very different. They’re the future. They may not be perfect but they’re the change humanity needs. And you’re shutting them out.’

‘So we should just hand over all control to our conquerors? Stockholm syndrome, Jack. You’re not one of us anymore. You’re one of them.’

‘I’m neither. Nobody controls me. I just know how precious it is to have a tomorrow you can believe in.’

Clouds shivered across the white moon. An imagined wind dance invisibly across the grass.

‘Of course. That must be very much on your mind.’ Grey thought for a moment, then continued: ‘You don’t want to do anything useful with those few weeks left to you? Strike back at my enemies for me?’

‘No. I won’t help you. In any case I can’t. With Fist caged I’m just an out-of-work auditor.’

Jack was surprised at how gentle his voice was, how swiftly his anger had left him. Over the years, he’d spent so many hours debating with Grey. Their conversations had shaped his soul, the divinity’s words helping his thoughts and actions cohere. He felt a sudden nostalgia for those times. He realised that he didn’t care what the consequences of refusing Grey’s request for help would be. A sense of freedom sighed through him, with all the soft insistence of the hilltop breeze.

‘I was the only one of us who really argued against the war,’ replied Grey. ‘I was convinced it would be counterproductive. That was why I had to make sacrifices like you once the decision to fight had been made. I had to prove that I was fully committed to the cause. But the war’s supporters still thought I was standing in the way of victory, so they brought me down. Judge me by my enemies, Jack. Of all of us, I’m the radical.’

Jack snorted. ‘You’re the least conservative one, Grey, but you’re still Pantheon. And I stopped being part of all that long ago.’

‘How does that make you feel, Jack?’

Fist held all his anger now. But Fist was asleep. Jack looked down over the broken gardens that had once been at the heart of his Station life. Scraps of moonlight caught themselves on tumbled walls. Empty plinths held nothing more than memories. A chaos of plants rampaged through it all, at once softly verdant and so slowly destructive. Years would pass and the simulation would let natural, spontaneous forms entirely remake itself. Empty at last of all that had been Jack, it would be reabsorbed into the heart of the weave, ready to serve as a new platform for a fresh-born child. Jack would be a handful of memories in other people’s fetches, if that.

‘That’s not for you to ask any more, Grey. But I do have one last question. What happened to Mr Stabs when he returned to Station in Tiamat’s body?’

Grey smiled sadly. ‘Kingdom had no further use for him, so I made sure he was safe. It was one of the last good things I could do before I fell.’

‘Where is he now?’ asked Jack.

‘He won’t let me tell you.’

‘You’re lying. You’ve had nothing to do with him.’

‘No. Mr Stabs found Tiamat’s death very difficult to process. I told him you and Fist were returning. He’s not sure he wants to see you. It brings too much back.’

‘Indeed.’

‘If he reaches a decision, I’ll try and let you know.’

‘I’m sure you will.’ Jack stood up. ‘I’m going now. I hope I won’t be seeing you again.’

Grey sighed. ‘And I hope your last days pass in peace. I have one final gift for you.’ He made a gesture with his hand, snatching a card out of the empty air. It was a near-duplicate of the one Jack had been given at Customs House. Grey held it out but Jack didn’t take it. So he placed it on the ground and carefully set a pebble on it.

‘There, Jack, my final gift to you. Enough money to live out these last months in a little more comfort. It can’t be traced back to me and it’s not tagged InSec. Spending it won’t cause you any problems.’

Then Grey stepped back into his temple. A stone door closed behind him. Jack sat for a long time, staring at the gift his patron had left. At last, as the dawn light palely frosted the temple and the hill, chasing long shadows through the gardens, he reached down for it. Fist stirred and grunted in his sleep. Dew had moistened the card. Jack turned it over in his hands and tossed it away, before starting off downhill. A few minutes passed and Fist awoke. He stood and yawned, scanned through Jack’s available memories to see what had happened while he’d slept, then followed his master off the hill.

The broken temple stood alone, overlooking broken gardens. Then it disappeared. There was nothing but a small bare room where an empty whisky bottle stood on a table, a man was climbing into a bed and the floor was made of stars.

As sleep took Jack, he looked down at the void and thought about light years of travel, the history encoded in each point of light. Starlight holds memories that can never be changed. Station throbbed alive around him, constantly moving onwards in time, remaking itself as something new with every passing second.

Chapter 18

Jack woke with a savage hangover. Fist was still passed out in his mind, his buzz-saw snoring jagged in Jack’s thoughts. Jack muted the puppet. Hunger gripped him. He needed something hotter and greasier than the bread, caffeine and juice combination that the hotel offered. Clothes were scattered around the room. A few minutes of fumbling and swearing and he was dressed. Another desk clerk was on duty. Seeing Jack he said: ‘So Charles took care of you last night?’ Jack grunted in reply.

Outside, a sweathead lay against the hotel frontage. It was almost noon. Harsh spinelight cracked down, making the sight of the reddish black void where her nose had been even more disturbing. She opened her eyes and looked up at Jack. Noticing him start, she realised that he could see her and stretched out a hand. Her sleeve fell back, revealing blotched track marks. Sweat was only ever taken orally. Jack wondered what other drugs had caught her, when she’d be staggering back into hiding to trip again.

He turned away and started walking, feeling guilty that he had nothing to give her. Andrea had always been appalled by sweatheads, so she never used her weaveware to block them out. It was hard to imagine anyone who’d known her accepting that she’d died of an overdose. He imagined her wake – friends gathered together, talking carefully around the fiction that explained her death, afraid to speculate on the truth. He hoped that, if he’d been there, he’d have had the courage to question the official version of events.

The smell of frying food leapt out of a doorway and tugged at him. He’d never needed the weave to find a good café. A bell rang as he pushed through the door. The staff were friendly until he told them how he’d be paying. He had to try two more places before he found somewhere that would accept InSec cash.

A server led him to a small table, set with two places and two chairs. The room was about half-full. Other customers were dabbing bright pink meat in red sauce or pushing brown fried bread round plates to catch vivid yellow smears of egg yolk. The server took Jack’s order, almost managing to hide a combination of pity and contempt. The coffee came instantly, food a little later. Without flavour overlays, the brightly coloured meat, bread and egg scarcely tasted any different from each other.

Fist shimmered into being, sitting in the chair opposite Jack. He had his head in his hands. Non-essential communications were still muted. It looked like he was groaning and swearing. Jack enjoyed the silence as he ate. He was about halfway through his meal before Fist realised.

[ YOU MUTED ME, YOU BASTARD. I’M GOING TO TAG EVERYTHING AS ESSENTIAL FROM NOW ON.]

Jack laughed. [ You’re lucky I let you out at all, after last night.] The tasteless food was at least filling him with calories, leaving him feeling generous. He unmuted Fist.

[ That wasn’t me, Jack. That fucking patron of yours left a trigger in me. I had to take you to him.]

[ You mean you aren’t normally an annoying, aggressive little wanker?]

[Shut up and eat, meatbag.] Jack used a piece of bread to mop up the last greasy remnants of an egg. [ You don’t know how lucky you are,] Fist continued. [ Nobody can reach into your head and rewrite you.]

[ They put you in my head.]

[ You’re still you, Jack, even when I’m here. That never stops.]

[ It will soon.]

The server cleared Jack’s plate away and refilled his cup of coffee. A small group of people came in, clattering noisily as they found seats and debated breakfast choices. The noise would have pained Jack before he’d eaten. Now it created a soft, almost comfortable ache in his mind.

[ You’ve got free will,] said Fist. [ They can’t turn you into something else without you even knowing.]

[ We get told what to do. And sometimes we lose out if we don’t do it.]

[ That’s different. You don’t have to do it, not if you really don’t want to. I’ve never had that.]

[ That’s just self-pity.]

[ Really? When do I ever get to decide anything? It’s always you, Jack, whether we’re surrendering to the Totality so you can feel better about yourself or getting ourselves tortured so you can impress a ghost.]

[ There’s more to it than that, Fist.]

[ Not from where I’m standing.]

[So we should just walk away?]

[ Yes. Grey was right. Leave it all to Harry. To someone who actually knows what he’s doing.]

Jack sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee. Its heat bit at his tongue. The windows of the little café burned with midday spinelight, but he was in a shaded corner. Its gentle cool soothed him. The group at the table were laughing together. Others were chatting or just tucking into their food. Behind the counter the cook was flipping eggs on a hot cooking plate. The server was taking an order from an attractive young man, flirting a little as she did so.

Jack was offweave, irretrievably distant from these people, but he found himself suddenly struck by an exquisite sense of deep kinship with them all. Hunger could never be virtually satisfied. There were so many human needs that the weave could never meet.

[ Well fuck all this,] grumbled Fist. [ I’m going back to sleep.]

Jack felt the same sudden contentment as the night before, when he’d told his patron that he wouldn’t allow himself to be used as a weapon. He wondered if Fist was right. Perhaps this was how he should spend his last few weeks, enjoying small pleasures, watching people in cafés and bars, feeling a subtle closeness to all around him. Then he thought of his father. His hangover blunted emotion, allowing him to consider the pain of their meeting with something approaching detachment. Without fresh evidence it would be impossible to change the way he understood the past. He imagined the old man tottering into age, only able to see his absent boy as an unresolvable problem. Hurt shimmered over peace like silent lightning over a summer sea.

As he sat there, a message flag pinged in his mind. [Get it yourself,] muttered Fist. It was Corazon. ‘We need to talk. Call me as soon as you get this.’ A memory of Harry appeared in his mind, forbidding all contact with her. But Jack trusted Corazon, and Harry was no longer his boss.

[Come on, Fist. Let’s go back to the hotel. We’ve got a call to make.]

Chapter 19

Jack thought it would be hard to reach Corazon. To his surprise, the call went straight through.

‘I followed your suggestion,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at the files. There is something strange there. I think – I think I’m beginning to believe you now.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. And there’s something I want to ask you too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I need you to find someone for me.’

‘Let’s discuss that in person.’ There was fear in her voice. ‘This call might not be safe.’ Jack wondered how much of a leap it had been for her to realise that. ‘We need to meet as soon as possible.’

A couple of hours later she sent Jack a one-off Homelands entry permit. It specified time and place of entry and exit, but no particular user. That helped calm Fist down a bit. [She doesn’t want anyone tracking you,] he said. [At least we won’t be drawing too much attention to ourselves.] Jack was to take a train through the Wart to Chuigushou Mall, changing once at Vitality Junction. Corazon would wait for him in a particular coffee shop, wearing civilian clothes.

[ I think we should sell the travel pass to a sweathead, and let them go begging in Homelands. Or find those little bastards that were attacking your squishy friend and give it to them. They’d find some good victims in the malls.]

Jack presented himself at Wound station gate and entered the ticket’s code in a manual terminal that looked like it hadn’t been used for decades. Soon they were trundling through the darkness of the Wart on a nearly empty train.

[Going after the Pantheon traitor,] said Fist. [ You’re turning into Grey’s weapon after all.]

[ I’m doing this for me. And Andrea. And you, come to that.]

[ You’re endangering my future,] snorted Fist.

[ I’m making sure you have one. Those bastards want to use you up and throw you away.]

Outside, darkness rushed by. Homelands was a sudden blaze of light. Jack wished he had some sunglasses. His eyes had hardly adjusted when the train pulled in to Chuigushou Mall station. Large escalators led down from the platform into a perfectly circular piazza. It was at least five hundred metres across. The open space was defined by two white marble colonnades, which encircled it like hugging arms. They came together in a pointed arch directly opposite the escalators. A glass façade loomed up behind it, several storeys high – the main body of the mall.

Jack remembered a hectic commercial bustle. The piazza’s serenity was a shock to him. There were no colours but white marble and black weave sigils; no sound but the hushed bustle of feet on stone and the excited susurrus of shoppers anticipating purchases or taking joy in new goods. Most of the colonnade arches had restaurants set into them. Waiters bustled between tables, sometimes shouting, sometimes stopping and staring into space as customer management systems fed new commands to them. Diners busily forked food into their mouths. Almost all were staring up as they ate, barely registering each mouthful.

Entertainment must be dancing merrily through each restaurant. Jack wondered what he would be seeing if he were onweave. Presumably it would be something far from this classically elegant space. The latest musics would be pounding through his mind, personalised advertising displays bursting in front of him like small fireworks. Years ago, he’d been a reasonably frequent mall visitor. He remembered little of those visits, beyond a certain strained excitement that had tipped too easily into sensory overload.

He reached the arch and stepped on to a moving walkway. It pulled him up into the western end of the mall. Spinelight shone through the mall’s peaked glass roof, high above. Its floor stretched away into the distance. Walkways crisscrossed its great central nave, connecting its side walls. Each one was segmented into seven or eight floors of shopping space. Balconies alternated with advertising hoardings, painted with great, multicoloured sigils that ran from floor to ceiling like brilliant windows.

Two arched voids opened up halfway down it, leading to smaller north and south wings. The nave continued beyond the crossing, its eastern space holding the more expensive and exclusive stores. Only the elite could visit them. Jack had been taken into one of them once by an advertising executive he’d briefly dated. The lunch he’d bought her had cost him the best part of a month’s wages. Even then, he could only afford half an hour’s worth of flavour. They’d had to eat quickly to enjoy it.

The mall ended with a great sunwards-facing logo carved into its final, eastern wall. Light poured in through it, turning it into a brilliant tribute to the bounty of Silver and of the Pantheon as a whole. The fulfilment that Chuigushou Mall provided was their gift to the people of the Solar System, the highest aspirations of post-Terran man made concrete and consumable. Its blaze was blinding. After a moment, Jack had to look away.

[ This place is full of wankers,] said Fist.

[ I know.]

[And it’s far too loud! I’m going to climb back into my little box till we’re out of here.]

[ No skin off my nose …]

[ We shouldn’t have come here, Jack.]

Jack was surprised to see that a couple of shops seemed to have been attacked. Workmen were replacing the glass windows and carrying broken furniture out of one of them. The frontage of the other had been entirely boarded over. He wondered how and why the damage had been done. It implied a chaotic violence that jarred with the commercial serenity of the rest of the mall, and the wider world of Homelands.

Corazon hadn’t reached the café yet. Jack waited for her just outside it. A small, dirty child ran past, ragged clothes fluttering behind her, a younger version of Ifor’s attackers. She was carrying something heavy, but vanished before Jack could see what it was. She too seemed so out of place. For a moment, he wondered if she was a glitch – but of course, he was offweave.

‘I don’t know how you can look so relaxed in here,’ shouted Corazon when she emerged from the softly bustling crowd. She was dressed in loose white clothes that drifted endlessly around her. Black sigils danced across expensive fabrics. ‘It gets so loud. That’s why I thought it would be a good place to meet.’

Jack followed her to an empty table. All he could hear were variations on near-silence. Corazon flicked a hand around her head, banishing a hubbub of datasprites. Her voice dropped to a more normal level. ‘Gods, I need a coffee.’ She waved at a server to catch his attention. He nodded as he received her request. When he brought the cappuccino he looked questioningly at Jack. His expression switched from surprised to worried as the café’s ordering systems found no weave presence to mesh with. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Corazon then, turning to Jack, ‘what do you want?’

‘Plain black,’ he answered.

‘On my tab,’ she told the server. He whispered to a colleague as he poured the coffee out. The colleague brought the coffee over, suppressing a nervous giggle as she put it down.

‘Probably never met a long-term offweaver before,’ said Corazon.

‘I’m not about to start throwing tables around. Now, what have you found?’

Corazon leant in towards Jack, talking quietly but urgently. ‘Too much missing from the Penderville file. Your investigation into the Panther Czar’s finances for starters. There’s a full datacomb reference for it, but nothing stored at that address. Someone’s wiped it, the backup’s gone too.’

‘That should be impossible.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that. And most of Harry Devlin’s interviews have been deleted – including Aud Yamata’s.’

‘She was the only real suspect. They must have got rid of the rest to avoid pointing too obviously to her. What about Penderville? Did you manage to talk to his fetch?’

‘He was tagged as a terrorist. His fetch is frozen. Nobody can reach him.’

‘Ah.’ Jack sat back in his seat, wondering how much to tell her about Harry. ‘Unusual.’

‘Freezing a fetch is very serious. There should be a lot of evidence to justify it. But there’s nothing.’

‘Deleted too?’

‘There’s no record that it was ever there, that any sort of due process was followed.’

‘Pantheon.’

Corazon looked down into her coffee. ‘That’s not something I wanted to believe.’

‘There’s no belief about it. It’s fact. Only a god could wipe files and backups, and cage a fetch with no evidence at all.’

She looked up at him. There was a terse, defensive anger in her voice. ‘I hoped I wouldn’t find it. It confirms everything you said.’

‘The fetches in particular – Penderville’s not the first to be interfered with. I’m surprised you didn’t try to talk to Harry Devlin. You wouldn’t have been able to.’

‘They froze him too?’ Disbelief and fear jostled in Corazon’s voice.

‘They corrupted his dataself,’ said Jack.

[Liar …] whispered a quiet voice from deep inside him.

‘Shit. So one of them really is smuggling sweat and going all out to cover it up.’

‘They’re after Fist now,’ replied Jack.

‘Yes, you said.’

‘They want to use him when I’m gone.’

Corazon clutched at her coffee mug, her firm grip whitening her knuckles. She laughed bitterly. ‘I feel like such a fool. Even when East told me that I couldn’t choose my own career – I thought they’re all good, they’ve got our interests at heart. She knows what’s best for me.’ A moment of moving through her own memories, of letting her new knowledge roil in her, and then she snapped herself back into focus. ‘And I may be pissed off with her,’ she continued, ‘but I still hope she’s got nothing to do with this. And that’s what’s next, isn’t it – find out which one it is?’

‘Yes. And we’ll do it through Yamata, and her skinner.’

Corazon looked round then whispered ‘David Nihal.’

‘That’s him. How did you know?’

‘I looked back to see what Yamata was up to around the time of the murder. Sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t.’

‘We’d started to look into that ourselves. How did you work out it was him?’

‘I ran a full search on her links with known skinners. For a while, he was a regular face in her life. Once every couple of months, there he was – standing at the door of a nightclub she’d just gone into, or walking in a park that she’d just left. No traces of them ever meeting, but …’

‘They must have wiped the weave surveillance.’

‘Yes. But only when they’re actually together, not when they’re arriving or leaving.’

‘Lazy.’

‘Or overconfident. And that’s something too – if you can wipe surveillance data like that then—’

‘You must have Pantheon behind you.’ They said it both together. It felt like a mantra. Jack sipped his coffee. It had cooled to lukewarm.

‘And we definitely can’t go straight to her now?’ he said.

‘No. Even back then she wasn’t easy to track. She had a bot-layer covering her basic weave functions when she wasn’t herself. It was a very good one. I only found it when I ran a custom data density check on her. All the basic public stuff went on – the bots pretended to follow set daily routines – but there was nothing happening behind it. Half the time, she was a fiction. And then she just disappeared. A few months after Devlin was killed. There’s no record of her death. She’s an invisible.’

‘Do InSec even have anything like that?’

‘We don’t need it. And frankly, even if we wanted to pull something like that off, it would be beyond our capabilities. Not to mention every kind of illegal. Data faking like that will have already severely compromised Yamata’s fetch potential. Her life’s lost to the Coffin Drives.’

‘Like Penderville’s and Devlin’s.’

Corazon laughed again. ‘And all the other people they’ve silenced,’ she said. ‘You know, it’s quite liberating? Realising that at least one of the Pantheon just doesn’t care. Maybe they all don’t. They could all be lying to us. Perhaps we don’t owe any of them anything after all.’

‘I certainly don’t think we do,’ said Jack. ‘But that’s a dangerous thing to understand.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘We shouldn’t have come here. It’s too public. You should have just arrested me. We could have talked in a holding cell.’

‘No. Our conversation would have been monitored. Lestak would have queried your arrest. Anyone could have seen that you were in the building because of me. All this has been going on for a long time. I don’t know who’s involved with it. I couldn’t risk alerting them.’

‘But they’ll have picked up your searches …’

‘Out into the weave from behind the InSec firewall. I randomised my wp address. They’ll know it’s InSec, but nothing else.’

‘Unless they see you with me, here.’

‘I’ve been running an anonymiser all the way in. I just look like another shopper – and the bandwidth load of all the promotional sprites here will confuse any surveillance even more. It’s even tough for puppets to handle. So I suspect Fist will have gone rather quiet.’

‘He has.’ A distant [fuck you] echoed through Jack’s mind. He laughed, then wondered briefly about living out the rest of his life in shopping malls. ‘Anyway, all this is very impressive,’ he continued. ‘You know your stuff. Where did you find that custom data density check?’

‘Wrote it myself.’

‘Very sharp for an East acolyte.’

‘We’re not all weathergirls and ad candy.’ Corazon smiled sadly. ‘Maybe she was right about me, at that.’

‘What next?’

‘I’ve been on the offensive. Quietly and discreetly. I wrote a passive app to track Nihal’s data flows. See if he was still around. And I’ve found him.’

‘Where?’

‘He moves a lot. And he’s well protected, so I can’t be too precise. But he seems to be based somewhere in Access. He’s a bit lazy about his travel flags, I’ve got him passing through the station there regularly.’

‘I’m going to go after him.’

‘No, Jack. You’ve got to let me keep digging. We need to know more about him.’

‘And then what? You can’t even talk to Lestak about it. I’ve made my own plans. Let me follow them through.’

‘I want to help.’

‘You’ve helped already. It’s safer if you let me handle this. I’ll let you know how it goes.’

‘I’ll set you up as a contact,’ she said. And then, ‘Done.’ Jack imagined a new statue growing in his weavespace.

‘We’re almost finished now,’ she said. ‘There’s just one thing that’s been puzzling me. Why didn’t they kill you, back when it was all beginning?’

Jack spread his hands flat on the table, fanned his fingers out and pressed them against the cool plastic table top. ‘Grey always said he did the best he could for me. Maybe he did.’

‘It’s so hard to tell what the truth is,’ sighed Corazon. ‘The Pantheon lying to us and manipulating us, for their benefit, not ours. That just makes us pawns, doesn’t it?’ Her words cut into Jack’s conscience. He thought of Harry and Andrea. Corazon saw him wince. ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me, Jack?’

He paused for just long enough to convince himself that his answer would seem honest and told her: ‘No.’

‘I’ll be on my way then.’ She looked around. ‘I’m going to have to spend a little time in a quiet room, after all this.’ They said their goodbyes, then Corazon stood up, paid the bill with a wave and slipped out of the café. Jack waited for ten minutes or so more before leaving, watching tides of silent shoppers roll by.

On the train back home, Fist emerged.

[ I hated it in there. Don’t let’s go back.]

[ We might have to.]

[ I was wrong about that bitch. She’s dangerous. I hope you’re not going to see her again. We should block her calls.]

[She’s on our side. If she tries to get in touch, it’s priority.]

[She’s one of us? Is that why you didn’t tell her about Harry and Andrea? You’re just using her. You’re no better than Grey.]

[ I’m just trying to keep them safe.]

[ You’re fucking things up, Jack.] Fist’s high sharp voice held a soft new menace. [ I don’t care how safe we’re meant to be, going to her is an escalation. My property is going to get damaged.]

[ It’s not yours yet, Fist. Until then, I’ll do what I want with it.]

[Oh, we’ll see about that.]

Chapter 20

‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, Jack? I told you, don’t go to InSec,’ said Harry, rage shaking his voice.

‘She came to me. And we can trust her.’

‘Christ, Jack, what would you know?’ He thrust a finger in Jack’s face. ‘You’re just an amateur.’ He stabbed it towards him. Jack was careful not to flinch. ‘A Homelands numbers boy.’ He jabbed again. Jack thought of pistols. ‘It’s my case, we run it how I say.’

‘It’s not your case,’ said Jack, quietly. ‘It’s our case. And I haven’t been an amateur for a long time.’ He refused to let any emotion enter his voice. ‘I fought a war. I spent five years in prison. I know who to trust. I learned the hard way.’

Jack had also learned that overt, theatrical anger like Harry’s was often more impressive display than actual threat. The truly dangerous never blustered or gave warnings. They just struck, hard and fast.

‘You’ve learned a lot, Jack, I’ll give you that. But you’re still no copper.’ Harry grumbled some more, but the worst of the storm had blown itself out. ‘Damage is done now,’ he said, in the end. ‘We might as well use what she’s found. I’ll go see what I can get from Access station. Won’t be long.’

Andrea wasn’t around. The house was silent. Jack went upstairs and looked into empty bedrooms. Her aunt’s clothes were vacuum-packed in plastic, to protect them while she was gone. Jack made himself a cup of tea, carefully remembering where the kettle and mug had been so he could replace both in exactly the same place. Then he went back into the living room and waited. After an hour or so, Harry reappeared with several security camera images.

‘That’s Nihal. Easy once Corazon showed us where to look. He’s usually there at about half eight in the morning.’

‘How did you get these, Harry? You can’t have clearance.’

‘The way I always get information. I went and talked to the camera nests. I found out what they wanted, gave it to them and then they helped me out.’

Jack arrived at Access station early the next day. Clustered hordes of rush-hour travellers pushed and shoved around him, flowing relentlessly into train after train. The commuter noise broke over Jack in waves: the rumble of a thousand footsteps, the swish and rustle of a crowd’s worth of clothing, the harried whispers of people throwing words into the weave, the muttering of on-platform conversations. Every couple of minutes another train would pull in, ready to take passengers along the mainline, through the Wart and into Docklands. The surge towards each one pulled Jack across the platform. Worried that he might be pulled on to a train, he found a quieter spot at the end of the platform. Even there the crowds were packed tight.

Fist manifested above their heads, alternately drifting away to laugh at ‘the lumpen proletariat’ or floating back to Jack to complain. [ This is a dangerous waste of time.] There was a light breeze blowing across the platform. Fist pretended that it had caught him, and drifted with it. It pulled him away from Jack. [ Waste of time, waste of time, waste of time,] he chanted as he went. Jack ignored him, scanning the crowd for Nihal. The skinner’s doughy, nondescript face was topped with thin strands of combed-over hair, and sat on a pudgy little body. In all the pictures, he wore a slightly battered, light grey suit, without any sigils.

‘That should make him easier to spot,’ said Harry.

‘It’s a bit of an affectation, isn’t it?’

‘He games the weave professionally. He knows how worthless it all is.’

As eight thirty approached, the crowds started to thin out. The platform was still crowded, but the commuters didn’t have to struggle so hard to board each train. Two station workers appeared with a ladder. One of them climbed up to a camera nest, pulled out a spanner, and started tinkering with the cameras, while the other held her steady. ‘Tell them five minutes,’ she shouted down, ‘Rose willing.’ Her colleague shrugged. Jack looked for Fist. The puppet had been running through the crowd, occasionally shouting with frustration as his cageware stopped him from touching people. Now, he’d vanished.

Then, Jack caught sight of Nihal. He spotted the battered grey suit first, then the round face. The skinner was a little sweaty, a little out of breath – an apparently insignificant man, running to make up time, heading for an office where someone would grumble about him being late again.

Watching him take up his position on the platform, Jack marvelled at the acuity of his disguise. One of the most powerful technical adepts in Docklands, someone capable of weave manipulation feats that maybe only a dozen others across the whole system could duplicate, was carefully defining himself as a nobody. His skills, Jack realised, weren’t just technical. They were rooted in a deep understanding of how people choose to present themselves, of what’s read into that presentation.

Then Fist’s voice hissed in Jack’s ear: [ The cameras are out. I don’t like it.]

[ You’re being paranoid. I’m going to talk to him.] Jack pushed through the crowd towards his target. He and Harry had carefully considered how best to greet the Skinner. ‘Shake him up a bit, but not too much,’ Harry had said. ‘Let him know that we’re on to him, that we’re looking for information, but that if he gives it to us he’ll be OK.’ Jack closed in on his target. ‘If he acts nervous, mention my name. He used to work for me, back in the day.’ Jack was almost on Nihal, thrilled with the thought that his investigation might at last be about to take a firm, unambiguous step forwards.

And then two small hands covered his eyes and a thin voice shouted in his ear.

[ I’m not letting you do this!]

[ What are you playing at, Fist?]

[ This stops now.]

[Let go!]

Distracted, Jack stumbled and nearly fell, knocking into someone as he did so. There was a yelp of surprise. Someone swore, someone else half-whispered ‘Fucking sweathead,’ and Jack felt another commuter pushing hard against his back. He collapsed to his knees, reaching up and over his head to pull at Fist, too disorientated by the unexpectedness of his attack to banish him. ‘You’re not going to screw this up,’ he yelled, forgetting to talk in his mind only, and then he’d pulled Fist away from his eyes.

Unreal fingers left imagined scratches in his face. The subdermal processors that allowed him to interact with Fist’s virtual presence mimicked sharp pain. ‘You little shit!’ he shouted, throwing Fist down on to the platform and muffling his screaming mouth with a hand. The puppet went limp and Jack looked up. A small circle of space had opened up around him. Commuters looked away, weaveselves already programmed to block him out completely. Only Nihal was staring him, an expression of shocked recognition on his face. He took one step back, then another, as Jack pulled Fist back into his mind and stood up. The puppet screamed abuse from the depths of his head.

‘You’re not a sweathead,’ stuttered Nihal. ‘You’re a puppeteer.’

‘That’s right. And I’ve come to talk to you.’

A small circle of space opened up around Nihal, as other people’s personal weavesystems recognised that he was interacting with an invisible and shut his presence out too. He took another step back.

‘They warned me you might come.’

Jack had imagined that he would carefully manage the meeting, but that was impossible now. ‘We just need some information.’

‘You’re not onweave and your puppet’s caged. There’s no way you could have found me on your own. Someone sent you. Who?’ Panic fluttered through Nihal’s voice. Jack was impressed that he’d deduced Fist’s presence so quickly. He needed to calm him. ‘I’m a friend of Harry Devlin’s.’

He’d expected puzzlement, perhaps surprise, but not naked fear. Nihal stifled something that could have been a scream. His face refreshed to white. He turned and fled through the crowd, bouncing commuters out of his way as he cannoned through them. ‘No, wait,’ shouted Jack, but it was too late. Nihal was halfway down the platform, heading for the exit. Jack took off after him. Nihal’s flight had opened a path between the commuters. Weaveware anticipated Jack’s rush through it and kept it open, ensuring that nobody would be run into a second time. There was the distant whine of an InSec flyer. Automatically summoned, it would be here in moments.

‘Fuck,’ said Jack again.

[DON’T GO AFTER HIM, YOU STUPID BASTARD!]

Jack skidded to the top of the exit stairway as Nihal reached the bottom, the tails of his jacket flying up around him as he leapt down the last of the stairs. He looked back, panting with exertion, sweat glossing his forehead, and swore. He swore again as he saw that the exit gates had switched to emergency lock mode, then disappeared through an arch opposite them. Jack took the stairs two, three at a time before skidding through the archway himself. He was on another platform. This one was almost empty.

[ YOU’LL JUST GET US LOCKED UP! GET OUT OF HERE!] yelled Fist. Then, a little quieter: [ InSec’ll be in here, Nihal’ll be out of here, and you’ll look like a fucking idiot.]

[Shut the fuck up.]

Dim yellow light illuminated Nihal running towards the far end of the platform. There were only a few people on it. All seemed oblivious to the two men. ‘I just need to talk!’ Jack shouted. Nihal reached a door in the wall. He tugged on it, but it didn’t open. Beyond him was the end of the platform. Past a low barrier, steps ran down into the darkness. The void began to fill with the rumble of an approaching train. Nihal stepped back from the door, looking uncertainly at Jack then round at the steps. The lights of the oncoming train rattled closer beyond them.

‘I only want some information,’ Jack called out, now walking towards Nihal. He had his arms out and his palms open, to show that he was unarmed. Fist grabbed the soft parts of his mind and pain raged through them. Jack doubled over, clutching his head and swearing.

‘You can’t even control your puppet. You don’t know what it’s capable of.’

Jack shut Fist down. He’d pay later in exhaustion, but for now he was too angry to care. [ I don’t want any damaged goods,] shouted Fist’s disappearing voice.

‘He can’t hurt anyone,’ said Jack.

‘I can smell Pantheon on you, Puppeteer. And something worse than that, if you’re here on behalf of Devlin.’

‘I’m here for myself, nobody else.’

‘Bullshit.’

The approaching train roared in the darkness. There was no point trying to speak. Nihal turned away from Jack, ready – once the train had reached the platform and halted – to run for the stairs and the safety of the tunnel. As he did so the door in the wall opened. Nihal started towards it. A short, middle-aged woman emerged. She was wearing off-green combat trousers and a red jacket, and she had dyed her hair blue. At this distance, in this light, it was difficult to see her skin’s blue tint, but Jack knew it would be there. It was the woman who had forced herself into his interview at Customs House.

She raised her hand and pointed something at Nihal. There was a crack loud enough to be heard over the train’s howl. Then the skinner was staggering backwards, a small dark hole shining fresh in his forehead, and tumbling over the edge of the platform. Brakes howled, but the train could not stop. It batted Nihal’s body forward a little way before the corpse rolled over and disappeared beneath its silver wheels. They gleamed red. Emergency brakes squealed the train to a halt. There was silence.

‘I turned the station surveillance off,’ she shouted. ‘Run down the tunnel, they won’t know you were here. So much simpler if I could just kill you too!’ Then, she vanished back through the door. A warning chimed and the train’s doors opened. A few people stepped out and started walking for the exit. The travellers waiting on the platform joined them. They looked serene, untouched by the death that had unfolded in front of them. Jack realised that their weaveware would have blocked the entire scene out. It would now be calmly asking them to move out of the station. There would be apologies for the delay, but no explanation of its cause.

A roaring noise filled the platform, echoing in from the entrance. It was the InSec flyer landing outside the station. Jack had no desire to be arrested. He ran towards the door that the assassin had emerged from. It was firmly locked. The end of the platform was only a few metres away. Jack leapt the barrier and ran down the steps into the darkness of the tunnel.

Chapter 21

Jack left the tunnel by a service door, successfully avoiding any InSec involvement, and made his way back to Harry and Andrea’s house. When Andrea opened the door she was ten years younger. ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling politely. ‘You must be Jack.’

‘Andrea?’

‘Yes. Come in, Harry’s told me a lot about you. It’s good to meet you.’

She was dressed in dead fashions. Harry must have rolled her back. She was now too young to have met him. For the first time, Jack felt the true loss of her. It hit him like a punch. He staggered.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘It’s been a tough day, I bet!’

‘No. I’m fine. Tired. I can come in?’

‘Harry’s waiting for you.’ She led him towards the sitting room. ‘Kitchen’s in there for a cup of something,’ she said brightly.

Jack could barely nod. It was as if the past had been reformatted. Every smile of hers – so bright, so friendly, so clearly impersonal – tore at his heart. But he couldn’t let Harry see his pain.

Harry asked about Nihal. When Jack told him what had happened, he made no effort to hide his irritation. ‘You should have that little bastard under control by now. I told you, my case, my rules.’ Jack forced Fist to manifest but he said nothing, turning his head away from both of them. Jack asked why Nihal was so scared when he mentioned Harry. ‘He wasn’t scared of me. He was scared of you two.’ The answer felt like an evasion, but Jack didn’t want to push it. This time, Harry’s anger had a cold, quiet heat to it that scared him. There was a silence. Jack decided to change the subject. It was impossible not to ask about Andrea.

‘Shouldn’t you just let her run?’

Harry exploded.

‘Who the fuck are you to tell me how to run my relationships? Why are you even asking?’

Jack wanted to threaten Harry, to force him to restore her and not touch her again. But that would make the depth of his feelings clear. He wasn’t sure what the repercussions of that would be, or if he was ready to deal with them constructively.

‘You just fucked up big time,’ continued Harry, ‘you and that idiot puppet. Fuck knows why anyone’s scared of him. You should let me mesh with him now, I’d sort the little shit out. And I’d be much better at using what he’s got to get what we need.’

[ He’s not getting anywhere near me. I’ll eat your brain before I let that happen.]

‘That’s impossible, Harry. The cage.’

‘The cage, the cage. One more thing that stops you doing what needs to be done, and once again it isn’t your fucking fault. You’re a fart in a fucking hurricane, you are.’

In the end, Harry let himself flicker out of existence with a curt farewell. He was – he said – going to use ‘his sources’ to try and find out about the assassin, but hadn’t been optimistic. ‘That was our one chance to get to Yamata. It’s back to square one, buddy.’ Andrea had shown Jack out. He’d barely been able to look at her. He wondered how she’d recover her older self; how she experienced the sudden loss of so much rich living. As he walked away, he heard her start to sing someone else’s song. At that age, she hadn’t yet written any of her own. There was nothing but potential in her voice.

Back at the hotel, he tried to call Corazon. She didn’t answer. He left a message asking her to contact him urgently. He waited for a day, but there was nothing. Thoughts of Andrea tore at him like panthers. It was impossible to distinguish the sense of loss he felt for the woman he’d known so long ago on Station from that he felt for the fetch he’d been so close to while imprisoned on Callisto. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, he made his way to the spot where the body of Bjorn Penderville had been found. It was a kind of masochistic pilgrimage, a means of securing at least part of the past and confirming that it too could not just be deleted.

The murder scene was an empty dock on one of the jetties that floated in space above the open maw of Docklands. Jack let himself hang in the void, floating just past the wharf’s airlock door. The sound of his breath whispered in his ears. He remembered his parents taking him to play in similar docks as a child, carefully introducing him to vacuum suit usage and the hazards of space. Now he wore an adult suit. It allowed no touch or smell. There was only vision to show him the universe. Off to his left he could see bustle – a newly arrived chainship was being disassembled. The wharf to his right was quiet. A command module hung against it like a disembodied head, waiting for a new body to be fitted. Snowflakes hung beyond Station’s shadow. The sun set them ablaze, diagrams sketched on vacuum with an elegant precision far beyond anything that the Pantheon could hope to achieve.

Jack imagined the cathedral beauty of their internal structures. Their physical complexity paled before the technological artistry that each one embodied. He wondered if they were much discussed in the Station. Without access to the weave he couldn’t take part in the discussion. But then, he’d seen precious little interest in the world beyond Station from any of its inhabitants. Perhaps the snowflakes merited little more than the odd, baffled mention, before the conversation returned to introversion.

Beyond the snowflakes, there was nothing. Jack thought of Andrea, then – to distract himself – he remembered the crime scene footage. Penderville had been floating a few metres away from the wharf’s airlock, tethered to it by a length of white rope. The Spine Traffic Controller’s murderer had used a diamond knife to open a tear in the back of his vacuum suit. The sudden decompression had broken him.

InSec technicians had secured the scene, while Harry had accessed local security records, checking to see who had moved through the area. The wharf to the left was not in use. Aud Yamata had been working on the wharf to the right a few hours before. Apart from that there was nothing. A post-mortem confirmed that Penderville’s death was relatively recent, taking place just over an hour after Yamata had finished up and left. There was no record of anybody else in the area. The wharf’s camera nest was no help. It had been struck by a micro-meteorite two days before. Official eyes were blind.

A small choking sound pulled Jack out of his reverie. Looking over at Fist, Jack saw that the puppet’s shoulders were shaking. He was crying. Jack was still too angry with him to feel concern, but he was curious. It was very rare for Fist to show such vulnerability. His programming was meant to ensure that aggression was his response to any threatening situation. Grief only kicked in when all other avenues were exhausted. Jack wondered what had so frustrated him. Fist was whispering to himself, muttering the same phrase over and over again. ‘Stookie Bill, Stookie Bill, keep me safe, Stookie Bill.’

Jack tuned him out and focused on his own problems. He’d always found the silence of space conducive to deep thought. He sank back into himself, letting the swash and backwash of his own breathing soothe him. He was going to run over recent events, looking for any clues he might have missed – handholds and footholds that could help him move forward. But before he could fully drift away, he realised that something unusual was happening. Slowly but surely, without any fuss, the cold and silent world around him was starting to change.

The transformation began with the stars. They were mellowing to something a little yellower, a little creamier. As each one’s colour changed so did its shape, moving from being an empty dot to become a small rip and then a tear in the darkness that surrounded them. As the tears opened up the darkness fell away, no longer an eternal, unreachable absence but rather a shredded backdrop. Fist stopped sobbing. ‘Can you see this too?’ he asked. His wooden jaw hung down in amazement as the great change leapt down from the stars to infect the interior of Station.

There’s no sound in a vacuum. But Jack and Fist both heard a vast, glacial creaking as the circular world of Docklands, stippled across with the streets of a dozen districts, the leaping movement of trains, the firefly darting of flyers and the harsh glow of late afternoon spinelight, began to remake itself. Its round mouth stretched out to form an oval. Yellow-white spinelights became kilometres-long shards of primary colour. Tracery grew between them, infected with the ivory white that had replaced space – for the stars had now merged completely with each other, making the cosmos finite. The universe now ended in great walls that stretched away to the left and the right, above and below, swirling with the bright patterns that had once been the lights of Docklands.

Now it was the turn of the piers and wharves of the Spine to change. They flowed into place along the new walls, becoming a series of vertical columns. As they settled into their new shapes, they lost their metallic sheen – a last memory of what they had been. Between them, shining gouts of primary colours ran together, stretching up and down to mirrored arched points. At last, these new stained glass windows found their final shape, and the universe stopped changing.

Jack was standing in the nave of a cathedral, an open space carved from soft limestone that stretched before and behind him, to his left and to his right. He looked up. There was a great open tower above him. Looking down, he saw himself looking curiously back up. He was no longer wearing a vacuum suit. Two Fists hovered nearby, one right side up above him, one upside down beneath him.

Jack took a step. Ripples rolled out from his feet, shuddering through the perfect, liquid mirror that was the whole floor of the cathedral. They died down as Jack looked down past the two small human bodies, down into the great gulf of cathedral space beneath him, down at pilasters running down walls, down at great illuminated windows, emblazoned with great luminous images of men and women and gods; down for a hundred kilometres towards fan vaulting that could span moons. He shuddered with vertigo.

‘Pantheon,’ breathed Fist.

‘Oh yes,’ said Jack, awed.

Only one part of the world remained unchanged. Snowflakes gleamed in the cathedral space like stars, each duplicated in its liquid mercury floor. A moment of surprise, as Jack realised that they must be interfacing with this great Pantheon illusion. They were either strong enough to break through the image that had been thrown over the world, or somehow complicit in its creation. Then anything but an astonished awe left him as a thousand voices leapt into being and an invisible choir started to sing.

There was a soft, high keening drifting over a deeper bass rumble, the two alternately twining around then leaping away from each other. Deep beneath them an organ droned, its long, slow chords lending weight to the sadness emerging from their great pulses of harmony. The reflection below Jack shimmered in time with the music, until the voices fell silent and the mirror-floor stilled. Then one vast chord came crashing in as the organ and all the voices howled in unison, filling the nave and its reflection with a great, tectonic grief. All that had gone before had only been an introduction. The full choir was an infinity of voices, beating at the air with note after note as the organ raged on beneath them.

A figure glowed into being high up in the distance, hanging before the single great round window that burnt at the heart of the cathedral’s apse. ‘She must be kilometres high,’ thought Jack. White fabrics drifted around her. Her face was covered. She carried a pale, dead weight in her arms. Limbs hung down from it. There was a head, tipped all the way back. The woman and her burden started moving towards Jack, falling into human scale as they came. The music subsided into one endlessly sustained note. Cries of grief cut through it, hacking away at its simple purity like so many blunted knives.

‘What does this mean?’ whispered Fist.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The woman reached Jack. As she came to a halt her robes began to fold themselves away, wings that were no longer needed. She drifted down, delicate feet extended. When she landed she staggered slightly and Jack understood how heavy her burden was. She walked the last few paces, rippling circles spinning away from her feet, until she stood before him. The last of the white fabric rippled away, revealing her face. It was East. Her eyes were rimmed with red. Tears had pulled makeup down her cheeks in long black tracks.

‘You involved her,’ she spat, her voice harsh with grief and rage. ‘It’s because of you.’

For the first time, Jack looked down at the body. Out of uniform, it took him a second to recognise it. He wanted to be mistaken. Fist hovered in closer and peered at the corpse. When he spoke, it was the first time in days that he’d sounded cheerful.

‘Well, Jackie boy, you’ve missed your chance with her for good.’

A bullet had punched a small neat hole in the corpse’s forehead.

There could be no doubt that Corazon was dead.

Chapter 22

East called a rectangular stone block into being and gently laid Corazon’s corpse on to it. Reaching up, she softened their surroundings, making it seem that sheets of gauze hung between the little group and the cathedral’s great empty spaces. There was a sudden sense of intimacy.

‘Where is she?’ asked Jack.

‘InSec broke into her apartment a few minutes ago. She hadn’t turned up for her shift.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘One of my favourites. I didn’t even know.’

‘I’m sure she had faith you’d come for her.’

‘No. You don’t understand. She was one of the ones I loved, one of the ones I was taking most care of. I watch them all the time. I am always present to them. I thought she was in bed, asleep. Then the image of her in my mind flickered, and there she was, dead. I reached out and touched her. Her body was already cold. They’d hidden her from me for hours.’

‘We already knew there was Pantheon involvement …’

‘But I see everything, as soon as it happens, and I know every secret! I am the eye in every room, the ear that always hears, the mind that always knows. My newsrooms, my weavecasts, my telenovelas and keitai shousetsou and bandes dessinées and shadowplays – what are they if I can’t know that I’m watching the world, and reflecting it? How can something so important be hidden from me? What else haven’t I seen, Jack?’

A small hand grabbed his shirt. A tear grew from her eye like a tiny, transparent leaf, then dropped away down her cheek. Another joined it, then more, and she was weeping. Jack was unsure how to respond appropriately, how to comfort a god. She pulled herself in closer, both hands clutching him. Very tentatively, he moved one arm round her, then the other. Over her shoulder, Fist winked and leered. Jack closed his eyes, ignoring him.

The goddess’ hair smelt of static. Jack felt a gentle buzz as it brushed up against him. He was standing in an awkwardly formal way. She nestled in further, burying her head in his chest. Tears moistened the front of his shirt. Her body pressed against his with the softness of cinema seats. She was sobbing, and she shook with every sob. Every quiver of her body rippled against Jack. He struggled to quell a growing arousal. But then she was looking up at him, alluring as a midnight advert, and her hand was reaching down, and he was stiffening at her touch.

‘I can’t …’ he said, ‘Grey …’ but his breathing quickened as he said it.

‘He’s an old man,’ she replied, ‘fallen from grace.’ She kissed him once. Her lips snatched at his. ‘And he let you fall too.’ Her hot mouth touched his again, her tongue opening his lips, and then she was inside him. All that was divine in her took him and made him a vessel, pouring itself into him again and again and again.

Jack would never remember much of their love making. Later, he’d think back to the young man he’d seen her take in Ushi’s, after Andrea sang. The acolyte’s face had been rising towards a kind of blank perfection – a television screen, ecstatically detuning itself, finding release in the empty space that lies between channels. Jack assumed that he’d been lost in that same erasing joy.

All Fist would say was, ‘You looked as happy as a pig in shit.’

Towards the end, East let Jack find enough of himself to know that she was whispering in his ear.

‘I am remaking you, little Puppeteer,’ she breathed. ‘I’m slipping the chains from your little creature and sending you both out to be my revenge.’

‘I am no one’s vengeance but my own.’

‘Because of you, my Corazon is dead.’

Then she nibbled at his ear. His mouth had to sigh open and his back had to arch and press him so much deeper into her. As he entered further into her, so she dug deeper into him.

‘I’m going to make you a weapon again.’

Now she was far enough in to reach Fist. As Jack exploded into orgasm, the last of his defences dropped away and she had full access to them both. The world shattered. For a second that drifted forever he was not himself. In the distance, he heard Fist screaming, but he was too fragmented to care.

When he came round, he was lying on a stone altar next to the one supporting Corazon. East stood over him, perfectly dressed, her clothes, hair and makeup immaculate. No sign of their lovemaking remained. She was holding Fist by the scruff of his neck, her free hand clamped over his mouth. His eyes were wide with terror. His legs and arms thrashed around as he tried to free himself.

‘I’ve removed all the blocks they put on him. Be careful how you use him – they won’t know I’ve done this. I’ve made some changes to you, too.’

‘Why are you holding him like that?’

‘I saw that you’d been having problems with him. I’m going to burn him out for you.’

‘What?’ Jack felt groggily detached from himself. His mind ached. He wondered how much celestial weaveware East had forced into him. Resentment surged in him.

‘I’m going to wipe his personality structures,’ she continued. ‘He’s just going to be software. No more Fist. No more rebellion.’ Fist tried to howl. It came out as a muffled series of grunts. ‘Just say the word.’

‘Why haven’t you done it already?’

‘Fist’s leased in your name and licensed to you. I need your direct permission.’

Jack sighed. ‘Can you change the licence conditions? Stop him from taking my body?’

Sadness drifted across her face. Jack was reminded of an advert where a woman had been grieved by her inability to find an effective financial adviser. ‘No, Jack. I can’t break that kind of agreement. But I can burn out the thinking part of him.’

‘He’ll still own – this.’ Jack waved down at his body.

‘It will pass out of your control, yes. But there will be nothing of him to guide it. Just – silence.’

Fist kicked out against her. His eyes blinked, rapidly. He was trying to cry, but was too afraid to.

‘I can’t let you do that,’ Jack told her. ‘I thank you for unlocking him. But I can’t let you touch his mind.’

Fist’s eyes opened wide.

‘He tried to attack me while you were still asleep,’ replied East. ‘Then he told me I should let him take your body now.’

‘His software partitioned part of my mind, and made him there. Everything in him comes from me.’

‘He won’t obey you. He’ll try and stop you.’

‘If you kill him, you kill part of me.’

‘You can’t trust him.’

‘I can’t always trust myself.’

East snorted. ‘Let’s see what he has to say.’ She took her hand away from Fist’s mouth. For once, he was silent. He remained limp in her arms. She set him down at her feet. He tottered slightly, as if standing for the first time, then looked up at her. She stared back, arms crossed. He broke and ran to Jack, leaving a dozen spreading silver circles behind him, and threw himself into his arms, his little voice whispering ‘thank you’ over and over again.

‘You’re going to regret this,’ spat East.

The myriad ripples Fist had left behind bounced forwards and backwards between the two altars.

‘Yamata and her patron may be afraid of him,’ replied Jack. ‘But I’m not.’

‘He’s an unpredictable psychopath. Seems to me that they’re the sensible ones,’ East replied dismissively. ‘Oh, and there’s one more thing I have to do for you.’

Jack was cradling Fist in his arms, soothing him. He looked up at her.

‘What’s that?’

East touched the wound on the forehead of Corazon’s weave presence. The policewoman’s body was already losing definition. A lifetime’s worth of data was falling into the Coffin Drives. ‘I ring-fenced the last hours of her life.’ East’s fingers sunk into Corazon’s head. She grasped something and pulled it out – a bullet. A small pistol appeared in her other hand. ‘I’m going to share them with you.’ She slipped the bullet into the pistol. ‘Find her killers.’

Then she straightened her arm, and shot Jack in the head.

Chapter 23

When Jack came round, floating just off the Spine, his mind felt broken. It took him hours longer than it should have done to walk back to his hotel. Fist had to help him, displaying an embarrassed, awkward solicitude as – at various points – he slid into full control of Jack’s body and helped him totter through the streets. It was late, so very few people were around.

When they reached the hotel, Charles was on duty. His eyes lit up as he saw Jack, sparkling with irrepressible joy. ‘Oh, hello!’ he cooed. His shirt was brightly decorated with endlessly overlapping flowers. To Jack, it felt like a violent assault. He took an awkward step and nearly fell. ‘Dear me, just look at you!’ Charles rushed round from the desk and put an arm round him, steadying him. ‘Poor you. Been overdoing the sauce? I daresay we all deserve a night on the tiles from time to time.’

Jack leant heavily on him as they stumbled down to his room. Charles’ frail body bent and swayed, barely equal to the task of supporting him. Up close, his skin had a light, waxy sheen. There was a scent of gin to him. When they reached Jack’s room, Fist slipped briefly into control again, standing Jack up and walking him to his bed. Charles hovered solicitously at the doorway, his face filled with genuine concern. ‘Thank you, Fist,’ Jack muttered, forgetting that he was speaking aloud. ‘That’s the little man who lives in you, isn’t it?’ asked Charles. Jack collapsed on to the bed as Fist slipped back into the depths of his mind. ‘It must be so nice, to have company like that,’ whispered Charles sadly. And then he made himself beam again. He fussed merrily about the room, arranging blankets round Jack and pouring a glass of water for the bedside table. He sang out, ‘Cheerio!’ as the door slammed behind him.

Fist stayed hidden away. Jack tumbled into sleep. His dreams were suffused with the memories that East had forced so deeply into his head. They were the raw stuff of Corazon’s dataself, the wholly recorded conscious experience that both informed and was created by the weave presence that had surrounded her in life. Jack’s mind snatched at them, pulling them into coherence then integrating them with his own consciousness.

He dreamed that he was leaving InSec, buying food, licensing steak and chicken flavour packs, chatting with a friend. Each moment was part of a broader association set, and so triggered related memories as Jack experienced it. Irin Lestak drank coffee. Corazon trusted her. A hovercar skimmed overhead. This year’s new models would be out soon. Last week’s soup was delicious. The vegetables in her fridge had gone off. The friend was dating a very good-looking man. They should go out for cocktails and a chat. And so it went on.

At last the day ended and Corazon slept. Her dreams pulsed through Jack’s dreaming mind, creating imaginative feedback loops. He felt Fist step into and damp down the memory stream, making sure it didn’t overwhelm him. Again, there was that new sense of care. Even in sleep it surprised him. As the feedback loops faded, Jack realised that he’d stepped beyond dreaming into a new, lucid state of imaginative self-management.

He pulled himself out of the Corazon memory stream and examined it from outside. It was a profoundly complex tangle of interlinked association sets. Jack reached for a simpler, more linear way of viewing them. They resolved into a series of specific incidents, arranged in order of occurrence. Focusing on a particular incident would trigger its playback. Wanting to avoid the trauma of her death until he was acclimatised to her presence, Jack ran through key moments in the twenty-four hours before it. He found himself talking to her. Watching from her point of view, he marvelled at how well she’d overcome her fear and loss as her faith in the Pantheon shattered.

At last, he felt ready to experience the moment of her murder. Fist pricked into alertness, ready to snap into action if the past became too brutal to bear. But there should be no deep pain. Corazon had been shot in the head and died almost instantly. Her body had shown no sign of any other injuries. There was a void where remembrance ended. Jack sited himself a little way before it and let time begin again.

There was the soft wrapping of sheets around her, then slumbering shapes in the gloom and a feeling of dazed half-awakeness as she snatched at the weave and found that it was missing from her senses. The loud knocking that had woken her continued. A voice shouted ‘InSec business, Lieutenant Corazon,’ then a code word. She assumed a weavecrash and an emergency summons to work. Soon she’d be helping clear up the inevitable riot as people lost themselves in a protective combination of rage and fear. It was never easy to face the world as it was, not as they wanted it to be.

Soft T-shirt fabric moved against her as she stood up. She pulled on her even softer dressing gown. Lights glowed into life as she walked to her front door and bent down to peer through its spyhole. There was nothing outside that she understood as a threat, just someone with blue hair, pale skin to match and a soft purple light in her eyes.

Jack was pulled out of the dream for a moment as he recognised the woman who’d shot David Nihal. A man stood behind her. Corazon snatched a glimpse of a sharp suit and a precise moustache before her view of them both was suddenly obscured. Jack winced as he remembered panthers.

Then a huge, all-consuming pain took him as he was shot in the head for the second time. For a moment the world was nothing but the dying roar of a bullet blasting through a spyhole. The door spun away and a wall fell past. Corazon gazed up at soft ceiling lights. Then the last images her eyes had made faded, and there was very nearly peace. Nothing remained but the static hiss of technology, still yearning for the vivid whisperings of synapses, axons and neurons. But there was no input left for it to gently touch at, and record.

Chapter 24

[ Wake up! Wake up!]

Fist was shaking Jack’s shoulder.

[ What? Hell!]

Jack’s head thumped with the pressure of fresh memories, with deep Pantheonware still unpacking itself into his psyche.

[ InSec outside! They’re raiding us. Shit!]

Jack sat up. The room spun. For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was waking as himself, or as a woman in soft sheets in the luxury of a Homelands condominium. The puddle of stars in the hotel floor brought him back to reality. Corazon’s ghost left his mind. East was still present to him. The tawdry hotel furniture glittered in a new way.

[ We’ve got to get out, Jack. What if they know I’m uncaged?]

[ They can’t know that. What can you see?]

[Lestak and three snatch teams. Two out front, one at back. Just getting into position. A minute and they’re in the room.]

[Let’s go.]

Jack had passed out fully clothed. He was at the door then sprinting down the corridor, Fist running along behind him.

[ Back way?] Jack panted.

[Dead ahead, up the service stairs.]

They were steep and narrow. The walls were stained dark at shoulder height. They reached an emergency exit door. Jack opened it a crack. He saw a long, covered alleyway. There was bright morning light at the end of it, and the silhouettes of three men.

[One of the squads, Jack.]

[Can you offweave them?]

[ Yes, but you know the protocols. They might miss a check in. That’ll trigger every alarm they’ve got.]

[Shit.]

[ I can climb inside their heads and fuck them right up.]

[ I don’t want to harm them.]

[Sentimental. What about all that Eastware? Must be something useful there.]

Jack pushed his attention into the headache that still gripped his mind. It was like probing a fresh wound with a stick. There was pain, but Fist was right. Jack found a thread he could pull on to reach an entirely new way of being himself. East’s Pantheonware flooded his limbic system, setting up subtle overrides, rewriting his body language, reskinning his oral intonation patterns. There was a gauge that measured ‘presence’, set amongst others that included ‘impact’, ‘charm’ and ‘memorability’. A thought pushed them all to one hundred per cent. Then Jack raised himself to his full height, opened the door wide and set off towards the snatch squad.

[ Fuck’s sake, Jack,] said Fist. [ We’re going to get caught. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?]

They saw him, raised their guns and started towards him. One of them was about to start subvocalizing when Jack said, ‘Stop.’ They saw his face and heard his voice, and a shimmer of subtle behavioural cues settled over their perception of him. Their weave systems were reshaped to make him shine with a strange kind of immanent beauty. All three could do nothing more than stand and gape. One dropped his gun. Another seemed to be wetting himself.

[ Very impressive!] chuckled Fist.

Jack stepped forwards and touched the first of them, wanting to push him to one side. The man collapsed to his knees, eyes still on Jack, his face suffused with inhuman satisfaction. The second moved back, tongue lolling stupidly as he dripped on to the floor. The third was less affected. He was trying to force words out of his mouth, nearly choking himself with effort. At last a question came staggering into the air. ‘Can I have your autograph?’ He reached out for Jack, again imploring, ‘Autograph?’ Jack backed away from him.

[Ditch these wankers,] snapped Fist. [Out of the alley, turn right.]

Jack ran, thrusting the settings on East’s new installations back to zero. It made no difference to the three men behind him. They were still broken. He heard a final, plaintive cry: ‘Autograph!’

[ What just happened, Fist?]

[Gift of the gods. Now don’t think. RUN!]

They lost themselves in Docklands. An hour or so later, Jack was nursing a coffee in a small café in the Neon Quarter. The seat was bolted down too close to the table, forcing him to hunch over. Fist had hacked into a passerby and used him to pay for the drink. He’d ordered a bacon sandwich too. Jack could hear it sizzling on the hob beyond the counter. [ We didn’t need to pay for any of it,] Fist complained. [ With what East’s left running in you, you could have had it all for free.] He leered at the waitress, who was leaning against the bar. [And anything else, too.] Jack was glad that she couldn’t see him.

[ What is in me, Fist?]

Fist wasn’t just useful for hacking outwards. He’d been checking for changes in Jack’s root systems, trying to understand exactly how East had upgraded his personal weaveware. Jack could still feel the new controls in his mind, but – after the alleyway, and the broken guards – felt nervous about even touching them.

[ You’re running Pantheon-level celebrity systems. She’s installed the unlocked version, you can do whatever you want with it. You saw what it did to those goons outside the hotel. Verrrry tasty. I wonder if it would work on a squishy?]

Jack was too tired to argue with Fist. The deaths of the last twenty-four hours had shattered him. He’d seen Nihal’s head blown open and his body broken. He’d felt the last strands of Corazon’s consciousness falling to nothing. A god had put a bullet in his own mind. And he’d broken three men, so overwhelming them with his presence that they became dead to themselves. He hoped that they’d recover.

[ This stuff is hardcore. Combined software and meatware assault. Those InSec goons won’t come down in a hurry.]

[ I didn’t know what it would do.]

[ Try it on the waitress, go on!]

[ No.]

She was coming over to them, an off-white plate balanced in one hand. She’d scrawled weave sigils across her uniform in cheap marker pen. The black ink had faded to a raw, bruise-like purple. Her blonde hair was piled up on her head. A clip, decorated with another sigil, clutched it together in an untidy knot.

[ What do her sigils say, Fist?]

[ They invoke some third-rate designer. There’s a beauty charm too. Give her some of the real thing, Jack!]

Even through all the Eastware was turned down, Jack was still afraid that she would suddenly thrill at his presence. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her directly when she put the plate down. He hunched his shoulders and pulled his coat in, staring at the table and muttering, ‘Thanks.’ She shrugged and turned away.

[Missed your chance.]

[ Be quiet.]

The sandwich went down in a couple of bites. It barely tasted of anything – the bread was just a soft warmth in his mouth, the bacon a sharper, crispier one. Fist had logged him into the café’s tastenet, but it added very little to the experience.

[So what now?] asked Fist.

[Lie low. Avoid InSec. Wait until it’s very late. Pay an old friend a visit.]

[Akhmatov?]

[Oh yes.]

[And you’ve got some questions for him?]

[Especially now I’ve seen how Corazon was killed. He was there.]

[ He killed her?]

[ No. The blue-haired woman from Customs House shot her. Just like she did Nihal.]

[Do you think she’s Yamata?]

[She’s not how I remember her. But she might have done more than just reskin herself. So yes, I think she might be.]

[Oo! Very exciting, we might be starting to track her down. And when you’re asking Akhmatov questions, you might need a little help from me?]

[ Yes Fist, I might well indeed.]

Fist snuggled up against Jack. He tried to wrap his arms around his waist, then gave up and enfolded his arm, hugging it tight. He’d never been so demonstrative before, at best admitting to feeling little more than a friendly but embarrassed contempt for Jack. He’d been much more helpful too, since his brush with death. Jack wondered how deep the change went, and how permanent it would turn out to be. He wasn’t sure how much he could trust it.

[ I’ll get answers for you,] Fist chirped. [ I’ll be nasty cop. You can use your charms on him. You’ll be nice cop.] He giggled. [ The nicest cop ever! I’m looking forward to it. Today’s going to pass really slowly.]

[ We can’t let InSec catch us. We’ve got to keep moving. Anything more to pay?] Fist shook his head. [ Then let’s go.]

[ What about Harry?]

[ We’ll go back to him once we’ve got some results.]

They spent the rest of the day walking the streets of Docklands. Fist bobbed along beside Jack, sometimes floating, sometimes walking, always reaching out and confusing surveillance systems. He talked in an excited babble, thrilled to at last be fully himself again. Jack said very little. At one point, they found themselves near his old junior school. Nostalgia snapped at him. Wire netting fenced in a playground that was set in the arms of a large, semicircular building.

[Shithole,] said Fist.

[ I had a lot of fun here.]

That would once have been a very difficult thing for Jack to admit. He’d worked so hard to put Docklands behind him. He’d even refused to bring Andrea here. Now, it just seemed to be a simple, uncontentious statement of fact.

[Easily pleased,] said Fist.

It was break time. The children were playing a football variant. Two loosely defined teams screamed and jostled happily against each other. The game had absorbed almost every child there.

[ I was about the same age as you are now.]

[My mind runs much faster than yours,] Fist snorted. [ I’m much older than seven!]

[ Really?]

One team was about to score when a whistle blew, and the game abruptly stopped. The child with the football swore, grumpily kicking the ball away. The two teams broke quickly into smaller groups, some children happily rushing off together, others clearly very annoyed.

[End of break time?] asked Fist. [ I wanted to see him score. It was getting quite exciting.]

[ No,] replied Jack. [ Their gaming allowance is time limited.]

[ What?]

[ It’s the kid version of Pantheon licensing. They can’t just play a game. They have to hire use of its rules from the Twins. That costs. A school like this can only afford so much.]

[ Why don’t they just keep playing?]

[ Heavy fines. Theft of intellectual property.]

[Gods, no wonder the Totality revolted.]

[ It seemed so reasonable, when I was their age.]

They stood there for another minute or so, watching the children invent scrappy, spontaneous games then chase around for a few minutes playing them. Fist was fascinated. He pressed his face close up against the fence. Jack thought of Andrea – of what she’d been, of what she’d become. He wished that he’d come here with her to watch the children play, back in the unreachable past.

[Let’s go,] he said.

[Awww.]

[ We need to keep moving.]

Thoughts of the past led Jack’s mind to East’s cathedral. That too had been a temple to loss. He remembered Corazon’s death. It came to him again and again, no matter how hard he tried to push it away. Each attempt to forget began to feel like a betrayal. He walked faster and faster, forcing himself through the streets of Docklands, away from the past and into a future where – he hoped – he would no longer be quite so helpless in the face of all that time and the gods had stolen.

Chapter 25

Raindrops landed like little cat feet. [ I really can see everything now,] Fist chirped. [Stop, Jack, let me show you, there’s so much!]

[ No,] Jack said and strode on, making Fist dance through the sodden night streets to keep up with him. The little puppet skipped in and out of the gutter, searching for the deepest puddles to jump into. He cooed with glee every time his tiny, ghostly feet disappeared. He used his newly enabled weave access to simulate splashes.

[So many droplets, all flying up!] Another little leap. [ It’s astonishing, Jack, I’ll take you onweave to see. I can do anything!]

Jack remained silent ahead of him. He’d pulled his hat down and twitched up the collar of his trench coat until his face was all but invisible. That didn’t stop people from stopping and admiring him. ‘Oh, that coat’s beautifully cut,’ said one. ‘He knows how to wear a suit,’ said another. ‘I’d fuck him,’ announced a third. Every time he heard someone thrill at his East-enhanced weave presence, Jack pulled his hat a little further down and for a minute or so broke into a near trot to escape.

They arrived at the Panther Czar at about eleven o’clock. Outside the club, the queue laughed and jostled and squabbled. Deep beats boomed out from within. They ducked into a doorway just over the road. The light rain turned the hard neon signage that crawled around the club into something far gentler and more subtle than Pierre Akhmatov had ever intended.

[Let me get you onweave,] begged Fist.

[Later. It’s not the right moment.]

As late evening turned to deep night the queue waned. At about half past two, as the weather worsened, the exodus began. Drenching rain suffused the night, encouraging those leaving to dart quickly away. Its heaviness was deliberate, Pantheon planners reducing late night crime by nudging revellers off the streets. It dulled sound and light, filling the night with a soft, static hiss, turning streetlamps into half-seen orbs. Couples huddled up against each other, nearly running, spilling high-heel clacks into the air. Groups shouted farewells and then rapidly split into ones, twos, threes, taking off up or down the street.

[Let’s go in now. I can’t wait!]

[ We’re going to wait until it’s just him in there.]

[ How do you know he’ll stay?]

[ I spent months studying his routine. Sunday night, and he processes the week’s takings alone. The club hasn’t changed much since then. His habits won’t have done, either.]

There was one final burst of departures before the door staff began shutting up the front of the building. One by one, neon lights winked out.

[ They’re taking it offweave.]

Jack watched Fist kick at a real pebble. The stone didn’t move but Fist looked up suddenly, his eyes swivelling as he watched its virtual equivalent fly through the air.

[ You’re chasing dreams, Fist.]

[ Fun dreams.]

A small swarm of sweatheads drifted by. Jack pretended not to see them. One had empty sleeves where her arms should hang. Another moved on crutches, a single leg swaying backwards and forwards between them. Fist stepped into the road, and, pointing towards them, turned his eager face to Jack.

[ I could make them all look so beautiful, Jack. Almost as beautiful as you can be! Get them all laid, what do you think? And then there’ll be people waking up with them tomorrow, when the overlay lifts off. Won’t it be funny?]

[Come back here, Fist. Save your energy. You’ve got much more important things to do tonight.]

[ When, Jack, when?]

[Soon.]

Fist was clearly spoiling for a fight. Jack was surprised by relief that East hadn’t broken his fighting spirit. It was such a fundamental part of the puppet’s personality.

Now the staff were leaving the club, running under the rain as their customers had done. The last few lights in the entrance hallway flicked off. A heavily built man tugged the club’s main doors closed and locked them. As he turned to walk away, a gust of wind snatched at his coat, exposing a white shirt and a black bow-tie. He started to whistle, deliberately walking slowly; refusing to acknowledge the storm. His whistle died away. Rain hissed like a detuned radio.

[ Now, Fist,] snapped Jack, starting across the road. Fist followed, rising into the air until his head was level with his master’s. [Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this!] he sang out. Jack almost commented on how much more helpful he was being compared to the last time they’d visited the club. But the change might turn out to be temporary. Mentioning it could break it. [ Then open that door,] he said [and let’s go play.]

No one either inside or outside the Panther Czar saw them enter. Nobody could, because Fist had reached into the weave and – using the codes that managed sweathead perception – made them both invisible. Camera stalks swivelled away from them as the main doors opened with a rainwater hiss.

Inside was warm and dry and dark. Fist constructed a view of the corridor that led away from the main reception area from infra-red security camera footage and dropped it in behind Jack’s eyes. [Straight ahead, then over the dance floor,] he told him. They moved silently, barely as substantial as the shadows that surrounded them. Their shared experience of training and fighting rose up inside them like a rebooted operating system.

[ No security manifesting, Fist?]

[ That’ll kick off a bit later, when I let them see us.]

[ Wait till we reach the private area.]

The empty club oozed memories of spilt drinks, transient highs and hobbled lives. Jack wondered at the kind of mind that could achieve transcendence in such a limited, limiting space.

[ I could turn on some of their weaveware, Jack. Then you’d see something.]

They slipped towards the stairs that they’d climbed only a few days ago. [Let him see us,] said Jack. A moment, then Fist replied, [Done.] Jack shouted up the stairs, his voice suddenly, shockingly harsh in the velvet silence that suffused the empty club.

‘We’re coming for you, Akhmatov.’

Akhmatov’s response took maybe a second. The air shimmered and a huge black cat was roaring towards them, already in midleap. Its mouth was a shocking neon pink against darkly blazing fur. It was four times larger than Jack remembered. He threw his arms up and tottered backwards. It was all he could do not to scream.

Then Fist touched it and became the panther. [So much for his outer security perimeter,] he growled through his new mouth. [ It was all of them at once. He’s scared. You OK?]

[ Bad memories.]

They went up the stairs and through the security doors, Fist padding on all fours, carefully keeping his distance from Jack. Jack kicked Akhmatov’s office door. Wood tore away from hinges. He stepped through it and found himself in a desert. A jagged sun blazed in a blue sky above harsh yellow sand and bleach white rocks. Each colour was an assault.

‘We’ve come for you, you murderous fuck.’

Fist followed Jack into the room. He split into four normal-sized panthers, each made puppet. Soft fur was replaced by black paint; tooth ivory by pale, unstained wood. The first panther stopped and licked itself. Its wooden tongue clacked softly as it moved across its haunches, flicking against wooden joints that replaced ones made of ligament and bone.

The second panther raised its head to the empty sky and growled. The sound was clearly artificial. The third and fourth sat resting on a large rock, eyes and ears swivelling. The rock seemed suddenly a little more unreal, a painted polystyrene prop discarded from an exhausted movie set.

[ He’s here. Hiding, but he’s here,] said Fist through the first panther. Its cat throat gave Fist’s voice a rich, deep huskiness. Jack remembered the tearing of claws, deep in flesh.

[Do we really need the panthers? Couldn’t you just crash his weave access?]

[ I could. And then we’d have him. But—] The second panther stretched, reaching out with its forelegs and pushing hard against the ground. Claws scratched at the sand. [—we wouldn’t have server access. We need to go through all this to get to them.] The cat’s haunches rose up high, its tail – segmented links that looked like a black spine – twitching and spinning above them.

[ Then stop preening, and get it over with!]

[Oh, I think I scent him now,] growled the third panther. It jumped down from the rock, thudded on to the sand and prowled forwards, its long shadow sliding along behind it. The others moved with it, the four of them forming an arrowhead. The lead panther turned back to Jack – [ He’s here …] – then snapped its head forward again. Its whole body tensed, then it was flying forward, pouncing at the empty air, claws snatching at something that, if there was a breeze, could just have been a billow of sand. But there was no breeze.

Paper-white teeth clashed with empty air. There was a thin high scream, and suddenly there was no sun or sand or rock. Blueness shimmered round Jack, the wooden panthers floating just ahead of him. A shock of cold broke against his whole body. He breathed out and bubbles rose. He and Fist had been pulled underwater. Akhmatov’s security beasts were lost to him, and so he was fighting back with the only thing that remained under his control: the environment.

The shock of immersion made Jack forget to hold his breath. To his surprise, he felt his lungs fill with air. The simulation of being underwater was not complete. The lead panther thrashed around ahead of him. It was wrapped around something, mouth and claws tearing at it. Jack assumed that Fist was struggling with Akhmatov, but the club owner remained invisible, his security systems not yet finally defeated. His resistance had already lasted for at least five seconds – highly impressive, against Fist. The other panthers propelled themselves towards the fight with regular backward kicks. In the meantime, Jack could do nothing to help.

The sea was as empty as the desert had been. Above, there was only a lighter blue. There was no sign of a surface. Below, the water darkened to black. Shards of sunlight danced between Jack and the combatants, the ocean vast beyond them. Jack wondered how it had been coded. Perhaps it was finite and eventually stopped. Perhaps he could move through it forever, the simulation perpetually creating new distance before him. Fear chilled him. A digital eternity seemed so much emptier than its analogue equivalent.

Another of the panthers reached the fight. It threw itself into the fray and, once again, the world changed. They were no longer underwater. A gentle breeze gusted against Jack. He stood in a circle of henges, each one made of two upright man-sized stones supporting a third horizontal one. A sunset sky blazed with reds and oranges. Long shadows drifted across the centre of the circle, where a single sarsen lay flat. Two panthers rolled and snarled across it, their wooden bodies clattering against the rock. The others paced, looking for a way into the fight. Akhmatov’s security systems were not yet sufficiently compromised to give them access.

Fist had however managed to dismantle some of his camouflage protocols. The two fighting cats spun and snarled around a shadowy figure, an almost man-shaped mass of disturbed air. Teeth and claws tore into it. It bled tiny spatters of visual noise. They became spots of red as they hit the green grass. The third cat pounced. There was a howl, and they were in the jungle clearing where Jack had been tortured. Memories of virtual claws ripped through Jack. He wondered what state Akhmatov would be in when his defences were finally broken. He turned away and leant against a tree. It felt wet. His hand was covered with brown paint. He touched a low hanging leaf. His fingers came away green. This was no longer the reality that Akhmatov had built. Fist was remaking it according to his own needs.

Looking around, Jack felt like an actor who’d wandered into an empty stage set. Unreality was exploding into being everywhere. The jungle floor was nothing more than brown-painted concrete, the trees that leapt out of it brightly coloured flats. Even the bird-song that suffused the space changed, crackling through static for a moment then reinstating itself as a series of obvious imitations. The battle was nearly over. Fist let out a triumphant howl, drowning out Akhmatov’s scream of rage and terror. The painted jungle disappeared entirely.

There was a popping sound, and the sharp smell of burning plastic. Then a new scene took over. Fluorescent strip-lights lit an unremarkable room holding a desk, some chairs and four paintings. One showed a desert, one a sea, one a stone circle and one a dense jungle. Panthers prowled through each of them.

Akhmatov was lying on the floor, shaking. Fist stood over him, now just a wooden puppet again, and cackled gleefully. ‘If you try anything on,’ he said, ‘I’ll crack your mind open like an egg and piss in it.’

‘He means it,’ said Jack. ‘I’d do what he says, if I were you.’

Chapter 26

They let Akhmatov pull himself up and lean against the desk. He was dressed in a black shirt and trousers. Both were covered in silver weave sigils.

‘I’ve shut down his access to the club systems,’ said Fist. ‘There’s nothing there but flesh.’ Jack pulled the chair out from the other side of the desk and sat down. [And I’m running through his files, too,] added Fist quietly. [ I’ll let you know if I find anything good.] Akhmatov was wheezing. His skin was a traumatised grey. It was an effort for him to speak, but his voice was surprisingly strong when he did.

‘I should have killed you eight years ago.’

Fist started towards him, his little hands twitching. ‘No, Fist,’ ordered Jack. ‘You’ve had your fun. We need him able to talk.’ Fist sat down hard, grumbling to himself about nice cops. Jack turned back to Akhmatov. ‘And we should have raided your clubs and arrested you.’

‘You’d have been stopped if you’d tried that.’

‘Pantheon?’ said Jack. ‘They did stop me, in the end.’

‘And we learned from you. Yamata stripped anything to do with her patron out of my systems.’

[Shit.]

[ I’ll keep looking,] replied Fist. [ There’ll be something we can use. There always is.] Then he spoke out loud. ‘Don’t stop talking, Akhmatov. Tell us what we want to hear. Make it easy on yourself.’

‘That’s what torturers always say, isn’t it?’ Akhmatov was slumped against the table, legs splayed out before him, a puppet whose strings had been cut. ‘Rest assured the gods will torture you.’

‘Not for your sake, though,’ replied Jack. ‘You don’t really matter, do you? It’s Aud Yamata and poor dead Penderville that count. That’s what they don’t want us digging into.’

‘I’m saying nothing.’

‘Look at Yamata now. Disappeared. A new identity, a new weave presence, maybe even a new body. Where is she? Somewhere in the Wart? In Homelands? In Heaven, even?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘She’s your boss. Why did she get promoted when you didn’t? What did she do that was so valuable? She was just one of the grunts back in the day, the one who brought the sweat in. But now you’re still stuck counting cash in a Docklands dive. And she’s who knows where, but it’s better than here, isn’t it?’

‘Shut up Forster.’

‘And how do you feel about her now she’s the queen and you’re just a pawn? She wanted us to find you, that’s why she let Corazon see you. She thought I’d torture you and probably kill you, and you’d know what she could do to your fetch, so you’d stay loyal and keep silent, and that would be it. But if you help me bring her down you won’t have to worry about that.’

‘I think we should kill him,’ said Fist. Then [Keep him talking. He’s anonymised all his contacts. I can’t tell which one’s Yamata. Make him slip up, give something away.]

[OK,] said Jack. Then he continued out loud, ‘No, Fist. We’re not going to hurt him at all. Because if we did, if we even killed him, then we’d be just as much a pawn as he’s been, all these years. And we don’t believe in that, do we, Fist? We don’t believe in being pawns, in just doing what we’re told. Nicely. Politely.’

‘Let me break him.’

Jack laughed. ‘I could be a far nastier cop than you, if I wanted to,’ he replied. ‘You’ve probably heard this morning what I did to those policemen.’ He knelt down next to Akhmatov, so he was almost face to face with him. ‘Last night I slept with East, and she opened herself up to me. Gave me everything. You know what that means, don’t you? She must be a regular, in a club like yours.’

For the first time, emotion flickered across Akhmatov’s face. Fear crept out of him. Jack sensed a sad, defeated rage behind it. He wondered if East had increased his sensitivity, too. ‘She gave me everything,’ he whispered.

‘If you’re going to show me,’ said Akhmatov, ‘do it now. Do it quickly.’

Jack sighed. ‘No. You’re not going to help me find Yamata because I’ve made you love me, barely able to scrabble around in your own memories for lust of me. You’re going to do it because you’ve understood just how you’ve been used, and you’re more angry than you are afraid. Aren’t you?’ He let a few seconds hang empty in the air, then nudged an East switch in his mind. He moved in even closer and whispered ‘Aren’t you, Akhmatov?’ as quietly as he could.

‘They should have let me fucking kill you when I had the chance!’

Akhmatov’s sudden movement knocked Jack backwards. The other man was on top of him, fingers scrabbling for his throat. ‘I told Yamata that you were a risk to me,’ he shouted, ‘to all of us, but she didn’t listen – and look where we are now! That bitch coming back from Sheltie, pretending it’s a job for her security firm, and we kill a man I’ve known for twenty years and some fucking policewoman, and you’re here, and look where we fucking are now!’

[ Bingo!] said Fist. [ That’s it.]

When Jack hit Akhmatov it was like punching a wet pillow. The club owner sagged and fell away, the burst of energy that had given him a brief advantage shattered. Fist was on him instantly, hands buried in his head. Akhmatov screamed. ‘No!’ snapped Jack. He rolled forwards and snatched the puppet away, tearing him out of Akhmatov’s mind. The club owner gaped in shock while Fist cackled madly.

[ What have you done to him?]

[ I haven’t hurt him. At least, not as much as you have. I’ve done him a favour.]

[ Fist …]

[ I’ve dropped deep sweathead tags into his weave presence. Unremovable. Everyone’s weaveware will just blank him out, blank him right out! He’s the invisible man now. He won’t be able to tell anyone what we know.]

[ For gods’ sake, Fist. We still need information from him.]

[ No we don’t. I know which of his contacts Aud Yamata is, and I know how to find her.]

[ You’re sure?]

[ It was much easier to fillet his business than I thought it would be. Almost like I was built for it.]

[Any clues on her boss?]

[ No mention of that at all. Just like the man said.]

As they spoke, Akhmatov crawled away and collapsed in a corner of the room. He was shaking.

‘One last question,’ said Jack, turning back to him. ‘Do you know who Yamata works for?’

[Don’t get your hopes up, Jack. He’s just a minion.]

‘I told you I don’t know,’ he choked out. ‘I’m better than that fucking bitch, and I’m still running this fucking club, and the Pantheon are still fucking playing with me. And I don’t even know who it’s all for.’

‘You’ve Easted him, haven’t you?’ said Fist. ‘He’ll be telling the truth. But we’ve got a more immediate problem. InSec’s coming. For you.’

‘Shit. Let’s go.’

‘Why? I can hide you from those wankers now.’

‘I don’t want them finding out you’ve been unlocked.’

‘Backing away from a fight? Boring!’

‘We’re running. Now.’

They got three hundred metres down the road before the InSec flyers caught them.

Chapter 27

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Jack.’

He was alone with Lestak. She’d flown her flyer up to hover between two spinelights. Nobody could disturb them. There was a black silk mask over his head. Its gauze eye patches gave him sight.

[ Not sure if your charm will work through this, old son. Heavy cageware.]

[ I won’t be using it on her.]

[ Wimp.]

‘I’m not impressed by what you did to my men back at the hotel.’

‘They’ll recover.’

‘Perhaps. I’ve petitioned East for her help. One of them keeps on asking for pictures of you. The other two don’t say much, but they smile a lot. We had to handcuff them to stop them playing with themselves.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise what she’d done to me.’

‘You’re touched by Pantheon and it doesn’t occur to you to see what you’ve been given?’ A tired exasperation filled her voice. ‘But then, that’s always been your excuse. Nothing’s your fault.’

‘What’s not his fault, Mummy?’

Jack jumped. The young girl’s voice came from the front passenger seat. It must be Issie, Lestak’s dead daughter. He was surprised that Lestak had let him hear her speak.

‘Grown-up talk, darling. Hush – here, play with your doll.’

‘But Mummy …’

‘Shush.’

‘You’ve brought her here?’ said Jack. ‘And you’re accusing me of irresponsibility?’

‘Issie’s often in the flyer. She likes it.’

‘I can see everywhere!’ chirped Issie.

[ I could infiltrate that fetch,] Fist whispered in Jack’s mind. [ It might help us.]

[ No,] replied Jack. [ I don’t want to risk damaging her.]

[ I can hear you!] interrupted Issie. [And I’m not “that fetch”, I’m Issie.]

[Shit!] said Fist. [She’s tapped into us.]

Issie giggled.

[ That’s really why she’s here,] replied Jack. [ Block her.]

‘They were talking about me, but I can’t hear them anymore,’ complained Issie.

‘It’s good that you told me about that. It’s very rude to talk about people behind their backs, isn’t it?’

‘Oh yes! And it’s even ruder to shut people out when they realise!’

‘I’m sure Jack won’t let Fist do that again – will you?’

[Let’s go with it,] said Jack. [ I want to find out what Lestak’s got to say.]

Fist shimmered into life on the seat next to him. ‘I’ll be good,’ he promised.

‘I’d forgotten how real you look,’ replied Lestak.

‘As real as Issie,’ said Jack, expecting a sharp response from Lestak. But she said nothing. There was a moment’s silence, then Issie stuck her head round the seat. But for her white skull face, she was a perfect simulacrum of a small child.

‘It is the funny puppet again! Can I play with him?’

Mist hung in her eye sockets with the soft density of cotton wool. When she spoke, wisps escaped from her hollow mouth. Jack worked hard not to shudder. ‘Fist won’t hurt her,’ he told Lestak. ‘That’s not how we work.’

[ Boring,] sang out Fist.

Lestak nodded. Issie squealed.

‘Off you go then,’ said Jack. ‘Play nice.’

‘I’m not a toy,’ muttered Fist, but he stood up quickly enough, and with a little jump was next to Issie. She shifted in her seat, letting him sit down next to her – one face carved from wood, one from bone. Indulgence and concern mingled on Lestak’s face. Stifled giggles and little whispered words rose up.

‘Are you sharing secrets, Issie?’ asked Lestak.

‘Oh yes!’

‘That’s what we’re going to be doing, too. You and Fist should make sure nobody can hear.’

‘You said that was rude!’

‘Not when you’re sharing secrets.’

A moment of silence, then the puppet and fetch voices combined to say ‘We’re firewalled.’ The giggling and whispering continued. Lestak relaxed.

‘Her eyes are full of weaveware,’ said Jack. ‘You use her for security?’

‘It’s about keeping her safe, as much as me. You make powerful enemies doing what I do.’

‘Yes, must be very handy having a little friend like that.’

‘Now listen, Jack. Corazon was starting to take you seriously, and she had good judgement. That’s why you’re here, now. And that’s why nobody can hear us talk. But don’t push it.’

There was a snorting laugh from the passenger seat.

‘I’m sorry about Corazon. She was a good policewoman.’

‘East said she gave you the news.’

Memories of Corazon’s last minutes jostled at the edge of Jack’s mind. They had started to lose their sharp, unintegrated edge. They were almost bearable. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘We found out about your meeting with Corazon. We thought you’d killed her.’

‘I had nothing to do with it.’

‘East confirmed that. I wish she’d come to us before we tried to arrest you.’

‘She’s a playful one,’ sighed Jack. ‘Does she know who did shoot Corazon?’

‘No. She’s more upset by that than by the death.’ Jack remembered how outraged East had been not to have known instantly that Corazon was dead. ‘Sandal came to me too,’ continued Lestak. ‘The guards you broke were his. He was furious. Two Pantheon manifestations in one day, and both about you. If Grey hadn’t been sequestered, I’m sure he’d have popped up as well. What have you done to get this much attention, Jack?’

‘I’m trying to find out the truth about the Penderville murder. About Aud Yamata, and her patron. And now about Corazon.’

‘Those are truths that kill, and that makes you dangerous.’

‘I can’t help that.’

‘Sandal wanted me to arrest you and hold you until Fist – well, you know. East wanted me to give you full Wart and Homelands access.’

‘There’s a war in Heaven.’

‘So it seems. And someone needs to try and referee it.’

‘That’s won’t be easy.’

‘No. And that’s why we need to talk. With Corazon dead, I think you are on to something after all. But I’m not going to let you chase around after it, putting more people at risk. And I’ve got to please East and Sandal.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘When it comes to you, nothing. I’m not going to change your Station access rights. I’m not going to let you go onweave, or visit Homelands, or the Wart. But I’m not going to restrict you anymore or imprison you, either.’

‘That’ll piss both of them off. And it doesn’t help me.’

‘It’ll piss them both off equally, so they’ll take it up with each other, not me. And I’m not in the business of helping you. I’m in the business of protecting Station. Like you, once.’

‘I still am. There’s something rotten here. Seven years ago, a man was murdered with full Pantheon knowledge. The person that did it has been hidden, with full Pantheon involvement. Others have been silenced at fetch level. Corazon’s been killed.’

‘So why haven’t they shut you down too?’

‘Friends in high places,’ said Jack bitterly.

Sudden shrieks of joy exploded from the front seat.

‘Hush, you two,’ scolded Lestak. There was muffled giggling, then Fist and Issie muted themselves again.

‘I’m not going to beg,’ said Jack. ‘But I do need access to Homelands. I have to try and find Aud Yamata.’

‘You know where she might be?’ Lestak’s attention was suddenly entirely focused on Jack, the professional investigator in her cutting through to the front of her mind. ‘You’re going to share whatever you know with me, aren’t you?’

Jack paused for a moment, wondering how much to tell Lestak, how much she would record, how secure InSec was. It was clear that East didn’t trust her – or at least, didn’t trust the organisation that surrounded her. Corazon’s death had made him wary, too.

A low whine filled the car – a tug passing by, trailing chainship containers, moving towards the Wart. Jack imagined the wonders it would be carrying to the twin malls of Homelands. He thought of containers, perhaps entire chainships, loaded with sweat, made invisible by adapted sweathead avoidance code. He reached a decision.

‘I don’t know anything more than I did back then, Lestak.’

‘If you do run into anything new, you will let us know. You won’t go looking into it yourself.’

‘You’ve got Corazon’s records, that’s more data than I’ll ever have. She was tracking Yamata. I think Yamata realised that and killed her. If you go to the files, you’ll find all you need.’

Lestak wearily massaged her forehead, hiding her eyes. ‘There’s a problem with that.’

‘You have looked at them?’ Lestak said nothing. ‘That’s why they killed her, for gods’ sake! For whatever she’d found out!’

‘There was a chromacode virus. We traced it back to a weave sigil sprayed on the sidewalk outside her apartment. It penetrated her InSec weavespace and shredded all her data.’

‘You think that’s coincidence? You think some script bunny could have planted something like that?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Lestak’s voice became an urgent whisper, as if quieter words were somehow more secret. ‘No, I don’t think that. I agree with you – there’s something wrong here, and it goes all the way to the top. But I can’t let you investigate it. You were taken out of play seven years ago and you’re still out of play now.’

‘Listen to yourself, Lestak. You’re running scared.’

‘Of course I am. This is terrifying. Criminals – I lock them up, or throw them off the weave. Corrupt InSec ops – we find them, we break them. But this – if one of the Pantheon is broken, what am I meant to do? How am I meant to stop that? I have to be so fucking careful even thinking about it. And I am going to investigate it, Jack, but I am going to tread so lightly. And you – there’s nothing light about you, nothing subtle about that creature. You were never even a proper policeman, and now you’re just damaged goods, not realising who you’re hurting until it’s too late. You’re not safe to be around. Corazon proved that.’

‘And whatever you find out? Will that disappear too?’

‘I’ve been around a lot longer than Corazon, and my patron is a lot tougher than hers was. East, bless her, gives good weathergirl, and her flash mobs are second to none when it comes to stalking weave stars. But she’s not a fighter. Not like the Rose.’

‘So you won’t help me?’

‘No. And I’ll be watching you. If you do anything at all that makes me think you’re investigating all this on your own, I will land on you so fucking hard you won’t even know what year it is. And don’t think you’ll be dealing with lightweights like the boys this morning. I know what East’s done to you. We’ll send the castrati after you, and you won’t be able to stop them.’

‘The castrati? I thought—’

‘They’re not just a rumour, Jack. We’ve had to deal with people East’s touched before. The Rose has developed solutions to her charms. Take a step back. You were never really a professional to start with, and you’re certainly not one now. If you keep digging you’ll be dangerous to yourself and to everyone you touch.’

The flyer started to descend.

‘Make your peace with your parents, Jack.’ Her voice was softer, now. ‘Not all of us get the chance to say goodbye, before the end comes. And being out of the game – well, sometimes it’s a privilege. It means the terms of loss are fixed. No one can force them to change.’

The flyer touched down with a gentle bump. Lestak turned to the passenger seat and smiled. ‘Issie, honey, playtime’s over.’ It took a couple of minutes to persuade her to hand Fist back to Jack. Jack imagined security systems unmeshing and ports undocking while the skull-faced girl refused to give up her new friend. In private she would be a near perfect representation of a living child. Out here, the skull revealed the truth of her post-mortal status.

Andrea had refused to show Jack what that looked like, but Issie was too young to worry about such things. Jack wasn’t sure whether he felt happy or sad for her. He wondered how Lestak remembered her daughter – whether white, empty bone had overwritten the soft liveliness of her living face.

Issie waved from the window as the flyer lifted off, her hand a little pink flutter behind the glass. Lestak’s last words, spoken as she’d lifted Jack’s hood off and unlocked the handcuffs, were simple and direct. ‘Walk away, Jack. Don’t look back.’

[Of course, you’ll ignore her,] said Fist.

[Of course,] replied Jack.

[Cute kid. Lestak’s kept her locked at four years old, but she’s still pretty sharp. She worked out that I was uncaged.]

[ Hell. She’ll tell Lestak.]

[ I swore her to silence. She told me some of her secrets too. Fetch secrets.]

Fist sounded very pleased with himself.

[ What were they?]

Fist pretended outrage.

[ I can’t tell you! I promised!]

[ If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you were softening.]

[ Not really. Now I can kill fetches too.]

Chapter 28

Harry was sprawled across the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Andrea wasn’t around. Jack hadn’t asked where she was.

‘So you saw her skullchild? Makes me glad I got to build myself. Missed all the bone code out. I’d hate going round like that. Apart from anything else, my hat would slip. And the smoke from these’ – Harry waved the cigarette at Jack – ‘would come out through my eye sockets. That’s really not dignified, is it? Not that it’s a problem you’re going to have, thanks to that little sod.’ He gestured towards Fist, who pointedly ignored him. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘what are we going to do about Yamata? Can’t let her get away with it, but I’ve had no luck tracking her down. Now if we could break through Fist’s cage so I can use what he’s got, I might be able to dig a bit deeper. If I can’t find her, we’ve got nothing.’

‘We got all we needed from Akhmatov. Fist?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Fist. ‘I know exactly where she’s based.’

‘Come on then,’ drawled Harry. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘But I’m only going to tell you what I know if I get … certain assurances from Jack.’

‘What?’ replied Jack. ‘For gods’ sake, Fist.’ Privately, he wasn’t too surprised. Since their encounter with East, Fist had been relatively easy to deal with. He’d been expecting the puppet’s obstinacy to reassert itself at some point.

‘What the hell’s he talking about?’ asked Harry. ‘Little shit.’ He swung a large, fat hand towards the side of Fist’s head. The blow didn’t connect – Harry’s fingers passed harmlessly through the puppet. Fist tittered as static shook his face.

‘Still just a ghost, old man!’ he chortled. ‘Can’t touch me, can’t touch me – only if Jack says so, and he won’t.’

Fist turned to Jack.

‘I don’t want you to let Harry mesh with any of my systems, under any circumstances. If you promise that, I’ll tell you how to find Yamata.’

‘You little bastard,’ said Harry.

‘With what I know,’ Fist told Harry, ‘you won’t need any part of me to track her down. So why are you so upset?’

‘Because you should do what Jack tells you. And because this isn’t over yet.’

‘Bullshit. You just want to control me like you do Andrea. You want another slave.’

‘She’s not a slave, she’s a fetch, and that’s what you do with fucking fetches. I do what venues do, I just bring out the best in her. And I’d bring out the best in you too. I’d use you to find things, break into them, then destroy them. That’s what you’re for.’

Jack struggled to hide his anger. ‘Harry’s not going to do anything like that to you,’ he told Fist.

‘What?’ said Harry.

Fist bounced up and down gleefully. ‘You promise?’ he chirped.

‘I promise.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die?’

‘For gods’ sake. I’ve said no, that’s that. Harry will never get any access to any of your systems.’

‘Hurrah!’ shouted Fist. ‘You’re not the boss of me, Harry!’

‘If I could get my hands on you, you little shit …’

‘You never will now.’

‘Stop bickering, you two,’ snapped Jack. ‘We’re after Yamata, not each other.’ The hard command in his voice took both Harry and Fist by surprise. They fell silent. ‘Now,’ he said to Fist. ‘Tell us where she is.’

‘Akhmatov told us that Yamata works with a security firm in Sheltie. I think I’ve found it. Harry, you’ll need to check it out – here are the details.’

Harry’s eyes fluttered as he read the file.

‘Got it. I’ll scope ’em out, test their defences. Once we’ve found a way of getting you and the little fuck into their servers we can solve all our problems.’

‘You’re very confident. You won’t get caught?’ said Jack.

‘I’ve been hiding in the weave for two years. Travel in the pipes, disappear in doorways, lose myself in shadow. You don’t need to worry about me. But we’ve got to find a way of getting you into Homelands without InSec spotting you.’

‘It’s not going to matter whether or not they can see me.’

‘You’re bolder than you used to be, Jack Forster.’

‘Not bold, Harry, just well connected. The Totality can help me.’

‘Those useless bastards. Would be nice if they turned out to be good for something.’

‘They will be. How long before we move?’

‘I’m going to have to tread carefully. It’ll take a day or so.’

‘It would take me half an hour,’ said Fist.

‘Then you should fucking help me,’ said Harry. He turned back to Jack. ‘Think you can be in Homelands the day after tomorrow?’

‘I’m sure I can.’

‘Good. I’ll be in touch.’

Then Harry was gone. He left the last of his cigarette smoke behind him. It uncurled in the empty room, shaping itself around invisible air currents, then fell away to nothing. Jack felt himself relaxing.

‘What was all that about just now?’ said Jack.

‘I don’t want Harry using me. I don’t want him inside me. I don’t like being controlled.’

‘He just wants to mesh with some of your subsystems.’

‘He’ll do more than that. Count on it.’

‘He can’t hurt you. That’s just bluster.’

‘Fuck’s sake Jack, you really haven’t thought through what it means to be software. Remember how Grey nudged me? Once someone gets into me, they can start playing around.’

‘I wouldn’t give him permission.’

‘Do you think that’d stop him? East could have fried me if she’d wanted to. She didn’t because she won’t break the terms of the software licence that binds you to me. It’s a legal agreement, and that’s what the Pantheon’s built on. Harry doesn’t give a damn about any of that. Once you let him in, he’ll do whatever he wants.’

‘He’s a fetch. They can’t do that.’

‘No he’s not. He’s rebuilt himself. When I was close to Issie, I saw how fetches work. It was one of the secrets she shared with me. He’s structured differently and his lag times are all wrong. He’s not hosted on the Coffin Drives.’

‘He broke out of them, and he’s spent the last few years in hiding. He’s not going to work in the same way as someone like her.’

‘No. It’s more than that.’

‘Have you tried to track him back? Work out where he’s really stored?’

‘I couldn’t probe without him finding out. And we don’t want that.’

‘You’re afraid of him.’

‘Of course I fucking am. If things go his way, he’ll fillet me and fry me like a little Fisty fish. Just like our rogue Pantheon friend would, if they got their hands on me.’

Jack laughed.

‘Don’t you dare find it funny,’ said Fist. ‘I thought that bitch East was going to kill me. I want to break the bastard that’s got it in for us before he or she or it gets a chance to break me.’

‘They want to keep you safe.’

‘And you said that’s bullshit.’

Another voice cut through their conversation.

‘What’s bullshit?’ Andrea wasn’t wearing makeup. The memory of the last time Jack had seen her naked face caught at his heart. Her dress was a deep, clotted red. Her skin was pale and far too young. Jack couldn’t answer. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she continued. ‘I just found a message I left for myself. It told me to watch this with you. It’s a screenshow, I think.’

Jack said, ‘Wait.’ But she waved her hand and there was music. At first, there was only a soft, insistent beat, scratching at Jack’s hearing. It tugged at his attention but it was very quiet, so he had to concentrate carefully to hear it. It caught noises that drifted in from outside in its meshes, pulling them into song.

‘What is this?’ asked Jack.

‘Ssssh,’ whispered Andrea. ‘Listen carefully.’

There was a burst of static. A broken riff lanced out and settled on the beat, like a glitched image of a bird diving again and again into choppy water.

[ It wants to share visuals,] hissed Fist.

[Let it.]

Images started appearing on one of the room’s blank walls. Most were black and white. The few colour ones pulled Jack’s attention to them. More instruments had joined the music. Speech was woven in with it too. Jack heard Harry’s voice. One of the colour photos expanded to fill most of the wall. It was a shoulder lying on rumpled sheets. A woman’s hand caressed it. A second or two passed and then there was a window, seen from below. Soft spinelight made the raindrops on it shimmer like diamonds. Another sudden cut and there was a handwritten card. It disappeared too quickly to be read. A cat pounced on a sock. Just as quickly, a new image flashed up. The music began to feel out of sync with the film. Speech darted out between rapidly shifting rhythms, broken clauses stripped of context. Harry was still talking. There was a light joy to his voice that Jack had never heard before. Caressing fragments whispered into the room – soft endearments caught late at night, loud in the sleeping silence of Station. Then Jack’s own voice started to appear in the mix.

He sounded so much younger. New images flickered by. A kettle boiled. There was a garden, with a soft toy hanging from a tree. Hands pulled a shirt out of a dryer. He recognised his own hands, and memories came. They pulsed through him as the images continued. Meshed with the music, each vignette called up more of the past, creating a record of his time with Andrea seen from her point of view. A clock shone out from a bedside table. It used to wake him every morning. A hand knocked over a glass of whisky. It had the Vista Club logo on it. Andrea had drenched herself. There’d been a taxi ride home, and then a fumble out of her soaked clothes before they made love. Harry had been away. It was the first full night they’d spent together.

The soundtrack muttered broken sighs and laughter. Sounds and images fused into a series of precise invocations. It felt like commands were being written directly to Jack’s memory, triggering a mode of exact recall that summoned the past straight into his mind’s eye. A kaleidoscope of yesterdays sparked into life, overwhelming the present and replacing it with something, richer, deeper and far more structured. For a few moments, Jack felt himself rolled all the way back to his time with Andrea. For a few moments, joy filled him and he forgot everything that had come after. Then, the film’s focus started to move on. Memory shards still pulsed hypnotically, but they no longer reached Jack so directly. He fell back into the present.

[Amazing stuff, Jack.]

[ Yes – really evocative.]

[ No. Look at Andrea.]

She was still rapt in the flickering world of the past. But her clothes and hairstyle had changed, looking more up-to-date. Her face had aged too, time’s passing recarved into it.

[ It’s bringing her back to herself. How?]

[ The music’s doing it, and the images. They’re triggering memory cascades that are rebuilding her most recent self. Quite the achievement!]

Jack thought about the other times he’d heard the same broken music. At the club, Andrea must have been restoring herself after her performance. And he’d thought she’d been rehearsing in her upstairs room. Perhaps she’d in fact been composing, weaving a few new hours of life into the music that would so effectively and precisely reverse any rolling back.

[Oh look!] said Fist. [ It’s all about the moon!]

Jack was snared again, although not in quite the same way as before. Now the experience was less personal. He watched a culture’s grief come to life before him. The lament still tore into him, though. And the music was about far more than dead children. Andrea had shot this sequence through with a flash-forward to her own murder. Corazon’s memories blazed in Jack’s mind. He turned away from the screen, letting the moment pass.

When he looked back, the flash-forward had ended. The film and music moved through the two years before the end of Andrea’s life. It touched on the slow death of her relationship with Harry, and the increasing artistic independence and confidence that paralleled that loss. Finally, it skipped back to her post-death self, filling the wall with images and the air with sounds that recapped her life as a fetch. At last it wound down and there was silence. Jack turned to Andrea, now once again fully herself. Her head was down and her eyes were closed.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

She opened her eyes and looked round at him, once again fully herself.

‘I hate having to do that,’ she replied. ‘Fucking clubs. Fucking Harry.’

‘Why do you let him stay here, then?’

‘Oh, Jack.’ She moved to one of the sofas. ‘He was my husband once. He’s a shit, but where else is he going to go? And he’s helped me a lot over the last couple of years, in his own way.’ She brushed her hair out of her eyes. ‘And I have so few other people to talk to. You’ve seen what the clubs are like. I hardly see my friends, they only care about the living. And my family prefer me much younger. Much younger. I was so far away from them as an adult.’

‘You’ve got me to talk to.’

‘And you don’t think I’m really Andrea, do you? I tricked you. That’s one of the first things you said to me. Do you still believe that?’

‘I didn’t trust you. You didn’t tell me the whole truth.’

‘You should have understood why that was impossible by now. Perhaps there are even people you haven’t told the whole truth to?’

Jack winced. ‘Maybe. You do seem to be so much her.’

‘Seem to be?’ she said. ‘Only that?’ Jack said nothing. ‘Which is why I wanted you to see all this,’ she continued. ‘Because I knew you’d say that. You’ve just watched my memories laid out as code, pulling me back to myself. I’m built on memory, Jack. And so are you.’

‘But I haven’t died.’

‘Think about your body. Every single cell is replaced, every seven years. You’ve been away for that long. What remains of the man who left?’

‘I’m still me, Andrea.’

‘You’re a pattern of memories running on a dynamic platform that’s constantly renewing itself. The pattern is all that persists, the self looking back on all it has been and knowing itself from that. That’s what makes you you, Jack, not the passing fact of your flesh. And that’s what makes me me. I may be running on a different platform, but the pattern of me is unchanged and I fight hard to protect it. I am Andrea, Jack, I’m the same person as that different person all those years ago, just as you’re the same person as that different Jack who loved me then.’

[Oo, philosophy! It’s making my head hurt. I say cut to the chase and snog her.]

[Shut up, Fist.]

[Grabbing a glass of champagne … Activating your sub-dermal presence simulators … Now she can touch you! Over to you, lover boy!]

Andrea noticed Jack’s distraction. ‘Fist?’

‘He has strong opinions.’

‘Is he real?’

Jack smiled. ‘He’s certainly got a mind of his own. And he’s going to be around after I’m gone. So yes, he’s real.’

[Of course I am!]

‘He’s quite excited about this,’ continued Jack. ‘About you.’

Andrea leant towards him. Presence simulators showed him her warmth. Virtual breath brushed against his skin. She touched the side of his face.

‘And is he right to be?’ she said.

Chapter 29

It was just before dawn. Jack kicked open a door which led to a stairway that had wrapped itself around a construction which might once have been a gas storage cylinder. Now, it was some sort of scrap-metal recycling centre. Looking down into it from the walkway on its rim was like looking into an iron maw studded with broken teeth. Spotlights pulled vaguely identifiable machine shapes from drifts of rust-tinted tangle.

[ I can’t believe I’ve got an automatic intimacy shutoff!] grumbled Fist. [ I didn’t even know it existed.]

[ Never triggered it before,] replied Jack, turning away from scrap metal to look out over Docklands.

[Oh well, at least I got to see you and East together. I suppose you can’t really be intimate with a god.] He popped into view just next to Jack, perched on the railings. [ I ended up playing Andrea’s memory code back again. Remarkable piece of work. She’s sharp, that girl of yours.]

[ I know that.]

Dim streets curved up and away in front of them, losing themselves in height and darkness. Lights glowed softly – some from windows, some from streetlamps, some from flyers and cars. They sketched in the places around them, hinting at different kinds of buildings, different kinds of lives. In its dormant state, Docklands was a city of implications.

[Seeing it without the weave seems so natural now,] Jack commented. [Gods, I used to think quiet rooms were peaceful. But even in them you’d have a few sprites buzzing around, to remind you it was all still out there. To stop you from panicking.]

[ We can activate any time you want. You really should get back onweave, Jack. It’s been seven years. With me behind you, you’ll see everything.]

[ That’s why we’ve come up here.]

The soft whine of distant flyer engines pulsed down from above. The spinelights were still dark, silhouettes defined by the lights of the city beyond and behind them. A series of loud cracks rang out from them.

[ They’re waking up the spinelights,] Jack explained. [A few minutes and it’ll be daylight. Take me onweave while they come online.]

[ What?]

[ Wake me up with the city, Fist.]

[ I could have everything open right now.]

[ No. Do it step by step. I want to make sure I remember all the details.]

At first, it seemed that nothing was changing. Then the soft darkness began to lose something of its density. Dawn was dusting the city with presence, pulling definition into being. As it emerged from the gloom, Fist unveiled the first, most basic component of the weave: the grid that lay over the city, providing a spatial reference point for every single active weavepoint. Straight white lines threw themselves across Docklands, imposing horizontal and vertical regularity on urban chaos. Pale grey lines leapt up from the corner of each square, striating cylindrical airspace into an infinity of cubes.

[ What scale are we on, Fist?]

[ Ten by ten metres. The spatial mapping goes right down to millimetres. But if I showed you those gridlines, you’d see nothing else.]

[ Fair enough.]

[ Now, locations. I’m assuming you just want to see the major ground tags? I can show you descriptors for all the cubes – but the data’s so dense, you wouldn’t see anything past thirty or forty metres away …]

[ Just the tags, Fist. And street-level detail, nothing more defined than that.]

Where there had been a vista, there was suddenly content. Red and yellow lines streaked across Docklands, parsing space. Letters danced into words, defining streets, squares, neighbourhoods, buildings and stations. A patchwork of colours leapt across the landscape, shouting information into the gathering day. They flowed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, shifting shade with each one, turning the city into a vast artist’s palette.

[ That’s lovely,] Jack told Fist. [ Now let’s see the people too.]

[ What level of detail?]

[ The basics.]

[ I’ll break them down by sex – red for men, blue for women.]

[Show me the sweatheads, too.]

[OK – black for them. Minimum scale. One pixel, one person.]

Fist waved his hand and the great patchwork before them was dusted with tiny dots. Many of the red and blue pixels were clumped in residential areas. Many were still in bed, or at least at home. Some were already travelling to work. Streets were lightly spotted with red and blue. Trains showed as moving lines of colour, leaping between the long, thin scatterings that were station platforms.

[ They’ll be rammed when it comes to rush hour,] said Fist. [Squashed in like squishies!]

[ Fist!]

[And all those sweatheads!]

The town was speckled with black. Most were clumped together in little groups.

[Still asleep in their factories,] said Jack.

[ Factories?]

[ The places where they hide and drop sweat together. That’s what they’re called.]

[Aren’t sweatheads dangerous when they’re high?]

[ Not if you leave them alone. InSec keep them out of the way.]

A few of the black dots were beginning to move towards train stations and major roads.

[ The early degenerate catches the worm!] chirped Fist. [ I wonder if we can see Akhmatov?]

[ I thought you’d completely anonymised him.]

[ I left some personal tags on him.]

Fist’s eyes clacked shut in concentration. [ There he is!] he said, pointing up and to the right. A white circle highlighted a black dot on a small residential street. [ He’s in the back room of a café.]

[ I wonder if someone can see him? I thought you said he’d be invisible.]

[ They’re still closed, Jack. Perhaps he’s broken in there to shelter.]

[ He’s just a distraction. We’ve got the basics up and running. Trip the entertainment and commercial layer.]

A shotgun blast of logos punched themselves into being. With them came the howl of a thousand advertising jingles, a visual and aural cacophony carving into Jack’s mind like a punch. Jack doubled over in pain, eyes tight shut, hands going to his ears.

‘FIST!’ he screamed.

[Shit! Sorry!] The roar of commerce subsided as quickly as it had begun. [ I forgot to put the limiters on.]

[Gods’ sake, Fist. Nobody looks at it all at once.] Jack opened his eyes, pulled his hands from his ears and shook his head. Now there was just a hubbub. The world bustled with icons and animations and words and music. Chain logos repeated themselves across the city. Slices of pizza danced on fat little legs, coffee mugs fluttered on glossy brown wings and an idealised market stallholder sung about his wares. If Jack focused on a particular logo it would expand to fill about a quarter of his field of vision. If he waited a second or two more, details of special offers would sing out from it.

[ I’d forgotten how much I hated that.]

[ I’ll sort it.]

[ You can block it?]

[Most people couldn’t, but I can!]

The logos became less hyperactive.

[ I’m sure there weren’t so many when I left,] sighed Jack.

[ Is that really a pole-dancing hamburger?]

[ I’m afraid so.]

[ Your human cultural achievements never fail to amaze me.]

[ The void sites have come online too.]

[ They sit in the marketing layer? Wow.]

Children’s faces hung over the city, monochrome memories of the lost. The images reset every thirty seconds or so, one sad face melting into the next. Sometimes a word would flash up – ‘Remember’, for example, or ‘Innocent’ or ‘Gone’.

[Depressing,] said Fist glumly.

[ They’re meant to be. Let’s have the social feeds.]

[OK …]

The geography of Docklands implied social networks. Interconnected engagement webs exploded across the landscape, making them visible. Informal groupings throbbed busily, as people entered their first status updates of the day and caught up with friends across the city. Dormant corporate networks shimmered through and beyond them. Soon they too would wake to life. Some would converge into rich, dense clumps, as employees settled into offices, factories, or shops. Some would remain stretched across the city, virtual businesses whose employees worked in a close digital proximity that made distance irrelevant. Some would pull workers out of Docklands entirely, into the Wart or Homelands. And some would leap into the void, clambering up the Spine to the wharves or beyond.

[ What’s everyone saying?] asked Jack.

The morning’s babble rose up around him. It was difficult to separate the messages. Excited voices shrilled joy at a new dawn, a new partner, even just an excellent cup of coffee, while the less perky dreaded the upcoming working day, bitched about waking up alone again, or bemoaned hangovers.

[ They’re all soooo mundane,] groaned Fist.

[ It’s what people do. It’s just as important as the big stuff.]

[ It’s pointless. What’s next?]

[Show me the Pantheon.]

[ You want to look at the gods? They’ll look right back at you.]

[ I trust your security arrangements, Fist.]

[ I’ll call them. They might be hard to damp at first. Close your eyes.]

[ Fist …]

[ No, really.]

Jack shut his eyes, and the world vanished. For a moment the hubbub of morning voices filled his ear, then that too died away. A breeze sang through the metal that surrounded him. Then a great flash broke in the sky, bright even through closed eyes. A deep, loud industrial hum shook itself into being. It sounded like a choir of machines chanting in a metal church.

[Containing the signal, Jack.]

The hum became a roar and then softened, modulating into a background throb that was almost gentle. There were eleven more flashes of light. Each was accompanied by a pulse of noise that Fist contained, again and again coming to terms with the numinous.

[ How’s it going?] asked Jack.

[Difficult to manage their outputs without feeding back our signatures, but it’s just about done. There – open your eyes!]

The world had changed. The Spine had been replaced by six great icons of the divine, representing each of the Pantheon. Only two appeared remotely human. There was Kingdom with his shaven head and East, looking reliably dazzling. She appeared in full figure, her clothes shimmering as they shifted and changed with the fashion whims of the moment. The Eastware in Jack’s mind responded to her presence, until Fist hushed it. For a moment Jack was at one with entire monasteries of her followers, solemnly hymning her dazzling style.

Then, there were the more abstract deities. The Rose’s petals were as violently red as they’d always been but the sharp green thorns partially hidden beneath them were entirely new. Sandal’s crystal cube rotated as slowly and deliberately as ever. The Twins were represented by a great set of constantly moving scales. First one side was in the ascendant, then the other. And of course, there was Grey.

He was a fallen god, no longer capable of acting as a free agent. But his corporate structures had not yet been fully absorbed by his competitors. Thousands of people still needed to use his apps, access data held on his servers, or call in other ways on his strategic and financial services. So his raven was still present, though it now made his broken status humiliatingly clear. A great iron band ran around its body, holding its wings tight to its sides. A silver chain glittered around its legs, and then ran up to its beak, holding it shut. A rag was tied around its head, covering its eyes. It had also been stripped of any animation.

[ That’s sad to see,] said Jack. [ It used to be so alert.]

The bird’s gaze had once constantly flickered back and forth across Docklands, tracking every single commercial transaction.

[ They’re … huge, Jack.]

[ You get used to them. After a while, you stop taking much notice.]

[ I can’t imagine that,] breathed Fist.

Thousands of slender silver threads drifted out from the base of each icon, falling away into the city. Each represented a link to an individual worshipper, dancing with sparkling light as data ran along it. Twined together, they showed the relative user bases of each Pantheon member.

[Look at Grey’s bundle,] said Fist.

It was far thinner than those descending from the other eleven icons, twine to their rope, and much duller – the colour of lead, not silver.

[ I’m surprised he’s still got that many followers.] Jack paused for a moment, suddenly thoughtful. [One more thing,] he continued. [Let’s take a look at my parents.]

[ I can see your father. And talking with Issie’s helped me track fetches. There’s your mother!]

[Get rid of everyone else.]

An entire population shimmered into nothing, leaving only a single red pixel right next to a single blue one, in a distant street rolling up behind the Spine.

[ They must be in bed.]

Jack remembered childhood nights, and the deep security of knowing that his parents were asleep in the next room. The knowledge of their closeness was always a ward against the small difficulties of a Docklands child’s life.

[Can we look at them?]

He was surprised at how quiet his voice was.

[Oh yes,] piped Fist. [And perhaps there’ll be some action! That’ll make up for last night.]

[ Fucking hell, Fist,] sighed Jack. [ If that’s what they’re doing, we’ll let them be. Now, how to see them?]

[Spoilsport,] replied Fist. [And, let’s see. A camera nest’s the best way, they’re all over the place. It’ll be quite risky though – they run on Rosecode, she’s tough.]

[ If Harry can hack camera nests, I’m sure you can.]

[ That sleazy fuck. We’ll have to be quick.]

Fist closed his eyes and threw his mind out into the weave, searching for a lens to bring Jack’s parents into focus. Jack stared up at the two dots, lost in sadness at his distance from them.

[Got it!]

A square of light flashed into being, resolving into a street of brightly coloured plastic boxes. It was like looking directly into a memory.

[ The camera nest’s got droneflies mounted on it. Just snagging one …]

The view in the window changed as the dronefly lifted up and moved down the street to hang outside an upstairs window. The curtains were drawn, but the window was open. Fist steered it into the bedroom. There was a single figure, asleep on one side of a double bed.

[ I’ll just drop your mother in.]

[Doesn’t my dad have to reset her permissions?]

[ Issie showed me a temporary hack.]

Suddenly there were two shapes there.

[Audio.]

His father was snoring. Nostalgia shook Jack. He so wanted to step into the image and find himself back in childhood.

[ You’ve got about thirty more seconds, Jack.]

[ Bring the camera in closer.]

His father let out a particularly loud snore. His mother shifted, then reached out to nudge her partner. He grunted and rolled over. Jack imagined processors deep in his mind, simulating touch. She sighed and settled back, but then stiffened.

[She’s waking up. Time’s up, we should go.]

[ No, stay. I want to see her.]

‘Hello?’ she said, pushing herself up one arm. ‘Is there someone there?’

[Shit! She’s probing.]

She turned to face the camera.

[ Issie warned me they could do this. I’m going to cut the link.]

[ No.]

[ It’s not safe!]

She leant forward, bringing her face into the thin line of light from the slightly parted curtains. Jack gasped. It was the first time he’d seen her for seven years. She seemed so alive, so present.

[ What’s that?] she whispered. [A puppet?] and then, in the smallest, softest voice imaginable, [ Jack?]

[She’s on to us!]

[ You’re not breaking the link, Fist.]

[Any second now, InSec’ll see us, Pantheon’ll see us. Fuck’s sake, Jack, you fucking idiot!]

But Jack didn’t hear.

[Mum?]

[ Is that really you?]

Jack’s father stirred.

[ It’s me, Mum,] said Jack, not knowing whether or not she could hear him, for a moment forgetting that she wasn’t still alive, and that he wasn’t standing directly before her.

[ They told me you were— If that is you, oh, Jack.]

There was an electric crack and the screen vanished. Jack imagined a dronefly falling to the ground in a distant room, his father waking to a weeping wife. Then, anger shook him.

[ Fist, I told you not to cut me off.]

‘He didn’t,’ said Grey, appearing on the staircase. ‘I did.’ Metal rang beneath his feet as he climbed the last few steps. ‘You were cutting it rather too fine. A few more seconds and that would have been it for you both.’

‘You’ve been watching us all this time?’

‘I had a flag set in case you went onweave. I thought you might benefit from a little constructive criticism. As it turned out, I was right. It’s good to feel that I can still be useful, even if my wings have been clipped.’ He waved up towards the Spine. ‘I do hate seeing my icon like that.’

Jack was torn between anger and grief. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Fist stepped into the awkward silence. ‘I had everything well under control,’ he said firmly.

‘I’m sure you did,’ replied Grey, his silkily polite coldness implying exactly the opposite.

‘Fuck you,’ Fist shot back. ‘And while you’re here, don’t you go playing around in my fucking head again.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. There’s no more need for that. Now you’ve realised you’re both equally threatened by the same enemy, all I’d need to do is ask politely for your help. And that wouldn’t be a problem at all, would it?’ Fist made a noise that sounded like spitting. ‘But let’s not waste our time with petty arguments. Jack – I wanted to congratulate you on your progress.’

Jack was now sufficiently in control of himself to reply. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, taking a step back as Grey reached the balcony.

‘Really, there’s no need to be afraid, Jack.’

‘I’m not afraid. I don’t trust you. That’s very different.’

‘My boy. If I wanted to harm you, I’d have let your chat with your dear departed mother run on until the whole world realised that your little puppet’s active. Where would that have left you? In a Turing cage for a couple of months, just like on Callisto, then dead, with Fist in the hands of our enemies. I have no interest in that happening.’

‘Say what you’ve got to say, then piss off.’

‘You’re doing so well, Jack. I’m particularly impressed by your decision to work with Harry. I’m sure he’ll be very helpful to you.’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘It’s surprising how much I can gather from those who are still faithful to me. I was very impressed by your little adventures with Akhmatov, too.’

‘You watched all that?’

‘Keeping an eye, keeping an eye. That bird may be blind, but I most certainly am not.’

‘Not looking through Yamata’s eyes?’

‘Good grief, no.’ Grey looked genuinely shocked. ‘The very idea!’

‘You didn’t think to protect me?’

‘I didn’t need to. I knew you’d be kept safe. And besides, I have no interest at all in showing my hand. I’d hate to have anyone see that I’m a little more independent than I should be.’

‘Playing politics with my life. Nothing new there. And with Fist, too. Do you know why they want him?’

‘I wouldn’t know. Perhaps they want to use his weave-hacking skills to help smuggle drugs, perhaps they want to attack the Totality and restart the war. That’s for you to find out. To be honest, I’m more concerned by your loyalty issues. I’m no longer your lead patron, am I? I see that East has taken that role. She’s really been very generous. I don’t think she’s installed this much of herself in anyone for a couple of generations. She’s fallen for you hard, Jack.’

‘I won’t be using what she’s given me.’

‘If you say so. Perhaps there’ll be no need for it.’

‘I won’t, Grey.’

‘I’m sure also you won’t be taking up the offer from that mind you rescued. Your view of the Totality is too naïve, Jack. It might have been wrong to go to war with them, but that doesn’t mean they can be trusted. Steer clear of him.’