"Beetle! What about Mandy?" I said in the rush.

But his mind was on another trip, the jam was kicking in, and his eyes were scanning the pack for a way out.

"We can't leave her, Beetle!"

"Kid can hack it." A quick breath, and then, "There's gotta be a back way."

We were cutting through the pack, as they made way under the threat of the Beetle's curse and the jammed-up energy in his fists. I heard a shout from below -- "Out of the way! Police!" Some such. You ever seen a cop trying to cut through a dancing crush of semi-legals? I guess that Murdoch was having some problems down there. So suck on it, shecop! I was right up against the food tables now, and Barnie the Chef was giving me a bright stare. "You liked my food, didn't you, Crew?" I told him that he was the King of the Feast, and that the angels were dining out on his takeaways. He pointed us to a back door. "This way, Crew-cut," he answered. "Relish it."

And we were clattering down a shining steel ladder of hard rungs, a fire-escape to heaven. Me and the Beetle, on a ride together, old-days style. Felt like flying, and I guess I still had some Thunderwings in me. Then we were down on the back streets and running for sweet life.

I'm not telling this very well. I'm asking for your trust on this one. Here I am, surrounded by wine bottles and mannequins, salt cellars and golf clubs, car engines and pub signs. There are a thousand things in this room, and I am just one of them, the light is shining through my windows, stuttered by bars of iron, and I'm trying to get this down with a cracked-up genuine antique word processor, the kind they just don't make any more, trying to find the words.

Sometimes we get the words wrong.

Sometimes we get the words wrong!

Believe me on this one. And trust me, if you can. I'm doing my best to tell it true. It just gets real hard sometimes...

The very strangest thing about that night of running was this: that I could picture the Beetle better than myself. I didn't know where I was. But the Beetle was always, all of the time, very clear to me. I was following his movements through a clear-sighted glass, watching him burn a way down the darkness.

Me, myself, I was the Beetle's shadow, just hanging on to his flame, running through a black alley, back of the Slithy Tove restaurant. Something weighty and hard was banging around inside my jacket pocket but I didn't connect to that just then. I could feel a crowd running with me, but I didn't know who they were. Maybe I was still on Thunderwings, but that thin tickle should have long dissolved, into the blood stream. So what was I on?

What was I on?

Felt like the night was surrendering to me, filling me up with its pictures.

I was getting glimpses of everything.

I was Vurt-high, running through a dark space, with some crowd behind me, with nothing in my mouth, no feather in my mouth.

Cop sirens were sounding off, making bad music.

Whistles blowing.

The howling of a generator, as it pumped hard power to a set of arc lights.

Shadowcops shining down.

Feet clattering. Real human feet clattering over concrete.

Didn't know where I was.

Coming up hard against a brick wall, and turning away, and there was the Murdoch, scarred-up face glaring at me.

Dancers, former dancers, panicking behind me, in a crush, in a little crush, and then scattering. And me left there alone, facing the Murdoch's scars.

"I've got you." The shecop's voice was hard from the chase, and the gun in her hand was crackling with shiny new life, like it had living bullets in the chambers.

I reached into my pocket without thinking, my fingers closing on Murdoch's old gun, the one I had stolen from the pad floor. But I had little knowledge of such things, and when Murdoch told me to drop it, I dropped it. It made a dead sound as it fell to the concrete, like I'd cut myself off from release but Murdoch's gun was well aimed and true. "What's it gonna be, kid?" she offered. "Dirty or clean?"

Murdoch's gun was the only thing in my life, the only thing worth living for. It gets like that sometimes, with instruments of death.

"What's it gonna be?"

Murdoch's gun was a raging hard-on, pointing straight at me, straight to the heart. There was just a glint of sun coming up, over a rooftop, and a dark mist forming to her right. Other cops were moving into position. I could hear screams and cheers as people were brought down, or people were escaping. I could feel the Beetle's presence, way up close, but I couldn't see him anywhere.

"Best to come clean," Murdoch said. The mist behind her right shoulder solidified into a twisting shape.

I knew that face, that shape.

Shaka! The blown apart shadowcop.

His smoking body was a mess of fumes, and his face was a grimace of smoke. He was waving in and out of existence, as his new-fangled box of tricks struggled to shine his broken body into the real world, so that it could lick there, feeding on secrets. They'd patched him up somewhat, but his beams were still strong and hot, and he fired them at me, somewhere towards me; I could feel them burning the brickwork just to one side of my head. "He's mine, Shaka!" shouted Murdoch.

And wasn't it just my fate, to be the prize in a shooting contest, between the real and its shadow.

Murdoch asked her gun barrel to focus, and I could hear the whirring, as it found my centre, fixing hot bullets upon the heart, that soft target.

"Turn around slowly," Murdoch said. "Towards the wall. No surprises. I don't like surprises."

Sure.

So I'm turning to the wall, just in the very act of turning, when I sense Beetle nearby. That's how it was. I could just sense him!

The Beetle steps out of the shadows, holding his gun aloft, like an offering.

Murdoch had seen that gun before and now here she was, once again, on the dirty end. You could tell she wasn't too keen on it. Same with the Shaka. He'd taken punishment from it; now here he was, once again, on the dirty end.

Made me feel good; just to be free, for once, of the dirty end.

Shaka was flickering on and off, his shot memory banks struggling against his mechanisms. His box of tricks was being held by some new dumbfuck partner, who was obviously way out of cool; he was shaking, and the aerial box was shaking with him. Shaka was doing his best to keep his beams in line. You could tell from his half-lit face that humans left him kind of cold at this precise moment.

Murdoch was sweating; fluid was running down the claw marks in her face.

At the junction of Wilbraham Road and some poor bugger's driveway, rested the mobile kennel van of Dingo Tush and his pack of canine players. Hey, hey, we're the Warewolves, painted on the side. Next to it I could see Tristan and Suze, their hair a strong river flowing with moonlight Suze had the two robo-hounds on a double leash. The dogs were almost as tall as she was and baying for cop-blood. I was dancing. That twitching dance that only the truly scared-to-fuck can manage. But my mind was like a stranger, a cold hearted stranger with a gun in his hands. That was the Beetle. Mandy came up behind him, her eyes darting from point to point, as she made out how the twin guns were poised; one on my heart, the other on a shecop's head.

Moon was still, full, and voiceless.

I'm taking this one moment at a time, step by step, because it's difficult, and because it's so important.

Murdoch spoke up. "You're going down for the murder of a police officer, Beetle."

"So take me," the Beetle answered, just like that. Beautiful. Murdoch let the sweat droplets roll down her face, down her arms, down her fingers, to the trigger on the gun. It was slippery. The whole thing was slippery.