'Jesus, I didn't know that,' said Gumball. 'You mean…'

'Yeah. Parker took his mask off, gave it to the girl. He saved her life.'

'Jeez!' He'd finished his prawns by now, and the gum was back in his mouth, and he was chewing on it, but slowly. 'That's fucking brave!'

'It's stupid. But yeah, brave, I suppose. I found him there, stuck fast in front of the television. He had the gun out and everything, and he was pointing it at the screen, and I swear he was trying to shoot, even with the thrall on him. He had tears… tears on his cheeks, frozen. That's when I heard the backup sirens. Too fucking late, course they were.'

'Hey, don't blame yourself, Muldoon.'

'Why not? You got someone else handy?'

'So…' And here he stretched the gum out of his mouth in a long line - a dirty yellow this time - and then let it snap back. 'So what did it look like?'

'The advert? Well, I had the mask on, so I was only getting the filter. Just some stairs, nothing special. Animated, so that they kept rising upwards, and never ending. Looked kinda cheap, really. You know, amateurish.'

'That's it?'

'That's it.'

'Jeez!'

'Yeah. Let's clock off.'

But when I started to get the gear together, I saw this kid looking at me from the next table along, listening distance. It was the jetgirl, the one with the hard shopping eyes, and away from her flottish friends now. She was smiling at me.

'What's up with you?' I asked her.

'Nothing much, just listening.'

'This is cop business," said Gumball. 'Get the hell out of here. Bloody flots!'

'I'm not a flot. I'm a jet. How dare you?'

'All the bloody same. Nothing better to do than play stupid games all night long.'

'They're not games. It's an art form.'

'Yeah, right.'

'I'm good at them. I get to cheat, you see. It's a secret, cause the cheating's built into the art. You have to discover it, then you progress. The next level.'

Gumball stood up. His mouth worked at the gum like a machine, a rainbow machine. 'I'll progress you!' he snarled, and when he spoke, you could see all the colours inside, caught in the change.

'Sit down, Gum,' I said to him. 'Just a kid, that's all.'

'You're not telling him everything, are you?'

She'd said this directly at me, with a look in her eye, a knowing look.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Tell him about the mask.'

'What is this?' asked Gumball.

I ignored him, kept my eyes on the girl. She looked so young, nine or ten, although you can never tell for sure, not once they're on the street. 'What do you know?'

'Stuff.' And she smiled again.

'What's your name, girl?' I asked.

'Lucy. What's yours?'

'Never mind that. You'll have to come with me, I'm afraid.'

'Smashing. Will I get to be a commcop, please?'

So I sent Gumball on his way, clocked off with HQ on the bleeper, and then offered to buy the jetgirl some breakfast. This she readily agreed to; not prawns, just coffee and biscuits would do. She sat there, slurping away. I took a look at her; quite good-looking, incredibly slim, like I could pick her up like a feather. And well-dressed like all the jets were. Compared to the flots of course, who were trash personified. I asked her why she'd left home, and she said that home was for the lonely, and I could connect to that. I was a commcop, wasn't I?

'I can look at adverts,' she said, with a crunch of biscuit. 'Bet you can't.'

I remembered, then, that she'd been hanging round real close to the action this morning, and maybe she had seen a glimpse of it, I couldn't be sure.

'I've got the mask, haven't I?' I said back at her.

'I don't need a mask, me, so don't think that's why I want to join up, just to get a mask and a gun, cause I don't need 'em, well, the gun would be nice, but just for kicks like. Why do you think I don't want prawns? Adverts mean nothing to me.'

Now I knew there were a few people out there that were immune to the messages. The marketing men called them the Blind Consumers, the Unresponsive 6 Per Cent. And I knew that Brendel would love to get her hands on this girl, this Lucy, subject her to a million lab tests, extract all the scattering out of her. I wasn't keen on the procedure, because I'd seen what the extraction did to the immune. It made them go hollow.

'What should I have told my partner about the mask?' I asked her.

'You took it off, didn't you? When you saw the stairway advert. Am I right?'

'No. I mean… I wanted to… it was…'

'It was trying to make you, right?'

'Yes… I started to… started to lift up the mask… I couldn't…'

'How much?'

'What?'

'How much?'

'Just a bit, a sliver, not at all.'

'You haven't told anyone?'

'Look, what is this? Nothing happened.'

'And now you're scared. Scared that they'll take you off the streets. Am I right?'

I looked away. The flotboys had all left now, and another bunch of diners had taken their place. Maybe these were people with real hunger, maybe they were artificially induced, there was no way of telling, not without the proper equipment.

'You've seen it, haven't you?' I said to the girl.

She was quiet for a time, and then she started to cry. Not tears of pain, or anger or frustration even. She nodded,her head, said nothing. Just cried.

They were tears of loss, I'm sure they were.

Later on, when really I should've been home and in bed, I took Lucy out to the commcop station. She got over the tears as soon as she got in the van, and the journey through the streets had her smiling, especially when I turned the siren on, just for her. Anything to take her mind off what was happening, because I wasn't sure about what I was about to do; I had no way of knowing the reactions that I would get. Luckily, Brendel was off duty as well, and the high-security cells weren't her natural habitat anyway. I signed in with the guard down in the cellar, put a tick next to 'Officer in Attendance' and another against 'Family/Acquaintance' and got Lucy to sign against that.

'It's breakfast time, anyway,' said the guard. '1 was going to take this in.' He was holding a plateful of mush and a spoon. 'You want to do it?'

I nodded. Took the plate and spoon - plastic plate, plastic spoon - and then waited as the guard unlocked the door. 'Be careful in there,' he says.

The occupant of cell 945 was asleep as we came in. At least, I thought he was. It was dark, and the faint light from the door fell only on a bulky shape lying on the bed. I put my fingers to my lips, but Lucy was quiet anyway, and too nervous even to breathe out loud. I felt the same, and when I put on the small and well-protected overhead light, and the figure on the bed stirred slightly, it felt as though I was waking the dead. There was a draw of breath at last, and a gasp as Lucy saw what Parker had become.

Become.

Reduced.

Victim to.

It was the first time I'd come to visit. Maybe guilt had kept me away, or just the sense of helplessness. He was tied to the small bed. Strapped down. I hadn't expected this. It must've been bad. Still bad. Shit. I could hardly think of anything at all, and when his eyes opened, and it took him a good long moment to recognize me, well, I was on the edge of turning away.

Parker's head was propped up slightly on a pillow, and this was the only bit of him that could move at all. The bastard only smiles at me, doesn't he? Then he says, 'Muldoon, you came. Is it breakfast time already?' I come forward with the bowl, and I scoop some of the mush out of it with the spoon. I place it against his lips, he opens them, chews the stuff, swallows. After about six of these mouthfuls, he shakes his head for no more please.

'You caught it yet?' he asks.