‘Look… I’m sorry about Marjae,’ she said.

He turned from the window and stared at her in confused bewilderment, then his expression sharpened when he saw what she was doing.

‘You stupid ignorant little bitch. You want to end up like my sister?’ he sneered.

‘AIDS and sep,’ she managed as she pressed the H-patch tighter against her skin and shuddered with expected pleasure. ‘She was jabbing. That’s real dumb.’

‘So you’re the sensible girl?’ he hissed at her.

Irony, that was. Polly knew what irony was, even now. The hit from the patch was weak; it in fact seemed to sober her rather than take her anywhere pleasant. She needed to use the chaser — the second patch—but knew that to do so would probably further piss off Nandru. He moved close now, leaning over her.

‘Well, sensible girl… I’ve seen it, stretching further than the eye can see: a hell of flesh and teeth and bone and, of course, the scales. Just a glimpse, mind. Just a glimpse past the feeding mouth it used to take four Binpots, then Leibnitz, Smith… Patak.’

Fucking insane.

She must have lost it for a moment then because when she came back Nandru was sitting on the arm of the sofa, the weapon resting greasily against one of her cushions. In his hand he held an object that glittered.

‘… too much of a literary reference, don’t you think?’

‘What? What?’

He was staring at her again with that sick crazy look. ‘I haven’t got time and you’re too smashed to understand.’ He reached into the pocket of his fatigues, took out a roll of money, and showed it to her. ‘You get this after you’ve followed my instructions. I’d give it to you right now, but I know you’d be useless to me if I did. Hopefully I can get this done before it gets me. You see, I’m a marked man—I’ve been selected from the fat stock.’ He paused, suddenly looking very angry. ‘You know, they didn’t give a fuck about the rest of us—had us confined and wired so they could watch and learn while it took us. Well, I’ll take them. You just watch me.’

Polly stared at him in bewilderment. Some animal had killed his men and was hunting him. Who were they? Different from the animal? What was he talking about? She eyed the money as he slipped it back into his pocket.

‘I took it to our place, you see. You remember? Our party place before the two of you went shit out…’ He leaned closer and shook her hard. ‘Do you remember!’

‘Yeah! Yeah, I remember. Back off, for fuck’s sake!’

She’d sucked down a real interesting piece of blotting paper while camping out in the Anglia Reforest. Why it was called that she had no idea, as there hadn’t been forest there before the flood and the reclamation. East Anglia had been mega-fields and factory complexes stretching from the outskirts of London to the coast. Maybe the name referred to the far past; way back pre-millennial, before the European space station and the Big Heat, back when knights in armour charged after dinosaurs and all that crap. Polly was hazy about the details.

Their camp had been next to a ruin that was little more than half-collapsed breeze-block and brick cavity walls, the cavities packed with estuary mud sprouting stinging nettles and thistles. This ruin had stood in the shadow of a thermal generating tower, built there when the place had still been under water. The holiday had been Marjae’s idea. They’d spent two days on bennies and disiacs, partying with Nandru and one of his comrades from the Task Force: screwing amid the rough grass and stinging nettles, stopping only when the chemicals ran out and they began to feel real sore.

‘The old house under the tower,’ Nandru reminded her. ‘I won’t tell you exactly, in case they put a bend on you. I’ll instruct you when you lead them there. You know, they didn’t dare feed it… kept it in Isolation while they studied it.’

Polly accepted that there was some valuable object out there and that somehow she would be involved. She smelt money. She smelt danger. Now she turned her attention to the glittery thing he held.

‘This is state, diamond state. They got some in Delta Force and maybe in the SAS. Like I said before, they’re called Muses.’ He must have told her when she was out of it. She studied what he was holding out to her. In his palm rested a fancy ear stud and a teardrop of aluminium the size of a cigarette lighter. ‘It’s AI, got about a hundred terabytes of reference, can fuck any idiot silicon within five metres.’ He caught her by the shoulder and pressed the teardrop into the hollow at the base of her throat. It hurt. It hurt a lot.

‘What is it? What are you doing?’

He was at her handbag and in a moment had found what he wanted. He held up the second patch for her to see, and she nodded, choking as the pain spread from the base of her throat to the back of her neck, as if someone was slowly sawing off her head. Moving in front of her, he parted her legs, then reached up to press the patch against her inner thigh, just hidden there by her leather pelmet. DP they called it: double patching. The second patch was an ‘endorph gate naltraxone derivative’—or a ‘pearly’, to those who used them. It reactivated over-backed neural receptors, brought the H-hit back on line; made it like it was. The pain faded and Polly lay back to stare at the pretty lights. Vaguely she heard a door open and close.

At five in the morning Polly woke on the sofa with post-euphoric depression, undressed and went to bed in a foetal coil round the pain in the top of her chest. She didn’t know what Nandru had done, but she could feel the metal lump bedded above her breastbone. She tried to get back to sleep, but as well as the pain everything else nagged at her: not only was Marjae’s brother back on the scene with some serious weaponry and a serious fuck-up in his head, but there were the prosaic and sordid facts of her everyday life.

The rent was overdue, she’d used the last of her patches, her DSS card had been revoked because she’d been caught soliciting without a U-gov licence, and now the Revenue were after her for back taxes for the ‘public service’ she had provided. But she was determined they were not going to get her on any of the social projects, which was the usual way things went in this situation. She had friends who’d done that and who were classified bankrupt, the result of this being revocation of citizenship and full indenture to U-gov. The chains were plastic cards, location torcs, but nobody dared call it slavery.

At seven Polly rolled out of bed and got herself moving. She kept herself busy to hold depression at bay. Without somagum she had no chance of sleep now. Anyway, the temperature was in the upper twenties already and the day looked likely to be a holezoner. Standing before her grimy mirror, she studied the ear stud Nandru must have inserted in her lobe while she was stoned.

It looked a lot nicer than her usual topaz so she left it in place, before turning her attention to the teardrop of metal. With her hardened fingernail, she tried to lever it up from her skin, but it was stuck solid there. He must have used skin bond—the stuff comedians had put on public toilet seats before all the public toilets were closed down. No doubt she would see him again sometime when she wasn’t out of her skull and he wasn’t out of his, then she could demand an explanation. For now it could ride: there was the morning trade to catch and she had work to do.

She dressed in absorbent knickers, loose vest and padded knee boots, then sat in front of her mirror and did her face. Her flat was squalid and her credit breadline, but she was proud of the fact that she could sling on any old charity-shop rag and, with a bit of eyeliner and lipgloss, look good enough to walk into Raffles or Hothouse. She grinned at herself, exposing her white and even teeth. Best thousand euros she’d ever spent, having those done: no tooth decay, nothing stuck to their frictionless surfaces, and no pain. And the force of the blow required to break them would likely kill her, so she had no worries on that score. Suitably tarted she strapped on her waterproof hip bag and stocked it with the essentials of street survival. Into it went condoms, tissues and spermicidal spray, a neat Toshiba taser the size of a pistol grip, her smart cards, money, cigarettes and lighter, and her last joint. She would save the joint to haze things for the inevitable rich ugly bastard she usually ended up blowing. Thus set she headed out into the streets of Maldon Island.