“It does when you head-butt a hydrofoil from twenty metres up,” she told him.

She pulled her mask down; the air was a hot blast at the back of her throat. She waved at Dloan. He took the plugs out of his ears, cocked his head.

“Aren’t you getting anything?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Just the carrier signal; nothing about the train being late or being on this section of track yet.”

She turned back, frowning. “Shit,” she said, and flicked a grain of dust off the muzzle of the hunting rifle. She put the mask back up.

Miz stood looking out of the hotel-room window, glaring at Aïs’s dusty eastern suburbs. He glanced at Cenuij, who was taking the doll apart on the table, a magnifier clipped over his eyes.

“I was set up,” Miz said incredulously. He flapped his arms as he turned back to look at the others. “Some bastard had me steal the fucking necklace and let Lebmellin think he was going to double-cross me, but they had it all worked out; fucking Mind Bomb shit and the guns it switched off. And the set-up in the tanker; it was all done that day; I checked that route myself during the morning…” His voice trailed off as he sat heavily on the couch beside Sharrow. “And look at this!” He reached out to the low table in front of the couch and snatched up the newssheet Sharrow had brought with her. “Re-purloined Jewel wins the first race in Tile yesterday! Bastards!”

“Hey,” Sharrow said, putting her arm on his shoulders.

“Anyway,” he said, “enough. You had a worse time.” He squinted at her. “Two identical guys?” he said.

“Completely identical,” Sharrow nodded, taking her arm away. “Clone identical.”

“Or android identical,” Cenuij said from the table, putting down the magnifier.

“You think so?” she asked.

Cenuij stood, stretching. “Just a thought.”

“I thought androids came kind of expensive,” Sharrow said, swirling her drink. “I mean, when the hell do you ever see an android these days?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ve dated a few,” Zefla grunted, going to the room’s bar for a drink.

“They tend to stay in Vembyr, certainly,” Cenuij agreed. “But they travel, occasionally, and like everybody else,” Cenuij smiled frostily at Sharrow, “they each have their price.”

“Dloan was in Vembyr once,” Zefla said, turning from the flasks and bottles displayed in the cooler. “Weren’t you, Dlo?”

Dloan nodded. “Arms auction.”

“What’s it like?” Miz asked him.

Dloan looked thoughtful, then nodded and said, “Quiet.”

“Anyway,” Zefla said, taking a bottle from the cooler, “fuck the androids; what about that doll?”

Cenuij looked at it lying spread out on the table. “Could have been made anywhere,” he told them. “PVC body with strain gauges and an optical wiring loom; battery pack and a chunk of mostly redundant circuitry foam, plus an electronic coder-transmitter working at the long-wave limit of normal net frequencies.” Cenuij looked at Dloan. “Could the doll have been linked to some form of nerve-gun to do what she’s described?”

Dloan nodded. “Modified stunner can produce those effects. Illegal, most places.”

“I didn’t see any gun,” Sharrow said, trying to remember. “There were the two guys, the two chairs, the gas cylinder…”

“Chlorine!” Miz said, slapping both knees and jumping up from the couch to go to the window again, running one hand through his hair. “Fucking chlorine! Sons of bitches.”

“The gun could have been anywhere in the tank,” Cenuij said, glancing at Dloan, who nodded. “Possibly with the master unit controlling the androids, if that’s what they were. Or,” Cenuij added, nodding at Sharrow, “the doll could have been transmitting directly.”

Nobody said anything.

Sharrow cleared her throat. “You mean there might be something inside me picking up the signals from the doll?”

“Possible,” Cenuij said, gathering the bits and pieces of the doll together. “This long-wave transmitter isn’t how you’d normally slave a gun to a remote. It’s… strange.”

“But how could there be something in me?” Sharrow said. “Inside my head…?”

Cenuij shoved the remains of the doll into a disposal bag. “Had any brain surgery recently?” he asked, smiling humourlessly.

“No,” Sharrow shook her head. “I haven’t been near a doctor for… fourteen, fifteen years?”

Cenuij scraped the last few bits of the doll into the bag. “Not since Nachtel’s Ghost, in fact, after the crash,” he said. He sealed the disposal bag. “So it was a nerve-gun.”

“I hope so,” Sharrow said, staring towards the window where Miz was standing again, looking out over the dusty city.

“You want this?” Cenuij asked her, holding up the bag with the doll’s remains in it.

She shook her head and crossed her arms, as though cold.

They booked a private compartment on the dawn-hour Aïs-Yadayeypon Limited. Three hours into the journey the train left the last vestiges of Outer Jonolrey’s prairies behind and decelerated across the first jagged outcrops of karst for its last stop before the eastern seaboard. They completed their breakfast and watched the pale-grey, intermittently spired landscape below start to dot with houses, solar arrays and fenced compounds.

They were the only people who got off. The straggled town felt like frontier territory, lazy and open and half-finished. The local vehicle dealer had the six-wheel All-Terrain waiting in the station car park; Miz signed the papers, they collected a last few supplies from a general hardware store and then set off into the karst along a bumpy, dusty solar-farm road that roughly paralleled the widely spaced fence of inverted U’s supporting the thin white lines of the monorails.

Sharrow looked up as something moved above her on the monorail. Cenuij looked down, his scarf-enfolded head showing over the edge of the rail eight metres above.

“What exactly is going on?” he said.

She shrugged. “No idea.” She looked at Dloan, still listening to the monorail’s circuits, then along to the next support leg, where Zefla was sitting in the shade, her head bowed.

“Well, that’s fine,” Cenuij said tetchily. “I’ll just stay up here and get heat-stroke, shall I?” He disappeared again.

“What an excellent idea,” Sharrow muttered, then tight-beamed to the point on the rail two kilometres away where Miz was. “Miz?”

“Yeah?” Miz’s voice said.

“Still nothing?”

“Still nothing.”

“How long till the next one’s through in the other direction?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Miz, you are absolutely sure-” she began.

“Look, kid,” Miz said, sounding annoyed. “It’s the regular fucking express, the Passports were issued yesterday and my agent in Yada says a Huhsz front company hired a private carriage on this train, today, about five minutes after the Passports hearing broke up. How does it all sound to you?”

“All right, all-” she began.

“Whoa,” Miz said. There was silence for a few moments, then Miz’s voice returned, suddenly urgent. “Got something on the phones… definite vibration… should be it. All ready?”

She glanced at Dloan, who was holding one hand to his ear. He looked up at her and nodded. “Here it comes,” he said.

“Ready,” Sharrow told Miz. She whistled to Cenuij, who stuck his head over the top again. “It’s on its way,” she told him.

“About time.”

“Got the other foil ready?”

“Of course; putting the gunge on now.” He shook his head. “Stopping a monorail with glue; how do I get into these situations?” His head disappeared.

Sharrow looked at the squatting figure a hundred metres up the line. “Zef?”

Zefla jerked. Her head came up; she looked round and waved. “Business?” her sleepy voice said in Sharrow’s ears.

“Yes, business. Try to stay awake, Zef.”

“Oh, all right then.”

Dloan shut the junction box in the monorail leg and started climbing up the hand-holds towards the top of the rail.