“Oh, yeah.”

Stanyon arrived at the fiftieth floor to find it in turmoil. The vestibule was packed with excitable possessed. None of them seemed to know what was going on.

“Anybody seen him?” Stanyon shouted. Nobody had.

“Search around, there must be some trace. I want the teams that were searching floors thirty-eight and thirty-nine to go down to fifty-one and check it out.”

“What’s happening?” Bonney’s voice asked from the walkie-talkie; there was a lot of crackling interference.

Stanyon held the unit to his face, pulling out more aerial. “He’s dodged us again. But we know he’s here. We’ll have him any minute now.”

“Make sure you stick with procedure. Remember it’s not just Dariat we’re up against.”

“You’re not the only council member left. I know what I’m doing.”

“I’m a minute away from the lobby. I’ll join you as fast as I can.”

He gave the walkie-talkie a disgusted look and switched it off. “Terrific.”

“Stanyon,” someone called from the other end of the vestibule. “Stanyon, we’ve found something.”

It was the troll, the faerie prince, and both of the cyber-ninjas who had broken into the apartment. They were hanging around the bathroom door when Stanyon arrived. He pushed his way past them impatiently.

The sides of the ruptured toilet sphincter had sagged, squeezing more of the yellow fluid out. It was running down the outside of the cone to smear the surrounding dune of polyp chippings. Water from the fractured pipe was sloshing over the floor.

Stanyon edged forwards, and peered cautiously over the crater’s lip. There was nothing to see, nothing to sense. He pointed at the smaller of the two cyber-ninjas. “You, go see where it leads to.”

The cyber-ninja looked at him. Red LEDs on his visor flashed slowly, an indolent blinking to mirror the thoughts they fronted.

“Go on,” Stanyon said impatiently.

After a brief rebellious moment, the cyber-ninja dematerialized his flak jacket and lowered himself down into the sewer tubule.

Dariat had been worried about the undercurrents. Needlessly, as it turned out. They were rising fast up the giant tract with only the occasional swirl of bubbles twisting around them. It was still raining heavily, but the whole process was eerily silent.

He maintained the small flame burning coldly from his fingers, mainly for Tatiana’s benefit. There was nothing to see above them, only the empty blackness. They slid smoothly past the intermittent circlets of closed tubules with monotonous regularity, their only real measure of progress.

Dariat was warm enough, circulating heat through his skin to hold the water’s numbing encroachment at bay. But he did worry about Tatiana. She’d stopped talking, and her chittering teeth were clearly audible. That left him alone with his own thoughts of what was to come. And the whispers of the damned, they were always there.

Rubra, have you ever heard of someone called Alkad Mzu?he asked.

No. Why?

Capone is very interested in finding her. I think she’s some kind of weapons expert.

How the hell do you know what Capone wants?

I can hear it. The souls in the beyond are calling for her. They’re quite desperate to find her for the Organization.

Affinity suddenly gave him a sense of space opening around him. Then an astonishingly resolute presence emerged from the new distance. Dariat was at once fearful and amazed by its belief in itself, a contentment which was almost the opposite of hubris; it knew and accepted itself too well for arrogance. There was a nobility about it which he had never experienced, certainly not during the life he had led. Yet he knew exactly what it was.

Hello, Dariat,it said.

The Kohistan Consensus. I’m flattered.

It is intriguing for us to communicate with you. It is a rare opportunity to talk to any non-Edenist, and you are a possessor as well.

Make the most of it, I won’t be around for much longer.

The action you and Rubra are undertaking is an honourable one, we applaud your courage. It cannot have been easy for either of you.

It was realistic.

His answer was accompanied by Rubra’s emission of irony.

We would like to ask a question,consensus said. Several, in fact.

On the nature of possession, I assume. Fair enough.

Your current viewpoint is unique, and extremely valuable to us.

It’s going to have to wait a minute,rubra said. They’ve found the toilet.

The cyber-ninja had squeezed down into the sewer tubule and was squirming along on his belly. His mind tone was one of complete disgust. Pale violet light illuminated the lenses on his low-light enhancement goggles, casting a faint glow across the polyp directly in front of him. “They were in here,” he yelled back over his shoulder. “This shit’s all been smeared around.”

“Yes!” Stanyon banged a fist against the muscle-membrane door. “Get down there,” he told the second cyber-ninja. “Help him.”

The cyber-ninja did as he was told, sitting on the edge of the crater and slinging his legs over.

“Anyone know where these pipes lead?” Stanyon asked.

“I’ve never been in one myself,” the faerie prince said airily. “But it’ll empty into the lower floor eventually. You could try searching down there. Unless, of course, he’s simply popped up inside someone else’s john and walked out.”

Stanyon gave the slack cone an irritated look. The prospect of Dariat simply walking through the habitat’s pipes to escape in the throng was intolerable. But with everyone wearing their illusionary form it would be appallingly easy. Why can we never organize ourselves properly?

With extreme reluctance he switched the walkie-talkie back on. “Bonney, come in please.”

Rubra opened the sphincter muscle below every single toilet on the forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first floor. It was an action which nobody noticed. There were over a hundred and eighty possessed milling around on those three levels, with more still arriving. Some were obediently searching through the rooms; most were now there simply for a piece of the action. As there was no organized plan, none of them were suspicious when all the remaining apartment doors slid open. At the same time, emergency fire-control doors quietly closed off the lift shafts.

Dariat pulled Tatiana to his chest and held her tight, locking his fingers together behind her back. “Stay with it,” he said. The surface of the water was just rising over the sewer tubules of the twenty-first floor.

Bonney reached the twelfth floor well ahead of the five deputies accompanying her. She could hear them clumping down the stairwell above her. They competed against her heart hammering away inside her ribs. So far she didn’t feel any fatigue, but she knew she’d have to slow down soon. It was going to take a good twenty minutes to reach the fiftieth floor.

“Bonney,” her walkie-talkie said. “Come in please.”

She started down the stairs to the thirteenth floor and raised the walkie-talkie to her face. “Yes, Stanyon.”

“He’s vanished into the pipes. I’ve sent some of my people after him; but I don’t know where they all lead to. It’s possible he might have doubled back on us. It might be an idea to leave some guards in the lobby.”

“Fuckhead.” Bonney slowed to a halt as mystification overshadowed her initial anger. “What pipes?”

“The waste pipes. There’s kilometres of them under the floors. We found one of the toilets all smashed up. That’s how he got in there.”

“You mean sewer pipes?”

“Yeah.”

Bonney stared at the wall. She could sense the thought routines gliding through the neural strata a metre or so behind the naked polyp. In his own fashion, Rubra was staring right back at her. He was content.