“We can fit you with new sensors, of course,” Kiss replied. “Audio, visual, sensory, you name it. Just think of it. Ice cream, music, the scent of primroses after a heavy shower, the sunset over the Loire valley…”

I could experience all that?

“No problem. And that’s just the start of it. If you’d just use your imagination, there’s no end to what we could show you.”

Fuck.

Kiss blinked. “What?” he said.

I said fuck. It’d have been really nice, I bet. Too late now, of course.

“Too late?”

Use your common sense. I’m armed and about to blow. You don’t think there’s anything I can do to stop it, do you?

“But—”

You honestly believe I can switch myself oft? Get real. As far as bombs are concerned, free will is a lawyer’s marketing gimmick. God, I wish you hadn’t said all that stuff about what I could have had. You’ve really upset me now.

Five seconds and counting. Time was doing its best, but there are limits. At the back of his cosmic awareness, Kiss could feel the world tapping its foot and saying, Come on, do something.

Do what?

Anything. Anything is better than nothing. Nothing. Generally defined as an absence of anything, nothing is usually produced by some catastrophically traumatic event; an atomic bomb, — say, going off in a confined space. Such as a galaxy.

Kiss thought, and something came. If he’d been a cartoon, a bubble with a light bulb in it would have appeared above his head.

Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what supernatural beings are made of. Among other things; including a pretty substantial amount of pure, crude energy. Kiss had never bothered to learn the physics (he’d spent physics lessons practising simple levitation on the underwear of the girl sitting next to him) but he had an idea that what he was mostly made of was raw power. Which accounted for his being able to fly and materialise physical objects, not to mention the chronic indigestion.

And to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; which he had only been able to understand in terms of a very fast car hitting a very solid lamp-post.

Indeed.

The trouble was, if he used himself as the lamp-post, he was likely to get seriously bent.

Omelettes and eggs. Three seconds and counting. Yes, he screamed in his mind, the complaint of every poor fool since time began who’d suddenly found out he’s been cast to play the hero, but why me? And the inevitable answer: because you’re here, and there’s nobody else. Because we didn’t think you’d mind. You don’t mind, do you?

Kiss moved.

Here, protested the bomb, what the devil do you think you’re playing at? It was bad enough with that goddamn nymphomaniac carpet…

“Shut up,” Kiss replied. He wrapped his arms tight around the bomb, and closed his eyes.

No seconds, and counting.

“I expect you’re right,” said Philly Nine wearily. “No doubt he’s disarmed the bomb in the very nick of time, and all my hours of hard work gone straight down the pan. Which only leaves me,” he added, taking one step forward, “the consoling thought of what I’m now going to do to you.”

Jane’s eyebrows shot up like Wall Street after a Republican landslide. “Me?” she snapped. “What on earth have I got to do with it?”

“A whole lot,” Philly replied, flexing his fingers purposefully. “If it hadn’t been for you, he’d never have thought to interfere. All this is your fault.”

“Rubbish.”

“Your fault,” Philly repeated, pale with anger. “Your goddamned meddling can’t-mind-your-own-business fault. Well, you can take it from me, it’s the last time you’ll—”

“Excuse me,” said Asaf.

The shock stopped Philly Nine dead in his tracks. The feeling was hard to describe, but it was something along the lines of the way you’d feel if you were sitting in, say, the roughest dockside bar in San Francisco and a four-foot-six eighty-year-old missionary tottered in on a zimmer frame and offered to fight any man in the place.

“What?”

“Please,” said Asaf, standing up, “don’t talk to the lady like that. You’ll upset her.”

“You what?”

“And if you upset her,” Asaf continued, “you’ll upset me. So please, cut it out. OK?”

The Dragon King, who had been trying to look unobtrusive to the point of virtual translucence, suddenly snapped out of existence. He rematerialised as a vague presence at the back of Asaf’s mind, hammering on the door of the Instincts Section, Self-Preservation department, which appeared to be locked.

Cripes, mate, are you out of your tiny mind? This bastard’ll have you for flamin’ breakfast.

“I know what I’m doing,” Asaf replied. “You go away and leave this to me.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Philly Nine narrowed his eyes. “Are you serious?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You are threatening me?”

“If you choose to look at it that way, I suppose I am.”

It had been a long day, and Philly had had enough. “You’re dead,” he said softly. “Dead and buried. Now then…”

And then he stopped. In fairness, he tried to back away and run for it, but somehow he couldn’t. Rabbits who go foraging for food in the middle lane of a motorway often experience the same effect.

“Please…” he said, and then his tongue packed up, immobilised like the rest of him.

“I really don’t want to do this,” Asaf said, “but you leave me no choice.”

He was holding a bottle. To be precise, it was one of those small screw-top plastic bottles they sell fizzy drinks in nowadays. Slowly, his body language broadcasting determination and regret in equal proportions, he advanced.

Philly’s tongue came back on line just before the neck of the bottle touched him. “You can’t make me get in there,” he hissed. “Absolutely no way. There is literally no power on earth…”

“In you get.”

“I steadfastly and categorically refuse to—”

“In.”

Wildly, Philly stepped backwards and groped behind him for something to cling on to. Try as he might, he couldn’t take his eyes off the neck of the bottle; it seemed to summon him.

“As you can see,” Asaf said gently, “this is no ordinary bottle.”

“You’re lying. It’s just a bog standard pop bottle, and I’ll be damned if I—”

Asaf’s face creased in a smile that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour. He levelled the bottle as if it were a gun, and beckoned.

COME.

“Shan’t!”

COME.

“Good Lord,” Philly gibbered, both arms linked round a granite outcrop, “you didn’t honestly think I was serious about destroying the world, did you? It was just a joke, honest. I mean, why on earth would I possibly want—”

WHOOSH.

Asaf shook his head sadly, screwed on the cap and held the bottle up to the light. It was transparent plastic; but there was nothing to be seen inside the bottle except the usual few beads of condensation clinging to the sides. And they had been there before.

“Gosh,” said Jane.

With a sigh, Asaf swung his arm back and threw the bottle up into the air. There was a sudden terrifying clap of thunder, a streak of lightning that made Jane think the sky had finally come unzipped, and then nothing.

“A pity,” Asaf said. “But there it is.”

There was a flutter of air and the Dragon King hove back into existence, hovering a few feet above the ground. He was shaking slightly, and his wings were creased.

“Stone the flaming crows,” he said. “I never seen the like in all my…”

Asaf nodded to him. “Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome, mate, no worries. Any time.”

Jane looked from one to the other, and made a sort of feeble questioning gesture with her left hand. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It was his bottle, you see,” Asaf said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “I guess he must have been carrying it around for years. Boy, how he must have hated himself.”