“You’ll see,” she said again, and her voice was low and multilayered, her eyes dark. Lore wanted to trace Spanner’s cheekbones with her fingertips, run her palm across her shoulders, reach down into her clothes, touch her, feel her moving under her hands. She wanted it urgently. She ached.

An aphrodisiac, then, a pheromone, but more powerful than any she had heard of, legal or illegal. This was unstoppable. Spanner began to unbutton her dress. Lore moaned.

“Anything you like, baby, anything.”

There were about thirty people in the big room, spilling out into the kitchen, onto the steps. Lore introduced people, though most of them knew each other better than she did. Everyone was drinking very steadily. She brought out snacks, made sure the music never faltered. She avoided Billy, who just stood in the corner and watched everything with his small, flat eyes that reminded her of all the things she tried not to think about.

“I don’t like him,” she hissed to Spanner in the kitchen.

“You don’t have to like him,” Spanner said, “just be civil. This is business.”

Lore refilled her glass and went back into the living room. Her wine was cold and aromatic, like sunshine at thirty thousand feet. The music was loud and insistent. Ellen was talking to someone at the other side of the room; they were laughing. Lore sat on the floor and wondered where Ruth was.

When Spanner came out of the bathroom she moved slowly from one group to another, smiling, shaking people by the hand, touching a cheek. The whole party suddenly seemed to Lore a gross parody of the business parties the van de Oests had occasionally hosted before Ratnapida.

“What’s the occasion?” Ruth asked, and sat down next to Lore on the carpet.

“Hmm?” Lore was thinking about Ratnapida: long cocktail dresses, expensive jewelry, uniformed caterers. Always for a reason, to gain or cement advantages. Never for fun. From the other side of the room, Spanner’s finger glistened just before she touched someone under the ear.

“The party. What’s it for?”

“I’ve no idea,” she lied, and nodded over at Spanner, who was still doing her hostess bit. “She just came home one day and said, ‘party time.’ So it is.”

Ruth looked at her curiously. “You know, you’re nicer than I expected. Not like Spanner’s usual-” She went red. “I mean…”

Lore wanted to tell her it was all right, but she knew that if she did, other things might come tumbling out—she would tell Ruth to find Ellen and run, now, before it was too late, before they were caught up in Spanner’s web. And mine, she thought, I’m the one with the camera. “Did you know the woman Spanner was with before?”

Ruth nodded. “And the one before that, and before that. They don’t usually last more than about six weeks.”

Lore looked into her wine. What would she do, where would she go without Spanner? “Have you known her long?”

“Less than two years.”

Lore wanted to ask more, but Spanner was heading toward them. “Ruth! Glad you could make it.” She touched the back of Ruth’s neck lightly. “Oh, there you are,” she said to Lore. “Why don’t you go get your camera?

Spanner’s pupils were tiny: the antidote, Lore assumed. Her own probably looked the same.

There were three people on the bed when she went to get her camera. They did not seem to notice her as she edged past them and lifted the Hammex. She checked the disk on the way back to the living room, where Spanner drew her aside. “Make sure you get everything. We need all the live action we can get.” She nodded over to the corner where a couple was kissing.

No one took any notice of the amorous couple. It was not the polite ignoring of an inappropriate display of lust but, rather, that everyone was becoming engrossed in his or her own partner. Everywhere eyes were glazed, skin gleaming, lips moist. The air was thick with sex. While Lore watched, one woman started to unbutton the fly of the man opposite her.

Lore turned away, lifted the camera to her shoulder. A man was turning around his partner and pulling down her trousers. Lore cleared her throat, pointed to her camera. “It’s switched on,” she said to the air eight inches above their heads, “but I need your permission before I…” She trailed off. They completely ignored her. She licked her lips, remembering how it felt to be wrapped in the drug.

She saw Ellen with Ruth and hurried over, intending to stop them, get them out of there, but they were already kissing. From the other side of the room, Spanner was watching her. Don’t let Spanner see even a chink. “Do I have your permission to film?” she asked dully.

“Just don’t get in my way,” Ellen said, and reached up under Ruth’s dress.

Lore put the camera to her shoulder and filmed. Her face ached and her cheek, wet with tears, chafed against the eyepiece, but she filmed for hours.

When Lore edited the film, she swapped around heads and bodies, or used library heads. She needed these images—they needed these images—to make films that would sell for enough to feed them, at least until summer, but she could not bring herself to use her friends without some kind of disguise.

Weeks later she got a call from Ruth. “You bastard.”

“What-”

“The film. I saw it. At a friend’s. You bastard.”

“Ruth… Ruth…”

“You think asking permission all nice and proper makes it right?”

“Ruth, I wanted to warn you-”

“I didn’t see any pictures of you,” Ruth cut in.

Yes, you did, Lore wanted to say. You’ve seen pictures of me in far more humiliating circumstances; and my abductors did not even have the courtesy to swap my head for another’s… And all of a sudden, Lore did not care. What did it matter that Ruth was upset? She, Lore, had been through much, much worse. Ellen had given permission of a sort, hadn’t she? And at least Ruth had enjoyed it while it was happening. Lore had not enjoyed one single minute of her ordeal.

She turned off the screen. Her mouth felt strange. She knew that if she looked in a mirror she would see her lip curling, like Spanner’s.

The first people into the breakroom were Meisener and Kinnis. Meisener flicked a look in my direction but said nothing. Maybe he’d heard something. Kinnis either had heard nothing or didn’t care. He went to the wall screen and V-handed the PIDA reader. He made a disgusted sound when the figures came up.

“Every month I check my wages—every month I hope someone somewhere made a mistake, or a program screwed up and I’ll be a billionaire. Every month it says I made seventeen hundred.”

“You should know better,” Cel said, sitting down to unwrap her food.

“Hey, Bird. You think I should know better. No, and I’ll tell you why. Hope is good for a person. You think I’d keep shoveling shit if I knew, really knew all I’d get was seventeen hundred?”

There were two other people waiting to use the reader to check their wages, so Kinnis moved aside. He sat between me and Meisener. “You got paid yet?” he asked Meisener.

“Na. Timed it all wrong. I’ll have to wait until next month now.”

“You?”

I blinked at him. Payday. Money. I nodded and joined the queue at the reader. Put my hand in when it was my turn, read the figures. Almost sixteen hundred. I had earned money, in my own right, without family help, without hurting anyone else. I drew my hand out and looked at it. I wondered if Paolo would get paid.

When I woke up the next morning the sun was bright and I lay in bed a few minutes, smiling. I was alive. I had the next two days off. I had been paid.

Sixteen hundred was not much, but it was manageable. I still had a chunk left from before—nine hundred, maybe—and the scam would net tens of thousands. I felt rich.

I took breakfast onto the roof and watched the clouds, the glints from the river. There were several barges on the water. I wondered what they were carrying today. Steel from Scunthorpe, maybe? I closed my eyes and let the breeze blow soft against my lids. People had been using the river for thousands of years. Wheat during Roman times. Clay before that. Maybe blue beads arid young, scared slaves; a tun of beer. And before then, in the days when boats were hollowed-out logs, scraped goatskins, dried fish from the coast, dyed feathers for a religious rite. What had the weather been like then, and how had the air smelled? Maybe life had been more simple. Maybe it was possible to sit high up every day of your life and just sniff the breeze. Maybe not.