“Best I could do,” she said.

“You did say you were a civilian,” I reminded her, a little reproachfully.

She flashed me a look. “So: a lie, then.”

The last time somebody else had couriered me, taking me on a transition I was not controlling, had been back in UPT, when I was still being trained. That had been over ten years earlier. What she had just done was impolite at least, though I suspected this was beside the point.

“Have we met before?” I asked. It was time to place bets. We had some plastic chips in front of us; she had more than me. We both chose nearby numbers.

“Most recently, here,” she said quietly. “This world, or as good as. Venezia, Italia. Five years ago. We discussed restrictions on power and the penalties associated with trying to evade them.”

“Ah. Yes. That didn’t end too well for you, really, did it?”

“Have you been shot yet, Tem?”

I looked at her. “Yet?”

“Hurts,” she said. “The way the shock of it spreads through your body from the point of impact. Waves in a fluid. Fascinating.” Her eyes narrowed fractionally as she watched the horizontal wheel spin, its centre glittering. “But painful.”

I looked round some more. The casino was gaudy, over-lit, expensively tasteless and full of mostly slim and beautiful women accompanying mostly fat and ugly men. The fragre was not so much of too much money as of too intense a degree of concentration of it in too few places. It’s not uncommon. I’d thought I’d recognised it.

“Can you remember your very last words?” I asked. “From that earlier occasion?”

“What?” she said, brows furrowing attractively. “You want to check it’s really me?”

“Really who?”

“I never said.”

“So say now.”

She leaned right in to me, as though sharing some intimacy. Her perfume was intense, musk-like. “Unless I’m much mistaken, I said, ‘Some other time, Tem.’ Or, ‘Another time, Tem’; something like that.”

“You’re not sure?”

She frowned. “I was in the process of dying in your arms at the time. Perhaps you didn’t notice? Anyway, hence I was a little distracted. However, the interception team might have heard me use those words. More to the point, before my violent but dashing end, I used the term ‘emprise.’ Only you heard that.”

Which was true, I recalled, though I had told the debriefing team from the Questionary Office this fact as well, so that didn’t really prove anything either.

“And so you are…?”

“Mrs Mulverhill.” She nodded forward as we were asked to bet again. I hadn’t even noticed we’d lost the last gamble. “Good to see you again,” she added. “Had you guessed?”

“Soon as I saw you coming.”

“Really? How sweet.” She glanced at a thin, glittering watch on her honey-tanned wrist. “Anyway, we don’t have for ever. You must be wondering why I’m so keen to talk to you again.”

“Not just the sex, then.”

“Wonderful though it was, obviously.”

“Uh-huh. Consider any latent male insecurity dealt with. Carry on.”

“Briefly, Madame Theodora d’Ortolan is a threat to more than just the good name and reputation of the Concern. She, with her several accomplices on the Central Council of the Transitionary Office, will lead us all to disaster and ruin. She is a threat to the very existence of l’Expédience, or, even worse, if she is not, and instead represents all that it most truly stands for, proves beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, by her past actions and present intentions that l’Expédience itself is a force for evil that must be resisted, contended with, brought down and, if it’s possible, replaced. But in any case reduced, entirely levelled, regardless of what may or may not come after it. In addition, there may well be a secret agenda known only to the Central Council, and perhaps not even to all on it, which we – or, at least, you and your colleagues, given that I am not one of you any longer – are unwittingly helping to carry out. This secret agenda has to stay secret because it is something that people would reject utterly, perhaps violently, if they knew about it.”

I thought about this. “Is that all?”

“It’s enough to be going on with, wouldn’t you say?”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.” She nodded forward. “Time to bet again.” We both placed more chips.

“Have you any proof of any of this?”

“None you’d accept. Nothing that would convince you empirically.”

I turned to her. “And what was it that convinced you, Mrs M? One instant you’re a lecturer; bit truculent, bit misfit, but a star of common room and lecture hall and marked for greatness, according to the rumours; the next you’re some sort of bandit queen. An outlaw. Wanted everywhere.”

“Wanted everywhere,” she agreed beneath a flexed brow. “Unwelcome throughout.”

“So what happened?”

She hesitated, gaze flicking restlessly across the table for a few moments. “You really want to know?”

“Well, I thought I did. Why? Am I going to regret asking?”

Another uncharacteristic hesitation. She sighed, tossed a chip to a nearby square on the table and sat back. I placed some chips on another part of the table. She kept looking at the table while she talked quietly. I had to sit closer to hear her, hunched over the giant ball that was my borrowed belly. “There is a facility at a place called Esemier,” she said. “I was never privileged with the exact world coordinates, I was always tandemed there by somebody with impeccable security clearance. It’s on a large island covered in trees on a big lake or inland freshwater sea. Wherever it is, it’s where Madame d’Ortolan used to carry out research and test some of her theories, especially on those transitioners with an abnormal twist to their talents. Both the official line and what you might call the top layer of rumour have it that it’s gone now, the remaining research decentralised, distributed, but Esemier is where the important programmes started. Maybe where they’re still going on. One day I might go back there, find out.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“That would please her.”

“Go on.”

“As you say, I was seen as promising; a future high-flyer. Madame d’Ortolan likes to have such people on her side, or at least brought before her so that she can test them; evaluate them while they think they’re the ones doing the evaluating. I was invited to take part in a programme investigating – amongst other things – the possibility of involuntary transitioning; the theoretical possibility that changes in the structure of an adept’s mind might let them flit without septus, or at least without a specific pre-enabling dose.”

“I thought that was completely impossible.”

“Well, quite, and if you ever ascend to the clearance levels that allow you access to the results of the research I’m talking about you’ll learn it was this programme that’s credited with determining that.”

“And did it?”

“After a fashion. It was more thorough and wide-ranging than just that, though. The full programme was aimed at establishing what randomisers were capable of, removing the myths and superstitions associated with their weird-shit powers and giving the field a proper scientific grounding, but septus-free transitioning was the pinnacle, the platinum-standard goal we were never likely to achieve but should never quite lose sight of, either.”

“What did it involve?”

“Torture,” she said, fixing her gaze on me for a moment. “In time, it involved torture.” She looked back at the gaming table as the chips we’d placed were raked away. She reached out, placed another on the same square. I placed some of mine nearby. “The randomisers ranged from the cretinous through the educationally subnormal and the socially awkward to the odd disturbed genius. Initially it was harmless. We were convinced we were helping these misfit people. And it was fascinating, enthralling; it was a privilege to be spending a vacation researching something that was almost certainly impossible but which would be simply astounding if it proved to be a viable technique, the sort of breakthrough that resounds across the many worlds and down the centuries, the kind of achievement that means your name is known for evermore. Even if it proved to be an entirely mythical talent – as we suspected – we were finding out lots of stuff. It was the single most exciting time of my life. When the autumn came and I was supposed to resume work at UPT, I volunteered to take a year’s special leave so that I could stay on at the facility and keep working on the problem. Madame d’O herself smoothed away any problems the faculty might have offered. For most people, that was when I disappeared.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry I never did say goodbye to you, not properly. I thought I would see you at the start of the new term, then… well, I’m sorry.” She looked away again.