I take out my torch and shine it into his eyes. I have seen the medics do this, I’m sure. He squints and tries to move his head away. His pupils contract very slowly. This means something, though I’m not entirely sure what. I stop squeezing the torch’s handle. It wheezes to silence and the beam fades to darkness. Within seconds the man is snoring again.

I choose another man at random halfway down the ward on the far side and get the same responses. I have just switched the torch off again and he has just fallen back asleep when I hear footsteps in the corridor. I duck down as a figure approaches the doors, then I crouch out of sight as one of the doors starts to open. I crawl underneath the bed, banging my head on a metal strut, and have to make an effort not to cry out. I can hear the person walking down the ward, and I see a soft light flicking on and off. A pair of legs comes into view: white shoes and a skirt. The nurse passes by the bed I am crouched beneath without pausing. I lower my head so that I can watch her. She goes to the far end of the ward, stopping at a couple of beds, flicking her small torch on and off each time. She turns and walks back down the ward, stops at the door for some moments and then leaves, letting one of the doors swing shut against the other without closing it especially quietly.

I wait a few minutes. My heart calms. In fact I become so relaxed I think I might even drift off to sleep for a few moments, but I’m not sure. Then I let myself out. I negotiate the lower corridor and stairwell without being seen but the light is on in my room when I return. The duty nurse for our floor is in my room, frowning as he looks at my notes on the clipboard. “Toilet,” I tell him. He looks unconvinced but helps me back into bed and tucks me in.

As I close my eyes I picture the ward downstairs again, and I realise that one of the things that felt wrong, one of the things disturbing me about it, even though I could not pin it down at the time, was the sameness of it all. The bedside cabinets all looked the same. There were no Get Well Soon cards, no flowers, no baskets of fruit or other items that would personalise the allotment of space each patient is allowed. I can remember seeing a water jug and a small plastic cup on each cabinet, but that was all. I can’t recall seeing any chairs by the sides of the beds either. No chairs anywhere in the ward that I could remember.

Husks. I keep coming back to this strangely significant word. Whenever I think about the silent ward and those deeply drugged or in some other way near-comatose men, I think of it. Husks. They are husks. I am not sure why this means so much to me, but it would appear that it does.

Husks…

“But, madame, is it really such a terrible thing?”

Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles as though he was quite mad. The two of them were squeezed into a dusty study carrel high in a spire of one of the less fashionable UPT buildings, an outskirt adjunctery within sight of the Dome of the Mists but sufficiently distant and obscure for their conversation to stand no chance of being recorded. “Someone transitioning without septus?” she asked, emphatically. “Not a terrible thing?”

“Indeed,” Loscelles said, waving his chubby-fingered hands about. “Ought we not, madame, rather, indeed, to celebrate the fact one of our number has, or may have, discovered how to transition without the use of the drug? Is this not a great breakthrough? A veritable advance, indeed?”

Madame d’Ortolan – immaculately dressed in a cream twin-set, an unlined notebook to the olive graph-paper of Professore Loscelles’s bucolic three-piece – gave every appearance of thinking fairly seriously about trying to cram the Professore through the unfeasibly narrow window of the tiny study space and out to the sixty-metre drop below. “Loscelles,” she said, with an icy clarity, “have you gone completely insane?” (Professore Loscelles flexed his eyebrows, perhaps to signal that, as far as he was aware, he had not.) “If people,” Madame d’Ortolan said slowly, as though to a young child, “are able to transition without the drug… how are we to control them?”

“Well-” the Professore began.

“First of all,” Madame d’Ortolan said briskly, “this has not turned up in one of our extremely expensive but – now, apparently – rather irrelevant laboratories, or within the context of a carefully regulated field trial, or constrained by any sort of controlled environment; this has come upon us on the hoof, in the midst of a profound crisis in the Council, and in the guise of a previously loyal but now suddenly renegade assassin who, I am nervously informed by those trying and mostly failing to track him, may be continuing to develop other heretofore undreamt-of powers and worryingly unique abilities in addition to this one. As though-”

“Really? But that’s extraordinary!” the Professore exclaimed, seemingly quite excited by such a development.

The lady’s brows knitted. “Well, fascinating!” she shouted, and slammed her palm on the carrel’s small desk, raising dust. The Professore jumped. Madame d’Ortolan collected herself. “I’m sure,” she continued, breathing hard, “you’ll be glad to know that the relevant scientists, experts and Facultarians all share both your enthusiasm and your inability to appreciate what a catastrophe this represents for us.” She put her hands on either side of the Professore’s ample cheeks and brought them towards each other so as to compress his smooth, perfumed flesh, making it look as though his squashed mouth and ruddily bulbous nose had been jammed between two glisteningly plump pink cushions.

“Loscelles, think! Defeating an individual or grouping of people is easy; one simply brings greater numbers to bear. If they have clubs, and so do we, then we simply ensure that our clubs are always bigger and more numerous than theirs. The same with guns, or symbols, or bombs, or any other weapons or abilities. But if this man – who is now patently not one of us, whose hand, rather, is most forcibly turned against us – can do something that none of our own people can do, how do we combat that?”

The unyielding firmness of her grip on his face and the concomitant unlikelihood of him being able to form a comprehensible reply led the Professore to believe that this was in the nature of a rhetorical question. She shook his face gently back and forwards in her hands. “We could be in terrible, terrible trouble, thanks just to the threat of this one individual.” She jiggled his face in her hands. “And, then – worse, for this can get much worse – what if anybody can do this, just with some training? What if any idiot, any zealot, any enthusiast, any revolutionary, dissident or revisionist can just decide they want to flit into another person’s body, displacing their mind? Without planning? Without the necessary safeguards and respect for just cause and proven importance? Without the guidance and experience of the Concern? Where does that leave us then? Hmm? I’ll tell you: powerless to control what is arguably the single most potent ability an individual can possess in this or any other world. Can we allow that? Can we countenance that? Can we indulge that?” She spread her hands slowly, letting go of Loscelles’s cheeks. The Professore’s features rearranged themselves into their accustomed alignments. He looked surprised and a little shocked to have been handled so.

Madame d’Ortolan was shaking her head slowly, her expression sorrowful and grave. Professore Loscelles found his own head shaking in time with hers, as though in sympathy.

“Indeed,” the lady told him, “we cannot.”

“It might, I suppose, lead to anarchy,” the Professore said profoundly, frowning somewhere towards the floor.