I asked for and was given a radio to use in my room. That was better. I am still struggling to understand more than about a quarter of what is said – less when people talk too fast – but I have worked out that this is a mostly peaceful world and that this is a relatively benign, egalitarian society – my care here will continue indefinitely, paid for by the state – and that I am here because I suffered some sort of breakdown which left me in a catatonic condition for a month. The medical staff think I must still be suffering from a mixture of amnesia and delusion, or that I am just plain putting it on, pretending to be crazy to escape… well, whatever it was I felt the need to escape.

I have been back to the ward of sleeping men, in daylight. Nobody tried to stop me. It is an ordinary ward, after all. The men were mostly awake – a few were snoozing, but not all – and there were chairs by the bedsides, and there were flowers and Get Well Soon cards on the bedside cabinets, and there was even a family – what I took to be a wife, sad and sallow-faced with two small, silent children – visiting one of the patients. The two adults were talking quietly. Some of the other men, sitting up in bed, looked at me as I stood at the doors of the ward, staring in. I met their level, mildly inquisitive gazes, felt foolish, and turned and walked away down the echoing corridor, relieved and disappointed at once.

My name still means nothing to me. Kel. Mr Kel. Mr P. Kel. Mr Pohley Kel. Nothing. It means nothing to me – well, beyond that it feels the wrong way round somehow. Still, it seems that I am stuck with it and I suppose it will do as well as any other.

I was a crane driver, they tell me. I worked in one of those tower cranes they use to build tall buildings and other large structures. This is a job of some skill and responsibility, and one that you’d want someone quite sane and sensible doing, so I probably couldn’t just walk back into it. But it occurs to me that it is also a job that somebody who did not very much like interacting with other people might choose, and one that might allow the imagination to roam free and unfettered above the city and the site, so long as the mechanics of the job got done safely.

I lived alone, a loner, both in my home life and up there in the sky, swinging loads around from place to place while the people below scurried like ants and I took instructions from disembodied voices crackling over the radio. No family, no close friends (hence no visitors, save a foreman from the firm while I was still catatonic, apparently – anyway, the whole building team has moved to another city now). I’m told I rented a small flat from the city council which has now been allocated to somebody else. My possessions, such as they may be, are in storage until I claim them.

But I remember nothing of that life.

Rather I was a dangerous, skilled, swashbuckling hero, a remorseful but utterly deadly assassin, a thinking person’s hooligan and later (or perhaps just potentially) a mover and shaker, high-flying, fast-tracked, in a vast and burgeoning shadow-organisation spreading secretly under our banal existence like some fabulously bright and intricate mosaic long buried unglimpsed beneath a humble hearth.

I remain convinced that this calm, unambitious, self-satisfied, unspectacular little world is not all there is. There exists a greater reality beyond this dull immediacy and I have been part of it – an important part – and will return to it. I was betrayed, or at least persecuted, and I fell and nearly perished, but I escaped – as of course I would, being who and what I am – and now I am hiding here, waiting, biding my time. So I need to prepare, and work out whether I should do nothing but wait here patiently, or take matters into my own hands and strike out purposefully.

There is much to be done.

Between the plane trees and belvederes of Aspherje, on this clear midsummer early morning, the dawn-glittering Dome of the Mists rises splendidly over the University of Practical Talents like a vast gold thinking cap. Below, amongst the statues and the rills of the Philosophy Faculty rooftop park, walks the Lady Bisquitine, escorted.

From the vantage point of a terrace a few metres higher and fifty metres away, Madame d’Ortolan, with Mr Kleist at her side, watches the little party as it meanders closer. From a distance, Bisquitine looks quite normal, just a pretty plump blonde in a rather old-fashioned long white dress, attended by four gentlemen and a lady-in-waiting.

“There are other people we might employ, ma’am,” Kleist says.

He has been waiting to say this. He might have said it a dozen times in the last day, but has held his tongue. She has been waiting for him to say it.

“I know,” she tells him, still watching the sauntering progress of the little group. Bisquitine does not appear to have noticed her yet. Her escort – handlers and guards – should have noticed them, if they are doing their job, but they show no sign either. Madame d’Ortolan takes two steps back on the pink stones, only just keeping the approaching figure in sight. “How are Gongova and Jildeep?”

Kleist ignores the question because he knows it is rhetorical, a comment rather than a request for information. “There are others besides, before we need to resort to this… thing.”

“Indeed there are. But it will all take time, no matter what we do, and the next team we send, if we do not use our little blonde friend here, will be seen as just another incremental escalation. He will probably be expecting that. We need to send him somebody who will come as a deeply unpleasant surprise.”

“I am in no doubt that her deployment will produce a deeply unpleasant surprise or two.”

Madame d’Ortolan still doesn’t look at him, still keeps her attention focused on the distant white figure. “Possibly on our own side as well, you mean.”

“That was what I wished to imply.”

“Message received, Mr Kleist.” Madame d’Ortolan squints, tips her head fractionally. “You know, I’m not sure I’ve seen her in sunlight before,” she says, so quietly that Mr Kleist is not certain that she even means him to hear.

He supposes that what she says it true. They have seen the creature in laboratories, strapped to things like dentists’ chairs, confined in small rubberised cages or tied to hospital beds, sometimes weeping, sometimes hysterical, more lately in states of humming, unconcerned calm, or babbling nonsense, but always surrounded by muttering technicians wielding clipboards, electrodes and meters, and rarely with a window even in sight, always in artificial light. And always, until now, physically restrained.

It has not always been pleasant to watch, but the girl’s powers – evident from birth but beyond control – have been heightened and honed over time. Weaponised, you might say. Personally he thinks a little less time might have been devoted to raising those abilities to their present admittedly formidable heights and a little more to making them easier to predict and control, but Bisquitine, in her present form, is very much Madame d’Ortolan’s creation, and such timidity – as she would see it – is not Madame d’Ortolan’s way.

“Hmm,” Madame d’Ortolan says. “She looks as though she has a touch of the mongrel about her, in this light.” She looks at Mr Kleist. “Don’t you think?”

Mr Kleist makes the motion of looking. “I couldn’t say, ma’am.”

Madame d’Ortolan turns to look at the distant group again. She nods, shallowly. “An octoroon, or thereabouts, I’d say.”

There is a pause, then a sigh before Mr Kleist says, “Well, in any event, ma’am, if you truly are decided on this course, we should waste no further time.”

Madame d’Ortolan flashes him a look, then relents, shoulders falling. “You’re right. I’m procrastinating.” She nods at the steps leading down from the terrace. “We must seize the day,” she observes, patting her blouse frills flat against her jacket lapels. A flower, gelded by Mr Kleist, lies limp upon her jacket breast. “And the nettle.”