If they heard this statement, the three gentlemen were unimpressed.

“You have to go. Please, run!” whimpered his companion, tugging at his arm.

“Fuckers!” he roared, face open with delight, eyes staring at some fantastical outcome only he could see. “Come on then, come on!”

I tapped the girl, tears still flowing down her face, politely on the shoulder. “Drugs?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. Johannes whooped. A blade flicked open in the fist of one of the approaching men.

“Right then,” I muttered, and put my hand on Johannes’ arm.

Jumping into an inebriated body is an entirely unpleasant experience. It is my belief that the process of getting drunk is a cushion to the actual reality of being drunk. Bit by bit the mind grows accustomed to swaying room, burning skin, churning stomach, so though every aspect of your physiology screams, poison, poison, it is the gentle and pleasant acquisition of the state that prevents the experience from becoming a thoroughly vile event.

Jumping straight from a reasonably sober body into one riding high on more noxious substances than I cared to guess at was like taking a standing jump from a trotting pony to a speeding train.

My body jerked, fingers tightening on the bar as every part of me tried to rearrange itself in some other place. I tasted bile, felt mosquitoes feeding inside my head. “Jesus Christ,” I hissed, and as Christina swayed and opened her eyes beside me, I pressed my hands against my skull and turned, and did my very best to run.

The skin of strangers as it touched mine was an electric shock that rippled through my arms, ran down to my stomach and made the sack full of puke I carried beneath my lungs swish like the ocean against a cliff. I heard the girl shriek and the boys run, staggered against a man with coffee skin and avocado eyes, beautiful in every way, and wanted to fall into him then and there, damn Johannes.

The fire exit was shut, but not locked, the alarm long since disabled to let the smokers, sniffers and shaggers out into the alley at the back. I stumbled, forgetting that I wasn’t in a dress, wasn’t in Christina’s fancy shoes. I crawled up the stairs to street level, reached for the nearest dumpster, pressed my head against the cold stinking metal and was profoundly, and gratefully, sick.

The fire door slammed shut behind me.

A voice said, “You’re dead, Schwarb.”

I lifted my head to see the fist, which collided with the hard bone beneath my eye. I fell, hands scraping along the tarmac, vision spinning, heard tinnitus break out loud in my right ear, coughed thin white bile.

The three boys had an average age of nineteen, twenty at most. They wore knock-offs of sporty brands: baggy trousers and tight T-shirts which emphasised in clinging polyester just how few muscles they had to celebrate.

They were going to kick the crap out of me, and with my head auditioning for soprano, I couldn’t precisely put my finger on why.

I tried to get up, and one of them swung his fist again, slamming it into the side of my face. My head hit the ground and that was fine, that was completely fine, because at least with most of me on the floor, there was less of me to fall. The same thought seemed to occur to one of the boys, who grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt and began to haul me upright. I caught his wrists instinctively and, as his nostrils flared and his eyes widened, I dug my fingers into his skin and switched.

Johannes in my hands, my heart in triple figures, Christ, my fingers wanted to strike, my muscles wanted to strike, every part of my body was buzzing with adrenaline and I thought–why the hell not?

I dropped Johannes and turned, putting my entire body into the blow, knees and hips, shoulders and arms, twisting and rising to deliver a punch under the chin of my nearest companion. His jaw cracked, a tooth snapping as mandible hit cranium, and as he fell back I leaped on top of him, my knees into his chest, my face against his face, and pushed him down, screaming with a voice only freshly broken. I hit him, and hit him again, and felt blood on my knuckles though I wasn’t sure where it had come from until the third boy grabbed me by the throat, yelling a name which I guessed had to be mine. As he pulled me off the bleeding mess beneath my knees, I grabbed his arm where it lay across my neck

I had an arm across the boy’s neck, but I made it better, putting my left forearm across my right to pull tighter as the boy, bewildered and confused, writhed and wheezed and wiggled in my grasp. I kicked his left knee, and as he dropped, I held on tighter, suspending him by skull alone until his eyes began to roll and his fighting grew less, at which point and at last

I let him go.

And turned, breathless, to Johannes.

He sat, blood running from a wide cut across his face, palms dirty and scratched, staring at me with mouth open, eyes wide. I looked at the two boys on the ground, and saw that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. I looked back at Johannes. His lips were twitching from side to side, unsure of which torrent of thought they should express. When he finally found something, it was not the sentiment I had expected. “Oh my God!” he whispered. “That was incredible!”

Chapter 18

That was then.

Belgrade, the body of a man who might or might not have been Nathan Coyle.

I bought an hour of internet time in a café behind the dark-domed cathedral of St Sava, opened a packet of biscuits and a sweet fruity drink, and went online.

I needed a hacker.

Though when Johannes Schwarb went online, he did so in an altogether different guise.

Christina 636–Hi, JS.

Spunkmaster13–OMG! How are you?

Christina 636–I need a favour.

Chapter 19

More photos in the Kepler file.

Faces and memories. Places seen, people travelled.

I pulled one from the folder.

Horst Gubler, US citizen. First contact with entity Kepler, 14 November 2009.

Current residence–Dominico Hospice, Slovakia.

Good on the Slovakians.

No one else would have taken him in.

It takes twelve hours to travel by train from Belgrade to Bratislava.

By plane the journey is barely worth the taxi down the runway.

Get stuck on a plane, however, and your options are far fewer than they are on a train of several hundred diverse weary travellers. As for getting a gun through an airport–a train seemed the easier option.

I caught the 6.48 from Belgrade to Bratislava.

Notes on the train from Belgrade:

It is a mish-mash of carriages and compartments, some Serbian, some Slovakian, some Hungarian, most Czech. A surprisingly high number of seats are designed for disabled passengers, though none are to be seen. An entire carriage is assigned for passengers who have children under the age of ten on the wise assumption that twelve hours with a mewling infant in close proximity is enough to drive anyone to a criminal act. The restaurant car sells variations on a theme of sandwich, soup, tea, coffee, biscuit, cauliflower and cabbage, all carefully reheated in the microwave to your exacting desires. The train crosses three international borders, though passports are checked only once, and were it not for a slight variation in the spelling of “toilet” as you pull in and out of long platforms, you might not notice the transition at all.

I turned my

this body’s