‘Look for someone who doesn’t care about who they’re taking,’ Slvasta urged. For a second the montage was overwhelmed by the vision of Quanda’s face, beautiful and terrible, her mouth parted in a wide victorious smile as she loomed over him.

‘There!’ Coulan exclaimed.

Slvasta focused on the sight gifted by a comrade from a cell at the far end of Cranwich Road, where a relative peace had fallen. People who had leapt out of the way of the stampede were beginning to re-emerge onto the street, as were the sheriffs. At the junction was a big thickset man in late middle age wearing a filthy tweed jacket and stained brown trousers. He carried the limp form of a teenage boy over his shoulder. His walk was methodical, inexorable, as evidenced by the determined expression on his squat face. One hand only had two fingers.

‘Got to be him,’ Slvasta breathed.

‘Challenge him,’ Bethaneve sent to the nervous cell member who was watching from a safe distance.

The possible Faller was going round the corner into Knole Street and heading away from the station and the sheepish sheriffs. In all the turmoil no one else was paying him the slightest attention.

‘Faller,’ the cell member said in a feeble voice. Nobody even heard her, let alone paid attention.

‘Back her up,’ Bethaneve’s instruction went cascading through their erratic communication web between cells.

‘Faller.’ This time the cell member sounded a little more confident. She raised a hand and pointed. ‘Faller!’

The call was taken up by other cell members along Knole Street.

‘You, hey, you!’

‘Stop.’

‘Faller! He’s a Faller.’

‘Stop him.’

‘Sheriff, sheriffs! Do something.’

Now people were starting to look. The Faller – if that’s what he was – had quickened his pace.

A sheriff stepped towards him. ‘Just a moment, you.’

He was ignored.

The sheriff was only five metres away now, his arm held up, palm outwards as if he was directing traffic. ‘Right, you—’

The Faller flung the unconscious teenager he was carrying right at the sheriff, who collapsed under the impact, crashing to the pavement. He screamed in pain. The Faller started running, moving incredibly fast for a man his size and age.

It seemed as if everyone on Knole Street was shouting. A cacophony of alarm and fear that was swiftly supplanted by shrill sheriffs’ whistles, calling for help. Some people tried to stop the Faller, lashing out with teekay. Others – stronger, confident men – attempted to tackle him physically. They were smashed aside as if they were rag dolls.

Then a couple of Meor regiment squads raced into Knole Street.

‘Get down,’ their officers bellowed – an order backed up by shrill ’path shouts. The soldiers brought up their carbines. Everyone dropped to the ground, parents clawing at their children, forcing them onto the cobbles; even the sheriffs ducked down. The only person moving was the Faller, pounding along at an inhuman speed, still looking directly ahead as if he hadn’t noticed what was happening. Even treading on cowering bodies as he went.

The carbines opened up with a devastating roar.

7

Philious never enjoyed visiting the Faller Research Institute. Even in childhood Fallers triggered an instinctive discomfort, but his father had insisted he see one as part of his training. Time hadn’t lessened the reaction.

The black carriage he rode in with Trevene and Aothori was larger than an ordinary cab, but unadorned with any heraldic crest. There were several of them in the palace stables for the family to use when they wanted to travel about incognito. Two ordinary cabs followed them through the streets, filled with Palace Guards in civilian clothes.

East Folwich was a wealthy borough dominated by the clothing trade, so although it had a large industrial park the factories didn’t belch out smoke and chemical effluent as many did in Varlan. Pleasant houses formed quiet leafy streets, while larger residences surrounded the two parks. The majority of factories were built along both sides of the Dolan Drop canal, a channel dug specifically to divert half of the river Erinwash in a two-kilometre semicircle. Water surged down the brick-lined canal with considerable force, powering dozens of water wheels. Pollution here amounted to the tremendous clattering of big looms that reverberated through the air for sixteen hours a day.

To an observer, the institute looked like a small exclusive factory, wedged between an underused railway marshalling yard and the edge of the Dolan Drop factory zone. It was surrounded by an unusually high wall which was well maintained. No sign announced what was contained within. There was only one entrance, through heavy wooden doors into a short tunnel that had another set of identical doors at the far end. They were linked mechanically, making it impossible for both to be opened at the same time.

With the inner doors open, the Captain’s carriage trundled out into a bare courtyard. The institute building’s sombre purpose was reflected in its plain design, a long two-storey rectangle with narrow iron-barred windows and no adornment at all. Philious believed it was the only part of Varlan where you could see no vegetation. Even the weeds were scoured regularly from the courtyard’s cobbles by the staff. Human staff. There were no mods permitted inside, ever. Of all the places on Bienvenido, the institute remained steadfast in following the guidelines laid down in the original Faller manuals it had produced almost three thousand years earlier. Fallers, those pages warned, could exert total control over mods and neuts, rendering any human instruction worthless.

As he alighted from the carriage, Philious reflected on the irony that the other most devout believer in that tenet right now was Captain (retired) Slvasta.

The institute director, Professor Gravin, bowed gravely at his distinguished visitors. He was well into his second century, an enormously heavy man whose midnight-black skin served to highlight his remaining wisps of silver hair. Shaking the professor’s damp hand Philious also noticed how much sweat was glinting on that skin. It wasn’t from stress; moving such a bulky frame just a few steps seemed to exhaust Professor Gravin.

‘I’m so very glad you came, sir,’ the director wheezed as he led them inside. ‘What we have found is remarkable. And disturbing.’

‘So your letter implied,’ Philious murmured. He kept glancing at the director’s white coat. Everyone at the institute wore one, it was their uniform. But the buttons on the oversized director’s lab coat seemed perpetually on the point of ripping, they were under so much pressure. Not for the first time he began to question the need for the institute. For all his dedication, the professor and his staff were utterly inferior to the scientists who had accompanied Captain Cornelius, those stalwarts who had investigated the Fallers as their ship’s instruments decayed and died around them, who had determined so much of their nature and ability. Since those first two centuries, the institute had added very little to their knowledge. These days it didn’t do much other than confirm that the corpses of humans and animals brought to them were indeed Fallers, and check that there was no deviation, that nothing new had developed. Pioneering science had given way to a detailed cataloguing mandate as the institute tried to establish any kind of a pattern in Faller activity, because it no longer had anything else to contribute. Any idea that the institute would lead the fight back against the Fallers and their Forest home had faded more than two thousand years ago. Now it was just another government department, locked into the status quo, battling for budgets and staff.

Professor Gravin opened the doors of the autopsy room, barely fitting through the gap. The room was completely clad in shiny white tiles, except for the ceiling, which was all glass, with the late-morning sunlight streaming in. Philious had to squint against the glare.