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  I hacked a rough circle in the plas bricks and put my boot through it with a couple of big heel kicks. Those sambo lessons I’d traded for karate had been worth every bruise.

  I didn’t wait to check what was on the other side but crawled through, head first, hands out to break my fall.

  Mistake. I touched something alive. Tilting my headlight downward, I scoped a dazed python, curled up tight for the winter.

  Well, it would’ve been - if I hadn’t disturbed it.

  It stirred sluggishly like it had a hangover. Pythons weren’t poisonous but their bite hurt and was filthy. Septicaemic in fact.

  On instinct I grabbed its throat before it had a go at me then I tumbled the rest of my body through the hole. By the time I got upright, it had aroused itself and begun to constrict around my arm and shoulders.

  I shuddered and sucked in a deep, steadying breath. I didn’t want to kill it, there were few enough native animals left in this country, and these guys kept the rats down, but I was in a bit of a hurry. With difficulty I unwound its heavy body.

  Now what? If I put it down it might bite. Maybe if I tied it really tight in my pack it might come in handy. Not many people could think straight when you waved a snake in their face.

  I stuffed it in awkwardly, strapping the flap down hard. After a minute or two of frantic gyration, it went still.

  I sighed. I’d have to stop collecting things; a Borgia canrat, now a diamond python. Anyone would think I was the animal kind.

  I rechecked the straps several times before I levered the pack on my back, trying to shut out images of the python getting loose and throttling me.

  Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. As soon as I got back on the ground, I’d dump it.

  Taking a settling breath, I looked around properly. Now I’d broken through the wall of plas bricks, cut-thrus ran in all directions. I chose one randomly, keeping to a generally south direction, taking care to avoid any more sleeping creatures.

  Twenty or more villas later I risked coming down. Even then I squatted for a time over the manhole, remembering my last roof crawling excursion. Stolowski and I had found our way into a Mueno living room. Considering I wasn’t even Oya, they were pretty chilled about it. If my hunch was right, that was the time I’d been infected with the parasite. That’d teach me to get splattered with sacrificial human blood.

  Blood! A surge of desire for it welled up in me - breathtaking in its strength. I bent it into anger and self-pity.

  What the hell was I doing chasing Leesa Tulu around this place?

  My head ached with the intrigues in my life. Everyone had an angle. And for some reason they all seemed compelled to use me to work them. Daac wanted to manipulate the Eskaalim, the Cabal wanted me to find their karadji, the Muenos wanted a real flesh goddess, and Teece wanted a woman who would stay at home helping him make money off black-market tek and motorbikes.

  But what did I want?

  I wanted to stay alive.

  And I wanted Loyl Daac to stay alive. In that order. I cared about him. And that I really hated!

  Forward was the only way I’d get those things.

  Sighing, I hauled the manhole cover off and took a recce below. For once I caught a break. Empty - apart from small vermin and ankle-deep small vermin shit.

  I dropped down and waded through it with big, impatient steps, stamping my boots clean when I hit the pavement. Then I checked my direction log.

  Dawn had deserted and the sun already radiated on to the tacky plas overhangs with a new intensity. I felt the sudden change of season, a declaration that winter had pissed off. It got me jogging the return route with fresh determination. King Tide was only a couple of days away and I hadn’t found the karadji.

  I recognised the villa set soon as I turned the corner. The ‘kleen beds and air con’ neon was dead, but it was unmistakably Chez Nutter. The quad-runna had vanished from outside, along with its legion of twitchers.

  Panting with exertion, I took my pack off and squatted down next to it, wondering what to do next. Nothing came to me except the desire for food and a comatose sleep.

  I only sensed the set of tampering hands when my pack got up a fair wriggle. Wheeling, I found a petit crim - spotted with bleeding, cauliflower-shaped hives - draped in a grey-green python.

  I grabbed the snake’s neck as it fanged open to have a taste. ‘Get your fingers out of my stuff, or I’ll let go.’

  The petit choked and coughed, waving his hands frantically in front of me.

  ‘What do you want?’ Petits didn’t bother me much. They were usually after food, sometimes drugs. Often they poached just for the sake of it.

  This one had a curtain of limp, thin hair that did little to hide the bloody sores on his face and neck.

  ‘Did-youse-come-in-on-the-quod-copt? Youse-gotta-be-from-outwhere-cos-they-speak-different-so-slow.

  I wasn’t surprised he thought that. He gabbed quicker than a cheap advert.

  As I looked closer, I thought I recognised something about him. With a foot anchoring my pack to the pavement, I unwound the snake from his neck and wrestled with its tail.

  ‘You did biz with a friend of mine yesterday. Big guy with dark skin.’

  He nodded, being careful.

  I glanced over at Chez Nutter. ‘He ran into a problem. ’

  The petit nodded. ‘Clancy-uses-crawl. Spread-quick.’ He glanced across at the lifeless neon almost bitterly. ‘Epox-can-afford-it.’

  ‘Clancy? Grrl at the desk?’

  ‘Uhuh-that’s-her.’

  ‘What’s an epox?’

  ‘Epoxyed-to-whatever. You’ll-see-more-of-’em.’

  His face closed up then like he’d said too much. People were the same everywhere when they didn’t want to talk.

  I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I leaned down heavily on him. ‘First, who took my friend and where?’

  He squirmed a bit. ‘Hey-my-words-ain’t-free.’

  I’d really had a skin full of this how much thing, so I loosed my grip on the python.

  It obligingly constricted around his neck.

  He gargled like baby. ‘get-it-the-fok-offa-me-can’ttalk. ’

  I figured he could talk underwater, strangled, with burst lungs, but I relented and recaptured the snake. Why did everyone in this damned world want to be paid?

  He rubbed his neck uneasily, glancing down at my pistols and back at the python. ‘Ike-took-him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Ike’s-place.’

  ‘Is my friend alive?’ Considering the karma I’d attracted on my journey this far, it seemed a reasonable question.

  ‘For-a-while-depends-how-long-it-takes-to-strip-him-down. ’

  Strip him down? ‘Who is this Ike?’

  ‘The-manufacturer.’

  ‘What do you mean, “manufacturer”?’

  He gave me a considered look, as if to gauge whether I was capable of understanding. He even spoke slowly, so I could take it in.

  ‘We call him God.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Oh,’ I said. So God was in manufacturing.

  ‘We-trade-body-stuff.’ He thumped his bony chest. ‘Me-I-carry-the-sebar-virus. Me-I’ve-lived-longer-than-all-the-others. Ike-says-me-I’m-a-fokin’-miracle. Get-all-my-food-for-free-now. S’long-as-I-turn-up-for-swabs. ’

  Sebar virus? I’d never heard of it but the sores on his face told me enough. Ike - God - sounded fully uncool.

  I delved into my pack for some of Loser’s hair and flicked it to the petit. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘It’s part dingo. Worth something around here. Buy yourself some health care.’

  He gave a confused look.

  I slipped the rest of the hair away into my pack before I lowered the python back and strapped it in.

  Damn me if the little creep didn’t whip a magnifier and light gismo out of his pants to check it out. What was with these Mo-Vay people? Was everyone a lab geek?

  His grin broadened into something almost pleasant
. ‘Go-to-the-pies-a-couple-sets-down. Tell-’em-me-Monts-says-you-should-have-the-floater. ’

  Monts? I gave him a look.

  ‘’S’-cool. ’S-not-on-the-menu. Strictly-on-the-house-for-friends. ’

  Friends? What was the little creep thinking?

  I bared my teeth at him, and moved on.

  My stomach growled incessantly as I jogged southward, but innate paranoia told me not to risk eating from Mont’s recommendation or any other of the food vendors. Apart from the hygiene questions, I seriously did not take to the locals.

  I thought I’d seen every type of aberrant living in The Tert, but Mo-Vay punters were something . . . other. Not sicko so much as sick . . . ailing in mind and body. Crusted lesions or wet scars marked their skin like they were living with a permanent, oozing toxicity. Certainly nothing you wanted to get physical with.

  How did they get like this? Where had they come from?

  Urgency forced me to stop and ask questions using the canrat fur as lubricant. Straight up they knew I was a stranger. I was outsized, my skin was too clear and I talked too slow to be anonymous in this place.

  Everyone had a fancy magnifier or a portable DNA analyser and a sample scoop. I imagined the scoop gathering sloughed-off skin cells or catching exuded moisture droplets, and found myself holding my breath as I waited for them to answer.

  I approached twins (or one person split - it was hard to know) who only had one set of arms between them. They camped under the old monorail track in a lean-to made of cracked roof tiles. Up close their congenital abnormality was less alarming than the sticky, lumpy texture of their skin and their infected eyes.

  ‘I’m looking for someone.’ I waved a finger of canrat hair in their faces and described Tulu and Mei.

  I got no response.

  ‘What about an ultralight? You seen one fly over?’ I tried.

  That got them laughing. At least that’s what I think it was. When they spoke to each other it fell somewhere between a dialect and a cleft palate.

  Pretty soon, though, I got their joke.

  By late morning the sky was busy with air traffic - droning unmarked cargo ’copts and buzzsaw ULs swooping in from the east. Each one circled low, before disappearing into the same spot. Due south.

  I tried talking to a young epox that looked like Clancy. This one was gummed to a short-board on nifty all-terrain wheels.

  I showed her my dwindling tuft of canrat hairs.

  ‘What’s all the action with the ’copts? What’s in them?’

  She opened her eyes wide. ‘How-else-do-youse-get-here? Wern’tcha-reborn?’

  Reborn?

  I suddenly got cowardly on that conversation and changed the subject to the quad-runna and its escort of twitchers. On that topic I got nothing concrete - just enough to know south was a safe bet, and that the twitchers were trouble.

  By late afternoon the villascape altered again. I waded into a dense, impenetrable morass of plaster, plas and planks. The pavements narrowed into endless cul-desacs. I had an unnerving image of myself as a bug at the narrow end of a funnel web. All paths leading down, and round, and in.

  My compass told me I was circling. No matter what I tried I couldn’t seem to go any further south or east. Sweating freely, light-headed from hunger, mouth watering constantly, I lost direction like a compass affected by magnetism. Only sheer stubbornness and an unhealthy dose of fear kept me upright and moving.

  Space dwindled to tiny pockets of pavement and gaps between villa walls. Figures scurried between them and disappeared into buildings.

  I dared not follow them inside, and found myself swaying, sucking in large gulps of air as if the oxygen quotient had dropped away. The air reeked of incenses and decay and unholy secretions - a head-spinning mix.

  My skin prickled with paranoia.

  Am I being followed?

  Unfamiliar hesitancy crept through me, turning my thoughts gloomy and muddled and leaden. The parasite was taking hold of me the deeper I travelled into Mo-Vay. Stealing my hope.

  I tried to concentrate on what I knew, to think my way through a wave of despair.

  Tulu had brought Mei to Mo-Vay. Why? Daac had been taken alive. Who by?

  Wild-tek was rampant here. Did the Cabal know about this place?

  I wallowed in a trough of unanswered questions. Apprehensions turned into hard lumps of worry. As the evening shadows lengthened, so the shadows darkened my mind, suffocating me in the worst kind of hopeless-ness.

  I found a partly boarded-up recess - an old cylinder housing - and slid my pack off. As I loosened the strap, the jolt stirred the python. It slithered out and away from me.

  I watched it. Wanted it to go. Until an intolerable vision of it turning up in some sort of pie pressed me to follow. On automatic I chased it to the door of a shabby villabar where it wound itself around the neon like a string of broken party lights.

  ‘Come ’ere.’ I reached up a shaky hand.

  It surrendered meekly despite my clumsiness, curling around my arm.

  I dropped it slowly back into my pack. ‘This is no place for you,’ I whispered, fumbling with the flap. ‘Or me.’

  Yet exhaustion coaxed me inside the bar. I asked the barkeep for a jug of whisky, water and some privacy. He pointed to an orange glow coming from a cubicle at the back of the main room.

  ‘Private booths cost.’

  I scraped around for some of Loser’s hair.

  He dropped it in his analyser and nodded. ‘One night only.’

  ‘Enough,’ I agreed, and waded through the jumble of patrons. I might have been hallucinating but punters seemed to reach for me without touching. Conversations about me seemed to happen behind hands. So did shrewd, avaricious looks.

  I felt the strain like a psychosis. Did everyone know I was a stranger?

  I managed to fumble the shutter across on the booth and take several, lengthy, breath-denying swigs before I passed out. Oblivion had begged a dance and I gratefully accepted.

  The swigs turned out to be half of the jug and I woke up a few hours later - around midnight, I thought - with a swollen tongue and a fetid mood that didn’t welcome the racket in the bar.

  Pushing the screen aside, I took a blurry-eyed look. Most of the patrons were up on their tables throwing things, the rest were backed up to the door, or haunching it on to the bar.

  Head thumping and faint, I squinted into the near dark.

  The python stretched lethargically along the bar. The lump in its neck suggested the successful quest for a decent-sized canrat. Or a small human.

  Maybe even part of a human.

  Sudden unease made me glance back into the booth. My pack had been rifled. Flap open, clothes scattered. I slapped my hand to my holsters.

  Empty.

  Wrist check. Charm bracelet? Gone. So were my pins.

  Knife belt? OK. Cabal dagger sheathed and pressing into my belly like a prayer book.

  I’d slept on the Gurkha.

  I grabbed hold of it thinking to help the python out, when a figure caught my eye.

  I fell back in the booth and shut the screen to a crack.

  Leesa Tulu scanned the crowd. She was dressed in the same headscarf and boots. Her metallic eyebrow studs glinted and luminous beads glowed at her throat and waist

  She made violent hand movements, rubbing something brittle between her fingers, chafing it to dust as she mouthed silent words.

  A draught spilled across my overheated body, and a memory of how easily she had laid me out in front of Loyl and Mei with her power.

  Blowing the last of the dust from her hands she swept the bar with her gaze. It settled on my booth. I told myself she couldn’t see in. I knew she couldn’t see in . . . and yet . . .

  A moment later she disappeared through a back door.

  I stuffed my clothes quickly into my pack. My new fatigues looked like they’d been through several wars and a zoo insurrection, and I hadn’t even worn them. Crap! Mourning the loss of the Luger
s, I went after her.

  The door led to a filthy corridor. I tried all the rooms along it. Mostly, they contained beds. Some even had bodies in them: stoned or comatose, smelling worse than a Sensil parlour.

  The last door fed into a dark closet under the stairs. With enough room for a small, hunched-over adult, it led down rough steps to a makeshift cellar filled with unevenly stacked kegs and a neat, new still belching pure ethanol.

  I unsheathed the Gurkha and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim light, then I searched the cellar for another way out.

  Nothing.

  I moved in between kegs, barely daring to breathe, expecting Tulu to slam me.

  Nothing.

  A creak on the steps and I froze.

  The barkeep stamped down and poured two large flagons straight from the still. Maybe the python had bitten someone? After a kill they were usually too torpid and lazy, but the barkeep carried enough whisky to numb the entire bar - or serve as antiseptic.

  He left a few moments later, sloshing drops.

  I crouched, face pressed against the cool, plas kegs, and waited. A tiny draught caught the attention of my fevered body. The smallest sigh of air that diluted the reek of hops and grain alcohol, and served notice on my body hair.

  I hunted for the source.

  There. Had to be. Obscured behind a wall of crates, another set of stairs leading upward to a small hatch.

  I crawled up them to investigate.

  The hatch was open less than a thumb’s width. In The Tert hatches were usually sealed like tombs. You never knew what was behind them. Or what might come in through them.

  Me, for instance.

  I shoved this one open and climbed through.

  Chapter Ten

  Like switching Sensil mid-programme, disorientation gripped me. Soil crunched underfoot. Moist breeze licked me all over like an eager dog.