The cycler bleeped softly, and Zidarov heard the bolts clunk back. Draj reached for the handle and eased it open. Once inside, he drew a sleek laspistol – one with a silent operation and minimal beam flare. Zidarov followed him in, and they found themselves in an unlit, unfurnished corridor. Zidarov adjusted the light-gain, and picked out a standard-looking industrial interior – prefab sections, plastek surfaces, grime on the floors and the ceilings, no real decoration. Draj closed the door behind them, ran another sensor-sweep, and intercepted the feeds of a couple of motion detectors lodged up ahead.

‘So we’re in,’ he said, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘I’ve got nothing close by. But ahead – heat. Lots of heat.’

Zidarov ran his own scans. It looked like a stairwell branched off and led up a few levels. ‘Up higher. We’ll get a better look at it.’

They stole down the corridor, broke in through another locked door, then climbed a set of steel evacuation stairs. Four levels passed by inside the echoing stairwell, all without interruption. They saw no evidence of activity at all – no guards, no lit chambers – but heard plenty. The air throbbed with it, the hum of hundreds of machines, echoing as if they were working within a huge and confined space.

They reached a final door, also locked. Draj applied the cycler, and Zidarov prepared his iris to record. When the bleep came, Draj leaned gently against the door, tilting it open. Keeping low, they both slipped through.

They emerged onto a narrow walkway set high up the interior wall of the warehouse’s main chamber. The open space was barely lit, with just a few strip-lumens hanging from the apex of a high arched roof. The floor was stuffed with machines – all of them more or less identical to the wheeled couches Zidarov had seen in the grade-eights. Every machine was in operation, linked up to the next one along by bundled cables. At the end of every row were clusters of machinery, storage tanks with temperature controls, purifiers, elixir vials, analysis gauges. The further you looked along the length of the space, the less you could see – the air was thick with condensation – but Zidarov estimated there must have been several hundred couches in the rows, perhaps more.