Every couch was occupied. The bodies were clamped down tightly. Tubes ran from mouths, noses, into veins in the arms and legs, and out of puncture-rings in the torso. None of the bodies were moving – the shackles had been ratcheted tight. They all looked to be wearing a whole variety of clothes – ordinary clothes, not many worker-drab uniforms, but more exotic material. Every subject in the chairs was young, and they were mostly wearing the kind of things the young wore when they could get out of the hab – cheap synths, gauze wraps, skintight bodygloves. Garments you’d wear to have fun in. Their eyes were all closed. They weren’t crying out. They weren’t even moaning. Perhaps that meant they had been sedated. Perhaps it meant the tubes cramming their mouths made it impossible.

The machinery made a sound like breathing. The cyclers clunked and clinked in sequence, marking out a rhythm like a chrono. Second by second, those lives were being drained away, siphoned off, ready for the raw matter to be processed into commoditised medicae supplies.

Zidarov felt his gorge rise. It smelled awful – a mix of powerful chems and human waste. The temperature was uncomfortably hot. He reached for the walkway’s guide-rail, and steadied himself.

Draj said nothing. Somehow Zidarov could sense the man’s fury burning clean through all that armour.

‘Steady,’ Zidarov warned. ‘Evidence, or it means nothing.’

The sanctioner stayed where he was. Far below, armed guards in pairs were walking down narrow aisles between the rows. They wore unmarked uniforms, carried autoguns. They looked far from attentive, strolling like amiable couples. Zidarov wondered how they could stand it, being so close to all that batch-processed agony. They might have been fitted with emotion-suppressors. Or perhaps they were just bastards.

He took static picts. He made sure that each one was stamped with time/location markers. He ran the full detection spectrum. He had to blink often, not just because of the eye-watering stench, but whenever he caught too clear a view of the expressions on the faces below.

They were all Naxi’s age, more or less. He suddenly thought of what Milija had said – There’s bad people. In the city. Who knows who she talks to? – and he felt a lurch.

‘We should get out,’ Draj hissed. ‘Get a Bulwark down here, clean this filth out.’

Zidarov kept scanning. He didn’t have enough yet – no recog­nisable sigils or cabal tattoos. The few guards he could see didn’t have the look of Vidora, but that didn’t count for much.

‘Wait,’ he said.

In the distance, where the miasma thickened almost to the point of impenetrability, three figures were walking. Two were guards, dressed the same as the rest. One was different. He was taller. He walked rather unusually, as if he were somehow heavier than he looked.