He got back in the groundcar, headed out down-region towards the Vostoka habclave. He pulled off the main route and descended into the maze of connector viaducts that threaded around the district’s shabby tenement zones. Immediately it got darker, drenched in shadows that never really shifted, and the sounds and smells became more intense. He cut his speed, weaving between both moving and parked groundcars. Above him the cheap prefab towers clustered, strangling the light, crumbling and cracked and pocked with a thousand grimy window frames.

He lowered his cab window, propped one arm on the top of the door panel, and let the promethium-tanged air in. He swung the car around a narrow corner and entered an almost subterranean street between two tenement cliff faces. Laundry hung like military banners from hundreds of close-packed balconies, and the ground-level walkways on either side were crammed with food stalls. He pulled up before one that looked much the same as the others – a shack of corrugated steel hung with crimson lanterns and bearing a flaking sign that read Best Jejen And Best Paraja. A wiry man with a red apron tended a long row of heat plates, all sizzling with fat. The air was hot with oily steam, enough to make your eyes sting.

‘Zido!’ the man said, the enthusiastic tone of his voice out of sync with his wholly static features.

‘How’s it going?’ Zidarov asked, watching as the man heaped a blackened pile of heavily fried meat onto an oily looking flatbread.

The man shrugged. ‘You know. You work, you sleep. You work, you sleep.’

He said the same thing every time. With expert fingerwork, honed by doing the same thing hundreds of times a day, he folded the flatbread into a cone, then reached for a plastek squeeze-bottle.

‘Go easy,’ warned Zidarov, watching him load a slop of sauce onto the cone.

The man laughed. ‘Watching weight, eh?’ He handed it over to Zidarov, wrapped in paper. ‘Not what’s on top that’ll kill you. What’s inside! That’ll kill you!’ Then he grinned widely, and wiped a greasy hand on his apron.

Zidarov stowed the flatbread cone in the well between seats and reached for a slate-scanner. The man wouldn’t have an iris, and certainly no connection to the dataveil, so the slate-credit had to be manual. ‘Good to know,’ Zidarov said, making the transaction. ‘Take care.’

‘You take care,’ came the reply, just as ever.

Zidarov pulled away. He picked up the folded bread and meat and began to chew, driving slowly while he finally let his iris shunt its accumulated case-data at him.