‘Big incident down at Heilos,’ she said, sitting opposite him. She talked while she ate, chewing her way around the words the whole time. He always did one or the other – speak, or chew. For her, the words tumbled out. For him, they had to be prised, like confessions from a suspect. ‘Twenty dead. Citizens, worker-class. We might save two of them, but it’s a bloody mess. Something in the machines down there, either a malfunction or a narc-head with a bomb. Throne, I get so tired of stitching these bodies up.’ She twirled her fork around, and steam rose from it. ‘You know, they’re all sick anyway. All of them. I patch them back to work condition, but I could fix some of the other things they have, if I had the time, but I don’t, so they just go back on shift a few days later with their staples still in. Then I get a call a week later from the overseer asking for med sign-off on new intake, and you know it’s because the ones I fixed are dead now, either from what I patched over or what I didn’t get time to look at, and it’s stupid, because if I just had more time, we could get them all back to real labour fitness, and we wouldn’t have these rotations. I said this to Alejo, and he–’

Zidarov listened while he ate. Much of this he’d heard before. All of it was right, as far as he was concerned. He liked listening to it all. He liked hearing her voice at the end of the day, with its insistent outrage and resilience. A state-run medicae-bay was a tough place to work in – under-resourced, constantly battling against infection, violence and a general neglect from a ruling class that thought of human life as an inexhaustible series of largely expendable labour-units. Milija had been a medicae there for as long as he’d been in the enforcers. Somehow neither profession had finished them off yet.

‘–so the run on morpholox is going on still, and we know what’s behind it, but no one will do anything because it’s an urban-sector governor making money and she can’t be touched. Maybe something for your castellan to take a look at?’

She smiled as she suggested it, and he smiled too. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’d be a real priority.’

‘Bastards,’ she said.

‘They are bastards,’ he agreed.

‘Run into any more today?’

He nodded. ‘I did meet someone.’

‘You met someone.’

‘I met Udmil Terashova.’

She raised an eyebrow, and briefly stopped eating. ‘Going up in the world, Agusto.’

‘She liked me. My sense of humour, I think.’

‘That’s what did it for me. What did she want?’

‘Listen to this. Her only son’s gone missing. And she wants me to find him.’

Milija laughed. ‘She can find him herself. If he’s really missing.’