A figure stumbled into his path, and didn’t get out of the way. Zidarov looked up to see a powerfully built man wearing overlapping slabs of synthleather. His face was a mess of scars and poorly bolted metal plates. One eye was amber yellow, clearly a cheap augmetic, and the other was bloodshot. Zidarov smelled both jeneza and topaz on his breath. He carried an iron bar with crude electro-spikes soldered onto it. Some kind of local strongman, then, hustling in the shadows.

‘Lost, good friend?’ the strongman slurred, exposing a mouthful of rusty metal teeth.

Zidarov sighed. He could do without this. ‘Fine, thanks.’

His stinking face got closer. ‘Not seen you here before.’

Zidarov glanced around him. No one was taking any notice. Some of the poorer, sicker citizens were scuttling away faster. The rest were ignoring the encounter, knowing better than to interfere.

He blink-summoned a quick iris scan of the thug’s poorly constructed armour-rig. It was a shambles, impressive at first glance but barely functional in practice. A gaggle of loose wires was exposed just above the waist, some of them feeding directly into the cortex controller. Zidarov reached out to grab the wires with his jawsnapper hand, releasing a steady force-pulse as his fingers closed.

The man convulsed, jaw clenched tight, as Zidarov sent many, many jolts through his inexpertly integrated collection of bio-interfaces.

‘But I’m not here, am I?’ Zidarov growled, keeping his voice low. ‘No one’s here. It’s all in your narced, fucked-up mind.’

The man spasmed, sweat breaking out across his forehead. The iron bar dropped from his grasp, clanging on the street.

‘Run off, now. Forget about this. Put it down to a bad batch.’

By the time Zidarov let him go, he was drooling. The thug stared at him for a moment, blood mingling with the saliva, before stumbling away, still twitching.

Zidarov kept on moving, not bothering to look back. One intersection up, he turned from the alley into a dead-end access spur. Alone now, and in the gloom of walls on three sides, he climbed a rusting metal escape-gantry for the hab-tower on his right. He went up a few storeys before reaching a level walkway that led crookedly ahead, worming its way between two crumbling rockcrete walls. On his way he passed an old plaque set into the masonry bearing the coiled-serpent sigil of the city and the initials of the building inspector who had passed all this off as meeting minimum requirements. The windows around him were all shuttered fast. The hubbub of traffic overhead and crowds below remained in the background, but muffled now, a long way away.