The fifth was Heretic. He’d brought something with him. On a leash. Finch didn’t know what it was. Couldn’t tell where it started or ended. It had no face, just a sense of wet, uncoiling darkness. Like an endless fall off a bridge at night, under a starless sky, into deep water. That one glimpse and Finch never looked at it directly again.

The light in the room had faded to the dark green preferred by the gray caps.

“Do you like my skery, Finch? Do you find my skery pleasing to the eye?” Heretic asked in a voice rough yet reedy, standing in front of Finch. Emphasis on pleasing to the eye. As usual when Heretic tried out a turn of phrase. “No? That’s a shame. The skery is a new thing, and useful to us. Very soon, it will save us a lot of effort, allow the Partials to do other work.”

Finch had no answer for that.

Together, Finch, the gray cap, and the skery went to his desk. At night, Heretic walked with a kind of effortless forward movement. More at ease and more deadly. As if daylight affected a gray cap’s equilibrium.

Heretic sat down, dropping the leash. The skery went right to Finch’s memory hole and began worrying the edges with its wet gobble of a mouth. Cleaning it of parasites.

Finch put out his cigar in the ashtray at the edge of the desk. Stood in front of Heretic. Take the initiative. In a calm, flat voice, he said: “I went back to the apartment. The body … one of the bodies was missing.”

“I took it away.” A clipped quality behind the moistness. Some continuing thread of amusement. The eyes looked as though embedded in a rubber festival mask. “We’re testing the body for a variety of——.” The word sounded like tilivirck.

Finch nodded like he understood.

“We also harvested another memory bulb from the man.”

Utter paralysis. Unbidden: an image of Sintra’s face as he entered her. The way she sighed and relaxed into him. As the blood of his tears dropped onto her cheeks, her lips.

“What did you see?” Finch asked.

Heretic shook his head. A simple motion rendered alien, frightening. “Perhaps you should tell me first, Finch. What you saw.”

“It’s in the report,” Finch said. Too quickly.

“The report. It’s all in the report. How could we forget? Perhaps because the report was disappointing. Very disappointing, and not what we’ve come to expect from you.” Still a secret amusement there, mingled with the threat.

His stomach lurched. The room felt hot. At the other desks, the last of the gray caps had sat down. At their feet, their familiars curled, mewled, foraged.

“It’s only been a day,” Finch said.

“Finch,” Heretic said. “Are you telling me everything?”

Bliss had disappeared from a ten-foot-square room. With no windows.