“I won’t. I promise. I can’t. It wouldn’t last for long.”

“What’s the risk if I say yes?”

Shriek hesitated. Then said, “I won’t lie to you. It’s a sacrifice. I will be doing things to your body to make my own. Stealing from your tissue. Robbing you while you’re already weak. You won’t be the same afterward. Even after you recover from the torture. You’ll have dizzy spells. Headaches. You may not sleep for a while. When you do sleep, there will be nightmares as your mind flushes out my memories. But you’ll be setting me free. And I won’t take it from you unless you let me.”

“You’re saying it’ll almost kill me.”

“And heal you, too,” Shriek said. “In the short term, I can make your flesh knit faster. I can shield you from the aftershock of what the Partial did to you. And a part of you will always be with me. Even after you die, you will live on because I will still be alive.” Shriek grinned, showing his teeth. “I’m hard to kill.”

Lost time. Lost worlds. A man who had lived for more than a hundred years, only to die in a crappy apartment as part of a larger game by a species that had come from a place so distant they’d spent centuries trying to find it again.

A giving up. A giving in. That’s what Shriek was offering him. It tempted him. He had nothing left. Nothing of worth. No master plan. No better life waiting. Just his own death. Too much for him, and too little, standing there on the battlements of a place re-created by a passenger in his brain.

Finch searched the face of the dead man for honesty or deceit. Saw himself reflected back.

“How do we start?” he asked.

“For you, it’s easy,” Shriek said. “A mental trick. Just think back to the time when you went from being Crossley to being Finch. Imagine that instant as exactly as you can. Every detail you can remember. While you concentrate on that, I will enter through the ‘gap’ created. That’s as simply as I can put it … The rest you won’t feel.”

A hopeful expression on Shriek’s face.

The thought that maybe this was happening in the seconds before his death. That the last week had taken place in a single moment in his head. That none of it was real. Even the parts that seemed real. Those least of all.

Finch shuddered. Closed his eyes.

“Let’s get this over with.”

The creation of John Finch happened at night. Cold for once. The flares and tracers of battle over the darkened skyline. The roar of the tanks. The gunfire of attacking infantry. A percussive music playing all over southeast Ambergris. Near the Religious Quarter. Heavy losses for the Hoegbotton side. A series of tactical mistakes.