In the cramped sick bay, a scan of Kuwale’s leg revealed ruptured blood vessels and broken ligaments, a trail of damage like an aircraft’s crash path leading to the bullet buried at the back of vis thigh. Ve watched the screen with grim amusement, sweat dripping from vis face as the ancient software ground away at a detailed assessment; the final line read: Probable gunshot injury. “Oh, I was hit!” One of the farmers, Prasad Jwala, cleaned and dressed our wounds, and pumped us full of (off-the-shelf) drugs to limit bleeding, infection, and shock. The only strong painkillers on board were crude synthetic opiates – which left me so high that I couldn’t have given a coherent account of the ACs’ plans to anyone if the fate of the universe had depended on it. Kuwale lost consciousness completely; I sat beside ver, fantasizing about gathering my thoughts. It was just as well that my stomach was tightly bandaged; I had a strong urge to reach through the portal I’d made and probe the machinery which remained inside me: the tight smooth coil of the intestines, the demon snake which Kuwale’s magic bullet had tamed; the warm, blood-drenched liver, ten billion microscopic enzyme factories plugged straight into the circulation, a bootleg pharm dispensing whatever its chemical intuition desired. I wanted to drag every dark mysterious organ out into the daylight one by one, and arrange them all in front of me in their proper positions, until I was nothing but a shell of skin and muscle, face-to-face at last with my inner twin.

After about fifteen minutes, the same enzyme factories finally began degrading the opiates in my blood, and I clawed my way down from marshmallow heaven. I begged for a notepad; Jwala obliged, then left to help out on deck.

I managed to get through to Karin De Groot immediately. I stuck to the essentials. De Groot heard me out in silence; my appearance must have given the story a degree of credibility. “You have to talk Violet into heading back to civilization. Even if she’s not convinced of the danger … what has she got to lose? She can always deliver her final paper from Cape Town.”

De Groot said, “Believe me, she’ll take every word of this seriously. Yasuko Nishide died last night. It was pneumonia – and he was very frail – but Violet’s still badly shaken. And she’s seen the cholera genome analysis – which was done by a reputable Bombay lab. But—”

“So you’ll fly out with her?” Nishide’s death saddened me, but Mosala’s loss of complacency was pure good news. “I know, it’s a risk, she might get sick on the plane, but—”

De Groot cut me off. “ Listen. There’ve been some problems here, while you were away. No one’s flying anywhere.”

“Why? What kind of problems?”