‘There will always be the Gower.’

It was Birgitta. She’d interrupted the conversation and was momentarily distracting – something that Hooke and Jonesy both exploited.

Whu-whump

They’d drawn and fired their weapons almost simultaneously. Concussive vortex rings do strange things in restricted spaces, but opposing thumps do even stranger things – and like weather systems, Arctic badgers and Sister Contractia, they are difficult to predict. The two pulses met with the sound of a log being split, then ran around each other before stabilising in a tight vertical dust devil that sucked up anything not nailed down – dust, paper, hats, gloves, books. We watched the vortex grow darker and heavier and had to hold onto furniture and each other to avoid being swept off our feet, until the maelstrom explosively lost cohesion and knocked us all off our feet. Hooke drew his second Bambi but Jonesy’s back-up weapon caught him on the chest and cannoned him backwards into a plaster wall, which buckled under the impact, and Hooke fell forwards in a cloud of dust.

Jonesy dropped the spent thermalite from the Bambi and swiftly replaced it with another.

‘We’ll laugh about this later,’ she said to me, advancing upon Hooke, who was struggling to get up, still dazed, ‘in that cosy retirement we promised ourselves.’

Whump

There was another ear-popping concussion and Jonesy was lifted off her feet and thrown backwards through two chairs, a standard lamp and out through one of the front windows by way of the heavy drapes. The snow and wind swirled into the room, the cold air replacing the hot in an instant. I turned. Lucy Knapp was holding a Thumper and had a look of steely determination about her. Lucy had lied: she was HiberTech first, friend second. When you accept a corporate fast track, you have to leave a part of yourself behind.

I pushed my way past the tattered curtains, which were flapping wildly in the gale, and waded through the snow to where Jonesy was lying. She wasn’t dead, but it wouldn’t be long. Her face was a fine mesh of broken capillaries. Her eyelids were sunken and closed and I knew that her sockets were empty underneath. She was breathing in short gasps, and a small amount of blood frothed from the side of her mouth. Her lips were moving and I leaned closer.

‘It’s Charlie,’ I said.

Her cheek twitched into a half-smile.

‘We had a good life together, didn’t we?’ she whispered.

‘The best,’ I replied, ‘I have no regrets.’