Foulnap was on the phone. The medic I’d followed was to one side, and looked startled when he saw me. Sitting on a chair was a third man of Nordic appearance who had a fresh bite mark on his cheek. When he saw me, Foulnap ignored the Bambi I was pointing at him and simply told the person on the other end of the line that ‘There was a f—ing moron trying to piss in his pocket’ and he’d call them back.

‘By all that’s pointlessly brave, Worthing, is that you?’

He seemed more impressed than worried.

‘You can do this,’ I said, voice quavering.

‘I can do this?’ echoed Foulnap in a relaxed manner. ‘Then what are you here for?’

‘I was talking to myself,’ I said with a croak. ‘What I meant was that you can’t do this.’

I could see my hands tremble and felt a cold sweat crawl up my back. Foulnap was right. I was a f—ing moron. I should have just walked away.

‘That’s much clearer. So: why can’t I do this?’

‘Because—’

Whump

I’d not been paying attention. Foulnap had drawn and triggered his Bambi in less time than it took me to realise that he could. I barely had time to register the shock wave rippling in the air before I was lifted from the ground and thrown backwards into a chair that had been placed next to the door, reducing it to matchwood. I fell to the floor stunned, my head spinning from where it had thumped into the wall just next to the light switch.

‘Lobster,’ said Mrs Tiffen from the bathroom.

My vision returned to reveal Foulnap standing over me with a look of annoyance. He relieved me of my weapon, then shook his head sadly.

‘That’s the thing about good advice,’ he said. ‘It’s really a lot better to heed it.’

Foulnap’s colleague, the one with the bite mark on his cheek, rose and pulled a weapon of his own from a holdall. Only it wasn’t a hand weapon, it was the twenty-KiloNewton Thumper, normally used for riot control and punching pressure-holes in snowstorms. Deputy Consul Klaar had been repeatedly pummelled with something like this outside Nightgrowls. She’d liquefied internally under the shock waves and by the time we found her she’d leaked out, pooled in the footwell and frozen solid. They’d taken her to the morgue with the floor mats still attached.

Foulnap helped me sit up and I touched my mouth where it was bleeding.

‘Believe it or not, I was as green as you when I started out,’ he said in a gentle voice, pulling my lower eyelid down to peer at the whites of my eyes, a simple way to check if there was any lasting shock damage, ‘full of dazzlingly good intentions but as stupid as the Winter is long.’