This time, though, Room 121 went dark and dropped sideways. A million silver eels flickered past the windows. Whispers filled each dusty corner. She felt the tank world come apart around her, into dark and streaming pixels: next thing, she was hanging in the parking orbit above a rusty alien artefact the size of a brown dwarf. Things were such an effort. She was swimming with eels, down to the pocked and gouged surface. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath, a woman like herself lay on the allotropic carbon deck, a white paste oozing from the corner of her mouth. This woman was barely human. She was neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There was something wrong with her cheekbones. She was waiting. She came from the past, she came from the future; she was about to speak.

The assistant thrashed about. Lost in space, trying to place herself equidistant from everything else in the universe, she heard her own faint cry in the dark and moved towards it. Yellowish oily liquid filled her mouth. Later she listened tiredly while the twink-tank patched her up. In her anxiety, it told her, she had choked on the tank fluid or ‘proteome’. She had ripped out the main cable. She was losing cerebro-spinal fluid and later today she might experience a little light bleeding from neurotypical energy sites; it wasn’t so bad.

‘Something happened in there,’ she said.

‘Once immersed,’ the tank reminded her, in the voice of a real mother, ‘you should never move or try to shout.’

‘I don’t expect to feel like that.’

Over on the other side of town, Epstein and his soldiers were still trying to bring Toni Reno back to earth. Toni’s reaction seemed coy, especially for a dead man. Every time one of them touched him he bounced gently away, making curious swimmy elastic movements in the air, curving his back in a clean arc, circling some invisible central point as the uniforms jumped and waved their arms twelve feet below him. It was puzzling. It was even elegant. The rain had stopped. Morning traffic clogged Tupolev; downtown was solid.

4 Givenchy

FOUR

Givenchy

Left to herself, Anna Waterman tended to medicate with reasonably-priced red wine, a bottle of which, taken before bed, only made things worse next day, when – full of guilts like a ball of living eels she couldn’t disentangle without each one slipping away quietly into the dark – she would ring the consulting rooms to see if Dr Alpert had a cancellation. This she did at half past eight one morning a week or two after missing her last appointment.