The assistant adjusted some of her overlays and studied the corpse. In addition to losing visibility it had risen a further sixteen feet in the rainy air. Some thought Toni’s rate of rotation had slowed, some thought not: Epstein the thin cop placed himself, with some reservations, in the latter camp. He had money on it. The assistant thought she could detect a faint smell of decay leaking from whatever space Toni now occupied; perhaps thirty molecules in a cubic kilometre of air.

‘What problem?’ she said.

In lieu of an answer, Epstein ushered her into the building from which they had first viewed the dead broker.

‘You remember this place?’ he said.

She said she did.

‘Well, it’s a sensorium parlour, it turns out. Now in this room here – no, in here, this way – they have some bird style of alien, they’ve drilled his head for access. He’s wired the way they are, mainly to look at ordinary stuff, a coat hanger, some needles, those kinds of things. But here’s what.’

‘What?’

‘Maybe for an hour a day they got him looking into the street. So our experts play back what’s left of his head, and have an operator decode it, and find that the footage covers the period of Toni Reno’s death.’

Epstein gave the assistant an intent look, then, when she didn’t respond, went on to tell her, ‘This alien was at the window the exact moment Toni arrived in the alley.’ Reno had come from the direction of the noncorporate spaceport, the retrieved material showed: it showed him running. Then, as he drew level with the house, someone attacked him, straight out of the doorway downstairs. ‘Toni’s looking back over his shoulder. He’s so agitated he doesn’t present with his usual careful grooming. He’s scared of something we can’t see. A woman comes up off the ground so fast you can barely see her, and shoots Toni in the armpit with a Chambers gun. From some angles it looks as if she’s coming up through the ground.’

‘And?’

He smiled.

‘And she’s you,’ he said.