She sighed and smiled as if that weight was off her mind. ‘Look out at those stars,’ she urged Antoyne again. And then, in a change of subject he could not follow: ‘All the shoes you can eat!’ She pulled herself up with her hands on his shoulders to get a look around the crew quarters.

‘Oh, Liv,’ she said. ‘And our lovely, lovely rocket!’

Antoyne felt himself begin to cry. All three of them were crying after that.

24 Spike Train

TWENTY FOUR

Spike Train

Three fifty am, the assistant visited Ou Lou Lu’s on Retiro Street, a venue added only recently to her night’s round. There she drank a cup of espresso, holding it in both hands and dancing thoughtfully to the sidewalk music the way R.I. Gaines had taught her, watching out for the flash of pre-dawn light above the city. When it came, she drove back over to Straint Street to talk to her friend and confidant, George the gene tailor. It was fine rain like fog. The Cadillac rolled down Straint, its 1000hp engine already turned off, and came quietly to a halt outside Sharp Cuts. The assistant – let’s call her the Pantopon Rose – tall, white-blond hair cropped to not much of anything – possessing the kind of height and fuck-off good looks which come naturally from the most radical tailoring – stepped out on to the sidewalk.

‘Hey, George!’ she called.

No answer. Her expression grew puzzled. The door hung wide open and the rain was blowing in from the street.

She could smell the dockyards. From the factories she could hear the sound of women clocking on for the early shift. The light had a yellow colour: it picked out the ceramic receiver of the reaction gun she now took out quietly, holding it down alongside her thigh. One instant she was outside, the next she was in, silent and motionless, smiling around. The chopshop seemed empty. Nevertheless she didn’t feel alone. Something was masking itself in the IR, RF, acoustic and active sonar regimes. It was near. She could hear a rat breathe two rooms away, but it wasn’t that. Something was in the room with her. It was impure in the sense it didn’t fit. It was the kind of thing that didn’t fit in and if you failed to grasp that you had already made a mistake. She couldn’t smell it, but she knew it had a smell. She couldn’t locate it, but she knew it had a location. Then came the whisper she almost expected, the amused voice from an empty corner:

‘My name is Pearlent—’