The assistant put a Chambers round exactly where her systems placed the voice. A soft, coughing thud and the corner of the shop burst into rose and grey flames. Heat splashed back. In the shifting lick of that – the warm flicker of geometry followed by dark – she identified an object moving. It was a decoy. It was all over the room. It was all around her with—

—and the low, charismatic laugh of a rebuilt thing.

If it shot back she was dead. It was there, not there: there, not there. Then it was right in her face. Tall, with white-blond hair cropped to nothing much. The fuck-off body language of someone who can run fifty miles an hour and see in sonar. Someone whose very piss is inhuman.

It was herself.

It was gone. It was next to her yet out of range. For an instant everything hung suspended, then fell.

‘Christ!’ the assistant screamed. She redlined her equipment. She was quick enough to get a round off at the blur in the doorway. The round fizzed away like an angry cat and burst in the street. When the assistant arrived out there she found she had shot her own car. Flames were already reflecting in the window of the Tango du Chat, appearing curiously still, like cut-out flames, or flames in an old book. Spooked drinkers stared out. They hadn’t even begun to duck. She could hear running footsteps, but they were unhurried and already three streets away. That was something you might puzzle over later in your room, when you recalled a face just like your own glaring madly into yours from ten inches distance – permitting itself to be seen in five false-colour overlays, teeth bared and laughing with your own perfected fuck-off arrogance – and admitted just how far things had slipped away from you. You would be forced to express it, she thought, in a similar way to this:

But no one is quicker than me!

Back in the chopshop, a few scraps of orange light from the Cadillac fire slipped between the window-boards, barely touching the dusty counter, the shoot-up posters and powered-down proteome tanks. If light could be described as fried, the assistant thought, this was how it would look, this was how it would illuminate a bare resin floor and reveal the open eyes of the corpse. She knelt down. George had bled out an hour ago from a deeply penetrative wound in his right armpit, as if someone had come up from the floor at him – waited there all night, in complete silence in the photon-hungry dark on the dirty floor, then come up at him and driven one of their hands, fingers stiffened to make a cone, deep into his armpit. He looked almost relaxed, as if the worst thing he could imagine – the very thing he was most afraid of – had finally happened, thus relieving him of his anxieties at the same time as it confirmed them.