That was how things rested until it got dark. George looked as if he might speak. The assistant sat on the side of the bed waiting to hear. Then R.I. Gaines walked in through the wall, combat pants rolled halfway up his thin, suntanned calves.

Over those he had his signature lightweight shortie raincoat with the sleeves similarly rolled to the elbows. He was carrying a canvas poacher bag with a feature of tan leather fastenings, from which protruded the grip and part of the receiver of a Chambers gun. His feet were bare. He looked tired. ‘Oh hi,’ he said to the assistant, as if he hadn’t expected to find her there. They stared at one another and he said: ‘Skull radio.’ They spent a few minutes searching through her possessions. When she found the radio, he couldn’t make it work. He knelt down and banged it on the floor until the glass broke and the baby’s lower jaw fell out. A few white motes drifted here and there. ‘Good enough,’ he said. He engaged in a conversation his side of which finished, ‘You know it’s almost like we’re in a real world out here. Maybe you should think of it like that too.’ He threw the radio into a corner. ‘Upper management,’ he said to the assistant: “What can you do with them?” Next he caught sight of poor dead George, staring at the ceiling with the blankets up to his neck.

‘What’s this?’

‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘We all make mistakes.’ Gaines examined the corpse. ‘Were you trying to have sex with him?’

‘It happened across the city.’

Suspecting more than a malfunction, Gaines took her hand and encouraged her to stand by the window, where he could examine the data scrolling down her forearm. Still visible: but in that light the Gothic blacks and Chinese reds weakened to faint grey and orange, and her skin was the colour of old ivory. He sniffed the palm of her hand then let her go. ‘You’ve got a Kv12.2 expression problem,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ She stared down at her own hand, then up into Gaines’s face – as if, he thought, she was trying to understand the exchange as emotional rather than diagnostic – and after a moment asked:

‘Do you want to sit on the bed and talk?’

‘You really are someone’s project,’ he said.

Which of them was the cypher? They sat on the bed, with George the tailor behind them, and both of them stared at the wall. Gaines felt tired after Panamax IV, suddenly the only scene he could remember from his whole life was him and Emil Bonaventure in the PEARLANT labyrinth, dragging along some dead entradista whose suit visor was caked an inch thick with the remains of his own lungs. After a moment or two, he put his arm round her shoulders.