Gaines smiled at her. ‘Because you don’t understand yourself,’ he said. ‘Because you’re bored. I’m leaving you the mocha, OK?’ When he was happy, he had a passive, easy look.

The assistant watched him fade back into the walls. The raindrops never dried on his coat, she thought. They stayed fresh. How did a holographic fetch bring coffee? When he had quite vanished, she pushed the tin box as far away from her as she could, until it fell off the end of the bed and on to the floor. She didn’t like it. To be sure Gaines had gone, she waited until she could feel her tailoring come back to normal; then she drank the mocha. She opened a secure pipe to SiteCrime and instructed one of her shadow operators to search the name Gaines. ‘And send me the car,’ she said. She took calls, and as a result of one of them, drove the Cadillac across town to the noncorporate rocket port, locally dubbed Carver Field. She manouevred between the tubby little tramp ships until she arrived at the bonded warehousing facility, where, forty hours after the crime occurred, she found herself staring up at the corpse of Toni Reno’s loader.

Enka Mercury had risen five or six feet higher in the air since Toni Reno found her; but Epstein the thin cop, who had brought in a cherrypicker to get a closer look, thought her rate of ascent was slowing down. Like Toni, she was still joyfully circling some invisible point. Unlike him she had begun to fade somewhat. The colour leached out of her almost as you watched, Epstein said; at the same time she was becoming transparent. In a day or two she might disappear. He had been no more successful with Enka than with Toni. She wouldn’t be caught. Whatever you did, she was out of reach. He stood shrugging apologetically in the chilly space of the warehouse and, indicating the flap of skin dangling from the vic’s armpit, said:

‘At least it looks like she was shot.’

The assistant stepped into the cage of the cherrypicker and manouevred it all around Enka Mercury’s corpse. Puffs of gas were emitted irregularly from its valves. After five minutes she set herself down again.

‘What did you get from the operator I sent?’ she asked Epstein.