Everyone, anyway, wanted a piece of it. Alarms were going off. In-house fire teams, weighed down with hand-held  thermobarics and bandoliers of Chambers ammunition, grinned out of every lift. The assistant took the stairs. Halfway down, something so strange happened  she never reached the basement. An emergency door opened on to the echoing stairwell in front of her and the figure of a woman emerged on to the landing. She was tall, built, shaven-headed, looking back over her shoulder, finishing a sentence with a word that sounded  like ‘Pearlent.’ At that, the assistant raised her hand. ‘Stop!’ she called. Her tailoring launched but would not come up to operating speed: instead, she saw the world at a subtle wrong angle, as if she was someone else, with annunciative  light pouring in a dazzle down the stairwell. The figure turned towards her, mouth open in a laugh she couldn’t interpret, and whispered, ‘Don’t jump, babe!’ Half blind and full of inexplicable dread, she watched  it vanish  round  the  next turn  in  the  stairs. Footsteps hurried  away. Lower down, a door boomed closed. Nothing else. The assistant sat down, breathing  heavily, nauseous  with waste chemicals from her own overdriven systems. They had not been interdicted  from outside; they had simply become emotional and confused. They were all right now.

She left the building, and later turned up at Sharp Cuts, a downscale tailor parlour on Straint, where the owner, who had made his way to Saudade City after an accident in an Uncle Zip franchise nearer the Galactic core, took one look at her and said:

‘I can’t do anything for someone like you.’ At the same time, his clients that morning  – half a dozen gun-kiddies from the beach enclaves of Suicide Point, in for a midprice growth blocker called 7-4eva –were leaving by the back door. Five feet from the assistant you could smell the heavy metals in her blood, the hiked ATP transport  protocols, the immune  system add-ons: they would be enough to drive anyone away. Among other gifts, she could hear naturally to 50 kHz, then process up to 1000 kHz by frequency-division,  heterodyne   and  expansion  systems,  the  product   of which was delivered as one of a hundred  realtime visual overlays. Her skin, infra-red  sensitive, reported  to biological chips laid in subdermally on a metamaterial mesh. These kinds of cuts weren’t police, or even SportCrime. She had Preter Coeur written on her at every biological scale. You could smell the animal smell of the fights, the chemicals in her  tears. She encouraged  the tailor  to come out from behind his counter and stepped in close to him.

‘Try,’ she said.