Toni didn’t mind walking in the rain. He could always turn up the collar of his Sadie Barnham work jacket, or, if that sensation got old, flag down a rickshaw. When he looked up between the buildings there were already gaps in the cloud cover, revealing part of the Kefahuchi Tract opened like a map of the city across clear wet sky. The rain would stop in half an hour, the streets would dry out fast in an offshore wind. Meanwhile Toni could enjoy the feeling of weather. He could enjoy the way the monas laughed past him on Tupolev, on their way to the bar they called the Tango du Chat, huddled up in their short fur coats, stepping out bravely in those inappropriate shoes they loved. Nothing new, nothing old, people believed in Toni’s time of the world: everything in that thin yet endless tranche of sensation between the past and the future.

Waiting for traffic at Tupolev and 9, he got a dial-up from his loader, a woman called Enka Mercury who’d been on the Beach longer than Toni was alive. The pipe was poor and Enka sounded as if she was calling from outer space.

‘Your goods you wanted are in the yard,’ she said.

‘That’s good, Enka.’

‘Is it?’ she said. ‘The fucker spoke to me, Toni.’

Toni laughed. ‘What did it say?’

‘Mind your own business. I hope you know what you’re doing here.’

‘Hey kid,’ Toni said: ‘You tell me.’

You knew Toni Reno without ever having seen him before: the usual thirty-year-old hipster with a girlfriend in middle management, he was unconnected, young to be in business on his own. Five per cent earned him a refurb townhouse in the Magellan Ladder and quality off-the-shelf tailoring from a contact he had at Preter Coeur. At that time, which turned out to be his life’s high point, he was brokering cargo from all across the Beach, taking a significant tranche of his profit off interplanetary tax gradients, which – steep, complex and subject to sudden variation – caused him inevitable sleepless nights. For the times he wasn’t working, he and his girlfriend maintained a rewarding but controllable tank habit, an experience called Brass Arm they shared with their cohort all across Saudade.

‘Fucked if I ever saw anything like this,’ Enka said. ‘You’d think it was—’

At that point the pipe went down.

‘Call me if you need to,’ Toni Reno said into the air, in case his loader could still hear him. ‘I’ll be with you in ten.’