‘My name is Nicolas Rodriguez,’ he said. ‘My brother’s name was David.’

Fowler saw Amanda’s eyes widen, her complexion turning even paler than usual.

‘You know that name, David Rodriguez?’ Fowler asked her. There was something familiar about it.

She nodded. ‘One of the early casualties from Site 17. He got caught in a . . . in a temporal anomaly, I guess you’d call it.’

Fowler nodded, something cold and indigestible settling into the pit of his stomach as he finally remembered the unpleasant details of the incident.

‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ he told Nick. ‘I wish there was something we could have done for him.’

Nicolas Rodriguez shook his head like he was disappointed. ‘It took a long time, and a fortune in bribes, to learn the truth. I envy him for the things he must have seen. But you told us lies about him, and our mother died believing he was killed in some routine laboratory accident. Imagine how I felt when I discovered he was caught up in some miserable form of limbo between life and death. I clung to the hope that my informants were wrong, and I had been fed just some ridiculous fantasy.’

He glanced over his shoulder towards the growth, which was now towering overhead. ‘Then I began to understand that I had not, after all, wasted my family’s fortune on bribes. I kept digging for more information. I learned that you were one of those responsible for the research programme of which my brother was part. Now, it seems, we are all to be exterminated like cockroaches scuttling in a drain.’

‘So now you know who we are,’ said Fowler, ‘but there’s no reason to blame us for what happened to your brother.’

‘On the contrary,’ Rodriguez replied, staring directly at Amanda. ‘What happened to him was no accident, was it? And I recognized you in particular, Miss Boruzov.’

Fowler glanced between them in puzzlement. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded.

‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now,’ said Amanda, her eyes fixed firmly on Rodriguez. ‘His brother was smuggling high-security data back home. We . . . decided to arrange an accident to neutralize him.’

‘And is that how you choose to deal with your brightest and best?’ demanded Rodriguez. ‘Better that you’d simply put a bullet in his brain than allow him to suffer this . . . this living death.’

‘He has no idea that he’s caught in a temporal field,’ Amanda insisted. ‘His subjective experience of time ensures he isn’t even aware that anything’s wrong. You could hardly call it a “living death”.’

‘Perhaps,’ Rodriguez replied grimly, ‘that is something we should leave for others to decide.’

‘Others?’ echoed Amanda.