They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them. They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles—where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height. Café électrique had already rotted her little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then said something like:

“Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?”

She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

This seemed to anger her unreasonably. “Fortie!” she shrieked.

Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:

“I’m so scared I don’t know whether to laugh or shit.”

Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the street door. The girl’s eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.

It was this:

One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing air. Even their shadows had tusks. Their huge arms were blue with cold, but they were too fucking hard-on to care about that. “Hey,” they told one another, “I wish I’d put less clothes on. You know?” The entry pattern was this: they rushed the door of the twink parlour in twos, and the kiddies inside shot them down from behind the coffins.