He pulled out the Hi-Lite Autoloader he had taken from the dead girl and fired it into the ceiling. “I’m so scared I could shit!” he yelled at the Cray sisters. They looked startled. “So, you know: fuck you!” He darted jerkily out from behind the counter, every nerve in his body firing off at random. He could barely control his limbs. “Hey, fuck, Ed. How’m I doing?” he screamed. Ed, who was as surprised as the Cray sisters, stared at him. Any minute now, Bella and Evie would wake up from their trance of surprise. They would brush the plaster dust off their shoulders and something serious would start to happen.

“Jesus, Tig,” Ed said.

Naked, stinking of embalming fluid and punctured for the tank at “neurotypical energy sites,” a wasted Earthman with a partly grown-out Mohican and a couple of snake tattoos, he ran out into the street. Pierpoint was deserted. After a moment explosions and flashes of light lit up the windows of the tank farm. Then Tig Vesicle staggered out backwards, the arms of his coat on fire with blowback from the reaction pistol, shouting, “Hey, the fuck,” and, “I’m so shit!” They stared at one another with expressions of terror and relief. Chianese beat out the fire with his hands. Arms around each other’s shoulders they blundered off into the night, drunk for the moment with body-chemicals and camaraderie.

10
Agents of Fortune

Three in the morning. Valentine Sprake was long gone. Michael Kearney stumbled along the north bank of the Thames, then hid among some trees until he thought he heard a voice. This frightened him again and he ran all the way to Twickenham in the dark and the wind before he got control of himself. There he tried to think, but all that came to him was the image of the Shrander. He decided to call Anna. Then he decided to call a cab. But his hands were trembling too hard to use the phone, so in the end he did neither but took the towpath back east instead. An hour later, Anna met him at her door, wearing a long cotton nightgown. She looked flushed and he could feel the heat of her body from two feet away.

“Tim’s with me,” she said nervously.

Kearney stared at her.

“Who’s Tim?” he said.

Anna looked back into the flat.

“It’s all right, it’s Michael,” she called. To Kearney she said, “Couldn’t you come back in the morning?”

“I just want some things,” Kearney said. “It won’t take long.”

“Michael—”

He pushed past her. The flat smelled strongly of incense and candle wax. To get to the room where he kept his stuff, he had to pass Anna’s bedroom, the door of which was partly open. Tim, whoever he was, sat propped up against the wall at the head end of the bed, his face three-quarter profile in the yellow glow of two or three nightlight candles. He was in his mid thirties, with good skin and a build light but athletic, features which would help give him a boyish appearance well into his forties. He had a glass of red wine in one hand, and he was staring thoughtfully at it.