“I can feel you . . .” Ben smiled. “You’re only half visible, like a fucking spook . . . but I can feel you.” He stopped smiling and groped for words. “Dee . . . I . . . they’re going to kill me. Oh Jabber . . .” he breathed out. “I’m scared. I know these . . . scum . . . will use pain on me . . .” His shoulders shuddered up and down as he lost control of his sobs. He was silent for a minute, looking down, weeping silently for fear. When he looked up, his voice was solid.

“Fuck ’em! We’ve got the bastards running scared, Dee. You’ve got to chase it! I hereby appoint you editor of fucking Runagate Rampant . . .” He grinned fleetingly. “Listen. Go to Mafaton. I’ve only met her twice, in cafés near there, but I think that’s where she lives, the contact—we met late, and I doubt she’d have wanted to find her way back across the city on her own after, so I’m figuring she’s from round there. Her name’s Magesta Barbile. She hasn’t told me much. Just that some project she was working on in R&D—she’s a scientist—the government terminated and sold off to a crime boss. I thought it could all be a wind-up; I published out of fucking mischief more than ’cause it was a real story. But my gods, the reaction vindicates it.”

Now Derkhan was crying, a little. She nodded.

“I’ll chase it, Ben. Promise.”

Ben nodded. There was a moment of silence.

“Dee . . .” said Ben eventually. “I . . . I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do with that communico-wossname that would . . . I don’t suppose . . . you can’t kill me, can you?”

Derkhan let out a gasp of shock and grief.

She looked around desperately and shook her head.

“No, Ben. I could only do that by killing the communicatrix . . .”

Ben nodded sadly.

“I really don’t know as I’m going to be able to . . . hold back from letting some stuff slip . . . Jabber knows I’ll try, Dee . . . but they’re experts, you know? And I . . . well . . . might as well get it all over with, know what I mean?”

Derkhan was holding her eyes closed. She wept for Ben, and with him.

“Oh gods, Ben, I’m so sorry . . .”

He was suddenly, ostentatiously brave. Stiff-jawed. Pugnacious. “I’ll do me best. Just you make damn sure you chase Barbile, all right?”

She nodded.

“And . . . thanks,” he said with a wry smile. “And . . . goodbye.”

He bit his lip, looked down, then up again and kissed her on the cheek for a long time. Derkhan held him close with her left arm.

And then Benjamin Flex broke away and stepped back, and with some mental reflex invisible to the distraught Derkhan, he told Umma Balsum that it was time for them to disengage.

The communicatrix rippled again, quivered and staggered, and with an almost palpable gust of relief her body collapsed back into its own shape.