Derkhan stumbled forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.

Derkhan sank to the floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.

“It couldn’t get them! They kept coming and it was . . . it was backing away . . . It kept its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was fearful . . . confused. And while it was moving back, the crane was moving! It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was waiting . . . and the crate came down on it.”

She turned and looked at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground. The slake-moth keened piteously.

Behind her, the Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid it.

“It cannot sense my mind. I am invisible to it,” the man said. “And when it hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and relentless slide . . . and that is all.

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

“There is nothing in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it.” The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. “I can kill it.”

Derkhan stared at Isaac.

“A thinking machine . . .” she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.

“Why did you subject me to that?” he said shakily, seeing the blood which still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.

“It was my calculation,” he said simply. “I computed it as most likely to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening.”

Isaac shook his head in exhausted disgust.

“See . . .” he spat. “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic . . . No allowances for variables like headaches . . .”