‘It’s a bust,’ Strambli said, and then repeated it twice, the hope draining from her voice. ‘It’s a bust. It’s a bust. We came all this way and it’s been for nothing.’ She moved to one of the piles of boxes and opened the one on top. ‘All of ’em. I’m sure of it. There’s a reason those doors weren’t sealed up – it’s been picked clean.’

‘They’re not empty,’ Prozor said, and to begin with her way of saying it was so matter-of-fact Trusko and Strambli didn’t seem to notice. She had to repeat herself, louder this time. ‘They’re not empty. You’re just not looking at what’s inside ’em the right way.’

‘There’s a wrong way?’ Strambli asked, with an edge of desperation in her voice.

‘You’re looking directly. But that’s not how it works. Got to look askance, out of the corners of your eyes. Like you aren’t meanin’ to peek at all. Then you can start to see it.’

‘See what?’ Trusko asked.

‘Ghostie stuff,’ Prozor said.

They edged close to the box she’d opened. I was looking as well. The box looked empty, just a rectangular enclosure with smooth gold walls, lacking the ornamentation it had on the outside. Empty at least when I was staring at it directly, trying to see something. But when I averted my vision, forcing my brain to stop asking if the box were empty or not, a smoky, glassy outline showed itself. The natural reaction was to snap back onto it, try to see it more clearly. But then there wasn’t anything in the box again.

‘I see it,’ Strambli said, with wonder and terror in her voice. ‘It’s what she says. Ghostie. Heard of it, but never seen it . . . never even met anyone who’d seen it.’

I kept glancing away, catching furtive snatches of what was in the box, and allowing my brain to stitch these clues into a form. It was a knotty thing to do. It wasn’t just hard to see the stuff in the box, it was hard to remember what you’d just glimpsed. The Ghostie stuff was as slippery on the grey as it was on the lamps, like it didn’t want to be remembered.

Slowly, though, I got the curious gist of it. The thing in the box was upright, with arms and legs and a torso. It was made up of glassy panels, curved to fit around a cove.

‘It’s armour,’ Prozor said. ‘Ghostie armour. And there’s more of it. All these upright boxes. They all hold armour.’

‘Been here before, have you?’ Strambli asked.

‘I just know it.’