‘Emperor-damned vermin,’ Luc muttered. His nostrils flared as he exhaled deliberately and slowly. DeShelle was astonished at the speed of his reactions, and the precision of his hand-eye coordination. She wondered what cocktail of drugs was mingled with his blood to have enhanced his reflexes like that. Was it always there, or was it released in response to external stimuli? If the latter, the dispenser – wherever it was – must have an unbelievable trigger rate, since an unenhanced human body could have barely begun its physiological response by the time the rat was already in the air…

She realised she was staring, and dragged her attention back to the refuse pile. They’d gone through inch by stinking inch of it and were almost at the back wall, but there was still no sign of the missing Navigator. She didn’t like to think what Luc would say if this turned out to be for nothing.

She frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘Something else that stinks worse than grox dung,’ Luc grunted, not looking up.

‘No!’ DeShelle insisted. She took two unsteady steps forwards, her boots sinking into the unstable mess. The rat’s leap had caused another sack to fall sideways, spilling its rotten guts, but it had revealed a section of the alley’s back wall that was stained a darker colour. ‘Look here! Is this blood?’

Luc turned his luminator on it and joined her, squinting sceptically down at it. ‘Could be,’ he admitted, somewhat grudgingly. He leaned down and took a closer look. ‘I mean, blood’s blood. Two of those rats could have killed a third.’

‘There’s a puddle,’ DeShelle said, poking with her boot at the alley’s surface. ‘Dried up, but it’s there. A bleeding body rested here for a short time.’

‘Or was left here,’ Luc muttered. ‘They wouldn’t have got far on their own bleeding like that, if they were human.’

‘Or a Navigator,’ DeShelle added quietly. She looked back up the alley. ‘Why drag someone off the street, knife them halfway down an alley, then drag them to the other end of it and leave them here for a short time before moving them again? And where to?’

Luc grunted, and shone his luminator’s beam on the service doors that flanked them, one in the wall of each building. ‘I think perhaps we need to have conversations with the owners of these establishments.’

DeShelle shook her head. ‘No. It doesn’t feel right.’

Luc’s face screwed up perplexedly. ‘It doesn’t feel right? We think a Brobantis Navigator might have been murdered in this alley, and you’re telling me that investigating the two most likely places the body got dumped doesn’t feel right?’

The nausea was back. DeShelle dug out her data-slate and activated it again, bringing up the map.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘I’m checking what’s on the other side of this wall,’ she told him, expanding the readout with a swipe of her grimy fingers.

‘What’s…? It’s a wall! There’s no door! What the warp does it matter what’s on the other side of it?’