‘We’ll have to get a gene-hound down here, see if this matches his,’ Luc said, jerking his thumb at the wall. It wouldn’t be hard to do, DeShelle knew: every Navigator house had the gene sequences of all their members thoroughly mapped out, to best identify the most bene­ficial reproductive pairings. ‘But if it’s his, then he was killed here. So what happened to the body?’

‘Dragged or carried back up the alley, then loaded into a transport?’ DeShelle suggested, but Luc shook his head and tracked his luminator back the way they’d come.

‘The ground’s clear. No trail of blood.’ He looked at the piles of refuse that took up the dead end of the alley, and his lip curled in distaste. ‘You don’t think…?’

DeShelle sighed, and rolled up her sleeves. ‘Only one way to find out.’

‘You’re not serious?’ Luc said in dismay. He clearly felt that the position of head of security did not warrant getting his hands dirty in rubbish.

‘Trust me,’ DeShelle said fervently, ‘I’ve been in worse. I spent a few hours in a sewer system, once.’ She plunged her hands into a pile of mouldering vegetable peels and other, more decayed and less identifiable debris.

‘You continue to surprise me,’ Luc muttered. He hesitated for a moment, then shook his head in resignation. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’

DeShelle’s questing hands found innumerable putrid objects, but none of them were the flesh of Avomarr Du-Choi Brobantis. Her fingers did once close on a hard, slick object she recognised as bone, but when she pulled it out it clearly wasn’t human: the femur of some animal killed for meat, presumably.

‘Anything?’ she asked Luc, who glowered at her.

‘If I’d found anything, I’d have told you.’

He pulled a refuse sack aside and something leapt at his face as it was caught in the beam of his luminator – a rat, three feet long including its tail, with incisors the length of DeShelle’s little finger, and its dark fur sleek and wet with rancid fluids.

Luc snatched it out of the air with his free hand, and hurled it at the wall with a yell of disgust. It hit with a gruesome cracking noise, and dropped unmoving into a heap of old gutrot bottles.

‘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…