“Sounds cool. What is it?”

“Missing person.”

“Seriously?”

Yuri smiled at the doubt in her tone. The lift reached the ground floor, and he tugged the cage door open. “Oh, yes.”

“Why the hell are we doing a missing persons?”

“Because it’s important. And that’s why I want you. I’m sending the address over now. Be there in five minutes.”

Yuri walked straight back to the Sloane Square hub and went out along a radial to loop, then around that to the Hackney hub at the end of Graham Road. As he went, Boris started loading instructions into the Olyix Monitoring Office G7Turing. He wanted a record of Horatio Seymore’s travels through the Connexion network for the last four days. Bank search for financial status. Facial recognition search through Hackney’s public surveillance cameras, going back three days. A request routed through the Connexion Metropolitan Police liaison office for gang activity in Hackney.

Those would do for a start.

Eleanor Road, on the edge of London Fields, was half old brick terrace houses with tall slate roofs that had all undergone conversions to add a loft room for the budget middle classes still inhabiting London’s suburbs. The remainder of the buildings were newer, purpose-built tenements, narrow and tall to fit in as many one-bedroom flats as possible, with the rent and management optimized for a fast turnover of young low-wage workers with service jobs in the city. Exactly like Horatio.

Jessika’s heels clattered on the pavement behind Yuri as he approached the front of Horatio’s building.

“Good timing.” He smirked as she caught up with him. She was wearing a smart cherry-pink office suit and white blouse, with slim five-centimeter heels; her face flushed even through her perfect makeup. Her normally immaculate jet-black hair was ruffled from hurrying along the street.

“And you blend in so flawlessly.”

“Hey!” she protested. “I’m strictly an office meetings and cocktails kind of girl.”

“Right.” He told Boris to let them in; Gwendoline had given him the code.

The hallway and stairs were bare concrete, shaped by onetime printed molds and formed by civic construction bots—cheap and coldly utilitarian. Horatio’s flat was two rooms: a slim shower and toilet suite; and the living room equipped with a tiny galley kitchen, a built-in wardrobe, and a sofa sleeper. With two stools standing beside the kitchen bar, there wasn’t even room for a chair.

“Depressing,” Jessika said as she glanced around.

“No sign of a struggle,” Yuri said. “So he wasn’t taken from here.”

“Outside then.”

“Boris, what have you got for me on Wednesday morning?”

“Connexion has no record of Horatio Seymore using the hub network since twenty-one-seventeen hours on Tuesday night, when he left the Hackney hub on Graham Road. That is a global negative, not just London.”

“Did I ask for a global search?”

“No, but the G7Turing deduced it was relevant.”