Julius shoots me. He shoots me in my fat gut, just where my belt runs across the navel. I fall almost as an afterthought and watch him stand over me, his mouth wide open and the lips curled back across his toothless gums, savouring the Smoke that is rising from my wound like steam out of a heating pipe. Where it passes through his body, it changes colour and doubles in intensity; unfurls behind him like a flag. Julius stands and drinks me and works the lever for a second shot.

Then something steps up behind him. He wears the bluff features of a greengrocer. I know at once he is not human. He does not smoke. He stands on the far side of the metal bars, not a foot away from Julius; stands in the boy’s Smoke, the very thick of his Smoke, and adds no Smoke of his own. A kind face, seen up close: fleshy, balding, ruddy. The grocer threads his arm through the bars. Milady’s gun is in his hand: a Beretta, double-barrelled, decorations beaten into the steel of its short snout. Its tip touches Julius’s neck.

There is a pause, a moment of conspiracy, a wish asked and granted, as boy and grocer share a look. Two monsters from adjacent pits; one smokeless, one dripping with raw need. Then the shot rings out. As he falls, I notice something in Julius’s Smoke, something so essential to it, so all-pervasive, that I did not notice it before. It is the very solvent in which all his evil is suspended. Self-loathing, a hunger for his own destruction; a desperate desire to find rest. Julius drops forward, into the bars; kneels before the grocer. The man turns to me. The gun turns with him. It points calmly at my bulk.

He will shoot me too. I can see it in his face. He’ll do it calmly, benignly, without passion or ego, not for himself, not from anger, not from triumph or because he is possessed by a truth; simply because I can do harm to him and his while alive, and none dead.

Then he sees I am already dead and turns away. I look after him with dread and admiration. Perhaps his kind are the future. It might please the state.

The grocer will make it a good servant.

FUSE

FUSE