But it is difficult to believe what he is saying. A man immune to Smoke, hook-necked and all. It’s impossible: like seeing a ghost. I don’t think he’s lying, of course. Charlie wouldn’t lie. It may be he can’t. But this was the city: a thousand people pushing, pressing, trampling one another’s feet; no air to breathe; and so much Smoke in your blood your senses are screaming. To fight, mostly, smash someone’s face in. That, and the other thing. Find a girl, I mean. Rip her clothes off. It’s like your pulse has slipped into your pants. Chaos, in other words, not just in the square but in you, rage and lust and laughter, too, a mad sort of laughter, weightless and simple, and your stomach tells you it wants food. To see a man in all that, one that doesn’t smoke, because his collar is clean on the inside, you notice it when he walks past, well—

There’re things you have to see for yourself, I suppose. It’s not a matter of choice, or even friendship. You cannot help but doubt. We are lonely creatures, Mother used to say. We live in our heads.

And when I tell him what I saw — and I do, as honestly as I can, though my stomach heaves with it and I keep spitting up black — all Charlie wants to know is, am I all right. I’m not, but that isn’t the point. Charlie saw an angel walk past. I think I saw the devil. There’s none of us going to be all right ever again.

Here’s what I tell Charlie. When the Smoke spread—her Smoke, the woman’s, the murderess’s — I pushed closer to the scaffold. What drove me there was this: if Renfrew is right, if there is a cancer of sin growing in my guts, my heart, my brain, then she is what I will become. My fate, my patrimony. So I wanted to look her in the eye. For a sign of kinship, or something. That, and there was this flavour to her Smoke, something I have noticed before but never this clearly. It tasted good. Bitter of course, sheer murder on the lungs, but good, too, like spirits I suppose, if you ask a drunk. Seductive. So I pushed ahead. Dealt out a lot of thrusts with my elbows. Earned just as many, my arms black and blue, but kept on pushing.