‘The artificial intelligence is the key,’ Hannah told him. ‘They would only allow me just small portions of the comlife presently being developed, and it works every time – for a little while at least. And if this Janus is capable of penetrating government security like you’ve just demonstrated, then it’s far in advance of anything I knew about.’ She used some of the tea he’d just made her to wash down another painkiller. The ache in her leg was not so bad now – it just felt like she’d bashed it against the edge of a desk.

‘You’ve had people connect up?’ he asked. ‘Fully?’

Her tea was just as she liked it: strong with two sugars. It bothered her that somehow he had remembered this small fact, yet nothing else about her.

‘Yeah but, with the comlife they allowed me, it was like trying to direct-link laptops using different computer languages. Janus is almost certainly like all the other comlife you created: an almost direct synaptic copy of your own mind.’

‘Alan Saul lives again?’

‘No, there should be no memories there . . . unless you did something no one knows about while you were a free agent. But you claimed Janus activated at about the same time you woke up in that crate?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s . . . odd.’

‘Perhaps Janus just initiated before but wasn’t conscious, and then started searching for the coded signal from the hardware you installed inside my head?’

She nodded. It could be that his earlier self had prepared the AI just before his capture, and that it found him only after the guards removed him from the interrogation cell, perhaps when his brain re-engaged with the processor lodged in his skull. However, she felt a horrible intimation: perhaps Saul had connived at his own capture, knowing that he needed to become something else, and that only by destroying what he already was could he . . . no, no, that way lay madness.

‘You’ll go alone?’ she asked.

‘Far too risky to take you back there,’ he replied.

She didn’t quite manage to hide her relief.