Abruptly a memory surfaced from when Kay’d been working for the UK government. Her head of department had been very full of himself too. He’d been desperate for the various scientists under his care to understand just how important he was, how indispensable, whilst simultaneously never really understanding any of the research. This Dr. Rat was probably a better scientist than that, but she had the same sense of someone puffing themselves up as much as possible—lest they be forgotten and left behind. And from what Rove was saying, that fear could be very real, if the chosen few are about to evacuate to a virgin New World. She had loathed that browbeating supervisor for two years. Then, after she’d left, she’d run into the man in a gay bar in Leeds. He’d been a completely different person, as, in a very real sense, had she.

Maybe we can build bridges and I can cadge a fag off you too—or perhaps reconstruct the molecular sequence for nicotine from first principles, because I am gagging for it. But first things first.

“One thing, Doctor,” she said. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m a woman, okay? Female. I don’t know what that really means to you, but it’s important to me.”

There was a pause. Perhaps it was accessing files or remembering instructions from Rove. But Dr. Rat only twitched its whiskers. “That is acceptable,” the translator explained, probably quite mystified, but Kay was surprised how much better the concession made her feel. I can work with you, she decided. Or at least she could try.

III

In the third interview Julian’s bosses had put him through, Alison was in the room when they brought him in. That was when he started to think it might be all right. Or at least that everything else might be sufficiently screwed that firing him for breaches of protocol was no longer anyone’s priority.

“Matchbox.” He nodded to her.

“Spiker.” She looked tense, pale, likely operating on the same cocktail of stress and adrenaline that he was. He hadn’t had access to a mirror any time recently, but probably he looked worse, on account of how he’d been fatally shot two days ago. Tended to put a crimp in your day, that.

Using those very words inside his head, he allowed himself a small smile at just how goddamned British he was being about this.