Alibi: no one knew I was on Salay Ewwel. I had travelled as Waller Alman and would fly back to Tristcontenta tomorrow under the same name. If the traffic copter was in use, I could blag a ride back to town in that. I was rostered for duty every day I was away from Dearth, but I had volunteered for the standby list, as everyone did from time to time. I had done this before. Patrols went out, transgressions were dealt with, the reserve was never called in. By law there had to be an extra officer on standby readiness, but the call never came.

That’s where I was: on standby at home in Dearth City. Everyone on the station would confirm it.

Mutability? The curse of every investigation on Dearth. All detectives were on their guard, because evidence could change, or could be said to have changed. We had to become experts in reading it. Dearth Island was positioned on a geological fault above several gravitational anomalies. Mutability could kick in without warning, because of local effects. Things happened. A power spike usually, but often faulty IT on some nearby corporate system, an obsolescent memory card on someone’s washing machine, a hotel door unlocked incorrectly, a personal computer loading bootleg software.

Nothing like that was a risk on Salay. There was only a single geological fault, and that was beneath the central lagoon. Gravity normal. Nothing would change. What had just happened would always lead to what would happen next. Reality could be trusted.

But I remained aware. The old Dearth habit.

I paced around the squalid hotel room. The moments dripped by like the runnels of sweat inside my shirt.

Jeksid discontinued.

I turned away from Jeksid’s account, rubbed my eyes. It was late, and my mouth was dry. Jeksid was starting to tire me. I ran a glass of cold water, wondering if I should close down for the night and read the rest of what he had written tomorrow.

Spoder had summed it up.

‘Who are these people?’ he had said, in a rare for him display of feeling. This sudden vehemence had startled me more than the remark itself. I thought he took these old incidents more seriously than I did, but at that moment he had caught exactly the same feeling as mine. Frejah Harsent in her souped-up car and uttering her implausible warnings, now this ex-policeman proud of his gun skills, going about a law enforcement job in a place where there was allegedly no crime, where he carried a weapon everywhere but had never fired it, bragging about being a senior marksman. The Dearth habit of distrusting reality, because it was believed to change.