‘That was a demonstration of how things will be if you resist,’ I said. ‘Now I’m going to ask the question once more…’

XI

Patience heard the buzzing, not with her ears but with her mind, and slid into cover behind a crumbling rockcrete wall. Moments later, a varnished human skull hovered past through the gloom. Tech implants decorated the back of its cranium, and lights shone in its hollow orbits. A sensor drone, sweeping for her. She’d heard the bastards talking about them before her release. This was the first physical proof that men were actually after her.

Men. Hunters. Killers.

The skull hovered on the spot for a moment, circled once, and then sped away into the shadows. Patience stayed low. After another minute, a second drone – this one built around the skull of a dog or cat – skimmed past and made off in another direction.

She slowed her breathing, and deliberately encouraged her mind to do the sort of tricks that usually happened unbidden. She reached out. She could feel the area around her in a radius of ten metres, forty, sixty. The shape of the geography: the sloping trench to her left, the broken columns ahead, the line of burned-out habs to her right. Behind her, the sewer outfall pouring sludge into a cracked storm drain. She sensed bright sparks of mental energy, but they were just rats scuttling in the ruins.

Then she sensed one that wasn’t.

This spark was bigger, human, very controlled and intense. Right ahead, beyond the columns, moving forward.

Moving slowly so as not to dislodge any loose stones, she turned and began to creep away around the storm-drain chute towards a jumble of plasteel ruins. Her left toe kicked a rock, and it rolled away off the drain’s edge and started to fall. Patience caught it neatly with her mind and lifted it up into the silence of her hand.

The brief delay had been to her advantage. Now she sensed three or four human mind-traces in the ruins ahead of her. Not focused like the other one, feral. In the shadows.

Don’t trust the black, that’s what DaRolle had said to her. Trouble was, could she trust DaRolle’s advice?

She crouched low, and stayed there until she could see them. Ragged human shapes, barely visible, moving like animals through the ruins. Gangers, members of the notorious Dolor clan. She could see three, but was sure there were more. The hunter was closing from the right, now almost at the rockcrete wall.

Patience lifted the rock in her hand and threw it, sending it far further than her arm alone could have managed. It landed in the trench with a loud clatter.

The hunter turned and made for it immediately. She got a glimpse of a man in an armoured jack and high boots scurrying towards the lip of the trench.

Then the Dolors saw him too.