He tried to reach her, though he knew it was far too late. Then something else came down through the hole in the floor. Something fast and dark and feral. It was the animal, the killer, trying to find an escape route.

It slammed Drusher over hard with one flailing limb, and he crashed into a plasterboard wall that shattered like old marzipan icing.

For a moment, just a fleeting second before he passed out, he glimpsed it. The shape.

The shape.

He came round staring up at Falken’s face.

‘He’s all right.’ Falken spat and turned away, wiping dust off his face.

Drusher sat up fast, his head pounding. ‘Macks? Macks?’

‘What?’ she asked.

Drusher saw her, crouching in the rubble in front of him. Falken was getting the dazed Edvin back on his feet.

‘Macks?’

She was leaning over the body. Drusher got up, and could see now the mutilated corpse was Rimbaud.

‘It got away,’ Macks murmured. ‘It got Rimbaud, and then it got away.’ Falken was shouting for the other troopers to sweep the rear of the building.

‘What happened?’ Drusher asked.

‘I didn’t see it,’ Macks said. ‘Falken saw something move, and fired. Then it all went to hell.’

‘It came down this way. After it had…’ Drusher paused. ‘It followed Rimbaud’s body down.’

‘You see it?’

‘I didn’t get a proper look,’ Drusher said.

Macks cursed, and walked away. Drusher crouched down beside the trooper’s body, and turned it slightly so he could look at the wound. The same clean, ghastly cut right across the face. But this time, a second one, abortive, made behind the line of the excising blow, as if the predator had been in a frenzy – alarmed, perhaps – and had made a first hasty strike before following it up. Even so the first strike, deep and into the side of the neck and head, would have killed Rimbaud outright.

But even in haste, so clean. So straight.

‘A cat? A cat did that?’ Drusher looked around. Edvin, blood dribbling from a cut above his left eye, was staring at his friend’s body.

‘That’s what the experts say,’ Drusher replied.

They drove back to the Magistratum HQ in silence. The sweep had picked up nothing. The killer had melted into the ruins beyond the Commission of Works as fast as frost in summertime.

‘You thought it was me, didn’t you?’ Macks asked finally.

‘What?’

‘The body. I heard you cry out. You thought it had got me.’

Drusher nodded. He felt they might be about to have a moment, something honest that approximated intimacy. He was prepared to admit how much he would care if anything happened to her.

‘If you can’t tell the difference between me and a hairy-arsed male trooper,’ she said, ‘I’m not holding out much hope for your observational expertise.’

He looked over at her. ‘Screw you too, Macks.’