‘I haven’t seen anything, but someone must have come in. Hurry up.’

He followed her to the door, and they went out together into the kitchen passageway.

There was someone at the far end, by the hall door.

‘Mister Nayl?’ Macks called out. She raised the stab-beam.

She’d found the missing body.

It was standing up, a twisted skeletal figure, caked in dirt and black organic tatters. It began to limp towards them.

Certain things had trailed Valentin Drusher around his whole life. Poverty was one, frustration was another. A lack of confidence. A wounded sense of being overlooked. All of those things had visited him on an intermittent basis.

But fear had been, pretty much, a constant companion.

Drusher’s fear took many forms. Sometimes it was abstract, like his fear of failure and its ugly, contrary twin, his fear of success. He was afraid of authority and afraid of being forgotten. Mostly, his fear manifested as a simple fear of pain. He was a nervous, timid man, who lived in dread of a midnight knock at the door from a predatory road-mob, or of getting in a fight when he was minding his own business, or of being dragged away and beaten by law enforcement if his papers weren’t up to date. He was afraid of heights and of drowning. He was afraid of being hurt.

A lingering early memory was the fear of the aggressive canine his father had kept, a creature that never seemed to tolerate Drusher. During his long years of training and education, he had lived in perpetual anxiety about being bitten or stung or clawed by the lab animals and wild specimens he was examining. Even as a magos, that fear had persisted, making him tentative in his work and his studies. He knew a lot about animal behaviour, and, for the most part, he knew how to avoid the risks and handle potentially dangerous life forms, but the most basic rule of all was that even a magos biologis never knew everything, and that an animal, especially one trapped or surprised, could do the unexpected. The damn sea raptor had remained in its cage for months because he’d been too afraid to get near to it.

Twice in his life, he had faced things that were truly fearful: the unholy xenos specimen that he and Macks had cornered in a mill in Outer Udar years before, and the psychotic killing-thing he had hunted in Tycho City.