There were probably five of them, but it seemed more. The fishers could not be seen with their spiked tridents in the open streets, but the myrmillons had brought their wooden practice swords. As I flailed in the nets, they beat me systematically until I faded in a smother of disjointed sounds.

I was coming to. New tenants must be thin on the ground. Perhaps they had heard what life in a Smaractus apartment is like. The office was mine still; I was waking up.

Not in my room; somewhere else.

I felt desperately tired. Pain lapped around me as thick as spilt nectar, then I swirled in a torrent of sensation and fierce noise back up from the whirlpool.

“He’s coming round! Say something, Falco,” Lenia ordered.

My brain uttered words. I heard no sound; my cotton ball mouth never moved.

I felt sorry for this Falco if he hurt as much as me. I had left the world for perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps a hundred years. Wherever I had been was better than here, and I wanted to go back.

“Marcus!” Not Lenia any more. “Don’t try to talk, son.” Lenia had sent for my mother. Good heavens.

Slowly the red blur behind my eyelids solidified. Slowly I and that other poor man they called Falco fused together.

“This is—” Who said that? Me or Falco? Him I think.

My mother’s voice, acid with relief, spoke: “This is why people keep up with their rent!”

Lenia loomed over me, her neck haggard as a giant lizard. “Lie still,” she said. I sat up.

My mother had helped. Anything to lie down again, but her arm at my back held me upright like a puppeteer’s softwood stick.

My mother raised my head, holding me under the chin with the firm, neutral grip of a lifelong nurse. She treats me like a hopeless case. She speaks to me as if I were a delinquent child. The loss of my great-hearted brother burns between us like wormwood in the throat, a perpetual reproach. I don’t even know what she reproaches me for. I suspect she doesn’t know herself.

She seemed to believe in me now. Mother said, in a voice that forced sense deep into the mash that had once been my brain, “Marcus! I am worried about the little girl. We read her note. I sent Petronius to find her, but you ought to go—”

I reached the Forum in a litter, shouldered through the crowds like some gross eunuch with more money than taste. We jostled to the Golden Milestone, from which all the roads in the Empire take their distance. I thought of her, waiting to meet me at the heart of the world. No sign of her now. One of Petro’s troopers gave me a message to meet his captain in Nap Lane. The man held back, still expecting someone else. I set off on foot.