‘Hey, I’ve got parents. I see them pretty often.’

‘Good for you.’

Mike shook his head again, a little blearily this time. ‘Still can’t believe it, man. It’s like a fucking movie. All the way back from the zones to take down Edward Quain.’

Chris finished his drink. ‘Yeah, well. Some of us have got what it takes, some of us haven’t. Remember.’

‘Ah, shit, Chris, I didn’t mean you. I’m not saying everyone in the zones deserves to be there, you know that. If I’d known, you know, about your parents and stuff, I wouldn’t have said—‘

‘No? You must have known my background, Mike. You said yourself, that first day I met you in the washroom, Hewitt was batting my details about before I arrived. And it’s not a secret where I grew up. It’s on the resume.’

‘What?’ Mike squinted at him. ‘Well, yeah, but I assumed. I don’t know, accidental son of some slumming exec and a bargirl, a dancer or something.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Fuck, I don’t mean. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything, but I just assumed. It happens, you know. Seen it happen. Come close a couple of times, myself. I just figured, something like that, that’s how you got your break at Ross Mobile, maybe a leg up into LS as well.’

‘No.’ Chris smiled tightly. ‘I got Ross through an old friend of my father. Everything else I clawed down myself. Don’t worry about it, Mike. You were right. Some of us have got what it takes, and what it takes is hate. I had enough hate to paint a towerblock. I grew up hating. It was like fuel. Like food. You don’t need much of anything else when you’ve got hate.’

‘Look—‘

‘And then one morning I woke up and I’d killed Edward Quain, and the world was still here. I had a job, I had a life, well, a lifestyle anyway. Hammett McColl had just promoted me. I had money, a lot of money, for the first time in my life.’ He tipped his empty glass horizontal. Looked into it and laughed. ‘It seemed a little ungracious not to go on living.’

The two of them sat there in silence for a while. Finally, Mike shifted uncomfortably and cleared his throat.

‘Chris.’ He hesitated. ‘You, uh, you want to stay at my place tonight?’

‘No. Thanks, no. I’ve got to be alone for a while, Mike. There’s stuff I need to sort out. I’ll get a hotel. But thanks. And.’ He waved vaguely. ‘Thanks for, you know, saving my life and everything.’

Bryant grinned.

‘Shit, I always owed you for Mitsue Jones. Just call it even.’

The hotel would not hold him.

He poured himself a whisky - another fucking whisky - and stared at the phone as if it were poisonous. His mobile was still switched off. No one outside of Mike knew where he was. He’d have to pick up and dial.

He picked up the TV remote instead, and zapped through the channels. Endless, mindless, brightly-coloured shit and an upbeat report just in from Cambodia. He recognised the editing.

He shut down the TV’s painted window and went out on the balcony. Warm night air gusted over his face. A well-lit Kensington street angled past seven floors below. A couple walked along it, arm in arm. Laughter floated up. A cab idled by in the opposite direction, cruising for custom.

He retreated to the bedroom. He lay face up on the bed and stared at the perfectly moulded plaster ceiling. Tension itched down his limbs.

He prowled the suite and gnawed a thumbnail down to the quick.

He lit the laptop and tried to carry out simple database tasks.

He hurled the whisky glass across the room.

He grabbed wallet, Nemex, jacket, and he left.

She was waiting for him.

She must have heard the cab in the street outside. The door opened as he pressed the bell. She stood in the clothes she’d worn at Break Point, black leggings and a loose grey running top, face scrubbed clean of make-up, hair gathered back. They stood looking at each other, an arm’s reach apart.

‘I’ve got to talk to you,’ he started, but she shook her head.

She reached for him as he crossed the threshold. It felt like falling. He was close enough to smell freshly drunk coffee on her breath, behind that the swirl of female scent mingled with orange blossom. The kiss was an open-mouthed collision that squeezed tears into his eyes, a mutual assault of tongues, of teeth tugging on lips and hands on clothing below. She was laughing excitedly into his open mouth as they clinched and his hands felt impossibly full of her body, unable to grasp the substance of it with enough force. He kicked the door shut and found a breast beneath the sports top, unsupported and surgically perfect - the porn segment sprang through his mind like sweat — hard under soft, a swath of stomach sprung with taut muscle, the hard length of one thigh and the lift of arse cheek above it. He could not settle on any of it.

Her leg thrust between his and ground upward against his prick. He was already hard. She bit him on the neck. Hands dragged him down the hall, past the kitchen and bathroom and left into an untidy bedroom. Cluttered bedside unit, a teetering pile of books and a glass of stale water. A pale blue quilt crumpled across an unmade bed. He drank it in and the new intimacy was a tiny itching in the pit of his stomach, an opening to an inner sanctum, built into his prior knowledge of the rest of the house. She let him go with a sudden motion as if he was hot, sank to the bed in front of him and peeled off her leggings in two single stripping motions. Fingers touched the mound beneath the white cotton thong she wore underneath, rubbing the groove up and down. She grinned up at him as she did it. Her free hand scrabbled across to the bedside table, ripped open a drawer and reached inside.

‘No, wait.’

He shed jacket and shirt, dropped to his knees beside the bed and buried his face in the white cotton, breathing in the undiluted scent of her. She gasped and sank back on the folds of the quilt. The heated heart of flesh between her thighs was moist. He slid his hands up the insides of her thighs, fingers first, pulled aside the cotton and sank his tongue into her. A hard spasm and her hands came to grip the sides of his head. Her legs lifted and folded over his back like wings. She was panting.

When she came, she ground up hard against him with a deep grunting sound, then flopped to twitching stillness. He shouldered his way gently out from under her legs and straightened up. In the drawer she had opened, he found the Durex can. He rolled its chilly length along the plain of her stomach, got another twitch as it touched her, then lodged it between her breasts and rolled it idly back and forth in the indelible cleavage surgery had given her. She raised herself on her elbows.

‘So what do you want now?’ she asked, mock tough.

‘I want to fuck you, Liz.’

She seemed to consider that for a moment, head tilted slightly. Then she sat up, tugged her hair loose of its binding and set about unfastening his belt buckle. She liberated the engorged length of his prick from the cloth it was trapped in, handling it with greedy care and sliding it back and forth into her mouth. Then she gripped it at base between thumb and forefinger, picked up the Durex can and sprayed him steadily from end to end.

It was a long time since he’d needed to use the stuff, and the sudden, cold tightening of the instant membrane was a shock. He gasped and Liz Linshaw grinned again as she heard it.

‘That’s just for starters,’ she said in the back of her throat and held up the can for his inspection. ‘This is cocktail-laced. Expensive stuff. You wait ‘til the contact sensitisers kick in. You’re not going to last long.’

He reached for her and she scooted back on the bed, opening herself for him. He sank all the way into her with a groan, cupped one breast in both hands, working the flesh. He sucked in the nipple and it touched the roof of his mouth.

She was right. He didn’t last long.