You smelled their sour cat smell in here the way you never would in Saudade; it was as heavy and thick as talcum powder. They sat motionless, pressed together too tightly to move. Wherever Vic went in the room, they were facing away from him. Even Emil Bonaventure agreed: if you entered between dawn and dusk, from the Lots, these cats would be filling the outer regions of the site. Accounts varied, as they always did: but you would, in Vic's experience, always have some cats in your life; and in places they would come to resemble a thick fur on everything, a kind of deposit. They were always motionless, turned away from you, sitting on their haunches with their faces pressed into the walls, the corners, the cobwebs, each other. It was as if they were ignoring you. But it was also as if they had no choice-wherever your gaze fell, they had to face away from it. Emil believed that this was evidence which, though anecdotal, might one day be correlated with science from outside the site.

Vic Serotonin had no theory about the cats.

He stood in the middle of the room.

A street ran left to right just below his eyeline. There was a real sense of bustle down there. Laughter. Women's heels tapping back and forth. Rickshaws rang their bells. Deep summer lunchtime, and the old New Nuevo Tango issued from every open door. There were the smells of Cafe electrique, Calpol, and other exotic stimulants from the history of Ancient Earth. There was hammering and banging, the scrape of spades through wet cement, trowels through mortar, the rattle of construction machinery. Everyone down there was busy, or they were having a working lunch, pears in brine with a really interesting small salad of alien leaves. It was always like that until you went to the window and looked out. Then the noises cut off instantly and you saw that something was wrong with the street. It was a representation. Curving sharply away in both directions to identical early sunsets, the offices and shops, the sidewalk cafes and street lamps, were drawn on, in unrealistic sunshine tones, thick poster yellows cut with blues and reds, strong blacks to make the outlines.

It was empty. It was silent. Vic stared out.

After a minute or two, an accordion started up, then, half a bar into Hernando's Hideaway, stopped again; and he saw, as he had hoped he would, Elizabeth Kielar struggling away from him down the middle of the street. Time doesn't pass the same way in there, and sometimes luck will help you with that, and sometimes it won't.

"Elizabeth!" he called, "Elizabeth!"

When she turned, her face was rubbed-out white, the features gone, and he wondered for a moment if it was her after all. By then he was in the street and Elizabeth was twenty yards away, walking fast, as if she wanted to get away from him, as if Vic was part of the place, just another weird thing you couldn't depend on and didn't want to engage. Nothing was the same down there, but Vic had expected that. The street looked real again, but it looked older and dirtier too. Ripped awnings over the shop windows. Brick with a hard finish, a metallic, clinkered look. When you passed an open doorway, smells of old carpet, leather chairs, furniture polish, some insistently medical smell you couldn't name. Elizabeth stopped suddenly and waited for him to catch up.

"I'm frightened. How did I get here?"

"I thought I'd lost you," Vic said. When he tried to embrace her, she backed away.

"No," she said. "Look, I was on a beach. And now it's this." She stared around her with a bruised expression. "I didn't pay for this. Where have you been?" She put her hands in the pockets of her coat. "Where have / been?" she asked herself.

"Perhaps you could tell me what was it like," Vic said.

"I don't remember."

"Do you remember anything at all after you left the Baltic Exchange?" He meant, I warned you. He meant, It's dangerous to come here looking for any part of yourself.

"I was on a beach," she said. "A man was exercising two dogs." She had watched him walk his dogs backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, over the same two hundred yards, even though he had miles of beach available. His reflection kept pace with the reflections of the dogs along the wet sand. Every so often, she said, he seemed to stop and, cupping his hand, splash their undersides with seawater. "They were so patient and accepting!" They stared ahead in whatever position they had come to rest, and eventually one of them curved itself into a taut, elegant hoop and tried to defecate. After that, all three of them trudged away up a steep shingle bank, the rain dissolving them into a single wobbling cipher.

"You followed them. It was evening, you saw lights."

"No."

"You found yourself here," Vic said.

"They were as fastidious as schoolgirls, those dogs," she said. "I had to laugh." She said, "I felt like a little girl again."

"It wasn't a beach. They weren't dogs."

She turned her back on him and began to walk away. "I'm going in, whatever you say."

"Elizabeth, you're already in."

"Do you know anything, any of you? Anything at all?"

He couldn't answer that.

Smoke was still rising from the Lots half an hour after Vic Serotonin had made himself scarce. Bodies lay in extreme positions where they fell. One of the surviving gun-kiddies had died. The other had stopped crawling and begun to make a peculiar thin keening noise; it had suffered significant head injuries. Site Crime was arriving in numbers, mainly local uniforms in their huge patrol vehicles, responding to the original conflagration: but also specialist teams from Hygiene, Quarantine and Surveillance; teams whose job it was to co-ordinate with EMC; and teams whose job it was to co-ordinate teams. They held informal meetings on the Lots to discuss protocol, collars raised against the rain; or stared up at the roof of the Baltic Exchange, which had collapsed shortly after the departure of the Poule de Luxe. A group of them gathered round the punk, some taking bets, some repeating in loud voices, "Can you hear us?" and, "Can you tell us who did this to you?" then advising each other tiredly:

"Forget it guys, this one's fucked."

They avoided Aschemann's car, although they sometimes tried to catch the eye of his assistant, whose reputation had reached them via one Bureau pipe or another. On her part, she had nothing to say. She leaned against the rear quarter of the Cadillac, radiating heat from her ramped-up metabolism-which, like most contemporary Preter Coeur product, had a stage by which it burned forty per cent of its own cellular waste-and treating everything but her datableed with contempt. She hadn't spoken since Vic got away.

"I'm feeling very shaken up," Aschemann told her.

He put his hand on her arm. "Thank you for everything you did; perhaps next time you could kill a few less people."

She shrugged.

"Are you angry?" he said.

"This was never an investigation. It was a mess."

Her eyes went out of focus; she said something flatly into her dial-up. She had called down another fire-team; but it was too late to catch Vic, and Paulie had never been her responsibility. When Aschemann reminded her of that, she levered herself angrily away from the Cadillac and stood off a few paces, looking in any direction but his. She knelt next to Alice Nylon and tidied the hair out of the peaky, dead little face. "I don't understand why any of this had to happen!" she said to Aschemann. "I don't understand why you have to pretend to be old, and get driven around in a car from the historical times. No one in this culture has to be old any more." She lifted Alice by the shoulders, shook her lightly-as if Alice had gone to sleep on some secret which if she had shared it would have changed both their lives-then allowed her to drop back again. "An escape is involved here," she reminded Aschemann. "I don't understand why you can't investigate the way everyone else does."