"Take a bite," she told Zaq.

He looked doubtful.

"I'll have it," Eli said.

"Zaq's ill," Maria insisted. "He gets first bite."

"I'm not," said Zaq, shaking his head, mostly to stop his mother from putting her hand to his forehead to see if he had a fever.

"Burning up," she told him. "Eat it now."

"I've got a fever too," announced Eli, but his brother had already bitten into the fruit and over-sweet juice was running down the small boy's chin.

"Yuk..."

"It's good," Maria promised.

"I feel sick," said Zaq and passed the apple to Eli, who immediately took a bite before Maria could stop him.

"You have some," Eli suggested, seeing anger tighten his mother's eyes.

Maria shook her head. "Give it to Zaq," she said.

She was a good mother who shared her food and only ever stayed out nights if it was impossible to get back. Never once had she thought about selling, killing or abandoning either of her children, no matter how tired they made her. There were, however, limits and both Eli and Zaq understood that these had just been reached.

So Zaq did what he was told and ate everything, including the core, in silence, then licked his fingers and went with Eli to find fuel, anything that might burn. "Magnesium would be good," said Zaq, but his mother was asleep and Eli was outside, lying on top of a girl Zaq had never seen before.

The next morning Zaq woke with a rash, feeling sick and muttering about M-theory, Zero Point Energy and the luxury of oblivion. So Maria did something she'd never believed herself capable of doing. She took the gold ring Eddie had made her from circuitry, his lucky lump of black glass which she'd stolen and what was left of her beauty down twelve levels, looking for a medicine woman.

What Maria found was Doc Joyce, a shambling figure dressed in rags and old sweat and what he wanted was none of the above.

All he required in payment was a metal bolt Maria wore strung on a cord between her breasts. She didn't stop to consider how he knew this talisman existed or where she kept it hidden. The ragged man was obviously a shaman, how could he not know? Waiting patiently, she stood as he undid the buttons on her dress and stared impassively at the hexagon of grey metal.

Other men had gazed in rapture at her breasts. Not for some years, it was true, but even where she lived in the cold thin air that fed the upper levels of Rip, strangers would occasionally stop, catch their breath and wonder fleetingly -- in between lust and the promise of forgetfulness -- about the twists of life that gave a perfect ass, breasts and hips to a roofwhore with two children and a scar which disfigured half her face.

Doc Joyce barely noticed her body as his fingers closed around the hexagon. The bolt was warm and would remain warm long after it was taken from between her breasts. And were he to pass electricity through the hexagon and introduce it to the cold then the object would remain cold even if Doc Joyce hung it on a cord and tucked it under his own rags. And the Doc always wore rags when visiting the intricate maze of shafts, narrow levels and hangars that made up this part of Rip. It helped to blend in with the scenery.

The Doc had been hunting for a scrap of metal such as this for most of his life, which was already twenty times longer than that of the girl standing in front of him. His vision had been augmented to scan beneath life's surface layers, his sense of smell was acute enough to distinguish illness from anxiety and he could taste the presence of a hundred different metals on his tongue.

That was how he'd known this was the moment he'd been waiting for. A taste on his tongue unlike all others.

"Button your dress."

The girl looked so offended that Doc Joyce almost smiled. Every society had its own social currency, even one as fractured as Rip. She traded on her beauty, he traded on his intelligence; there wasn't that much difference between them, no matter how impossible she would have found that thought.

"My small boy," she said.

"How old?" Doc Joyce asked, firing up a medical core. Something Maria saw only as a quick blink and sudden concentration on the part of the man.

Maria told him.

"You're rather young to have a child that old," Doc Joyce said, reading off her biological age. It was a comment made without thinking.

Maria looked puzzled.

"Eli's older," she said.

CHAPTER 6

High Atlas, Monday 25 June [Now]

Ghosts hid among the holm oaks and cedar trees. Aged and almost transparent with exhaustion, they had been driven into the High Atlas by disbelief and fundamentalism, the last being a nasrani term for long beards and a rigid belief.

The ghosts had learned to distinguish those who disbelieved from those who objected by their clothes. Disbelievers wore jeans and T-shirts mostly. Blue jeans, sometimes black and mostly tight, although a few of the girls now wore trousers that flapped round their ankles like sails starved of a breeze.

Objectors wore three, sometimes four fists of beard, when in the old days two would have been considered sufficient. Like the disbelievers, they also refused to accept the ghosts, albeit for diametrically opposite reasons.

So the djinn wandered the city hungry and lonely, spilling into absence with every new breeze. Those who could, the ones freshly fed on belief or fear, headed for the dry woodlands of the High Atlas, where their kind were still welcome and if not welcome then at least accepted for what they were.

The man rough plastering an arch in a half-finished kasbah on the slopes of a valley had no trouble believing in ghosts; but then Prisoner Zero had little trouble believing in most things, except himself.

"Nobody's worth that much," said Idries, tossing his newspaper to the floor of the kasbah. The dust it raised stuck to the lower edges of a freshly plastered area, extracting a sigh from Prisoner Zero.

"You know how much it is now?" Idries demanded.

Prisoner Zero didn't.

"Twenty-five million dollars. You have any idea how much that is in dirham? You want to thank God you're among friends." There was a tightness to the small man's voice that the prisoner might have found worrying had his mind been less locked into flashbacks of ghosts, burning cars and the falling 'copter.

It was nearly three weeks since he'd shot the Brigadier. A time spent working himself half to death in Hassan's kasbah, unable to summon up the doubt he needed to make the ghosts vanish, while lacking enough faith to deny their existence.

A doctor had been introduced the first morning, a clean-shaven young man who arrived blindfolded in the back of Idries's jeep and who dressed the burns on Prisoner Zero's stomach, listened to his heart and peered deep into the back of his eyes using a cross between a flashlight and a magnifying glass.

"It will take time," the doctor said.

"What will?" Idries asked.

"For the drugs to leave his system."

"Drugs?" That was Hassan. At least Prisoner Zero thought it was; he had trouble remembering.

"This man is drugged," said the doctor. "Surely you knew?"

"Is he?" Hassan's laugh was bitter. "I'm surprised you can tell."

"Aren't you going to answer that?" Idries asked eventually, after Prisoner Zero abandoned his arch to drag a metal ladder into the hall, signalling Idries to bring a bucket full of rounded stones.

"Answer what?" Prisoner Zero demanded.

"Your mobile." The rat-faced man held out a cell phone he'd spent the previous week trying to make Prisoner Zero carry round with him.

"I don't think so," said Prisoner Zero, putting his ladder into position.

Seen from above, Idries looked every bit as unprepossessing as the prisoner remembered, maybe even worse now that a thin skim of hair was all that covered the man's narrow skull. Prisoner Zero tried to recall who'd first called Idries rat boy and gave up.