She shook her head. “Never mind.” She glanced at the female assistant at Roa’s side, not sure if she recognised the woman. “How is Keteo? I don’t see him here.”

Roa’s brows furrowed. “He is gone from me; he proved to be only a temporary apparance.”

“Oh? What appeared to happen to him?”

“He appeared to become religious and join some decamillennialist faith. A section of my personality I am best rid of, I think.”

“Ah-hah,” she said.

Roa looked at his assistant, then at the waiting jet. “I must go now. Good-bye.” He bowed.

She raised one hand. “Pleasant journey. Watch out for low bridges.”

Roa ignored this as he walked for the plane.

She rejoined Zefla.

“Anything?” Zefla said.

“Nothing,” Sharrow told her.

Roa’s plane rolled towards the take-off pad and was gone a few minutes later.

They met up with Miz and Dloan at the hotel and had dinner in their suite. The men had worked out the position the bike dials were indicating to a ten kilometre circle near the head of a ninety-kilometre-long fjord deep in the Embargoed Areas. They discussed the options for getting safely into and out of the Areas.

Later, Sharrow took the service stairs out of the packed, noisy hotel and walked back to her apartments through the quiet. She got slightly lost but then saw Feril’s steam car parked on the street in a pool of light cast from the brightly lit lobby of the apartment block. The lights were on in the apartment Feril was renovating just below her own.

She stood in the lobby waiting for the lift, whistling quietly to herself. She thought she heard the clack-clack of android footsteps on the stairwell at one point, and looked up the steps round the side of the lift shaft waiting for Feril to appear, but they stopped somewhere above.

The elevator appeared and she took it to her floor. She was about to open the door to her apartment when she heard a door open on the floor below.

“Lady Sharrow?” she heard Feril call.

She looked down the stairwell. Feril’s head poked round the side of the lift shaft. “Yes, Feril?”

“I think there was somebody here to see you,” the android told her. It sounded puzzled. “But it was strange.”

“How?” she said.

“The person looked like an android, but it was actually a human dressed to resemble an android; they didn’t respond to my transceiver and a simple EM scan-”

“Did they go in here?” Sharrow said quickly, jabbing her thumb towards her apartment.

“I believe so,” Feril said. “I thought perhaps it was somebody you knew.”

She looked back at the door to her apartment. “Wait here,” she said. She pressed the button for the lift and heard it rumbling in its shaft.

She looked back down at the android. “On second thoughts,” she said, “don’t wait here. Just to be on the safe side; get out of the building.”

The lift doors hissed open. “Do you think-?” she heard Feril say as she swung into the elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. The lift descended. She checked the HandCannon.

There was nobody on the first floor, or in the lobby. She kept against the wall and went to the doors; there was no way she could get out to the street without it being obvious. She sidled back to the rear of the lobby and made her way out of a dusty office and a short corridor into a dark side-street.

She walked quickly to the corner of the building, keeping her boot heels off the pavement so they wouldn’t make a noise. She looked out. Light from the apartment block lobby cast a soft glow for a half-block in each direction. After a few seconds, Sharrow made out a pale figure crouched in the shadows diagonally across the street, in an awninged doorway under another building. The figure-it did look like a rather bulky android-was looking up towards the top of the apartment block, and seemed to be holding something in both hands.

Sharrow sensed movement to her left, at the apartment block doors; she saw the figure in the doorway look quickly down from the top of the building to the doors.

Sharrow glanced to her left, to see Feril come out of the lobby doors and stand on the pavement between the doors and the silent bulk of the antique steam car. Feril looked diagonally across the street towards the figure crouching in the doorway, then raised one hand.

The figure brought a hand gun up and fired at Feril. The android flicked its head to one side; light flared on the stonework immediately behind it as a crackle of noise burst across the street; Feril dropped to the paving stones. Sharrow aimed the HandCannon as the figure raised its other hand and seemed to shake something. She fired the HandCannon.

Light flickered above her an instant before it burst from the muzzle of the gun. The wall beside Sharrow rippled as the gun roared. A mighty thump came through the soles of her boots and then a crushing, numbing pulse of sound rolled down over her, dwarfing the percussive bark of the gun.

She half-fell, half-dropped to the ground, then rolled across the pavement towards the building and under the cover of a broad window sill as the blast echoed and re-echoed off nearby buildings and merged with a terrible, tearing noise. Chunks of masonry and huge long shards of glass began to fall and shatter on the street and pavement.

Dust choked her nostrils; the roaring noise filled her ears through an insistent, cacophonous ringing.

When all but the ringing stopped, she stood up, brushing dust and flakes of stone from her jacket and skirt.

She looked up through a cloud of grey, moonlit dust. The top half of the apartment block had disappeared. Most of it had fallen into the street in front, entirely blocking it and burying the lobby doors and the ancient steam car under a ten-metre-high pile of dust-clouded rubble; there was no sign of Feril.

She tried going back the way she had come, but rubble filled the dark corridor, blocking the way to the office; her little torch made a white cone in the dry, throat-coating dust. She went back out, coughing and choking, and clambered over the rubble towards the doorway where the figure had been crouching.

Whoever it had been, her shot had killed them; the metal and plastic chest bore only a small puncture mark near its centre, but there was a sticky red mess a metre up the wall behind where the person had been crouching and a slowly advancing puddle of deep; dark-red was making its glistening way across the dust and debris-strewn floor of the doorway, its thickly gleaming surface picking up little particles of drifting, coating dust as it moved.

She kicked aside pieces of rubble and pulled at the figure’s head.

The head/helmet came away after she gave it a half-twist.

A man. At first, with an odd sense of relief, she thought that she didn’t recognise him.

But then she took another look at that youthful but now slack face, and with a feeling of sadness that became anger and then a kind of despair she recognised Keteo.

She was unsure whether she wanted to cry or to punch that smooth, boyish, dead face. Then just as she was about to shove the android-head helmet back over the young ex-Solipsist’s head, she saw something glint at the collar of the olive T-shirt he wore.

She drew the thin chain out.

On the end of it hung a small planet-and-single-moon locket, the symbol of an intern-grade Huhsz Lay Novice.

She looked into the youth’s dead eyes again, then let the trinket drop back to his chest. She stood up and let the hollow android head fall beside him in the doorway.

A large truck drew up in the street behind her, wheels skidding through the glass and stone wreckage in front of the main rubble heap. The truck’s lights picked out the dust-shrouded remains of the building. Two androids jumped out of the vehicle and stood looking at the pile, then moved to a section of it and quickly started to pick up lumps of the fallen masonry and throw it behind them, excavating a trench in the debris.