The trooper blinked. ‘Woah…’ Then a broad, lazy smile stretched his face wide. Three blockers had probably been a bit much, but Will didn’t really care-and from the look of things, neither did Private Floyd.

‘You going to be OK?’

Floyd just beamed-so Will left him to it, lurching back up the drop bay.

‘One, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand: breathe.’

‘What’s our ETA?’ Detective Sergeant Cameron stood holding onto the edges of her booth, staring down at Stein’s pale body. Trembling.

‘Two, maybe three minutes.’

She nodded. Cleared her throat.

‘How you doing?’

‘Is he…’ She took one hand off the railing and ran it across her soot-smeared cheek. ‘I don’t get it. I mean, one minute it was all fine and the next it was…everywhere. We didn’t even do anything. They just…’ She shuddered.

Will gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘You did OK back there.’

She wouldn’t look at him. ‘Is that what it’s like in the Network? Everyone wants to kill you?’

‘Look: why don’t you give Nairn a hand with the crash kit? You cracked that securilock in ten seconds flat, maybe you can get it going too.’

DS Cameron nodded. Wiped a hand across her eyes. Took a deep breath. Marched over to the tangled mass of wires and levered Sergeant Nairn out of the way.

One minute later she’d got the machinery working.

Two minutes after that, Private Richard Stein was dead.

The hours all melt into one another, slipping by, carrying her along with them. Sunset paints the horizon with violent red. The sky is bleeding just for her. One by one the city’s streetlights flicker on, a Mexican wave of sodium fireflies as the day slowly dies, their light giving the greasy city an unhealthy yellow pallor.

A garishly painted Roadhugger hisses to a halt beside her. She ignores it, just keeps trudging along the baked pavement. And then the voices start:

‘Jeeeesus, would you look at the state of it! That blood?’

‘Some bugger must’ve cut it. Disnae matter, just shove it in the back with the others.’

Rough hands grab her shoulders, but she’s too tired to resist. They haul open the back doors and bundle her into an empty bay. Then paw at her flesh.

‘Cannae see any wounds,’ says a man who looks like a ruptured pig. His face is fleshy and bloated, a thin fringe of hair outlining the uppermost of his many chins. ‘Think we should take it straight tae the hospital?’

‘Bugger that. Only got another six to pick up and then I’m aff home for the night. Let them worry about it back at the depot.’

Pig-Man frowns. ‘There’s an awful lot of blood here Harry, what if someone’s chibbed it? What if it dies?’

‘If it dies, it dies. It’s just a fuckin’ halfhead! Who cares?’

Pig-Man is quiet for a moment, then he sniffs. ‘Yeah, suppose you’re right.’ He pulls the restraining bar down, clambers back out into the night, and slams the door. Then waves through the window at them, sharing a joke with his ugly friend as they walk back around to the cab.

The engine starts and she lurches against the bar, blinking. Light-headed. Hungry. Sharp and broken. Bees and broken glass.

She needs to take her medication. Or someone will-get-hurt.

Another lurch, and one of the halfheads stumbles. They’re all around her: freakish faces devoid of thought or emotion. The rancid smell of their sweat is everywhere. Bluebottles and dead birds. The one in the next bay is staring off into the middle distance, the barcode tattooed over its left eye fresh and sharp. A new convert to the ranks of the living dead.

She reaches up and touches her own forehead, trying to feel the tattoo she knows will be inked into her own skin. The colours faded, the edges blurred after all these years.

It holds the key to everything she is and was. It holds her name.

The Roadhugger grumbles from stop to stop, and each time the back door opens, Pig-Man pushes another halfhead into an empty compartment. It doesn’t seem to worry him that his cargo was human once. That they were shiny things with dreams and feelings. Because that doesn’t matter any more: their brains have been burned away. They’re just lumps of barely sentient meat to be used as slaves. Walking, mutilated, orange-boilersuited reminders that crime doesn’t pay.

Or rather, that getting caught doesn’t pay.

Caught by a man in a dark-blue suit, with a jagged scar on his face. The scar would be invisible after all these years, but the face would be the same. A little older. Maybe a little more grey in the hair…Would his screams still sound the same?

The Roadhugger stops outside a large, featureless, concrete building, then the vehicle slowly judders backward towards an open loading bay. Beeping.

She knows this place: she’s seen it every morning and every night for the last six years. A sign on the wall, in cheerful orange and blue, reads: ‘SERVICES, UNIT 47 EAST. H-HEADS: LOADING AND UNLOADING’.

They will clean her and feed her and give her a place to rest until morning. She is home.

There will be plenty of time for revenge later.

6

Drums pound in the darkness, like the heartbeat of something huge and hungry. Creeping down the pitch-black corridor, Sergeant William Hunter grits his teeth and keeps moving.

The carpet scritches and screltches beneath his feet, sticky with blood. He can’t see it, but he can smell it: hot copper and burnished iron. Every single floor is like this, shrouded in darkness and drenched in blood. Like a nightmare he can’t wake up from.

Cramp screams across his back again and he stops for a moment, gritting his teeth and swearing quietly. Private Alexander weighs a bloody ton and Will’s been carrying him around for long enough to resent every last ounce. He unclips the trooper’s harness and struggles the almost dead weight onto his other shoulder.

‘Bloody hell…’ his voice is barely a whisper, ‘…why did you have to be such a fat bastard?’

Private Alexander isn’t the only weight he’s carrying: the whole building’s pressing down on top of him, grinding him into the blood-soaked carpet. Making every step a battle. Add to that one empty Whomper-the battery as dead as the rest of the Dragonfly’s team-and Will has all the fun he can handle.

He fastens their harnesses together again, then pushes off the wall and staggers on in the dark: one hand held out in front of him, the other brushing the wall at his side.

Plastic doors bump beneath his fingertips, each one hiding its own horrible little story. A murdered family. A VR shrine to the building’s new digital god. A tattered corpse, mutilated and half eaten…

It’s been a day and a half since the Dragonfly crashed headfirst into this freak show, thirty-nine floors up, and so far the only people he’s seen have all been very, very dead…

He stops. Something has changed, but it takes him nearly a whole minute to figure out what: the drums are silent. The bloody things have been his constant companion for a day and a half, pounding away at him, and now they’re gone.

Thank God.

He slumps against the nearest wall and closes his eyes, enjoying the blissful peace. Could go to sleep now. Kick in the door to one of the flats, chuck the dead bodies out into the hall, and barricade himself inside. He sighs. Never going to happen. If he doesn’t get Private Alexander to a medic soon, he’s going to die.

Slowly Will pulls himself upright and forces his legs to move, carrying the trooper’s fat arse through the blackness.

The corridor seems to go on forever, stretching away into the dark. On and on and on.

Door, wall, door, wall, door, wall, door, wall, door, wall…

And then a rush of warm, foetid air brushes Will’s face.

He freezes. Then reaches out a hand. There’s a little metal lip, and then nothing. Lift shaft? There’s no sign of the actual lift, just that column of dank air, laced with the smell of machinery and grease.