Valentin shrugged. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “But I’ll ask you a question in return. Would you voluntarily throw yourself into this maelstrom?”

“I did,” said the monster, a crooked smile on his face. “So did you.”

“Correct,” said the vampire. “And look where it got us.”

“In which case, let me ask you something else,” said Frankenstein. “How do you think all this is going to end?”

Valentin smiled widely. “Badly,” he said. “More tea?”

Jamie watched Kate walk into the officers’ mess and smiled as she stopped to talk to a table full of Operators near the door. It had only been thirty-six hours since he had sat beside her in the Zero Hour briefing, but he was genuinely struggling to remember when they had last spent time in each other’s company, for no other reason than that they wanted to.

On the other side of the room, Kate laughed loudly at something, and was joined by the men and women sitting at the table. Jamie recognised Mark Schneider and Carrie Burgess, two of the NS9 Operators who had been brought to the Loop by Larissa, what now seemed an impossibly long time ago, and his smile widened. It was good to see Kate chatting happily with her colleagues; there had been a time, barely six months earlier, when she would have struggled to find more than a handful of people in the entire Loop who were willing to speak to her – Kate’s involvement in the ISAT investigation and her widely perceived status as Paul Turner’s favourite had alienated much of the Department. Now, with Turner promoted and Kate reporting to Angela, Jamie assumed things were getting easier for her, and was glad.

“Hey,” she said, arriving at his table and smiling at him. “How’s it going, Jamie?”

“All right,” he said, and gestured at the empty seat opposite him. “Aren’t you sitting down?”

“Not till I’ve been to the bar,” said Kate. “I need a beer. Urgently. You?”

“Sure. Cheers.”

Kate nodded and set off towards the bar that ran along one side of the wide room. The Loop, in its current form, was barely thirty years old; it had been almost entirely rebuilt after a research trip Jamie’s father had made to Nevada in the 1980s, borrowing heavily from the American designs. The officers’ mess, however, had been transplanted intact from the first building it had occupied, one of the cluster of wooden huts and bunkhouses that had been erected under the watchful eyes of the Blacklight founders. The ceilings and walls were panelled with dark wood, the floor was hidden beneath an ancient purple carpet that was now noticeably threadbare, and the furniture that filled the room had been acquired over the course of more than a hundred and twenty years; there were leather sofas and armchairs, like the one that Jamie was now sitting in, alongside wooden benches and velvet chaises longues and clusters of plastic chairs that looked like they had been smuggled out of the Ops Room. Nothing matched, and there was no discernible pattern to anything, giving the place a chaotic charm.

Kate returned and placed four bottles of beer on the table between them.

“Thirsty?” asked Jamie.

Kate shrugged. “No sense in getting up more often than necessary.”

“The motto of alcoholics everywhere,” said Jamie.

Kate flipped him a lightning-fast V-sign. Jamie grinned, and picked up one of the bottles; she did the same, and clinked hers against his.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.”

Jamie took a long swig and set the bottle down.

“How was last night?” asked Kate. “Patrol Respond, right?”

“Bit of a strange one,” said Jamie. “I submitted a report.”

“I haven’t seen it,” said Kate. “What happened?”

Jamie took another drink, and launched into the story of his encounter with the Night Stalkers. His friend listened in silence, sipping steadily from her beer, her expression shifting from professional curiosity to genuine intrigue as the tale progressed.

“Jesus,” she said, when he was finished. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Jamie. “Two litres of blood healed the bullet holes.”

“Don’t try and be all cool about it,” said Kate. “You got shot. I don’t care if you’re a vampire or not, it’s still a big deal.”

“I know that,” he said. “I do.”

“I hope so,” said Kate. “I worry enough without you starting to think you’re invulnerable.”

“You worry about me?”

Kate frowned. “Obviously. Why wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t have to,” said Jamie. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can look after myself.”

“Right,” said Kate. “The Fallen Gallery is full of people who thought exactly the same thing.”

For several minutes, they drank in silence. Jamie was slightly surprised to see that his bottle was almost empty; he could feel faint, fuzzy warmth in the pit of his stomach.

“Do you ever think about after?” he said, eventually.

Kate picked up her second bottle. “After what?”

Jamie looked around the mess. “This,” he said. “After all this. Assuming we win, and that we don’t die in the process, do you ever think about what you’ll do afterwards?”

Kate smiled. “You’re assuming I don’t see myself as career Operator.”

“I am.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Bullshit,” said Jamie. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Fine,” said Kate, and set her bottle down on the table. “Go to university. Spend time with my dad. Try and be normal for a while. How does that sound?”

“It sounds good.”

“What about you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Bullshit.”

Jamie smiled. “That’s fair,” he said. “To be honest, a lot would depend on my mum. Away from here, if we were out in the world, I’d be pretty much all she had. The only person who knew she was a vampire, at least, and who could understand what that’s like. I think she’d want to go somewhere where nobody knew her, and I don’t think I could let her go on her own.”

“Like where?” asked Kate.

He shrugged. “She always loved Italy when I was growing up. Maybe there. I don’t know.”

“Do you think you’d look for your dad?”

“No.”

“Just no?” said Kate. “You wouldn’t even think about it?”

“No.”

“What if your mum wanted to see him?”

“That would be up to her,” said Jamie. “I wouldn’t have to be part of it.”

“Have you told her yet?” she asked.

Jamie felt sudden heat behind his eyes. He tried to force it back down, to stop the red glow appearing, but the expression of shock on Kate’s face told him he had not been successful.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. It’s involuntary.”

“It just startled me,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not,” said Jamie. “I know what it looks like. But it was because of my dad, not because of you. OK?”

“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought him up.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “And to answer your question, no, I haven’t told her. If this all comes to an end, I will, and she can do whatever she wants. It won’t be any of my business. But I’m done with him, Kate. I told him so, and I meant it.”

She nodded.

“How about this?” he said, and raised his second empty bottle. “You think of something else to talk about while I get more drinks. Deal?”

Kate smiled; her face was still paler than it had been a minute earlier, her eyes a fraction wider, but it was a start. “Deal,” she said.

Jamie nodded and headed for the bar, silently cursing himself as he went. The red fire in his eyes was an involuntary reaction to certain stimuli: fear, excitement, anger, the presence of fresh blood, to name just a few. But he knew exactly what it looked like, as he had seen it for himself in the eyes of dozens of vampires; it looked like a display of aggression.

It looked like a threat.

“Four beers, please,” he said to the barman, and risked a glance over his shoulder. Thankfully, Kate wasn’t looking in his direction; she had drawn her console from her belt and her attention was fixed on its screen. He waited patiently for the barman to deliver the second round of drinks, then carried them back to their table. Kate looked up at him and smiled.