The doctor worked his scissors down the back of one leg. “If I believed you, you’d be telling me that the New Machine Jihad is loose again and you’re the only person who can control it.”

“No. It’s more subtle than that. I’m the only person it trusts. I’m the only one it will follow. And on its own, the Jihad will screw up. We get no second chances on this one. Either we win today or we lose forever.” Petrovitch gasped as the dried blood that had welded his skin to his trousers relinquished its grip. He unclenched his fists, a finger at a time. “The longer I spend under the knife, the worse the situation gets. So make it quick. I don’t care about dirt, fragments, bodies foreign or domestic. Patch me up enough to get me back out there. After that, you’re absolved.”

The doctor worked in silence for a while, revealing the full extent of Petrovitch’s wounds.

“I can’t… I.” He stopped and started again. “This, this doesn’t make sense. Why would you be doing this if you weren’t telling me the truth, and yet I can’t possibly trust what you’re saying.”

“Willing to take the risk that I’m full of govno?”

“No.” He dug into his bag again and retrieved a sterile syringe and a bottle of straw-colored liquid. “Any heart problems?”

“It’s in a jar somewhere in a lab. It hasn’t caused me a problem since the surgeon ripped it, still beating, from my chest.”

“What model do you have?”

“American. Prototype. You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“What I’m asking is, if I stick you full of morphine, will you die?” The doctor drew off the liquid into the syringe. “Weight?”

“No idea.”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“Just guess and get to work, man.” Petrovitch grunted as the needle went in his backside. “I haven’t got all day.”

He could feel it, every last bit of it: the widening of wounds and the probing jaws of the forceps; the drag and cut of shards of plastic and metal and glass as they slid from his flesh, oiled with his blood; the cold tunnel air reaching deep, alien places inside him. But he didn’t care. He was immune to care for the duration of the injection.

“Tell me you haven’t got Hep or HIV,” said the doctor. His hands were bloodied up to the wrists.

“No. You?”

“No. I had a needlestick once. Scared the crap out of me. I had to wait six weeks for a repeat test. When it showed up clear, I nearly wrecked my liver on cheap whisky anyway.” He flicked his fingers and another piece of plastic clattered against the window, where it stuck briefly before sliding down. “I’m getting to the point where I’ve found all the obvious debris. The rest of it… I don’t think I can get it out. The light, the blood, it’s just impossible.”

“You got a needle and thread?”

“You need skin.”

“Got any?”

The doctor sighed. “It’s not going to be pretty. I can guarantee that you’re going to end up looking like Frankenstein.”

“The monster. Frankenstein’s monster. Frankenstein was the creator.”

“So why are you doing this? What’s so important?”

“Everything.” The needle punctured his already scarred back and the thread drew through. “Everything. The whole of modern history is collapsing on this exact moment. Everything since the first steam engine, since the first telegraph, first radio, first aeroplane, first rocket, first computer. We can go one of two ways, and we get to choose. We can stay where we are, we can decline and die. Or we can embrace the future like a long-lost lover, and we can live forever.”

“That’s the morphine talking.”

“No. No, it’s not. Do you suppose the caterpillar has any idea what’s going to happen to it? Does it dream of flying? Does it dream of drinking nectar? And look, a pupa is such a weird thing, just a sack full of chemicals. You can crush it and get nothing but goo. That’s what we are now. Pupating. I need to buy us enough time so we can hatch. A butterfly, a little butterfly. Babochka.”

One thread was tied off, another patch of embroidery begun, and Petrovitch felt the overwhelming need to talk.

“I see it sometimes. When I close my eyes. I see it as if it was already there. We’re not gods, we’re just people, but we have such vision and drive as to make us seem otherworldly. We have technology like fairy tales have magic. We can do anything we put our minds to. Why can’t others see it as clearly as I can?”

“Because we’re not delusional?”

“I don’t have to be there. I don’t have to be part of it. It’ll have a momentum of its own. All it’ll take is one push at the right time, and that right time is right now. But it needs me to live long enough to give it that one last shove, get it moving in the right direction. Then it doesn’t matter. No one will be able to stop it. Destiny. The future. I can pass it on. The caterpillar dies, the butterfly lives.”

“This would be easier if you shut up.”

“We’ve spent too long here. Trapped by our fears and our blindness. We have wings. We can fly. Armageddon was over twenty years ago, and we’re still shut in our cages and we’ve grown used to it, like the frog in a pan of water brought to the boil. Those days are over. Nothing can ever be the same again. Slow death or immanent glory. That’s what tomorrow brings.”

“Just. Stop. Speaking. It’s distracting me.”

“You don’t understand. You can’t. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. It’s beautiful. It’s worth dying for.”

The sewing became more angry and violent. Petrovitch felt himself as a piece of cloth, roughly handled and roughly stitched.

“There is,” said the doctor, “so little worth dying for. I only stayed because I couldn’t go. I was going to leave them here, promise them I’d be back, but I left it too late. You, you bastard, you make promises and you keep them. You even bring a fucking coach. The only reason I’m still here rather than driving my way out is because I’m scared. Scared of the Outies. If I thought it would do any good, I would abandon you all to save myself. Got that? And that’s what every other person in the Metrozone would do. So screw you and your madness. I don’t care about your dreams or even about tomorrow.” He made one last cut with the scissors. “That’s it. I’m out of thread.”

Petrovitch blinked in the blue light, and moved his hands to underneath his body. He pushed himself up to his knees and held on to the furniture while his ears roared and his vision grayed.

“A hand here?”

The doctor pulled him up. Pins and needles, dull aches, the sensation of his circulation returning—it was happening to someone else. They were definitely his trousers lying on the floor of the carriage, though.

The doctor packed his bag while Petrovitch worked out which way was up. He stooped to pick up his ruined coat, and as slowly as he moved, the world turned just a little faster. He dragged his arms through the sleeves and shrugged the leather around his shoulders.

“It doesn’t cover your arse, let alone anything else.”

Petrovitch checked that the gun was still there, and the knife. Lucy had the rat and the info shades. “It has pockets. That’s all I need it to do.”

He swayed toward the door and looked over the edge of the step into the darkness. He had to try and shake the out-of-body feeling: it mattered what happened to his meat, because it carried his mind.

So he lowered himself down to the track and made sure that he was heading in the right direction. The doctor soon fell into step beside him, lantern swinging in his free hand.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Probably,” said Petrovitch, who was concerned more with putting one foot in front of the other. “Straight down the middle, lots of smoke.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“The Outies’ front line is between us and my forces…”

“Your forces?”

“My forces,” said Petrovitch emphatically. “By the time we get there, it’ll be close-quarters urban warfare. So I’m just going to get the coach to drive straight through until we’re safe. No one’s going to pay us any attention because they’ll all be too busy not getting killed.”