He could hear a rhythmic grinding noise that grew louder. It stopped and, after a few moments, there was the unmistakable rattle of lift doors opening.

Two of the men reached down to pick Petrovitch up again, and he decided that he’d be damned if they were going to put him inside that metal cube. If he blinked, he could see the pile of bodies and the wash of blood.

“Stop,” he said, and they were so surprised that he was conscious and talking that they dropped him again. He managed to get his hands under him to partially break his fall.

The lift door started to close again, and one of the men stuck his boot in the way. The motors wheezed pathetically as they strained against the obstruction.

“I don’t want to go in the lift.”

“I don’t see how you’ve got any say in where you go or how you go,” said the man at the lift.

“I can walk,” said Petrovitch.

Someone laughed.

“I don’t think so,” said the man. “You barely look alive.”

Petrovitch looked up. The man’s face was a blur; he could just make out a shaved scalp and a black beard. That, or his head was on upside down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have hit me so hard.”

“Like it matters.” He relented, and nodded to the men standing behind Petrovitch. “Get him to his feet. Let’s see him stand.”

Petrovitch was hauled upright, then steadied as he wavered. He lacked the visual cues that told him where vertical was. Something else was wrong, too. He put his hand to the side of his head to find his skin wet and sticky.

He stared at his palm, and scratched a pattern in the half-dried blood with his fingers.

The man heaved the lift doors back. “You wouldn’t make it up the first flight of stairs, and we’re going all the way to the top. We don’t get credit for your corpse, either.”

Petrovitch felt a hand at his back push him toward the open doors. He tried to resist, but realized how weak he really was when he found himself going faster and faster toward the rear wall. He slammed into it with a boom, and stayed pinned there by the same hand.

The bearded man released the doors and let them squeak shut. “You see? Much better to cooperate.”

There were only so many more blows to the head Petrovitch could take. He shook himself angrily and turned around, pressing his back against the lift side as it rumbled into life.

“Nervous?” he asked.

Without his glasses, he missed their expressions, but the way they stood betrayed them.

“We haven’t got anything to be nervous about.”

“Yeah. Let me tell you about my morning. Big, modern tower, the latest, smartest everything; polished marble floor, brushed steel and glass. Something called the New Machine Jihad took that building over, trapped most of the people who worked there in lifts not so different to this one, and killed them all. Dropped them from the top floor, crushed them to an unrecognizable mush at the bottom. So much blood in each one that it came out in a wave.” Petrovitch paused. “You have heard about the New Machine Jihad, haven’t you? Everyone’s talking about them.”

“Shut up, you Russian bastard.”

“They’re the ones to beat. Sorry, but no one’s afraid of the Paradise militia anymore—not when the Jihad can reach into the heart of your territory and take out whoever it likes.”

“I said, shut up.” The fuzzy shape the bearded man held up was Petrovitch’s Norinco.

“Must make you cross. Struggle on all these years, carving out your little kingdom, living in little better than a ghetto, then when your moment comes… it gets snatched away from you by a bunch of faceless nerds who just happen to know how the Metrozone really works.”

His own gun was pressed to his already bruised temple. “Five, four.”

Petrovitch squinted past the barrel. “You’re going to lose, and lose hard.”

The lift shuddered to a halt, and the doors slid open. “Three. Two.”

A familiar voice drawled: “Is that necessary?”

“He’s asking for it.”

“And you got sucked in? Come on out, Petrovitch. We’ve been expecting you.”

Petrovitch could see a bulky figure in a plaid shirt framed in the doorway. He added that and the accent, and worked out it could only be Sorenson.

“Hey, kid. Where are your glasses?”

“You’ll have to ask the peshka. Maybe they’ve been so busy slapping me around and playing with their yielda that they don’t remember.” Petrovitch stumbled out, blinking. The watery light was bright enough to make his eyes smart.

“Come on, boys. Hand ’em over,” said Sorenson. He waited a few moments, and the door started to close again. He stepped forward and held one of his meaty hands up to prevent it moving any further. “Don’t make me come in there.”

The bearded man thought about defiance, and decided against it. He reached into his pocket and threw Petrovitch’s spectacles onto the floor outside the confines of the lift. He followed it with a gobbet of phlegm.

Sorenson was just about satisfied. He let go of the door, and when it had shut, he kicked it for good measure. He scooped up the glasses and pressed them into Petrovitch’s hands.

“You look like crap,” said Sorenson.

“Yeah. So everyone keeps on telling me.” Petrovitch jammed the bent frames onto his face, wincing as the cold metal touched his open wound. “I was wondering where you’d gone to. Then I was told a police station had been destroyed in an explosion, and I thought of you. That’s what you used to do, right? Blow stuff up?”

He blinked and tried to make the lenses more or less cover his eyes. He was in what used to be a community lounge for the residents of the tower block and was now a war room. It was at the very top of the building, with only the roof above, and the long plate-glass windows afforded an uninterrupted panorama of the destruction below. The tower was on the south side of Paradise: he could see Regent’s Park off to his left, and the City straight ahead, partially obscured by the smoke rising from many fires—one of which was St. Joseph’s.

Sorenson, dressed in a looted flying jacket and urban camouflage trousers, swung a medical kit onto a table. “Sit down, kid. I’ll patch you up.”

Petrovitch perched on the edge of the table and tried to keep his head still as the American swabbed lukewarm water across his cheek. There was a map of the Metrozone pinned to the wall, with arrows pointing toward the nearby domiks and down the Edgware Road.

“Where do you fit in here, Sorenson?” Petrovitch watched as a teenager with a pair of expensive binoculars slung around his neck passed a note to one of the women near the map. The woman moved one of the arrows back from Regent’s Park and onto Marylebone station.

If that had been Madeleine’s escape route, she was now cut off.

“Where do I fit in? Well now: how about the top?” Sorenson tutted. “You need stitches and a slab of fresh skin. All I’ve got are these steristrips. You’re going to have a scar.”

“Like that’s the thing I’m most worried about. Let’s get this straight: you’re in charge of this rabble now? What happened to the other guy?”

“I killed him. What’s this white stuff you’ve got all over you? You look like a ghost.”

“Pulverized concrete dust. And stop changing the subject: what happened to you? I thought you’d go feral, but zaebis! This is extreme.”

Sorenson used more pressure on Petrovitch’s cut than was strictly necessary, causing him to suck air in through his clenched teeth. “You really don’t know when to shut up, do you? What else could I have done? My life was ruined, squeezed between Oshicora and Chain, and no way to get either of them off my back. Until you gave me an idea.”

“So what pizdets am I responsible for now? Apart from you tearing the city up like it was Saturday night in Tashkent?”

“You got involved with Oshicora because someone tried to take his daughter. That got me thinking.” Sorenson packed the medical kit away, discarding the mound of bloody swabs into a plastic bag. “What better way to get revenge on the blackmailing sumbitch?”