“Dr Petrovitch?” It was that madman with his torch again. This time, though, his irises closed to pinpoints when it was aimed at him. “Blink if you can hear me.”

“Of course I can hear you, you balvan. Now get this yebani tube out of my gullet before I vomit into my lungs.” That was what he wanted to say. Instead, he blinked, slowly and obviously.

“You’ve woken up early. We need to warm you up carefully, so bear with us.” A nurse impaled the canula set in his forearm with a syringe, and squirted the contents into his sluggish bloodstream.

He immediately felt himself slipping away again. “Michael? Is this okay? Am I doing it right?”

Michael’s avatar appeared behind the technician who was turning up the heating elements for the pads he was lying between. [You realise the reason they know what your core temperature is is because you’ve a probe in your anus?]

“Terrific. I have wires up my zhopu, and I feel like crap.”

[You feel like crap because you are alive, Sasha. I have given the medical team all the information they need to effect your successful recovery and, unsurprisingly, they have previous experience of this procedure. Let them do their jobs.]

The pain continued to flay his skin, but at least he could move his eyes now, and he let his gaze wander. At the far end of the ward, behind the locked double doors, he could see a face pressed against the glass. Madeleine’s.

“What happened after I went under the ice?” [There was, inevitably, a firefight, in which one of our lifters crashed and Lucy used the alien weapon to disintegrate parts of Alaska.]

“Disintegrate?”

[Whilst we have not been able to conduct experiments under laboratory conditions, the device appears to produce a beam that disrupts matter at a molecular level. Energetically.]

“Is she…?”

[Lucy Petrovitch is well. The designers were thoughtful enough to include shielding to protect the user. She is currently in the local police station under armed guard. Tabletop is with her. She will come to no harm.]

“So how long was I under the ice for?”

[Twenty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. You drifted, and they had to make a new hole in the ice. You floated past, eventually.]

Madeleine’s expression was set firmly to neutral as she watched. Her arms were above her head, resting on the top of the door frame. Perhaps she’d run out of emotion after pulling her drowned husband out of the frozen sea, and the faint scowl she wore was the only remnant of her grief.

“She knew what I was trying to do, right? That I would have bled out otherwise?”

[Knowing that you had to and watching you do it are, I understand, two very different concepts. One is of the mind. The other is of the heart. She was distraught. She had to be stopped from diving in after you.] Michael walked through the techie to Petrovitch’s bedside. [Another thing. Your leg.]

He remembered being shot. At least twice. One bullet had passed clean through his thigh, missing his femoral artery. Another had hit his lower leg, and the only thing holding his foot on had been the friction between his socks and his trousers.

“Is it off?”

[From the lower thigh. The surgeon wanted to try and save the knee, but I persuaded him it would be better for you not to have to undergo long-term and potentially unsuccessful reconstructive surgery.]

They looked at each other, man and machine. “I’m running out of body parts,” said Petrovitch.

[If you want, I can show you a graph that predicts your complete replacement with cybernetics within thirty years.]

“Maybe later.” At last the burning pain started to recede. “Why are my ears cold?”

[You are wearing a cap which circulates cold water. It is usually used so that chemotherapy patients keep their hair. I suggested it might be useful here.] The avatar shrugged in a very familiar way. [I became an expert in your condition; it was necessary in order to ensure your survival. I would, however, like to discuss my earlier offer of reconstituting your personality as a virtual construct at some point.]

“Earlier offer? That was a decade ago.”

[You declined then. Perhaps recent events will cause you to reconsider.]

The doctor came back to Petrovitch’s face. He got out his torch again.

“Can you tell him to stop that? I’ll shove it up his nose and illuminate the inside of his skull in a minute.”

[That would require voluntary movement on your part. Something you lack to a great extent.]

Petrovitch didn’t need to move, though. The doctor’s phone beeped. He ignored it and carried on with his examination. It chimed again, more insistently, and eventually he pulled back to answer it.

He looked at the screen, and the message on it. He looked at the bed, then back to the phone. He frowned and approached.

“Dr Petrovitch?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Petrovitch typed. “Can we lose the ventilator? It feels wrong. And don’t shine your little light in my eyes again. It hurts. And while you’re on, I’m fucking freezing and I can feel everything.”

“I was warned about this,” said the doctor. He told the rest of the intensive care team to stop for a moment, then put his mouth next to Petrovitch’s ear. “You’re my patient. You’ll do as I say.”

The phone buzzed with an incoming message. “You’ll be saying next you preferred me dead.”

“Or I could just let your wife in to see you, and you can sort out who’s in charge here with her.” He glanced at the door, and Madeleine’s gaze flicked from Petrovitch to the phone, and back to Petrovitch. Her expression didn’t change. The doctor’s did, though. “As next of kin, she gave me written consent. And frankly, I don’t want to be the one to piss her off, because she looks ready to take someone’s – anyone’s – head off with her bare hands. I’d rather that wasn’t me.”

“I surrender.”

“Good. Because we’re not set up for repairing decapitations. Now shut up and stop harassing me. You seem to be in control of your faculties, but not your body. That part is my job, and I’ll do it the best I can.” He muttered something about governments and guns, then put the phone back in his scrubs.

As he retreated, the rest of the staff moved back in to continue what they’d started.

“Michael, I thought she’d be happy.”

[She was happy, Sasha. She was happy that for ten years no one was shooting at you or trying to blow you up. Now, as a result of what Lucy has done, everybody will be trying to shoot you and blow you up. And not just you, but her and Lucy, together with the rest of the Freezone. While you were dead, the President of the United States of America called us “the single most dangerous organisation in the history of civilisation”. Even accounting for hyperbole, that puts us in a difficult position.]

“Yeah, that’s good coming from him. Mudak.” Petrovitch programmed his heart to spin a little faster. “I wasn’t the one who shot down our First Contact.”

[All Madeleine can see is a war without end and an immediate future without you. Sooner, rather than later, she believes you will die, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She is already in mourning for you.]

The doctor had gone to the door, and Madeleine had stepped away to let him out. Petrovitch could see them through the glass, her with her head down, listening, and him with his head up, explaining what was going on.

When they were done, she resumed her vigil.

Petrovitch checked to see what was happening outside. The hospital was surrounded by camera crews and reporters, and he dipped into their broadcasts to catch a flavour of what they were saying.

“Yobany stos.”

[Did you expect people to react differently?]

“To be honest, I didn’t think about how they’d react at all. Who leaked it?”

[There was no leak. Marcus went to the UN, talked to the Secretary General, and addressed the Security Council even before you arrived at hospital.]