I waited, testing the restraints on my wrists and feet, and wondered how much force the chair would take before it smashed.

Then Eugene began to undress.

He undid the tape that sealed his gloves to his sleeves, his boots to his trousers, his helmet to his neck. He pulled his head free with a shake of peppery hair, peeled back the zip on his suit, revealing a white vest beneath. He tugged his boots off, untangled his legs one limb at a time to reveal grey underpants and black socks. His legs showed more sign of age than his face, hollows settling around the inside of his calves, digging into the fat behind his thighs. Then he pulled his vest off, and his chest was bone and white scar tissue. I could not call it skin, as I had never seen skin which had been so scoured, burned and rearranged and yet claimed the title. He spread his arms so that I might see the dunes welt and weal, the electric burns across his back, down his spine, whose effect was to seem to shrink his vertebrae into a swollen chain of pinkish-grey disfigurement. Thin lumps stood out on his shoulders, golf balls of improperly healed muscle and bone.

He turned, and turned again so I might fully appreciate the spectacle, then this old man in his underpants faced me at last, pressing his palm against my cage, and said:

“Do you like what you see, Kepler?”

(Do you like what you see?)

“You may have met the one who wore me when this was done. He called himself Kuanyin, the god of mercy. It was an operation that went wrong. There was a tear in my suit, he managed to get his little finger into the gap. I don’t recall the events that followed. I take three different kinds of medication, painkillers. I piss acid, I breathe fire. My body was violated in every manner there is, and still Kuanyin would not leave, would not speak, would not do anything but scream and weep and shit blood for three weeks, until at last his spirit broke along with my body, and he begged to die.

“A former colleague of mine volunteered to save me. He was seventy-two years old, his wife was dead, he had no children, and thirty years of smoking had left his lungs in a poor state. He came to where they held me and took my hand, and I remember opening my eyes to see him smiling down at me, this friend, this man who had trained me, and then his smile faded, and he looked up, and he was not my friend at all, he was Kuanyin, who had the arrogance to call himself merciful. They put two bullets through his head right there and buried him in my friend’s grave with all the honours of a life well lived. It was a good ending. I hope you’ll agree to a similar arrangement when the moment comes. Because it will come. So, Kepler,” arms spread wide, hazmat suit at his feet, “do you like what you see?”

(I love it, Janus replied. I love it I love it I love it!)

“I knew Kuanyin,” I answered, taking my words slowly, familiar sounds on an unfamiliar tongue. “She was kind.”

“The only kindness I saw Kuanyin perform was in the manner in which he died. I want you to understand this. I want you to understand what we are. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Then be merciful to yourself, if no one else. Where is Coyle?”

I licked my lips. “One question…”

“Where is Coyle?”

“Just one, and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you, and when this is done you can find a nice body with a terminal disease, and I’ll go.”

He waited, broken flesh and breathing silence.

I closed my eyes, trying to shape the words. “I’ve been thinking about Frankfurt. Your organisation was running a trial, a vaccination programme–vaccinating against me, my kind. Four researchers were killed, and you blamed Josephine–blamed me. I studied Josephine’s life. She was no killer, but when I became Alice, I had a look on her computer, and there it was. CCTV footage from Frankfurt, the night of Müller’s death, and Josephine smiled at the camera. She smiled and it wasn’t her, we both know it. Not Josephine, not my Josephine. I made her a deal and she had no idea what I was, she didn’t know what it meant to be worn. But your CCTV footage predates the time when I met her, so if she had been worn, she cannot have been aware of it. Grabbed in the night perhaps by the man she’d slept with. A few hours vanish, a few minutes. She closes her eyes in a stranger’s hotel room, and when she blinks, she is there still, though her hands feel cleaner than they were, and two maybe three hours have passed her by. Is that the time, she asks, and a stranger says, yes, yes it is, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? And she walks away, not knowing that in the bathroom by the door the tap is still washing away someone else’s blood, scrubbed from her fingertips.”

Eugene ran a finger along a line of scarring across his belly–habit, fascinated by his own flesh, eyes focused on nothing, body moving on automatic. “You haven’t asked a question yet.”

“I want you to understand it, before I ask. You told Coyle that Josephine killed those people under my orders but that it was her choice. You blamed me for another’s crimes without evidence. You sent Coyle–a man with a history–to kill me, and through all of this I think about Galileo. Where Galileo fits into all of this. Because Josephine killed no one. I studied her life, it wasn’t her. But a few hours here, a few hours there, perhaps–just perhaps–her body killed someone. And the manner in which it was done is all Galileo. Every step of the way. So, either you’re a fool, giving orders that do not conform to your stated intentions, or you’re nothing more than a pawn. My question, therefore, is this: have you been losing time?”

Silence.

He paces.

He turns.

He stops.

He paces again.

Is he considering the question or simply his answer?

He paces again.

Stops.

Says, “No.”

That is all.

“All right then,” I replied. “You’re just another foot soldier.”

His eyes flickered up to mine, then away again. “Where is Coyle?”

Fingers running over scars.

“Rathaus Steglitz,” I said.

“An address.”

I gave him one.

Chapter 50

Waiting in a prison.

Boring, waiting for the excitement to begin.

I remember:

(Do you like what you see?)

(I love it! Love it love it love it!)

Kuanyin.

I remember her as decent, if aloof.

I remember her as a her, beautiful in a Congolese woman, her hair pinned back, the scar marks just visible on her wrists from where the blades had slashed, as she proclaimed, “She said she would try again.”

And what did you do?

“Why, I took her away from there.”

And what will you do when she wakes? Kuanyin, goddess of mercy, what will you do when the woman you are wearing opens her eyes and the grief that you walked away from is still fresh in her heart?

“I will open her eyes in a safe place, with no knives nearby,” she replied. “She chooses death because it seems simpler than life. I will make that decision hard.”

I heard Kuanyin speak, and I was impressed.

“Do you like what you see?”

“You’re very beautiful,” I replied. “Very kind.”

Only later did it occur to me that I never asked when she intended to give the body back.

And then, as far from the austere coldness of Kuanyin, there was Janus, who stood in front of a mirror in an apartment in Brooklyn and said, “I love it!”

It was 1974, and though the Cold War raged and Nixon still clung on by his ragged fingernails, there was a sense in the air that these were the times that would change all times.

Her brief had been nothing remarkable. Her ambitions bordered on the banal–a house, a family, a life to call her own. A clean body with no past, no baggage. I just needed to get her started.