A dead man in my arms.

His tongue flopped in his bloody mouth, his eyes bulged, and he didn’t understand, and he died.

I scrambled back, bits of broken visor slipping down the inside of my suit.

Looked up.

Alice was staring at me. She held a gun with both hands, and it was pointed at me.

“Leontes!” she barked, and I stared back, empty-eyed, empty-brained. “Leontes! Your suit is breached, Leontes!”

I remembered that my feet were not chained, tried to get up, felt scar tissue tight across every muscle. Constriction in my chest, aching in my ribs, tasted blood on my mouth, heard a whining in my right ear and wondered if Eugene could remember a time when he had felt human, before this constancy of physical distress became all that he knew.

“Leontes! Sir!” Alice’s voice was shaking, but the gun was not.

A picture of Coyle’s phone–Aeolus, Circe.

Call and response.

Alice called Leontes, and Eugene responded…

… God knew what.

I took a step towards her, and as her finger pulled back the safety to fire, I stumbled, fell, landing breathless on my hands and knees, my palm slipping in the growing pool of blood spreading out from…

… whoever he’d been.

Whatever man it was who’d died, eyes cold at my side.

I looked up and met Alice’s eye, and she knew I was not Eugene, and would not permit herself to believe it. I made no sound but launched myself from the floor towards her face, hands outstretched to tear at the mask that covered her head. I heard the gunshot, felt the shock of something below my lungs. She’d aimed low and wide, deliberately, and it wasn’t enough to slow me down as I slammed into her, throwing her back through the open door of the cage and on to the floor beyond. I knelt on her chest, dragging at her suit as the blood ran down my trouser leg and someone jumped on my back and tried to pull me off, and I drove my elbow into their stomach as hard as I could and heard a whomph of air, managed to get my fingers under Alice’s helmet, a bare inch, as she pushed her hands against my neck and chest, trying to drive me away. I could see a corner of her bare skin and, as the man I’d just thrown off tried again, hurling himself on to my back, I bent beneath him and pressed my lips into the side of her neck and jumped.

Alice Mair.

Good to be someone you know.

Above me, Eugene sagged under the weight of the man wrapped across his back. I drew my fist back and drove it as hard as I could into his face, felt his nose snap beneath my fingers. His body went limp. I kicked him off me, and as he rolled, so his attacker rolled with him, still clinging to Eugene with all his might. I pulled my hazmat helmet back down over my suit, and as the final man in the room untangled himself from Eugene, I crawled to my feet and gasped, “Help him! For God’s sake help him!”

The man looked at me, looked at Eugene, fallen to the floor.

His eyes roamed over my suit, stained with Eugene’s blood, but he saw no tear.

“It’s in him!” I shrieked, overestimating how high my voice could climb. “Help him!”

If he looked close, too close, he’d see the tiny gap between suit and helmet where I’d wormed my fingers in to touch Alice’s skin. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Perhaps there was too much blood to see.

Then he got to his feet, ran to the door, stuck his head outside and roared, “Help us! Somebody help us!”

This “us” included me.

Chapter 52

East Berlin.

There are many ways to tell when you’ve crossed that now unsung line from West to East Berlin. Trees shorter, roads straighter, new buildings that much newer. All these things are the external indicators; for internal, I find nothing gives the game away quite so much as discovering yourself in a windowless concrete industrial workshop on whose walls are written the immortal words: CONFIDENT IN OUR STRENGTH.

Capitalism’s self-confidence is infinite, but never quite so vividly pronounced as that of its socialist rivals.

Running feet, running people, raised voices. Duck and cover.

A medical team, fully dressed in hazmat suits, kneeling over Eugene. The inside of my colleague’s helmet was steaming up. I cowered against the wall, dreading the moment someone asked me my half of a call sign or something as simple as my true name.

I needed to get out of this suit. I needed skin.

Vomiting wouldn’t hurt either.

I bent over double, hands around my belly, and gave the preliminary shudders of a woman about to puke. The sight of nausea is often enough to induce nausea in those who see it. People cleared out of my path as I staggered, head down, into the corridor.

They believed that I was Eugene.

Let them believe it. If I was lucky, Eugene wouldn’t wake any time soon. If I was unlucky, some bright spark would watch CCTV footage of the last thirty seconds and spot the moment when my fingers brushed against Alice’s neck, and that would be that. Either way, time was a factor.

I headed away from the cage, away from the commotion, into the bowels of the building.

It had perhaps once been a factory; heavy metal doors led off to concrete caverns where the empty pipes of extractor fans hung down like jungle vines. Most was still empty space, but some computers had been wheeled in, server racks and cooling fans in a maze of unadorned copper and silicon. Around these worked the men and women of this institution, whatever it may be, some in suits, some in ties, some in loafers. None carried guns, though one door guarded a collection of padlocked cases whose contents, I guessed, were rather more explosive than a set of disco lights. I avoided people, kept my head down, hands to my belly, a woman running for the toilet. I was having a bad day, speak to me at your peril. I’d counted seventeen strangers by the time I found the unlabelled grey door to the women’s toilet, eighteen by the time the woman in the solitary stained cubicle emerged, saw me, smiled and said, “You all right, hun?”

I scampered into the cubicle.

Never speak when you can get away with saying nothing at all.

There was something important I’d left with Alice Mair.

I got down on my hands and knees in front of the orange-flecked toilet bowel and stuck two fingers down my throat.

Anyone who says that inducing vomiting can be therapeutic lies.

It took four attempts before my body got through hot spasms and down to the more important business of throwing up. When done, I sat, sweating and wretched, my arm draped over the edge of the seat, and tried to get my breathing under control. When I could muster the will to look, there, floating among the sticky orange stomach contents from my day, including the near-digested burger I’d had on Kaufurstendam, was Spunkmaster13’s second USB stick.

Ghosts are lazy.

Not stupid.

I took off my helmet, my gloves.

Under my suit I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of black leggings. As an outfit it wasn’t ideal, but neither was it soaked in Eugene’s blood.

I moved through the building. I smiled at strangers and nodded at those who nodded at me and kept my eyes low when I could, and when a man with a pencil tucked behind his ear stopped me with a hand on my arm to ask what was happening with Kepler, they’d heard something bad, I nearly jumped out of instinct, and said, it’s OK. It’ll all be OK. And walked on.

It took a while to find an unattended computer. I stepped into the bare grey office and wished the door had a lock. The facility felt temporary–dull flat desks in dull flat rooms, not a picture, nor a Post-it note out of place, none of the detritus of an ordinary working environment. The computers were new enough to feel clean in what they did, but old enough for the processor to whine like a puppy begging for RAM. I didn’t bother to guess a login, but shoved Johannes’ USB stick–minus the worst of the puke–into the nearest portal, waited just long enough to see lines of incomprehensible code begin to flow and started rifling the desk. The best thing to do with Spunkmaster’s technology was let it get on by itself.