So saying, I closed my laptop.

Coyle was motionless.

My eyes felt sticky inside, full of weight.

“Aquarius experiments on ghosts.” The words fell from my tongue. “The torture isn’t about cooperation. It’s limit testing. They want to know how we work. Look at Galileo’s file. Look at Josephine’s–at her real file, not the tissue of lies they gave you to read. Look again at Frankfurt, ask yourself if this was a vaccination programme or something else entirely. Consider the data they gathered, observe the direction of their enquiries, the resources available. Ask yourself why the researchers died, and why in so much pain. Look at my file, look at dates, times, places, see if I was in Frankfurt when they were killed. Look at Josephine’s face in the CCTV camera and ask who is looking back at you. Understand that as I have a history with Galileo, so it has a history with me, and this is not the first time we have danced around each other in the course of our lives. Ask yourself: who in Aquarius has been losing time. But don’t tell. Whatever happens, do not tell them what you find. You’re compromised now.”

I stood up.

“I’m going,” I said, barely bothering to glance at him as I spoke. “I’ll send someone to pick you up. You can keep the laptop, the money. I can’t take it with me. But this–” my fist tightened around Schwarb’s USB stick “–is mine. Tell your bosses that. And ask them why, of all the ghosts they’ve broken and all the skins they’ve killed, they lied about Galileo.”

I nudged the laptop closer to him with the end of my foot so that it was just within his reach.

Walked away.

Chapter 58

You must travel light when you wear another’s skin.

Everything you own belongs to someone else.

Everything you value you must leave behind.

It is not I who made a family.

It is not I who have a home.

It is someone else, whose face I borrowed for a little while, whose life I lived and who now may live the life I lived as I move on.

Time to go.

I went to the post office and sent my USB stick first class to a PO box in Edinburgh, where some time I had worn a skin whose name was

something-son

and had opened an account and been careful never to close it. Because even a ghost needs something to call their own.

I headed to the airport.

This is how I run.

I am Alice.

I stand in the departures lounge of Brandenburg airport, and as the crowds bustle around me on their way to the luggage check-in, I spread my fingers wide and brush

a child holding her mother’s hand who walks towards the check-in desk for flights to Athens, and as I look up into my mother’s face I decide that actually this body is a little too young and a little too puffy-eyed from an early-morning start, so I switch into

Mum, straight back and wearing a belt a little too tight across the belly, I support my child as she staggers, only to reach out and politely tap the guard who stands by the oversize luggage counter to say, “Excuse me?” and as he turns, brush my fingers against his neck to become

oversize luggage porter, my arms folded, my breath stinking of cigarette smoke, I smile at mum and resolve either to get out of this body or get some mint into it as soon as possible. I march towards the security gate, calling out to the bored guard who confiscates all liquids and bottles over a hundred millilitres (verily, though they be empty, they shall be confiscated), “You got a cigarette?”

She turns, rolling her eyes at my approach, and as she does I catch her hand and

pull my hand free from the sticky grasp of the confused oversize baggage porter, tut and say, “Cigarettes will kill you, you know?” and turn, pushing my way through the winding queues for the security gate. The crowds are thick and unwilling to part, even for a woman in uniform, so I am

teenager slouching with drum and bass roaring through my headphones. I pull the cord free in disgust and, eardrums still ringing, reach out for

businessman, standing crooked, hip down, shoulders twisted, impatient for the flight, who reaches for

father, no longer listening to his wife,

who touches the arm of

student carrying too much stuff and none of it what she needs who stands at the head of the queue, and her heart is racing even though mine is not and I wonder precisely what else she’s carrying to induce such terror of the X-ray machine, but perhaps now is not the time to find out, so as the security guard passes me the tray for my personal belongings I brush his fingers and

straighten up, smiling my most reassuring smile at the shaking student and turn to my colleague, bored staring at the X-ray screen, and say, “Hey, you got the time?”

My colleague barely glances up from her monotonous study to grunt her reply, by which time I’m on the other side of the counter and into

baggage checker, who’s just been through a woman’s underwear, and the woman is bright red, ashamed of all her pink lace, though I,

as I move into her and pack up my bag again, think it’s really rather charming and not nearly so sexual as perhaps she intends it, and as I sweep through customs and towards duty free, I feel in my pocket for my ticket, and see it is to San Francisco and sigh, and go looking for someone who might be heading for Paris instead.

Chapter 59

My name is Salome.

This is what my passport says and I have nothing better to go on. I had been aiming for first class, but the queue was varied and my fingers were warm, so Salome I remained, knees pressed against the seat in front of me, window view, a vista of wing, engine and a scrap of sky.

Somewhere a USB stick containing the records of a company called Aquarius is heading towards Edinburgh.

In Zehlendorf police have received a tip-off that a man is handcuffed to a radiator, confused and afraid.

And I, who don’t feel comfortable with a name like Salome and fancy myself more an Amelia, close my eyes as take-off pushes me into my seat and, with nothing in the world to call my own, think of Paris.

I heard a story once, in the basement of a Paris café where artists gathered to whisper of rebellion, and the music was soft, and the smell was strong coffee and cheap gin.

The story was told by a woman called Nour Sayegh, who studied not much at the Nouvelle Sorbonne and spoke French with an Algerian accent. There was a quality to her face that fascinated me, enthralled me, and as I sat among her fellow students–how I love freshers’ week!–I wondered if I had not met her before, or worn the skin of her sister, and yet I could not place her features until at last she began to speak.

“My name is Nour Sayegh,” she said, “and I carry the fire of the jinn.”

A slow drumbeat, for this was a space for people who liked to perform, for students with dreams of the limelight and contempt for those who already had it, and as Nour told her tale–of her journeys in Africa, of her coming to France–she swayed to the music that ran beneath her words, plumping them up.

“My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother married a jinn,” she said. “Her husband was a rich man in Cairo but he did not love my grandmother. She was an ornament in the house, not a woman at all. So my grandmother would weep, alone beneath the moonlight, and look towards the sacred waters of the Nile and pray to the ancient gods, to falcon Horus and gentle Isis, mother of all things, for some magic to change her husband’s eye. She wept so softly, for she feared being seen to be sad, that only the little crickets clustered beneath her feet knew of her distress, and the breeze that blew from the sea. Until the jinn came. Fire of the desert, the knife-wind, he comes, he comes riding the sands, and his name is a thousand eyes without expression, elf’ayyoun we’ain douna ta’beer, youharrik elqazb doun arreeh, and his voice is stirs-the-reeds-without-wind, and his sword is starlight, and his eyes are the hot embers of a fallen sun.