“I’m… Yes. Keeping busy. Trying a few different things.”

A flicker of concern across her high plucked brow. “Are you all right, sweet thing?” she murmured. “Have you… had a bad experience?”

“I’m fine. You?”

“I’m fine too.”

“Well then. There you are.”

Silence, her eyes fixed on mine. I looked away. Her arm tightened against the crook of my elbow. Two women pressed together in a room of strangers, and stranger than could be known. “You know,” she murmured, “for the last thirty years I’ve been looking after my body. I exercised, ate carefully, played golf–golf of all things. Walking away from all that work I put in was… frustrating. But at least now I don’t have to care about my figure. More champagne?”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.

Stand on a balcony overlooking Miami.

Cars back to back, pairs of white lights in one direction, red in the other, glowing like angry ants stuck in a queue to the nest.

Look down.

Pick a body.

Any body.

As an estate agent, I picked my bodies carefully. The beautiful, the wealthy, the popular, the beloved. I picked apart their lives and made their lives my own.

More care, less artifice.

Look through the walls, and I can see seven million lives acted out as though their stories, their memories, were the defining point of the universe.

Which, in a way, they are.

I stand on a terrace fifteen floors up, at a party hosted by a charity whose name I can’t remember but which is terribly, terribly grateful to me for turning over most of my savings to its account, and Miami isn’t cold, not even in November; the most chilly Miami gets is when you step inside the foyers of arctic air conditioning,

but I shiver.

Then Janus is by my side. She is very beautiful, and she is young, and ancient, and careless, and free.

“More champagne?” she says.

I do not say no.

Some hours later, as the rising sun pushed shadows across my bedroom ceiling, Janus rolled over beside me and said, “Cancer.”

“What?”

“I–Morgan, I, myself–developed lung cancer.”

“I’m… sorry to hear that.”

“It’s a slow tumour–large but slow. It hasn’t spread–hadn’t spread. Left lung. I had excellent medical insurance. I think he’ll live.”

“You had a family.”

I could have made it a question, but there was no point. The answer was easy, obvious, known.

“A wife, two children. Elsa, Amber. They’re both grown up now. I was in a hurry. We’re always in such a hurry, you and I. The treatment was chemotherapy, radiotherapy, drugs, and eventually a lung transplant. I did the radiotherapy and it was… fine. My wife, Paula, came with me on every trip. She was very brave. She carried on as if nothing was happening, which is what you need when you have… this thing. But when the hospital called, she was there by my side. Then my hair began to fall out, I was sick, cramps in my stomach, legs. My gums bled, my eyes ached, I was hot and dizzy and it wouldn’t go away. Pain I have experienced… Would you believe I used to go to the dentist when I was Morgan? But nausea. Trapped sweating in a dying corpse, knowing that there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, your own body trying to poison you from the inside out. It was… And Paula held my hand and… I didn’t mean to, it happened so fast. I was Morgan, and then he was lying on the bed beside me, his eyebrows falling out, and he was shouting, screaming, who are you, who are you, what’s happening, so loud that Elsa came running too. She’d come for dad. To help me get through this, and I was so… I didn’t mean to jump. I blew it. When Elsa came through the door and saw me–saw Morgan–and he didn’t recognise her, didn’t know her face. It was over. Just one second, just a moment, a tiny moment and…” She stopped, turned her face away from me. I waited. “My wife. Paula. She lied to me. She had arthritis, her hands had seized up, painful. She’d said that they were fine, not to worry, here–have another pillow. But I went into her and my fingers were… to even bend them hurt up to my elbows, hurt into my jaw, relentless. She’d lied to me as she brought me food and held me in the dark. My wife lied.”

Janus was crying, silently, her back shaking, head buried.

I held her, tight and without a word, having nothing better to give.

And then the sun was up, and I said, “I’ve quit estate agenting.”

She sat in the window, eating toast and honey, and I said,

“There was an affair in Edinburgh. A deal that went bad. A ghost who… I thought I knew. You hear rumours but you never know for certain until it happens to you. I sold her out. Gave her account information to some people.”

“What people?”

“The kind of people who kill ghosts.”

“Why?”

I thought about it then shrugged. “I didn’t think she deserved to live.”

Janus laughed.

Twelve hours later Janus was gone, and Ambrosia Jane was in the emergency room. The doctors inspected her for concussion, substance abuse, psychotic breakdown; prodded for the four months of lost time she had experienced between getting on a bus in Tampa and waking up in South Beach with silk on her shoulders.

A week later a letter addressed to Carla Hermandez arrived at my apartment. It smelt of lavender and was signed, “Your fellow traveller and friend”.

It contained an invitation to the Fairview Royale, a barge specialising in loud music and cheap wine: Please come if you can. There’ll be fireworks.

You hear rumours.

A frigate in 1899 off the coast of Hong Kong. A cruiser in 1924, ferry in 1957.

Milli Vra, Alexandra, Santa Rosa.

You never believe it’ll happen to you.

In the same way that a beautiful man in a Parisian café perhaps does not look for the men in Lycra who have come to end him. They’ve been there all along. You simply did not think they could be there for you.

I went to the Port of Miami, to have drinks on the Fairview Royale.

As the ship pulled away from the harbour I looked for Janus, and she found me.

She was wearing a young black woman with warm round cheeks and a shaven head.

She said, “Carla?” and there was a note of surprise in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I received an invite. I thought it was from you.”

“I didn’t send anything.”

This is that moment. It is the second of realisation when the terror bites. It is the instant when paranoia raises its head and whispers, Fear me. I was right all along. You go forward, you go back; the choosing is all.

“We need to get off this ship,” I breathed.

“Carla…”

“We need to get off this ship.”

Janus didn’t argue.

I am

partygoer, packet of pills in my pocket, vodka on my breath,

waiter, blisters on my feet, trousers too tight at the groin.

I am sailor in childish white uniform who knocks on the door of the cabin and says, sir? A message, sir?

I am the captain of the ship, and I am taking the boat towards land as fast as I possibly can.

Janus is my first mate, arms folded, eyes fixed on the partying throng below.

“It’s not a bomb,” she–he, a young man in white buttoned socks–says at last. “If it was a bomb we’d be dead now.”

“Maybe they’re limiting casualties.”

“They?”

“They. Whoever they are this time.”

His eyes flicker to me, then back to the dancing below. “You’ve done this before,” he murmurs.

“A couple of times.”

“It might not be a trap.”

“You believe that?”

“No.”

I take us towards a concrete wharf, flattened sheds of an industrial quay, the swollen sides of container ships riding high in the water, silent monoliths overhead.