“And so Galileo lives.”

“It would appear to be so.”

“Just because he is of us,” she added sharply, “doesn’t make him our responsibility.” Even as she spoke the words, her shoulders uncurled, fingers relaxed over the end of her spoon. “Though he seems to have made us his.”

“It’s not just Galileo.”

She waited.

“In Frankfurt Aquarius ran a medical trial. They were attempting to create a vaccine, to immunise people against us.”

“Can that work?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. As it was, they didn’t get very far. Four of their researchers were murdered. A woman called Josephine Cebula did it. She was worn. Aquarius blamed me.”

“Why you?”

“I thought about that. Perhaps because I was convenient, because I showed up. But then I also thought about why they assumed that Josephine was somehow complicit in the act, instead of an unwilling host. I saw CCTV footage of her covered in blood, and to me it seemed obvious–blatant–that she was Galileo. That Galileo did the killing. But Aquarius blamed me, blamed her, and ordered us both killed. Host and ghost. That’s not how these things usually work.”

“How did they die?”

“Who?”

“The people your skin… that Galileo… killed.”

“Badly. Drowned. Stabbed. Mutilated; it varied.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps because they were developing a vaccine; perhaps that was a threat. But also…” I hesitated, drew in breath. Janus waited, a fork between two fingers, playing with it like a ball of string, watching. I ran my finger around the rim of my coffee cup, found I couldn’t meet Janus’ eye. “How did you become a ghost?”

“Badly,” she replied.

“Violently? When I… died–I think it’s fair to say that was the mechanism in my case–when I died, I held the ankle of the man who’d killed me. That was my first jump. I watched myself bleed to death and shook my frozen corpse, trying to get back in, but of course the flesh was dead and I lived, and the watchmen arrested me for my murder, which seemed, in a way, fair. It was, as you say, a bad beginning. I take it your origins were no less glamorous?”

“Stabbed. In the stomach. Bled out. Jumped into the nurse who was trying to push my guts back in.”

“Aurangzeb was hit by a car.”

“Aurangzeb was an idiot.”

“Kuanyin had ergot poisoning.”

“She never told me that–that I can believe.”

“The point is, our origins tend to be… traumatic.”

“How is this relevant?”

“Consider an organisation like Aquarius, any organisation of that ilk–there are plenty to choose from. It kills ghosts for whatever reason. But no matter how many you destroy, we keep occurring, popping up like dandelions between the cracks. Perhaps you realise that there is a pattern in our origins; perhaps you conclude that violence, terror, pain, whatever–these are our creators. Aquarius can hardly eliminate violence, but not every murder in an alley creates one of our kind, not every ergot poisoning or death on a bedroom floor. There must be conditions above and beyond those presently observed. I’ve been a doctor now and then, and even I know that to vaccinate against a virus first you must understand the thing itself. You must know how it functions, how it replicates. In Frankfurt they may have been attempting to make a vaccine, certainly. But first they need to understand what it is they’re vaccinating against, understand what we are.”

“You propose that the vaccination programme could have been creating ghosts as well as destroying us?”

“I suggest that there is a mechanism in the human brain which can trigger a jump in a tiny minority of people at a time of trauma. Identify that, and perhaps you can prevent it manifesting. Perhaps you can kill us before we are born–genetic genocide. Perhaps you could do so much.”

Silence.

Then, “Why Galileo? Why Frankfurt, four people dead?”

I pinched my fingertips together, bit my lip. “Permit me a different question. Why were the murders so brutal? You and I, we were created in a moment of violence, of brute force. Milli Vra, Santa Rosa, mass murders, fear, trauma, why? Perhaps because every few years Galileo looks in the mirror and realises that the face staring back doesn’t love itself. Perhaps he tries to cut that look out of the mirror, and in doing so… creates a situation. Or perhaps he looks in the mirror and sees something beautiful which will eventually die, and Galileo wants the perfect things to last for ever, and you and I, if we are careful, will last for ever. Perhaps Galileo wants to create ghosts. If that’s the case, he too needs the same thing Aquarius does–to understand us. A trial to investigate vaccination can be permitted to go just far enough to discover the mechanism of our creation, but not too far. Not so far that it can actually inoculate against our existence. Just far enough.”

“This is still supposition.”

“Absolutely. But then we must add more evidence to this. If we suggest that Galileo, far from being ignorant of the Frankfurt trial, is in some manner aware of it, even manipulating it, then we can say that he is fairly well embedded in Aquarius. Embedded in the very organisation that is meant to destroy him. A series of murders in Frankfurt should have been blamed on him, and were instead put at my door. A host who any ghost would have worn–Josephine–was worn by me, and instead of ordering just my death, hers is ordered too. Clearing up loose ends, maybe. Or maybe more. Maybe we could call that jealousy. And who’s sent to kill me? A man by the name of Nathan Coyle–a man with more cause to hate Galileo than he could ever find to despise me. Finally there’s the Galileo file itself, which passes straight through incompetence and out the other side into lies. Plain and simple lies. Aquarius is protecting the single most violent member of our kind. Why?”

A half-laugh passed Janus’ lips, humourless as a crocodile’s wheeze. “Aquarius believed they were running a programme to destroy us, whereas Galileo was using the programme to create us. Absolutely marvellous.”

“Mostly marvellous,” I corrected. “But Josephine died.”

Her smile was still there, frozen and distracted, smiling at a thing that had no humour. “You always were overattached to your skins. I’m surprised you don’t have… a little sympathy for what Galileo has done.”

“No. No sympathy. Some… inkling of comprehension for why. We move through skins. Today I am Sebastian. I have an iPod, a book, some clothes, these shoes, I am this face that I see in the mirror, and tomorrow I am… someone else, and I do not have any of the above. Today I have… you, in a sense. It may not be an association that either of us enjoys, but it is… a link. Something about which I can say, ‘Yesterday this was so and tomorrow it shall be the same,’ and that is something. Perhaps something good, in that it exists at all. Galileo… looks to make something–something that lasts, something that he did, regardless of who he was at its creation. So perhaps I can understand, but no, that is not the same as sympathy.”

A bill was placed on the table.

I remembered that I was Janus’ son and paid.

Sebastian didn’t carry much cash. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Janus watched. “How did Galileo do it?” she asked. “How did he get so deep into Aquarius?”

I laughed.

Didn’t know where the sound came from.

Sebastian Puis had a good laugh: it came right up through his belly, pushed his shoulders back. I liked it. It was the first thing about this body I admired.

“I think it was me,” I said. “I think I made it happen.”

Chapter 66

“Are you the estate agent?”

Do you like what you see?

“Are you the estate agent?” she’d said, and I’d looked up from my desk, and she was young, pampered and not at all herself.