“Galileo.”

I flinched as Coyle said the word and imagined that perhaps he winced too, though at what recollection I could only guess.

“Indeed,” murmured the sponsor. “Galileo. Pamela was kind enough to take me through the file last night. I had looked at it before, of course, though not with such a… critical eye. You allege that the entity Galileo has somehow entered your organisation?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Because Kepler says so?”

“Yes, sir, and for other reasons.”

I stared at a white wall, my hands by my head, and wondered if this was how it felt to be a host. The world moves, and I am still, actions beyond my control turning, unseen, in the background. I am a woman who sells her body for medicines she cannot afford, and around me conspiracies were unravelled and tales told, and I stared at a wall and waited.

“Such as?”

“Frankfurt.”

“Yes, the medical trials. What of them?”

“They were designed to create a vaccine against ghosts. I think Galileo subverted them instead, to gather data not on the destruction but the creation of creatures like him.”

“Because?”

“I think Galileo murdered the researchers in Frankfurt.”

“In itself not proof of anything.”

“Kepler was blamed and her host too. I was ordered to kill them both. Why was I ordered to kill the host?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the sponsor.”

“And as I’ve said, my interests are varied, my tastes eclectic, and I do not make operational decisions. But now you work with the very entity that you sought to kill. Why?”

“Galileo.”

A sigh, a shifting of weight. Perhaps now a cake was consumed; perhaps sugar was added to some gently cooling tea. I imagined delicate fingertips holding a French fancy by the edges, unwilling to damage the icing. The thought made me smile.

“Galileo.” The sponsor’s sigh, deep and old. “We always seem to come back to Galileo.”

The fountain dribbled, the carp swam. Beyond the moon door a thousand people ebbed and flowed, their eyes turned to the wonders of the past.

Then the sponsor said, “Kepler.”

I lifted my head at my name, didn’t turn from the wall. Bodies moved in chairs behind me. “Kepler, look at me.”

I turned, keeping my hands raised, looked into the eyes of the silver-haired man. His face was grey, stained with yellow spots beneath the sagging hollows of his eyes. His neck hung with skin like the soft fins of a seal; his eyes were deep dark and looked on me without hatred, without recognition, and I knew his name.

He cleared his throat and, one hand scratching irritably at the vest underneath his ironed white shirt, said, “Why are you here?”

“I share Coyle’s interest in Galileo.”

“Why?”

“It seems… right. Maybe that’s not even it. We’ve… shared hosts. I wore her flesh; he wore mine. At first you could say we were competitors. Then it was retribution. I betrayed Galileo, and Galileo took revenge.”

“What kind of revenge?”

“He wore someone I loved, and I killed him. He was… beautiful. I didn’t have the heart to put a bullet in his brain. That was in Miami. And then in Berlin… I went to a friend for help, and Galileo burned him alive. He did it so that I might see. He said, ‘Do you like what you see?’ We always like what we see, people like us. We always see how something else could be better than what we have. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps this face, perhaps these hands, perhaps… perhaps I will be better. Perhaps no one will care for the things I did when last I was someone else. Perhaps someone will love me. Perhaps they will love me. Perhaps if I love them enough, they’ll have no choice but to love me in return. Do you like what you see? we ask, and the answer is yes, of course. I love it. I love it. If I am it, will you love me?

“That Galileo is a monstrosity is an evident truth. That he has penetrated your organisation, torn it to pieces, is again obvious. Galileo has ripped you apart. That Galileo is perhaps attempting, through research and violence, to create more of himself, to create children, if you will, a something, someone that will last–well, that is debatable. I doubt Galileo himself would be able to give you a fair assessment either way.”

Again the sponsor scratched at his vest, rubbing across his chest, and I wondered what manner of surgical scars might lurk beneath, digging their way through the body of this stooped old man.

“You are the first—” He stopped and smiled at a joke only he could know. “You are nearly the first,” he corrected, “creature of your kind I have spoken to. You do a better impression of human than I expected. I congratulate you. That Galileo may have… compromised us in ways we do not know, well, the matter is rather too repugnant to speak of, yet we must speak of it. You… suggest that orders have been given, and operatives have acted on them?”

“Yes.”

“Orders given by Galileo?”

“By Galileo, through another’s voice.”

“We have protocols in place, of course, to prevent this.”

“Your protocols are only as good as the people who created them. Galileo has been around for a long time. Perhaps when you agreed a code word with a friend, you agreed it with someone else entirely?”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.”

His breath caught in his throat, as his hand scratched scratched scratched at his shirt. “And we should believe you: a murderer, a slaver, a—”

“Sir!” Coyle was on his feet.

“Whatever Coyle may say,” his voice rose, cutting Coyle off, “do not think that your pretence of humanity begins to redeem the harm you have done!”

Pam was stepping clear of the table, out of Coyle’s reach, and now the gun was in her hands.

“No, sir…”

“Michael Peter Morgan!” My voice, high and hot, sliced through the air, knocked the sponsor back on his seat, a shudder running through his cold withered hands. “How old are you now? Your body must be far advanced into its declining years, but you–twenties, thirties? At least thirty years younger than the flesh you are prisoner to. Tell me, when they killed Janus did you know that it was yourself you ordered dead? It was you they gunned down in that house in Saint-Guillaume; it was the hand that held your wife, the heart that loved your children, flesh of your flesh but soul of his soul. You lost so much time: you lost your youth; you blinked and it was gone, a brief nap, and when you wake you are this. A man of eclectic tastes, and who are you? I don’t think you even know.”

The old man, cramped and curled around his own pain, one hand hugging the edge of the table, the other pressed against his chest, raised gummy eyes to my face and hissed, “How do you know me?”

“I knew Janus. I knew the person you were in your real life.” He opened his mouth to speak, but the corners curled in; no sound emerged. “Mr Morgan,” I said, “have you been losing time?”

Silence.

Not-silence.

This is the silence of air moving through our lips.

This is the silence of muscles tight, blood running, hearts racing.

This is the silence of a whole world turning outside the door.

This is the roaring not-silence of minds that dare not think out loud.

“Mr Morgan,” I breathed, “you studied economics at Harvard. You did tae kwon do, had terrible taste in clothes. Both parents dead by the time you were twenty-five, you were still a virgin when Janus took your flesh. You blinked, and when you opened your eyes your wife was crying by your side, and your daughters, Elsa and Amber, they didn’t understand what had happened to their father. They thought he’d died. Death of the mind, not the body. I know this because I knew you, Mr Morgan. I shared a drink with you in the junior common room in Princeton in 1961, when I was… someone else. Just doing my job. And since then you’ve hunted us for all you’re worth with all the wealth that Janus left behind, but you’re old now and all alone, and so I have to ask–have you been losing time?”