He inched through the fog towards the slickbike stand.

Sunadomari’s flyer touched down on a blue-and-white patio of Mansion Stargonier. En route from the Blackstone house, he had immersed himself in a sea of surveillance data. There were sightings of Rafaella Stargonier dating back less than two seconds; but the images were all in Skein, all from surveillance logs he could no longer trust. The last verified sighting might have been yesterday, when Roger Blackstone saw her in reality.

Twenty-five armoured officers were already waiting in the grounds, while two specialists from Domestics Division, both top-class Luculenti, worked through Skein, sitting safely back at Peacekeeper HQ. As soon as the DD men cracked the mansion’s security, the tac team poured inside through doors and windows.

Sunadomari waited outside.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

The tac team commander, Helen Eisberg, responded in Skein, via tu-ring.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘No one openly in the rooms. Deepscan shows no one hiding inside the architecture.’

Simultaneously, he talked in Skein to the DD Luculenti.

<<audio: Any luck with the house logs?>>

Their reply took a millisecond to arrive.

<<video: Rafaella Stargonier boarding a flyer.>>

<<image: A large red question mark icon.>>

One of the Luculenti had a sense of intellectual irony, using a symbol from the archaic Latin alphabet to comment on a Luculenta with the Latinate name of Rafaella. Sunadomari thought it puerile, remembered the origins of that word, then shook distracting thoughts away.

What was clear that the woman had left yesterday and at some point simply disappeared inside Lucis City. Then:

<<audio: Shit!>>

<<audio: The house memory is reinitializing.>>

Sunadomari closed the in-Skein link and sighed.

‘Lieutenant Eisberg?’

‘Sir?’

‘Leave two people in situ, and let’s find someone we can arrest. Protocol zero.’

Eisberg checked her weaponry status.

‘I take it they’re maximally dangerous, sir.’

‘They may be. Their names are Helsen and Ranulph.’ He concentrated, sending data through Skein to Eisberg, while making the arrest request to JusticePlex in Skein. ‘JP is issuing warrants now.’

NetSprites tore through Skein, questing through video data, trying to match search arguments to moving-image objects via their heuristicEquals( ) functions: a low-level, brute force approach that could succeed where sophisticated strategies might fail.

Nothing.

‘Shit.’

‘Sir?’

‘When our global, ubiquitous and all-seeing surveillance actually manages to find who we’re looking for, I’ll let you know their locations. Until then, remain on stand-by.’

Helen Eisberg’s face remained almost blank.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Shit.’

He had let three known spies escape from Fulgor because they weren’t the particular criminals he sought. Now all the remaining suspects were gone as well. He knew less than he had two days ago.

Except that Stella Weissmann’s name had been added to the list of the dead, her corpse lying close to the remains of the Zajinet prisoner they had kept for so long - and failed to extract information from.

He gathered himself.

‘Helen,’ he said to Lieutenant Eisberg.

‘Yes, Keinosuke?’

‘Ignore my mood. Have you two good people you could spare?’

‘To go with you?’

‘Right. To the Via Lucis Institute.’

‘What’s there? I mean, besides all the Skein experts and plexweb designers and shit.’ For the first time, she almost smiled. ‘Is there anything actually useful?’

‘A history lesson.’ He gazed around the grounds. ‘I need to find out what happened a hundred years ago.’

‘Talk about tracing root causes.’

‘Tell me about it.’

Alisha had been set up. Roger, dear Roger, had told her about the Zajinet Research Institute - without him, she probably would not have found it. Rafaella Stargonier, had she been sufficiently interested, almost certainly would have discovered the place - and probably obtained more useful data from the Weissmann woman.

This was a strange place.

‘Another glass of daistral, miss?’ It was a pliable, smooth humanoid shape that gestured with its caricature hand and spoke. ‘She shouldn’t be too long.’

‘No, thank you.’

Alisha was sitting on soft quickglass, in a cylindrical quickglass chamber whose walls were translucent, predominantly ice-green, and filled with complex shapes of blue and violet, along with continuously rising bubbles. The roughly humanoid shape was a quickglass extrusion, part of the surrounding system. Call it an exotic accessory; but Alisha did not like it.

Am I even in the same building?

Having taken part in that mannequin thing, pedalling the construct through the parade, she had been exhausted. Had it not been for Stef’s persuasion beforehand, she would never have agreed. It was only when they were struggling en route that she put together all the hints: Stef had subtly (or not so subtly) made sure that Roger was taking part.

Matchmaking. That was a set-up, but not one she minded. Roger was sweet and she herself was too uncertain to make the first move - she might be only weeks away from upraise, a reward for hard work and capability, but that did not help. The countdown to upraise was terrifying; and the thought of how different she would be afterwards . . . that was a barrier to friendship, never mind romance.

For a few seconds, when everyone climbed from the mannequin, sweaty and tired, there had been an opportunity to speak to Roger. But she had walked away, wanting to think things through, knowing she was too tired to make reasonable decisions. And then, she had caught sight of Luculenta Rafaella Stargonier, who had smiled and seemed eager to talk, though not for long.

Far too eager. Why didn’t I spot it?

She looked at the quickglass person-shape, and changed her mind.

‘I will have that daistral, thank you.’

‘Coming up, miss.’

Rafaella - she had insisted Alisha use her first name - arranged this meeting to ‘catch up on your findings,’ and allegedly so Alisha could see what a successful Luculenta could achieve by way of commercial sidelines. Twenty minutes ago, she had entered the foyer of Aleph Tower, where a human employee had led her to a conference room to wait. What had been unexpected was the way the room descended, a bubble through quickglass, and opened into this waiting area, some ten metres (she estimated) below ground.

But it wasn’t the location, it was the decor that was strange: weird geometric shapes and rising bubbles within the wall, the person-shaped extrusion that offered drinks . . . and now handed her a goblet morphed from its own hand. Alisha snapped the goblet free, looked at the daistral inside, then set it on the floor.

‘Is everything all right, miss?’

‘Fine. Thanks.’

For a soon-to-be Luculenta, she had been slow on the uptake. It wasn’t just Rafaella, it was creepy Dr Helsen playing games. Realspace hyperdimensions weren’t some academic topic chosen at random: there was something going on.

Why would Helsen want Rafaella to be thinking about hyperdimensions?

Something to do with Zajinets?

The woman at the Institute, Ms Weissmann, had raised the subject of teleportation, then ruled out Roger’s hypotheses about the mechanism, leaving only one: the Zajinets could project themselves along the Calabi-Yau hyperdimensions of realspace.

But she had also said that teleportation was beyond the reach of current knowledge. Surely Rafaella could not think it was possible to discover the Zajinets’ technique?