Maybe that’s it.

It would explain her . . . shiftiness. She would want to patent the concepts and bring a first application to market before anyone else got hold of the knowledge, or even knew of its existence. That made commercial sense.

She looked down at her untouched daistral.

‘Shit.’

‘Miss?’

‘Nothing.’

I really am slow on the uptake.

Missing a night’s sleep and doing that crazy mannequin thing might be contributing factors, but not a good excuse. She should have realized last night, not now.

Weissmann’s a Luculenta.

All the signs of it had been there. How could anyone miss the way she—?

Something moved.

‘Hello, Alisha.’

It was Rafaella Stargonier, her long black hair twisting as if in wind, though the chamber’s air was still. She reached out a fist, and Alisha touched it with hers.

So Rafaella was real. She had risen up through the quickglass floor so fast, Alisha had thought she might be holo.

‘Rafaella, good morning. I’m glad to be here.’

‘Did you come alone? You were welcome to take a friend.’

‘I—I decided not to disturb anyone else.’

She had called Roger in Skein, receiving no response. Her disappointment was mitigated by how exhausted he had looked last night. He was surely off Skein by intent, catching up on sleep.

‘So, my little place here is somewhat exotic, don’t you think?’

‘Er, yes, ma’am.’

‘We’re on first-name terms, remember? And I want to give you the tour.’

‘The tour?’

‘There’s so much in the world that people ignore. So much wonder they could experience, but they distract themselves with trivia instead.’

‘Um . . .’

Rafaella raised both hands, and her eyes were shining as her voice become resonant.

‘Let me show you the world beneath.’

All around them, the room began to change: flowing and morphing, the person-shape melting back into the floor, the concave space reconfiguring to something like the inside of a hollow tear-drop. Alisha’s seat budded a twin, and Rafaella sat down next to her.

‘Here we go.’ Rafaella patted Alisha’s hand. ‘You’ll love this.’

Essentially they were in a sophisticated bubble, but it felt like a craft, and the illusion strengthened as they moved forwards, like a clear submarine through green waters. Then their direction dipped, as they began a forty-five degree descent.

‘Where is this?’

‘My little Alisha. Did you never ask what exists below the towers and marvels of Lucis City?’

All around, within the translucent depths, were straight-edged shapes and rippling streamers, a complexity of organic and geometric structures she found hard to look at - there was so much of it, all around their pseudo-vessel, like a vast biological abstract sculpture, like a giant technological organism, deep inside the organs, the lymph nodes and capillaries, the microstructures within the cells, the complex molecules of life.

It was like a fantasy of being shrunk to tiny size and floating through a great living body; but it was real.

‘There’s so much of it,’ Alisha said. ‘So . . . beautiful.’

‘Ah. That’s why I wanted another person to see it.’

‘To—?’

‘So I know it’s not just me. This place is a marvel.’

Alisha stared around as they continued to sink deep among nameless structures.

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘Welcome,’ said Rafaella, ‘to The Marrows.’

They popped into an enormous vault - perhaps containing air - their ‘vessel’ a true bubble now, lowering on a quickglass thread in a space big enough to contain several buildings, each a quickglass tower. In the distance were ranged other vaults, equally huge.

‘It’s like a different world.’

‘This is where we grow the city.’

‘Oh.’ The meaning of what Alisha saw became clearer. ‘It’s just so . . . Oh.’

‘Isn’t it?’

The descent stopped. Rafaella stood, and the craft-bubble’s walls shivered apart, leaving only the floor. They were now on an exposed quickglass platform suspended by a hundred-metre thread from the vault ceiling, at the centre of this huge space, far below the surface city.

‘The architecture above is just the tip of everything,’ said Rafaella. ‘People would know this, if they bothered to look.’

Alisha stood, her legs wobbly.

‘I . . . Can we go back up now?’

‘In a moment. See over there? You gave me the idea.’

‘I’m sorry?’

A row of long, silver-scaled dragons hung in place, their wings diaphanous red, their crystal eyes bulbous. Quickglass dragons. Huge.

‘For Last Lupus,’ said Rafaella. ‘I thought we might end Festival with something spectacular. Your little mannequin inspired me.’

Alisha’s bottom lip hurt. She realized she was biting it.

‘And you gave me the Zajinet,’ Rafaella added. ‘You have no idea how helpful that was.’

‘I don’t—’

‘My capacity for expansion is now effectively infinite. Isn’t that something wonderful?’

Shaking her head, Alisha found the surrounding marvels blurring as tears filled her eyes.

‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? I don’t know why, but you are.’

‘Oh, no. You’re thinking of the old me.’ Rafaella’s mouth turned up at the corners, but the expression was not a smile. ‘I do things differently now.’

Her eyes appeared to expand.

Oh, God. Oh, no.

Vampire code poured through Alisha’s plexnodes.

THIRTY-EIGHT

EARTH, 1939-1940 AD

The Bohr Institute, home of startling ideas, was everything it should be: stone walls, an atmosphere of grandeur, the great man’s coat of arms upon the wall: heraldic icons around a yin-yang. When Bohr had been knighted, he had chosen a superposition of classical and new, of west and east.

It was all very appropriate; but Gavriela found it hard to care.

‘Florian Horst.’ Her Danish was almost non-existent. ‘Please.’

In German, such abruptness was rude enough for insolence. She did not know if Danish was as formal. Perhaps her accent might mitigate offence.

‘You’re from Berlin?’ asked the woman behind the desk, in fluent German.

‘Oh, thank God. Yes, originally. You can recognize regional accents?’

‘Not much, but it’s hard to mistake a Berliner for anything else.’

There was an old joke about the difference between someone from Berlin and a doughnut - nothing, they’re both Berliners - but she pushed it aside. Danish bakeries probably didn’t even make Berliners, though Swiss bakeries did.

She had eaten so little food for the past fifteen days. At least, she thought it was fifteen days.

The trek across wild countryside had been long, and she survived only because it was not her - she had no other way of thinking about it. Her body had lived off the land, trapping small animals in ways she should not have known, slipping past troops and civilians, always afraid.

As for what she had done to the three Gestapo men, if that was what they were—

‘Fräulein?’

‘I’m sorry. You were saying, about Florian Horst?’

‘He left for—Ah, Fräulein. Are you Frau Horst’s friend?’

‘You mean Elke. Oh, yes. In fact I introduced them, Elke and Florian. I’m Gavriela Wolf.’

‘Could you wait a moment?’

The woman slipped from behind the desk, and went down a corridor to the rear, high heels clicking. There were sounds of two men talking, a knocking - someone tapping his pipe free of old tobacco - and then a rustle of paper. Then the woman came back, carrying a large envelope.

‘For you, Frau Doktor.’

‘Thank you.’ Gavriela took it. ‘But what’s inside?’

‘There are so many . . . They’re trying to help as many as possible. Professor Bohr is a marvel.’

She opened the envelope, finding several typed sheets, a small box and some banknotes: various denominations of Kroner.