‘They can’t possibly select Arrowsmith,’ Al was saying. ‘He’s no replacement for Admiral Kaltberg.’

‘Never underestimate our superiors’ ability,’ answered Jed, ‘to perpetrate total, utter—’

‘Guys,’ said Angus. ‘Look at this.’

A spiky network of golden lines hung in front of him - a network glistening here and there with a redness that appeared to be spreading.

‘Tell me that’s not an infiltration,’ said Jed.

‘It’s not.’

‘But it looks like—’

‘It’s going to be genocide.’

Last Lupus, the final day of Festival.

Now trompe-l’oeil holoillusions marched across the sky, ‘Fanfare for All’ resounded from quickglass buildings used as musical instruments, and everywhere were streamers and cloudflakes, sparklemist and twirlywhispers, while vendors dispensed sweetbeer and plasmaberry wine, roast cicaderm and gyle nuts, jantrasta-coated fruit and daistral whips.

Merrymakers laughed or embraced, watched amused or wistful, meeting new lovers or losing old, or staying with their long-term lover, the ongoing growth and renewal of family, or they simply joked with friends, sang stupid, surreal songs, composed poems, played 7-D killchess, drank, belched, ate, pissed, burped, stood on someone’s toes, made friends, caused arguments, held hands, smiled, cried, farted, picked their noses, said sorry, drank some more and put the world to rights.

Yet in the midst of swirling, interacting, splendid-yet-mundane humanity, something was changing.

It started with a trio of Luculenti, walking together, tracking the patterns in the aerial displays. The silver dragons were just one more attraction among the smartkites and dirigibles and holoillusions; but now the nearest dragon was catching their attention.

Within the next two seconds, another fifty-nine Luculenti looked up at one or other of the dragons and wondered what was different about it.

Then they all screamed.

Tightbeams rained down from the dragons, pinning the Luculenti in place, broadcasting their locations to the one who waited deep below the city. Now they were hooked and landed fish, awaiting the terminal blow - but the hooks came through the hyperdimensions, and so did the vampire code.

It was the opening salvo of the Skein War.

Deep in The Marrows beneath the city, the body that had been Rafaella Stargonier floated amid translucent green splendour, tiny in her quickglass sea, surrounded by the organic vastness and geometric lattices that were the city’s true body, the towers above mere epidermis, the visible exterior of the true marvel that grew and provided everything from food to sanitation, enfolding civilization.

Now she and it could be so much more.

On the surface, her Luculenti still lived, components of herself, while her first body flung out its arms, drifting cruciform in its living, subterranean surroundings. Perhaps her head tilted back and smiled; or perhaps it was a random motion, caught in quickglass current.

Each of her remote Luculenti entered Skein, eyes blazing, searching for prey.

It took no more than seconds for each to subsume another, then another. Geometrically, vampire code spread, as Luculentus minds speared others of their kind, cascading through Skein, all remaining physically alive, their neural topology routed through the Calabi-Yau dimensions, the realspace axes that humans cannot see, hundreds then thousands of bodies and plexwebs forming one continuous substrate for a unitary net of cognition and predation.

The once-Rafaella had transcended.

On the rooftop of Ebony Tower, Roger stood beside Alisha’s stretcher - the tac team did not carry med-drones - not understanding why the officers had taken her back out of the flyer. But his tu-ring flared, and a strange Luculentus appeared in holo.

‘I’m Hsiu Li-Cheng,’ he said. ‘Download this code, broadcast through tightbeam at her.’

‘What will it do?’

‘Disinfect her. Destroy the lingering code.’

‘Code?’

Behind him, the tac team commander, Lieutenant Eisberg said: ‘Something to do with her being pre-upraise, right?’

Roger did as Li-Cheng said.

‘Will we able to use this on Luculenti?’ Eisberg asked.

In the holo, Li-Cheng’s face was a mask of emptiness.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to build another Skein, but we’ll never manage—’

The holo snapped out of existence.

‘Another Skein?’ said Roger.

‘I don’t know.’ Eisberg shrugged her muscular shoulders. ‘This is bad. And Keino-Superintendent Sunadomari is off Skein.’

‘Maybe Luculenti need to disconnect for safety. You’re saying there’s infectious code in Skein?’

‘That wasn’t what I—You know, that wasn’t how this started, but I think you might be right. One moment.’ Her jaw muscles moved, uttering tense subvocalizations. ‘I can’t reach HQ. The connection pool on every channel is full. Shit.’

If the peacekeepers were flooded with calls, from civilians and officers alike, then whatever was happening, it was widespread.

‘Lieutenant?’ One of the troopers was pointing into the cityscape. ‘You see that?’

In her stretcher, Alisha twitched, but nothing more. Roger looked back up, seeing that all of the tac team were staring in the same direction.

‘Holy fuck.’

‘That’s not possible.’

But Eisberg said: ‘Clearly it is.’

With the stress of the day, Roger’s vision had blurred or tunnelled to a pinpoint several times over, and for a moment he thought it had recurred, a symptom of adrenal overload. But then he realized that it was no artefact of trauma, but reality that he saw.

The sky was still filled with festive smartkites and illusory holos, dirigibles and dragons; while below still lay an elegant expanse of shining quickglass towers, linked by skyways and viaducts, amid streets and plazas and piazzas filled with city-dwellers out to celebrate Last Lupus; but the city was altering.

With a twitch here and a twist there, quickglass towers began to shrug and shift, to compress and expand, and then to flow. Everything began to move. Suddenly, one skywalk flailed like a tendril, spilling tiny humans to the ground below.

The city was coming to life. Viaducts buckled, tore free. Buildings writhed into motion.

It’s impossible.

But still the towers walked.

It began in The Marrows. By the time it reached the surface, affecting the quickglass towers that humans lived in without appreciating the marvel of what surrounded them - nor how small a portion of the true city they inhabited - the process was more than eighty per cent complete, the metamorphosis unstoppable.

While underneath, the subterranean quickglass sea pulsed with complex growth, organs and systems combining to expand and move, to grow new surface structures, to reach out and live.

Even as their old homes buckled - luxurious apartments in city towers, quieter mansions in the outer districts, extravagances shaped like ziggurats or giant sculptures - their Luculenti owners did not care. Ordinary Fulgidi, whether employees or friends, backed away from those who had changed; some perished as the floors twisted apart or walls expanded to envelope them, while others ran outside to chaos.

All Luculenti were becoming one - but more than that. For they were the nervous system, while the quickglass city formed the body they were embedded in. This was beyond transcendence.

A new form of life was being born.

In the Via Lucis Institute, LuxPrime’s finest Skein designers were fighting back. The global Skein environment was centuries old, its lineage tracing back to Earth; now, those designers were creating a new version in minutes. In the growing SkeinTwo, as they brought it into being framework by framework, ecology by ecology, emergent configurations - force-grown at a speed no one would have thought possible - bore parallels to the structures they mirrored in the corrupted, dangerous, original Skein . . . but they were rooted in different protocols and codes at the very lowest level. Meanwhile, a specialist team was working on a single service: the gateway that would allow a Luculentus to switch his mind into the new environment, plunge into SkeinTwo while cleansing himself of the old, losing any traces of the vampire code that was destroying everything.