15

Patient 8262

I think I am well,” I tell the broad doctor who had the dolls in her desk. I know her name now. She is called Dr Valspitter. “I think I am okay now to leave.” My grasp of the local language has improved markedly. It is called Itic. Dr Valspitter looks at me, lips pursed, brows gathered in the middle as though by a pulled thread. “I appreciate everything all here have done for me,” I tell her.

“What do you remember of your past life?” the doctor asks me.

“Not very much,” I confess.

“What would you do if you returned to the outside world?”

“I would look for a place to stay and for work to do. I am able to work.”

“Not at your old job, perhaps.”

“Ordinary labourer. I could do ordinary labour. I know building sites. That I could do. Ordinary labouring.”

“You feel you could do this?”

“Yes, I feel I could do this.”

“How would you find a place to live?”

“I would go to the Municipal Available Local Lodgings Clearing Office.”

Dr Valspitter looks approving, nods and makes a note. “Good. And how would you find work?”

The obvious next question. “I would approach building site managers, but also I would go to the Municipal Local Employment Exchange.”

The doctor makes another note. I think I’m doing all right here. I need to. I have to get out. I have to get away.

Last night I found I could not sleep and took another small-hours wander along the corridor, down the stairwell and along to what I still thought of as the silent ward. I could not help it; I felt drawn there. I don’t think that’s what woke me up but once I was awake I found myself thinking obsessively about the rows of still beds with their vacant-eyed, near-silent patients, and the contrast with their appearance in daylight when they were awake. I couldn’t think what good padding down to look at them would do, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do either and maybe just seeing them for real rather than in my mind’s eye would let me get back to sleep eventually.

So I went, I looked – they were all just the same, though there were cards and personal items on the bedside cabinets and a few chairs scattered throughout the ward, all the things I’d convinced myself hadn’t been present on my first two visits but which I suppose were always there – then I came back again.

There was somebody in my room. I had left the door closed and my light off, but now I could see some light showing beneath the door, reflecting dimly off the shiny floor. At first, of course, I thought it would just be the duty nurse again.

Then I saw more movement, at the far end of the corridor, somewhere inside the day room. A pale figure, moving across the dark space, disappearing then reappearing and coming towards the low lights of the corridor. The figure in the day room emerged into the half-light of the night-dimmed corridor lights and was revealed as the duty nurse, walking back to his desk at the end of the corridor holding a magazine and flicking its pages, intent on it. He did not look up, so did not see me.

I felt a sudden terror and shrank back against the wall as far as I could, hiding behind a metal cupboard holding fire-fighting equipment. The duty nurse sat down at his station at the far end of the corridor, feet up on the desk, still flicking through the magazine. He stretched out to one side – I could hear the wheels of his chair squeaking – and turned on the radio at a low volume. Tinny pop music sounded.

I could no longer see the door to my room. Who was in there if not the nurse? Was it my former attacker, whoever had tried to interfere with me? Perhaps I ought to go to the door, fling it open, confront them, the noise and commotion of course attracting the attention of the duty nurse. Or perhaps I should just approach the duty nurse directly and tell him there was somebody in my room, let him deal with whoever it was.

I had decided on the latter course and was about to step out from behind the fire-equipment cupboard and walk towards the duty nurse’s station, when, from the far end of the corridor, I heard a toilet flush.

A door creaked and closed. I stepped along the wall to the nearest door, twisted the handle and let myself in. This should be a private visiting room, empty at this time of night. Sound came from somewhere near the toilets. Slipper-slapping footsteps came, and I recognised one of the old boys, a not-quite slack-jaw capable of holding a conversation and talking about something other than television or the weather. He went, head hunched, past where I watched via the cracked door.

Somebody said something and he looked up, waving down the corridor, no doubt at the duty nurse. I opened the door a little further to watch him go. When he was opposite the door to my room, a couple of doors short of his own room, the door to my room was flung open and light spilled out. “Mr Kel?” I heard a strong male voice say.

The old guy stood looking confused, staring blinking at whoever had addressed him from my room and then down the corridor. I heard seat wheels squeal as the nurse said something, voice inflected in a question.

Then a bright light shone into the old fellow’s face, he put his hand up to shield his eyes, the duty nurse shouted something, the bright light went out and a man – tall, well-built, in a dark suit – went running past me and away down the corridor towards the stair well. He held a chunky-looking torch in one hand. In the other hand he was carrying something else. He thrust it inside his jacket as he ran past me. It was dark and heavy-looking and I knew it was a gun.

So:

“Can I leave?” I ask Dr Valspitter. “Can I go? Please?”

She smiles. “Perhaps. I will need other doctor to come to same opinion, but I think you can.”

“Wonderful! Can we get other doctor, their opinion, today?”

“You are in such a hurry to leave?”

“I am. I want to get out,” I say. “Today.”

She shakes her head, frowning just a little. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow if other doctor agrees with me and we can complete all required paperwork and provide you with clothing and belongings and money and so on. Maybe tomorrow. I cannot promise. But soon, I think. Maybe tomorrow. We shall see. You must understand. You must be patient.”

I want to protest, but I am aware that I have pushed things quite far enough already. If I seem too desperate to get out they might take that as a sign that I’m unbalanced or neurotic or something. I do my best to smile. “Tomorrow, then,” I say. “I hope,” I add, before the frowning doctor can reiterate that it’s still only maybe.

“No!” I wail, staring at the two beige pills lying in the bottom of the little cup. The cup is colourless, translucent plastic, and tiny; a stingy measure of drink if you were serving spirits in it, and yet to me it seems like it’s as deep, dark and dangerous as a mine shaft. I stare hopelessly into it and despair. “I not want to!” I am aware that I sound like a recalcitrant child.

“You must,” the old nurse tells me. She is starting to lose patience with me, I can tell. “They harmless, Mr Kel. They give you a good night’s sleep, that’s all.”

“But I sleep good!”

“Doctor say you must have them, Mr Kel,” the old nurse tells me firmly, as though this trumps everything. “Do you want me to go and get doctor?”

This is a threat. If she fetches a doctor and I still refuse to take the sleeping pills I may well find that such a protest too will count against me when I ask to be released from the clinic. “Please not make me,” I say, biting my bottom lip. Perhaps I can appeal to her emotions. This is only partially an act. However, she is not moved. She has seen it all before. Perhaps a younger nurse might have been persuaded but this old one is taking no nonsense.

“Very well, we get doctor.” She turns to go and I have to reach out to her and say,

“No! All right!” She turns back, and at least has the decency not to look smug. “I take them,” I tell her.

First line of defence: I think I can fool her and just keep the pills under my tongue until she has gone and then spit them out, but she insists on inspecting my mouth afterwards and so I have no choice but to swallow them.

Second line of defence: I’ll go to the toilets and throw them up. But the nurse is watching for me to do this as she goes down the corridor dispensing drugs and twice shoos me back to bed with the threat that she’ll inject me with a sedative if I insist on going to the toilets. She knows I already went not ten minutes ago.

Third line of defence: I’ll throw up here in my room, into my water jug or out of the window if I have to. I can sign myself out voluntarily if I have to. Everything subsequently will be harder if I have done so – the finding a place to live and a job and so on – but not impossible. I am not stupid, I can survive.

Some time later I am vaguely aware of being pushed gently upright and something – the water jug, perhaps – being taken out of my hands. I am tucked into bed and the light is turned out. I feel very sleepy and in a way happy to be so, cosy in my wrapping of sheets and the feeling of dozing quietly off, while another part of me is shrieking with fury and terror, screaming at me to wake up and get away, do something, anything.

He comes for me again during that night. The drug still holds me, and it is as though everything happens through layers and layers of swaddling, through multiple bundlings of something insulating and muddling, making everything vague and fuzzy round the edges.

There is an impression of the quality of the light and sound around me changing somehow, of the door being opened and closed very quietly. And then there is the feeling that somebody else is here in the room with me. At first I feel no sense of threat. I have a vague, groundless and completely stupid feeling that this person is here to protect and look after me, to tend to me. Then I feel something happening to my bed. I still persist with the vague sensation that all is well and I am being cared for. They must be tucking me in. How nice. How like being a child, safe and warm and loved and quietly looked after.

But I am not being looked after, and the bed is being unmade, not made, untucked, sheets and blanket loosened, a way being made clear.

I feel the sliding, spiderly-creeping, probing hand slide into the bed and over my body at my hip. I feel my pyjamas being touched and investigated and then the cord that ties them being found, and – gently at first – tugged at. The knot does not give, and the tugging becomes harder, more impatient and aggressive.

In all of this it is as though I am watching everything on a screen, feeling it not as something that is happening to me but as something that is happening somewhere else to somebody else and the sensations accompanying the experience – the sensations that are the experience – are being transmitted to me through some technology or ability I have not heard of. I am dissociated from what’s going on. This is not happening, or at least not to me. So I have no need to react, to try to do anything, because what good would that do? It’s not happening to me.

Except, of course – as one part of my mind has known all along, and is still bellowing and yowling about – it entirely is happening to me.

The hand undoes the knot on my pyjama bottoms and pulls them forcibly down. There is a roughness and an urgency to the hand’s movements now that was not there before. I think that whoever is doing this realises that I am truly in a deeply drugged sleep and so am not likely to wake up and start resisting or screaming. And there is, too – horribly, horribly – a feeling of something like the uncaring passion that infects lovers, when they cannot wait to get at each other, when clothes are ripped off the self and the other, when hands shake, when bruises happen, unmeant, unfelt at the time, when shouts and screams and crashings and bangings ring out without a care who hears them, when we abandon ourselves utterly to something that is neither fully ourselves or them any more but something that lies between us, aside from us, beyond us. I think I can remember feeling like that: wanting somebody like that, being wanted like that. This – this single-handed furtiveness, this selfish, unmindful groping, however urgent, however needy – dear fuck, this is a sad, pathetic, petty thing in comparison.

Something inside me wants to cry, confronted with the memory of such wild and joyous passion, such fervently mutualised desire, contrasted with this sordid, sweaty feeling and grabbing and squeezing. I think I do feel hot tears in my eyes and on my cheeks. So I can feel, at least, if not react. Would I rather this than outright unconsciousness, until it’s all over? Is it better to witness such violation and know that it most surely happened, or better to know nothing until one wakes up sore, bemused, suspecting perhaps, but able to dismiss it, forget about it? I don’t know. Anyway, I seem to have no choice, either about it happening to me or about the fact that I am aware of it.

The hand tires of manipulating my genitals and starts trying to turn me over, onto my side, rotating my body so that my exposed rear is turned towards my violator.

What heat there is in tears of such frustration. How can I let this happen to me? How can somebody do something so base and selfish and debased to another person? My brain is still minutes behind events but my heart seems to be waking up to what is occurring. It thrashes and spasms in my chest, as though trying to wake me up through the sheer physical disturbance pulsing through my body. I feel something happening with my behind. I think my arms and hands might be flapping now, trying to move, to beat away, though I could be imagining this. I go with the feeling anyway, trying to reinforce and strengthen it, imaginary or not.

Something enters me. A finger, into my anus. Too thin and hard and jointed to be a penis. No worse than a doctor’s dispassionate probing, in theory, but this is not dispassionate, this is not for my own good, this is only for the pleasure of the person doing this to me.

Motherfucker. How fucking dare they. I summon one vast wave of disgust and fury and put it all into one arm, striking back at my assailant. Then I squeeze my lungs, contract my belly, throwing a pulse of sound out upwards through my throat, vomiting a scream that quickly turns into a cough and a terrible, squeezing, constricting pain all across my chest, imprisoning me.

The finger pulls roughly out of me. I heave myself onto my back, getting a glimpse of my attacker as they send the seat clattering to the floor and dash for the door.

I recognise him. It is the duty nurse from downstairs, the fellow who whistled, his uniform covered by a patient’s dressing gown. He puts his head down and hunches his shoulders as he makes his escape into the corridor outside. I hear the duty nurse on this floor, a female nurse tonight, saying something, then shouting. My door slams shut.

Outside, I hear running, but I am flat on my back, hardly hearing it for the noise in my chest, hardly caring about anything any more except the sensation that a ten-tonne iron giant is pinning me down, one knee planted firmly on my chest as he squeezes the life out of me. The band around my chest cinches tighter and the pain grows a little worse. The last thing I’m fully aware of is the nurse coming into my room, taking one look at me and running off. Is that the reaction of a seasoned professional health worker? I’m not sure about this, but somehow it scarcely seems to matter any more. This crushing, constricting pain beyond pain is all that matters.

An alarm sounds, not that I can hear it very well in the vast, over-everything silence that seems to be dropping onto me like some inky overcast, raining pain. Then I think the door bangs open and somebody starts thumping me on the chest. As though I haven’t had enough to endure this night.

They tear open my pyjama top and I want to protest. Please; passion, something shared, wanted, yearned for, not imposed, not this. Wrong. They put my head back, put their lips to mine, and kiss, blowing into me. I smell her perfume. Oh, that old sweetness. I will miss that. But still unasked for, still a sort of violation. Also, frankly, been eating garlic. More thumping and thudding against the hollow cavern of quietness that is my chest.

I drift away, despite the smashing and whacking and the regular, purposeful, breathful kissing trying to fill the void caged by my ribs. Then voices and lights and a feeling of crowding. Come all ye in. There is plenty of room here, my loves, in my empty chest and increasingly vacant mind, if nowhere else. So be at home, my guests; I’ll stay so long and then so long.

Something pulls across me like a hawser, side to side, plucking me like some thick and fleshy string set vibrating, forcing my back bowing up off the bed, jangling every nerve and fibre of my being before releasing me, letting me fall back with relief.

Something resumes, some regularity returns to matters, like a stopped engine at last coughing hesitantly back into life. I think. I don’t know. I’m still sort of drifting, like a boat at a quayside, half disconnected, just one painter securing it, letting it move and wheel and jerk according to the vagaries of tides, currents and winds. It would not take much of a tug to separate me altogether from this mooring, but I am lucky and it does not happen.

Feeling myself drift into a sort of warm fog-bank, a pocket of peace, I bump against the pier again and am secured once more.

And so here I lie, back in my own bed in my own room, brought back to life and grateful for that, but lying here in dread, for I think I have seen what happens next, I believe that I know what is coming.

I cannot get away. I am too exhausted, too weak, too sedated, too disabled by all that has passed to be able to get up and go or even sit up and beg. I try to speak, to tell the staff what I fear, what I have seen happening, but I seem to have lost the words. I can formulate the sentences in my head and I think I am speaking them in my own language inside my head well enough and perfectly coherently when I speak my own language out loud, even though I know nobody will understand, but the translation into the language spoken here, by these nurses and doctors and cleaners and other patients… that seems to have gone from me. I speak gibberish no matter what I try to say, and anyway talk so softly that I think they’d struggle to hear even if I was enunciating with exemplary clarity.

So here I lie, seeing through the day and the hazy sweep of the sun’s slow track across the sky outside and the sheltering blinds between us, waiting for darkness, waiting for night, wondering if it will be this night and knowing that it will be, and the dark-dressed man will come for me before the morning.

I feel tears well in my eyes and trickle gently down my cheeks, intercepted and guttered only when they meet one of the various tubes and pipes and wires that join me to the various pieces of medical equipment clustered quietly around me like mourners around somebody already dead.

The Transitionary

No wonder I’ve been losing track of myself. I’m sitting at a little café a short way from the railway station, back to the wall, nursing an Americano and watching the boats stream up and down the Grand Canal. Just along the broad quayside, a line of tourists stand with their luggage waiting to pick up water taxis. At the next table two Australian guys are arguing about whether it’s espresso or expresso.

“Look, for Christ’s sake, it’s there in black and white.”

“That could be a misprint, man, like Chinese instructions. You don’t know.”

I am still toying with my new-found senses. Sensibilities, even. I have done no more leaping into other people’s brains, whether Concern or civilian. I seem to have a sort of vague spotter sense, which is quite useful. I can sense that the baffled, disordered, demoralised intervention teams are still milling about the Palazzo Chirezzia, their members collecting themselves, tending to their wounded, making their excuses to each other and themselves, still not entirely able to understand what really happened, and waiting for back-up and assistance to arrive.

This is all happening just a few hundred metres away from where I’m sitting. I am ready to move quickly away if I need to, but for now I’m happy that I can see them without them seeing me. Another sense: they give the impression of deaf people talking loudly amongst themselves and not realising that they are doing so, while I am sitting here perfectly silent. I would be nervous about putting it to the test – however, I’m oddly but completely confident that a spotter could pass me by right here, a metre or two away, and have no idea that somebody capable of transitioning was sitting watching them. And of course they have no idea what I look like now.

I have been able to take more control of this glass-walls, future-paths sense. At the moment it is telling me that nothing especially threatening is imminent. Looking backwards is possible too, though. It’s like I can see down corridors in my head, in my memory, and as though there is a near-infinite series of doors angled partially to face me as I look down from one end of any particular corridor, so that by looking closely and then zooming in on each one I can see what happened during different transitions I once made. There is an uncanny impression that this is at once one corridor and many, that it leads off in an explosion of different directions scattered vertically and horizontally and in dimensions that I would struggle to put a name to, but, despite this, my mind seems able to cope with the experience.

Here is the time just passed when I bamboozled the whole of not just one conventionally configured but high-skill-and-experience- level Concern intervention team, but two (and more like three, if you count the people watching the perimeter), all at the Palazzo Chirezzia, barely an hour ago.

Here is the time I sat in a room with somebody I thought I loved and watched transfixed as her hand moved through a candle flame like silk.

This is me chasing two fucked-up kids though a Parisian sink estate and watching them die… and again, except differently.

Here is the time I blew that musician’s brains out while he sat in his preposterously blinged half-track.

Look, observe how I save a young man from certain death.

Here, see how I stare at Madame d’Ortolan’s tits, zitted with diamonds.

And this is me with my pals walking down a street and stopping by a fat old geezer sunbathing in his postage-stamp-size front garden, one sunny day, long ago.

I sit, indulging myself in my own internal slide show, amused as all hell.

I’ve let my Americano grow cold. The Grand Canal still froths with boats passing to and fro. The arguing Aussies are gone. Confusion tempered by affronted professional pride still reigns at the Palazzo Chirezzia. And there is a little fear there, too, because their back-up has started to arrive at last and they’ve heard that Madame d’Ortolan is also on her way, with questions.

A warm wind scented with tobacco smoke and diesel exhaust stirs me from my reverie, back to the present and the insistent reality of the here and now.

Indeed; all this historical stuff is highly intriguing, but there is the small matter of my being hunted with pretty much every resource the Concern is able to bring to bear. That needs attending to. Beyond that, the coup that Madame d’Ortolan would appear to be trying to mount is either proceeding or not. I have already done what I can in that regard. I can only hope that my attempts to alert Mrs M to the targets I’d been sent after worked, and they have been warned and put themselves safe.

My present embodiment came complete with a mobile phone. I try calling my new friend Ade, on his way here with a cunningly worked container full of septus, but his mobile telephone is switched off and his office tells me that he is away, expected back tomorrow sometime. I look at the timepiece wrapped round my wrist. The smaller but more important hand points to the two parallel lines just off the vertical, to the left. Eleven. Adrian said that he should be here by four in the afternoon.

We are to meet at the Quadri on the Piazza San Marco, safely surrounded by the tourist throng.

It seems I have to wait.

I pay, then go for a walk, crossing the Grand Canal by the Scalzi bridge and coming back the same way half an hour later – an elegantly curved new one further up is only a week or two from being opened. I wander into the station, sit down in the café and order another Americano, the better to sip slowly. I have a faint desire to count how many platforms there are in the station, but it is residual, easily ignored. The phone rings a few times and its screen shows me the faces of the people calling: Annata, Claudio, Ehno. I don’t answer.

I take several more walks around the western end of Cannaregio and the nearer parts of Santa Croce and sit in several more cafés, none too far from the Palazzo Chirezzia, keeping the vague hubbub in internal view at all times. I sit quietly, seemingly watching people, actually probing further into my own pasts.

I am sitting in a little tourist café on the Fondamenta Venier near the Ponte Guglie when I am recognised. I prepare for the worst, but it is just somebody who knows this body, this face, enquiring why I’m not at work this afternoon. I look furtive and embarrassed and stick to vague generalities, mostly keeping my head down. The man nods, winks and taps me on the shoulder before he walks off. He thinks I am waiting for my lover. I drain my lemon tea and leave. I’ve had enough coffee.

I walk to another café, on the Rio Tera De La Madalena. A spritz this time, and some pasta. Staring at the spaghetti in my bowl, I drift into a strange trancelike state, at first wondering how many individual strands of the pasta lengths there might be in the bowl, then how many metres they would all add up to if laid end to end, then realising – as I toy with the pale, soft strands, draping them languorously, voluptuously over the tines of my fork – that their aggregated complexity is like the various entangled themes and episodes of my life: a swirling, hideously complicated, topologically tortuous, possibly knotted exposition of my very own reality lying dumped and glistening here in the moist coils lying on the plate before me, the sliced, abbreviated strands like the lives I have cut short, the glistening red of passata adding an appropriately gory sheathing.

How many lives, I reflect. How many elisions and abbreviations, how many slack abandonments. And how many lives and deaths of my own self-elisions, lives lived briefly in the head and body of another then skipped away from, blithely flicked like dust from a sleeve. Every mission a suicide mission, every transition a transition from life to death (and back again, but still; a death).

I drift, almost without meaning to, into my private viewing theatre of the past. Here I am toddling, saddled on my mother’s hip, dandled on my father’s knee, going to school, leaving home, arriving at UPT, making friends, going to classes, seeing Mrs M for the first time, studying, drinking, dancing, fucking, sitting exams, vacationing at home, fucking Mrs M for the first time, fucking Mrs M for the last time, standing drunk on a parapet in Aspherje looking out over the drop to the Great Park on the far side and wondering where she had gone, why she had abandoned me and whether I should just jump, and then falling backwards, too wasted to stand or balance or even cry. Here I am training to be a fucking multiversal ninja instead.

I can even see how I got where I am metaphysically, too, if you know what I mean; how and why I have changed and my abilities have developed over the last few months and weeks and days and even hours. I was always a natural, always a good learner, I always saw things clearly and I was just genetically predisposed to take transitioning and its associate skills to places they had never been before, with the right sort of push. It doesn’t even make me that special; untold trillions of similarly potentially gifted minds have lived and died on untold worlds all unknowing, their existences just never divined, never sniffed out by l’Expédience. And I can see how all those fraught, dangerous extra missions that Madame d’O sent me on were what made the difference, what proved me and tempered me and forced me to find and cultivate skills within that I did not know I had. I can see these traits, these attributes quite clearly in myself now and I suppose it is just possible that the right, properly attuned sort of person – a Mulverhill, a d’Ortolan – might have seen them or at least their potential in me years ago, if they were able to glance in at just the right angle.

I snap out of my reverie when the waiter nudges my seat – deliberately, probably – waking me from my dream.

The light has changed, the remnants of pasta are quite cold. I glance at my watch. It is fifteen past four o’clock. If I stick with this body then even if I try to run through the crowds, by the time I get to San Marco I’ll be half an hour late. Maybe I should take the next right and get to the Grand Canal, call a water taxi. Or maybe I should do the smart thing and just swap bodies with somebody already in San Marco. I close my eyes, prepare to do whatever it was that let me flit across to this body.

And can’t do it.

What? What’s going on?

I try again, but still nothing. It’s like I’m back to being blocked again. I’m stuck with this body.

I rise, throw down a handful of notes to cover the bill, start walking quickly in the direction of the San Marco and pull out the phone to call Adrian, wondering if I can still sense Concern people remotely like I could before, or if that’s gone too, then stop in mid-button press and mid-stride, stumbling to a halt as I realise, yes, I can still sense stuff and what I sense now is that a profound change has taken place within the Palazzo Chirezzia.

Something very strange and unpleasant has appeared in the small crowd of Concern people in and around the building, something bizarrely different, and not benign.

Who or what is that?

Whatever or whoever it is, I have the disturbing feeling that it’s what is blocking me, and also that as I look at it, it’s looking straight back at me, with a kind of predatory fascination.

Adrian

“Hello. Who’s this?”

“Ade, it’s Fred, who you are coming to meet.”

“Yeah, Fred, right. Look, mate, I’m en route, amn’t I? Bit optimistic getting through the formalities and then from the old aeroporto to the city in forty-odd minutes. Sorry about that, but you know what it’s like. In a water taxi wotsit now, though, making maximum speed. Driver says we should be there in about ten, fifteen minutes. That be all right?”

“Yes. Adrian, please tell your driver to take you to the Rialto. I’ll meet you there. Not San Marco, I’m running late too and we should get to the Rialto at about the same time.”

“Rialto, not San Marco. Gotcha. That’s the bridge, innit?”

“That’s right.”

“Okey-doke. See you there, mate.”

“Don’t display the box, though.”

“Eh? Oh. Okay.”

“Stand as close as you can to the very middle of the bridge, right at the top of the walking surface.”

“Got that. Middle, top.”

“What outer clothes are you wearing?”

“Blue jeans, white shirt, sort of, umm, orangey, beigey leather jacket.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Okay, then. See you there.”

Madame d’Ortolan

The voice was sing-song. “Here-here, hyah-hyah!”

In the main study of the Palazzo Chirezzia, Bisquitine sat sprawled, unladylike, on a rather grand couch whose white covering had only recently been removed. She picked her nose, then inspected the finger involved, cross-eyed. Mrs Siankung sat to one side of her, one of her handlers to the other. Madame d’Ortolan sat on an ornate chair a couple of metres away across a Persian rug and a still sheet-covered occasional table. The other handlers stood behind the couch.

“Now, my dear,” Madame d’Ortolan said quietly, “be very sure about this. He’s still here, still in the city? Still in Venice. Are you certain?”

Bisquitine sucked in her lips, looked meaningfully up at the painted ceiling of the study and said, “These are my lawyers, called Gumsip and Slurridge, they’ll send you the bill and then talk of demurrage.” She smiled broadly, displaying white teeth with little bits of seaweed stuck between them. The body she’d found herself within when they had transitioned had been that of a smartly dressed young woman carrying a briefcase. She’d been standing on a pontoon waiting for a vaporetto when her own consciousness had been displaced by that of Bisquitine, who had immediately decided the weed growing on the side of the floating jetty looked edible; in fact, delicious.

Madame d’Ortolan looked at Mrs Siankung, who watched Bisquitine with anxious concentration. Bisquitine appeared dishevelled already; hair awry, her businesswoman’s jacket removed as an annoyance, her blouse hanging half out, buttons undone at the bottom, tights laddered, shoes discarded. She brought her head back, and stuck her jaw out, lowering her voice to something close to a man’s as she said, “Blinkenscoop, why, you silly man, what do you call this? A fine to-do, to do, to-do, to-do, to-do-oo-oo. I can’t see with you in the way. Begone, you tea urchin!”

“She will need one of the other blockers to be sure,” Mrs Siankung announced.

Madame d’Ortolan and Mr Kleist exchanged glances. They were

out of character, in a sense. He was too young, wiry and blond, she too fat and awkward, with badly dyed grey-black hair and a loud orange velour trouser suit. Mrs Siankung was similarly wrong, manifesting as a massive, robustly built woman in a voluminous yellow dress who needed a three-pointed aluminium stick to walk. They’d had no time to find body types closer to their own, especially as they’d all had to transition together with Bisquitine and her handlers, who had been similarly randomised in physiques.

Madame d’Ortolan frowned. “A blocker? You’re sure?”

“I think you mean a spotter,” Mr Kleist suggested.

“No, a blocker,” Mrs Siankung said, reaching out to flick an unruly lock off her charge’s forehead. “And it has to be one of those who was here earlier, with the first intervention team.”

Madame d’Ortolan glanced at Mr Kleist and nodded. He left the room. Bisquitine made as though to slap Mrs Siankung’s hand away, then started pulling at her long, brown, still mostly gathered-up hair, tugging a thick length of it free and putting the end of it in her mouth and starting to chew contentedly on it. She looked at a distant painting with an expression of great concentration.

“What will happen to the blocker?” Madame d’Ortolan asked.

Mrs Siankung looked at her. “You know what will happen.”

Mr Kleist returned with one of the two blockers a few minutes later.

The young man had been dried off after his dunking in the canal beside the palace’s landing stage. His dark hair was slicked down, he was dressed in a towelling robe and he was smoking a cigarette.

“Put that out,” Mrs Siankung told him.

“I work better with it,” he said, glancing to Madame d’Ortolan, who remained expressionless.

He sighed, took a final deep draw, found an ashtray on the broad desk and stubbed the cigarette out. He took a frowning look at Bisquitine as he did so. She was in turn obviously fascinated by him, staring wide-eyed and still holding the hank of hair to her mouth while she chewed noisily at it.

A slight, bald man hurried through the study doors, came up to Madame d’Ortolan and kissed her hand.

“Madame, I am at your disposal.”

“Professore Loscelles,” she replied, patting his hand. “A pleasure, as ever. I am so sorry your lovely home has been made such a mess of.”

“Not at all, not at all,” he murmured.

“Please stay, will you?”

“Certainly.”

The Professore stood at the rear of Madame d’Ortolan’s chair.

The sheet-covered table was moved back and the young man who was employed as a blocker was sat on a chair immediately in front of Bisquitine, almost knee to knee. He looked a little nervous. He pulled the robe tighter, cleared his throat.

“She will take your wrists,” Mrs Siankung told him.

He nodded, cleared his throat again. Bisquitine looked expectantly at Mrs Siankung, who nodded. The girl made a noise like “Grooh!” and sat forward quickly, grabbing at the young man’s wrists and encircling them as best she could with her own smaller hands while she thudded her head against his chest.

The reaction was immediate. The young man bowed his back, jackknifed forward and as though doing so deliberately vomited copiously over Bisquitine’s head, hair and back before quivering as though suffering a fit and starting to slump backwards in the seat and then slide forwards out of it, legs splaying as he lost control of his bladder and bowels at the same time.

“Dear fuck!” Madame d’Ortolan said, standing so suddenly that she knocked her chair over.

Professore Loscelles put a handkerchief to his mouth and nose and turned away, bowing his head.

Mr Kleist did not react at all, save to glance briefly, as though concerned, at Madame d’Ortolan. Then he walked over and carefully set her chair upright again.

Mrs Siankung moved her feet away from the mess.

Bisquitine didn’t seem to have noticed, still cuddling into the young man and pulling him to her as he spasmed and jerked and voided noisily from various orifices.

“Who’s a bad boy, then?” they heard Bisquitine say over the noises of evacuation coming from the young man, her voice muffled as she hugged his shaking body and they collapsed together onto the floor. A thick, earthy stink filled the air. “Who’s a bad boy? Where’s this? Where’s this, then? You tell me. Ay, Ferrovia, Ferrovia, al San Marco, Fondamenta Venier, Ay! Giacobbe, is that you? No, it’s not me. Ponte Guglie; alora, Rio Tera De La Madalena. Strada Nova, al San Marco. Alora; il Quadri. Due espressi, per favore, signori. Bozman, who said you could come along? Get back, get away, get thee to your own shop, if you have one!… Euh, yucky.” Bisquitine seemed to notice the mess she was lying in. She let go of the young man, who flopped lifeless on the rug, streaked with his own excrement. His eyes – wide, almost popping – stared up at the biblical scene depicted on the ceiling.

Bisquitine got to her feet, smiling brightly. She stuck the length of hair in her mouth again, then made a sour face and spat it out. She continued to spit for a few more moments before holding her arms out to Mrs Siankung as a child would, straight, fingers spread. “Bath time!” she cried out.

Madame d’Ortolan looked to Professore Loscelles, who was dabbing at his lips with his handkerchief. He nodded. “It would sound,” he said hoarsely, “as though the person is heading from Santa Lucia – the railway station – towards the Piazza San Marco. So it would seem, given the names of the thoroughfares mentioned. Or they may already be there, at the Quadri. It is a café and rather fine restaurant. Very good cake.”

Madame d’Ortolan looked at the other man standing nearby. “Mr Kleist?”

“I’ll see to it, ma’am.” He left the room.

Bisquitine stamped one foot, messily. “Bath time!” she said loudly.

Mrs Siankung looked to Madame d’Ortolan, who said, “Shower.” She glanced distastefully at Bisquitine. “And don’t tarry. We may need her again, soon.”

The Transitionary

I make my way through the slow bustle of tourists on the main route leading towards the Rialto and beyond towards both the Accademia and Piazza San Marco, moving as quickly as I can without actually throwing people aside or trampling small children. “Scusi. Scusi, scusi, signora, excuse me, sorry, scusi, coming through. Scusi, scusi…”

At the same time I’m still trying to monitor what’s going on just across the Grand Canal. What a stew of conflicting talents and abilities are massed around the Palazzo Chirezzia! There are blockers and trackers and inhibitors and foreseers and adepts with skills I barely recognise, many of them recently arrived. I think I can identify individual presences now, too. That one there would be Madame d’Ortolan, this one here might be Professore Loscelles. And at the centre of them all that bizarre presence, that strange, guileless malignity.

One of the blockers seems to have gone. I remember the first blocker I’d Tasered, the young man who was smoking and fell into the small canal at the side of the palace. He isn’t there any more. And some of the others are starting to move, quitting the Chirezzia and streaming in this direction, heading for the Rialto, others clustering in what must be a launch—

“Jesus! Hey! Watch where you’re going! What the – I mean, Jesus.”

“Scusi, sorry, sorry, signore, I beg your pardon,” I tell the backpacker I’ve just knocked to his knees, helping him back up to a surrounding chorus of tutting.

“Well, just—”

“Scusi!” Then I’m off again, sliding and dancing through the crowd like the people are flags on a slalom course, leading with one shoulder then the other, sliding and swivelling on the balls of my feet. The boat with the half-dozen or so Concern people in it is on its way down the Grand Canal. More – maybe a dozen – are on foot, heading over the Rialto now. I’m just a couple of minutes away from there. If they turn left on its far side, they’ll pass right by me or we’ll bump into each other.

My phone goes. It’s Ade. A symbol on the display that wasn’t flashing before is flashing now. I suspect the battery is about to give out.

“Fred?”

“Hello, Adrian.”

“Just landed at the Rialto, mate, just past the vaporetto sort of floating bus stop wotsit. On the bridge in one minute.”

“I’ll see you very shortly.”

I stop, walking into the doorway of a glove shop, breathing hard. I still can’t flit across to another person. I can feel the squad of Concern people splitting up, most heading on down the main route for San Marco, three coming this way. I turn to face the calle and close down as much as I can, calming myself, attempting, if it’s possible, to take all that I can of my new abilities off-line. A minute or two passes, the street teems with people. I recognise somebody and my heart leaps, then I realise they’re heading the other way and it’s just the backpacker I bowled into earlier. I try a quick toe-in reading with my sense of where the Concern people are. All three of the nearest are still heading up the way I’ve just come.

I walk out and on and turn a corner, find myself facing the eastern end of the Rialto.

Madame d’Ortolan

“Cripes! Heads up, mateys! Here’s our boy! Whoop whoop! Last one in’s a scallop! I say, that ain’t politic. I ain’t even broke my fast yet, dontcha know?”

“What? Where?” Madame d’Ortolan said. She glared at Mrs Siankung. “Is this something new?”

Mrs Siankung stared into Bisquitine’s eyes, letting one of the other handlers take over the job of towelling her hair dry. “I think so,” she said. They were in one of the main bedroom suites of the palace. Mr Kleist and Professore Loscelles looked on, as did Bisquitine’s handlers and a spotter in a schoolboy’s uniform who was keeping in continual touch with the intervention teams heading for the San Marco and the smaller groups checking out the other places that Bisquitine had already mentioned. Bisquitine sat on the bed in a white towelling robe like the one the unfortunate young blocker had been wearing. “This is the bad man?” Mrs Siankung asked her gently.

Bisquitine nodded. “Dish it all, Chaplip, I’m hungry! I mean, jeepahs!”

Mrs Siankung took one of the girl’s hands in both of hers, stroking it as though it was a pet. “We shall eat, my love. Very soon. You get dressed now and we go to eat, yes? Where is the bad man?”

“Sausinges would be nice. I says it like that cos it’s cute. Where’s my old ma, then? I ain’t seen her round the blinkin farmstead in mumfs.”

“The bad man, my love.”

“He’s here, love-a-kins,” Bisquitine said, putting her face very close to Mrs Siankung’s. “Shalls we to go see da bad mun?” she said, deep-voiced, as though talking to a baby. She shook her head. “Shalls we? Shalls we to go and see the bad mun? Shalls we? Shalls we?”

“Yes,” Mrs Siankung said quietly, at the same time as Madame d’Ortolan shouted, “Enough of this!”

Bisquitine seemed to ignore them both. She stuck one finger sharply up into the air, narrowly missing the eye of the handler towelling her hair. “To the Rialto, me hearties! Realty bound! Tally fucking prostimitute!”

Madame d’Ortolan looked at Professore Loscelles. “The Rialto. That’s close, isn’t it?”

“Five minutes away,” he told her.

Mrs Siankung patted Bisquitine’s hand. “We’ll get you dressed,” she started to say.

“No, we won’t,” Madame d’Ortolan said, standing. “Bring her as she is. It’s warm out.” She looked sourly round them all. Only Professore Loscelles appeared like himself or well enough turned out to be presentable. “We can’t look any more ridiculous than we do already.”

The Transitionary

It looks like all humanity is packing the Rialto; the bridge over the Grand Canal is compact but massive, sturdy yet elegant. Two lines of small packed shops are separated by the broad central way whose surface is composed of flights of shallow grey-surfaced steps edged with the same cream-coloured marble found throughout the city. Behind the shops two further walkways face up and down the canal, linked to the pitched street of the central thoroughfare at either end and the centre. The walkway facing south-west is the busier as it provides a longer, more open view down the Canal and the bustle of boats plying its milky blue-green waters.

They’ve left the Palazzo Chirezzia. The thing, the person, the nexus of sheer terrifying weirdness is on the move, and so is practically everybody else who was still there, including Madame herself and the Prof. They’re a minute away; they can probably see the bridge by now.

My mobile phone goes and I start to answer it, seeing that it’s Adrian. The display blinks off. The phone won’t come back to life. I shove it in a pocket and start up the slope of the Rialto with the rest of the tourist crowd.

Madame d’Ortolan

“When, sir? Why, sir. I’ll tell you when, then; between the Quilth of Octoldyou-so and the Nonce of Distember, THAT’S JOLLY WELL WHEN!” Bisquitine’s shout echoed off the surrounding buildings.

“Hush, my dear,” Mrs Siankung said, conscious of the stares they were attracting.

They were on the Ruga Orefici, within sight of the Rialto. Bisquitine padded happily along in the midst of their motley collection of ungainly bodies and unfortunate clothing styles. She wore the same towelling robe she’d been wrapped in after her shower and had been persuaded into a pair of panties but had adamantly refused shoes or even slippers. She hugged the gown about her, looked round at the various shops with their excitingly bright displays and tried unsuccessfully to whistle.

The smell of a bakery distracted her as the square in front of San Giacomo di Rialto opened out to their left.

“Still hungry!” she cried out.

“I know, dear,” Mrs Siankung said, trying to keep an arm round the girl’s waist. “We’ll eat soon.”

“Wot you lookin at then, squire?” Bisquitine said in a deep voice as two bronze-skinned teenage girls passed by, staring and then laughing at her. “Pop a crap on yo petal, bitches, upside ya head. An no mitsake, mistake, mystique, Mustique. I meant that.”

“Shush now, dear.”

“Claudia?” a man said suddenly, stepping right in front of Bisquitine. She had to stop, as did the others. The man was tall. He wore sunglasses, had salt-and-pepper hair, wore a suit and carried a briefcase. He took the sunglasses off, frowned, eyes screwing up as he stared into Bisquitine’s eyes.

“Ill met by sunlight, my good fellow,” Bisquitine said haughtily. “Why, I’ve half a mind to scratch the boundah!”

The man looked confused and concerned in equal measure. “Claudia?” he asked. “Is that you? You were supposed to be at—” He took a step back, taking in the knot of people obviously with this woman who looked like somebody he knew and yet was not her. “Hey, what the hell’s—”

Mr Kleist didn’t wait for the nod from Madame d’Ortolan. He stepped up to the man, saying. “Sir, if I may explain…” and did a straight-finger jab into his throat. Gasping, eyes wide, unable to speak, clutching his gullet, the man staggered back. It had been done so quickly that it seemed nobody had noticed. “I’ll catch you up,” Mr Kleist told the others quietly. He squatted as he made the man sit down on the road surface, still wheezing and struggling for air. Madame d’Ortolan glared at Mr Kleist but he couldn’t just leave the man making that noise. He told himself that he was lingering here because he needed to make sure the man stayed down, out of action, not likely to follow them, but really it was to stop him making that terrible choking, gasping noise; to ease him. He pinched the fellow’s neck, attempting to reopen his windpipe. The man tried to bat his hand away. A crowd of people had formed around them and he heard somebody call for the carabinieri. The man made a series of terrible gagging, strangling, sucking noises.

Bisquitine glanced back as they hurried away. “Dat gotta hurt, sho nuff. I’d get some cream on that. Trot on!”

“Dearest,” Mrs Siankung said, “please. We’re nearly there. Very soon.”

“When, sir? Why, sir. I’ll tell you when, then; somba tyme atwixt da the Quilth of Oncoldyou-such and zee Chonce of Plastemper; tankums, wilcums, noddinks, hurtsies. Oh-dear-oh-dear-oh-drear. Oh-dear-oh-drear-oh-drolldums. The backstroke? In these shoes? Have you taken leafs off your fences? Enough already. You muddy funster; you’re landfill.”

“I wish we could shut her up,” Madame d’Ortolan muttered to Professore Loscelles as they hurried up towards the broad shallow steps of the Rialto itself.

“I suspect—” the Professore began.

“Tuk-tuk, talkink in the ranks!” Bisquitine sounded affronted.

“There there, dearest,” Mrs Siankung said, patting her arm. She glanced back at Madame d’Ortolan.

“Noo,” Bisquitine intoned in her deep, masculine-sounding voice. “But quate appy to use this poor damaged creatchah for your own dimmed ignoble ends, midim. Ain’t dat de trute!”

“Bisq, shh!”

“Poor damaged creatchah, poor damaged creatchah…”

They had climbed almost to the summit of the Rialto, the crowds growing ever thicker and more chaotic. Madame d’Ortolan grasped Mrs Siankung’s arm. “Is he here?”

Bisquitine stopped suddenly, did a little dance and with one arm straight out pointing said triumphantly, “Bingo! Bandits ahoy, chumlets! Thar she blows!”

Adrian

So I’m standing here at the very top of the very middle bit of the Rialto in Venice, feeling like a bit of a muppet and wondering what the chances are that this is some gigantic long-winded, long-game wind-up. (Except it can’t be, can it? All that monthis as standard instruction ey over the years was real enough, and the box Mrs M sent and Fred asked me to bring didn’t show up in my hand luggage when I went through Heathrow security, did it? Sailed past.) But anyway, that isn’t stopping me from getting that What-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here? feeling, even though, yes, it’s all very lovely in a sunny, chocolate-boxy, can’t-move-for-bleedin-tourists kind of a way, and here I go having to step away from the very top of the very centre bit yet again because yet another group of Japanese or Chinese or whatever tourists want to take a photograph of one of them standing at exactly that point, when this little bunch of frankly not very well dressed people come marching up the steps from the opposite direction I arrived from.

There’s a mousy bint in a white dressing gown in the middle of them, hair straggling everywhere, muttering to herself. Proper nutter. Then she sees me and sort of jogs on the spot and points and blabbers something, just as I feel a hand on my elbow, cupping it like a brandy glass but I don’t know which way to look because this lot with the lady in white at their centre are all fucking looking at me now and starting up the slope towards me while the person behind me holding my elbow says quietly, “Adrian? I’m Fred.”

The Transitionary

Adrian turns to me and his expression and body language changes instantly. “Tem, my darling man,” he says.

I stare at him, then look beyond him to where the others are, the small group intermittently visible through the swirl of people coming and going and chattering and laughing on the bridge. This group includes Madame d’Ortolan, Professore Loscelles and the frightening weirdness of the presence that has been blocking my new-found abilities for the last half-hour. Except she isn’t blocking them any more. Not since the instant that somebody different stepped into Adrian’s shoes.

The approaching group is six or seven metres away, hurrying raggedly towards us.

“Tem, my love,” Adrian says. “I believe you’re free to do something now. I think you’d better do it. Leave Madame d’O. I need to talk to her.”

I can’t approach the girl’s mind. The rest – the people who attend her, the Prof, the muscle boys and the specialist adepts, including a guy called Kleist who’s hurrying towards the group from the street behind – them I can work with. They all become convinced they really are tourists and just wander off to look at the lovely views. I work the same trick with the rest of the intervention teams, all of whom had been ordered to about-turn and are in the process of converging on the Rialto. The group in the launch – currently exceeding the speed limit back up the Grand Canal to a wavelike chorus of shouts and horns, and almost at the Rialto – unanimously decide to visit Burano for ice creams, though they’ll be pulled over by a police launch near the railway station a few minutes later anyway.

Meanwhile, all l’Expédience people who were carrying weapons have picked them out of their pockets with looks of puzzled distaste and, holding them by thumb and finger, disposed of them. Four Tasers and six handguns have splashed into canals, to join all the other secrets the waves have hidden over the centuries. The whole fragre of the locality relaxes distinctly.

For a few moments, Madame d’Ortolan is left bewildered. Then she starts shouting furiously at her people as they saunter away wide-eyed, smiling, ignoring her. “Mr Kleist! Loscelles! Mr Kleist!”

Only Bisquitine remains unaffected, looking bemused as the people around her disperse. “Rum to-do,” she muses, and picks her nose. “Business elsewhere, Mr Rumblebunk, I’ll be bound.”

So I have time to ask Adrian, “Mrs M?”

She makes Adrian bow. “Indeed. Hello, Tem. Glad you jumped the way you did. Welcome aboard.”

“You can do this? Flit to somebody who’s already been transitioned?”

She spreads Adrian’s arms, “Patently. Well, when it was me who popped their transitioning cherry, anyway. Good trick, eh? I’ve been developing my talents. So have you, obviously. Congratulations.”

“The people on the list?”

“Safe. I got to all of them first.” She winks at me. “It’ll cost ya.”

“And what now?”

“I’m afraid you have to go, my love.” She feels inside the jacket, pulls out the box that Adrian brought from London and gives it to me. “Take this and get well away, Tem. I mean, well away, untraceably distant.” She glances round to see Madame d’Ortolan looking undecided, then, with a word and a nod to the girl in the white robe, start towards us again. She turns back. “No matter what happens here, you need to disappear. Whoever controls the Concern, even if it’s the good guys, chances are they’ll want to find you and take your mind to bits to find out how you can flit without septus. Or they’ll just kill you.” She smiles, nods at the box. “Soon you won’t need that.” Again, she glances briefly towards Madame d’Ortolan, who is having to push a party of laughing Chinese girls out of the way to get to us. “Now go,” she says, closing my fingers round the box. “You’ve done all you can. This is my show now. I hope I see you again. Go.” She places a finger briefly on my lips, then turns away to face Madame d’Ortolan.

Mrs Mulverhill

The angry-looking woman in the orange velour jumpsuit walks up to the man in the tan jacket, ignoring the jostling crowds and the wash of humanity pressing in from all sides. The girl in the white towelling robe trails vaguely after her, still digging into her nose with the one remaining fingernail she hasn’t broken or cracked in the hours since she found herself in this body. She sighs. “Still hungry,” she mutters. She finds something up her nose and eats it. Success! Chewy and salty.

Madame d’Ortolan stands in front of Mrs Mulverhill, close enough for the veloured breasts and belly of her current incarnation to touch Adrian’s shirt, open jacket, jeans. She stares into the grey-green eyes.

“Hello, Theodora,” Mrs Mulverhill says, in Adrian’s pleasantly deep voice. “How’s tricks?” Madame d’Ortolan tries to take Adrian’s wrists in her hands but finds her own wrists grasped. “I don’t think so, Theodora. Let’s stay here and discuss this like civilised people, shall we?”

“What in the holy fuck are you, Mulverhill?”

“Just a concerned citizen of the Concern, Theodora.” Mrs Mulverhill uses Adrian’s face to smile over Madame d’Ortolan at the girl in the white robe.

Bisquitine waves back with one finger. “Sui amazaro. Climb ev’ry woman. Ah belong to you, Underground.”

“You hypocritical bitch.”

“Oh, now, Theodora, I’m not the one trying to murder my way to absolute power within the Central Council. You might have noticed your loyalists have gone unharmed.”

“Really? What about Harmyle?”

“Oh, he was a traitor so many times over that I’m not sure even he knew who he was betraying at the end. He was a disloyalist. I think offing him was just to get your attention.”

“You think. Let’s ask Oh himself, shall we?” Madame d’Ortolan struggles to free her hands, in vain.

“The point is I could have murdered them all in their sleep if I’d wanted to. But then I’m not you. I’m going to stay an outsider.”

“You’ll stay dead when we kill you.”

“You’d have to catch me first, which you have signally failed to do so far.”

“Try flitting now, then.”

“Oh, I know, so close to your little friend here, we’re all stuck with what we’ve got.”

“And with their vulnerabilities,” Madame d’Ortolan hisses, and tries to knee Adrian’s body in the balls. Mrs Mulverhill turns Adrian to one side, still gripping Madame d’Ortolan’s wrists. The velour-padded knee thuds into the side of Adrian’s thigh.

“Ow! Now, Theodora: civilised, remember?”

“Eye bee eye bee for eye for-oh,” Bisquitine sings. “It’s all idiotic nonsense. Mama’s little baby loves shortbus, shortbus.” She is standing quite close behind Madame d’Ortolan. She sticks her tongue out the side of her mouth, extends one index finger and pokes Madame d’Ortolan in the small of her orange-clad back. “Me belly finks me froat’s cut. Wot’s a gel to do then, sing for me suppa? I should cocoa, coco. Let me tell you.”

Madame d’Ortolan whirls round as best she can with her wrists still held and spits, “Do not touch me!”

Bisquitine takes a step back and folds her arms, looking grumpy. “Leiplig!” she growls. “My war chariot! At once, d’you hear!”

Madame d’Ortolan turns and presses further into Adrian, who tenses as Mrs Mulverhill holds her ground. Madame d’Ortolan goes on tiptoe to put her mouth as close as she can to Adrian’s ear. “If I had a gun I’d blow your brains out the top of your fucking head.”

“Jings. We’ll take that rifle now, Chuck.”

Mrs Mulverhill makes Adrian sigh. “You’re not entirely comfortable with this whole ‘civilised’ concept, are you, Theodora?”

“Why are you doing this, Mulverhill? You could have been on the Council years ago. There’d have been peace, a pardon. No grudges. We’re pragmatists and you’re gifted. You made your point. What more can you want?”

“Give up this day our Mendelbrot.”

“All this is tired, Theodora,” Adrian’s voice says. Mrs Mulverhill uses Adrian’s face to smile at a couple of passing nuns, monochrome punctuations amidst the colourful throng. “And keeping me talking while your teams come groggily back to their senses isn’t going to work. In the meantime our man Tem is getting away, and anyway, your little chum there is ticking down to zero.” She nods at Bisquitine, who is staring intently at the back of Madame d’Ortolan’s head.

“Und dat is dat und vat noo? Terminé, terminé.”

“Let me worry about her.”

“I wish you had, but it’s too late now,” Adrian’s voice says with every appearance of resignation and sadness. “Madam, I don’t think you realise what you’ve unleashed here.”

“And you do, of course.”

“Yes. Like Tem, I can see round corners.”

“We’ll get him.”

“Too late, I got to him long ago.”

“I bet you did, my sweet.”

“My finest pupil. Though it was you who really brought him on. All those missions. Were you trying to kill him?”

“Yes.”

Mrs Mulverhill raises one of Adrian’s eyebrows. “Well,” she observes drily, “there’s blowback for you. Between us we’ve made him something very special. He’ll go far.”

“Urry up please, it’s time.”

“It won’t be far enough. We’ll get him.”

“Soon there will be no ‘we,’ Theodora. You will be on your own, exiled.”

“We’ll see about that, too.”

“I don’t mean just from the Council. I’m talking about what she’s about to do.” She nods at Bisquitine again. “She can make solipsists of us all. You’ll never see Calbefraques again, Theodora.”

Madame d’Ortolan smiles humourlessly. “You aren’t frightening me, my sweet.”

“Theodora, it’s settled. This is already over. I can see the ways forward from here and they all—”

“Go to fuck!” Madame d’Ortolan shouts as she struggles again to free her hands. Mrs Mulverhill keeps Adrian’s body turned to the side, protecting his groin.

Bisquitine rolls her eyes. “Excuse your being French. I’ll thank you to keep a civil lung in your chest. Oy! I is posimitively Biafric here, missus wumin. Do I look facking Effiopian? You caahnt.” Madame d’Ortolan ignores her.

Inside Adrian’s head, Mrs Mulverhill can still sense Tem’s presence. She has a sudden vision of him standing at the bar of a café, just out of Bisquitine’s damping range. He’s draining an espresso, quickly. She can feel the various Concern people starting to remember who and where they were, and why. Then Tem’s presence winks out. “Bless you,” she murmurs.

“What?”

“Help me, General Betrayus, you’re my only hope.”

“Nothing. What’s it all been for, Theodora? Apart from power.”

“You know what it’s all been for.”

She smiles. “I think I do, now. But you can’t hold it back for ever.”

“Yes, I can. There are a lot of for evers. They add up. And it’s all about power, you fuckwit bitch. Not mine; humanity’s. No diminution, no subjugation, no ‘contextualisation,’ no aboriginalisation.”

Mrs Mulverhill shakes Adrian’s head. “You really are a racist, aren’t you, Theodora?”

Madame d’Ortolan bares her teeth. “A human racist, and proud to be so.”

“Nevertheless. We will meet up. They will be here. In any event, it will happen.”

“Over the dead bodies of every fucking one of them.”

“That will soon no longer be in your power.”

“You think so?”

“Like it or not.”

“I like it not.”

“Terminé. Hoopla!”

Adrian/Mrs Mulverhill glances over Madame d’Ortolan at the girl in the white towelling robe. “Goodbye, Theodora,” she makes Adrian say, and lets go of the woman’s wrists, pushing her gently away while the crowd surges all around them.

Bisquitine, tired with it all, says, “Ach, then get ye gone, all ye.”

And, in a blink, go they did, to the scattered realities she flung them to; every remaining Concern consciousness on Earth – save for two – just disappearing, plucked and hurled away to their various fates, a few part-chosen by themselves – where those being thrown had the time and the wit to grasp what was happening and were allowed to exercise some control over their cross-reality trajectory by Bisquitine – but many with no understanding and no control permitted, tumbling into wherever they happened to have been directed, some more pointedly than others.

The one who thought of herself as Madame d’Ortolan was heaved away with particularly enthusiastic gusto but also with a kind of ruthless disregard, with no control allowed over her own destination but also with no exceptional care taken by Bisquitine over where d’Ortolan landed or what her precise fate would be. Let her know that control was not everything and that she had been dismissed, discarded; judged by the abused freak as being unworthy of any singular treatment. That would hurt more than any contrived tormenting.

All that mattered was that they were gone and they could control her no longer; she was finally free of them. They had let her grow too strong because they’d thought they were so clever and she was so stupid, only she wasn’t so stupid after all, no matter how clever they might think they were, and they had never really understood what she could do and what she had kept hidden from them. That was because there was a core inside her, a steely soul of rage they’d never really glimpsed in her because she’d kept it concealed from them for all that time, unafraid, and only finally unleashed it now, when they’d thought to use her and she had used them instead. So there!

The people who had been taken over were suddenly back again, staggering, looking round, astonished, nonplussed, wondering what had happened, where the day had gone. The woman in the orange velour jumpsuit looked around her, not really registering the man in the tan jacket standing a couple of paces ahead of her. She turned round, frowned at the strange-looking woman dressed in what looked like a hotel dressing gown, then pushed past her and wandered off to be consumed by the swarming crowd.

But he didn’t go, Bisquitine noticed. The man in the tan jacket who’d been waiting at the exact centre of the bridge, the one who’d given the box to the man who’d walked away (who had then disappeared all by himself), the one who’d held on to the bossy orange woman and had looked over her head at her; when all the rest were gone, that man was still there.

She looked at him, frowning, lips pursed, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed. She thrust her jaw out, briefly bit her bottom lip. “Say, you’re from outa town.”

“You can stop now,” he said to her, gently. She thought he seemed very gentle altogether.

“That’s not very funny, Sidney. That’s not very sunny, Fidney.”

“Can I ask you your name? It’s Bisquitine, is that right?”

She stood at attention, made a salute. “Right as rain, left as lightning. Straight on till wottevah. Innit.”

“Do you remember me, Bisquitine? Last time I saw you they were calling you Subject Seven. We talked. Do you remember?”

Bisquitine shook her head. “Disblamer: cannot be held responsible for acts carried out by the previous administrators. Now under old management.”

“You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

“Wide asleep, fast awake. Lost yer bandana, ave you? I et one of them once; was yeller, not grey.”

“Ah-hah.” The man smiled at her. (She saw, now. She’d thought he’d seemed familiar. The woman was inside the man. That was a bit tupsy-torvy!) “So,” the man-woman said. “Are you all right now?”

“We apologise for any convenience caused.”

“Listen, Seven, Bisquitine; I’m going to have to go soon. Is there anything I can do for you before that?”

“Yo, you cookin wit gas, now, hep cat. Cool. Hot properly.”

“Why don’t you come down this way? We’ll find a café, sit down, maybe have something to eat. What do you say?”

“Shiver me timbres, matey-boy. About flipping time, me old teapot!”

“I’m going to take your hand, is that all right?”

“Better men than you have tried, Thruckley. Leave me here. I’ll only slow you down. That’s an order, mister. Let’s get outa here. Pesky kids.”

“It’s okay. There. Come on. We’ll sit down. You’ll be okay. I’ll get somebody to come for you.”

“Lummy. There’ll be no going back, mind. Not on my escapement.”

“They’ll be my people, not the others. You’ll be okay. I swear.”

“This isn’t about you, it’s me.”

“Let’s get that gown closed, okay? There you go.”

“I take full responsibility.”

“That’s better.”

“Funny old life, sport.”

“Okay?”

“Random.”