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The TransContinental was packed, as always.

As Dran Florrian turned away from the observation window, a young man in a logoed coverall, sour with the odour of three-day-old sweat, brushed too close—and for a moment Florrian saw, vivid against the deep black of his skin, the pink of gills at his throat, pulsing voraciously. A popular mod these days amongst the worst-off: the man would be paid a small incentive for the work his reconfigured respiratory system did in filtering the blackened atmosphere below.

In here, however, in mid-leap above the smog layer, the air was relatively clear, the gills’ incessant palpitation without purpose. Florrian knew—as the man surely did not—that the blood-poisoning his modifications were inflicting hour by hour would kill their owner long before his tiny government stipend ever amounted to anything. The incentive was a small, wheedling fix, when what was needed was the vast, the drastic, the world-defining.

An alarm trilled in Florrian’s ear—and though he’d been expecting it, he still started. The young man eyed him curiously, and Florrian wondered if he was an agent, as anyone on the TransCon could be and one in every twenty surely were. He forced calm, gave the young man a carefully measured smile that said, Nothing I’m doing is any of your business. The young man turned away, and after quick consideration, pushed deeper into the TransCon’s lounge, elbowing past a woman with tightly bound grey hair above engineer’s epaulettes, who looked at him with hatred. The press closed behind him and he was gone.

Florrian took the measure of the lounge once more, his gaze drifting over the moulded plastic of the benches, cramped with bodies pressed so close that they appeared to overlap. Looking back over his shoulder, he gave one last glance to the protruding bulge of the observation window, the TransCon’s only slight concession to form over function. Before he started moving he singled out one head, turned somewhat away from him, a woman with bronzed skin and lustrous black hair cut above the ears. He gave a half nod, as though in greeting, and sidled towards her.

Only at the last moment did he veer aside. His true objective was a door marked NO ENTRY in heavy block case, recessed discreetly from the public space. It was unguarded; but unguarded did not mean the same as unwatched, and neither implied that it wasn’t alarmed. Florrian considered the back of his hand, the small diamond of discoloration nestled just beneath the skin. He had his doubts about the crack on his Ident Plant. Necessity had narrowed his contacts to only the most shadowy and disreputable—and in the end, to a man whose name he’d never asked or been offered.

“What will my new identity be?” Florrian had asked. “What does it say?”

The old hacker barely glanced up from his work. “You don’t need to know.”

“What if they stop me?”

“If they stop you it’s already over.” The old man’s eyes drifted to Florrian’s right forearm, crinkled, refocused, as though they were seeing for an instant through skin and sinew—as for all Florrian knew they were. “You’ve got something there, don’t you? They stop you, do for yourself quick . . . or else they’ll do you slow.”

Florrian knew what would happen to him if he was caught. No crime was less forgivable than changing sides, as they’d surely assume he had done. They would empty his head like cats around a broken fish tank, not caring what else came out so long as there was even the possibility of valuable information. They would take their time, as the old hacker had said.

Yet the crack had activated on time and it had got him aboard, his cargo too, which was more than he’d dared hope for. Now every step felt like pushing luck he had no right to expect. They had made him a spy—because, they said, it was impossible these days to be a great scientist and not be a great spy also. Because if he worked for them, (and what choice was there but to work for them?) then by default he knew too much. They would protect what was in his head by any means necessary. If he was to be a scientist, then he must be a weapon too, and he must be their weapon.

Anger lurched into Florrian’s thoughts. He stilled it—as they had taught him to. He raised his hand to the scanner’s glinting eye, a casual gesture. The eye blinked, red and then green. The door hushed into its frame.

There were stairs down. He took them hurriedly. If he met anyone, then he could not explain his presence. He had dressed functionally, anonymously, but still he did not belong. If he was discovered, it would come to violence, one way or another—and for all the training they’d forced into him, Florrian had no liking of violence.

At least he knew where he was going. The TransCon’s schematics had not been hard to find. At the bottom of the stairs he turned left into a tight tunnel of metal, excessively lit, and continued halfway down its length. There was a door to the right, another lock, and this time Florrian didn’t hesitate. The access light flickered, red, red, red—and then green. The door whispered aside.

The TransCon’s storage bay was even larger than he’d imagined: larger than the passenger compartments on the level above and every bit as claustrophobically packed. Here near the door were smaller items of personal luggage, strapped in dense tiers with bands of lurid orange elastic. He pressed further in, through the rows of ceiling-high shelving, until the space opened out.

And there it was. Encased in its shockproof carrigel it was a monolith of lime green, no different to the other cargo arranged around it like graffiti-spattered ruins of some antediluvian culture. Only its sheer size gave it away; its peak nearly brushed the steel rafters. When Florrian touched his palm to the gel and dug with his fingertips it shrank and withdrew with a faint sucking hiss, until its entire mass was a ball cupped in the palm of his hand.

He put the ball at his feet and inspected the newly revealed machine, caressing its front panel, inspecting for any slight damage. It was vaguely humanoid: a sphere of blistered metal above an angular carriage of black plastic, with panels protruding at either side, one of which curved around its front like an arm bent ready for a bow. Towards its base the surface spread into a metallic skirt, wherein lay most of the actual mechanism. It was far from being the most attractive thing he’d designed; in fact, it was ugly, unfinished-seeming, vaguely monstrous. And for all his paternal care, it frightened him—terrified him to the depths of his heart.

He called it Palimpsest. Five years of work, a lifetime of theorising, a thousand lies, woven tight.

Florrian touched two fingertips to his forehead. Though the gesture wasn’t necessary to activate the chip nestled against his brain, he found—in a way he recognised as old-fashioned—that it helped him to concentrate. He evoked the virtual interface he’d tagged to the arm of the undignified machine-figure before him and, sure enough, it lit in recognition. At first the light was just a glow as of luminescent mist, and then a phantom square of blue appeared, flush above the arm’s surface. Text spiralled, conjured by the modified retina of Florrian’s left eye. Satisfied, he let his hand fall to the pad, which shifted subtly to meet his fingertips. He tapped out a lengthy authorisation code and received an acknowledgement, which he himself had written: WELCOME, DOCTOR FLORRIAN. PALIMPSEST IS ACTIVATING.

“Step away from that, will you?” The voice came from behind him, from somewhere near the entrance. “A dozen steps backward, please, and don’t turn until I tell you to.”

He didn’t recognise the speaker. Male, not discernibly young or old, no clues of accent or intonation. Whoever they were, they didn’t sound nervous or angry. In fact, their tone was perfectly composed. They weren’t TransCon staff then, or even an agent. They were not surprised by Florrian’s presence here—and that disturbed him.

He had set a nine-letter kill code on Palimpsest—according to statistical analysis, that being the lowest number of characters impossible to type by accident. He might have programmed a word sequence he could transmit by thought alone, but he’d determined the risk was too great. Memory struck Florrian as a fractious, unruly thing; he couldn’t bear the danger of trusting Palimpsest’s security to the whims of his unconscious. Instead, he had practised every day for a month, until he could enter the tactile code with the barest flicker of the fingers of one hand. It took him just under a second.

It struck him now that that was considerably longer than it would take whoever was behind him to fire a weapon.

“Please don’t do anything we’ll all regret, Dran. Just do as he said.”

Florrian froze. The second voice he knew—almost as well as his own, though it was nearly a year since he’d last heard it. “Karen?” he asked.

He wanted badly to turn then. The urge was a palpable itch. He wanted to see her; he wanted to see the expression on her face. But he remembered what the first voice had said, and if he was going to be killed, he didn’t want to be killed for something stupid.

For typing the kill code though? For making certain Palimpsest could never be misused? That was worth giving his life for.

A sudden jolt of pain in Florrian’s forehead made him arch his neck. It was gone as quickly as it had arrived. When he looked back for the phantom blue of the interface, however, he found that it had vanished. Where it had been was only the grey crust of Palimpsest’s curving arm.

“Okay,” said a third voice: nasal, unsure. “That’s it. He’s shut out.”

It was true. When Florrian attempted to recall the interface, nothing happened. His first efforts were a reflex. After that he tried to think methodically, picking through the simple mental sequence that should have restored the virtual keyboard. Then he became desperate. It made no difference.

There was a physical interface built into Palimpsest’s side panel. There was no way he would have time to reach it, let alone make use of it.

“Put your hands up, Florrian. Do as I told you,” the first voice said. “A dozen steps backward.”

Florrian raised his hands and began to walk backwards. That had been it, his chance. He’d let it slip between his fingers. Yet it was useless to berate himself; as long as he was alive he might yet create another opportunity. At the twelfth step he stopped, mildly surprised he’d managed not to collide with anything in the crowded storage bay.

“Well done. Keep that up and you’ll get through this in one piece.” The male voice was close to his ear this time, and moving. The speaker walked past him on his left, and Florrian watched from the corner of his eye, glimpsing a face: late thirties perhaps, blonde hair, discreet signs of minor surgery, piercing blue eyes, hard lines of cheek and jaw. Handsome, he supposed, though he thought there was cruelty in those azure eyes. In any case, it was a face he knew.

Not well, though, and he struggled for a moment to match a name to it. Harlan Dorric. A scientist also, though Florrian couldn’t say in what field. He only remembered that the man was deeply embroiled with high-level corporate research, a hugely profitable position to be in. They had been at the same functions, no doubt, perhaps they’d even spoken once or twice. None of that explained why Dorric should be here now.

There were three other men with him. Two of them, from the way they flanked Dorric, Florrian assumed to be hired security. The third he didn’t get a clear look at, though it seemed safe to assume he was the one who’d blocked Florrian’s neural connection to the outside world. In any case, Florrian found it hard to concentrate on them, when so much of his attention was occupied by the room’s fifth occupant. He hadn’t seen her, yet knew she was close by—for the delicate scent of gardenias hung in the air.

“Karen,” Florrian said. “It’s been a while.”

“Be quiet, Dran,” she told him, from behind and beside his ear. “I’m just here to make sure you don’t do anything foolish.”

He thought about that. Florrian supposed that her being here had saved his life, for if he hadn’t heard her voice he would certainly have tried to type the kill code, and most likely they’d have shot him for it. Then again, letting Dorric gain access to Palimpsest when he’d had a chance to destroy it was surely the greatest act of stupidity imaginable.

“So that’s him,” he said. “Harlan Dorric. You’ve done well for yourself.”

He’d sounded more peevish then he’d intended. But all Karen said was, “Yes, I have.”

Florrian returned his attention to Dorric and the three men with him. The two he’d taken for bodyguards were facing his way now, with their backs to Dorric and the fourth man. They were looking at Florrian, each holding his right arm upraised so that the open hand, too, was trained in Florrian’s direction. Each palm was hidden by a disk of silver and black, with a protruding half sphere of gold at its centre that pulsed with steady rhythm. The pose looked uncomfortable. Florrian imagined trying to hold his own arm out like that and how quickly he would tire. Yet these two didn’t look as if they would grow tired, ever. They looked as if they’d stand there for as long as was needed, and even if an hour had passed, or ten, they would still be able to kill him in an instant with their neat little weapons.

Behind them Dorric and the fourth man were investigating Palimpsest’s graceless facade. There was something comfortable about the way in which they worked, something almost proprietorial, which made Florrian’s stomach clench.

His thoughts were moving rapidly now—and if the results remained less than productive, he had at least recalled details about Dorric. He knew, too, why at first he’d remembered so little. The man’s expertise was in military innovation, designing new toys for the private militias that thrived throughout Africa, the Middle East and the destabilised regions of Europe. Dorric had courted controversy early in his career, straining even the limited ethical restraints the corporations chose to impose upon themselves; but all that had died down, or else been quashed. No doubt Dorric’s rapidly growing wealth and connections deep in the corporate military had helped, and in subsequent years his name had vanished, both from the media and the scientific community’s already limited network of social gossip.

There’d been one story, however, that he had heard; one that had persisted, though he couldn’t recall now how it had come to his attention. Florrian dropped his voice, low enough that only Karen would hear. “You must have heard the rumours about him,” he said.

For a moment he was sure she wouldn’t respond. Then she replied, matching her volume to his, “That he’s gone over? That gets thrown at everyone, sooner or later.”

She was right. There wasn’t a significant figure who hadn’t, at some time, in whispers and closed conversations, been accused of treason. “No, not that,” he said. Florrian turned his head, so that for the first time he could see something of her face; one dark eye, a cheek and the sharp corner of her mouth, framed in curves of almost-black hair. “They say he went full psycho.”

It might have been his tone more than the words themselves that reached her. Karen’s eye widened a fraction. Or might he have glanced upon some already-held suspicion? An inkling she’d harboured? But there was nothing in her voice as she said, “That’s ridiculous.”

It was an accepted fact of psychology that the rich, the powerful, the superskilled, were all to a greater or lesser degree insane. Or rather, they had disorders; they had grown or else had always been unbalanced. And it was truly an accepted fact, for what balanced mind could make decisions that affected millions and not buckle irreparably? Certain strains of malfunction were even watched for and cultivated. The trick was in recognition and containment, in checks and balances.

Yet there were those, always, who could not be checked, those who grew too unbalanced—whose madness metastasised and ate away their public worth, leaving only megalomania. There were even shrinks who’d gone whistleblower, not able to live with the thought of the ends to which their clients might put their power. Hadn’t one doctor levelled such a claim against Dorric? Was that where Florrian had first heard it? But if that were the case, the doctor had vanished particularly quickly.

“I think it’s true,” he said, “and I think you know it. Whatever’s going on here, it’s hardly the actions of a sane man.”

He knew immediately that he’d pushed too hard. Whatever he’d seen or thought he’d seen in Karen’s face was gone. “I’m sorry, Dran,” she said, “I am. But the best thing you can do now is to stay still and keep quiet. If anyone’s crazy, it’s you.”

“Is that what he told you?” Florrian asked bitterly.

“He didn’t need to,” she said. “We were married for six years, remember?”

He had no response for that. Instead, sidestepping, he said, “Dorric wants the machine for himself.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “He’ll reverse-engineer it and sell the patent. You haven’t patented it yet, have you? You’ve been keeping it a secret. Because you’re paranoid and you think they’d take it off you.”

“They would take it off me.” And they would turn it into a weapon. A shiver zigzagged down his spine. Was that what Dorric wanted it for? But if he only wanted to sell it to whichever corporate department offered the most, then that was hardly better. Florrian had taken a terrible gamble in trying to smuggle Palimpsest out. Yet nor could he have stayed where he was, not for very much longer—and here on the TransCon, high in mid-leap, was the safest place he could devise for the tests he’d planned, the experiments that would provide data he urgently needed to convince those waiting for him at the other end.

He turned his attention once more to the three men around Dorric. The one close at Dorric’s elbow was definitely a technician of some sort. Though he saw nothing himself, Florrian had no doubt that the man had summoned a system interface, as he himself was now unable to do.

Florrian had made Palimpsest’s software purposefully idiosyncratic; to do so was the simplest defence against more casual forms of espionage. An amateur might spend days riddling out its secrets, weeks convincing it to function. This man was clearly no amateur. He was a specialist, technointuitive perhaps, one of those lost creatures who understood machines perfectly and their fellow humans hardly at all. If that were the case, he might need mere hours to penetrate the machine’s fundamentals.

The other two, the two who watched Florrian back, were killers. No other word would fit them. Nor was it the weapons they pointed that gave them away; it was in their eyes and the way they stood, the way they owned the space around them. He had seen enough of such men during his training to recognise them even if they were unarmed, even if they’d been going about some innocent task. They were framed for violence.

It could only be a matter of time until Dorric’s technician unravelled Palimpsest’s secrets, and Florrian was helpless to stop him. What could he do against four of them? Or should that be five? He supposed he must count Karen amongst his enemies, too. Yet he couldn’t find it in himself to feel betrayed, just as he’d never been able to blame her for leaving. He’d given her nothing in those last, impossible months, and so she had left.

Now here they were, together again, and Florrian found—almost to his amusement—that despite the circumstances, despite the immeasurable danger of the situation, he was on some level pleased to see his former wife. That thought led to another: something so integral to their relationship, yet he had never told her. “You know, you gave me the idea,” he said.

“What?” Karen looked towards him. Her eyes were tired, her mouth drawn tight. “What idea?”

“For Palimpsest. My machine,” he said.

“That’s what you’re calling it?”

“It means . . .”

“I know what it means,” Karen said. For a moment he thought she might add, But what does it do, however she seemed content to leave it at that—as she always had been. Their growing distance, her growing disinterest, had made Palimpsest’s function an easy secret to keep.

Now, in fact, she’d looked away once more. So Florrian let it go. What could it matter, in any case? It was too late for her curiosity to mean anything. That night, the night she’d inadvertently inspired him, when everything had changed—hadn’t that been his last opportunity to draw her into his clandestine world, instead of driving her further away?

She had come back late—or early, rather. He’d glanced at the clock on hearing the chime of the outside door, the chirrup of the security system standing down, and noted a time somewhere in the drag between midnight and dawn. He had been deep in his work since the last evening. He didn’t remember eating. He hoped she would go to bed, not come looking for him, but only go to bed and leave him. And at first he thought that was what she’d done, for he didn’t hear her footsteps. Florrian turned back to the open slab of machinery he was working on, tried to refocus on its filigree of circuits, like a cartographer thinking his way into his map.

Karen said, “I’m sorry I’m so late.”

The circuits blurred. Golden threads merged and interweaved.

“We were in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “Wadi Khatayn. There’d been a report of a leopard family in the south, but by the time we could drop in, word had got out. The Manjoro were there before us. Professional bastards . . . when they’re not poaching, they’re running guns or drugs or people.”

Florrian clicked up the monocle interface he wore for such impossibly delicate work and knuckled his eyes. Then he flipped the monocle back into place. The labyrinthine circuitry, magnified a hundred thousand times by the monocle’s firmware, in conjunction with his own adapted retina, swam back into clarity.

He forgot sometimes how hazardous his wife’s work was—as he forgot so much about the world outside this room. The feeds gleefully labelled her a combat zoologist, but Florrian knew that for Karen, the fact that the places she went to were so often dangerous was incidental. She went where she was needed and did what she could. She was the bravest person he had ever met; that incredible, white-hot strength of hers was one of the first things that had attracted him. He had simply never met anyone like her.

Yet now, in this moment, he resented her presence. Florrian had been like a diver submerged in the fathomless depths of his work, and now he was being made against his will to surface. He resented, even, the guilt he felt at his own frustration. For he could hear the exhaustion in his wife’s voice, and under it the lividness of fresh pain; he knew she needed him to say something. “Did you save them?” Florrian asked.

“One cub,” Karen said. “A girl. She’d dug in half under her mother’s corpse.”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say. He understood that he should go to her, comfort her, but even as he’d spoken he’d seen something: a tiny part of the solution. Suddenly his wife and everything else seemed far away. Florrian reached eagerly for the terminal controls, and in his haste, dashed his wrist against a drinking glass he’d left balanced on the work surface. By the time he registered the movement and was crouching to catch it, it was already shattering—and it was only some mindless instinct that made him keep grasping hopelessly towards the tiled floor.

“Hell!”

Florrian whipped his hand back, saw the jagged line of red engraved there. He eyed with hatred the particular shard that had wounded him. The cut was deep; it would only keep bleeding. It would need stitches, and that meant waking up his physician, or else paying the exorbitant fees of an all-night clinic. Either way he’d get no more work done, and the thread of his thought was broken. It was all he could do to hold in the frustration bubbling inside. “Hell!” he repeated, and by the time the word reached the air it was a growl of distilled anger.

“Calm down,” Karen told him, fatigue adding an edge to her usual calm determination, “and wait there a moment, will you?”

“It’s bleeding,” Florrian complained. His rage had abruptly evaporated, but now he sounded petulant even to himself.

“Then suck it, you idiot.”

She was out of the room before he could respond, which perhaps was just as well. Florrian pressed the stripe of red to his lips and sucked, wincing at the bitter tang and sharpened pain. Suddenly he was entirely conscious of how tired he was, how far beyond the point of overwork. He listened to the sounds of his wife moving somewhere deeper within their apartment, and for a while there was nothing but that jarring current of noise, his exhaustion and the iron-filings taste of his own blood.

Then she was back. He hadn’t known what to expect, but the scrap of fabric gripped between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand wasn’t it. He eyed it with distrust as she marched over, deftly avoiding the glacier flow of glass fragments across the floor.

“Hold out your hand,” Karen said, and he did. In two smooth gestures, she drew a plastic strip from its reverse and wrapped the fabric neatly over his cut.

Florrian looked at the strip of fabric. It made no sense to him. He couldn’t even find the words to frame his objection. “But . . .” he said, and had no idea how to finish.

“Sometimes it’s all right to just patch something up, Dran.”

His instinct was still to resist. He was conscious of the opening in his flesh, masked but unhealed—a problem deferred.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You’re tired out and so am I. You’re not going to bleed to death. It might take a few days longer to heal this way, but it will. You won’t even have a scar. It’s okay. Not everything has to have a grand, perfect solution.”

And she was right. There was no white light flash or chime of revelation, merely a shift somewhere deep in the substrata of his mind. She was right. Perhaps not about his hand, for he could feel how deep the cut was and knew it probably would scar. But completely accidentally, completely unexpectedly, Karen had gifted him the wider answer he’d been unable to find himself.

He had been mired for so long in theory, with no thought of application. Once he’d looked out at the world and wanted to solve it, to heal its many woes. The more his goal had seemed impossible, the more he’d turned away, digging deeper into the safety of abstracts. The problems were too big; their very size made them insoluble, for he was only one man. So Florrian had found a problem he could scale his mind to and set about solving that instead.

Yet now he understood what his machine could do . . . how it could do good. He couldn’t heal the world, but perhaps he could still bandage its wounds. What he couldn’t repair he could at least patch.

Another revelation jolted Florrian back to the present: in a very real sense, Karen had given him Palimpsest. But the past was gone, immutable. Now she was ready to let someone else take it away from him. And that he couldn’t allow.

Florrian steeled himself. He’d let this go on long enough. If he’d thought to learn something from his former wife, it was clear he’d be disappointed; if he’d hoped for some shadow of their past affection, then even more so.

Nevertheless, that didn’t mean Karen couldn’t be useful.

Florrian took a step back and sideways, and even before Dorric’s two killers had time to decide if whatever he was doing was grounds enough to end his life, he had the palm of his hand against her temple.

“There is a weapon built into the bone of my arm,” he said loudly. “Constructed out of my own body. Utterly undetectable. At the correct mental trigger it will propel a molecules-wide sliver of bone through an aperture in the palm of my hand. It will hurt me considerably, but more significantly from your point of view, it will be carrying enough kinetic energy to split my ex-wife’s skull like a rotten egg.”

He might have expected incredulity from the two men aiming their dainty weapons at him. But they surely knew that such devices existed, and that spies were often fitted with them, and that therefore so were scientists who might be called upon to act as spies. They didn’t flinch. They didn’t take their eyes off him. But one of them said, in a voice carrying no baggage of emotion, “I can drop him before he fires, Mister Dorric. Just give the word.”

“He won’t hurt me,” Karen said. “Harlan, please, let me talk to him.” She tilted her head towards Florrian, enough that he could once again see her face in distorted profile. “You won’t hurt me, Dran, and those men will hurt you. So please, stop being so foolish.”

“Shut up!” Florrian roared. “I’m telling you, Dorric, you thieving son of a bitch, if one of those Neanderthals so much as . . .” Then he was moving—shoving Karen hard with his free hand, using her resistance to propel himself. And as good as Dorric’s men were, they hadn’t had his psych training; they were no match for a hanging sentence. He had shaved a fraction of an instant from their reaction times, and when they fired, the shots strummed the air beside him, close enough that he felt the sudden heat. Too slow. Too late. He was into the maze now, weaving between shapes made anonymous by the shocking green of the carrigel.

Everything Florrian had said about the weapon in his arm was true. They had put it into him without his knowing, while he slept in chemically induced sleep, and the next day had proudly told him what they’d done. On cold nights, the core of his radius still ached with phantom pain; it throbbed now, as he thought of it. The one detail he’d neglected to tell Dorric, however, was just now the most important: if Florrian once used it, the weapon’s recharge time was such that only a miracle would allow him a second shot.

Large as the storage bay might be, it was still too confined to hide him for long. Assuming Dorric himself kept out of the fight, Florrian was only outnumbered two to one; but those odds were meaningless, and in fact his enemies had every advantage. His best tactic might have been to get out, head to the bridge perhaps and shoot the pilot and crash the whole damned TransCon into the sea. What were the deaths of a few thousand compared to the horrors Palimpsest might unleash in the wrong hands? Yet Florrian wasn’t sure he could do such a thing—and in any case, would never make the door before they cut him down.

That left two options: try and destroy Palimpsest, or hope taking out Dorric would be enough to deter his lackeys. Florrian had no idea what a shot would do to Palimpsest, except that it might be catastrophic; the energies held within were hardly in check, barely controlled. Also, he wasn’t certain that when the moment came he would be able to think that crucial, killing thought.

Harlan Dorric, on the other hand . . .

Florrian was a rational man, a creature of science and reason. He couldn’t hate Dorric for the fact that Karen had chosen him over Florrian himself. Choice had been all that kept them together, and she had exercised hers in leaving. Nor could he hate Dorric for being here now, trying to take by force what Florrian had worked so unimaginably hard and sacrificed so much to create. Such was the world they lived in; such crimes were hardly deemed crimes at all so long as the corporations reaped the final benefit.

Florrian was a rational man. Killing Dorric might save Palimpsest from him. Killing Dorric might secure the lives—the thousands, the millions, the billions of lives—that Palimpsest would endanger.

From a rational perspective, it was not a difficult decision. In a way it irritated Florrian that his only objection was moral. He couldn’t justify killing to himself, even when it was unquestionably logical to do so.

However, he found that the thought of severely injuring Dorric rang no moral alarms whatsoever.

Florrian stepped out of cover.

The first thing he saw was Dorric, looking straight at him—and then Dorric, too, was moving. The second thing Florrian saw was Karen, far beyond Dorric, partly obscured by the brutalist bulk of Palimpsest—and she was moving also, though more slowly. Her eyes were wide at seeing him. In the moment it took her to note the spreading aperture in his palm, they grew wider.

Dorric, meanwhile, was a picture of calm. He had a weapon in his hand now and it was aimed at Florrian, as though he’d perfectly predicted this attack. Florrian had never seen a man look so sure of himself. It took, he thought, a special sort of madness to stare down death with such indifference.

For an instant the three of them were like dancers. Florrian was moving. Harlan was moving; Karen, too. Yet they all three seemed frozen; their movement prearranged, no movement at all. There was a horrible inevitableness to it, a weight of constricting possibility. Even as Florrian fired, he knew he was going to miss—just as he knew Dorric wouldn’t.

Pain trembled up Florrian’s forearm. Blood misted, hung in the air—his own. Whether it was from his hand or the funnel of pain that had abruptly drilled its way into his chest, he couldn’t say. Beside Dorric’s head, a section of Palimpsest exploded in showering sparks. But the shot, Florrian’s shot, laden as it was with awful energy, did not stop there. And even as his momentum tore her from view, Florrian saw Karen shudder, like a tree split by lightning.

D’ren Florein fell hard. Though the thorax chitin was soft there, pain still jolted up his arm. He rolled over, endured a vertiginous moment as he saw through the semitranslucent surface to the ground far, far below. He could just make out the city-hive’s blurred, distant outlines, towering steeples in coral pinks and lurid purples; but every line and curve was further smudged by the swarming blackness that roiled in the intervening air. The NachtSchwarm, entomological engineering gone madly out of control. The horror he had sworn to save his world from.

Florein rolled to his knees and then let his wings carry him to his feet and forward, so that the shot that came a moment later from the centre of the room skimmed narrowly behind him. His head was pounding, a sickening, dizzying pain. His memory of the last few moments was an agonising blur. He had fired, had missed Halann D’rik, and hit—he had hit Palimpsest.

As he dashed between two rotund cargo pods, as another shot gouged a line through the nearest, spattering viscous grey fluid, Florein caught a glimpse of his creation: its surface, the crawling sheen of it, was pulsating now, rising in bumps and tendrils that folded back almost as soon as they’d formed. He’d never seen it do that before. He had no idea what it meant. But he couldn’t shake the sense that it looked angry, and knowing what Palimpsest was capable of, that nonsensical thought chilled him to the marrow.

Florein ducked amidst a cluster of storage pods and gulped moist air. His arm hurt with a steady, throbbing pain. He glanced at his palm. Tiny black insects were crawling round the red-raw hole in his hand, razor-sharp wings safely furled, already dying and crumbling to dust as they reached the ends of their tiny, preprogrammed lifespans. It would take a few seconds more for the biomechanism in his arm to breed another burst of flechette flies; until then he was defenceless.

Had D’rik’s thugs stopped firing? Had they lost sight of him? If they had, then it could only mean a brief respite. They had no reason to wait him out, and even if they did, Florein doubted their employer would share the sentiment. D’rik, who had never seen Palimpsest before today, was surely as alarmed by its weird activity as Florein himself.

Sure enough, at that moment a voice called from behind him and somewhere to his right: “Are you all right out there, Florein? I hope my men didn’t do you too much damage?”

Florein fought the urge to answer. If D’rik was willing to reveal his position, it could only be because he hoped Florein would do the same. Instead, he slipped into a crouch and moved, light-footed, to the shelter of another pod, this one beside the cargo bay’s softly pulsing outer wall.

“Come on, Florein, let’s stop this nonsense. You know it’s not in my interests to hurt you. And this machine of yours—I’m telling you honestly, it doesn’t look too healthy.”

As he scurried across another narrow gap to the next clump of pods, a flash of liquid warmth in the meat of Florein’s arm told him the fast-breeder had completed its recycle. When he glanced at the crease of his elbow he could see the tiny sac embedded there, engorged with the crawling life within. They were monsters, the ones who’d done this to him—yet just now he was glad of their paranoia and their obscene science. He tensed the muscle, felt a reassuring purr go through it: a hum of violent potential.

Just in time. His opponent’s ploy had misfired; Florein was confident that he knew now where D’rik was. Or else D’rik was simply drawing him in. It hardly mattered. At least this way Florein would have his chance.

“Do you want that horror of yours to explode? Is that it? To explode and take me with it?” D’rik chuckled, as though he could appreciate the appeal of the idea. “But what about you, Florein? What about K’ren? And this entire queenship perhaps, and maybe the entire city-hive below. Do you even know what that monstrosity of yours might do?”

I don’t, Florein thought. I truly don’t. And for an instant he wondered if the sanest choice might not be to surrender himself to D’rik and hope they would let him live long enough to try and repair the damage he’d inadvertently wrought.

He ducked around the curve of the pod he was sheltering behind. There to his right, beyond the silken tangle of webbing in which smaller cargo items hung suspended, was the fleshy valve of the outer door. He had come full circle, circumnavigated the entire room. Even as it occurred to him, Florein thought to look for K’ren—and sure enough, there she was. Rather than retreat to the centre of the room with D’rik, she had chosen to crouch with her back to a storage pod, mirroring his own posture.

Did she think she was safer on her own? Perhaps she didn’t like the disregard with which Drik’s men had fired in her direction. Certainly she would not be panicking. K’ren had been under fire often enough, and in worse situations than this. Sure enough, she chose that moment to glance his way, and even at such a distance he could recognise the calm determination in her eyes. It said, Whatever happens I don’t intend to die here.

He wasn’t sure what made him do it, but Florein put a finger to his lips. Even as he did it he had no idea how she would react; whether she would call out. Yet her reaction still surprised him: K’ren shook her head.

What did it mean? Then he understood. Palimpsest was to his left now. D’rik, surely, was nearby. Even if he’d only been drawing Florein in, he couldn’t have got far. Don’t do it, that was what she meant.

But he had no choice. There wouldn’t be another chance.

Florein sprang forward, keeping low, twisting his body and dragging his wrist up as he broke into clear space. The biomechanism throbbed in anticipation. There, not far away, was Palimpsest, still writhing with its newfound life. Before it, D’rik stood almost casually. There too was one of the bodyguards, arm still raised, as though it were the only pose he knew—but pointed the wrong way, to where Florein had been and not to where he was. He had sensed the movement, was already beginning to turn. He wouldn’t be quick enough.

So Florein ignored him, focused instead on D’rik. Within his mind he whispered to the million murderous lives teeming in his arm: Him, he’s the one. In response they sang a high-pitched, furious note. Fire washed through the muscle of his arm, climbed into his shoulder, built and built.

Only something was wrong. If K’ren had wanted to stop him, why hadn’t she cried out?

No. She’d been trying to warn him.

Florein ducked, and it was all that saved him. The air above him crackled. A heat to match the one igniting in his arm flashed close enough that he smelt the sudden stink of his own scorched hair. Florein rolled, not gracefully. Behind him was the second bodyguard, stepping from his hiding place. The device they’d melded to his hand made a deformed stump of it, a confusion of shining black plates like a beetle’s jaw that still steamed greenish plasma. The bodyguard had already adjusted his aim. His next shot wouldn’t miss.

Except that he wouldn’t get the chance. For the biomechanism in Florein’s arm was a scream of white hot pain now, consumed with a life of its own, and he couldn’t have restrained it if he’d tried. A stream of black poured from his palm, and as they revelled in their newborn freedom, each microscopic flechette fly spread its razor wings. They scythed the air, their path only interrupted by the bodyguard’s face—and their high whine only broken by his scream. Then, reaching the end of their minute life spans, brittle bodies crackled and were gone.

Florein froze. It was partly through horror—for he could see the ragged wetness that was one side of the bodyguard’s face—and partly indecision. Adrenalin was trilling in his blood, and his every urge told him to rush D’rik, to pound him with bare fists if need be. A distant part of his mind swore it would be suicide; the rest hardly cared.

It was the second bodyguard who saved Florein from himself. He was still screaming, turning and clutching at his face, as if he wanted to touch it but didn’t quite dare. Then, in an instant, his manner changed. Professionalism was restored. Florein watched the man strain, as though trying to force his senses into compensation for a pulped eye, one shredded ear and nostrils clotted with blood. Then he raised his hand and fired.

Yet he was still firing blind—for though only one eye had been gouged out by the flechette flies, the other was spattered with gore. That first shot went wide of anything, embedding itself with a moist thud into the queenship’s hide. His second missed Florein, but caught the cargo pod behind him squarely, evicting its contents in a splatter of pinks and blues. His third, the wildest yet, tore through the chitin floor at K’ren’s feet.

The hole was small, but widened instantly. Its ragged edges flapped and tore and tore still further, an opening wound. Florein cried out K’ren’s name. She was looking at him, directly at him, even as she fell. Your wings! Open your wings, he thought, but there was no time to say it—no time for anything. Yet still, he found himself moving. She was twisting now, reacting finally, trying to reach for something. For a moment Florein imagined he’d have time to catch her clutching hand. Then she was gone, and there was nothing left to do. Even as another shot flashed by him, Florein was hurling himself forward, into nothingness.

He made certain he was clear of the still-widening hole before releasing his own wings. An interlacing of machinery and his own modified tissue, they’d never been meant for anything so dramatic. Through artificial nerves, he felt them strain against the buffeting air. He could see K’ren ahead, and sure enough she had her own wings out, iridescent blues and greens fluttering madly. She was trying to aim herself towards the maintenance gantry strung along the queenship’s tendril legs.

But she was moving too fast, and so was he. His wings were slowing him fractionally, but suffering themselves in the tearing currents. All Florein could do for K’ren was hope. All he could do for himself was brace against the coming impact.

It came hard—not like falling, but as if something had rushed up to meet her. Daniella Furian took a moment to gather her breath; it felt as if every scrappy vapour of air had been punched clean from her lungs. Yet a thousand feet above the surface of the sea was no place to gather her senses; in fact, the view only assailed them. Below her, the sea heaved, patched in oily black and rainbow hues. She could smell its rankness, even from so high above.

A heaving rattle of the great prop engines far above her head, a shift of trajectory that made the wind scream in her ears, and the island city of New Valencia slid into view, rooftops bright beneath the midday sun, airship ports tilting crazily into the ether. It would have been beautiful but for the filth lapping hungrily at its shores, the detritus of a civilisation choking on its own production. It was ample illustration, should she have needed it, of the crisis she’d sworn to remedy.

Furian caught hold of the nearest rope, took one more deep breath and then drew herself back to her feet. Glancing directly upward she saw the shattered hole in the belly of the airship’s cabin, the TransAtlantico’s colossal balloon bloating behind it. From within the hole a man and a woman stared down at her. The man’s face was a scorched horror: partly Furian’s own handiwork and partly a result of the ruptured fuel line that had gouged that yawning puncture. The woman was Harla Durrich, who until a few minutes ago had been barely more than a stranger and was now her enemy, her ex-husband’s lover, the thief of her life’s work. And was that uneven ticking behind them—that grind of out-of-control gears—the sound of Palimpsest slowly shaking itself apart? For just a moment Furian felt herself almost consumed with fear at what she might have let loose.

But there was nothing she could do about it now, and certainly nothing she could achieve trapped down here. Furian forced the doubts from her mind and turned her gaze downward, ignoring the stained waters this time to consider Kieran, who was half lying, half sitting where he’d landed on the catwalk.

“Anything broken?” Furian asked, offering him her hand.

Kieran shook his head—perhaps to confirm it was still fixed correctly. “I’m fine,” he said, “more or less.”

“So what now? Are you coming with me or would you rather wait for . . .”

Her sentence was interrupted by a prodigious crack from above, like a rock cleaving.

Kieran at least had the decency to make a show of having considered before he bounced to his feet, showing no signs of injury, and muttered, “I’ll come with you.”

Furian had already taken the lead. “Good choice,” she said, as another shot barked from above. They had no cover at all on the ’walk, which was a part of the airship’s docking collar, slung from the cabin on thick wire rope and with docking chains about its edges that would secure it to a tower’s protruding bay. It was navigable—for engineers would sometimes scurry about it, fixing loose connections and such—but it was far from safe.

Furian looked back. Kieran was moving with the steady grace of a tomcat upon a high wall. His face was taut, though, his eyes shadowed. Feeling her watching, he glanced up and said, “I didn’t expect it would come to this.”

Furian had no answer, except to accept that he was probably telling the truth. Her former husband had sometimes been terrible in his pragmatism, but he had never been cruel. She didn’t believe he would have willingly endangered her life, or have engaged in a plan that put her so dramatically in harm’s way. Just now, though, motives were irrelevant, facts were everything—and the fact was that a rope ladder was unfurling from the gouged cabin behind them.

“It can wait,” she said. Furian pointed ahead, to where the ropework came together in a half-funnel that rose to snag upon the prow of the TransAtlantico’s cabins. “We can climb up there . . . maybe reach the bridge.”

Perhaps there should have been some satisfaction in Kieran’s sudden understanding that his lover had kept secrets from him, his growing appreciation that their relationship had existed, at least in part, to allow Harla Durrich access to Furian’s research. Yet just now she lacked the energy for bile. Her forearm was leaden, sore from the kick of the dainty clockwork dart gun secreted in her sleeve. Her side and legs ached from her collision with the walkway, new bruises forming upon those she’d already sustained in the baggage store above. Her head was singing, her vision blurry, and trying to hurry upon the rocking catwalk was taking every iota of her courage.

Furian resisted the urge to look back once more to see what progress Durrich’s hirelings had made. She hoped the wounded man would be slowing them, especially upon the swinging rope ladder, but she dared not assume. The two were professionals, mercenaries perhaps from the fighting in Prussia; she knew better than to test herself against them again, for only luck had brought her through their last encounter. Her only hope lay in evasion, and perhaps in reaching the bridge—for so long as Palimpsest was in Durrich’s hands, she couldn’t run forever.

She had reached the point where the catwalk collar began to curve inward, bending in a vast horseshoe to meet its opposite flank. Manoeuvring the narrow platform had been difficult enough when it ran straight; now Furian found that all her concentration was consumed in keeping one foot ahead of the other. Making a sudden decision, she instead grasped a line and swung herself up, clutching the outer edge of the rigging.

Kieran, close behind, hesitated upon the catwalk. “This is your plan?” he asked.

Furian’s first reply was beneath her, and she was glad when the wind whipped it away before Kieran could hear. Sucking a deep breath, steadying herself upon the rigging, she tried again: “My plan is to stay alive for the next few minutes, and once I’m safe, to work out how I can get Palimpsest back.” And if we’re lucky, she added mentally, repair it before it tears this airship, this whole territory, perhaps this entire reality apart.

Kieran still didn’t move to join her. His eyes were narrowed, his cheeks sucked in, an expression she knew all too well: it was the way he looked when a question was eating at him, or when the answers he had were less than satisfactory. “Daniella,” he said, “I don’t feel right. My memory . . . it’s screwy. I fell, but I don’t remember how I didn’t break my neck. I hardly even remember boarding the TransAtlantico. I never asked . . . I figured you’d tell me when you felt the time was right . . . but what is that thing you built? What does it do?”

Furian remembered then how she’d craved to answer that very question, in the months before Kieran had left; how subtly and yet how deeply it had wounded her that he’d never tried to probe her secret world. Could it be that all along he’d felt the same, hurt by her own reticence? The look in his eyes said it could. It made it all the worse that she could only reply, raising her voice against the howl of the wind, “Not now, Kieran.”

He followed her gaze—saw as she had that Durrich’s two thugs had successfully alighted on the far end of the catwalk, with their rope ladder twitching and trailing behind them.

“Oh,” he said. Kieran leaped up, caught the ropes below her, and together they began to climb, in silence except for the screech of torn air and the whip and snap of the rigging.

Yet their progress was slow—too slow. It was all Furian could do to hang on, let alone ascend, for her muscles were a single ache now, and numbed by the cold. Durrich’s men must be closing in; must be already near. And if a shot from the windswept collar would be tricky, she made for an easy enough target, crawling the rigging like a glutted spider. Furian looked up, and the lip of the cabin was too far away. No, running was fine and good, all the more so when one was outgunned and outnumbered, but it wouldn’t save her. Perhaps five minutes had passed since she’d sworn off the possibility of meeting violence with violence, but she hadn’t made it this far without bending to circumstance.

As though in tune with her thoughts, two things happened then, almost together: first, a piercing tick-tick-TICK from the device strapped inside her wrist told her its mechanism had finally rewound; and second, a shot boomed nearby. It was impossible to judge its angle, and the noise was thunderous, but Furian felt confident it had missed by some distance. Most likely it had been meant to measure range. The next would be more accurate, as would the one that followed—and sooner or later they would hit her, for she doubted they had any shortage of ammunition.

Furian wished she could say the same herself. The clockwork weapon, designed first for discretion and second—a distant second, she felt now—for emergencies, was good for six shots, and took as many minutes for its tiny spring to rewind itself.

To all intents and purposes, she would have one try. It wouldn’t be enough.

She came to a decision. The brief pause had restored a little strength to her racked muscles; Furian began again to climb. The renewed prospect of imminent death, too, was an incentive. The second shot, as she’d expected, went wide once more. She wondered if they’d stopped to fire or were trying to hit her while navigating the catwalk; either, here upon the violently motive nether-regions of the TransAtlantico, would be difficult. Still, for her sake, Furian hoped they were still drawing nearer. If they weren’t, her one slender chance was gone.

She climbed on. The cabin was not so far now. She could see a maintenance hatch in its belly, and she hoped against hope it wasn’t locked. But the third shot, when it came, was far too close for comfort. Its crack was deafening, even over the background howl of the wind. It took Furian a moment to be certain she wasn’t hit, for shock had locked her every muscle rigid. Then an abrupt terror overwhelmed her: she was suddenly sure that Kieran hadn’t been so lucky. When she looked down, however, though his face was frozen in a grimace, he appeared to be unhurt.

Still . . . she had no more time. The hatch was too far. Another shot wouldn’t miss. No more time, and one chance only.

Furian made sure of her grip and then, reaching with her left hand, fumbled at the gadget on her wrist, found the minuscule pin secreted in its side and with her thumbnail clicked it upward. It had always amused her that, when the device was intended for only the most calamitous circumstances, its unknown designer had still thought to include this emergency setting. What catastrophe had that diligent mechanic envisioned? Had it been anything like this? In any case, she was grateful to the man or woman who’d understood that however dire the crisis, it could always grow worse.

Furian hooked her left arm into the rigging, shook her right arm free. Her brain struggled to make sense of rope and wood and sky and sea, and then she’d separated out the docking collar and Durrich’s two thugs upon it. One had hung back; from his crouched posture and the way he’d braced himself on the catwalk, she felt sure that it was he who’d been firing. The second was continuing towards them, not hurriedly. He was the one she’d wounded earlier, and from the flayed, blackened horror that was the right side of his face, Furian doubted he had much in the way of depth perception anymore.

In their impeccably black, close-fitted suits, they looked more like undertakers than killers; remarkably, they’d both somehow kept their narrow-brimmed bowlers perched on their heads. Each wore a glove of black leather on his left hand, and had removed the other to free the weapon concealed there: a messy intermingling of meat and mechanism, trading the luxury of five human fingers for a gear-studded stump and spitting death.

They were monsters of distorted science, and she might even have felt sorry for them were it not for their chill indifference. Whatever they’d endured, they had surely done so willingly, so as to become better weapons, so as to earn better pay. She was only another job to them, and Kieran and Palimpsest nothing at all.

Furian held a breath and tensed against the drag and push of the wind. There was a groove in the underside of the device on her wrist and she sighted along it. The man she was aiming at, the nearer of the two, made no attempt to get out of the way—for there was nowhere he could go. He only looked at her, with one good eye and the other a caved-in, bloody pit. He didn’t look afraid or angry, or even curious.

Furian twisted her wrist in just such a way, a switch in the dart weapon depressed, and with a shrill whistle it discharged the entirety of its remaining ammunition.

Four shots: four darts, expelled in a tight cone. With one or two or even three, she’d surely have missed. With four? But she couldn’t say. He hadn’t moved. He was still staring at her. No blood could show upon that pitch-black fabric. Then, still holding her eyes, he raised his own hand, and Furian knew she had wasted this, her one chance. She was going to die here, a stupid, helpless insect strung upon this web.

His hand closed on the rail. He leaned forward, and then his left leg gave out altogether, abandoning his weight. He sagged forward, and for an instant she was sure he’d fall. But at the last moment he managed to twist, so that he lay on his belly, one hand still grasping the rail and his other arm beneath him. Even then he could barely hold himself in place. He seemed torn between trying to remain on the collar and wriggling to take any weight off his leg—an impossible hope given that there was barely room to lie at all.

The dart must have ripped through the muscle of his calf. Between that and the tormented flesh of his face, he would be in inordinate pain. Still, Furian was glad she hadn’t killed him. And not just because she found the prospect of killing distasteful—for the second man, after a moment’s indecision, was hurrying now to rescue his partner before he inadvertently hurled himself into the ether. It was the best result she might have hoped for, the two of them both out of action—if only briefly.

She wasn’t about to wait and savour it. Furian pressed herself back against the netting and, as she did so, deliberately caught Kieran’s eye—taking a small pleasure in the admiration she thought she saw there. Then she was climbing with all her strength. The pinnacle of the rigging seemed closer than it had, and her movements were surer, arms and legs working smoothly together like the strokes of a swimmer.

A few seconds more and the hatch was almost within reach. In her eagerness Furian pushed up to her full length, strained against the flowing netting to hammer with one palm against the ironclad planks. It must be locked on the inside. No, it wasn’t, it gave, and she struggled harder, locking the muscles in her calves and thighs, taking sudden joy in the peaty scent of fresh-oiled hinges. Furian reached, pushed, sure that one hard shove would be enough, would mean safety . . .

. . . and her grip slipped, and then she was grasping at nothing, clutching empty air, knowing that when she fell she would surely take Kieran with her . . .

. . . but there was cold iron beneath his fingers, and Doran Floranov seized it with breathless gratitude. Even as the wind that slid across him in thundering sheets did its best to tear him from the top tier of the TransContinentia, he managed to slip his fingertips deeper. The window was stiff and so had been carelessly closed, a fact that had probably saved his life; but it meant that it took all his might to widen the gap. Yet he did, and in a moment there was room to compress his fist into the opening and wrench upward.

Only then did he dare to look for Kiera. He was grateful to discover that she was close behind him: stood upon the narrow rampart where the middle and highest levels of the colossal carriage met, holding herself in place with one hand jammed into a crevasse of the dull black metal. Doran wasn’t sure he had ever seen her nervous before; even now, she wore it subtly. As she looked back at him, only the slight flush of her pale skin and the intensity in her eyes gave it away. Her voice was calm as she said, “It’s all right, Doran. You go first.”

It wasn’t just selflessness, he thought. They weren’t trying to kill Kiera and so she was safe—as safe as one could be when clinging to the side of a train travelling at enormous speed. To be sure, Doran looked beyond her, seeking for Heleon Dorivic’s men. He could see the flank of the train coiling onward, a python whipping itself across the waters. Further, in the distance, across the red-stained, poisoned waters he had sworn to make anew, Nova Omsk rose in waves that made him think of beetles crawling, until the iron fortress at its heart thrust up to clutch the leaden clouds and render everything around it insignificant.

With an effort Floranov tore his eyes from the dismal edifice and once more scanned the nearer carriages—each as high as a two-storey house and half as wide—for Dorivic’s agents. In their neat, dark suits, and with the scene blurred by motion and sea spray, they had all but disappeared against the deeper darkness of the next carriage. It was not going well for them; the wounded man was making things difficult for his partner. He couldn’t stand, there wasn’t space upon the narrow catwalk that ringed the lowest edge of the carriage to rest him flat, and every time he struggled, he threatened to tip one or the other of them over. More, the wounded man was making it impossible for his colleague to pass.

Finally, as Floranov watched, the second man came to a decision. He drew out the stubby pistol he’d put away in his pocket. His wounded companion watched the motion carefully, though without obvious fear. Even when the gun was pointed at him, he didn’t react, other than to continue the irregular jerking motion that rocked his body. The snap of the gun firing was lost in the endless clack-clack-clack of metal wheels upon metal rails, like the crack of a tree struck down in a storm: a minor act of violence played out on too grand a stage.

The second assassin let a moment pass to make certain his colleague was not going to move again and then, with his foot, nudged the man’s legs through a gap in the railing. After a point, gravity and his weight took hold, and the dead man’s entire body was sucked along, dragged flopping across the lowest skirt of the train and over the edge of the sleepers and down the concrete embankment into the heaving, crimson waves of the Atlantic.

For some reason, this sudden, casual brutality and then the dead man’s helpless compliance with physics frightened Floranov more than any threat to himself. With the realisation that he’d stood numbly watching the entire act play out, he found suddenly that he could move. He turned again to the window and, with hands made unwieldy by fear, scrabbled at the entrance he’d created.

The opening was barely large enough, and he was grateful for the quirks of nature that had made him fine-boned. Another shot rang out; Floranov only knew that it hadn’t hit him. Fortunately there was a sturdy curtain rail bolted above the inside of the window, and once he had hold of that, it was merely difficult and horribly uncomfortable to haul himself in, then to twist and flop onto the nearest seat.

Within, the carriage was at once luxurious and austere. The walls were panelled with dark wood and the seats padded with dark fabric; the upper portion of the door was of smoked glass. The benches were wide and comfortable-looking, designed to double as beds, and a low table nestled between them. A smaller door to the left of the main one led off into what must be a private toilet. Cupboard doors might hide luggage compartments or, more likely, coolers for alcoholic drinks.

It was all a long way from the suffocating press of the prole carriages, where travellers were pressed in like chickens awaiting slaughter. Floranov had himself travelled in both, for only the Party’s money had ever been sufficient to provide him with this luxury. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t enjoyed it, even as a part of him had raged at the expense, the needlessness, the horrid divisions of a society that still wore the public face of egalitarianism.

Now Floranov gave the carriage only the briefest of glances and considered its connotations not at all. He lay on the couch seat just long enough to bring his breathing back under control and then reeled to the window and caught hold of Kiera’s outstretched hands. It was a struggle to draw her inside, but he managed it, and at the last she tumbled forward, her weight crushing him back down onto the seat.

Before Floranov had time to consider the implications of this sudden, uncomfortable intimacy too deeply, Kiera had rolled off him and over the table that separated the two couches. She ended on the other with a small “oomph” and lay staring up at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling in quick shudders.

“We need to keep moving,” Floranov managed. But when he got to his feet, he found his legs barely strong enough to support him. With an effort, he stumbled to the window and pulled the pane shut, drawing the curtain after it. It would only provide the briefest of delays, and if the sound of gunfire hadn’t alerted anyone, then there was little hope the shattering of glass would. Anyway, for all he knew the authorities were complicit in this plot of Heleon Dorivic’s. Floranov was not in a position to rely on anyone’s aid; except for Kiera, there was no one within a thousand miles he could categorically believe was on his side.

Yet even as he thought it, he registered the rigid set of her jaw, the suppressed fury in her eyes. He didn’t know what to make of her expression, except to realise it portended trouble for someone and to hope that someone wasn’t him. Not daring to ask, Floranov instead staggered out through the carriage door and into the corridor. It stretched a great distance in either direction, for the carriages were long. From the way the walls flexed with each slight bend, it would have been easy to believe they were travelling not on fixed rails mounted upon an artificial peninsula, but on the shifting surface of the sea itself.

Looking left and right, Floranov wondered if one way was better than the other. There was still something to be said for trying to stop the train. Out here, with nothing but ocean for miles, there was at least a hope of limiting the damage Palimpsest might inflict. Then again, every minute he wasted was one in which he might be challenging Dorivic, rescuing his creation, returning it to working order, or else neutralising it before something unimaginably terrible could happen. Yes, now that he thought of it like that, there was really no choice to be made. “I’m going after Dorivic,” he decided aloud.

“No, you’re not,” Kiera said. “Not until you’ve told me what’s going on.” She had moved ahead of him, in the direction of the engine car. She tried the handle of the last compartment of the carriage and, when it gave, eased the door open. “Come in here. Talk to me. Either you tell me or I’m going back to Heleon myself and I’ll make him tell me.”

Hurrying over, Floranov glanced anxiously back towards the compartment they’d just left, and then once more up and down the carriage’s long central aisle. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, through gritted teeth.

The slap took him by surprise. It shouldn’t have, he realised, putting a tentative hand to his jaw; and nor should Kiera’s strength, for she’d always been at least his equal in that department. “Listen to me . . .” he began.

“No,” she said. “You listen to me. I’ve been lied to by Heleon Dorivic, and you betrayed me a long time ago, even if it was only by omission. I owe nothing to either of you. But something’s happening here, I know it, something wrong, and you’ve both made me a part of it. If you want my help, then you’ll explain this to me right now. And if you don’t, I swear to you, I’ll ask Heleon. One of you should have the decency to tell me the truth.”

Floranov considered. He could refuse and keep Kiera safe, perhaps. Then again, he knew better than anyone that nowhere was safe from Palimpsest. And while he hoped her threat was meant only to provoke him, he couldn’t be certain. At any rate, there was more to concern himself with than his ex-wife’s safety, let alone his own—and he was very much in need of an ally.

“All right,” he said. Floranov pushed past, into the carriage, and drew Kiera after. He closed the door behind them and twisted the lock, which settled into place with a satisfying clunk.

It would be impossible to hear them from out in the corridor. These compartments, meant for officers and Party high-ups, were reinforced and soundproofed. If Dorivic’s man decided to start forcing each door, there was every chance he’d begin with the wrong one, find some Party mogul perhaps with his own bodyguards in tow, and then things would go badly for him.

Within, the cabin was identical to the one they’d left. That was the State all over, Floranov thought: even its luxuries were devoid of imagination. Yet luxury was still luxury, and the peasants in the prole carriages would still have been awed. Floranov sank thankfully onto the nearer bench. It was absurd, but he felt almost safe. He tried to remind himself that Dorivic’s thug was still out there, as was Dorivic himself, that even if the authorities were ignorant of this plot against him they would hardly be sympathetic—and that all of those dangers together didn’t equal one thousandth of the threat a malfunctioning Palimpsest might pose.

But all of that seemed distant. The seat was comfortable against his back and rump. When Kiera sat opposite him there was a cosy familiarity to the scene, for all that there was still irritation in the downturn of her mouth, insistence in the way her eyes held his. Palimpsest . . . how did he explain it? It was so hard to make sense of, even when it was working as it should.

Yet Floranov couldn’t stay silent beneath the gaze of those slate grey eyes. “I’m sure you know the basics,” he said. “Everyone’s aware of Ellinski’s elaboration of multiverse theory . . . her appreciation that the factors causing parallel realities to diverge from one another were more complex than had previously been hypothesised. She was the first to conclusively disprove that old cod-scientific trope whereby every choice, every apparently random event, would generate its own distinct reality.”

“I do know the basics,” Kiera said, without patience.

Floranov had always tended to forget what an omnivore of knowledge she could be.

“All right,” he said. “Then you know that Ellinski proved beyond doubt that while what existed was indeed a stack of alternative realities, each was in fact dramatically different from the next . . . but nevertheless interlinked, interdependent in ways we can hardly imagine. What Ellinski realised that no one before her had was that the differences between realities were far more significant than the old theories would have suggested. It was as if only the most vigorous, divergent realities could sustain themselves; the rest collapsed back into unbeing. As though it was all a deliberate process, a conscious process . . .”

“Please don’t tell me you’re talking about God,” Kiera said disdainfully.

She had always been even more contemptuous of the old theologies than the State required her to be. Perhaps that was one of the real reasons Floranov had hid Palimpsest from her, for in truth she had a point: his creation had always seemed to him to fall upon the intersection of science and something measureless and strange.

“No, nothing like that,” he countered, trying to sound as if he meant it. “All right then, think of it like a machine, or an organism . . . one that constantly remakes itself through experimentation. A deliberate evolution.”

“To what end?” Kiera asked.

“Who knows? Could we even imagine? Maybe there is no end. Maybe the experimentation is an end in itself. Perhaps the multiverse, the reality stack, just likes to dream itself anew each day.”

“You sound like a zealot,” she said. “Is that what happened to you? Why you were so distant for so long? Did you get religion?”

“No, not at all,” Floranov said sourly, not knowing if she was serious or joking, or attempting to hurt him, or all three. “I’m just trying to make you understand the theory.”

“Then say I understand. You still haven’t told me what this machine of yours actually does.”

“No,” he agreed. “Well, that’s more tricky. Bear with me, will you? You see, at first the idea was that Palimpsest would allow the viewing of realities further down the Stack. That was where my research money came from; some obscure R & D division in one of the more esoteric State departments. Only, the officer who authorised it died and they couldn’t find a replacement, and somewhere along the way it all got snarled in red tape. I found myself working in a vacuum. I realised they had no idea what I was up to, or else they didn’t care.”

Floranov paused, tried to gather his memories. It all seemed so long ago; the experiences of a younger, more naive and—he could see now—a happier man. Even in the bad times, the months when it had seemed that all his work would be for nothing, there had been a sort of certainty, an underpinning of reality, which had vanished in those latter days. How much of that had come from the woman opposite him, he wondered? And for a moment he hesitated—for it seemed to him they were on opposite sides of a gulf of terrible knowledge, and it would be an inordinate cruelty to share what should be his to bear alone.

Yet the choice was out of his hands. Her grey eyes held him, drove him on.

“But even with no one paying attention,” Floranov said, “for a long time my work felt like a dead end. I got close, very close, but the pieces wouldn’t come together. I was obsessed but I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t in love with it. It had no application. Oh, the State would find some purpose, maybe harvest technology concepts from other realities, maybe spy on other iterations of themselves and learn something that way. I could see uses. But I couldn’t see anything that was useful. Our world is broken and bleeding, growing worse by the day, and I wanted to heal it, in however small a way. But Palimpsest was the only idea I had, and I didn’t know how I could bend it to do that.”

“Doran,” Kiera said, with forced patience, “this is all very interesting, and there was a time when it would have meant the world to me to hear it, but just now there’s at least one man trying to kill you and possibly me as well, that device of yours is doing whatever it’s doing and . . .”

“Really?” he asked, unable to keep the astonishment from his voice.

“What?”

“You really wanted to know about my work? I thought you hated it.”

“Oh, Doran,” Kiera said. “Are you such an idiot? I married you because I loved you. I stayed because I loved you. Did you think I didn’t care about your work? I cared about it and I cared about you. It was you who chose not to see that, day after day. Blame me for leaving if you like, but don’t you dare pretend it was because I didn’t care.”

And to that Floranov had no answer. He found in fact that all the words, all the thoughts, had been sucked out of him; the mental equivalent of a kick to the stomach. He had always known he should have fought harder to keep his wife’s affection, known that he’d been wrong about many things. Now though, the sheer, sudden scale of that error was like the view from a frozen mountainside: chilling and vast and terrible.

Floranov struggled to hang onto something, to find a point to centre himself around. The question, he thought. Just answer the damned question and everything else can wait. Or else it can’t, because it’s already too late, but close your mouth, damn you, stop gawping.

“I already knew,” he said, and the words sounded too thick, so he gulped and started once more. “I knew that, in transdimensional terms at least, the realities were close to each other. I knew there was a degree of permeability. However different realities might be, the fundamental building blocks, the fundamental rules were the same, and they all obeyed the metarules of the reality stack itself. What it meant was, bring a patch of one reality into the vicinity of another in just such a way and the latter would emulate the properties of the former exactly. One reality would soak through into the other. Do it correctly and the changes would be permanent, irreversible.”

“So . . .” He could see she was struggling to think the idea through, feeling out its edges in her mind—just as he had done all those many months and years ago. “So say I have an empty room and I’d like a chair. I can just tell your Palimpsest to find me one?”

“Absolutely,” Floranov agreed. “Palimpsest would hunt out a reality with basic spatial compatibility that contains something it can recognise as intended for a bipedal mammal of about your height to sit on, and it will link our reality to that in such a way that the chair bleeds through and is duplicated. Only since I’ve had no way to test and perfect it, it’s not quite at that stage yet. Right now, with the limitations of the interface I have, it’s more of a blunt instrument. If you wanted a chair it might bring a whole house along with it. Or, given how divergent the realities can be, something much stranger. It’s programmed to automatically avoid emulating anything it identifies as harmful, but it’s still a long way from safe.”

Kiera was very still now. When she spoke again, only her lips moved; her eyes, unblinking, stayed fixed on his. “And say I wanted a bomb? Or a flesh-eating bacteria? Or a supernova?”

She had always had a remarkable ability to see to the heart of a problem: to perceive its dangers with all-too-perfect clarity. Floranov realised that cold sweat was prickling his brow, running in a rivulet along his spine. He tried to keep his voice steady. “If someone found a way to remove the safety checks, which are both integral and extensive . . . then yes, of course. Anything. Anywhere. Perhaps even an entire reality, pasted over ours.”

Much of the blood had drained from Kiera’s face. In the gloom of the compartment, she looked almost ghostlike. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I’d realised . . . I’d never had gone along with Heleon. I wouldn’t have made you explain all this to me now. I’m sorry. You have to go, this minute, and try and stop it.” Then her expression changed; colour rushed back into her cheeks. “But why would you build it? What were you thinking, Doran?”

There was such horror and disgust in those last words that he could hardly bring himself to answer. “I thought it could do some good,” Floranov said, in barely a whisper. “Replacing poisoned seas with clean, fresh water, wouldn’t that be a good thing? I thought . . .”

Tup. Tup. Tup.

Someone was knocking on the compartment door. In the sudden silence it sounded like the pop of fireworks.

There were many people who might be outside. It could be perfectly innocent: a ticket inspector or some other routine check. But it wasn’t. Because, in stupidly imagining Dorivic’s thug smashing his way into one apartment after another, Floranov had failed to credit the man with any subtlety at all.

Eventually he managed to tear his eyes from Kiera’s to look at the door. The panel of frosted glass revealed the vaguest of silhouettes, for the lighting in the corridor was lower even than the carriage’s. What would one see from outside, looking in? Very little, surely, with the curtains drawn as they were.

There came another series of blows—these briefer, more urgent. Fine acting, Floranov thought: the exact knock of some lackey frantic to inform his betters of an emergency. Then the door handle rattled, slightly at first and then furiously, for what seemed a long time.

What next? Shoot the lock off? Shots in a luggage car where one thing, shots fired outside a fast-moving train might pass unheard—but inside a carriage? That would be a careless risk to take.

With a brutal crack, the door shook on its hinges: the sound of someone flinging their body at it with all their strength. Not as bad as firing a gun, but hardly inconspicuous. Floranov found that his heart was racing. There was something about being trapped, and the smallness of the cabin . . . the inescapability of it. He wished he had even one shot left in the miniature pistol strapped to his wrist; it wouldn’t even make a decent cosh.

The door shook once more, and groaned. The man must have the strength of a bear. Even then he could never hope to break the door. The hinges, however, and the glass, which had already begun to spiderweb, those were different matters.

Floranov reached a decision. He didn’t allow himself to question it, for he knew he’d never act if he did. He got to his feet, took two light steps to the door, turned the lock and slipped aside—just quick enough. The third time the man outside struck with even greater force, if such were possible—and this time, with no bolt to hold it in place, the door sprang open.

Floranov barely had time to get his arms up; that he did meant only that the door slammed upon his wrists instead of his face. It jarred him back and bounced him from the panelled wall behind. He should have thought this through. If nothing else he should have warned Kiera. For now, with nowhere to go, she was crawling backwards on her rump, clawing her way like a startled alley cat.

As the door swung back and out of his way, Floranov caught his first proper look at Dorivic’s thug. He had traded his suit for a steward’s uniform in austere, dark blue. Floranov didn’t want to imagine what had become of its former owner. It was a poor disguise, in any case; the man looked no less like a killer for shedding one costume for another.

Nor did he look surprised. The door springing open hardly seemed to have fazed him. He was reaching into a hip pocket now, a pocket distorted by a familiar right-angle bulge. Yet his eyes were on Kiera; he seemed not even to have noticed Floranov. Pushing from the carriage wall, Floranov put all his weight into something between a grapple and a charge. It was clumsy enough, and clumsier for the confined space. He came up against the man’s arm first, and Floranov tried his best to pin the limb, to keep that hand in the pocket along with the gun it now contained, even as the two of them half slid, half rolled onto the couch behind.

But the other man was larger—and much stronger. Had there been any room in which to manoeuvre, Floranov wouldn’t have lasted this long. Only having his left arm trapped awkwardly beneath him and one leg snared by the central table kept Dorivic’s thug from tearing himself free. Floranov jammed a foot against the still-open door and tried to brace. He hadn’t enough weight, or enough strength—and the instant the man freed his gun arm it would all be over.

Or perhaps even before then: for, shockingly loud within the carriage’s close confines, a shot roared. Dorivic’s man had fired through his own jacket pocket. Floranov felt the recoil jolt through his arm, like electricity transmitted between them; it was such an absurd gamble that he nearly let go in disbelief. But it took him only a moment to realise that the man had been intending to put a bullet in Floranov’s calf. And he’d nearly succeeded; the slug had grazed cloth, creased the table, embedded in the floor.

The shock of the gunshot had formed a caesura in their struggle. Now they set to it again, renewed. For the rules had changed: Dorivic’s man had only to wrench his arm around, angle it just so and fire again, and the next shot would gouge through Floranov’s leg. Floranov had to stop him; but for how long could he manage that? It was a losing game and he had nothing else. More, they both knew it. He could see enough of the man’s face to identify the calm there, the certainty—just as Floranov had no doubt that his own expression already admitted defeat.

Neither had bargained on Kiera—so that it came as a surprise to both of them when she crouched forward, balanced upon the table, and struck Dorivic’s man hard across the face. She’d been holding something clenched in her hand, a key perhaps or a pen; Floranov saw only the glint of metal. Whatever it was, it left a lurid stripe across the man’s face and dragged a grunt from between his lips.

The man began to buck again, even harder. His eyes were on Kiera, focused now on regaining her balance, readying another blow. His calm had vanished, and suddenly the man was moving like a wild animal: an animal caught in a trap. He couldn’t defend himself, and that made him desperate. It took everything Floranov had to hold him down.

Then a number of things happened, so close upon each other that Floranov could hardly separate them out. Kiera struck Dorivic’s man again, close to his left eye this time. Howling, he pushed against Floranov with impossible force, as if his body had conducted Kiera’s strength and added it to his own. Floranov finally lost his hold, rolled backward—and in that same moment, heard another shot. Even as the noise buffeted his ears, as pain flared behind his eyes, he kicked out and there came another shot, so close upon the first that they merged into one sledgehammer sound. Dorivic’s man reared once more and then Floranov lost sight of him, for he seemed to be sliding downward, even as the light in the carriage faded rapidly towards nothing.

Adwan Faizan rolled onto all fours, and only once he was certain his body would accept that position, got to his feet; hesitantly, for he wasn’t quite convinced that he hadn’t been shot. A part of his brain seemed certain he had been: like a muscle memory or the recollection of a dream. He could feel the hole in his stomach, a rupture opening him agonisingly to the air. Yet when he looked down there was nothing. No wound, no blood, no ragged hole in his charcoal-grey djellaba.

He looked to Karam. She was crouched on the far bench amidst a scattering of cushions, red and gold and duck egg blue. Her poise was calm—straight-backed, hands folded in her lap—but her eyes were wild.

“It’s all right,” Faizan said, as much for his benefit as for hers.

She looked up at him, and then down to his feet, at the body curled there. Slowly, the fever in her stare began to fade.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Faizan told her.

“I know that.”

“If anything, he shot himself.” He realised how absurd it sounded—and that, in any case, nothing in Karam’s expression suggested that she was seeking reassurance from him. Faizan noticed his own hand, saw how it was shaking. Who was he trying to convince? But he really hadn’t been responsible. He looked at the body, as Karam had, followed the stain of red spreading into the lustrous copper of the carpet. The man had fallen so that the table hid his face, and for that Faizan was grateful.

Then the body made a sound. Not a human sound, not something that might represent enduring life: a chirrup, shrill and insectile. Faizan froze, horrified. There was something too grotesque for words in hearing that odd, artificial note issuing from a corpse.

The sound came again. Again. It was issuing, he realised now, from the man’s other pocket, the one that hadn’t contained his weapon—the scarab-like thing that had released its grip on his hand and lay now on its back amidst the spreading red. At the thought, Faizan considered taking the weapon, but found that his mind resisted the prospect of plucking it from that crimson puddle, of wiping it clean and letting it clasp to his own palm. In any case, the insistent trilling was commanding all of his attention. He had realised now what it was, and its significance.

Faizan reached down. He’d never been squeamish about death, but then he had never encountered it in quite so intimate a fashion before this day. Taking care to avoid the wound in his torso, Faizan levered the man’s left side up enough to slip a hand into a wide pocket and draw forth the thing he felt there. It was a flattened dish of burnished metal, its edge indented with a simple pattern of triangles, its front a disc of dark glass.

Faizan considered for a moment, and then tapped at its centre. The pane shimmered like unsettled water and Halim Dori’s face appeared, somewhat faint and ghostly.

“Abid? Abid, damn you . . .” he said, and then—realising he was not speaking to Abid, presumably the name of the man now curled upon the floor—fell quiet.

“Hello, Dori,” Faizan said. “I’m afraid Abid is no more. I’d say it was an accident, except that he was trying to kill us at the time of his demise.”

“Ah,” said Dori. “Well, that is unfortunate.”

“Yes,” agreed Faizan. “I suppose unfortunate is the word.”

Dori’s handsome features slackened into a tentative smile. “I fear I owe you an apology, Adwan Faizan. Events have gotten out of hand. Partly your fault, of course, for making such a scene before we had a chance to talk properly, but I can’t help but feel partly responsible as well. I promise you, I didn’t tell my agents to try and kill you. On the contrary, I made it clear that I was eager to have you kept alive.”

“Then they’ve been doing a truly terrible job,” Faizan said. “I suppose that means you should feel better about the fact that they’re both dead.”

“I won’t lose sleep over it,” Dori agreed. “This is what happens when you employ men who only know how to kill. Such blunt instruments! Not good company for the likes of you and I, eh?”

“I can only speak for myself,” Faizan said. “I suspect that you fit quite well in the company of killers.”

Unexpectedly, Dori’s pleasant half smile turned to a wolfish grin. “Well, you have me there. But not such crass and small-minded men as those, that’s my point. I like grand, beautiful weapons . . . the kind that do exhilaratingly horrible things and leave your hands clean afterwards. And haven’t you just built the finest of those ever, Faizan? It’s really a thing of beauty, your Palimpsest.”

“It’s not a weapon,” Faizan said—and even as he spoke he recognised the futility of the statement.

Dori’s grin widened. “Oh, but not only is it a weapon, it is the finest, the most deadly . . . and can I say, the most singularly neat . . . that has ever been devised. You don’t believe me? Somewhere out there is a reality where China is a desert of blue sand, in which nothing larger than a scorpion lives. Somewhere Europe is a jungle, inhabited by a race of men whose greatest technical innovation is the sharpened rock. Thanks to your machine, what exists anywhere can exist here. Thanks to you, Faizan, we don’t have to fight our enemies ever again; we just patch them out of existence.”

Faizan’s first reaction was a technical one: he wanted to say, Palimpsest can’t do that. Not yet, anyway, not in this iteration. Yet straight away it occurred to him that this instinctive rejoinder was almost as terrible as the madness he was responding to. Dori was talking about the snuffing out of millions, no, billions of lives . . . for the purpose of expediency, of politics, or not even that, for his own grotesque satisfaction. And there was nothing hypothetical about it. What Palimpsest was not yet capable of, they’d find ways to make it do.

“You’d go along with that?” Faizan asked instead, because he felt the sudden need to make it clear that he never would. “Kill so many people? So many innocents?”

“Please don’t be foolish,” Dori remonstrated, as if talking to a petulant child. “Everyone dies, sooner or later. And what could be more humane? One moment they’ll exist, the next they won’t, and there’ll be no one even to remember them. You’ve done what men have strived to do since we first left the treetops, Faizan, you realise that don’t you? You’ve made the perfect weapon. Only you have to fix it or else it’s all for nothing. From the noises it’s been making, frankly, I don’t know that it’s likely to last for much longer.”

Faizan clicked off the communicator. All he could feel was horror and a sort of deep-rooted revulsion. There had been a quality in Halim Dori’s voice, a peculiar edge to his calm and somewhat cheerful tone; it spoke so clearly of madness that the effect was like cutting into a ripe fruit to find it rotted black to the core.

“I didn’t know,” Karam said. “I should have. But I didn’t.”

She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring at a patch of floor, away from the blood now congealing over a considerable portion of the carpet. It took Faizan a moment to realise what she was referring to. It was strange how such a detail could come to seem insignificant, but Faizan had all but forgotten that she and Dori had been lovers.

“He was gentle and kind,” she said. “He never talked about his work. Not in the way you didn’t, not in a secretive way . . . he just always acted like it wasn’t important. He was intelligent. Funny. We talked about . . . my work. Small things. Not politics. Not . . . not war.” Tears were streaming down her face. It was so rare to see her cry that Faizan was quite taken aback. “Oh, Adwan. He’s a monster. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have known,” he said, and realised he meant it. He’d come across madmen before, but Dori was something different altogether. He could see how, for such a man, the pretence of sanity would become just another part of his scheming: a game to be played. He could imagine the pleasure Dori would have taken from falsifying so grand a thing as a love affair.

Karam wiped her face, and with that she was the woman he knew again. Already it would have been impossible to say that she’d been crying. “I should have known,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He used me. He used me to get to you.” Her revulsion was palpable. To be manipulated was utterly against her nature. Yet so was anger, Faizan realised, let alone revenge. For despite the disgust in her voice she was quite tranquil, and there was no pretence to it. “I’m going to help you make this right,” she said.

“Good,” Faizan said. “I’m not sure I can do it alone.”

“Only . . .” She looked distracted, suddenly, as though she’d just become aware of a noise previously on the edge of hearing. “My head hurts.”

It seemed a curious thing to dwell on at so crucial a juncture; but Karam would never waste time pointing out a mere headache, and now that he considered, Faizan understood perfectly what she was referring to. Not an ache as such, not a pain in any definable way . . . “A wrongness,” he said. “Is that what you mean? A sense that everything . . . isn’t exactly in the place it should be?”

“Yes,” she agreed, and looked relieved that he’d understood. “Though, it does hurt, in a way, like a toothache all through my head. But yes, a wrongness. Adwan, I remember . . . a train. A dirigible. Other things. Stranger things. I remember them, but in my head they’re all this place. They’re not my memories, but they are. They belong to other people but those people are all me.”

Faizan barely heard her last words—for as he’d listened his own head had begun to spin, as though the ship’s lurching upon the waves had been exaggerated a thousand times. A train, an airship, yes, and other places too: another flying vessel, the body of an impossible insect twisted by who could say what strange sciences. If anyone alive could understand what those half-memories represented it was he; yet the reality of it was almost too much to bear. Because if it were true then it meant that he, that both of them, had travelled greater distances in the last hour than any two people who had ever lived.

“I think I understand what’s happening,” Faizan said. “Or a little of it at least.”

“It’s your machine, isn’t it?” Karam asked. “Your Palimpsest. This is what happens when it goes wrong.”

“I think so,” he agreed. “When I reconfigured Palimpsest I built on top of what was already there: strata of circuitry laid upon each other. You remember I told you there was a time I’d meant it to be used for observing other realities? Well, the way it did that . . .” He struggled for the words, for the concepts. “There are many, many realities in which you were never born. There are realities where humankind has never existed. But there are others, a minority, which contains individuals we would recognise as ourselves, and others that contain what you might call versions of us. And like I said, there are rules in the reality stack. Patterns and trends. Perhaps it would even make sense if you could see the big picture.”

“You think,” Karam said, “that we’re somehow . . . combining with these other iterations of ourselves?”

“I can’t explain it,” Faizan admitted. “The viewing technology was never intended to work like that. At best it would have been like being a passenger in the head of another version of yourself. But that was with only one version of Palimpsest, in only one reality. If what we’re remembering is true then there are many malfunctioning Palimpsests and many versions of us, interacting up and down the stack.” He tried to hold the image in his mind and failed. “It’s amazing it hasn’t split the multiverse in two,” he said, and there was a note of awe in his voice that he found he couldn’t hide.

“There’s still time,” Karam said. “Maybe that’s exactly what’s happening.”

She reached down, towards the slumped body on the floor. He heard the sound of cloth rustling, and when she stood Karam was holding the weapon Dori’s thug had used, the scarab-thing. She’d wiped the blood off it, presumably with the man’s own clothing. With her left hand she placed it on her right, and immediately its crooked legs clawed round her palm and gripped.

Karam flexed her hand experimentally and the two narrow slits at the front of the device glowed brilliantly white. “I’m going to the bridge,” she said. “I’ll ask them to stop the ship. And if they won’t I’ll make them.”

Faizan almost told her that his own weapon was empty and at the last moment chose not to. He wanted Karam to be safe; it seemed, in fact, much more important than his own well-being. “You should try and persuade them to abandon ship,” he said. “I can’t say what will happen if Palimpsest should . . .” What was the word? Nothing like Palimpsest had ever existed, and certainly nothing like it had ever gone wrong. “I don’t know what it will do if I can’t stop it,” he finished. “Or what the safe zone would be. Maybe there is no safe zone. Still, promise me you’ll try.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “And you?”

“I’ll talk to Dori, face to face,” Faizan said. “If he’ll let me, perhaps I can stabilise Palimpsest.”

“And if you do? You can’t leave it in his hands, Adwan. You know he meant every word.”

“Yes, I know. There’s a self-destruct built into Palimpsest . . . vials of acid contained in its core. If I set the switches correctly they’ll etch its every circuit clean. There’d be no way to reconstruct it.”

“He’ll expect something like that,” Karam said.

“I’m sure he will,” Faizan agreed.

“I don’t know if he even cares that it’s malfunctioning. Maybe he’s insane enough to want to see what happens.”

“Maybe,” Faizan echoed. The possibility had occurred to him. Only he wasn’t certain anymore that Palimpsest was malfunctioning; not in the way he’d imagined until now. There was something else going on here, something he was finally beginning to see the edges of.

Still, there was a very real possibility that Dori would just shoot him on sight. And there was little Faizan could do to stop him.

He grasped the part-open door, which hung now from one twisted hinge, and wrenched it aside. Then he stepped into the passage, which on this level was carpeted and decorated with finely patterned wall hangings, so that only the unceasing motion of the floor underfoot gave any hint that they were at sea. It was surprising no one had heard the fight and come to investigate. Then again, didn’t many things go purposefully unnoticed these days?

Karam followed behind, reaching out the hand with the scarab-thing attached to keep it at a distance from herself. Faizan felt the need to say something meaningful or appropriate to the situation. But when he sought for words that might do the situation justice he found nothing. Those times when they’d been married, when they’d been lovers, seemed a lifetime ago.

“Take care,” he said finally. At least it summed up his feelings.

Karam reached forward then—and he wondered for a moment, with mingled joy and trepidation, if she was about to kiss him. Instead she put her arms around his shoulders and drew him close. He returned the embrace and they held each other, gently, as if they both were fragile. Then she let go and they stepped apart, as though the gesture had been nothing more than a step in a dance. He realised there was nothing left to do or say.

Yet it was Karam who turned away first. In a moment she was down the passage and through the far door and gone. Faizan stared after her—and then, realising how absurd he was being, turned also and hurried towards the opposite door, which gave into another section of mutedly lit corridor. He followed that, and when steps broke away on his left, dashed upward, though the sunlight at the summit was like a wall of heated brass.

As he forced his way up into the light, Faizan was grateful for the accompanying rush of fresh air, with its bitter edge of salt; it was refreshing after the perfumed staleness of the lower levels. However he realised straight away that the day had grown uncomfortably hot, and that the breeze skimming from off the water was insufficient to cool it.

The greater portion of the deck Faizan had come out on was filled with clusters of long benches, and all of these were occupied. Even then there was nowhere near enough seating space for everyone. Many, unable to afford the cabin fares, would be sleeping there. They might be grateful for the fair weather once night fell, but for now they were more concerned with shading their faces against the sun’s glower.

Most wore black, or else dark browns and reds and greys. Beneath the intense, golden light they looked like softened shadows, or like hieroglyphs, their edges smudged by age. Both men and women had their hoods up to shelter their faces. Many would merely be shielding themselves from the blazing sun, he knew, but others would be hiding marks of Plague: the mottling of cheeks and forehead, the gouges in the skin like old, deep scars.

No one, infected or well, paid any attention to the guards on the higher tier, and Faizan did his best not to as well. Yet they were hard to ignore entirely. All of them—except for one man Faizan assumed must be an officer—had the heads of jackals: leering and red-eyed, utterly bestial. How this could be so, whether it was some illusion or yet another example of scientific advances formulated in deepest secret, he had no way to say. But they made him think, just as he was meant to think, of death.

Feeling self-conscious, like an imposter, Faizan pulled his own hood up and pressed into the crowd. He kept as close to the vigorously contested territory along the rail as he could manage. It was cooler there, and so even more crowded; still, he didn’t feel hidden. Faizan was certain that if he were to look up at the higher rail, those jackal-headed men—Women? Things?—would be gazing down at him, with eyes like beads of bloody glass. Strictly speaking he had no reason to consider them adversaries: the Jackal-kind were like a force of nature and neutral in the same, very specific way, a way that might save one minute, only to destroy the next. But even if he’d known for certain that they weren’t allied with Dori, Faizan realised he would still never dare to approach them.

He pressed on. Whenever a line of sight cleared in the crowd, constantly shifting heads and shoulders forming by chance into a tunnel, he would glimpse the distant coastline, threading behind the stubborn bulk of the stern house. He could just make out the shimmering outline of New Cairo in the far distance: the pyramid that jutted from its heart, built in the stepped style of the Americans, and the carven splinter probing the sky from its harbour bay, which they called the Needle of Liberty. Even at such a distance, Faizan imagined he could discern the buzzing clouds of darker air that marked those regions—the shanties, the ragged markets where the poor were clustered—that had been struck by the thing called Plague. Such an old word, yet he knew it had been made by science, not born of nature, just as he believed with certainty that Palimpsest could remake the sickened air.

Near to the stern house, a corridor descended into the bowels of the vessel. There were signs that marked it for official use only and that was enough to keep the crowd from pressing too close. Stepping into empty space, Faizan felt more out of place than ever, more certain of Jackal eyes boring down upon him. He forced himself to set the feeling aside, to look—to feel—as though he belonged. He descended the stairs and pushed through the door at their base.

The corridor beyond was familiar. At the same time, a part of Faizan was certain he had never been this way before. One section of the ship was much like any other, of course, and especially in so utilitarian an area as this; the only adornments were pipes and bundled wires and the occasional notice or warning. Yet when he’d come before to ready Palimpsest for its trial run, surely he must have passed through here?

Yes, he must have. He had. He hadn’t. Faizan remembered both, and neither perfectly. He remembered walls of metal, of wood, of pulsating insect meat. Memories that were his and weren’t.

Faizan pressed on. It would be all too easy to think about it too much, too deeply or just from the wrong angle, and go quite mad. For surely the human mind was not made to hold so many memories, all competing, and the more he tried to resist them the more they seemed to bubble to the surface, thick and dark as tar.

Nor was that the worst of it. He was dimly aware of a deeper anxiety, a fear that had taken root in the cabin as he’d talked to Karam; something she’d said or that he’d said, but Faizan couldn’t place it, and the greater part of him didn’t want to try. Yet . . . it was vital. He sensed, somehow, that if he was going up against Dori then it was knowledge that couldn’t wait.

The corridor turned into another, equally familiar, equally new, and Faizan hesitated. What had he told her? It was like the memory of memory; it struck him that it hadn’t been Adwan Faizan who spoke those words at all. An unfamiliar accent: Eastern Europe, Rus perhaps? But twisted, changed into something he barely recognised by geopolitical currents he could hardly imagine. His own voice, bent to the dictums of an altogether other reality.

I built on top of what was already there . . .

Yes, that was what he’d done. At the heart of Palimpsest was a window, or rather an endless series of windows, into the depths of the reality stack. He’d worked in a fever back then, often for days on end without rest or food. Did he know, in the end, what it was that he’d built? What he’d embedded deep in Palimpsest’s heart, alongside its other core functionality, its artificial consciousness?

You think we’re somehow combining with these other iterations of ourselves?

Faizan did; he believed it absolutely. But he knew as well that that was only half an answer. It wasn’t enough—or even very meaningful—to understand what was happening. The important question was why.

He had given Palimpsest a mind, an extraordinary mind. And he had set so few restrictions on it. He’d only cared that it should be safe, that it should never endanger life but only protect it. That mandate was so vital and irrefutable that he’d put little thought into the actual details.

Was it possible that, in its desire to fulfil its most essential directive, Palimpsest’s nascent awareness had exceeded the limits he’d thought to set upon it?

Could it have seen a threat and acted?

For the memories were growing clearer now, as though his introspection was the stirring of murky waters; Faizan was beginning to see the shapes of what lay beneath. There had been an accident, a terrible accident. And then . . .

A sound broke upon his thoughts—an insectile chirping—and this time he recognised it immediately. He took the communicator disk from his djellaba and tapped its surface. He had half been expecting Dori’s handsome, smirking features, and could barely hide his relief when he saw Karam’s face fill the screen instead.

“You’re all right,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Karam agreed. “It turns out our captain is not such an unreasonable man. When I told him who I was and about the cargo of endangered animals being smuggled in his hold he agreed to stop the ship.”

Faizan’s heart sank. “But not evacuate the passengers?”

“Not yet. I mentioned a risk of infection . . . of deliberate infection, like in the attack on Tehran. Currently our good captain is wrapping himself in knots wondering what he should do about the risk of endangered, bioweaponised animals getting loose on his ship. He’s also let me use an office with a ship-to-land communications deck, and I’m pulling every string I have.”

“That’s good thinking,” Faizan said, trying to disguise his real thought: But it will take too long.

Perhaps she saw it in his face though. “My director knows the kinds of leads I’ve been following. And he trusts me—enough to back me on this, I think. If he does, then they’ll have no choice but to evacuate. Five minutes, Adwan, can you wait that long?”

Faizan forced a smile. “I think so,” he said.

“All right. Stay safe.”

The screen went dark, became a mirror in which he could dimly make out his own reflection. Like the passage he was standing in, like his memories, like so much now, that face was at once familiar and strange. If he considered it too intently he could only see it as a mask, a mask he’d worn for a long time and forgotten to take off.

But if that were true, what did his real face look like? Faizan could remember names, a card-house of identities, but not which one had come first. Was it Doran? Daniella? D’ren? No, there was another behind those, another identity, one he felt a kinship for that he didn’t with those others. It wasn’t that the others were lies, for every reality was true by its own terms, but that one—the beginning—was his truth.

With that realisation, finally, it came: Dran Florrian. If he pushed for them, the memories were there as well. The TransCon. An adversary, the same but different. Dorivic? No, Dorric, Harlan Dorric. The cargo bay. That was where it had begun.

And in that reality, an advantage none of the others offered: a technology he’d encountered nowhere else. There Faizan could connect with his machine without touching it. This version of him could hardly understand how it was possible, yet he knew it was, for he’d built it.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor.

The metronomic tread made him think of the Jackal-kind, but whether it was them or not, he saw no profit in trying to bluff an explanation of his presence here. The forged papers he’d bought no longer filled him with confidence. Faizan hurried onward, treading lightly, matching his steps as well as he could to those advancing upon him. With effort he found that he could remember his direction, even as contradictory memories overlapped. But it was getting worse, he realised—and it was his own fault. Having conceded that those shadow recollections were not false, were every bit as valid as his real memories, he’d relinquished his only mental defence. Why had he thought to call his creation Palimpsest? What he’d invented was more akin to blotting paper. That was certainly how his mind felt now: like something weak and porous, absorbing the seeping residue of other lives.

With difficulty Faizan recognised a turning and forced himself to take it, even as one portion of his mind demanded that the correct route lay straight ahead, while another was adamant he’d already left it far behind. He was even starting to doubt the footsteps following behind him. It would be easy to doubt everything; to see this reality as a fiction, a dream he might wake from. Faizan had to remind himself that this life was real and that a real him had inhabited it, through an entire lifetime. Its crisis was real; its pain was real. If he failed, if he let Karam down, then that would be very real.

He struggled with the thought, couldn’t quite accept it. The footsteps were insistent. Faizan pressed against the wall of the new corridor, understanding as he did so that it was an admission of guilt should whoever approached happen to look round and see him. He thought of red jackal eyes in a black jackal face. How could anyone try and explain to something like that?

The footsteps reached their crescendo. Holding his breath, Faizan was relieved to see a human head on human shoulders. He recognised the sky blue robe, with its geometric golden trim: a steward’s uniform, just like the one that Dori’s dead agent had stolen and likely killed for. It was worn by a woman with short-cropped hair. Perhaps at this very moment she was looking for her missing companion, whose body was no doubt somewhere far behind and beneath them, sinking towards the ocean bed. Whatever her mission was, the steward didn’t look round. In a moment she was obscured by the farther wall.

Faizan held in a sigh of relief and let his eyes stray further along the new corridor. It was much like the one it branched from: metal walls painted a chipped and fading green, tendrils of wire suspended in sagging bunches, and at the farther end, a door. Its sign read STORAGE. It seemed to him a validation: that single word pierced through the morass of contradictions, the voices that insisted on other directions in far different spaces.

Beyond that door was Palimpsest—and Dori. Faizan had no plan to deal with either. In this reality, he could only stop Palimpsest if he could reach it, could physically interact with it. And that meant getting past Dori. But in that other reality, the shadow of half-formed memories that were nevertheless more real-feeling than everything around him, perhaps Faizan had a different opportunity. And therein lay a contradiction. So far, Palimpsest had been moving him without his consent or control, casting him through realities like a stone skipped across a lake. Now that he knew what the machine could do, perhaps he could make Palimpsest do it; but that would mean interfacing with it, and that would mean . . .

That would mean thinking his way around a contradiction. Was the only way to reach Palimpsest to get back to the reality in which he didn’t need to reach it? Yet still Faizan felt sure that he was missing something, a crucial element—but one his mind inevitably shied from. Because it frightened him? Yes. A thread of memory, but pursuing it filled him with such instinctive fear that he could hardly endure it.

The communicator began to trill.

The wave of half-formed panic came close to bubbling over as Faizan dashed one hand into a pocket, hardly thinking yet painfully alert, straining to catch those footsteps petering out in the distance. He wrapped a sweating palm around the communicator, almost fumbled it—and all the while, all he could wonder was whether the steps had stopped or merely paused in curiosity. He managed to bring the communicator up to his face, to tap it with a slick finger, and Karam must have understood from his expression, for to his immense gratitude she only stared back in wide-eyed miniature.

Faizan listened. There was nothing to hear except the faint insistence of his own breathing, and distantly, the slosh of waves, the patter of muted conversation from on deck.

“It’s all right,” he whispered.

Karam’s face relaxed—but only partly. “Is it Halim?” she asked.

Faizan shook his head and then, realising how badly the gesture translated to the small, static-washed screen, said, “No. It’s all right. I’m worrying too much.” He thought of attempting a reassuring smile, but his face was not quite ready for that; it would likely arrive as a grimace.

“I have good news,” Karam said, apparently choosing to believe him. “Yousef Masri’s prepared to back me, and the captain had to take his word. They’re starting the evacuation now. All of the lifeboats, and they have a helicopter, too. There’s another smaller ship nearby.”

“That is good news,” Faizan agreed, leaving unsaid the truths they both knew: that there were too many people on this vast ocean-going vessel; that it might take hours to move them all. Still, it was good news. “And you’ll go with them,” he said. He took care to make sure that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a question.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Adwan. I’m staying here to help coordinate, and the moment I’m certain everyone is getting safely off this ship, I’m coming to help you. Which of us is Halim more likely to listen to? Just keep him talking and wait for me.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I have to know you’re safe.”

“And I have to know you’re safe. That means me being with you.”

Faizan struggled for an argument that would reach her. It had always been difficult and now it was impossible. His mind was only half on the conversation, the other half turned inward, and realising that brought a further distraction of guilt, for might this not be the last time they ever spoke? At least in this reality, he thought—and the sudden understanding jarred him physically, so that he had to clamp his jaw not to gasp.

“I know why we’ve been moving between realities,” he said, when he was certain he could manoeuvre his tongue around the words.

Karam looked puzzled, perhaps more by the dramatic change of subject than what he’d actually said.

Rather than give her time to consider, Faizan pressed on quickly: “But it means I have to do this alone. You can’t possibly help me. And it means . . .” He knew he shouldn’t say it, but he couldn’t help himself. “I don’t think I’ll see you again.”

“Faizan . . .”

He could already feel his resolve faltering. He couldn’t let her say any more. Faizan tapped the screen, watched Karam’s image contract to a dot and then to nothing. Then, on sudden impulse, he dropped the device to the ground and jabbed it with his heel. He watched as the smoked glass webbed with a dozen cracks and folded into a flower of convulsed metal.

There was no going back. Now he only had to hope that she’d listen. Yet when had she ever done that? No, what he had to do was end this quickly.

Faizan hurried down the last stretch of corridor, no longer caring about the clang of his feet against the metal floor. His plan was so desperate, so based in unprovable hypothesis, that he could hardly bring himself to consider it. The door at the end was locked with a diagonal bar. Hadn’t it been a wheel? A handle? Hadn’t the door been of wood rather than metal, or—and this memory was the strangest—of faintly pulsing purple flesh? No matter. He put both hands on the bar and twisted. Hearing it click, he drew the door open.

The cargo bay was a long quadrangle, plain and steel-walled like the corridor, but expanded into grander dimensions. Columns of netting braced with metal rings hung from the ceiling and clung to the floor, each filled to brimming with cases, bags, hempen sacks, cheap plastic carriers and other less identifiable luggage. Further in, crates were stacked, still bound in clumps of mesh. It made Faizan think of some huge, gangling spider, mindlessly storing what it couldn’t eat.

And there, in the centre of the room, too large, too ungainly to be stored anywhere else, stood Palimpsest. Its golden skin returned a sullen reflection of the orange light. One rounded corner had a chunk gouged from it, out of which sparks fizzed intermittently. Seeing it for the first time in what seemed an age, seeing it as parts of him had never seen it, Faizan could hardly imagine he had built it: it looked like a sarcophagus for something ancient and alien.

Of Dori and his assistant there was no sign. He didn’t know what that meant, though it must mean something. A trap? Perhaps. Faizan stepped through the doorway.

Immediately he heard a clicking, like the chitinous whisper of mandibles, but rendered in metal upon metal. A familiar sound; he’d heard it recently. Faizan didn’t look round, for he didn’t need to. He recognised the noise of the weapon, identical to the one Karam had taken from Dori’s dead agent. He knew it was pointed at the back of his head.

Yes. A trap it was.

Dori stepped out ahead of him, neatly blocking Faizan’s view of Palimpsest. He was wearing a dark blue robe that didn’t quite disguise his easy grace or the musculature of his upper body; he was possessed of a casual strength that Faizan only noticed now, seeing him as a threat.

“Dear gods,” said Dori. “For an intelligent man, you have the makings of a fine idiot. Did you really imagine you could sneak up on me by using a communicator that belonged to one of my own men?”

More than the weapon Faizan knew was pointed at his head, held presumably by Dori’s engineer, or the duplicate wrapped discreetly around Dori’s fist, that froze him in place: he’d been a fool indeed. That Karam had found the communicator’s frequency so easily should have been enough to make him doubt the device. Faizan had to fight back an instinct of guilt, as though he and Karam had been caught out in some sordid secret. “I only came here to talk to you,” he said, and was pleased when it sounded like the truth. “If you were listening, then you heard that, too.”

“So you two have reconciled your differences, have you?” Dori asked, his tone abruptly gracious. “Well, that’s nice.”

“Karam’s ready to put our personal history aside if it means stopping Palimpsest. She understands the risk it could pose, now that it’s malfunctioning. I’m sure you do too, Dori, so why don’t we . . .”

“But, Faizan,” Dori interrupted, “have you really not stopped to ask yourself how I knew what you were working on?” He chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry. Your darling Karam didn’t knowingly betray your secrets. How could she, when she didn’t know them herself?”

It struck Faizan then, as it should have hours before, and surely would have if he’d had even a moment to consider: Dori knew far more about Palimpsest than he had any right to. Though Faizan hated to let himself be distracted, going along with whatever twisted game Dori was playing, he couldn’t help himself. “It’s in the past,” he said. “I don’t care what she did or didn’t tell you.”

“Don’t you? Really?”

Faizan almost bit his tongue to keep the question in; what chance did his tenuous plan have if he let things slip out of control now? But Dori had him. He really did need to know. “You’re right,” he said. “Karam had no idea what I was working on. So how did you?”

“Ah,” said Dori, with a little, fluting laugh, “Adwan Faizan does have one weakness after all. Even you’re vulnerable to curiosity, eh? Well first of all I should tell you that I came across your project years ago. It was hardly revolutionary work back then, but it was interesting . . . and the more I considered, the more interesting it seemed.

“But I could tell you were holding back. Some people don’t do their best work under scrutiny, Faizan; I know that better than most. It seemed to me that if we could just lengthen your leash, then you might come up with something truly special. And as it turned out that wasn’t so difficult. The executive running your project, old Maloof, was far more interested in trying to misappropriate funds. No one had any issue with him running into a sudden heart attack . . . except, I suppose, for Maloof himself.”

“You killed him,” Faizan said. He should have been shocked, but he’d found Maloof to be a loathsome individual who no doubt had been embezzling exactly as Dori claimed, and so it was hard.

“Oh, absolutely. I killed him and I did you a favour, so please try not to sound so judgemental. And wasn’t I right? With no Maloof sitting on your shoulder, you soon began to realise what your machine might really be capable of. Only it turned out you were a little too good at keeping secrets; it didn’t take long for anything interesting to start vanishing from your reports. I knew that either you’d suddenly grown terribly stupid or that you were hiding something—and aside from the occasional aberration, you are not a stupid man, Faizan. Well, I hate to have a secret kept from me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t grow a little obsessed with you.”

“So you seduced Karam,” Faizan said. He surprised himself by not sounding especially bitter.

“She didn’t make it easy. Does that make you feel better? Well, it should. Even when all my efforts began to pay off, she still wouldn’t betray you. I tell you, you were a fool to let that one go. Still, there were days when I’d have liked to snap her neck for that stubbornness.” Dori reached into a slit in his robe, drew forth something tiny and metallic. When he held it in the flat of his palm it spread silvery wings and made a fragile whirring sound. It looked like an ornamental model of a locust, crafted from dull gold, but with the head too large, staring with disproportionate, jewelled eyes.

He said, “In the end, the most our dear Karam was good for was inadvertently smuggling one of these into your laboratory. Lovely work, is it not? My own invention: a more useful spy, as it turned out, than any of my flesh-and-blood agents.”

So that was it. For how long had those artificial eyes overseen his work, and Dori through them?

“As I’m sure you now see,” continued Dori, “I know your machine almost as well as you do. And I don’t believe for one moment that it’s going to explode. I don’t believe it’s going to turn this reality inside out or make frogs and blood rain from the sky. You understand,” he said, indicating with only a motion of his eyes the man now standing behind Faizan, “that I don’t at all speak from a position of ignorance.”

“So what, then?” Faizan asked. There was coldness growing in the pit of his stomach, an icy ball of fear. “What does your expert think is wrong?”

“Touma believes that, setting aside some minor functional impairment of little interest to us, the damage has erased a good portion of the inhibitor code you set on your machine’s master control daemon.”

Yes, Faizan thought. Your man knows his business. “And you don’t consider that a danger?” he asked, trying his best to sound sarcastic, trying his hardest to ignore the way the fear-cold was spreading up through his innards.

“A danger?” For the first time, Dori actually looked as though he was considering something Faizan had said. “Yes, of course. But more than that, I consider it fascinating. If I had one criticism of your project, my friend, I would have to say that I found it a little boring . . . all those safety checks, all those precautions. How did you expect it to do anything at all?”

Faizan had no answer to that. He had never dared hope to make Dori see reason, not really. Yet to talk with him, to realise how diametrically opposed they were: Faizan still found that shocking. His one slender hope had lain in Dori’s not knowing that Palimpsest, in all likelihood, posed no threat; that Dori might be afraid enough of losing it, and perhaps in the process his own life, to take the gamble of letting Faizan try and render his creation safe. And yes, it had been a slender hope indeed, and yes, Dori’s man was certainly good, to have worked out so much in so little time.

Now the only question left was why Dori was bothering to keep him alive, and Faizan had no desire to ask that.

“Dori,” Faizan said instead, “the way I see it, you have only two options. You can get out of my way or you can shoot me.”

“Really?” Dori looked more amused than ever. “Of the two of us, I’d never have guessed it would be you who’d be telling me what my options were.”

“Then let me rephrase,” Faizan said, steadily. “I have to get to my machine. I have to try to stop it. Whatever your man thinks, it’s unstable, and because I made it, I can’t let it hurt people. I have to do everything I can, do you understand? I have no choice.”

“I have to admit,” said Dori, “you’re disappointing me. The truth is I’d had some hopes of us working together. You built something so fearsomely capable of destruction. You dispatched the men I sent after you, without much trouble and apparently without much conscience either. I thought at the very least that I should try and talk to you; see if there might be some hope for you.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Faizan said.

“You should be,” Dori agreed, and he raised his weapon and fired.

It was so quick—a snake darting. Faizan had never seen anyone move so fast. He’d needed time to prepare, to ready his mind, and all he could think in that moment was that he had no time at all. There was fire, a lick of it like a forked tongue from the scarab-weapon’s vents, and then pain, and Faizan clutched for his focus as a drowning man would a broken spar, even as the impact tore him from his feet.

I’ve been shot, he thought. The pain was bewildering, beyond anything he could have imagined: the sensation of having a part of him brutally opened to the world, the awareness of what should be inside flooding out.

I’ve been shot.

But hadn’t that been the plan?

Now the pain was distant. If Faizan wanted it to be, it was all distant: his body, Dori, the storage bay, all little more than a shadow violently flickering.

He had been shot, and it was excruciating—but only in one single reality. There were many versions of him. Most were unhurt. Others were sick; some were long dead. A tiny few lived in realities where there existed nothing at all like the weapon Dori had wielded. And though he was Adwan Faizan, he was all of those other versions of himself as well, and all of them at once. Faizan was shot, but he was unhurt. He was dying, but elsewhere he lived. All possibilities were the same. All were within reach.

That was Palimpsest: a sinkhole through the reality stack; a tiny god in a room made of doors. That was the thing he had inadvertently built. And because he had built it, Palimpsest wanted to protect him—just as it had striven to protect the one person he cared about. It was determined to keep them both safe, and it had all of creation to play in.

Not this time, though. This time he had a destination in mind. Faizan had thought of it in the moment the shot had impacted, thought of nothing else, and he was thinking of it now, unheeding of the pain, of the dying. He was holding a memory, knowing it was more than a memory . . . knowing it was an entire reality. And at the same time he was shouting, in his mind, where he had to believe that Palimpsest could hear. Because it wouldn’t let him die. Because even now it would be in the process of copying everything that made him him, ready to replicate his consciousness into yet another reality. Because—before it could do that—there would be an instant, a fraction of a millisecond, where all of him was contained within it.

Take me back. Leave her here. You have to trust me. I know you’re trying to save me. I know you’re trying to save yourself. But if it’s possible, if there’s any way, then I need you to do this.

I made you. You have to trust me.

A pause. It felt like a held breath. Palimpsest had no need to hesitate, for its processes were as close to instantaneous as anything could be. Perhaps it was only showing him the mercy of consideration: a softening of the blow. How could Faizan not doubt himself? It was the spider at the centre of the universe-web and he, its creator, was merely a man.

Then time and space began to fold, or else unfold, shrink or expand, like origami worked by a million competing hands: backwards and forwards, in and out, and every way the same, everything a point and every point a centre. Faizan was falling, sideways, upwards, and then in no direction at all, for he understood by then that the sensation was only his mind fighting to make sense of dimensions it could not possibly comprehend.

Better, surely, to surrender, to relinquish himself to the flow—even if the flow felt as if it would twist him every way at once and spit him out in pieces. And sure enough, it was easier if he didn’t resist; so much so that for a moment it seemed he was on the verge of some great understanding. If only his body would stop trying to cling to antique notions of three-dimensional space, then perhaps his mind might see the multiverse for what it was—see the way his creation saw.

But the moment was slipping. The sensations he experienced were changing, the possibility he’d felt himself so close to was tumbling away. Space flexed back into something like its recognisable shape; time ceased its frantic hurtling, shrank to the mundane linearity of moment upon moment.

Faizan opened his eyes.

No. Not Faizan.

His name was Dran Florrian, and he’d come home.

He’d have been lying if he’d said the view was worth the effort. For the storage bay was much as he’d left it, and seemed more drearily pragmatical than ever for all the other versions of this space he’d witnessed, which still flickered on the edges of memory.

He was on his back, staring up towards the girder-ribbed ceiling. Was he injured? Florrian tried to recover what had happened in those last moments, before Palimpsest had cast his consciousness hurtling through the multiverse. He’d tried to shoot Dorric. He’d missed. Florrian had hit Palimpsest instead. The shot had carried on, and . . .

Karen. He’d shot Karen.

The memory was like a blow, a blow that brought with it other memories not quite his own. Florrian knew what it was like to be shot. He could feel the wound he’d suffered, only moments ago and never: could remember suffering a similar injury, in this body and this reality. He knew what Karen must have endured.

But Palimpsest had saved her, as it had saved him. It had spirited them away before death could claim them, merged what made them unique with other versions of themselves. It had sheltered them, protected them, made sure they weren’t seperated—like a child unwilling to see its parents part.

That seemed an absurd motive to ascribe to a machine. So maybe Palimpsest had simply calculated unimaginable odds and concluded that their best chance of survival—and therefore, its own—lay in their staying together. If so, it had been both right and wrong, for hadn’t those other realities proven every bit as hostile? Then again, Florrian was here and Karen was alive, or at least a version of her was. It was too early to condone or condemn Palimpsest for what it had done. He still had a chance to set this right, or to fail utterly. Because if he couldn’t beat Dorric, then no version of him, no version of Karen, would be safe ever.

So what now? Florrian was in the storage bay. He was lying on his back. He wasn’t tied up, for who would bother to restrain a corpse? Yet there was no wound in his chest, either. Only as Florrian raised his head to look down the length of his own body did he understand why: he wore not the one-piece coverall he’d dressed in that morning, but a long loose jacket and trousers of darkest grey, and the hand that he held up for his own inspection was not untanned pink but earthy brown. He wasn’t wounded because this wasn’t him.

His mind, but a new body: a body patched from another him in another reality. Palimpsest had brought him back here just as he’d asked, and done so in the only way it could. It would take some getting used to—if Florrian lived that long.

Then a panicked thought struck him. What about the neural implant? His remote interface with Palimpsest was the sole reason he’d sought out this reality. Yet even as he thought of it, he felt a whispering response to his probing. Not as he remembered it, though, like a note out of pitch: the implant belonged to this body, drawn presumably from a technologically analogous reality. With concentration, however, he found that he could access it; whether because it was genuinely similar or because this body had also brought memories with it, he chose not to wonder.

Florrian probed with the new mental implant, testing its limits. Would his connection still be blocked? Yes, it was like drumming against a wall, a wall in his own mind. He knew his first priority then. He tilted his head, hoping against hope that neither Dorric nor his engineer were looking his way. They weren’t: the engineer remained hunched over Palimpsest’s control panel, while Dorric was farther away, leaned against a cargo pod, his body language speaking clearly of impatience.

Dorric was out of reach, but the engineer wasn’t. That suited Florrian’s needs. He probed for the dull bone-ache in his arm that represented the weapon embedded there—and felt nothing. This body had never been modified, never been remade for the purpose of violence; of course it hadn’t, for if it had been, then Palimpsest could never have patched it through.

Then again, there was a contradiction there that Florrian had never quite been able to resolve. For with sufficient ingenuity, anything could be repurposed for violence—even a body.

Florrian rolled to his front, pushed onto hands and knees and then to his feet, the motion clean and gymnastic. His old muscles had been in good shape, but these were better. Before he was even fully standing, Florrian was moving, and the engineer was turning at the scuff of soles on metal. His mouth had formed a perfect O of surprise—as befitted the sight of a dead man, his skin colour inexplicably changed, barrelling towards him.

When Florrian’s fist met his chin there was almost no resistance. It was like the man wanted to fall. They went over together, Florrian struggling to find purchase against the limp form collapsing under him. The engineer was out cold, his jaw fractured or broken—and neural interfaces didn’t react well to extremes of pain, let alone unconsciousness.

Florrian flinched at the crunch of the engineer’s body beneath his knee and rolled over, trying to regain his feet. Ahead, Dorric was turning. Under other circumstances, the almost cartoonish astonishment on his face would have been gratifying. But he had a weapon in his right hand, a disk of glass and metal such as his thugs had used. It wouldn’t take Dorric long to recover and use it, and there was no cover, nothing nearby—nothing except Palimpsest, and Florrian would sooner gamble his own life than risk it suffering more damage. He staggered on, and stopped.

“Your skin?” Dorric asked, with all the wide-eyed puzzlement of a small child.

It must be shocking, Florrian realised, to see him like this: the same but different. Perhaps it was surprising that he wasn’t more shocked himself. It suddenly seemed funny, a minor victory, and rather than answer Dorric, he smiled instead, a smile that felt cruel and feline on his lips.

Dorric’s response was a small but visible shudder. “You were . . .” he said, and left the sentence hanging, as though it were both too obvious and too absurd to finish.

“I was,” Florrian agreed. Until Palimpsest brought me back. And only then did he remember the neural link. He tested it once more and this time, sure enough, felt the familiar sensations: a moment’s buzz like a pressure headache, the tingle of connection. Then an interface panel was glowing beneath the splayed fingers of his outstretched hand; not the one he was used to, but close enough that Florrian knew he could make it work.

“You were dead,” Dorric finished finally. “And you should have stayed that way.” His voice was calm again. Any uncertainty was gone; the unwavering confidence that only the truly psychotic could hope to possess had taken its place.

There’d be no playing mind games with this man. If coming back from the dead in a new body wasn’t enough to shake his grotesque self-assurance, then nothing Florrian could do or say would.

That left only Palimpsest. But the tactile interface was too slow, too clumsy. Florrian probed again. He didn’t even know what he was hoping for, except that after everything he’d experienced, everything he now knew it was capable of, the thought of typing commands into Palimpsest in any fashion seemed ridiculous and archaic.

Sure enough, there was a response. Not something he could quantify, because he’d never experienced its like before, but a sense of . . . presence. It was like stepping into a blacked-out room and knowing without question that someone else was there, just waiting.

Dorric raised his hand, so that the flattened palm with its gently glowing device pointed directly at Florrian. “I might have been using Karen,” he said, “but I still had a certain . . . regard for her. Truly intelligent women are such a rare find. It’s a shame you shot her open with that ridiculous little spy toy of yours. I’ll tell you, Florrian, she’d have died a slow, excruciating death if I hadn’t had the decency to finish her off.”

Florrian forced himself to ignore the words. He couldn’t think about Karen suffering, not now. I know you’re there, he thought. I need you. I need . . .

What? Not a weapon. Palimpsest would never allow that. Nothing actively harmful.

“I don’t expect I’ll be as generous with you,” Dorric said.

Just as water sloshed from nowhere, a wave without a sea, flooding over him from head to toe.

Florrian flung himself towards the nearest cover, the slap of brine against metal in his ears. Though he’d seen it, though he’d willed it with every fibre of his existence, he couldn’t quite believe what he’d seen: he hadn’t expected it to work, and yet it had. Water, summoned from the ether—emulated from another reality. A gift from the genie he’d unbottled.

He made it to the shelter of a luggage rack, just in time for Dorric’s first shot to gouge a chunk from it. Singed scraps of fabric exploded before Florrian’s eyes; blackened tufts flopped through the air like dandelion seeds. The rack was no cover at all, not much better than a pile of shrapnel just waiting to hurtle through his body. But at least he was out of sight—and at least, now, he had a means to fight back.

Or did he? No weapons. Nothing harmful. Florrian could sense the truth of the fact even as he thought it—as though, thanks to the neural implant, he was now within the penumbra of Palimpsest’s burgeoning consciousness. Was it still bound by the morality he had programmed into it, or had it found its own? Either way, he couldn’t keep fighting Dorric with water.

No second shot had come. Dorric would want to get up close; was surely endeavouring to do precisely that right now. He would already have worked out how a wave had materialised from thin air, perhaps had already theorised just how Florrian had risen from the dead. Having at least some idea of what he was dealing with, he would try for the element of surprise, acting quickly enough that Florrian could pluck no phantasmagoria from thin air.

Which meant that whatever Florrian was going to do, he would have to do it now. He took and held a breath, forced calm upon himself. What would Palimpsest allow? Not a weapon. An obstruction then? Florrian reached for what he needed, picturing it as clearly as he could manage with adrenalin still making his pulse dance. And this time it was even easier—as though Palimpsest was an eager child wanting to impress.

He saw, where a moment ago nothing had been, bundles of wire hemorrhage into existence. The wire was thorny with metal needles and strung between great, weatherworn concrete crosses, Xs at the end of some indecipherable signature. It had drawn a diagonal line across the middle of the cargo bay, in the direction from which Dorric would be approaching. The only routes open to him now lay to either side, and one of those would take him halfway around the room.

Florrian broke cover. He made four paces before the soft crump of another shot turned a circle of wall ahead to glowing yellow, which faded instantly through deepening reds to charred black. He ducked low and ran on, confident the next shot would sear through his back at every moment until the one when he skidded behind another rack of luggage.

This time he didn’t wait but pushed off again, hurling himself through space, gritting his teeth against the exertion of muscles not quite familiar. When Florrian glanced right, thinking to see Dorric beyond the barrier of wire or the brilliance of another shot carving the air, he discovered that he was looking instead at Palimpsest, planted in the centre of the bay like a monolith abandoned by some antediluvian culture. He had always found it strange, grotesque, unfamiliar, even as his hands were constructing it. Now he read those same traits differently. Not strange, but otherworldly; not grotesque, but primal. Had Florrian really created Palimpsest? Or had he only discovered it? Had it wanted to be created—perhaps called out from some impossible other dimension, demanding to be made and made and made again?

Florrian ducked behind a pile of perfectly stacked crates, each branded with lines of neatly printed scrawl. Foolish questions. He had invented Palimpsest; designed it to be a tool. Now all that mattered was how he made use of it.

Only, it really wasn’t so simple. A tool didn’t second-guess you. A tool didn’t refuse to be used. For he’d considered summoning a wrench or hammer, some innocuous object that could nevertheless be repurposed as a weapon—and even as he’d thought it, Florrian had felt the resistance. Palimpsest had read his intention, rejected it. A wrench or hammer could easily be turned into a weapon, but he sensed that nothing he did would bend Palimpsest the same way.

Dorric’s voice made him start. “You can’t hurt me,” he said with certainty.

The words were coming from towards the entrance, but Florrian couldn’t pinpoint where; that frustrated him almost as much as the fact that Dorric had read his thoughts so easily.

“I’ve learned enough about your machine to know that. All you can do is irritate me. And you can’t get out without coming past me. So why don’t we talk?”

All true enough, except that it was hard to believe Dorric had the slightest desire for conversation. But it was a fact that the only thing Florrian had achieved so far, with the godlike power he wielded, was to make a pest of himself. Childish pranks weren’t going to save his life, not forever. And escape wasn’t an option, now less than ever, as every minute made it more apparent to both of them what horrors Palimpsest might accomplish in the wrong hands.

No, Florrian needed to think bigger; outside the confines of this box he’d made for himself. No weapons. No weapons. But . . .

Then it came. And, oh, now he was thinking big—but perhaps too big, for he thought that his mind might burst with the idea; that his skull would split like a walnut shell. Was it even possible? Yet he knew it was.

Palimpsest . . . you know what I’m thinking.

Sure enough, that other consciousness was waiting for his; impatiently, Florrian thought, as though here was a question it had been anticipating.

You can do it, can’t you?

It could, he knew. Yet even as he probed, as the idea became whole, he understood just what he was asking. It was dangerous, deadly dangerous, this playing in realities as though they were one great sandpit instead of entire, distinct creations never meant to touch. Florrian understood what Palimpsest had risked by bringing him back here, in such brazen defiance of cause and effect, of life and death. It was meddling with an order that had begun with the first glimmer of the Big Bang, would hold until all there was had returned to nothing.

But . . . it was possible. He knew it was possible. And if it was possible he had to try.

Do it, Florrian thought. I take the responsibility. It’s my call to make.

Hesitation. An unresponsiveness that felt to him like doubt.

You know we have to try.

And somehow that was enough—for he was certain, a moment later, that his reality had changed. He was growing familiar with the process now, attuning some unprecedented new sense or receiving at secondhand a fraction of Palimpsest’s unimaginable sensory input. Something had changed, though what he couldn’t say. Had it worked? He tried to phrase it as a question, but no response came from Palimpsest, and perhaps Florrian hadn’t expected one.

It would have to wait. He’d know soon enough, if he could only stay alive. An added motivation then.

How much time had passed? He’d been so deep in communion with Palimpsest; for all Florrian knew Dorric could be almost upon him by now. It was hugely difficult to use Palimpsest like this, relying on a precision of thought nigh impossible to maintain under stress. Then again, what choice did he have? Florrian forced his eyes shut, though his instincts screamed against it. He needed time, needed to stay hidden. He needed to even the odds, at least a little.

An idea, then . . . something simple-seeming, until Florrian tried to put it into practise. There had to be a way to make it work, he knew. So he probed against Palimpsest’s resistance, testing ideas, negotiating, teasing through tantalising glimpses of worlds inconceivably far from his own until finally, impalpably, reality changed. Florrian opened his eyes . . .

. . . to darkness. To roiling gloom that hung heaviest towards the ceiling, in weird defiance of expectation. But this was no normal fog. He’d had to search hard, contorting his request to find something Palimpsest would accept. What looked like a dense, billowing dust cloud was in fact plant spores, light-absorbing organisms bred in a far-distant reality for perhaps just such a purpose as this. He had thought he’d understood for an instant, glimpsed their world in frozen tableau as perhaps Palimpsest glimpsed it.

His next request was easier. It took no effort, no noticeable time. Again he imagined the sensation of change, like the faintest breeze brushing the fine hairs of his neck. Florrian bent down to pick up the device at his feet, felt straps of heavy-duty fabric and a mechanism of plastic and glass and pulled it carefully over his head. As the lens slipped over his left eye, half of the world was reborn in shades of green and blue, speckled by dots of gold with pinprick fire-red hearts—what could only be the light-dampening spores.

Heat vision goggles. Not difficult to find. He’d sensed that the reality that offered them up was not so dissimilar to his own.

Florrian could see no sign of Dorric. There were the constellations of the plant spores, darker shapes of deep evening blue that must be luggage racks, stripes of rusty orange flecked with gold high up towards the ceiling that might be pipes or bundles of wire. But nowhere a glowing outline large enough to be a man.

Now, though, he realised he could hear footsteps—the sound of a man suddenly more concerned with not walking into a wall than with being quiet. Sure enough, a moment later he heard Dorric’s voice, taut with anger: “Damn you, Florrian. You’re becoming a genuine irritation!”

Florrian resisted the urge to answer. Let Dorric stumble around in darkness and silence; let that twisted mind bask a little in its own company. He had a feeling that even Dorric’s steely confidence couldn’t function in a vacuum.

There was a sound like fat sizzling and then a wound of brightness opened before Florrian’s eyes, so that he had to fight not to claw off his goggles. His nostrils filled with the stink of charred mould, and it took him a moment to realise it must be the odour of hundreds upon thousands of spores suddenly incinerated.

From somewhere in the glimmer-pricked darkness, Dorric chuckled horridly. “Did I hit you? Shout out if you’re dead!”

This time Florrian had no desire at all to reply. Because there was an edge of panic in Dorric’s voice, and Florrian found that he liked hearing it there.

“Come on, Florrian,” Dorric cried. “You’ve been dead once and it doesn’t seem to have inconvenienced you much. Why don’t you just give up?” The strain in every word was unmistakeable; Florrian tensed, awaiting another mad attempt at his life. If Dorric fired wildly enough, wasn’t there a chance that one of those shots would connect?

Yet no shots came. Dorric had enough self-control left, perhaps, to realise that all he was doing was masking the sounds that might give Florrian away. Florrian had hoped it might take him a little longer to reach that conclusion—for he couldn’t stay where he was. Even in the profound gloom he’d created it was possible to make out the darker outlines of things. Florrian wasn’t invisible, and he hadn’t made his own life easy either. It was a struggle to extract any sense from the patchwork blues and greens around him, difficult to judge where the entrance—and Dorric—might be.

It was Palimpsest, once again, that saved him. There was no mistaking its profile, its sheer idiosyncrasy—and so familiar was it that even at a distance Florrian could tell one aspect from another. He knew its front faced the door and that he was looking at its left side, from somewhat behind. In his flight from Dorric he’d circled much of the way around the room. That meant the exit should be ahead and to his right.

Florrian set out again, treading lightly. In a flash of inspiration he grabbed at the first luggage rack he passed, hauled out a strapped shoulder bag and flung it hard as he could to one side, where it landed with a satisfying crunch. Sure enough, a knife of light sliced the inky air—and though this time he had the forewarning to avert his eyes, Florrian got a sense of where it had come from. As he’d thought, Dorric had retreated towards the entrance.

Well, that was all right. Only one of them knew where the other was, only one could see, and that about balanced the odds in Florrian’s mind.

However he only needed to travel a short distance to realise that wasn’t quite true. First he glimpsed a shape to his right, lurid blots of red and yellow floating upon the green-blue backdrop. It was a person-shape: Dorric, perfectly still, his back turned. Then, too, the spores were diminishing; he’d given little thought to the area they should cover and Florrian could see a thinning perimeter close ahead. Dorric was standing on its margins, obviously unwilling to penetrate deeper.

The goggles were no more use, so he pulled them off and tucked them high in the nearest rack. He could have used Palimpsest to summon more spores, but that would only give away his proximity to Dorric. He might have tried for the exit, but Dorric was close enough that Florrian instinctively felt the risk too great. In any case, he couldn’t. It had to end now, and it had to end like this.

Florrian crept forward, edging up on Dorric’s turned back, watching for any small movement. He thought again of Palimpsest, wished it would give him a weapon of his own: a wrench, a knife, a damned pen, anything. But no, no more tricks; no more smoke and mirrors. He was on his own now.

It was agonising to move so slowly: painful to watch and listen so intently. His thoughts were breaking down, forming more slowly than they should. Was he wrong to reject Palimpsest’s box of tricks? But he was close enough now that he’d be as likely to sabotage himself as Dorric, and this powerful new body of his demanded to be used.

Florrian strove for some mental discipline. He could barely think, could only feel. Every time he tried to imagine, to plan, muscles ached to respond. He would punch for Dorric’s neck, he thought, kick for his knees—and he felt the motion in his forearm, in his calf. Another step. Almost close enough. Then, while Dorric was off balance, get him to the ground, grab for an arm, pin it . . .

Dorric turned.

He did not look surprised—and it was evident in that moment, painfully clear, that he had been waiting. Like the predator he is, Florrian thought. Why chase around in the dark when he need only stand here, waiting for his prey to come to him? Dorric was a good spy, much better than Florrian was. Not a hundredth the scientist, but a better spy. It seemed unfair, Florrian thought, that their contest should come down to that, after everything.

He watched as the edges of Dorric’s mouth crept up, in a smile that only grew and grew. “Oh, Florrian. All that power and this was the best you could come up with. I can’t say it hasn’t been interesting knowing you. But all told I think I’ll enjoy killing you more.”

Florrian held Dorric’s eyes . . . watched the dancing madness there, the sheer, unfettered joy. He didn’t look at Dorric’s outstretched arm, didn’t look at his hand. He’d seen enough of the weapon there. Florrian knew what it was about to do. He didn’t need to see it happen.

Florrian only released Dorric’s gaze when the other man’s eyes unfocused and he gave a small, strangled gasp. Then his face went stricken and pale. Dorric tried to put a hand to his own neck, the hand holding the weapon, but it was as if a weight was drawing him unsteadily towards the ground, folding him at the joints as though he were made of paper.

Florrian tried hard not to enjoy the sight, but he couldn’t resist the thought: Now you’re surprised, you bastard.

Karen, meanwhile, looked down at the slumped body at her feet, and then at the fire extinguisher she held in her hands, which had acquired a noticeable dint. “Did I kill him?” she asked. She sounded concerned—but not entirely so.

Dorric gave a long twitch and groaned extravagantly. He tried to get up and sank back instead.

Florrian ignored him. It was so good to see Karen, so utterly good, unlike anything he’d felt: a giddy rush of happiness pouring from his heart and coursing through his veins. It was like a dream come true, and equally as impossible.

Only it wasn’t quite Karen. He saw that now. Her skin was darker, though not so dark as his own, her hair quite black, her eyes nearly so. He knew where Palimpsest had found this body she now wore, and how in that reality he had known her by another name: Karam.

Finally he remembered her question. “I’m fairly sure you didn’t,” Florrian said.

Karen considered. “Should I hit him again?” she asked.

Dorric made another attempt to get up, failed once more, and when he lolled this time it was with a sort of helpless, mulish resignation.

“No need,” Florrian said. He thought a request to Palimpsest and was relieved when a length of neatly coiled cord materialised at his feet; he’d half expected to fall afoul of the machine’s intricate morality once again.

He glanced up at Karen. She was staring at the rope, and he had to suppress a smile at the oval of shock her mouth had formed.

Florrian bent down, planted a knee between Dorric’s shoulder blades and hurriedly bound his wrists one to the other. Dorric didn’t try to resist or even complain. Once Florrian had his arms bound firmly together, he started on Dorric’s ankles, making sure that the rope was just tight enough to cause him discomfort without any actual harm. When he was certain Dorric wasn’t going anywhere, he let himself meet Karen’s gaze.

“You made that rope appear out of nothing,” she said.

Florrian tapped a finger to his forehead. “Palimpsest and I have been working out a new interface.” He considered her steadily: her new face, so alike and yet so different from the old. “Out of everything it’s done recently, though, I wouldn’t have thought a bit of rope would be what you’d want to talk about.”

“I was dead. In this reality, I died.”

She said it as calmly, he thought, as anyone could have. Only the slightest, strangled edge gave away what she must be feeling.

Florrian hesitated. Now that the question was there between them, he found himself hunting for some lie, a fiction less bizarre and impossible-seeming than the truth. “Yes,” he said, “you were dead. We brought you back, Palimpsest and I; copied you from another reality in which I knew you were alive. Well, Palimpsest did most of the work, of course . . .” He realised he was rambling, trying to find some words that would make the shock and horror vanish from her expression. Then again, perhaps that was entirely too much to ask.

“It can do that?” Karen asked.

“It appears so.”

“Bring the dead back to life?”

“That’s not exactly what happened. Your body here was dead, but elsewhere your consciousness was alive in a living body. Palimpsest simply copied that version of you from there to here.” It all sounded horribly mechanical; and Florrian shuddered at the realisation that he might have gained a new insight into how Palimpsest perceived.

“Dran,” Karen said, “are you telling me you’ve cured death?”

Florrian shook his head. “It worked for us because Palimpsest had already salvaged our minds before they could die. Our consciousnesses were safe and so Palimpsest could restore us.” Something else occurred to him then, something he should have realised much earlier. “If it hadn’t, I doubt that our memories of this reality would have lasted much longer. The process was only ever supposed to be temporary, and Palimpsest had already twisted it beyond recognition.”

We probably didn’t have long left, he realised. Was that the real reason Palimpsest had returned him to this reality; not a response to his dying prayer as he’d imagined? Had all of the day’s adventures been nothing but a holding pattern, while Palimpsest decided what best to do with its creator’s fragile consciousness?

“We’re going to need to talk more about this,” Karen said firmly. She looked at her hand, turned it over, studied it intently. “A lot more.”

At their feet, Dorric mumbled something incomprehensible and tried to flop onto his side. This time, rather than rely on Palimpsest, Florrian went to a nearby luggage stack and fumbled through a couple of hold-alls until he found what he was looking for. When he knelt down, Dorric stared back at him; there was terrible rage in his eyes. “I could,” he mumbled, “the things I could . . .”

“Oh, shut up,” Florrian told him. He stuffed a sock into Dorric’s mouth, ignoring his attempts to spit it out, and then strapped it into place with the belt he’d found.

“What are you going to do with him?” Karen asked, in a tone that suggested she might have a few ideas of her own.

“Nothing,” Florrian replied. “Let them find him. Let him drive himself crazy trying to find me, or trying to re-create Palimpsest, or whatever the hell he wants to do.” He calmly held Dorric’s furious gaze. “It won’t help him. I’ve got his measure now.”

He crouched, tucked his hands beneath Dorric’s arms and dragged him into a corner hemmed in and hidden by unused storage racks. They’d find him eventually, but not before Florrian himself was off the TransCon and out of reach. In any case, the European authorities would not be quick to follow up on the wild claims of an American corporate scientist with known military connections; they’d waste a day at least, dredging through every last scrap of red tape they could find.

When he returned, he knew that Karen had anticipated his thoughts. “It’s finished,” she said. “You’re free.”

How Florrian wished that were true; perhaps more than anything it was that useless hope she’d interpreted in his features. “Not yet,” he said. “I still remember parts of those other lives we stepped into. What happened to those realities? Did I fail? Perhaps there are realities where Dorric won, where he has Palimpsest, where he knows what it can do. If even one version of Dorric manages to corrupt one version of Palimpsest, then he could bring the entire multiverse crashing down. Who’s going to stop him, and how?”

“It’s a lot to think about,” she said. “A huge responsibility.”

For once Florrian saw immediately the meaning behind her words. Here it was, another all-consuming obsession gaping beneath him, ready to swallow him whole.

“I’ll need help,” he said. But then, he’d known that already. Wasn’t that part of why he was on the TransCon in the first place? “I have someone meeting me at the other end; an old friend. We’re going to take Palimpsest deeper into Independent Europe. If I’m lucky, that might just buy me enough time to figure this mess out.”

“I’d tell you that you should destroy it,” she said, “but it’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

Florrian nodded. Too late—and even if it wasn’t he doubted very much if he could. It wasn’t the thought of the power he suddenly possessed; it was fear, pure and simple. He knew what every good scientist understood instinctively: that something once discovered could never be undiscovered. And so the discovery became not an achievement but a responsibility, to be borne forever.

Forever. But did it have to be alone? “Will you come?” Florrian asked.

Karen looked back at him steadily. He’d thought the question might shock her, but she didn’t appear shocked.

“As your wife?” she said. “It’s too late for that as well, Florrian. Honestly, there’s a part of me that wishes it wasn’t, but it is, and we both know it.”

“No,” he said. “You’re right. Just like you were right to leave when you did. Just now, if I could choose you, choose us, over Palimpsest, then I think I would . . . but it’s not that simple. I can’t unmake it, and as long as it exists, I have to do everything in my power to make sure it’s used responsibly.”

“You always had the best of motives,” Karen said—and though the sentiment had every potential for sarcasm, the way she said it was not sarcastic at all. On the contrary, it was as genuine as anything she’d ever said to him. Yet it was also thick with resignation. Good motives didn’t and hadn’t and never could a good husband make, and he’d had so many other fronts on which to fail.

Perhaps, though, there was something to be salvaged from that: from accepting what he couldn’t be. “I’d like you with me,” he said. “Not as my wife. As my partner.” It sounded wrong, yet Florrian could think of no better word.

Then it came to him: “Like this,” he said. “Like today.”

“Today?” she replied. “I started out as your enemy’s lover, trying to convince you to give up your greatest work without a fight.”

“That’s true.” Florrian tried for a smile, was surprised when he managed it, more so when he found that he meant it. “And you had your reasons. But I was thinking more of the other parts.”

“Oh.” Karen returned the smile, and he thought how strange it looked on that somewhat alien face, like something recognised from a dream. “Those parts.” She considered. “You know, you’re a fine scientist, Dran Florrian, but you’re not much of a spy.”

“I’ve reached the same conclusion,” he said.

“If I let you out of my sight, I doubt you’ll last the week.”

“A week would certainly seem optimistic,” he agreed.

“And I’m not going to be safe back home, am I? I can’t go back to my work, not once Harlan gets free.”

That he hadn’t thought of, but she was surely right. Florrian wanted to reassure her, for he knew that Karen’s job meant everything to her; but any reassurance would have been a lie. Instead, he offered her his hand. “So, partners?”

Florrian gazed at the woman before him, the woman forged anew as he had been, and tried to read her not-quite-familiar face. He felt he knew her and yet was sure he didn’t. And maybe, he thought, that was how it had always been, even when they’d been at their closest. Maybe that was how it always had to be.

Then Karen took his hand, finally, held it a moment—and shook.

“Partners,” she said.