were working to suppress us; to make us fail. Petty internal rivalry: you couldn’t allow another colleague’s work to succeed. So you did everything you could to hurt us, to make us imperfect. You brought suffering into our world. You brought pain and infirmity and death, and then left us alone in that ocean.’
‘Ridiculous.’
‘Really, Carl? I’ve seen how easily you turn to spite. Just ask that dead hamadryad.’
‘I had nothing to do with the Denizens.’ But even as he says it, he can feel layers of false memory begin to peel back. What’s exposed has the raw candour of true experience. He remembers more of Europa than he has any right to: the bright plazas, the smells, the noises of Cadmus-Asterius. He remembers the reefersleep casket on the outbound ramliner, the casket that he thought was taking him to the safety of another system, another time. No wonder he’s slept easier since the Melding Plague. He must have imagined that the plague had severed the last of his ties with the past, making it impossible for anyone to catch up with him now.
He’d been wrong about that.
‘You had to find a Denizen,’ Goodglass says, ‘because then you’d know if any of them were still alive. Well, now you have your answer. How does it feel?’
He always knew that the marks on her skull were evidence of surgery. But that surgery had nothing to do with the removal of implants, and everything to do with her transformation from a Denizen. It would have cost her nothing to hide those marks, and yet she made no secret of them. It was, he sees now, part of a game he hadn’t even realised he was playing.
‘Not the way I thought it would feel,’ he says.
Goodglass nods understandingly. ‘I’m going to punish you now, Carl. But I’m not going to kill you.’
She’s playing with him, allowing him a glimmer of hope before crushing it for all eternity.
‘Why not?’ he asks.
‘Because if you were dead, you wouldn’t make much of an exhibit. When we’re done here, I’m going to donate you to a suitable recipient.’ Then she turns to the palanquin. ‘There’s something I should have told you. I lied about my husband. Edric was a good man: he cared for me, loved me, when he could have made his fortune from what I was. Unfortunately, he never got to see me like this. Edric died during the early months of the plague.’
Grafenwalder says nothing. He’s out of words, out of questions.
‘You’re probably wondering who’s in the palanquin,’ Goodglass says. ‘He’s going to come out now, for a little while. Not too long, because he can’t risk coming into contact with plague spores, not when so much of him is mechanical. But that won’t stop him doing his job. He’s always been a quick worker.’
With a hiss of escaping pressure, the entire front of the palanquin lifts up on shining pistons. The first thing Grafenwalder sees, the last thing before he starts screaming, is a silver hand clutching a black Homburg hat.
Then he sees the face.
NIGHTINGALE
I checked the address Tomas Martinez had given me, shielding the paper against the rain while I squinted at my scrawl. The number I’d written down didn’t correspond with any of the high-and-dry offices, but it was a dead ringer for one of the low-rent premises at street level. Here the walls of Threadfall Canyon had been cut and buttressed to the height of six or seven storeys, widening the available space at the bottom of the trench. Buildings covered most of the walls, piled on top of each other, supported by a haphazard arrangement of stilts and rickety, semipermanent bamboo scaffolding. Aerial walkways had been strung from one side of the street to the other, with stairs and ladders snaking their way through the dark fissures between the buildings. Now and then a wheeler sped through the water, sending a filthy brown wave in its wake. Very rarely, a sleek, claw-like volantor slid overhead. But volantors were off-world tech and not many people on Sky’s Edge could afford that kind of thing any more.
It didn’t look right to me, but all the evidence said that this had to be the place.
I stepped out of the water onto the wooden platform in front of the office and knocked on the glass-fronted door while rain curtained down through holes in the striped awning above me. I was pushing soaked hair out of my eyes when the door opened.
I’d seen enough photographs of Martinez to know this wasn’t him. This was a big bull of a man, nearly as wide as the door. He stood there with his arms crossed in front of his chest, over which he wore only a sleeveless black vest that was zipped down to his midriff. His muscles were so tight it looked as if he was wearing some kind of body-hugging amplification suit. His head was very large and very bald, rooted to his body by a neck like a small mountain range. The skin around his right eye was paler than the rest of his face, in a neatly circular patch.
He looked down at me as if I was something unpleasant the rain had washed in.
‘What?’ he said, his voice like the distant rumble of artillery.
‘I’m here to see Martinez.’
‘Mister Martinez to you,’ he said.
‘Whatever. But I’m still here to see him, and he should be expecting me. I’m—’
‘Dexia Scarrow,’ called another voice — fractionally more welcoming, this one — and a smaller, older man bustled into view from behind the pillar of muscle blocking the door, snatching delicate pince-nez glasses from his nose. ‘Let her in, Norbert. She’s expected. Just a little late.’
‘I got held up around Armesto — my hired wheeler hit a pothole and tipped over. Couldn’t get the thing started again, so had to—’
The smaller man waved aside my excuse. ‘You’re here now, which is all that matters. I’ll have Norbert dry your clothes, if you wish.’
I peeled off my coat. ‘Maybe this.’
‘Norbert will attend to your galoshes as well. Would you care for something to drink? I have tea already prepared, but if you would rather something else…’
‘Tea will be fine, Mister Martinez,’ I said.
‘Please, call me Tomas. It’s my sincere wish that we will work together as friends.’
I stepped out of my galoshes and handed my dripping-wet coat to the big man. Martinez nodded once, the gesture precise and birdlike, and then beckoned me to follow him further into his rooms. He was slighter and older than I’d been expecting, although still recognisable as the man in the photographs. His hair was grey turning to white, thinning on his crown and shaved close to his scalp elsewhere on his head. He wore a grey waistcoat over a grey shirt, the ensemble lending him a drab, clerkish air.
We navigated a twisting labyrinth formed by four layers of brown boxes, piled to head height. ‘Excuse the mess,’ Martinez said, looking back at me over his shoulder. ‘I really should find a better solution to my filing problems, but there’s always something more pressing that needs doing instead.’
‘I’m surprised you have time to eat, let alone worry about filing problems.’
‘Well, things haven’t been quite as hectic lately, I must confess. If you’ve been following the news you’ll know that I’ve already caught most of my big fish. There’s some mopping up to do, but I’ve been nowhere near as busy as in…’ Martinez stopped suddenly next to one of the piles of boxes, placed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and scuffed dust from the paper label on the side of the box nearest his face. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Wrong place. Wrong damned place! Norbert!’
Norbert trudged along behind us, my sodden coat still draped over one of his enormous, trunk-like arms. ‘Mister Martinez?’
‘This one is in the wrong place.’ The smaller man turned around and indicated a spot between two other boxes, on the opposite side of the corridor. ‘It goes here. It needs to be properly filed. Kessler’s case is moving into court next month, and we don’t want any trouble with missing documentation.’
‘Attend to it,’ Norbert said, which sounded like an order but which I assumed was his way of saying he’d remember to move the box when he was done with my laundry.
‘Kessler?’ I asked, when Norbert had left. ‘As in Tillman Kessler, the NC interrogator?’
‘One and the same, yes. Did you have experience with him?’
‘I wouldn’t be standing here if I did.’
‘True enough. But a small number of people were fortunate enough to survive their encounters with Kessler.
