necked servitors towered over him, the chrome segments of its neck gleaming. The machine angled its head back and forth, digesting what lay below it. note 247 The blockades came down like heavy metal shutters: clunk, clunk, clunk through her skull. A barrage of neural data crashed in. She saw herself through Delmar’s eyes. The thing down on the medical couch was her, recognisably so — her head was bizarrely unharmed — but she was not remotely the right shape. She felt a twisting spasm of revulsion, as if she had just accessed a photograph from some bleak pre-industrial archive of medical nightmares. She wanted desperately to turn the page, to move on to the next pitiful atrocity. She had been bisected. The tether must have fallen across her from her left shoulder to her right hip, a precise diagonal severance. It had taken her legs and her left arm. Carapacial machinery hugged the wounds: gloss-white humming scabs of medical armour, like huge pus-filled blisters. Fluid lines erupted from the machinery and trailed into white modules squatting by her side. She looked as if she was bursting out of a white steel chrysalis. Or being consumed by it, transformed into something strange and phantasmagoric. Delmar… note 248 You don’t understand. This… state … doesn’t concern me at all. We’re Conjoiners, aren’t we? There isn’t anything we can’t repair, given time. I know you can fix me, eventually . She felt his relief. note 249 But eventually isn’t good enough. In a few days, three at the most, I need to be on a ship. CHAPTER 13 They had to drag Thorn to the Inquisitor’s office. The great doors creaked open and there she was, her back to him, standing by the window. He studied the woman through gummed-up eyes, never having seen her before. She looked smaller and younger than he had expected, almost like a girl wearing adult clothes. She wore highly polished boots and dark trousers under a side-buttoned leather tunic that appeared slightly too large for her, so that her gloved hands were almost lost in the sleeves. The tunic’s hem almost reached her knees. Her black hair was combed back from her forehead in tight, glistening rows that curved down to tiny curls like inverted question marks above the nape of her neck. Her face was in near-profile, her skin a tone darker than his, her thin nose hooked above a small, straight mouth.
She turned around and spoke to the guard waiting by the door. ‘You can leave us now.’
‘Ma’am…’ ‘I said you can leave us now.’ The guard left. Thorn stood by himself, only wavering slightly. The woman moved in and out of focus. For a long, long time she just looked at him. Then she spoke, with the same voice he had heard coming out of the speaker grille. ‘Are you going to be all right? I’m sorry that they hurt you.’ ‘Not as sorry as I am.’ ‘I only wanted to talk to you.’ ‘Maybe you should keep an eye on what happens to your guests, in that case.’ He tasted blood in his mouth as he spoke. ‘Will you come with me, please?’ She gestured across the room to what looked like a private chamber. ‘There’s something that we need to discuss.’ ‘I’m fine here, thank you.’ ‘It wasn’t an invitation. I have no interest in whether you are fine or not, Thorn.’ He wondered if she had read his reaction — the minute dilation of his pupils that betrayed his guilt. Or perhaps she had a laser trained on the back of his neck, sampling his skin’s salinity. Either way, she might have a good idea of what he thought of her assertion. Perhaps she even had a trawl somewhere in this building. It was rumoured that Inquisition House had at least one, lovingly tended since the early days of the colony. ‘I don’t know who you think I am.’ ‘Oh, but you do. So why play games? Come with me.’ He followed her into the smaller room. It was windowless. He glanced around, looking for signs of a trap or any indication that the room might double as an interrogation chamber, but it looked innocent enough. The walls were lined with bulging paperwork-stuffed shelves, except for one that was largely occupied by a map of Resurgam studded with many pins and lights. She offered him a chair on one side of the large desk that took up much of the floor space. Another woman was already seated opposite him, with her elbows propped on the edge of the desk, looking faintly bored. She was older than the Inquisitor, but possessed something of the same wiry build. She wore a cap and a heavy drab- coloured coat with a fleeced collar and cuffs. Both women struck him as faintly avian, thin yet quick and strong- boned. The one behind the desk was smoking. He settled down into the seat that the Inquisitor had indicated. ‘Coffee?’ ‘No thanks.’ The other woman pushed her pack of cigarettes towards him. ‘Have a smoke, then.’ ‘I’ll pass on those as well.’ But he picked up the packet and turned it over, studying the odd markings and sigils. It hadn’t been manufactured in Cuvier. In fact, it didn’t look as if it had been manufactured anywhere on Resurgam. He pushed it back towards the older woman. ‘Can I go now?’ ‘No. We haven’t even started yet.’ The Inquisitor eased into her own seat, next to the other woman, and fixed herself a mug of coffee. ‘Introductions, I think. You know who you are, and we know who you are, but you probably don’t know much about us. You have an idea about me, of course… but probably not a very accurate one. My name is Vuilleumier. This is my colleague…’ Trina,‘ she said. ‘Irina… yes. And you, of course, are Thorn; the man who has done so much harm of late.’ ‘I’m not Thorn. The government doesn’t have a clue who Thorn is.’ ‘How would you know?’ ‘I read the papers, like everyone else.’ ‘You’re right. Internal Threats doesn’t have much of
