Reckless Sleep

by Roger Levy

Genres: Science Fiction; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

A world that is literally falling apart, a fresh take on VR, realistic flawed heroes and a fierce intelligence mark this out as a debut of unusual quality. London is drowning in volcanic ash and someone is hunting down the survivors of a failed war on our first colony planet. Jon Sciler has to find out who before he is next.

Release date: October 17, 2013

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 432

Sample

The two men stood outside for two minutes buzzing the door alarm, their fat guns raised and ready, only slowly relaxing as the time passed. After that they packed the guns away.

It took them the next hour to break in. They could have done it in a fingerclick, but they took an hour.

They removed the security mechanism like archaeologists, stroking away the steel and qualcrete casing with cutters barely smouldering, then they dissected it in the corridor without a glance through the hard-edged access hole. They reassembled the mechanism carefully and dropped it into a clear plastic bag, sealed the bag and slid it into a soft black nylon holdall.

‘Locked from inside,’ the older man noted finally, flicking a long lick of blond hair from his eyes. ‘No tampering.’ He took a small camera from the holdall and activated it. An amber light quivered above the bull’s-eye lens. In his other hand he was working a wad of red jelly.

His partner rolled a sleeve up to his shoulder. ‘Yeah. What a surprise.’ On his biceps was a faded blue tattoo of a naked fox-headed woman straddling a man with a wolf’s head. He stretched his arm through the door. The tattoo was nearly gone before his fingers reached the other side. He felt around, the fox-woman bucking as his biceps worked. After a moment he grunted and leaned against the door. The door swung heavily in.

‘Wait, Maxie,’ said the man with the camera. He stood in the doorway and panned the camera evenly around the room, not pausing at the corpse in the chair in the centre of the room, then he slapped the sticky jelly high on the wall by the door. The jelly sagged fractionally and he kneaded it some more with the heel of his hand to stiffen it before easing the camera into place. He thumbed the focus button and stepped back. The lens turned several times then settled. The amber light blinked off.

‘You smell something?’ Maxie said, walking past the corpse to the window.

‘Nothing. You always say that. You know I got no sense of smell.’

Maxie stared squinting for a moment at the setting, a blinding noon view over a long beach of shining white sand, and in the distance a dark rocky outcrop squatting in the deep blue sea, then he touched the command sensor on the sill. He rested his forehead against the soft clear glass and glanced down. Five floors below him the rucked concrete was barely visible, almost lost in swirling grey dust. He opaqued the window quickly with a shudder and turned around.

‘Shit, Bly, this makes me nervous,’ he said.

His companion was following the wall left of the door. Maxie started right of it. His wall led him into a small windowless kitchen. He gagged at the smell in there and pulled a plastic respirator from his hip pocket, slapping it over his nose and gulping air. He looked at the ExAir vent. It was thick with grease and dirt. It had never been removed. It looked like it had never been cleaned. He counted seven knives and six forks and a few chipped plates beached in a bowl of congealed, cloudy fat, then he turned and opened the refrigerator. The freezer compartment was stuffed with ice trays. Maxie closed it, checked the cupboards and finally confronted the trash bin.

The trash hadn’t been cleared for days. He rolled on a pair of surgical gloves and began to sift through it.

He met Bly half an hour later at the window. Bly had set it to LoGlo, and the soft yellow luminescence honeyed his cheeks.

‘Anything?’ asked Bly.

Maxie nodded. ‘Yeah. He liked chocolate Weeties, and I guess he liked them on the rocks. But he must have ate them with a fork, ’cause there’s no milk and there ain’t a single spoon in the kitchen. You?’

‘Zip. No way out of the bathroom. Never cleaned his toilet. Filthy bastard. Didn’t even have a toothbrush in there.’ He made a face. ‘People’s lives, Maxie. Shit.’

They both looked at the dead man sprawled in the chair. His head was tipped so far back that his Adam’s apple was pushed out like a knuckle and his open eyes stared at the cracks in the dusty plaster ceiling.

Maxie reached out and touched his left eyelid, closing it into a wink. Water dribbled from the dead lips at the faint touch, and Maxie drew back with a start. The corpse was like a bucket filled to the brim.

Bly said, ‘Well, he observed inner cleanliness.’

Maxie glanced towards the window. ‘Very funny. Shit, Bly, I don’t like this. It gives me the shivers.’

‘It’s a body,’ Bly said. ‘It’s just a forensic take-out. Not the first and, the way things are going, not the last. Maybe not even the weirdest. It’s a body. Lighten up.’

‘I don’t mean the fucking body, I mean the fucking height. Five floors. It ain’t natural. What if there’s a tremor?’

‘Then you’re nearer to heaven than to hell, Maxie. And this block’s quake-stable, and there’s nothing forecast here today. So let’s get on with it, huh?’

Bly took the body’s temperature and compared it to the room’s ambient temperature, and spent a minute with an addpad. Then Maxie found the heating console.

‘Hey, Bly. Thermostat was automatically reset two hours ago. It was seven degrees cooler till then. What difference does that make?’

Bly shrugged. He pocketed the addpad. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll make a note. All this water screws everything anyway. It sure isn’t spit. Christ knows what temperature it started out at.’

‘So how the fuck do we get a time of death, Bly?’ said Maxie.

Bly stood back and surveyed the body. Then he walked slowly around it. The clothes were dry, apart from a fresh damp streak down the man’s maroon shirt where the water had overflowed at their touch.

‘I remember reading these murder stories,’ said Bly. He knelt down by the corpse’s feet and pressed his palms to the pale green carpet beneath the chair. It was bone dry. ‘Locked room mysteries, they called them,’ he said.

Maxie grunted.

Bly stood up. ‘The pacifists think at first it’s suicide or an accident. Murder seems impossible.’ He walked once more around the body. ‘I had an idea for one, a while back.’

Maxie grunted again. Bly didn’t say anything, so Maxie said, ‘Yeah?’

‘Picture it, Maxie. Man in an empty room, dead of a heart attack. Slumped against a door which is bolted from the inside, like he’d tried to get out but not quite made it. To get in, to get at the body, they have to bust down the door, then shove the body back out of the way.’

Maxie rubbed his chin, his fingers rasping against the stubble.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ said Bly. ‘You know I hate that. Are you interested or not?’

‘Any windows in the room? Ventilator shafts and shit?’

‘Uh-uh. Forgot that. Like here, you can forget betaaccess.’

The tattooed man sighed. ‘This one – these ones – aren’t like your story, though. Are they?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, this one, for instance.’ Maxie made a gesture at the corpse. ‘Sitting in his chair in the middle of his room, drowned. Hardly an attempt to make it look like suicide. So how was it done?’

‘Jesus! I don’t know.’

‘Hosepipe. That’d do it. Feed it down his throat, turn the tap. Glug glug.’

‘You think so, Maxie?’ The blond man prodded the corpse’s chest. More water washed from its mouth. He drew his finger across the cold chin and wiped it over Maxie’s lips before Maxie could recoil.

Maxie spat. ‘Shit. Now that’s good.’ He spat again and rubbed his sleeve across his mouth. He looked at the corpse with respect. ‘Seawater.’

‘Right. Whoever killed this one’s a clever bastard. “I killed him,” he’s saying. “But how did I do it?” Just like these detective books, see. The writer’s fucking with the reader, like the murderer’s fucking with the detective.’

‘Okay, Bly, I get it. Stop fucking with me. So how? In your story.’

‘I’ve got it,’ Bly said suddenly. ‘Rough time of death, at least.’ He pointed a finger across the room. ‘The chair was originally over there – see the space? Assume it was moved out here just prior to death, though Christ knows why. We weigh wetboy and the chair, then calculate TOD from crush damage to the carpet and fibre recovery time. Good, huh?’

Maxie cracked his knuckles. ‘Bly . . .’

Bly held up a hand to Maxie, listening. His eyes unfocussed for a moment and he spoke under his breath for a while, then nodded. He said to Maxie, ‘There’s supposed to be a book somewhere, we’re to take it back. Some sort of journal, diary maybe. Handwritten. You seen anything?’

Maxie shook his head.

‘Concealed, perhaps. If it’s here we’ll find it. And when we’re done here we’re to drop wetboy off for a real swim.’

Maxie wasn’t listening. ‘Blowpipe dart puffed through the keyhole,’ he said triumphantly.

Bly gave him a blank look.

‘Your dead guy in the locked room. Poisoned dart.’

‘Ah. Very good, Maxie. But no keyhole.’

Maxie glanced away at the body. ‘Okay, I give up,’ he said sourly. Slumped in the chair, the wide-eyed dead man seemed to have tossed his head back in a gesture of exasperation. Maxie muttered, ‘I know how you feel, pal.’

Bly grinned at him. ‘Tiny holes drilled through the door and the frame, from the outside. Then wires pushed through and connected to both parts of the bolt, and outside to a portable power source. The guy inside wasn’t trying to get out at all, see. Poor pitiful fuck thought he was locking himself inside. Slides the bolt home, makes the circuit and, yippety-zip, he’s in California.’

Maxie thought about it. ‘Okay, powerhead. So who sent this guy to California? King fucking Neptune?’

Jon didn’t much like working out of London, and he definitely didn’t like flying. He could have done without the display on the screen that had just told him, ‘Velocity two hundred and ten kph, altitude fifteen hundred and seven metres. Approaching Maidenhead.’ The copter pilot kept turning round and nodding vigorously, which was just about as much communication as the guy could manage with the opaque black headset on and the engine roar deafening them both. Even that was more than Jon needed right now.

While the pilot had been doing his preflight checks Jon had spent half a minute keying in the message that he’d failed to send every morning for three years. All last night he’d reworded it in his head, thinking things had changed now. And there they were as usual, those same two lines of inert text.

He left the message at the top of the screen, still unsent, as the machine tilted woozily into the air, and then he spent the first ten minutes of the flight checking the morning’s recons of the target.

If it hadn’t spread during the intervening hours, it was a kilometre end to end, pretty much a straight-line rupture. Fifteen metres wide, max. It wasn’t a spectacular rift, just one of the minor tectonic stress fractures Seismic was recording every few months now. And there had been ten minutes’ warning, too, and they’d got the location to within three square kilometres. It was getting better all the time. But then Seismic was getting the practice.

The pilot jerked round and nodded at him again. Jon shut the recon display down and stared at the words some more, then, without thinking, he made the mistake of glancing out of the window.

He took it in like a snapshot. The sky was unusually clear, which was probably the source of the pilot’s enthusiasm. The jumble of London was behind them and distantly picked out beneath the copter were the calm fields of the countryside.

Then he squeezed his eyes closed and pulled his head away. Against the tight blackness of his eyelids the sunlit river shone like a seam of fading chrome.

He opened his eyes and fixed on the lines of words again. His finger hovered over the send button, but instead he screened up the copter’s ventral camera display. He nined the colours and nilled the shadows so that the landscape they were crossing became a comfortably garish twodimensional cartoon.

The road patterns stood out in ash-grey, and Jon studied them with vague interest. They looked like they had meant something once and were now indecipherable. Motorways arrowed over the land like the skewed axes of forgotten charts. Minor roads were curves plotted between clumps of houses, and irregularly slashed across the whole thing were the dark impatient scores of geo-rifts. It was as if the calculations had been flawed and the printout jabbed and ripped in irritation.

After a while the outskirts of Maidenhead slowly took over the screen and the details began to swell as the copter started its descent. Jon checked his harness, running his fingers over the rough canvas webbing. Without looking round, the pilot made a sharp movement with his hand, up and down. There was a swift swelling blur of streets on the screen, then quakeside wreckage loomed close and stabilised. A figurine carved of rusty red stone abruptly centred in the camera’s field. It seemed inexplicable, a dragon with serpentine neck and coiled tail. Jon squinted at it, assuming the screen had gone to some standby display, then he sprang the harness and felt a blast of warm wind as the door slid wide for him. He looked down at the wavering ground and reached quickly back to the screen. He punched his thumb on to a key and over the dragon the screen winked ‘Sending’ twice in pale green, and then in white, ‘Message sent.’

Jon lowered his toolbag down before dropping the final metre to the ground. He crouched low in the debris, keeping his head down until the copter’s airwash had receded. Then he stood up, catching something with the toe of his boot. He glanced down and saw the red dragon there. It was the size of his fist, just the rooftop ornament of some quaked house. He stepped over it.

This was the edge of the town. It was semi-urban, less densely built than London. Fewer buildings had been quakeproofed here, so there was a lot of structural damage. The cleaned-up recon display had shown none of that.

Jon looked across the rift, searching for Dekk and not yet finding him. On the far side a road approaching the rift through the uneven debris of buildings ended abruptly, its thin veneer of tarmac slumped over the rim. Beneath it was a quake-resistant ten-metre sheet of visgel. At least they had that. The quake had stretched the visgel way beyond its specifications and then snapped it like bubblegum, and the exposed layer was gradually tonguing out. Severed electricity cables curled down, and water and sewage streamed from cracked piping like drool. Beneath this, mud and weeping rock descended maybe twenty metres. Jon could have been examining a cross-section of the world. There wasn’t too much more to see, peering down through the dust of whatever had plunged into the fault and the vapour of heat rising up from it.

Jon looked around at the wreckage. He lifted up his sack and then dropped it again. This was the widest stretch of the fault. Lengthwise, it looked like it extended further than on the recon chart. He searched the far side for Dekk again, still not seeing him.

He’d need more cable. He had enough in the sack to sew across ten or twelve times, which looked like taking him no more than two thirds of the way along the rift. And that was before he started cross-lacing. Dekk’s crab wouldn’t be any help across it, the gap was too great for its arms to span. So Jon would lace and web it, then they could leave it to the Cleanup and Carpet team to lay down expansion foam and hardcore to level it off for rebuild. But he’d need more cable first.

‘That’s a three,’ said Dekk’s voice flatly in Jon’s ear, as if Dekk were reading his mind. He still couldn’t see him. ‘That ain’t no way a two. That’s a twenty-em jump, and my rig won’t stretch to that.’ Dekk’s nasal whine made the earpiece buzz. ‘An’ I’m registering a secondary hairline over here. I’ll fix that, then it’s over to you, web man.’

Jon caught a small movement across the rift. He brought the long glasses up to his eyes. That wasn’t Dekk. Usually there was nothing so soon after a tremor. Dogs and cats were often better predictors than Seismic, and they fled well before the ground cracked, or else they froze for days afterwards. So nothing should have been moving over there except for Dekk.

He shifted his gaze. Now he could see Dekk on the far side, standing well back from the edge. He was dwarfed by the bright yellow steel webbing-crab the spider team used for hairlines and smaller faults.

‘Uh-uh,’ Jon said into the throat mike, shaking his head. He pointed at what remained of a two-storey building forward from Dekk, right on the rim, Dekk’s side. It was pre-quake, Edwardian probably, part of a long straight terrace. The terrace had been obliquely interrupted by the fault, and the house to its left had fallen in, while those to its right had collapsed. Much of the standing building had caved away into the fissure but the greater part was still just about standing in the way they sometimes did, like it was in a daze, punch-drunk or something. It was what happened when wave theory washed up against chaos theory. There were always tiny nodes of brief stability. The building over there was a textbook case. Rooms were left gaping and an exposed stubby rise of stairs led nowhere any more. At the point of the roof’s gable a small red dragon gazed over the rift.

‘Top room,’ Jon said. ‘Rear right corner. There’s a cot.’

Dekk took up his mags and focussed them on the shattered building. He clambered up on the back of the crab to see better, then sat astride one of the front pincers and had it lift him high.

‘I see it. An’ it’s empty.’ He let the mags fall on their neck loop and swept his gaze left and right along the rupture. ‘We’d better get right along now and stitch this trench. C&C’ll be along soon.’

‘You can’t see from there, Dekk. I’m telling you. The kid’s mother must have gone down if she wasn’t evacked. There’s a baby and it’s alive. Get the baby, Dekk. Then we’ll start sewing it up.’

He could see Dekk’s head shake vigorously, his long red hair flinging out a thin haze of dust. ‘I ain’t goin’ near it, Jon. It’s unstable. I told you, there’s a secondary hairline this side of the building and the whole thing could crack. I’m gonna have to knit that before I go anywhere near the goddamn edge. Look, I’ve checked the heats, there ain’t nothin’ but a handful of warm darters in there. Rats, for sure, and even they ain’t happy. Nothin’ else. No baby, Jon. The building’s cold as a year in CrySis. So let’s get with it, huh? If you’ll just slide on down there and lay some tags at about fifteen em your side I’ll stabilise the hairline this side. Then you can spread us a web and we can leave the hardcore and fomo and the rest to the C&C guys. Sound good?’

‘You’re sitting next to a hot rift, Dekk. You know you can’t trust heat sensors there. If you don’t get the kid, I’ll do it. So decide.’

‘There’s nothin’, man. Jon? Hey, you listenin’ there?’

Jon caught the flashes of Dekk’s mags catching the light. He raised his arms in an exaggerated shrug and rasped his fingernails over the bulb of his throat mike. He whispered, ‘You’re breaking up, Dekk. Must be the heat. I’m going across. Like you said, it could crack away any time.’

‘Are you fuckin’ crazy? I said there’s a hairline! Jon? Oh, Jesus, you’re a fuckin’ nightmare.’

Jon laid an anchor charge from his toolbelt five metres in from the brink and watched the dust dance as the telescopic lance penetrated four metres into the ground and the slim carbon steel mast shot up to knee height. He waited for the secondary shock of the sublaterals to secure it, then slung a knot of plasteel cable round the masthead. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a shimmer of yellow as Dekk’s crab commenced its slow jig along the far ground, nudging debris out of its path and knitting the hairline together in a series of dull explosive punches. It was all too slow.

He leaned back hard on the cable as he always did, though you could have slung an office block from that stanchion. Then he slid the long fat harpoon gun from its quiver over his shoulder and clicked the cable’s free end on to a limpet charge and loaded the charge. He swung the gun up to his shoulder. He sighted briefly at the house and decided against it. Most likely the head would overpenetrate and bring the whole thing down. Holding his breath, he lowered the gun and squeezed the trigger.

The harpoon’s kick nearly knocked him down, and its echo bounced down the rift. The chargehead dropped slightly faster than he’d anticipated, dragged by the trailing cable, whipping and hissing through the air. Ten metres below the building the charge slapped against rock. It imploded instantly and the tiny ratchet motor engaged, gathering up the loop of cable. The mast jetted out and the taut cable hummed as the sublaterals fired.

The yellow crab stopped for a moment, then carried on. Dekk’s voice was a furious hiss in his ear. ‘I don’t give a shit about you, Jon, but if that charge had triggered the fracture I’d have lost my rig. You slipped the rift another half an em there. Just sit back and leave this to me, for Christ’s sake. I’ll be twenty minutes, okay? Then you can do what the fuck you want.’

Jon ignored Dekk. He surveyed the long fine line. Now he had a bridge.

He locked a slider over the rope, checked his charge belt and slotted the harpoon back where it lived.

‘I know you can hear me, Jon, you bastard. Just turn around and this conversation isn’t even history. I told you, there’s no goddam kid.’

Jon double-checked the overhead slider and looked at the building. He tried to empty his mind of everything except that movement in the cot. The tiny hand waving. He felt the familiar taste of bile rising in his throat and swallowed it. Then he stepped over the edge.

The angle was too acute and he accelerated towards the far wall of the rift. He knew instantly he’d underestimated the width of it. The slider’s friction grip wasn’t intended for this degree of load. He was coming in too low and the rift was deep and hotter than he’d expected. Halfway over he swung his legs back and began to develop a movement ready to slam his feet into the wall, then realised he’d be too fast for that. He’d smash his ankles through his pelvis. He’d seen a spider do that before. The taut rope was keening above him as the slider played over it faster and faster. Jon threw himself sideways, hoping to slow himself at least a fraction but knowing it wouldn’t be enough.

The brief low rumble gave him no warning. The line jerked violently and went abruptly dead as the rift shifted. Jon dropped into freefall. All the breath went from him. He started to remember something, a dream of pain, and the rift’s jaws closed fractionally over him, taking a bite out of the light. There was a sudden lance of intense pain in his shoulder as he dropped, then the ratchet locked in and the line held again. The pain and the dream faded together. He flexed his shoulder, feeling only the old scar.

The line was slack now, and Jon’s weight took the ratchet motor well beyond its automatic tension cutout. It wasn’t going to regather itself.

He let himself swing gently. The breath that came back to him stung his throat. His body was pushing out sweat and the heat was evaporating it immediately. He was below the mast now, five metres out. The hairline must have slipped. The rock face in front of him was brown and rough, glistening faintly. Maybe he should have waited, like Dekk said. But his dreams were bad enough now without the death of some kid in a cot.

‘Are you okay, Jon?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, fuck you.’

Jon reached for the overhead cable, observing how his hands shook. He began to pull himself towards the masthead, hand over hand up the rope’s incline. The heat sucked the strength from his arms. He thought of the kid, scared up there and screaming, and moved on, not looking down. The bile rose again, and this time he couldn’t swallow it.

With the last of the strength in his arms he swung himself forward on to the solid mast and hauled himself up to straddle it. He sat there shaking for long seconds, leaning against the hard rock until he could breathe and the ache in his arms and hands had receded, and then he started to climb. The exhaustion fell away as he rose towards the light, methodically locating handholds and footholds in the slippery rock. The visgel had by now extruded into a featureless overhang, but climbing it was easy. He punched his fists and kicked his feet into it to provide little adhesive grips that gently nudged him out again as he passed on, making his way easily up the slick orange expanse.

The electricity cables higher up he avoided. The power should have been shut off, but it wasn’t always. He skirted the runnels of water and sewage, and then he had made it to the ruptured foundations of the house.

He came up on to the kitchen floor. Black and white ceramic floortiles had been shivered free and lay like a disrupted gamegrid. They shattered loudly under his boots. A blender hung from the wall by its cable. He glanced through the door and discounted the useless staircase. The kitchen ceiling was intact, so he shot up a piton and yanked the lath and plaster down around himself, then climbed up the wall and into the room beside the kid’s room. He pushed the door open.

‘Two things,’ said Dekk. The feedback screamed through Jon’s earpieces and Jon ripped them out. Dekk was standing there beside the cot. Through the window Jon saw the crab’s pincer, not so bright any longer, raised and ready for Dekk to step back on to.

Dekk reached out an arm and flicked the mobile hanging low over the cot, setting tiny silver spaceships spinning, sprinkling fine plaster dust over the rumpled blankets.

‘One. No fucking kid.’

Jon put out a hand to the mobile. One of the ships nestled in his hand, and he set it free again, twitching on its string and rocking all the others.

‘Two. You ain’t ever working with me again. This ain’t the first time you’ve pulled something like this, and I’ve had it. You’re fucking cracked, Jon.’

Jon turned away from Dekk and the cot and its slowly rotating cascade of spaceships to stare out over the rift. He blinked and ran the back of his hand over his eyes, wiping water and dust away. The movement over on the far rim took him by surprise. Usually by this time he was way down below, jinking from wall to wall, stitching and weaving, lost in the spider’s process. Then C&C would be arriving as he was lifted clear, and as far as he was concerned the whole operation was sterile. Apart from glitches like today’s.

Evacuated people were starting to gather on the far side, drawing up steadily and standing motionless along the rim, beginning to take in their local calamity. It would be fixed, of course. There would soon be another spider along to take over from Jon, then C&C would level the rift, and then they’d start rebuilding. But those people had lost everything.

Jon felt empty. He heard Dekk’s voice as if from miles away, and the change in tone made him look around. He suddenly remembered he’d finally sent the message.

Dekk had a hand to his ear, listening. ‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘I got it.’ He shrugged at Jon and shook his head. He said, ‘So you quit already. Thanks for telling me ahead. Well, you’re a fucking walker now, and this is off limits.’

‘I was going to . . .’

He let the sentence trail away. Dekk was already halfway through the window, clambering on to the arm of his crab, and the lie would have been wasted.

A local tremor had rollercoastered part of Jon’s direct route to Maze, and the demolition of a destabilised building forced him out into a wider loop. Wheeled vehicles were abandoned everywhere, shipwrecked on the quaked streets. Jon picked his way through them. They were useless now. They’d rust there until the emergency service autoids cleared them.

Maze was just within the quaked area, a sprawling two-storey building that had survived past tremors better than the collapsed architecture around it. Its outer wall was a long low façade of shadowblack glass, stark against the surrounding decay. The clear weather was still holding and Jon could read the vast words running along the dark glass from a hundred metres away. WANDERERS OF THE MAZE.

A copter in the red and yellow of Seismic swung above him, its speakers crackling. ‘There has been a tremor two in this area. No further disturbance is anticipated today.’ The announcement was casual and windblown. Tin cans and shreds of paper danced around Jon in the downdraught. The copter dropped and hung over him until he came to the building, then tipped sharply and clattered away. Jon thought briefly of Dekk and felt nothing.

A faint aura of ozone hugged the building. His filter buzzed clear, so he let the face mask fall to take stock of Maze. The tall letters glittered like dying coals against the obsidian background, dwarfing him. Jon walked slowly along the wall within the streetside corridor of scoured air. He reached the last word and stopped there.

Hunched beneath the M so that the apex of its arch met the letter’s midpoint was an etched representation of the mediaeval dark wooden door that was the company icon. The door was thickly studded with hammered iron rivets. The plate of an ornate silver lock was set into the right of