Also by Ian Green

The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath

The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade

The Gauntlet and the Broken Chain

EXTREMOPHILE

Ian Green

AN AD ASTRA BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2024 by Head of Zeus Ltd, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Copyright © Ian Green, 2024

The moral right of Ian Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781804545843

ISBN (XTPB): 9781804545850

ISBN (Broken Binding HB): 9781035915132

ISBN (E): 9781804545829

Chapter Illustrations: Shutterstock

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For the wee lad

EXTREMOPHILE, Noun, BIOLOGY – an organism that thrives in extreme environments

HORSE THEORY, Mantra, PHILOSOPHY – when the horse you are riding dies, get off it

1

Charlie

Chekhov’s clathrate gun

WE ARE HORSE THEORY THANK YOU!

Parker yells into the mic but the bass is still wailing as I push it at the amps and I don’t know if anyone hears them. By the time I can hear anything past my own heartbeat and the feedback there is no more applause, if there was any. I don’t look at the crowd when I’m playing – freaks me out. I look at the bass or at Parker or a spot on the wall and don’t notice the blood on my fingers where the strings have shredded through the calluses until well after, until it is all over my shirt. I’m slick with sweat – the space behind the old fish factory and the abandoned flats is open to the night, but the air is hot in London, even on a winter evening. It feels hotter than last year.

The band before us were a punk three-piece, all fast tempo and choppy guitar, so our distortion-bass laced with industrial synth and Parker’s poetry was a tidal shift. I’d hoped for a tidal wave, but a quick glance shows the crowd is already back to their drinks, their conversation.

You good, Charlie? Parker asks and I wipe sweat from my brow and nod and start to pack up. I can hear the party again; the sound dude has amped up the tunes and the murmur of people speaking and yelling and laughing is back. My heartbeat is still properly amped, full juice mental after a tight fifteen-minute set. We were early enough in the set-list that the dancefloor was half-empty, even though the bar is crowded. I get my bass packed and on my back and then head to the makeshift bar, where Parker is already surrounded by meticulously disarrayed scene punks, retro studded belts and patches just so.

One has a glitz shirt that keeps scrolling profanities across the thread, every four-letter you can think of with the occasional ACAB thrown in for good measure. A bit try-hard. Most don’t even glance at me; the one who does takes in my look and immediately dismisses me. Just the bass player. I can read his thoughts in the faint crease at his forehead, the diffident set to his lips. Fuck that guy.

What does HORSE THEORY mean? one asks but Parker waves them off with a smile and gets two beers from the mullet manning the beer pile, who passes them on with a good set mumble. Parker is sweat-wet as me, grinning, and the 20-key modded Casio is back in their satchel, slung low at their hip like an oversized six-shooter. We fade to the back of the crowd and drink the beers and share a joint from Zoot’s hothouse. It’s bad weed. It smells like a burning roll of fox piss and the only impact is a faint thrumming behind my eyes, as if the wasps in my skull are waking up. We watch TERMINAL MORAINE play twenty minutes of noise but their new guitarist is a showboat and I’m not digging it. Too noodly – guy is shirtless and strutting about.

I check my onyx – I’ve got a lens in so it doesn’t light up when I tap it through my pocket, just fires the top alerts straight to the heads-up display on the contact. Eleven new orders for ZODIAC CODE, with raw sequence files attached. Idiots. Who gives their DNA to a fucking astrology website? A few quick blinks and flicks of my eyes and I check the bank account to find the orders have already cleared – we have cash to burn. Beer at the show is stolen or donated or whatever, but I need gear for the lab and Parker needs new shitkickers.

I down my beer and flash the confirmation onto the onyx display to show the orders to Parker and they whoop and then we’re dancing – TERMINAL MORAINE finally finish and then it is the excellent INJURY DETAIL. Dudes with a lot of tatts and heavy beards – they shred. The drummer is absolutely crushing it, the double-bass pedals thrumming so fast it’s more like a reverberation, the thrum in the heart of a colossal hive of mega-bees instead of rhythm or any distinct hits. Makes me want a drummer, almost. I drink five more beers but they barely touch the edge – the metabolism booster I spun up last summer has its pros and cons. I spot my ex-girlfriend dancing with her three new partners in a little tangle across the room, head buzzed, stupid geometric face tattoos catching the light. I turn away swiftly, because nothing there is worth looking at.

With five beers I have to piss so often that I should switch to spirits, but the beers are cold and free and it is sweltering and the graffiti on the cubicle walls in the pisser is the only reliable way to stay on top of the zeitgeist. I down another and light a cigarette – this gig is in theory a warm-up for some protest march so the sound dude spends a long time between sets droning about Green vs. Blue, but whenever I stop moving I only feel Black so I stare out the rolltop doors of the warehouse at the sunset, a plane tree with scabrous fungi growing up it silhouetted by the streaking purple light. I tap my fingers on my legs.

Say what you want about the end of the world – the dead soil and ash in the air makes for a pretty sunset. We aren’t close enough to any of the big sulphur dioxide projects to get the really wild sunsets like they do on the equator or in Japan, but it’s still pretty tight. On the wall beneath the plane tree, graffiti – a stylised crossed hammer and sword, all in green. The symbol of the Heavy Crew. If this were Zone 1 and a corpo saw that, there would be a street team here within the night to cover it over with their own carefully crafted street art, tailored to appeal to the dissolute youth, to offer aspirations of money/sex/vice/escape. If a cop saw it, we’d be spitting tear gas within the hour. I’m feeling Black, so the symbol doesn’t get me jazzed. Just feels like more branding.

INJURY DETAIL are followed by some folks with some synthy shit, but good drums again. Maybe I’m just too focused on what we lack. I don’t catch the name but the drummer is a guy who was in a band I saw last summer at the venue beneath some arches in Bethnal Green and he was a nice dude, and it is all danceable and so we dance. The fug of sweat and beer is competing with the hot mess of the stagnant canal two streets away and a century of smoked fish baked into the walls of the factory next door. There is a faint acrid chemical smell underlying it all – someone is cooking hard drugs in one of the abandoned blocks of flats deliquescing around us, or in a canal boat, but the Met couldn’t give a fuck what happens outside of Zone 1. Everyone worth extorting has already moved north where they can breathe, or is in Zone 1 living high. I’ve smoked twelve cigarettes since arriving but the buzz is minimal. There’s the catch-all metabolism booster I dosed myself with coming into play again, ruining the fun – pros and cons, benefits and limitations. You wanna eat shit forever and stay skinny? I paid the price. I’m getting more beers and checking on my bass, tucked tight in a corner, and then I hear the yell: COCKBRAIN CORPO SONOFABITCH!

I get outside in time to see Parker rolling in the dirt with some fucking scene kid with good teeth and new shoes, a haircut in italics. No punches, no knives, just a kind of desperate wrestle. Me and Red Russ drag Parker off and a crowd starts spilling out to watch – we’re between sets so everyone is locked on. The kid rolls away and pulls themselves up and with a flash of weak streetlight on metal there is a blade in their hand. It flickers and snakes as he moves his wrist, the blade thin as a screwdriver. He wipes his bloody nose and spits red. Parker scrambles to their feet and grabs a beer from me. Asshole dickless dickhead motherfucker! They yell and throw the bottle and it misses by a mile. Recycled glass doesn’t smash good so it just rolls off. Anticlimax.

I’ll fucking cut you! The scene kid says but Parker just laughs and spreads their arms and takes a step forward. I grab the back of their shirt. Red Russ looms next to us, big fucker that he is, and now there is a crowd and people are yelling – fuck off, kid/beat their ass, Parker/nice ass, the usual mix of shit. I feel Parker settle back on their heels and I reach into my vest pocket and pull out cigarettes and pass them to Russ and Parker. We light up and the kid is just staring, knife swaying, sweat pouring, red-lipped. Alone.

I said—

We heard what you said, I say, and I look down at his new shoes and then meet his eyes. You put that knife away, kid, and you fuck off.

I’m game, Parker says, and Russ is holding them back with one arm across the chest. Parker doesn’t even have a knife, for fuck’s sake, and they are ready to charge in.

The kid opens his mouth to reply but I can feel the weight of the crowd and I don’t want conversation. I hold one hand out to Parker to calm them, and then from the back of my belt beneath my AMENRA shirt I pull out a claw hammer, chipped and scratched, the handle worn smooth with sweat, the heavy end sticky and dark.

Fuck off, kid, I say, and I don’t raise my voice. I don’t smile, I don’t blink, I don’t raise the hammer – it hangs limp by my side. The guy has six inches on me at least. My heart is back to full action, and there is an acid tang in the back of my throat. Behind us cymbals crash as the next band sets up their shit, and the kid backsteps once, twice, runs. He yells back, some stuff about assholes. Whatever. We watch him disappear and the crowd slowly fades, headed back to the speakers or the bar.

Fuck was that? I ask Parker, and I slip my hammer back in my belt and take a slug from a beer someone has left on the pavement. Maybe me. Parker wets their lips with that little pointed tongue and wipes sweat from their face, slicks a hand back through their shock of red hair. Fuckin’, fucking kid said we were derivative, Parker spits. Their cheeks are red, hair tousled from the tussle. Good-teeth motherfucker said we were just a JILLING/KILLING copycat. Can you believe that?

Red Russ shakes his head and punches Parker on the shoulder before lumbering off back into the pit. Good guy, Red Russ, Parker says, and we trade the bottle back and forth until it’s dead and then Parker hurls it in the vague direction the scene kid was headed. It bounces off to join the others. JILLING/KILLING are good though, I say.

There are always fights at the shows, and everyone has a knife, and everyone who doesn’t have a knife has a gun. The scene protects itself, and we are within it, part of the family. It’s always the new kids or the crazies or the skinheads or some city boys. If someone ends up cut, someone else will take them to the nearest clinic. If someone ends up dead, depending who it is, the canal is close, or plenty of bands have vans for moving their gear.

My eye twitches a little as my heart starts to calm but then my onyx buzzes and the message comes up on my lens – WHERE IS MY FUCKING MONEY CHARLIE – and the number is a new one but I know who it is, and I blink and flick my gaze to close the lens down for the night and press the heels of my hands into my eyes hard enough to see pinpricks of light.

Chef again? Parker asks, and I just nod, and they shake their head and squeeze my hand. Pay no mind, kid, they say. We head back into the noise.

After the show we walk home along the canal and we have sex and we watch ancient anime on Parker’s screen in bed, coiled together. There is no food in the volcano lair but old pizza with vegan cheese, rubber before it even cooled. The night is still so fucking tooooooasty, and the server is spitting heat as it works on the analysis for the ZODIAC CODE orders. The bulk of it is already done – that script took me a minute to think of and an hour to make, a day to perfect. Give me your DNA and your details and we’ll give you a custom astrological chart with moons and shit, animations, music. Formatted for an onyx lens or whatever peripheral you want, if you fancy, so it all floats around you in augmented or virtual reality. (I got some software noodle to code that shit in exchange for a weird little augment, wanted to only sleep three hours a night. Weird little software noodle, but they all are.)

ZODIAC CODE is all about aligning your code to your sign, how that relates to the procession of the universe – the epigenetic topology of your genome mapping to the grand procession cycle of the stars, our planet rising and falling in the tides of the galaxy. Smoke enough weed and understand patterns and you can align any two things, as long as you don’t care if it’s true. Correlation doesn’t equal causation but it does equal cash, and everyone loves a bit of pattern. It’s how we evolved – pattern recognition is as innate as breathing, probably a bit more. Give someone chaos and they will find a pattern, or seek to impose one. The program takes a few features unique to each DNA file set and aligns that with a bullshit astrological model some crystal-bitch made and it spits out some numbers. The next script takes those numbers and populates a premade form. It throws the results and some hi-res pics of planets and some line diagrams behind into a file and then another program makes an animated version for the onyx, an immersive version for the VR. I always delay sending it for three days to make it seem we are working hard on it, but the server should have it all spat out by morning. I wrote some good deep nonsense for the website – deciphered from the ancient ruins of Göbekli Tepe! (Göbekli Tepe = 10,000-year-old megalithic ruins in south-east Turkey. Super cool. Dick all to do with DNA. Fucking catnip to crystal nerds.)

Guanine synastry accords with the procession of mercury. In conjunction with Saturn, beware the impact on your 1st house!

Your fire sign is fixed, but the mutation of c>t muc16 omim606154 will leave you open to water’s emphasis…

With the world ending, everyone is looking for meaning. No refunds, satisfaction guaranteed. Most of the clients are in what’s left of North America, in their militarised enclaves, clutching geodes and desperation, and the cash clears eventually and spends as good as money from clever people. I order enough lab equipment that what’s left of the British government takes an interest once a year (or when they remember), and nothing I do on the genetics side is technically wrong. I pull out mutations, copy number changes, whatever. I make a few colourful charts. I file my taxes and fill in all the proper paperwork, and the land we’re on is industrial brownsite, so after the great d-reg pretty much anything goes.

Population still hasn’t bounced from the 2038 hit, so not like they’re short on space. Maybe the lab inspections make them feel useful, but their real reason for checking is to make sure that I’m not fucking with any corporate IP. If there’s one thing the police can be relied on for, it’s to protect money. ACAB might not have always been true, but it sure seems to be now. All cops are bastards, all corpos are bastards. Pick your C, it will probably be right. All people are bastards, I think, lying in the dark and staring at the ceiling and desperately wanting not to believe it. I feel Black down to my toes.

The punks and the kids say you are Green or Blue or Black. Greens want to save the world – go to the marches, make your own toothpaste. There are hard Greens (direct action, like the Heavy Crew with their hammer and sword) and soft Greens (grind your own quinoa, lament the death of the theatre). Blues don’t give a fuck as long as there is profit – the sea will rise, but if you’ve got money there is always higher ground. Blacks know that the world is fucked and you need to either have a good time or find a bath and a toaster.

Work, Charlie. Work to distract yourself from the end of the world. ZODIAC CODE – the interpretation is all horseshit but the genetics is solid and I stay a clear mile from anything the corporates have a hold on, so most of the feedback I get is astrology crystal-heads trying to point out mistakes in my star charts. I incorporate their feedback when I’m in the mood, and the next customer buys in even more. Iterative design, baby. Eighteen months in and ZODIAC CODE pays the electricity bill and the water bill, and the extra electricity to pump out the fucking floodwater every time the canals burst. Parker doesn’t have to steal (they still do, but they don’t have to – now it’s more for the point of the thing). I can afford meds when I need them, reagents for the real work (the stuff the police never see). Tech, drugs, booze, fags. New toys. A multi-pipette, resin for the printer. Every now and then some kid in the scene tries to talk to me about star signs and if I’m sober I quickly leave the conversation and if I’m drunk that’s my whole evening.

We sleep. Can you sleep better than after playing a show, getting laid, and getting paid by idiots? Maybe it would be a good sleep, but I dream of the young scene kid shivving Parker in the kidney with that flash of a knife, I dream of watching Parker bleed out. I dream of Chef finding me, chasing me. Catching me. Cooking me. I wake up when the power goes, again, and I’m drenched in sweat. I check my onyx but all networks are down – the last notification loaded is a message from Zoot on the latest supposedly encrypted messenger.

we need to talk : )

Below that, flashing, a news notification:

Eastern Siberian subsea landslide fires clathrate gun – emergency UN mee—

The bulletin is cut off. Next to me Parker mumbles something and turns on their side. I turn the notifications off for the news app and press my body to Parker and close my eyes. I can feel them breathing. The world is quiet and I am listening, my mind racing. Zoot would only message with encryption if there was a real job. Not scamming new-agers. Somebody wants to play grown-up games, and already my mind is itching to know what it is. Heist? Hack? Fix? Augment? Augment… for that I’d need my toolkit, and my toolkit needs power. With the power off, the volcano lair is silent, the server still and dead. The pump on the ground floor normally thrums as it tries to keep the waters back, but with it dead I can hear the marshes outside the high windows, the wind through the endless bullrushes.

I lay awake until the hum of the backup generator kicks in and the server whirrs to life and the sample fridge clicks back on. The pump starts up and through the high windows there is nothing but darkness and heat, but even with the noise returned I can hear a pigeon calling in the night. Good luck, lad, I think – same thing my father always said when he saw a pigeon. From the bedside table I grab a melatonin patch and tear it in half and stick half to each side of my neck, the microneedles on the patch scratching at my skin. There are little pictures on the foil packet for the patch showing very clearly that whatever else you do, DON’T TEAR THE PATCH! and DON’T APPLY IT TO YOUR NECK! The warnings are in a friendly and comprehensible font and there are little pictograms accompanying them.

My pineal gland is fucked anyway. I drop the foil to the floor and close my eyes.

2

Ghost

Where is my blood boy, where is my pig?

The usual questions are so boring by now, but John has to be certain. Any alcohol? No. Any drugs? No. Sticking to the supplement regimen? Yes, sir, of course, sir, threebagsfullsir. And on and on and on. This boy should know that John will check everything, that the first thing to be done will be a rapid analysis of metabolites and everything-omics, throwing the analytical kitchen sink at the subject’s blood. So why ask? Overkill, some would say. Some researchers just use the questions, but then whoops-a-daisy they get a bad batch and how much can you trust some gym boy really? John doesn’t trust gym boys, but gym boys are the best blood boys. Best to be sure.

John had a minion write these questions years ago, has had his tame AI Avery refine them every few months since, and for any other subject a minion (or more likely Avery) would be asking the questions. But this is different. Tuesday morning, John gets his own treatment. On Tuesday morning, John takes an interest. AETOS DIOS runs itself these days (it doesn’t really – a team of cold-eyed bastards he has slowly emplaced run it, with the understanding that there is some discretionary cash in the R&D funding for him, no questions asked, and in return he will occasionally make a deposit in the accounts from clients nobody will ever talk about, and keep the shareholders happy). The rote is boring, people who fear death taking his panaceas (he has been working on a joke about panaceas and pancreases since the company’s inception, but has yet to formulate it in a way he will speak aloud). But every Tuesday John is in the office for his weekly plasma infusion from a teenage athlete, and every Tuesday evening he sleeps so well. He never sleeps well when he misses his infusions.

It’s not just plasma, of course – blood boy is just the industry term. Sometimes stem cells, sometimes gut microbiome transfers, sometimes something a little more niche that requires a lot of digging around in, say, a pancreas. But for today it is a good old-fashioned blood transfusion. Something to give him a little boost.

Anything else worth noting? he asks and the blood boy shakes his perfect head. Kickboxer, or something. John’s eyes flit across the summary his lens is feeding him. Eighteen years old, and devoutly religious – excellent news, even less chance of contamination. The boy leans forward in his chair slightly. It is a chair that looks like it was designed with four pencil strokes, and it cost more than most of John’s employees will earn this year.

Bad dreams, the blood boy says, and John’s eyes go to a message he has received about the Ghana contract, and with a tap of his wrist screen Julio enters the room and ushers the blood boy out. Then it is all contracts about that mess with the supplier in Kent (forward to Hans) and admin (flag for Julio) and then he sinks back in his chair and drinks a cup of tea someone has brought him. They always bring him tea after he speaks to his blood boy, and they always bring the tea unobtrusively. John slips his glasses on after his first sip and leans back on the couch. With a twist of a nicely chunky and viscerally satisfying dial on the side of the glasses, the lenses turn opaque. The glasses are made to look like designer shades, and in a moment John is transported to his true office. Not the expensive chairs and the view of the dirty Thames swelling and thrashing – somewhere wholly under his control. He has the haptic feedback off, he is old enough to want to just do it by controller rather than touch, old enough to want the full virtual reality rather than an augmented layer over what’s real like the youths seem to prefer.

John’s virtual office is a forest glade full of scraps, images and objects that denote their contents. He goes to a bag of blood that is neatly hanging from a pine branch and with a tap of his finger he is accessing the blood boy project, the customers (old) and the donors (young). With satisfaction, he notes that Hans from Legal has finally submitted to the repeated offers, and has begun a course of treatment – harvested liver enzymes from a promising school-age athlete. All well and good. Having your team invested in the success of a project is always beneficial in the long run. The shareholders love the blood boys – so much cheaper than synthesising plasma like those Oxford cretins CADENSOR do, and the board loved John’s spiel about the human body being the ultimate bioreactor – nothing in our ken comes close to the wonder that evolution has created.

The latest lab reports from the customers are flagged for his attention by one of the research drones, Ellis – he takes in the top line. Immune, sleep, mood, neurodegenerative risk, cancer risk – all tracking as improved, as they should. Pissants like CADENSOR use artificial infusions but John knows you can’t beat the real stuff.

There is a sudden cold sensation on the crook of his elbow and he grimaces – the analgesic swab – and sure enough then follows the cat-scratch of the needle and a warm flush into his arm, back in the real. Plasma from his blood boy. Some of the clients prefer to stick with a known quantity and have their repeat donors, but John knows the joy of variation – and what if this one is the one that does it? The one that makes him feel like he did at eighteen, on fire and utterly aware? One of his rivals uses his own child, and another has a bastard-in-every-port scenario – the genetic similarity reduces any potential negative immune reaction to the transfusion. But John has no children, and wants none, even for this.

The plasma flows, and John reads the reports. The pig organ team are trying a new viral vector for their gene therapy, altering the organ to match its host. Cheaper in the long run than the current nanoparticle infusion, but a bit trickier on the technical end. The last vector they used had terrible efficiency. John grimaces and barks aloud in his real office – Julio, tell Samantha to get me the vector data after lunch, I want all of it. Julio will hear him, and Julio knows not to bother him with some stupid response. For the top-level clients they engineer the pigs at the embryonic level so they will match their eventual host, but altering individual organs is, he is told again and again, more efficient. Multiple clients per pig, in theory reducing overheads. Boring, though.

He has heard the ever-present rumours of human cloning, lobotomised clones grown in pods to be shelled like so many peas when their organs and tissues are needed. He has seen it himself, on a smaller scale, has played his part. The pig is the acceptable face of the same trade – it’s not that John doesn’t think the clone organ harvest works well (he knows it does), but it is even more boring than the pig alterations. At least across species there is some challenge.

There is more, and it is boring. All so boring! Stakeholder meetings, celebrity clients who want his ‘special touch’. His drones in the hard research labs, Ellis and Arain, have sent their daily spiels – Arain’s is exhaustive but with an excellent summary, and Ellis’s is poorly structured. John grimaces, deals with it. He flags and delegates but then there is one message that simply says POSTMAN, RED ENVELOPE and he grins and tears the glasses from his eyes even as he shuts his onyx down, disconnecting all monitoring from its lens.

Julio, red envelope! he calls, and drinks more of his tea – it is still warm, of course, the teapot resting on a tray with a thermal coil embedded. The tea is some kind of expensive mix he was gifted by Kanako, head of their Japanese branch. He likes it enough to have made Julio source him more, but not enough to learn its name or ingredients.

Julio enters, sleek and manicured and dressed perfectly as ever. John blinks at him and then gazes out at the grey of the Thames, shifts from his VR couch back to his clear desk.

That latest blood boy might be your type, J, he says, and Julio hands him from a black opaque folder an envelope in red, followed by a single long match that he leaves on the desk.

I don’t date poor people, Julio says coolly, and waits a moment to catch John’s smile and to ensure that John is focused on the envelope and needs nothing else. John likes that about Julio – he doesn’t ask, he just does.

When he is alone, John opens the red envelope and reads it, and smiles. Julio’s usual intermediary will have taken this all down verbatim, written in ink, and then carried it here personally – the envelope is laced with magnesium, and even the slightest spark will turn the contents to utter cinders, but even then no names are mentioned. The money will be ridiculous, the facilities will all be in place. All they need is someone who can arrive surreptitiously, someone who knows how to do whatever awful thing it is they want. They need someone unfettered by morality, legality, ethics. They need a biologist. They need a Ghost. The Postman can procure any service in this world, and one of those services is that of the Ghost. This is how John shores up the holes in AETOS DIOS’s accounts, how he keeps his edge. How he staves off the boredom.

John reads the letter and drops it into the bin and laughs as he strikes the match. It is cartel business in Mexico – a brain transplant from man into livestock. Some elaborate punishment. So much, so passé. But we want him to live a long time, the letter says, and John imagines a voice with a cartoonish cartel accent saying exactly that. Tricky. Perhaps not even possible. But interesting. And I haven’t been to Mexico in years. He has a Proustian recollection of the tang of fresh lime juice over ice, high in the desert, and for a moment John is still.

He burns the envelope and sends Julio a message – holiday in Mexico, five days, liaise with our local handler. And so on. He turns to go back to the VR couch and feels the sharp sting at his arm – the bag of plasma from his blood boy is trailing listlessly behind him on a sleek wheeled stand, and the analgesic swab and the excitement were enough to distract him utterly. The needle has pulled half-out and now red is staining the tape and gauze holding it in. A dingle drop on the cuff of his shirt. Shit.

John doesn’t call for help. The bag is almost empty, and he shuts off the drip and carefully removes the needle, pressing hard with a sterile swab that was hanging from the wheeled stand, ready to go. The swab has its own adhesives at its edges and soon it is on, his shirt is buttoned again, and he is relaxing back on his couch drinking his tea, looking at the grey water of the Thames and thinking about how to take a brain from a human into a pig, how to keep it alive, how to make sure it could feel afterwards. The Postman has clearly chosen John for this job because of his company’s line in… (porcine panaceas? Reaching for im-boar-tality?). John grimaces. These will all need work.

Julio, I need pig bio and transplant summaries, a fresh shirt, and a lime juice, he says, and he is not loud but he knows Julio will hear, the nub of the microphone embedded in John’s throat linked to the bumps of bone conduction speakers grafted into Julio’s jaw. Julio always hears.

Impossible, John mumbles, the same way he does every time he receives a red envelope from the Postman. Always, the tasks set before him are impossible. Always, the Ghost makes it work.

3

Charlie

Après nous le déluge

Parker is still bleary eyes and dry lips when they ask me what the fuckety fuck is a claratharatate gun? I’ve been up since seven (melanin did dick all) so I’ve done the digest. News and socials are full of it. Clathrate, I correct. Methane under the seabed, I say, so one big fuck off bubble of hardcore greenhouse gas. Methane spike, kick up the arse of global temp. Subsea earthquake letting it all loose, as if we need it.

Amen to that, they say, and then grab their jeans from the floor by the mattress and start getting dressed.

Global temp is already 2.8°C above pre-industrial – the 1.5 dreamed of decades ago was blown past the year I was born, and the models saying sea levels might fuck the Gulf Stream and actually make London colder were, well, shit models. Too many tipping points happened at once to model it clear, but it’s December in London and its nearly 10 a.m. and I’m already baking. The last two decades of mad geoengineering shit has made it all… muddled. Sulphur dioxide being shot into the atmosphere to slow the warming by half a dozen states, war in a dozen others. Huge population hits leading to kickback – hey, a third of us are, uh, dead, so let’s not worry about the petrol engine right now. Container ships the size of buildings chucking out more emissions in the time it takes the captain to shit than most folk will put out in a lifetime, and they never stop moving, and their engines never stop burning, and their captains never stop shitting.

The overhead fan is spinning, but it is just pushing hot air around.

Breakfast? Parker asks.

Oh yeah, I say. Most important meal of the day.

There is no food in the lair but I’ve made enough orders that the drones can find my window easy enough, and the ZODIAC CODE money gives us options. We wait, watching across the canal for a shadow coming our way. The drone that eventually brings breakfast is a shitty little number, six rotors and cheap-looking plastic bodyware coated in advertisements. Some corpo had the great idea of giving it little eyes and a face as if it can think, or feel. I shoo it away from the window ledge after grabbing the bag of pancakes and it wobbles off to join the others thronging across the skies of East London. Work today? Parker asks and I nod and my eye flicks as I check my onyx lens for any shout from Zoot. There is nothing since his last message, but he’ll show up eventually. He always does when there’s cash to be made.

A new message from a new number. WHERE IS MY FUCKING MONEY CHARLIE, ALL MY FUCKING MONEY AND ALL YOUR FUCKING MONEY, YOU RAT. I close it with a blink. Don’t think about Chef, don’t think about how many knives Chef owns.

Real work, I tell Parker. Zoot’s got us a job for later so I need to get this finished. The chickpea pancakes are glutinous, something between rubber and grit. With blueberry sauce. It’s a disappointment.

Parker eats their pancakes and grins at me with lips and teeth turned chemical blue. No way I can afford actual fucking blueberries in winter, no matter how many Americanos I swindle. Real work! Let’s play god! Parker says. They are always excited for the real work, even though they don’t understand it. They respect it. That’s enough.

The real work would probably pay better than the astrology but I don’t really charge more than what’s needed for the reagent cost. It’s more a token fee to get rid of timewasters. If you’ve taken the time to follow the breadcrumb trail I’ve left in the more esoteric bio forums then you probably aren’t a timewaster, but you might be a cop or one of those purist evangelicals – don’t change the code of life, say the motherfuckers with more minor surgery and drug experience than most medics. I can always tell a cop from a real client.

A real client? They’ll know I need their DNA, best coverage they can get me. I don’t sequence customer DNA on site, fuck that. Who has the time? They’ll know I need every data level they can give me, from base-level genomics up to epigenomics, topological, RNA expression, protein expression. Most of that shit is transient, but better to have so I can check for anything weird. They’ll know I need any medical shit they can give me (most of it I just skim – I’m not a medic). They understand, there is no going back. There is no knowing side effects. There is no longitudinal study, no mouse cohort, no decade of wet lab work. We are absolutely not in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

They understand. They live at the end of the world with the rest of us, why would they care if this metabolism booster fucks their kidneys in a decade or turns them infertile? Cancer in fifty years? They probably aren’t having kids at this latitude, not in the smog of London – urban birth rate has gone off a cliff. Who would have a kid with a world like this? Only someone with money or with religion or with hope. Whole continents are graveyards (hyperbole, sure, but like – not that much hyperbole). It is, they keep telling us, definitely not the end of days. Head north and north again to where it is still temperate, there are still decisions being made and all that big-dick geoengineering. The client though, they understand. If they are coming to me and they are in London – you can’t unfuck something once it’s been fucked, be that sandwich or person or city or planet. They won’t trust the corpos – they’ll do a good job on you but you are locked into their maintenance plans, their oversight, their structures.

They come to me when they need weird bio shit, and I am happy to provide. That’s the real trick – cops always ask for such banal stuff, but the real customers are a bunch of weirdos, and you can’t fake weird.

The volcano lair overlooks what was once marshland, then brownsite industrial, then microbreweries. It is marshland again, and a few of us rodents cling to the abandoned spaces – close enough to the centre that the net connection is fast, not far enough out that the gangs are too bad. I have a gun on my desk next to the keyboard but I’ve only ever had to fire warning shots – the legalisation of pistols after the last SARS riots keeps me calmer. Rim, Azzie and Rachel all got shot since then. Cops, cops, gang. A pistol won’t help, not really, and I don’t take it out with me normally. Seems like it will only end badly. I just take the hammer, and some bear mace I got sent from the California Republic Enclave. Serious shit that will really ruin your day. But a few gunshots in the sky might send anyone who comes snooping at the volcano lair off to hunt for easier prey. An Englishman’s home is his castle, they say, and I’m not a man, or English, but I won’t die for pacifism.

Is this one new then? Parker asks, and they push their hair back. The front is long now, and all of it that deep annoying blood-red. I’m at the lab bench, fume-hood turned on with its comforting hum, ethanol sprayed everywhere. Parker is at my shoulder like I’ve told them not to be when I’m pipetting into a fucking clear chip barely bigger than a pack of cards, a dozen tiny wells leading into the microfluidic system within. I keep my eye on the pipette tip, clear liquid going to clear liquid being held in clear plastic. The new pipette has an ergonomic grip and a smooth action and I calibrated it again last week – no bubbles for Charlie, thank you very much. I focus.

When I take a break and get up to answer Parker’s question they are across the volcano lair on the broken armchair by the bed, presumably working on the ZODIAC CODE. It was Parker’s idea, and I was happy to do the grunt work but I’m not answering fucking customer emails.

Listen to this one – Parker has forgotten the question about the new augment already. Your chart helped me realise the root of my problems with Andrew was in our stop codon weighting mismatch. Thank you so much. Thank you so much! Parker cackles and opens a garish blue tin of energy drink and then repeats the message in an exaggerated American accent. We should move into dating, they say, and I kick a dirty sock across the floor and sniff. DNA dating?

Old hat, I say. Been done. Might be able to scrape some old code or ideas though. You find people more attractive if their major histocompatibility index is different from yours, you know that? Immune shit, so in theory who you mate with gives your offspring more variety, better immune surveillance, you know that?

Parker stares at me for a long moment and shakes their head. Babe, they say. You must have a fucking WILDLY different massive histocomputer complex to me. They blow me a kiss and wiggle their eyebrows.

Let’s park it for now, I say.

I’M GONNA GUT YOU CHARLIE flashes up on my lens. New number.

YOU RUINED ME. YOU’VE KILLED ME.

Fuuuuuuuck. Block all from this number and associated, I say out loud, and the onyx buzzes in my pocket in affirmation.

Chef again? Parker asks, and I nod and my eye twitches, my gut aches. I blow out a long breath and gesture back at the lab bench.

It’s a new one, I say, and we make eye contact and match grins, both happy to change the subject from Chef.

Can I have it? they ask, and I say, Of course you can, you always can. Me first though.

Parker grins. The genetics and epigenetics is complex. Most shit you can’t just augment – Want me to fix your eyes? Most of the damage is done, kid. You need to get on that shit in utero like every big private hospital in the world now. Besides, you can fix it with mechanics, with meds, with surgery. The cyberpunk kids all gleefully body-modding with tech and LEDs – changing biology is a different level, infinitely more complex than some little tech toys. What else? Design your baby – I’m not fucking with that; Parker isn’t fucking with that. No choice, so fuck that. We specialise in the aftermarket workarounds. Augments. The kind of shit you don’t want to buy from your friendly corporate pharma interest. The kind that is a bit more baroque.

We made a deal, after I got booted from the institute. The deal was simple – always test on ourselves first, always let the client know the risk, never hold blame if it fucks up. Obviously this is stupid – we can’t test everything on ourselves. Most of it is massively targeted: that’s the whole point. The deal has leftovers though, as all deals do. Parker always asks to try, I always say me first. But now, unless it’s something really cool, we normally just pass it on straight to the customer. They know the risk. Or they should know the risk. But Chef is proof that risk appetite does not always equate to understanding, when you are an idiot.

Of course we’re augmented, anyway. Some of it is the same as what I give the customers. Most you could probably get from one of the corporates, with their tie-ins and maintenance fees and check-ups, with their deeply worrying gene inserts that have no clear function I can figure except, maybe, just maybe, easy future targeting sites. Worrying shit. No fucking thanks.

The metabolism augment boosted our ability to drink. The fertility switch made sure there will be no accidents, now or ever, for either of us. The hair colour thing was stupid, I admit – especially since Parker went and dyed theirs red anyway (prick). I had to modify about twenty-three genes in different ways and it was total guesswork, but go for a strong phenotype and you can’t go wrong. It’s the same rule as tattooing – bold will hold. Intricate shit might work short-term but you want something to stick, go for the heavy hit.

We augment stomach microbiota so that Parker can eat dairy (boooring, who eats dairy?!), drink more, sleep? Sleep we did. It’s not the whole deal, but a 15 per cent change based on some fucking with clock genes. It kinda worked but we both drink and take too many pills and have too much anxiety to really tell. Clothing and shelter you can’t really jam up genetically. Health, who gives a fuck about health? Go see a corpo, go see a medic.

Bangladesh got wiped off the map last year for the tenth time in a decade, Eastern Europe is about fifteen different wars, Northern Europe has gone all isolationist (oh the liberal oil barons were in fact super conservative, but had a nice geographical boundary between them and all the poor people? Oh when shit went bad they went right? Who could have guessed! Quelle surprise, quel damage). Africa, South America, North America are all pretty much fucked to varying degrees. Australia’s gone from being a desert with a nice habitable rim to a desert, fin. Minor nuclear exchanges in the Levant (minor…) fucked the ozone rather than giving us the predicted cooling effect. World is baking – who gives a fuck about health benefits? All that is left is the big boys India and China doing their geoengineering, and a hundred little countries pretending their choices can matter in comparison. The British Government acting as if we have the capacity to make a change, and getting pats on the head and table scraps from the big boys. So no, I don’t do health benefits. I do weird shit.

What does it do? Parker asks again and I realise I’ve been dooming. Black. Staring off and thinking about the end of the world, as we all do so often. My breath catches and I’m aware in an instant that the joke of a lab coat is too tight and the volcano lair is stuffy, even with the overhead fan. Green or Blue or Black, save the world, make your cash, or accept the end.

Today I feel Black, black as my Batman socks, black as my augmented hair. Black as the shit coffee sat next to my fume-hood.

What does it do? Parker asks again and I shrug and gesture at the neat row of vials labelled with tape. What the client wants, I say. Came in a few days back. Tag change.

Oh shit! Is that the one with the flu?

I close my eyes and try to picture a snowy day like in the films. How much cash would I need to go somewhere with real snow? When I was a kid the weather was swinging wild, and we had cold winters, snowy winters. I can’t remember the last one, but it was a long time ago. My mum and dad were still around. We spent an afternoon watching the snow bury the garden back in Scotland. Was Ellie there? No. She was already gone, dead, buried.

I scratch at my chin and focus on the vials because otherwise it is all a bit heavy. Survival instinct – focus on the crocodile nearest the canoe. Tag change.

Client has some cop trouble, potentially, I say. They are a Green, or that’s their line anyway. Maybe left some trace DNA at a site and need to make sure they don’t match if they get pulled in.

Parker is nodding. They get the Casio 20 key from their satchel and plug it in to charge – it’s from the Nineties or something, legit pre-millennium, but they had someone mod it so it can take normal power and plug into an amp, and they can program it from their wrist screen or their pad so each key and button does whatever they like. They start playing the melody to one of our tunes, DISCO TRACK, and I can see they’ve lost interest. Tag change isn’t new, though I need to do some checks to make sure I’m up to date on my shit.

The theory is simple. When cops look to ID you from DNA, they use standard methods. A few friendly brown envelopes full of preloaded pound cards in the right hands, and those methods are now all over the darker corners of what’s left of the free internet.

So what the cops do is they run the DNA on a pretty simple sequencer, good coverage. Then they look for variation in short tandem repeat sequences at a bunch of different locations in your DNA and compare that to their databases. Easy peasy. With about thirty locations they can say with a one-in-a-billion error rate that the DNA is yours, bucko. Go to jail! How dare you protest at a fracking site on what was once a nature reserve! You smeared shit on the door of that corpo who has been spewing toxic waste into your local river? Tough times, kid, work camp if your short tandem repeats match up. The short tandem repeats are just chunks of repeating DNA. Like, GATA. Do you have GATAGATAGATAGATAGATAGATA? Or are you more of a GATAGATAGATAGATAGATAGATAGATAGA TAGATAGATAGATA?

Tag change is messy. Now I have my anonymous customer’s DNA, I’ll pull out the same locations the cops will use (thank you, anonymous forums), and whizz up a design for a gene therapy to alter those locations. It sounds simple, but that is thirty locations, some additions and some deletions, all in different parts of the genome with different architecture. And then you want to do that in a way that doesn’t fuck the subject – short tandem repeats aren’t random shit. Well, not all. Depends where they are in the genetic code – promoter, enhancer, gene body, etc etc. You need to change it by enough that the cops’ algorithm doesn’t pick it up (someone posted the code for it online, god bless the British Police).

You also need to make sure you aren’t totally screwing their gene expression. You could buy a kit for this shit online that changes all of them but they just change the tags without giving a shit about the context. My services are a bit more nuanced, tailored to each person’s own genome to avoid the side effects. You get the same result in terms of the police readout, but potentially some nasty immune consequences further down the line. Either way, even with my custom number, you’ll have a fucking horrid flu for a week or more.

I check that the cops are still using the same methods (forums say, probably?), though apparently some MPs (read: corpos) are now pushing for full sequence comparison – someone has been snitching from our end. I fire Nathan a message to let him know in case it is one of our loose crew. I analyse the sequence, I pull out the short tandem repeats, I tinker and I fuck about and I get the toolkit. The toolkit is a metal box with rubber seals and locks. Waterproof, shockproof. It’s got all my code, all my digital tools, as well as a few toys (a mini-sequencer to collect and analyse samples on the go straight to my wrist screen, some sample collection stuff, a snake venom supercoagulant wound dressing in case one of us gets shot or stabbed, and a quick-CRISPR kit that can gen me up a custom alteration vector in just a few hours). There is the false bottom underneath that, with the heavy shit as well. All of it in a case that fits snug in my satchel. Today I just need the code.

It takes most of the morning, and I’m hungry because chickpea pancakes absolutely blow. The bioreactor is in the lab section of the volcano lair (separated from the kitchen by a line of yellow paint, with a dirty sock inching across it). It’s humming away getting ready and finally I fire in the instructions. I’ll use nanoparticles for this since they paid in advance. Good penetration, and quicker to generate than a comprehensive viral gene therapy or whatever. They want permanent, not transient, as they don’t know when they’ll get picked up. Fair.

I package up the augment to send to the buyer, a PO box somewhere in the city, and call for a drone – paying extra for the anonymous service that is almost certainly not anonymous. Whatever. As it cuts away across the marshes I flex my fingers and check my onyx. Dozens of messages about the band, about the scene, about the gossip and whatever of friends. Who is fucking, who is fighting. The latest outrage online (corpo with oversight on immigration has been burning files and sinking small boats rather than processing them to keep timelines looking good, shocker shocker usual usual). Another ZODIAC CODE order, no special note. Boring.

You wanna practise the new songs? I say and then I realise I don’t know where Parker is. I’m alone, just me in the lair. I press my palms into my eyes and I worry about Chef. Chef is taller than me, has fifty kilos on me easy. Chef is a stupid stupid man and I have ruined him, and I don’t think I can fix him. Chef is going to kill me and he might have a point. I’m alone and there is no music, just the sound of the building, the marshes, my own blood. I stare at the plastic screen of my fume-hood, lose my focus and then realise I’m frowning, my hands wringing. Buck up, kid, my dad would have said. I can hear Agnes, from the next unit over, outside at the canal, humming and singing. I slip some headphones in and drown her out with some pop-punk the algorithm has picked for me.

I take a shower and then I go and stare out of the window at the marshes, green and brown and yellow, dancing bullrushes and liminal sumps of brackish water. Birds, even after however many avian flu outbreaks (and that of course raises the ghosts of Mum and Dad, always does, fucking birds. I love birds as well). There are people out there on bicycles, and a tractor doing something in the distance. Trains cross the fetid water, and I can see bodies walking the intricate pathways raised over the sunken land. Someone with a kid, a kid dressed in bright orange, walking and holding their parents’ hands. I feel sick. I can see neighbour Agnes down where the canal cuts close to our old building. She is pulling rubbish from the water and piling it up, sorting it out. Her dreads are grey and her skin is wrinkled and she is working so fucking hard to clean this little patch of water, and I can look left and right and the canal is trashed in each direction as far as I can see. She is singing as she works, songs I don’t know. I feel so sick.

The door bursts open, and it is Parker and they brandish a paper bag and laugh at the worry on my face and come and kiss me. Hey hey hey, kid, what’s wrong? they ask, and I just shake my head and they put an arm around me. Hey now. They produce vegan sushi from the bag and break open a crate of warm beer from the bedside. Calm, Parker says. We will deal with Chef. I’ll tell him we can try and fix it. That right? And if he doesn’t like that, or you can’t, then… Parker grins and gestures at the mural painted on the bare brick of the volcano lair wall, the faint black stencil I sprayed three years ago. A reminder of a secret only Parker and I know. A great snake, writhing and climbing upward. Power to destroy a life.

Not funny, I say, and Parker nods and holds up their hands appeasingly and we eat sushi but their eyes keep returning to the snake. The easy answer. Parker hasn’t seen what the snake can do, so they can’t really be serious.

My onyx keeps buzzing with notifications about the clathrate gun, the UN, emergencies, shootings, corruption collapse disease famine displaced war gossip… The news cycle is brutality. I blink off my lens and switch it to silent and we go back to bed and watch seven episodes of the old comedy about the Australian flood defence force before the sun dips and it is cool enough to maybe even go outside. How Agnes does it I don’t know, working away in the blazing sun. I can’t hear her singing anymore.

The door to the volcano lair shakes as three sharp knocks bounce it on its shitty hinges and my eyes go across the room to the desk and the gun, because of course Parker didn’t lock the fucking door! But then from outside the familiar voice of Zoot calls out, Brethren do ya wanna make some monEEEEEEEEEEEy? And the twist in my gut calms, because I don’t, but it is action and I need to move.

4

Scrimshank

A short introduction to melting a dude

Scrimshank eats fast because Scrimshank is fucking wiiiiiiiired tonight, baby.

I’m wiiiiiiiired tonight, baby, he says, and the mic in his jaw sends it to space or a tower or some shit and in return he hears the joy of Cass’s laugh from the induction speaker in his cheekbone, her voice vibrating in his skull like some multiple personality shit.

As he waits for the arranged time, he eats noodles from a bouncy little place in Soho where the staff are all in short skirts and have a lot of tattoos. You want spice? the noodle girl asks. Her accent is fake bullshit, he is pretty sure, but she is cute and Scrimshank gives her his best grin and says hotter the better but she ain’t digging it, he can tell from her eyes, and he hears Cassandra purse her lips in the base of his skull (well, maybe not, but he pictures it. She has good lips – fucking better, he thinks, the cost of them).

You’re a bad boy, Scrim, she says straight to his brainpan, right into that reptile elemental shit, and Scrim feels tingles. Lovely Cass. Oh shit.

The tingles aren’t Cass (or, not just) – his onyx is buzzing. It’s hot, it’s sticky, it’s dark – it’s time to kick off. He dumps his noodles and winks at the waitress and heads toward Carnaby Street. Soho’s a fucking riot, Central is always full of city assholes and tourists and fucking teens but Scrim takes no shit, pushes his way through. Some pedestrian non-entity bumps into him and gives him a side-eye but Scrim just stares, and poses and flexes – gives the fucker a few seconds – YEAH MAN, see the muscles (cut as all hell), see the threads (black and red and real leather, bare arms and chest, shitkicker boots with a shine), see the shaved head and those eyes!

A note on Scrim’s eyes. He is proud of the eyes. (I’m proud of the eyes, baby, he is heard to say often.) Eye tattoos across the sclera with polarised something in them, micro-LED implants, he thinks, and his eyes shine and glow like the devil himself, if the devil himself followed a very western European late nineteenth-century vibe (which for Scrim he certainly does, baby).

All this to say, the fucking teen who tries to shoulder-check Scrimshank takes a step back and breaks eye contact, and Scrim spits and then he is moving, marching.

Who you got to hit tonight, baby? We going to party later?

Cass’s voice is a balm against the chaos, a sweet salve, water in the desert (strawberry sauce on the fucking dessert) and Scrim is sweating under the leather and he is ready for a bit more of special powder number 2.

Got me a Cousin Ellis special tonight, he says, and back in the car Cassandra is laughing at that.

Oh that weird shit? That guy’s a creep, Scrim. What’s the job?

Yeah baby, he says, that weird shit. Someone Ellis wants gone. Guy with a beard and bad luck.

Scrimshank cuts through a back alley, another, another, and then he is there – his onyx has been gently pushing directions to his wrist screen, even though he didn’t tell it to. Something Cousin Ellis arranged. He blinks at it and the screen changes to show the target’s picture again, and he checks quickfast for witnesses. Lots of witnesses, lots of cameras. Always the way, in London. But this is the Central Recreation Zone – Zone 1 – and all these cameras are owned by corpos, not cops – and corpos only give a shit if you impact revenue, and Cousin Ellis has the corpo hookup SUPREME.

Start the engine, babe, he says, and get some number 2 lined up. I’ll be with you uno momento.

You’re a bad boy, sweet Scrim, Cass purrs, and Scrim catches his reflection in a window and grins. Thin and tall and cut and cool as hell. Bad and dangerous. You’re a bad boy, Scrim, he says to himself.

The address is a barbershop and Scrim doesn’t hesitate, pushing his way in. It’s empty of customers – just two dudes and one has the neat beard and matches the pic. They are like, Arab, maybe? He doesn’t know. Brown dudes and one has a beard. Whatever. Both are wearing a lot of jewellery, and the walls are covered in screens showing sports, holos of various celebs and clients with different hair. Scrim sniffs and focuses in on beard guy.

Hey yo, I want a haircut, he says, and they both look up at his bald head covered in tattoos and the beard says, you having a fucking laugh, mate, and Scrim grins at that.

Yeah, he says, a laugh, and he breathes in deep and holds it as his hand raises the canister weird Cousin Ellis gave him. He sprays both dudes, a thick red mist engulfing the room. He can taste it himself, through his nose, and even though Ellis has his promises there is a moment of fear. It tastes of metal, of pennies, of paint. Fucking, please work, please Jesus work. Beard guy gets hit full in the face and takes a lungful, a skinful, a mucous-membraneful to use the parlance of old Cousin Ellis, but his buddy manages to duck the worst of the spray – ducks and fucking runs out the back screaming, which has Scrim shaking his head as he blows out a breath. Wouldn’t even help his dude. Weak sauce.

Beard starts screaming and Scrimshank pockets the canister and goes to one of the barber sinks and washes his hands, and behind him Beard hits the floor. Not that Ellis’s shit should hurt Scrim, not that washing his hands will help if it does – but Beard stops screaming and collapses, is gurgling and writhing on the floor, and Scrim can’t help but worry. The targeting is the whole thing, Ellis said. Custom nastiness that’ll screw up one guy and one guy only.

You good, sweet baby? Cass asks, and Scrim stares in the mirror at his reflection and he can’t answer. In the reflection, his gaze is locked on the beard guy. Dude is curled on the floor and making wet sounds and twitching and there is just so much blood. Like, no wound, and Scrim has to step back quick from the sink so his shiny shitkickers don’t get soppy. Guy is bleeding from his eyes and his mouth and his nose, his nailbeds, his… skin? Red sweat, flowing off him in sheets, legs and arms shaking.

What the fuck, Ellis.

Scrim takes his onyx out and snaps a quick vid for Ellis. You’re a nasty boy, Ellis, he says, and then he snaps the onyx closed and throws his hood up fast, and he quicksteps out the back and puts it all behind him. Figuratively! Literally! Metaphorically? He isn’t sure which of those is right so he does all of them to make sure. What’s another corpse? London is heat and steam and neon and darkness, a thousand signs, millions of people crowding into Zone 1 where the lights never go out and the starving masses are held at bay. There are a couple of people staring because he burst out of the shop, but Beard didn’t get to scream much beyond that initial warble – just wet gurgles. Scrim bails fast and whatever magic Ellis has done to the onyx takes him one two three streets and there is the car and Cass and she is driving before he even shuts the door. The ride is one they’ve had, like, two days now – fast and black and nice speakers, all that shit. The music is already going, drums and heavy bass and fast rhythm. She starts east fast, heading for the edge of the zone.

Ellis will take care of the cameras, and the onyx traces, and on and on. He is magical like that with his new hookup. Scrim doesn’t have no ID to ping the networks like some fucking civilian. Cops are so slow, they don’t stand a chance (unless this dude has links, but if he did, weird Cousin Ellis would have given Scrim a sneakier game plan).

Was it bad, sweet baby? Cass asks, and there is a moment of horrifying vertiginous hell as her voice is outside and inside, everywhere, her voice is the world and Scrim closes his eyes and can see nothing but the beard dude pissing blood on the barber floor. With a clench of the jaw he shuts off the induction speaker below his wisdom tooth. Cass’s hand on his arm squeezes, and then the car stops and she is kissing him and he doesn’t want it, fuck so much blood, but her lips tingle on his and he tastes the acrid metal of special number 2, feels the granules on her tongue, and he opens his eyes and grabs her and for a long moment he pulls her in and lets the physicality of the drug, of her, wash away the gore and the memory. Amphetamines laced with old-school synaesthesia bangers. He drowns memory with sensation, and with special number two he can hear how Cass tastes, can smell how she feels. His senses are a jumble, all of his wiring alive. Then there are horns blaring behind them and Cass laughs and falls back into the driver seat, sets off.

We need to party tonight, she says, smashing the horn, cutting corners and lights. You want to hit the Wet Market? There’s a full set tonight, French autobass. Scrim just nods and looks out of the window. One hand rests on his vest pocket where the canister from Ellis sits, spent. His onyx vibrates and in his skull he hears a mellifluous sexy voice – Payment received. He licks his lips and thinks why’d the bank get someone so sexy, and then smiles at the knowledge that no bled-out barber is going to fuck his energy. Not Scrim.

Don’t ever fuck with weird Cousin Ellis, Scrim says, and Cass is turning up the music and it has a beat to it and she isn’t listening, French autobass filling her up, and he can taste the drums. He says it again to himself, Don’t ever fuck with weird Cousin Ellis, and then just shakes his head and reaches for the vial of number 2 in the cup holder. Beyond the windows, London blurs.

5

Charlie

The Wet Market

You want bio-augments, weird shit – the kind of shit the corpo-pharma-bros save for their own behind closed doors, or that cost way too much – you go to the Wet Market underneath the old fish stalls at Billingsgate. It sprang up four or five years back – what was once a series of cellars below the industrial fish market had the walls knocked through. Started as a party scene, then a drug scene, but eventually the biologists trickled into the corners and bloomed like mould. The stench of fish above is thick in the air, enough to mask the stringent tang of chemical reagents, and the power and ice above enough to mask the draw of electricity below so the city AI doesn’t raise any flags. There are even plenty of boxes and trucks for shipping. The fish people don’t give a shit, they get their kickbacks (and the rate of trendy augments among fish people is certainly now higher than the norm – plenty of embedded tech and aesthetic mods).

Wet Market used to be what you call a place where you can buy your meat wriggling – fish or bats or eels, whatever. Take your pick. Surely a lot of those still kicking around if you travel far enough, but in Billingsgate most of the flesh is dead, save the poor fucking lobsters. In London, the Wet Market is where you indulge or procure the more elaborate side of biological research and a bunch of other shady shit. Drugs, weapons, data, biohacks, as well as the usual tech implants and cyber shit for the gearheads. All the stuff the corpos and their pet members of parliament don’t want you to fuck with. Plenty of other places in town you can get your gearhead shit, but if you want bio the Wet Market is the place to be.

We jump the DLR and it is blessedly quiet, cutting above east London beneath towering apartment blocks, some bright with life and others dark, one a charred stump. The transport AI cameras and sensors match your gait, your face, your ID card, and send you the bill for the ticket. We’ve all got spoofed IDs and, before we leave, do the usual fuck arounds – inserts into the soles of the shoes to change your walk so the gait profile matches the one with the matched ID, wear a disposable medical mask and a hat – and the system relies on the gait and the ID chip instead of facial recognition. If the mayor wants to know where we are going, she can come ask. In general, as long as there is credit on the account the AI tries to match to the profile, it stops looking – the boon of free market capitalism being that as long as someone is profiting, they stop scrutinising.

We walk the twenty minutes from Poplar station across roads glutinous with traffic, head and tail-lights and horns competing for sensory space. We descend from the humid fug that hangs over the road, the heat of friction and a thousand thousand ‘clean’ vehicles coughing their little contributions to the fume cloud, and make our way in through the open walls – the market is bordered by roads on one side and truly towering corporate apartment blocks on the other, all of it right on the edge of Canary Wharf where there is still work being done and money being made, somehow. The flood barriers downstream mean the defences around Canary Wharf are relatively calm, but I can still make out the shadow of parked earth movers and stockpiles of sandbags – the more expensive gear will be inside somewhere. Most of the blocks are buzzing with light but even here there are a handful vacant, not quite allowed to go full collapse. In the vacant blocks, if you squint, you sometimes catch the flicker of firelight or a torch as squatters try to stay circumspect. There used to be walls surrounding the whole market, systems and gates and regulation – but they’ve long been repurposed, and the rickshaws and bike-lorries are already queuing to fill their orders, waiting for the boats to come in.

With the big CC causing the acidification of the oceans, and the complete lack of enforced regulation on global shipping, fish are basically fucked so the dead wee guys on the ice are different stocks than when I was a kid. So it goes. I wear a pair of trainers I don’t like very much whenever we visit the Wet Market, and with the inserts in to fuck the gait recognition on the Tube, my feet are killing. My pistol is tucked tight in the pocket of my denim vest, my phone in the other, and I’ve tied a twisted bandana around my head to slick up the sweat of another hot night. I left the bear mace at home and took the pistol instead and that feels like a declaration of war on Chef. The hammer is tucked in my belt as well. Chef will come for me, and I will kill him if he does. I won’t die to a fucking burrito cook from the home counties.

Parker and Zoot are with me. Zoot’s the face, I’m the brains, and Parker is the muscle. Not, like, with muscles – they don’t have those, much. Not with a gun or a knife. Parker is the muscle in that they will kick the shit out of anyone, philosophically and physically and psychologically, and won’t let us compromise. I get too nervous, I’m too likely to agree to something without thinking it through – Parker doesn’t get nervous, they just get angry. Parker doesn’t hesitate – they act, regardless of fear or doubt.

As we walk through the market Zoot is smiling at everyone we pass, his big shaved head bobbing along. He has awful teeth and is self-conscious about it so his smile is all cheeks and eyes. He is wearing his usual get-up of tight trousers and a long vest thing over his bare chest, with dozens of necklaces beneath, all thin cords of leather and each adorned with a single little charm. More leather at his wrists, thick wraps of it, and then that great big shaved head. If it weren’t for the shitkicker boots you might think he was some sort of fucking Hare Krishna dude or something, especially with those fucking eyebrows. A waxed chest and a shaven head, but eyebrows and arm hair enough to balance his hair allowance. Dude’s family were from east of Jakarta, somewhere now underwater enough that they off fucked to Europe and then England and then had Zoot. Parker has known him since they were kids here, when I was still in Scotland. His boots have steel toecaps, he loves to dance, and he has said yes to every plan I’ve ever suggested – I love Zoot.

We walk, and I keep my gaze down and look at the fish and don’t think about Scotland, the rural idyll, the dead sister, the dead parents (and the avian flu, which they probably got from the fucking iridescent green ducks they kept, Bantam Black East Indian ducks that they didn’t even eat the eggs of. They just liked the look! Fucking ducks!). Apocalypse hit the rural communities different of course, not like here. The ’38 big hit left a lot of towns basically empty, and people consolidated into others. Lot of empty villages back home, and then the government moved to the node model where only certain towns/areas would warrant protection (see: roving gangs of migrants (if you believe that), swine flu, SARs, etc etc). You move to your node community, borough, council, whatever, and you get protection and vaccine checks and all that. You live outside it, and all they can say is good luck, and not really that.

The rural idyll is a ruin now, the next village a ruin. A commune has taken over the hamlet ten miles south, a cult has taken over the fishing village where we used to get chips. Loonies and nutters, my mum called them, but now every little sect can just do their own thing. No oversight.

Fucking ducks, I mutter, and instead of ducks I focus on fish. Their eyes always freak me out – bulging and round over gaping mouths, pupils distended by alien physiology. Fish are fucking weird, no two ways about it. Pupils like rugby balls or pears, depending how they evolved, what niche they were filling – how best to take in the light deep in the water or shallow, to look for threats above or food below (or switchy switchy – there is always some weird bastard doing the inverse, it’s the first rule of biology). Nothing like other branches of the tree of life to make you feel terrified of the universe.

Ice and oil and stink. Fucking who still eats fucking fish? Parker asks and I say, you and me, babe, like, two weeks ago, love, we had some cod off that guy in Plaistow. Zoot laughs. Who eats fish? Who still fishes? After the big d-reg, trawling was allowed, those chains and nets dragged on the seafloor. Whatever. I can’t get angry at fish people. Fishing people? Fish were fucked anyway, oceans turning acid, etc etc. The usual. Good Greens used to drop boulders on the seafloor to fuck up the nets. My dad said he was on one of those runs once. But it is never enough. None of these people are profiting off the end of the world, they’re just trying to survive. People have been fishing since there were people, not their fault they caught the shitty end of the salmon run (the salmon runs? I open my mouth to try and articulate that as a joke but the lead in is too much and I don’t believe any of it anyway). Parker takes a cigarette from me and Zoot taps knuckles with a lady hauling ten white boxes of silver little guys, dead and packed tight. There is a stall of cuttlefish with pupils like the letter W, and I stare long into them as I smoke a cigarette down and wait for Zoot to chat his shit with the dude at a stall he knows from somewhere.

It’ll be a total crash, man, he says, it’ll be a proper rager. You let me know and I’ll get you in alright?

Then we are moving again, and a door to what looks like just another fridge opens and instead there are stairs and we go down, down down down into darkness. My toolkit is slung in the beat-up canvas satchel on my back, and Parker has left their Casio at home and is doing the full art-hardcore tight black T-shirt tight black jeans tight black boots thing. They have a slick of black greasepaint across their eyes and they’ve put some shit in their hair so it slicks back, and they are walking like someone out to fuck or fight or both. I love seeing Parker in full predator mode.

The Wet Market isn’t just friendly biohackers looking to push the limits of the human experience. Always there are the hackers the corporations didn’t incentivise enough, the engineers and chemists trying to make their cash. There is a mix of the avant-garde geniuses and those who couldn’t cut it elsewhere, so the quality of service can vary. Is your chemist cheerfully competent, seeking work outside the strictures of governmental oversight due to their personal libertarian approach to recreational substances? Or is your chemist one who failed out, now batch cooking your happy-go-lucky fun pills in a bathtub under a fish market, high as balls, following a protocol more complex than the ones they couldn’t hack at uni or college or whatever? Pills stuffed in mackerel, powders bagged and tagged and triple wrapped, but fuck me can you ever really get the stink of fish oil out? You can smell it on people, at the gigs, at the bars. Better than the shit trafficked in some poor kid’s stomach from South America or West Africa. But it smells a lot worse.

I try and only buy coke from a guy Parker knows who has his own plants in a polytunnel down in Cornwall, but it is pissing into the wind and it depends how depressed I am. I have an amphetamine hookup from a guy at one of the larger pharma corpos, CADENSOR, who squares me for more pedestrian pills without having to go through the usual pharma hoops and registrations. That’s no better, really. The point is that the back tunnels of the Wet Market are full of criminals, and not the type that wear suits and fuck you with contracts. The type that have ceramic-weave in their boilersuits to turn a knife, and that fuck you up with lead pipes and British Army surplus weaponry if you try any funny shit.

Wait, the doorman says, and so we wait. He has augments and alterations, of course he does. I don’t think that gorilla-looking motherfucker is putting in a square six hours down the gym every day to get those hams. I don’t think he’s eating right, sleeping well, hydrating. From the pained way he is holding his arm, and the absolute fucking SIZE of the boy, I think someone has sold him a shitty myostatin blocker. In theory, you block myostatin and you have unregulated muscle growth (and there are some very hench cattle with myostatin mutations wandering the pastures of many a meat farm). The reality is this kind of works, and combined with the usual anabolic steroids you will end up with a beast of a man like the doorman. But it won’t strengthen your bones, or your tendons and connective tissues, and normally you’ll change super rapidly. So you end up with a roided-out rager with arms like thighs and thighs like, well, normal thighs because all these fuckers skip leg day and you still have to do a wee bit of the work. And every joint will ache like a bitch. The guy is wearing heavy shades full of tech and is clearly scanning us over.

Parker walks right up to him with a shit-eating grin but Zoot intercepts before Parker can end up spannering us with some dumb joke.

Donnely, how are you, are you well? You’re looking strong, my man! Zoot says, and the guy rumbles something back and they are talking and Parker turns back to me and we hold hands for just a second. The job is not clear from Zoot’s description. Just, beaucoup bucks and serious people. Greens, he said. Asked for us all by name, and Nathan vouched for them.

Greens should be workable, but they are always insufferable idealists and they never pay that well. We’ve worked for Blues before, people just out to make cash (be they corpo or criminal or, even, legit, but it always leaves a bitter taste). At least when the Greens are paying you there’s the comforting little lie you can tell yourself that the work is maybe doing some good. Blacks hire nobody, of course. What would be the point?

I’m sweating and its icy and it stinks of fish and I hate the Wet Market, but fuck, with a gun in my belt and the toolkit on my back at least we are doing something. Not just waiting to die – rolling again. Last proper job we did was two months back, Nathan lined it up – it was a hit on a corpo drone. The whole thing didn’t use any of my expertise, but each job Nathan has sent us has been different, so far no major disasters, and no sniff of the cops.

I grip Parker’s hand tight. It is a bad idea, of course, to take this kind of work. Nobody avoids the cops forever. Worse, nobody avoids the corpos forever, and that’s not a work farm or a factory, that’s two rounds in the back of your head and your hard drives taken back for some stiffneck to sniff over as they sip their tea, no questions asked.

The doorman moves to one side and then we are in, into the sweet chaos. We go through two sets of doors and the music is getting louder with each step. Of course, there is an extravagant and extensive party element to the Wet Market, and of course, it is night-time so it is heaving. The whole place is a warren. There is no grand central room or vaulted heights. Just tunnels and storerooms, some small and some large, corridors half-blocked by old crates, and in and around them all action.

See there some guy with a chemistry set doing some chemistry thing (who cares, chemistry is boring). See there someone getting tattooed on a makeshift bench, the tattoo needle being ever so carefully dipped into ink with a metallic sheen. Sparkers – if they do it right, and wear a charge pack on them, those tattoos can shock the shit out of you, or interfere with electrical fields. If they fuck it up there is a lot of leakage, and they end up electrocuting the surrounding flesh and having a deeply worried trip to the hospital for some emergency remediation.

See there the usual boring body-modders sticking silicone and chips and LEDs under their skin. Boring. Ooooh, this button in my hand vibrates when I point north, or beeps me onto the Tube. Boring. I roll my eyes as we pass someone with a garish slew of silicone subdermals altering the shape of their face and skull, and Parker laughs, and Zoot guides us on. There are a couple of proper gearheads, with the flashy eye implants. Implanted wrist screens aren’t quite ubiquitous, but more common than you’d see in the street. All a bit try-hard – I can get a screen wrapped round my wrist, without cutting myself up, for a hundredth of the price and a thousandth of the risk, and not have to stress about rejection and obsolescence and my actual body getting hacked by some bored teen who speaks fluent code. Easy enough to see everyone ten years older than us with their now defunct modifications, either left obsolete or replaced with the inevitable scarring and issues.

My own screen bracelet is in my satchel, largely unused. With the onyx and the lens, I can do pretty much all I need, and I have a set of glasses and a tablet if shit gets more technical. We move on and push through a gang of sex workers, all of them muttering as they examine the new contour mask one of them is sporting – skin-thin silicone embedded with miniature actuators that can protrude and retract, changing the shape of their face, adding curve and shape. They are furiously tapping into a wrist pad, the mask writhing as it tries to match the input.

Is it her, is it her? they ask, and the gaggle shake their head and mutter commiserations. The wrist screen has pictures of Samira, the mononymed star of VR who is the hot property this year. They keep tapping at the screen, a tech guy smoking a cigarette, leaning over and mumbling his help.

Take more than some face contours to make that wee egg look like Samira, Parker says (not quite quietly enough for my taste), and I push them on fast and hope the drums and bass covered for us, but I can’t help but grin – wee egg is a Charlie insult, and Parker using it is beautiful to hear. There is a heavy smoke in the air, cigarettes and hash and other. We push through dancers and drinkers and smokers, past the poles and circus rings and writhing bodies, past the pleasure tunnel full of flesh, past the storeroom full of VR deep divers writhing in their haptic isolation hammocks, hands pressing at membranes like they are trying to free themselves from semi-opaque caterpillar pods. My mouth twitches at that, and Parker reaches back for my hand and pulls me on. I had a bad few months a couple years back, got Black and chock full of nihilism and depression and went heavy in the simulations. You can sim your life away, and I almost did. I itch at the scar on the back of my neck where I had a collar interface installed (and then removed). No VR for Charlie, no fucking thanks. I grip Parker’s hand.

On and on, deeper and deeper, and Zoot has snagged us beers from somewhere and then we are with the weird biologists, and I recognise most. The room smells like ethanol and charring tiger meat; lab-grown tiger meat is the trend of the month, and Hot Mike has a little grill going with a bunch of kebabs burning. It only smells like tiger meat because I know it is all tiger meat this month. To be honest, it all just smells like meat.

The half-dozen biohackers have their own little suite of rooms clustered off a central larger space. Hot Mike is the one who brings in the tiger meat, the one who is constantly messing with some old corpo framework for synthetic meat with the genes of whatever extinct shit he can get hold of. That fucking moron Renault is there as well, and everyone is gathered at his little lab set up at the end of the long-arched tunnel room. We drift over.

On a surgical bed a naked woman lies, posing herself in the artful way pretty naked people pose themselves when they have an audience. Parker sniffs and I let out an involuntary gasp.

Renault, you fucking idiot, I hear someone say, and can’t help but laugh. The woman on the bed has a shaved head and skull tattoos, piercings, all that normal shit, but all any of us can look at are the shimmering lines that trace down her body. They start on her cheekbones and then trace the graceful line of her neck, down across her breasts and stomach and pubis before flaring out and around her thighs. Her skin shimmers and the lines flicker under the buzzing light, first a silver sheen, then a pulsing vibrant red. It takes me a moment to realise my shock – I’ve seen plenty more garish displays. But this isn’t glitz fabric, or a silicone body mask, or some filigree of translucent exotic material, or a tattoo with embedded silicone beads with frequency controlled fluorophores. This is biology – this is real.

Can’t get this anywhere else, Renault is saying to the crowd, double dragon exhaling his cigarette smoke from his nostrils to accentuate his point. This is genuine engineered squid chromatophores, totally tailored to her genome.

Zoot coughs, and I pull Parker away, shaking my head. They keep glancing back. I can hear the crowd starting to dig into Renault’s work already.

You fucking moron, Renault – I hear but we have a meeting, and we have to move. I hold Parker’s hand as we go.

See something you like? I ask, as we duck into the next tunnel toward Nathan’s holdout. Parker leers at me comically. Oh yes, they say, squid have always been so sexy. But that’s the beaks and the tentacles. What the fuck was that?

That, I say, gesturing for them to lead the way into Nathan’s, was a complicated cell graft of a complicated bit of bioengineering, that I absolutely would not trust to that fuckwit Renault who, if you recall from that party last month, is dumber than a bag of rocks and half as charming.

Parker just shrugs. Looks cool, though, they say, and they are looking thoughtful. I begin preparing my argument as to why I won’t give them sexy squid stripes (namely 1. it is probably really really hard work to do even remotely safely, and 2. I think they are sexier without squid stripes), but then Zoot has a hand on each of our shoulders, stopping us at Nathan’s door.

Nathan said this is heavy shit, Zoot says, and he smiles tightly at us both and slowly takes the beers from our hands. As in, big risk big money serious people. This could be a major score for all of us They asked for us by reputation after the drone heist. So… behave, yeah?

Both of us turn to Parker, and they just smile and open the door.

Whose dick do I have to chop off to get a drink in here? they say, and I feel the blood rush to my face, and then I see who is standing behind Nathan in the dim room and my heart sounds like an INJURY DETAIL track. All drums and no sense. Three figures, one of them blowing out a cloud of vapour and clutching a thin ecig that shrouds them all in a sickly sweet fog. I recognise one of them, the woman in the middle, but I don’t know where from – at least, I can’t bring it to the front of my mind. My body recognises them, though, and is going into full adrenaline dump panic mode. I force myself to breathe evenly.

Nathan smiles at us, eyes hidden beneath his ever-present sunglasses. He screwed his eyes with a shonky augment fifteen years back, but with the tech in the shades he knows what is what. Facial recognition, pattern recognition, full spectrum input – guy can see more than most, probably.

Charlie, he says, even though Parker is in front. He ignores their quip. Charlie, Parker, Zoot. Come in. Shut the door.

The three figures scan us, and their leader cocks her head. The woman I had the gut reaction to – maybe in her fifties, head half-shaved, half-dreads, one ear with an old-school jack-in plug above it from twenty years back when VR was the big thing and heavy wires the way to do it (before my time, when collars allowed a little more stealth to the whole thing). Her skin is a sickly pale, jaundiced under the sodium glare of the ancient bulbs buzzing above us. The other two are muscle – one literally, a hulk of a dude wearing military boots and a glitz shirt set to matte black, all light falling off it. The other is a sharp little figure, lean, wearing a light duster over a leather vest and trousers and gloves. They have a pistol at their hip, a short mohawk almost mirror image to my own but deep lustrous green. They are wearing huge oversized shades that cover their cheekbones, and they see me appraising and they smile and my heart flutters, my eyes drop. Then Parker is stepping forward and we all position ourselves awkwardly. This is Nathan’s little den, where he can run the bio side of the Wet Market, in as much as it needs running. He is the guy who sources the chems, the reagents, the gear. With the door closed, the looping bass and intricate drums from the bar are muffled. I sit with Parker but Zoot stands behind us, as if he was our muscle. Opposite him, the big man is doing the same and the lack of symmetry between them is ridiculous.

Charlie, Parker, and Zoot, the woman says, and I am nervous, already so nervous. The old woman shouldn’t know our names, not at this stage. Everything should be anonymous. How do I know her? Parker leans their chair back and thunk thunks muddy boots onto the clean table. The old lady doesn’t even twitch, doesn’t blink, but green mohawk curls their lip. Parker turns to Nathan, and he holds a hand for calm and goes to the door, checking it again and then placing a little box on the table – a signal jammer.

I swept the room before you arrived, buds, he says, and the big-muscled guy nods his agreement. My foot starts to tap. Swept the room? This is a bit of theatre, surely. If it isn’t, we are in with shit beyond the normal league. Nathan is nervous – his hand keeps flexing, the one with all those stupid body mod nodules to let him sense whatever it is they let him sense. He never will tell me. It always twitches when he’s nervous, and he doesn’t get nervous much.

You have the advantage, Parker says. You know us, apparently. Who are you?

The old woman smiles, and leans forward. She is wearing a light jacket cut in a vaguely military style, the sleeves rolled up to show intricate tattoos all up her arms, geometric spirals and fractal patterns. I can’t make out the detail in the dim light. We all wait, and wait, and nobody speaks, and I can sense Parker’s agitation. This feels wrong. I can feel the pressure building, and then the woman speaks. Her accent is clipped, unfathomable. From nowhere.

Charlie, Parker, and Zoot. The snake-charmer, the punk, and the friendly face. The biologist, the criminal, and the confidence man. We know you. We do our research.

Parker slams their feet from the table to the ground and leans forward, mouth opening, but I place a hand on their back. Snake-charmer, those are not chance words. These people know us more than a little. Not even Nathan knows about that.

And who are you? I say, and I make myself sit straighter. Just that mote of connection, my hand on Parker’s back, and I feel stronger, and I feel anger. Snake-charmer. Fuck this old woman for that.

I’m the boss, she says (Parker snorts), and then she gestures to muscles and the green mohawk – and this is Hull and Mole.

The woman leans forward and draws from her jacket a piece of card, browning yellow paper of the most recycled kind. Emblazoned on it, the green crossed hammer and sword. She sets it down gently on the table. The hammer and sword = gnarliest of the gnarly hard Greens. Murderers (yes), terrorists (well, whose definition?), hardcore (absofuckinglutely). Save-the-world eco-warriors, true Greens.

We’re the Heavy Crew, the boss says. And we have a job just for you. Three jobs, actually. Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world. What do you say?

The green mohawk leans forward and takes off their oversized shades and I see their eyes for the first time – dark eyes, black holes sinking into dark honey flecked with motes of something lighter, their face squinting, and… scars? Indents across the bridge of their nose, beneath their eyes, dark against the warm umber of their skin

Fuck, I say, and Parker and Zoot glance at me. I don’t say more though. Those aren’t scars. I’m the snake-charmer, after all. I know what those are – infrared sensing pits, like a viper.

We don’t do murder, Parker says, but as they speak I lean forward past them and stare at Mole.

Who did this? I ask and I gesture at their face, and Mole shakes their head and clicks their teeth.

Those? Those are barely the start of it.

They stand and take off their duster and on their bare arms I can see scars, and now I’m looking properly and can see they are off. Breathing is wrong, too slow, mouth a little open at all times as if they are too hot. Muscles like corded rope, and then they are taking off gloves and, fuck me, running each finger ends in something like a glistening chisel, with thumbs like hammer heads. She is not Mole – she is a mole. The moles are a rumour, a horror story, an urban legend – how far will people go? Pictures and videos online but never real enough to be evidence, something that could always have just been a prank, an exaggerated hypothetical. Incredible. I never thought they were real, never thought it was more than a sick joke. I run my thumb across my cheekbone and stop myself as soon as I notice what I am doing, and blush. What must it be like to feel so much more?

John Birchley, Mole says, their voice steady. The man who did this was John Birchley. Founder of AETOS DIOS, giving organs and blood to the rich. The Ghost. He has broken me, Mole says. You will help me kill him.

The boss woman puts a hand on Mole’s arm and draws them back down to their seat.

There is more than that, the old woman says, but more only for those who are in. Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world. What say you? We heard you are Green, Parker. You’re looking for payment, Zoot, but we know where you come from. Charlie Raith. Snake-charmer. Your parents, your sister… Dr Walker. So many dead behind you. Are you in?

Zoot is almost vibrating, nodding already, and I am still and silent, staring at the Mole, the ruin of their hands. I turn my gaze back to the old woman with her ancient VR port, a thin scar down one cheek, eyes like burning coals. Synapses fire. Oh fuck. I know where I’ve seen this woman before. I’ve seen this woman on the news, with a buzzcut, over decades. I’ve seen this woman on wanted posters, literal physical wanted posters. This is Eleanor Ilk. This is the queen of the Heavy Crew, the grand dame of eco-terrorism.

Next to me Parker drums a rhythm on the table with open palms and grins, showing every last tooth.

Well, hey, they say, hey. Hey. Intimidating. Lovely. They say, Now I’m Green as a little lovely blade of grass, oh yes, but that all sounds expensive.

6

Mole

The word for world is mine

Awa knew the world, and the world was the mine. In theory there was beyond, but the reality of every moment waking sleeping dreaming was the same. The mine. She would eat whatever little they had to eat, and then she would work. She would keep her head down. The sun was enough to kill and so they would spend long hours just trying not to die in the shade of the rocks or the old, corrugated iron shacks. In the dawn and the dusk they worked.

Awa started earning her keep properly at the age of four years (or thereabouts – there were no calendars, only seasons; there were no birthday parties, in the world). Before that she would run water in buckets or sun-faded plastic bottles from the pump to the workers out among the scree, little feet already toughened. They would pry at seams in the ground with metal bars, picks, hammers, hands. She slept and ate in the old truck canvas tent of her father. (Was he her father? He was Ibrahim. Did he love her? He was so tired. She did not know.). Later, when she pictured him, it was only eyes that remained, a deep liquid darkness. When she learned enough to know that his choices were so few, still it burned in her that he had chosen to have a child (not a choice, men would say, but Awa knew there was always choice). But then perhaps not – she knew no truth of Ibrahim, his life or past. Was he just a man in hell who found a child there and did his best? There were moments of care in those early years, but Awa did not dwell on them. There was only the world, and the world was the mine. Singing, in the darkness, but not enough of it.

This was before they broke her; when she was Awa and not Mole. It was the type of mine that was analysed by policy-makers and charities and industry experts and described as ‘artisanal’, like a rustic loaf of bread. She would trudge with the other children and pick loose stones from the surface, or squeeze into perilous fissures and tunnels in loose rock. Most weeks someone was crushed. The names did not linger in her, but the faces did. Every day, someone was injured. The coughing was constant, but Awa was strong. Ibrahim kept the worst of the men from her, and made sure she ate (that is love, is it not?). Other children were not so lucky and to eat had to choose which devil they would deal with (choose is not the right word – Awa is obsessed by this in later years, and even early on, that there are levels of choosing, but there is no word that describes the violation of making a choice that you should not have to make, no word that satisfies her, no matter how many books she reads or languages drip from her tongue, later).

The world. Miles of loose rock where the gold was close to the surface. The scrawny men with the guns and the headscarves and the sunglasses, they would come and bury explosives and there would be a great day of destruction and noise and chaos and then they would go. Trucks would come, to no schedule, and load up with whatever ore the miners had managed to pick and break and scrape and wash. There was one pump running on diesel, and the water it brought was to clean the ore. The runoff was for the workers. The pipes were old and they washed the ore in the same place the water came up, and so the runoff seeped back down. Everything tasted of dirt.

Awa had scars, and she watched her friends die. (Note – friends. Was there time for games? Not if you want to shift enough ore to earn your bread from the fat man and his locked truck of stores. Not if you want to earn enough ore to trade your piece for a turn at the pump, to drink and wash all at once. Piss if you can, right through your clothes, because you don’t want to go to the latrine, not without Ibrahim to look after you. You might end up living in a devil’s tent.) The world was the mine, and Awa did not hate it because how can you hate the world? Hate requires energy, and she had none to spare. Hate requires understanding, and she had none. Sometimes she makes it to the edge, where the dunes and the rock meet, where you walk far enough from the camp and you can see lizards running in the heat, little bugs. There are no plants, no green. The only colour is dirt and the occasional scrap of plastic, sun-faded.

This was where what was Chad and Free Niger and Libya did not quite meet or agree, a place where money changing hands could keep a mine running for years until the trenches of shit run in seams deeper than the gold. Elsewhere it is rare earth minerals, lithium, copper, whatever fetches a good price – but for Awa it was gold. Awa does not speak much when she is in the world – she understands the value of silence, of existing at the margins. The bright loud boys always end up dead or taken, taken by the men with the scarves and the sunglasses and the pickup trucks and the guns. There are no bright loud girls, and this she understands too soon, so soon. Awa stays inside when the men with the sunglasses come – Ibrahim says it is best they not see her, better to not eat for a day than be seen. He cuts her hair short on the same day he cuts his own, with the same doleful efficiency.

One day the men come and there is another with them, a man with skin like a ghost, white and grey, and hair to his shoulders that is liquid gold. He is dressed in white and he does not speak, but watches the world and points, and the men with the guns gather all the children. And where is Ibrahim? He is across the world, digging through rocks, desperate for something, some shine that can be bread for him, for her. And where is her mother? Surely dead, to leave her to this fate. Later she realises that this is an assumption, and that her mother may yet live. But what would she say if she found her, that future Awa, utterly broken? By the time she has freedom to think of that, she is broken and Awa no more. She is Mole.

But before that, in the stink of the world as the Ghost watches, Awa stands behind the others and she bends her legs so she isn’t so tall and she keeps her eyes on the ground. It doesn’t matter.

All of the children are loaded into the truck that normally carries the ore, and there is screaming, but not from Awa. One boy tries to run and a man beats him until he is dead, his limbs broken sticks (she will think in the future when sticks are in her vocabulary – then, she thinks, his limbs are broken limbs, because simile and metaphor are too weak to survive the sun). Awa scans the crowd of miners for Ibrahim but no. There is no drama to this, and in the end, it is a day when she does not pick through the little stones and a part of her feels a thrill of excitement. Perhaps they are going somewhere better. Surely, anywhere is better. When the miners talk about before/beyond/other it is always in reverent tones but Awa has no reference point but the world itself, and the world is the mine. Someone throws a bottle of water into the back of the truck and the children scramble but one boy bloodies another’s nose, and then they share. He is Moftah, and he is a strong boy who works hard and so the others listen, because they fear his arm. (Note – there is a lesson here that Awa learns young regarding the capacity for strength to induce order, the capacity for hardship to breed strength. It takes many years for this lesson to bear its fruit, but the lesson is learned, a seed lodged deep.)

The truck drives, and there is dust and sand and there is such a punishing sun, but the back of the truck has a canopy and as they crawl over the memories of roads through the desert the breeze cuts in and Awa feels almost cool, in the day, for the first time in so long. She sees beyond the world. She sees dunes and dunes for hours and then there, look LOOK, and the children are whispering at the awe of it. Tree, one says. Tree. The word passes among them. It is a stunted thing, a twisted dust brown cling of a thing reaching up between rocks, but there is green.

Eventually among the scent of piss and dirt and diesel fumes she sleeps, and when she awakens it is to the sound of a blaring truck horn. Awa licks stone-dry lips and looks out from the truck in the lulling shade of pre-dawn desert and she sees the fence, and it is tall and topped with coils of dark metal. She sees the trucks, so many dozens of trucks, and men in matching clothes of dark green. Things bigger than trucks. (These are diggers and earth movers and all sorts, she knows in the end, but on that first day everything that moves is a truck, the little trucks like the men with the guns drive, the big truck that takes the ore, but now she sees that what she called the big truck is not a big truck after all. It is a toy – not that she ever had a toy. It is a child. Something weak.) The wheels of the trucks in this new place are as high as any building she has ever seen. Next to her the boy Moftah is swearing softly over and over, the patois swearing of a child raised by miners. Don’t know what this means, he says between swears, and another boy says maybe it’s a church and Awa doesn’t call him an idiot, because there is no point. But he is an idiot.

Awa has already seen past the trucks of all sizes and the fence and the men, and she has seen piles of ore that reach the sky, broken rock pyramids looming, their peaks catching the first motes of light as the sun god rises yet again. Later they will break her, and she will become the Mole – but even in those first moments Awa understands that she is still in the world.

7

Charlie

Nuke the reefs

The Heavy Crew. The hardest of the hard Greens – the team who allegedly assassinated Germany’s environment minister when it came out the government were taking backhanders from fossil fuel companies (they shot him in the gut and filled his mouth with crude oil). The team who took the climate movement’s mantra of non-violence, looked at the world around them, and said hey, fuck that. The Heavy Crew who sank four whalers with drones off the coast of Norway, the Heavy Crew who fucked the Magnus pipeline with a decade of pipe bombs. The Heavy Crew who burned every luxury car in Berlin in a single night. Supply lines and infrastructure, explosives and murders. Always, high-profile trials. Interpol and the FBI claiming to have broken their network, but wait then who the fuck just derailed a train full of coal in the Australian outback? They’re the ones who stole a floating oil and gas drill boat thing and sent it pirate, for fuck’s sake, until the US sent in special ops. Eleanor Ilk’s face grainy, sketched on wanted posters with buzzed head and eyes like burning coals. I’ve seen T-shirts with that mugshot on them. Not in Zone 1, of course, but out in the boondocks and the ruin at parties, at protests.

The deal is made. We are in. We don’t even discuss it. Nathan just says three jobs, each double the rate from the drone, and then as he and Zoot speak I lock eyes with Eleanor, avoid Mole. The muscled slab of their man Hull stares down at me throughout. Why all eyes on me?

Why Hull? I ask, for something to say (and to prevent Parker from picking a fight), and the big man shrugs and doesn’t smile.

I come from Hull, he says, and I blow out a breath. Bloody hell. A mole from a nightmare, an eco-terrorist, and some dour northerner from budget-bin Atlantis. This is ridiculous. Stopping Hull from flooding ‘wasn’t economically sensible’ about fifteen years back. It’s still full of people, with their makeshift levees and community boats – but not worth officially saving.

We start Tuesday, Eleanor says, and writes a grid reference and an onyx ID on the back of the Heavy Crew card she showed earlier. Be there for noon, and we’ll talk details.

The old woman stands to leave and I flap my mouth, grasp for something to say, something to latch on to. We are moving too fast. This is insane. All insane.

Wait, I say, and everyone stares at me except Mole who is carefully pulling gloves back over her mangled hands, heavy shades already settled and covering the viper pits at the base of her eye sockets. The gloves must have little beds for each chisel in the fingertips, because when they are on, her hands look normal, perhaps only an inch too long at each digit – but now I know what she is, every rumour I’ve ever heard about the moles is fighting for attention in my brain, a snake-pit of conjecture and jokes and half-forgotten articles. Metabolism, parabiotics, heavy body mods. Immortal. I can’t ask about that, not yet.

Is it true what you did, Eleanor Ilk? I ask, not looking at Mole, and Eleanor rubs at her lip and actually smiles.

You’ll have to be more specific, kid, she says. It’s been a long ride.

The reefs, Parker says, and their voice is as serious as I’ve ever heard it. I love them for saying that. In all the adventure and rumour, Parker understands what I care about, what I would ask the Heavy Crew about. Parker knows me. Did you really nuke the reefs? Parker asks, and through the door the pounding of the music seems to amp up for a moment. French autobass is awful, awful stuff, and the reverberations are vibrating in my chest.

Hull huffs and heads for the door, and Mole follows. Eleanor’s gaze flits from Parker to me, and she shows the palms of her hands.

Stolen nuclear material, she says, voice lingering on each syllable. Deliberate irradiation of already dying reefs to speed up mutation rates, to give the coral a better chance to adapt to the new world. Did we do that? You tell me, Charlie. You’re the scientist. Would that be a smart move?

I shift my feet and feel the weight of the gun in my vest pocket.

There are no smart moves, these days, I say carefully. Only moves that work, and moves that don’t.

Eleanor laughs and sticks her hands in her coat pockets. I like you, she says. We will meet on Tuesday, noon, near Highgate. The grid reference. Call that onyx number when you are there, and come ready to work. We can talk about coral then, if you like.

She leaves, and it is just us and Nathan. As the door is opened there is a physical hit from the canned heat of the Wet Market, yells of pleasure or pain or some mix fighting to be heard over the music. French autobass uses heavy infrasound, based on some sketchy science of emotional manipulation. Some declassified government files from the last century, using infrasound to calm/panic crowds. A sound you can’t hear, a frequency nice and low that you feel in your chest, the back of your skull. The kind of thing that makes a dog panic before an earthquake hits. The documents claimed the US (back when it was the US) were pumping it into protests. The autobass guys say that elephants make infrasound that makes people calm, ecstatic, enraged, and they claim their music is tailored so the infrasound enhances the experience. Transcendentalism by way of frequency manipulation – ascendance to Bodhisattva by way of big, big speakers.

I hate French autobass, and as the door seals behind the Heavy Crew and the thrum dulls to a tickle, I force myself to unclench every muscle in my body, force myself to breathe.

Renault is on some questionable shit, I say, because I can’t talk about what just happened. Still processing. Nathan just laughs.

I introduce you to the fucking Heavy Crew, he says, slumping down into his chair, and you want to talk to me about Renault and his squid girl? It’s not so different from the chloroplast thing, Charlie. It’ll trend, it’ll pass. How many green Greens do you see now, hey?

I know he’s probably right. For a few years it was chloroplasts, the little organelles that plants use to photosynthesise. With enough tweaking, you can in theory take them into your skin cells, but the chloroplasts aren’t happy and the skin cells aren’t happy. Most of the idiots doing it were just doing algae implantation; there are some salamanders that do that in the wild. Almost everyone just ended up with fucking algal eczema and slightly fucked immune systems, or not much else. Showboaty peacock shit. Like most of the environment movement. I feel sick.

Parker heads to the back of Nathan’s office and retrieves four beers from the fridge beneath his desk and starts handing them out.

Please, Nathan says, voice flat, go behind my desk and have a beer, Parker. Parker just shoves him in the back of the head and hands him a beer and draws a chair to sit on. You’ll make it back on your cut, darling, they say.

So what the fuck was that, they for real? Zoot asks, and I drink half my beer in one. It’s cold, really cold, some cheap lager. Snake-charmer, Eleanor called me. She shouldn’t know that, not even Nathan knows that. Me, Parker, Zoot, that should be it.

They’re as real as it gets, I say.

Did you see that chick’s hands? Zoot says, and I start to chew my lip.

Not just hands, I say. Nathan nods and gestures for me to continue.

She’s a mole, I say. A real mole. Like the stories. Finger chisels, thumb hammerheads. Muscle augmented for strength and endurance. Metabolism and blood like, literally all moled up – moles have weird haemoglobin so they are better in low oxygen. Eyes fucked with for better night vision, lungs fucked with to deal better with particulates, liver fucked with to deal with the endless stress of the rest of it, innate immune system basically stripped so they can do all this and then boosted artificially to keep them alive. Double eardrums, I heard? Parabiotic attachments to keep them full of roids and uppers or just food. The fucking mulch bags they sew onto you so it seeps nutrients into your system and you don’t need to eat, like the AI wranglers have. Fucking, fucking, fucking viper pits to sense heat! Adaptive immune system boosted to all crazy hell. Immortality by way of naked mole rat gene repair mechanisms, if you buy that shit. If that lady is for real, she’s a fucking myth.

I say to them if she is for real, as if there was a question – but there is no question in my mind. I’ve seen body modifications by the thousand from the extreme to the banal, permanent, transient, but almost all are cosmetic. Mole’s were different. Functional, by some lunatic dream of function. Not aesthetics for aesthetics’ sake, like most of the wankers in the Wet Market. I know she’s real. I desperately want a cup of tea, not a beer. I want a cup of tea and to sit in my mum’s favourite chair and watch the wind blow across the North Sea, watch whitecaps rolling in as I wear a heavy knit jumper. I want to be cold.

I don’t get it, Parker says. Where does she come from? I’ve never heard of this shit.

Nathan taps his wrist screen and throws a quick onyx search up on the room’s wall projector. Headlines, artists renderings. No photos except for vague pictures of fences, mines that could be anywhere, trucks that could belong to anyone.

Well, he says, it was NARATOS. NARATOS, I think? Mining concern, heavy money. Big rumours in the scene maybe, maybe ten years back? Postman sent out his red letters to all the best biohackers – mining company was hiring biohackers, wanted to augment his workforce he said. Always some asshole who says yes to the Postman. But then maybe two or three years ago, company pretty much goes up in flames. Bunch of folk murdered over the course of a year, sites bombed, all that kind of thing. Looooooots of deaths. The whole board of directors, some major shareholders, a bunch of management. And rumours, rumours that the workers they augmented were kids. And the augments were insane. Like Charlie said. Mad scientist shit, certainly not pure profit driven. Lot of it didn’t even make sense. Like those viper pits – the range on those is like, nothing. Who would do that? And mines are hot once you get down there. Doesn’t make sense. Someone leaked a schematic, like the top level full body plan, it’s like… it’s like a meme, man, in the biohacker scene. Every now and then people would get bored on the forums and talk about how they’d improve it – how to make a better mole. A couple of journalists tried to piece it all out but nothing came of it. I thought it was bullshit but that lady has chisels for fingers, so fuck what I know.

Right, I say, and I finish my beer. Fuck what we know.

Zoot downs his beer and starts drumming on the table.

So we have to help this mole kill some biohacker guy? What was the other stuff – steal the flower, save the world?

Drama, I respond, and I feel it. I feel the blackness starting to creep back in. For a moment, speaking to Eleanor Ilk, something stirred in me, a coiling serpent in my gut. Go Green – save the world. She meant it. She’s Eleanor Ilk, of course she meant it. But she is wrong, wrong, of course. There is nothing much left to save and a flower won’t cut it. She’s been on wanted posters for decades. And what has she changed? You tell me, Charlie, she had said. Snake-charmer, she had said. I chew my lip. What have they changed?

I’ve done a little with them before, Nathan says slowly, and sips from his own beer. They will pay. They’re crazy, but the money will clear. Double the drone job fee, for each part of their plan. Half up front as well. And I think killing their ‘Ghost’ will be more… support and tactics than knives in the dark. That Mole looked pissed. And, well. You’ve done a little with them before, already. The drone job was your audition.

Holy shit, Zoot says, and then he jumps up onto his chair and starts dancing and spraying his beer. Holy shit, holy shit, Nathan, we are RICH! Double then triple? That is… wait. Six? Six times the drone job!

The rest of us let him dance for a moment, smiling up at him. I try and take a moment. We’ve already auditioned, Nathan said. The drone job was our audition. That was months back – how long have they been watching us, planning this? I turn to Parker but Nathan’s office bursts open. A sallow man in a boilersuit is there clutching a cattle prod and he spares Zoot a glance – Zoot does not stop dancing to the thump of the speakers.

Your new prick is in the tunnels about to get his head caved in, unless you want it stopped, he says, shouting to be heard over the music. Without waiting for a response, he turns and stalks back into the tunnels beyond. Nathan jerks to his feet and races after him, and the three of us look at each other.

We’re rich, Zoot hoots from up on his chair, and Parker gives him a hand down.

We’re rich, Zooty, Parker says, and even I can’t help but laugh and we have a moment together embracing before inevitably following after Nathan, closing his office door behind us.

It isn’t hard to see where he has gone. People are streaming away from the biohacker labs, one after another, not running but moving fast and sure. The music is still pounding and I can feel it vibrating the beer in my otherwise empty stomach. I snatch an abandoned beer from a table as we head in. Parker is behind me, one hand on my shoulder blade as they follow on. When we pause to let a group pass they lean into my ear.

Were they right to nuke the reefs? they ask, and I let out a sigh and don’t answer. Because I don’t know.

When we turn into the biohacker lab, and there is a crowd of people lingering in the entrance and I shoulder past, trying to see who it is who is going to get stomped. I light a cigarette and jostle and then the cig drops from my lips and I am not jostling, I am being shaken by the rough tide of the small crowd because I am utterly still, unresponsive. My mouth falls open and I’m not breathing, my heart is breaking. Because I see him – the worst man I’ve ever known, Ellis. He is standing next to Renault and his squid lady, chatting away animatedly, and he is wearing some bullshit office boy outfit, a schoolboy haircut (of a boy who went to a school wholly made up of wankers). How did he even get in here?

Is that – Parker starts to ask next to me, but I clamp my hand on their arm and squeeze hard until they stop.

Mine! I say, and from the back of my belt I pull my hammer as my other hand reaches into my vest for my gun. I push through the crowd but Nathan is ahead of me with his boilersuited accomplice. I don’t know his name, guy has an accent north of Perth at least. He runs the guns and the tech the way Nathan runs the bio.

You, he says, raising his cattle prod at Ellis. Ellis looks around and smiles.

Hi, I don’t think we’ve met, he says, and it is that same voice, and hundreds of hours stuck in a lab with this prick come flooding back all at once. Endless droning, always with the right answer to everything – or, an answer he knew to be right, by dint of his genius and ego, regardless of facts or research. My hand grips the hammer but Parker and Zoot are holding me back, Parker’s hand on my wrist in my coat pocket as I try and draw my pistol free. The boilersuit Scot steps forward and there is a crackle in the air as his cattle prod charges up.

What’s the problem? Nathan says, and from a side tunnel two more boilersuits frogmarch a skinny tall guy covered in tatts, bald and cyberpunk as fuck. He has the dumb little nodules all down his arms, bumps and ridges, and his eyes have that stupid LED devil thing that was in a couple years back with the ravers. He hustles to Ellis’s side and the boilersuits let him, and that is when Ellis sees me and his face falls.

Fuck, he says, and starts to back up with hands up.

I fucking told you what would happen if I ever saw your face! I try and haul myself toward him but Zoot and Parker both have me and the bald guy immediately takes a step in front of Ellis, the worst of all guys, and from a pocket, bald guy slips a set of brass knuckles on one hand and slips a cover off the knuckle ridge revealing a row of bright needles.

You want some, little girl? he asks and then everyone is yelling until the boilersuited Scot just steps forward and cattle prods the bald guy right in the gut and he falls to the ground, twitching and pissing himself. The biohackers are all staring from the periphery of the room, hovering over their precious workbenches, and the room still stinks of charred tiger meat. The two boilersuited goons both have their own shock sticks, and both lean in and jab the bald guy as Ellis backs away, hands raised. Renault’s naked squid girl is still naked on her table, leaning up on one elbow languidly watching as she sips a cocktail.

Finally the man raises his hand to halt his goons. Enough, he says. Nathan, this new guy can’t stay. He brought fucking Scrimshank with him, and Scrimshank is barred by me, on pain of having his teeth kicked in, for being an insane person.

As he finishes saying this, he brings a heavy boot down onto the bald guy who must be Scrimshank, first on his temple, then stamping on the hand with the brass knuckle.

Get them out, he says to the other boilersuits, and they start dragging the bald guy, one of them slipping the brass knuckles from his fingers. I’m still thrumming, thrashing, swearing.

I’ll fucking kill you, Ellis! I yell, and he smiles at me, composure returned.

Looks like I’m not staying, Charlie, he calls. Good to see you though!

His gaze slips from me as if I’m not even there and he raises his voice across the din to Nathan. Sorry for the misunderstanding, Nathan! Will pay the necessary. Love the operation and of course still interested. Didn’t realise my handyman had prior here, it won’t happen again.

Then he is following the boilersuits jollily, lagging a step behind them. I stop thrashing and drop my hammer and redouble my effort to pull my gun free from my pocket but Parker is faster than me, and then their hands are in my hands, pulling me into a tight embrace.

Hey, they say. Hey kid. Calm. Calm it, Charlie. Calm. Their voice is hot in my ear, their whole body pressed against me. Quiet they say, just for me – you want to kill them, we’ll kill them. I promise. But not on tiger meat night, right?

And it’s enough and I’m laughing and fuck the adrenaline is coursing through me like a thousand volts. Fuck.

FUCK, I yell, and turn and slap the wall a bit and press my hands to my face.

You, uh, know Ellis? Renault asks, sidling forward and I scoop up my hammer and point at his naked squid girl.

How did you do the nerve innervation for the membranes over the chromatophores to control the dilation? I ask, and he looks at me for a long moment with his big doleful eyes.

… the what?

Oh for fuck’s sake! someone says off to the side, and then Nathan gestures us aside and leans down.

You know Ellis? he asks, and I grip my hammer and slowly return it to the loop at the back of my belt. Nathan doesn’t say more, doesn’t fill the silence with his own thoughts and information. He’s a professional. He waits for me to speak. I can feel sweat on my lower back, can feel my guts churning as my body tries to process the spike of input I just gave it.

I know him, I say, and I meet Nathan’s eyes. The music is loud and I have to lean close to him to make sure he hears me loud and clear.

And you know me, I say. If I see him again, Nathan, I’ll kill him.

Nathan nods, and puts a hand gently on my shoulder. Fair play, Charlie, he says, but if it’s that deep between you two, heads-up. This guy is making waves. Custom bioweapons. Nasty nasty shit. I won’t have it here, said he could do his other stuff maybe, the usual, but this guy is into the worst you can think of.

Oh, I say, and I feel my face twitch into an involuntary grimace, and I remember watching Dr Walker die on the floor in front of me a lifetime ago. Dr Walker’s blood turning to a scab, all of her blood, all at once, eight pints of red coagulating inside her veins and arteries and capillaries. She couldn’t even scream. I close my eyes for a long moment.

I know exactly what he’s into.

8

Ghost

Sowcountant

The Pérez cartel job is a holiday in the end. What they want is to debrain a former accountant of theirs and reincarnate (Reinter? Reanimate? Recreate? Resume?) him as a pig – a female pig, no less, and John immediately understands the unpleasantness of the plans that must follow that and has to admit a grudging admiration of the corporate strategy, even if it adds two layers of complication. Certainly, if he were a new Pérez cartel accountant in Mexico he would have a rather long think before dipping his hands in the till if he was taken on a little tour and introduced to the hog that was his predecessor and its twelve boyfriends.

All the data he asked for was sent in advance, so he spends the plane ride (and the second plane ride) fiddling in his virtual office, massaging the gene therapy that would bring the pig into line with the man. It is a fascinating little problem combined with a hefty fee that will boost AETOS DIOS’s first quarter report, and that combination is exactly what he needs. There is a lot to do, so John drinks vodka and tomato juice and he works the problem. In his first-class seat he relaxes and in his forest glade office he listens to some Django Reinhardt jazz as he conjures a whiteboard and starts to scratch out a vague plan.

Problems:

Rejection of organ by host (species/sex/etc)

Volume

Long-term survival

The first takes him half the flight – luckily, AETOS DIOS have their whole custom-organ-pig-vertical, and so most of the research and tools he needs are already in place. In the office, for a prestige customer they’d grow a pig up from a single cell right through to squealing piglet in a nice artificial womb, gently rocking in the basement below the Thames building, safe in its artificial amniotic dream. By starting from scratch, they can engineer the pig genome to match the future host in advance, preventing immune rejection of the pig organ by the human body when it is eventually transplanted. For the lower end of customer they retroactively engineer organs to match the final host.

As John flies across the Atlantic Ocean, all he must do is say, okay, what changes would we have made? And design a little retrofitting, a little gene therapy. Let the pig be sick for a few days as he alters the DNA in near every cell of its body. Who cares if the pig is sick? It is horribly complicated, of course.

He gens up the therapy plan for the top three sow candidates (but he of course refers to them as little piggies, and in his glade creates a little straw house, wood house and brick house to store the plans for easy access) – it’s not hard. He sets Avery, AETOS DIOS’s tame AI, on getting it fixed. With John’s light hand on the tiller, Avery can get him a rather nice gene therapy plan with reasonably little effort. Of course the genius is in the nuance, nuance no expert system or AI could supplant (so John tells himself, and does not question the thought anymore). Avery makes polite suggestions, and John of course listens because Avery does, after all, have insight.

This takes John a couple of hours overall, and so he wiggles his toes and sends an order through the virtual link his glasses have to the hostess for another vodka and tomato. There is a nice little soft notification chime in his ear when it arrives, and he reaches out to it and brings it to his lips without having to break his concentration.

With the first problem done he moves on to the serious stuff, but the Manchester United match is starting and so he has that on a screen the size of an old physical cinema off to one side of the glade. He turns the commentator down and the crowd up and reacts to the noise of them, knowing from decades of dedicated following what silences and cheers will be worth glancing up for.

Volume! John mumbles to Avery and holograms of skulls start to spin around the glade. A male human, a female pig. A chart floats next to him showing volumetric capacity, skull thickness, as well as the brains themselves – the human’s so familiar, the pig’s about one-tenth the weight and far smaller. The brain cavity within the skull is, basically, way too small.

The brain will not fit in the cavity, John. John stares at the sky. Avery’s voice is calm but it grates on John’s ears. Stupid bloody machine. As if he didn’t know that.

Fuck, John says aloud in the plane, and above him Manchester are doing terribly.

Inside his office, he subvocalises and in the VR he is speaking aloud to Avery. In future, scraps, if you want to state the obvious, don’t.

Avery does not reply, and John makes a mental note to speak to Julio about getting a new AI. Avery is getting to be a pain.

It takes the rest of the first flight to get the volume question squared. In the end, he has the 3D model and the instructions for the surgeon. Remove the back of the pig’s skull and get rid of a chunk of the neck muscle back there. They’ll have to sew in some artificial tendons and the like to keep the head upright and in place, and it won’t be a happy pig-accountant, but it never was going to be. His model roughly works. The brain will be squeezed, and battered. Fine. A few strips of commercially available skin graft to patch over the mess they make. Fine.

Manchester lose and John sleeps. Mexico City is an easy transfer, and the second plane is smaller, but no less well appointed. The second flight is a cartel flight and so he has to do a little chat with some Pérez men in exquisite shirts. He does the usual anecdotes and they land with the usual laughter and shock (the Saudi Sheik racehorse fixing, the VR-head who wanted mulch bags with external inputs grafted almost everywhere so he’d never have to surface from his rigs, and haptic inputs all the way up his urethra). Their own anecdotes tend toward the grim, shot through with a humour that is less gallows and more death camp. When they let him get back to work, it is all nerve regrowth plans and checking his messages – there are updates for shareholders, all the usual. Ellis is having an analytical problem with one of his viral vectors. Arain has been reported to HR by a new junior researcher for shouting/belittling/bullying. John smiles at that one. One of the pigs in the Thames office needs to be harvested for a VR star who has screwed her liver. Samira? He recognises the name. John does his rote responses, but in reality he is thinking about the third point on his whiteboard.

Long-term survival.

Host rejection should be fine – the gene therapy Avery cooked up will knock out most of the pig’s immune system, so even if it does reject the brain it won’t be able to do much about it. Combine that with a nice lifetime of retrovirals and antibiotics and it should live… a while. The real question is having it actually live, be compos mentus. (Is there a joke in there about accountants? Countos mentus? Will that translate to Spanish? He makes a note on his joke pad in the office and asks Avery to workshop it a little.)

When they land there are no guns (the guns are at the perimeter twenty miles out), just beautiful women greeting him in Spanish. The Pérez compound is high on the Mexican plateau in the scrublands of Zacatecas, and it is beautiful. Some lieutenant shows him the lab, the gear he needs for the gene therapy. The pigs outside are snuffling under the cool breeze under a sky so blue John could kiss it. There is not a pig farm here, but they have set up a temporary affair just outside the storehouse that has been retrofitted as lab and operating theatre.

The cartel men introduce him to the neurosurgeon, a gorgeous woman brings him crushed lime juice over ice, and they let him do his work all day.

Avery, update, he asks, and the joke he gets back is not that great. From countos mentus and John’s prompt, Avery thinks he should say el contador cerdo will be el cerda contador. Patiently John stares at the wall as the neurosurgeon talks about something, and Avery translates the Spanish into John’s induction bud.

The accountant pig will be the sow accountant. Rubbish. Fucking AI! What about sowcountant, Avery?

Sowcountant is unlikely to translate well, John – sow is uncommon—

John cuts the feed with a blink and sniffs. Bloody Avery.

With the gene therapy generating and the surgeon panicking over John’s diagrams, the bosses come and there is much nodding and hand shaking. They ply him with red wine and mezcal and pork. They throw food scraps on the floor of the beautifully appointed dining room as the sun sets, and over the scraps step the waitresses. (All women, John notes, and the Pérez cartel bosses all men. Classic. They know how to do things in Mexico.)

You do this well then maybe we can talk racehorses, the boss says, and John smiles and thinks absolutely fucking not because these people are insane, and fixing racehorses is boring, but then he remembers Julio’s projections for Q4 and the hole in the books that the failed immortality project is leaving and he nods at the man. People have been genetically improving racehorses for thousands of years, and every time the tools improve, the fixes improve. Now that a good bioengineer like John can chop and change the genome with enough subtlety that it can’t be detected at a DNA level, it is just a question of hammering down on obvious phenotypes and John doesn’t care about that. But this is a cartel boss, and AETOS DIOS is haemorrhaging money, and so John smiles. If they can pay enough he can send one of the minions, Ellis or Arain.

The idea of sending Arain, a five-foot female desi east Londoner with face tattoos, who has more girlfriends than these cartel kings, is enough to make John’s smile real for a moment. I’ll send that little prick Ellis.

There is a lull and a waitress brings more mezcal, and John is grateful to the little parabiotic he has implanted just under one rib. With a flick of his eye he activates a signal from his lens to the microcircuitry in it, and it starts the job of making sure he doesn’t get too pissed. It has a nice little monitor so it can tell his blood alcohol, and secrete the necessary enzymes to process and nullify the effects as he chooses. The neat part being that it is a sealed unit, an organ of his own cellular material bioengineered. Just a little wiring for the sensors and the activation, but otherwise it is all John. He sets the blood alcohol to what he knows is peak John, convivial but still the smartest man in the world. He eyes the waitresses, knowing that if he shows a preference for one they will appear in his room later – cartel bosses, mafia, Yakuza, mining magnates, defence ministers – men in power are predictable in projecting their own desires, an assumption that everyone must want what they want. The alternative would be, what – that they are broken little toys, simple circuits that never developed into the social construct? John picks a waitress with nice legs and lets his gaze linger. He will do what is necessary to make the job a success, and he is human, after all.

The waitresses leave, and the boss (Mr Pérez) drops one more morsel to the floor with the flick of a hand.

Bring him in, the boss says, and John sips his mezcal and holds his poker face. Who are we expecting? he asks, and the boss looks at him like he is an idiot.

The guest of honour, the boss says, and then the doors are opening and there is a broken man behind them. Thin, black and blue across his naked body from welts and cuts and worse. Filthy.

Eat the scraps, chanco, one of the cartel men yells, and the rest laugh. The man is followed by an enforcer all in casual paramilitary black, a thin baton at his side ending in a little ring like a coin.

The accountant does not wait, he drops to his knees and starts to eat from the scraps on the floor. He does not raise his eyes to the cartel men, he does not speak or beg. Broken already. How long has he been living like this? John checks his mail on his lens but there is nothing interesting coming in. The VR star Samira with the liver failure is in post-op but all went well. Arain has sent him a report on the immortality project, asking for clarification on the Taiwan dataset he gave her, which he won’t be able to give, because he traded it for a blood boy with the head of research at a start-up out there. Data for flesh, an easy trade.

Can you tell Gabriel what you are going to do, doctor?

John takes another sip of mezcal and scratches his nose, returning his attention to the room. Always, this is part of the job. Amateur dramatics. And he knows that not so deep down he has a love for it, the power, the drama. Otherwise he could have just sent his files and instructions.

El contador cerdo will be el cerda contador, he says, and the cartel men hoot and the accountant freezes still on the tiles, and does not look up.

We will prepare the sow, he says, and we will prepare the accountant. His brain will be taken and put in place just so. We will regrow the nerves, rewire and repair and massage as necessary. He will feel. He will see, he will taste and touch and smell and move and remember, and he will understand. He might not count so well, though.

John raises his glass.

To the sowcountant, he says, and one of the cartel men laughs but the rest don’t – they don’t get the pun. Fucking, Avery. Fucking AI.

Please, the accountant says, and John’s implant automatically translates it and says it again in English through the conduction speaker embedded in his jaw, but obviously the accountant was saying please. Sometimes he despairs of it all, infinite analytical power being applied by these stupid, stupid machines.

They drag the accountant out screaming and the cartel boss raises his mezcal and roars EL CERDA CONTADOR! And there are cheers, and drinking, and three days later it is all done and John is feeling fat and bored, and he messages Julio – Talk to the Postman. Get me another red envelope.

It is late back in London, but Julio replies almost instantly – a picture of John’s last blood boy, the religious kickboxer, in a rather compromising position – tied to a bed with rather a lot happening to him.

Not so poor after all it turns out, just stupid. Will talk to Postman ASAP. Your boy Ellis is getting into interesting extracurriculars – report to follow.

John laughs at the picture of the blood boy, and eats an omelette in the garden as he waits for his plane to fuel up. The promised report from Julio on Ellis comes through swiftly – somewhat rising star in the research department, not quite John’s protégé (that would be Arain, if anyone), but enough that he has taken an interest. Bad at writing reports, but sharp. John skims as he eats – snake venom, bioweapons, custom augments – and all that in the boy’s spare time. Interesting.

Avery, prep me a summary of Ellis’s activities at AETOS DIOS for the plane ride. On books and off.

Avery chimes in acknowledgment, and John stares at the trailing vines and flowers surrounding the garden veranda. Beautiful. The omelette is a delight, with a shred of fresh basil adding the perfect counterweight to the rich cotija cheese.

At the far end of the compound, the accountant squeals and kicks.

9

Charlie

Tea?

We leave the Wet Market on foot, threading through the dancing bodies, and it is early so the DLR is still running. Zoot and Parker are trading rumours of the Heavy Crew, searching on their onyxs and throwing the funniest and maddest results back and forth between their lenses. They let me brood – they both know the deal with me and Ellis, the broad strokes. Snake-charmer, Eleanor called me, and then not five minutes later Ellis walks in. I don’t believe in coincidences, and this is too much for me not to worry. Is he working with the Heavy Crew, are they after bioweapons? I’m not making bioweapons.

The DLR from Billingsgate back up to the edge of Hackney is full of Canary Wharf types with good teeth, ready for a riskier party, but they are all getting off a few stops after us. We jump off at a station just south of the old Olympic Park, the concrete brutalism of the incongruously named Pudding Mill Lane. The park is abandoned and left to the packs of wild dogs and foxes and intrepid cyclists whose tyres can take the potholes. I love it. It is dark and hot and buzzing with insects and the soft thump of batwings on air. Nature has taken it back, and it thrives. Looming over us the dark skeleton of the old Olympic stadium blocks half the sky. Over our heads another bat cuts through the night, black on black on black. I love bats.

Who doesn’t love a mammal who can fly? I ask, and Zoot and Parker look at each other.

You ready to talk now, then? Parker asks, and we find a bench looking south, where you can see where the gentrification wave eventually peaked and started rolling back, back before the 2038 hit, before the big d-reg even. When there were zones beyond Zone 1.

I don’t like the coincidence, I say. She called me snake-charmer. Eleanor might be legit, but she knows some shit and the only source is Ellis.

If he’s involved we can walk, Parker says, but Zoot holds up his hands.

Woah now, he says. Woah. Can we calm? You haven’t seen this guy in what, years? This could be coincidence, Charlie. And if it isn’t, isn’t this the kind of job we’ve been dreaming of? This is the HEAVY CREW! Real difference, real action, real money. Not fucking around. We could be saving the world, here.

I roll my eyes at that and Parker gives me a cigarette from a ten pack they must have swiped at Billingsgate. We light up and smoke and then Parker says, quietly, It would be nice to do something that mattered. I push the heel of my hand into my eyes and think about my mum and dad in their garden, at the marches back in Scotland. Me on my dad’s shoulder, Mum holding the sign with whatever slogan they came up with over tea the night before, my painting above and around it. They always let me help. Ellie as well, her little hand in the paint, pressing her mark onto the sign. A reminder that every decision would impact the children, and their children. It didn’t do anything.

It won’t do anything, I say, and Parker holds my hand.

It might, Zoot says, and if it doesn’t we still get action, money, and excitement. And if you like, you can kill your nemesis Ellis, the man you hate most in the world. How does that sound?

Kill Ellis. I owe him that, for Dr Walker. Thinking of her is painful, as always. She was beautiful, and died ugly.

Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world, I say, and together in the darkness of the abandoned park we raise our cigarettes in salute to the idea. What could go wrong?

It’s a long walk up the canal back to the volcano lair, and Zoot peels off toward a party he knows but I don’t want it, not tonight. Too much to think about. Parker wants the party. I can tell, and I tell them to go but they demur.

I want to watch the next episode of Flood Wall Coolangatta, they say, with such earnestness that I kiss them.

Thanks, for tonight.

No problem, kid, Parker says, and as we walk up the canal, stepping carefully over broken glass and trash, they squeeze my hand. We are almost at the volcano lair when Parker blows a raspberry at the sky.

I meant it, you know, they say. If you need to kill this guy then we can do that.

There is an intensity to them, unspoken things. I know Parker has had to kill before, where they came from. My hands aren’t clean of violence, a few of the worse fights after shows against gangs of skinheads where I know my hammer made contact. This feels different. This is beyond the mundane horrible banality of violence for survival.

I hate him, I say, in the end, and that is enough. We don’t need to talk about it to understand each other. We walk past Agnes’s shipping container units where a little light still shines past a curtain, and turn to home. I check the camera feed on my onyx as we approach, and there has been no movement inside, but an hour ago someone at the front door. A big figure. I blink and focus and grab Parker roughly by the hand and manage to haul them back and left just in time as from the scrap below the iron stairs to home, Chef looms.

Charlie, he says, and his voice is thick as if his jaw is broken. A tall man, muscled and hulking. In the darkness his face is hidden, but I know it’s him. His hands are empty, but I’ve seen his knives. Charlie, he repeats, and the spell of stillness is broken.

Fucking, fucking, fuck, I say, and I stumble back, pulling at Parker and reaching for my pistol. Parker breaks free from my grasp and there is a flicker of light as their hand has a switchblade in it. They stand still, poised, and point the knife up at Chef.

I want my money, Charlie, he says, swaying on the spot. He doesn’t even glance at Parker. You’ve ruined me.

Steady, Parker says, knife unwavering. You need to steady, Chef. Money won’t fix it. Charlie can fix it if you let her.

I’m back on my arse on the canal path, scrambling over rough stones and pulling myself up to my feet. My vest pocket won’t open, my hands won’t open it. Can I fix it?

You can fix it? he says, and the pain in his voice breaks me,

I’m sorry, Chef, I say, and I mean it, I really do. I stop pawing at my pocket and press my hands into my jeans, grip until my fingers hurt.

I don’t know if I can fix it, but I can try. I can try if you’ll let me.

Chef steps forward and the weak light from Agnes’s window casts across his face. His jaw and throat are swollen, red and purple, his lips full to bursting. There are tears in his eyes as he stares at us, hands clenching and unclenching.

You’ve ruined me, he says again. Ruined.

I’ll fix it, Chef, I’m saying, and then he is clawing at the top of his head and weeping and a heavy fist juts out against the metal rail of the stairs, reverberating all the way up to our door.

Fix it! he says, and I manage to get to Parker and stand behind them.

We need time, Parker is saying, calm and in control. Standing behind them I manage to reach my hand in my pocket and feel the reassuring weight of the pistol, and so gently I ease the safety off, gently I rest my trigger finger on the guard around the trigger the way the boy in the shop showed me years ago. Can I fix it? I won’t let him hurt Parker.

Time, Chef says, and then he is laughing and weeping, and with a desultory kick at a scrap of metal, he turns and walks away into darkness. I want my money, Charlie, he calls back over his hunched shoulders, hands flexing at his sides. You fix it.

He doesn’t say or. He doesn’t need to say or. I know what the or is. We stand still and watch him walk away until the darkness utterly swallows him.

That young man is angry at you, Agnes says from behind us, and I almost shoot Parker in the spine as I jump.

Jesus wept Agnes! Parker says. Jesus wept. Little baby Jesus. He cried, he cried big bloody tears. About that. Don’t do that!

Parker folds away their switchblade and Agnes smiles in the darkness, one hand on her hip.

You going to stab me, child? she asks, and Parker nods their head in deference.

A long night, a dissatisfied customer, I say, and my voice is a weak little thing. When did I become so weak?

You two always have such fun, Agnes says. Do you want a cup of tea?

No thank you, Agnes, Parker says. Another time.

Agnes waves us goodnight and disappears back through her gate, into the little garden teeming with green that leads up to her unit. Her house is made of three shipping containers, an L-shaped footprint with one arm double the height of the other. We watch her go and then I take the stairs two at a time and rush through the locks, and when Parker is in beside me, I hit one of the low lamps and shut and lock and bolt the door, and then I throw down my keys and sit on the floor.

That was a lot, I say, and Parker sits next to me and together we stare up at the snake mural on the wall. In the dim light of the lone lamp it is hints and shadow, black and gold over red brick.

Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world, I say.

Heal the Chef, Parker says. Kill the Ellis.

Together we breathe and stare at the snake.

Tea? Parker asks, and yes, yes, of course the answer is yes.

10

Scrimshank

London über alles

Scrimshank checks the burn marks on his gut in the mirror of the gents at the White Lion in Plaistow. McSomething at the Wet Market still pissed about that scene with the three chicks and the ketamine balloons, so what, so what what what he burns up the Scrim? It’s a crime, his perfect cut muscles with a mar, a scar. He’ll have to get some cash to get the scars squared when they’ve healed. He’s just happy that Cass didn’t see those jumpsuit assholes pull him off the dancefloor, too busy at the bar making her moves. The burn marks from the cattle prods are livid red and black, and the muscles below ache like a bitch.

Shit, Scrim says, and mentally adds McSomething to his list of people to eventually give a solid kicking-to-death to. He pulls down his shirt and bares his teeth at the reflected Scrim, mirror-Scrim, and when mirror-Scrim doesn’t back down he heads back to the table. Ellis has two fresh pints waiting.

That was not perfect at the Wet Market, Scrimshank, Ellis says, and Scrim scratches at his nose. You managed to get us chucked out of a perfectly nice underground criminal research lab, my dear henchman. I spent weeks trying to convince them to give me a space there.

Not perfect. Scrim chucked the piss-soaked jeans, so he is down a good pair of jeans and those custom knuckledusters he ordered from the continent, with the little needles and space for the vials of whatever the fuck Ellis gave him. Before he even got to use them!

Shit, Scrim says, and he drinks half his pint and scopes the room. No point apologising, not to Cousin Ellis. The White Lion is quiet as all hell, as it always is on a Wednesday afternoon. Daytime crowd of old men with fat arses and thin dogs, indoor horse racing from Saudi on the screen above the bar. The barman Frank is fat personified in a pressed white shirt but Scrim has been to the back room, has seen him stripped to the waist sweat-wet grunting with exertion as he beats the piss from some poor kid who pays to take his try at the weekly punch-up-lock-in. Scrim catches his eye and gives a half-nod, which Frank returns. Frank is one of those ultranationalist dudes, heavy messing and old-school drugs, lots of cocaine and lager and football. Tattoos with a lot of lions. Ellis is looking at his pint.

You know this is a heavy white pride kind of place, right, Ellis? Scrim asks quietly, but the kid doesn’t budge. Hey, Scrim says, and leans forward but not as forward as he would with anyone else. The image of the bearded barber slick with blood, twitching, rises and with it his gorge. He sinks back another gulp of lager and leans back. Weird kid.

We need to be smarter, Ellis says eventually, and Scrim waits. Eventually the kid relaxes a little, sits back and drinks some of his pint.

You work for me, Scrimshank, he says, and Scrim nods.

I do, baby, he says, but I’m nobody’s bitch. Scrim works for Scrim.

Ellis locks eyes with him for a long moment and anyone else Scrim would lean in and maybe start a scene, eyeballing him like that. But this kid isn’t afraid. Sat in a white pride pub with a murderer and pint. Evaluating. Unaffected. Cucumber, baby. Cool as.

What we doing then, Ellis? Scrim asks, and Ellis downs his pint and zips up his bomber jacket. It is black and almost works, but Scrim squints and shakes his head, looks Ellis up and down.

You’re wearing old trainers, he says eventually. Because what else can you do? He has to teach this kid.

Does it matter, Scrim? Ellis asks. Scrim shakes his head, leg twitching.

You want them to think you are a cool cat, you need to dress the part. You got the money, I’ve got the hookup. Need a haircut, man. New threads. New duds. Maybe some ink. You’re into the hardcore shit now, man. Need to look the part to sell the parts, yeah? Those Wet Market guys, you are best off out. They won’t take you serious if they think you’re a corpo.

His jaw buzzes and he raises a hand and then Cass is speaking into his brain.

Baby, she says, baby where did you go? Vic said you got thrown out? They can’t throw you out!

Cass is still talking when Ellis leans forward.

Hang up now, he says, mouth a little thin line, hair like a schoolboy, bomber jacket over a corpo work shirt. And Scrim hangs up and mutes his onyx and finds himself sweating. He can feel the burns from the cattle prods on his stomach and back, pulsing pain with each heartbeat.

You work for me, Scrim, Ellis says again. Why do you work for me, of all people? Scrimshank the knife, Scrimshank with the propensity for violence and the augments and the devil eyes and the muscles. Scrimshank who should be dead or in prison, but who isn’t, because he’s too mad to get caught. Why do you work for me, Scrimshank? I had a long day at the office. Humour me. Why do you work for me, and not for Scrim, or anyone else?

Scrimshank feels the back of his head, runs his palm over the back of his skull.

You’re crazy, Ellis, he says, and doesn’t meet his boss’s eye. Instead his gaze flits around the pub, dreary brown and fake wood, glass, metal rails, stained carpet. Fuck. What does he want? He has seen Ellis in these moods before. The kid won’t let up.

You’re crazy, Scrim says. Mad as a bag of fucks. Smarter than anyone else I know. And into some heavy, heavy shit that could get us both rich, quick, if we don’t fuck it up.

Heavy shit, Ellis says, savouring the words. I liked the job you did on the barber, cousin. It was good. It’ll help us sell the service.

Scrim nods and chews his lip. He killed his first man (boy) age twelve, gang fight in Dagenham with some boaties. How many more? None of the faces stay with him, but that first kid. Until now – he can picture the barbershop, the blood from every pore of the bearded man’s face, instant wet death.

What was that shit, man? he asks. What was it? What did that guy do to you?

Ellis looks at him and laughs a little, even looks… embarrassed? Scrim has never seen him look like that before. The kid is squinting at Frank the barman in a way you really shouldn’t squint at barmen in racist white pride pubs, if you like your teeth inside your mouth.

We needed to show my targeted venom cocktail works, Ellis says at last, and through the speaker a bit of classic pop music breaks a little louder through the fug of vape clouds and cigarette smoke – Phil Collins. The one with the good drums.

Hence the video, Scrim says, and he is ten years old again meeting his cousin Ellis, from the good side of the family, the fucking distant side. And he is ten years old bragging about bloodying some kid and he tries to push Ellis about and it works, but then Scrim wakes in the night and his little cousin is on top of him, a kitchen knife pressed flat against Scrim’s eye and a garrotte pulling tight around his neck. You don’t fuck with me, the little Ellis said.

I hate this place, Scrim, Ellis says, and he is squinting at Frank again and Frank has noticed, has started frowning. Fuck.

Fuck, Ellis, he says. Hey hey. We need to be cool. These guys will fucking bury us in Essex. What’s into you?

Ellis just stares at Frank, and then smiles and turns to his cousin.

I’m evolving, Scrim. You need to as well. We’re the heavy heavy. We have Medusa. And they won’t bury shit. I’ve run this place, I had the work AI hack them. What’ll happen is, you’ll get us two more pints. Your racist barman who is, by the way, a paedophile, will ask what my problem is and you’ll tell him something and you’ll bring my pint back to me. Then, while I drink it, you’ll kill him. You’ll kill the four men in here, some of whom are armed. You won’t let any escape. You won’t let any of the dogs attack us. You’ll kill fucking everyone, because we need to show my product to potential buyers. Medusa. The nastiest snake venom in the world, magnified a thousand times. We have shown them with the aerosol we can target individuals, DNA-based target identification. Now we show them our range.

Scrimshank sips his beer and Ellis does too, in concert, for all the world two cousins sharing a quiet conversation. Then Ellis licks his lips.

Then when we have the video I’m taking from my lens, he says, and when we have a nice collection of five corpses – one for each of the venoms I have to sell – we’ll finish our pints, and burn the place down, and go on our way. The AI will wipe any trace of us on the onyx network. We’ll go get a curry, then you can call Cass and go do your thing. Do you understand me?

Scrim has gone very still. He does this sometimes; he doesn’t know why. Fight, flight, pause, fuck. Fuck. Five men, including Frank the not insubstantial motherfucker who certainly has something serious behind the bar, serious bang bang. Three old greyhounds. And more importantly, if they ever find out, most of the white nationalists in five hundred miles after his blood (including no small number of cops, criminals, judges, city boys, etc etc).

Who do you work for, Steven? Ellis asks, and Scrimshank winces at the name and cricks his neck. Ellis slips five needles across to him – the kind with the safety guard, the kind they use in insane asylums where you just punch a fucker in the muscley bit and the juice inside gets in somehow.

I work for you, you mad fucker, Scrim says, and he pockets the injectors and then he goes to the bar.

Relax, a calm voice says in his ear. My name is Avery. Ellis has asked me to help you. Relax, and all will be fine.

The fuck! Scrim thinks, but the AI can’t read his mind so he subvocalises instead so the jaw mic picks it up.

The fuck! You robot prick, get outta here, I got work to do.

Relax, Avery says. Frank has a gun behind the bar but it is next to the whisky, at the far end. There are two other guns I can spot, handgun carried by the old man at the window table and handgun carried by the bald man with the large tablet and the glasses.

The fuck, Scrim thinks again, but actually this is good shit.

Good job robot, he says aloud, and then he twitches his head and makes his way to the bar.

Who’s your little corpo friend? He got a problem? Frank asks, and Scrimshank blinks and grins.

Cousin Ellis, he says. We can’t choose family, eh?

Frank grunts and starts pouring two pints. It’s the type of ridiculous place where they still have beer on tap, as if preserving some long-forgotten ideal. Scrim checks himself in the mirror behind the bar.

You coming to the fight next week, Scrim? Frank asks, and Scrim smiles and gestures for him to wait and lopes Ellis’s pint over to him, long strides over sticky carpet.

Why the guy at the barber’s, Ellis? he whispers as he hands over the pint. He has to know. Just a random kill to show off Ellis’s product? Scrim’s heartrate is jacked, and his pits are wet with sweat, his eyes flicking between the old men. A table of two, and two lone guys – the guys the robot says have guns. Fuck. He slips one hand into his pocket and picks an injector at random.

Ellis gestures up to his hair, his corpo careerist schoolboy cut.

People keep taking the piss at work, he says eventually, and Scrim blinks at him and nods. He gave the kid a bad haircut. Slowly Scrim walks back to Frank at the bar and leans forward, taking a long sip from his drink. Cousin, you are insane.

Buy you one? he says, and Frank smiles a fat little smile and settles down on a stool and rests his elbow on the bar next to Scrim.

Scrimshank, Avery says in his head, Frank just tried to send a message on his onyx asking a contact to run a check on Ellis. I’ve blocked it, but you need to destroy that device.

Thank you, robot, Scrim thinks, and he sips his lager and leans in to Frank.

Tell me, Scrim says, what does London über alles mean? Some of the boys at the last fight kept yelling it.

Frank’s smile breaks into a grin.

Well! he says, and he leans in close, and faster than a viper, faster than a cheetah, faster than anything else fast you want to add to the list of really fast things is Scrimshank the knife, Scrimshank with the propensity for violence and the augments and the devil eyes and the muscles. Scrimshank who should be dead or in prison, but who isn’t, because he’s too mad to get caught. Scrimshank stabs the needle into the fat part of Frank’s bare forearm and immediately leaps backward, still holding his pint which he drains in one long pull before running to the door to bolt it.

You little cunt, what was that?! Frank shouts, and Scrim theatrically locks the door and sets down his pint glass, then pulls two more injectors and takes one in each hand and eyes up the old men. Frank is already frothing at the mouth, his face turning purple as he rolls onto the bartop as if reaching Scrim could save him.

Guys, Scrim says to the old racist men, because in the end you have to have a bit of fun.

Guys, I think I might be a gay Jew, and it turns out my mother is black. Shall we kiss?

And he hears Ellis laugh, and the old men are scrambling.

First thing first, guns. He is at the first old man in five steps and the guy is still holding a pint in one hand, reaching for a dog lead. Scrim shanks the fucker in the neck with one of the injectors and then it is rock ’n’ roll time. The two men together are on their feet and yelling, one of them grabbing at a chair.

Guns.

The music is pounding. Did Avery turn it up? He reaches the second target just as the guy pulls a pistol from his coat – an old-school revolver, snub-nosed and scratched and brutal. The dog at his feet is barking but instead of drawing and shooting, the old fucker tried to stand, and so Scrim barrels into him, and then they are down, and he is getting bitten but it is some stupid whippet thing – no whippet thing is going to slow down Scrim. He grips one hand on the gun, which goes off BLAM BLAM, and with the other hand he manages to flip the lid on the injector and wrestle it into the old dude’s thigh. The guy starts convulsing immediately, all of him, and the gun goes off again and again as Scrim scrambles back, bullets flying wild.

Fuck! he says, and with a boot dislodges the whippet thing from his calf and backs away further – and then collapses as a chair splinters across his back. Scrim sprawls to the ground but turns it into a scrawl, a roll, keeps moving. Never let the fuckers get a grip on you. He grips his third injector and scrambles to his feet and it is him and two old guys standing across from each other, the gunman convulsing on the floor between them. Scrim pulls his fourth injector and with one in each hand, glances at Ellis.

This what you were after? he calls, and Ellis is smiling and lifts his pint to him and tips it.

Scrim spits and one of the old men starts to speak, voice a growl, but Scrimshank the magnificent doesn’t have time for old racist chat. Scrimshank wants some food, and his pint, and to meet up with Cass and dance the night away.

He takes the hits. Heavy haymakers, thrown from far back. He takes the hits because he just has to land one little gut punch and then number three is down and then it is just one man left and the old fuck sees the writing on the wall and tries to run, and as the whippet things bark Scrim runs him down and jabs him right in the arse.

The dogs are snarling and biting and yapping so he picks up a table leg and goes to work as Ellis slowly walks around the room, videoing each of the fallen men. Frank, red-faced and frothing at the mouth. The first man who didn’t even get his gun clear has vomited black blood. The man with the gun and the whippet thing has convulsed himself to death. The old man who hit Scrim with the chair has turned deathly pale and is still. The final old man who Scrim stabbed in the arse is bleeding and gurgling, like the barber.

When the dogs are dead, Scrimshank goes behind the bar and gets himself a beer and sniffs. His calf is bleeding, his back hurts, and his stomach aches where the cattle-prod burns have opened up.

Ellis slips onto a barstool and Scrim hands him a beer and they stand in silence for a moment, staring at the bodies.

Curry? Scrim says, eventually, and Ellis sips his pint and nods, smiles.

Oh yes.

11

Charlie

Wild service tree

There is a psychological phenomenon known as Dunning-Kruger – if you don’t know much, you think you know a lot because you don’t even bloody know what you don’t know, whereas if you know a lot, you think you don’t because you know there is so much you don’t know. Or, as my mum used to say, smart people think they’re dumb, dumb people think they’re smart. In most fields this is a bias to be aware of – in science and punk it is an absolute ballache. With the former a lot of imposter syndrome and burnout, with the latter it manifests as a lot of pricks who are only really into about five bands talking a lot about those five bands as if they matter, while the kids making zines and getting oral history of the last sixty years of the scene just think, oh shit, who am I to talk about this stuff, I don’t know anything. Imposter syndrome or overconfidence – pick your poison.

I worried about this for a long time because I worry about anything/everything. I worried I didn’t know enough of the old bands, or if I knew the bands I didn’t know the musicians, or if I knew the musicians I didn’t know their full history, or if I did, I mean, who was actually running the scene? The promoters, the techs, the production, the distribution. The scene isn’t just music, it is family, dynamics, relationships – community. You can end up getting the equivalent of a history degree about the Glasgow post-hardcore scene (1989–2007) and still feel like a moron because you didn’t know Malcolm from DESPAIR IS A CHOICE is the same dude who ended up drumming for TERRAFORM ME, DADDY. There is a nuance of sordid and boring and beautiful history in every scene in every town in the world. The goths in the machine shops in Ohio and the ravers in Auckland. And so, and so – create something new just so you can have ownership, or drown in the history.

Parker fixed this for me, because they are a total babe.

You’re a scientist, they said, when I was complaining about not knowing the bands, how I couldn’t keep up. Go do some science, they said. How many bands, per year? How many shows? How many cities? How many scenes? Do that shit you do when you don’t have data.

Interpolate? Extrapolate? I asked.

Make shit up, yeah, they said. Have a fucking think about it and realise that anyone who says they know anything past the end of their nose is probably an asshole, and anyone trying to quiz you on bands is some gatekeeping cockwomble. Fuck ’em. You aren’t out to impress anyone but me, and I’m already impressed, sugar.

This is relevant because a few days later in the morning we lie entwined and watch an episode of Flood Wall Coolangatta, brain chemistry slowly warming up, and with matching vibrations of our onyxes we both get invites to a gig and I don’t recognise any of the bands – RAT KING, CATTLE GRID, SUNFLOWER DANCER, MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED. It’s a gig being held in a cemetery in Stoke Newington, ostensibly to raise funds and awareness and something else and something else for the latest series of protests. I skim that part. Parker and Zoot went to the protest the afternoon after our Wet Market outing, but I cried off, claiming I needed to work. Parker’s frown was a sad one, and I almost broke.

The RAT KING gig is two weeks on a Thursday to get everyone ready for the protest. FRIDAY WILL BE THE BIG ONE, says the shoutout in the mail, and I chew my lip and think about how many BIG ONES I’ve been to so far. I’m twenty-six years old, and each year there is at least one that all the Greens get jazzed about, get all fluttery. This is the one that is going to make a difference. I delete the message. Parker next to me is wrinkling their nose at their onyx screen, one hand on my bare hip. Most of the scene is Green, so no matter how Black I feel, if I want to feel something from the music I need to get into the gigs, get pressed up against the speakers. Listen to the protest chat. If you don’t go to the protests, people notice. People have asked me, before. Work, I say, or, fuck off, I say. But I’m with Parker, and Parker marches and makes signs, Parker has a thermos half-full of mud to neutralise tear gas canisters – close, shake, finito. Parker is the real deal and so I get a pass.

I thought RAT KING broke up, Parker says, and I burrow my head into their shoulder and restart the show on the pad. It’s the episode we fell asleep to last night, and I don’t know what we missed but it doesn’t matter. We’ve both seen Flood Wall Coolangatta three times at least. It’s background noise, comforting characters and plot, romance, set pieces. There is no threat. I don’t know who decided to take a setting of climate collapse and pandemic and refugees and the overreach of state authority and make it an office sitcom, but it works. I can feel my brain settling at the soothing cadence of the backing music, the lilting antipodeans with their good teeth and terrifyingly wide eyes.

EMERGENCY MEETING OF UN SECURITY COUNCIL pops up on my onyx and so I flip it and squeeze it twice to shut off notifications. Ten seconds later Parker’s onyx buzzes and they check it, and Parker is drawn in and messaging about that gig so then I’m watching the show alone, and it’s not the same – co-operative vegetative states are something different, exalted. Alone it’s just masturbation but slower, meditation but shonkier. I went down a rabbit hole when I was an undergrad at neuro studies on brain activity patterns – meditation and trash shows are two sides of the same coin, dissociation outsourced to predictable tropes and a laugh-track.

I should work, I say, flat voiced, and I start to paw for clothes but Parker kicks free of me and is scrambling and dancing around the volcano lair stark naked, waving their onyx above them like a talisman.

Fuck, fuck, fucking FUCK! Charlie! Charlie! Rat King want US as support! RAT KING! US! HORSE THEORY! US! We’re the ‘more to be announced’!

They start dancing around the room chanting RAT KING, US! RAT KING, US! With each utterance of RAT KING, they throw their hands high, and the sun through the skylight catches on their skin, dances across the thick bands of crimson and intricate gold tattoos across their shoulders and wrists and I can’t help but grin. They shake their butt at me and howl at the sky, a full werewolf howl, woo woo awooOOOOOOOOOOOOO! And I realise I do recognise RAT KING. Parker made me a mix with a couple of their songs when we were first dating – they’re the werewolf band. Every gig, full costume.

Wait, are they still werewolves? I ask, and Parker leaps on me in full werewolf mode and so it is a long time before either of us can speak again.

We are taking the gig, right? I ask, and they bite their lip.

Oh shit, I already said yes, kid. I mean, its fucking RAT KING. Full werewolf. I have a tattoo of the glyph on their first album! The moon-rune!

Parker doesn’t have to do a fairly explicit pose to show me the tattooed glyph on their upper right thigh, but they do anyway and I bite the tattoo. It’s a strange little explosion of spikes, angular and runic but oddly organic – like a crescent moon with a fractal daze of sharpness over it.

I forgot that’s what that was, I say, and I kiss it gently and then not so gently and then we lose some time together.

I’m sweaty and pressed close to their chest. I can feel their pulse and my pulse, different rates, and I can’t tell which is which. I know I can feel both, I know one is me and one is Parker but I can’t untangle the rhythms.

Should we go meet the big hitters? they ask at last, and I am perfectly at peace and so I do not answer. But the lair is getting hot, I need to pee, and Parker’s leg is drumming. I pull myself free slowly, stretch up. Overhead, the snake mural looms and when I see it my stomach clenches.

Snake-charmer. Ellis smiling at me. Dr Walker convulsing on the floor of the lab as her blood frothed and boiled and coagulated. Chef’s face in the darkness. Mole’s fingertips delicate on the table top in Nathan’s office, the way her face caught the light, the viper pits.

Charlie?

I blink and I realise I’m just standing still, staring up at the snake. Parker comes to me and cups my chin in their hand.

Hey, kid, they say. Shoot the crocodile nearest the canoe, yeah?

I give their hand a squeeze, but there are a lot of crocodiles and the canoe feels small today and I don’t know how much ammunition we have.

While we get ready to meet the Heavy Crew, Parker puts on RAT KING’s first LP, WEREWOLF GIMMICK. They pull it on their onyx and push it to the amps in the corner, and then it is forty-five minutes of properly heavy shit.

Eleanor Ilk gave us the grid reference and the onyx number at the Wet Market, and we need to be up in Highgate by noon. I still don’t know how I feel about her – the Heavy Crew are notorious for their brutality, their iron-hard codes. Eleanor wants Medusa, wants the snake, wants my past. Do they really want the other things? Mole wants us to help her kill the Ghost, and I can’t fault that. The rest is a mystery, and presumably deliberately, enticingly so. Steal the flower, save the world. Perfectly pitched to pull at Parker’s dreams of making a difference, at Zoot’s quest for the big leagues.

I don’t know what to do, but we are in now. They know our names. They know our pasts, have seen our faces. I get dressed and I listen to the music, and think about the gig instead. It is easier to think about the gig, to think about set-lists, pedals. Fun. Life. RAT KING are a four-piece, bass guitar drums keyboard vocals shared. It is fast-paced, choppy surf punk but then it breaks into these little post-hardcore blast beats and breakdowns, undercut by deep synth like an earthquake in the distance. A proper melange, and all through it hallucinatory vocals muttered like incantations, like SLINT by way of THE MOUNTAIN GOATS with the occasional HERALD STAR roar thrown in.

The album ebbs and flows but is never less than high tempo, and by the time we’re both showered and dressed and eating toast over the sink I’m shaking my head over the final track – gang vocals by a choir of punks rising like a tidal wave, the same refrain looped over and over until it is a wall of noise. The album finishes and I chuck my toast crust in the direction of the sink, semi-successfully. The album starts again from the beginning.

How the fuck are we meant to support someone this good? I ask, and ask again twice, increasingly loud so Parker can hear. They grin and dial the volume down.

Kid, we absolutely shred. They asked for us. We do our shit, we do it high energy, and we do it looking sexy as hell. Yeah?

Yeah, I say, trying to believe it, but in truth we don’t even have a drummer. We are weird industrial synth-punk, with Parker’s poetry and screaming, and my bass as close to a firework display as I can make it. I’m still grimacing and listening when there is a triple slap on the door and it swings open and Zoot is there in the same clothes I saw him in yesterday when he came around for beers. He purses his lips and points to the amps.

Werewolf Gimmick? he asks, and Parker does their best shit-eating grin.

Well, gotta research for our support slot, they say, and then there is ten minutes of them both being very excited and I make us all coffee and focus on the music. The second time through I listen to the bass, focus on it. The basslines have a speed that is making my fingers itch. Relentless.

To get to the grid ref Eleanor gave us at the Wet Market we have to go in then out – London is like an insect’s vasculature, everything ebbs in and flows back out – not much side to side action, unless you want to sit on three fucking buses and take your whole day. Zoot suggests cycling but it is warm already and we have our gear with us – well, I have my portable biohacking-fuck-you-up kit, Parker has a switchblade and a paperback of poems by some long-dead sad person, and Zoot has his wrist screen and a little roll of screwdrivers and cables and memory cards and sticks with opaque function and no labelling. It fits in one pocket. Still. I don’t fancy it.

So we’re on the Overground and only one change to Highbury and Islington on spoofed IDs, facemasks pulled up as if the smog/pollen/bird flu was a worry, walking with shitty pseudo limps with our ID-matched insoles. Everything is run by the transport AIs, of course – no ticket inspectors, just linked systems tagging where you start and end, what you get up to in between. As soon as you get within a few hundred feet of a Tube station it’ll clock you (long before, if you are in Zone 1 where the infrastructure is more reliable). The London network AI is a doddery old fucker though, by now, and it abides by a rule that is easy to pay lip service to – if you are paying, it pretty much lets you do whatever you want. The mantra of the age, the free hand of the market waving cheerily as the water rises. Skip a fare or try and cheat it and the AI will track you to the ends of the earth, but we don’t do that. The spoofed IDs are linked to prepaid travel cards. Only commit one crime at a time, my dad used to say.

London flashes by us and I look north at the churches, little spikes of dead religion probing skyward like fingerbones through rubble. The Overground isn’t busy – we have a carriage mostly to ourselves. At Dalston a woman with a pram gets aboard and while Zoot and Parker are chatting away about whatever they chat about, I look at the baby. It’s a fat thing, wrinkled face and peering eyes. Of course people are still having babies, people are always still having babies. I’m young, and so I don’t know any people having babies. It’s hard to remember sometimes how narrow my experience of the city is, it feels like it has its tendrils so deep in me. I blink at the baby and it blinks back, but that might just be chance, and then the woman is feeding it something and it loses interest. Babies. I look north out the carriage window as we cut across the city, and chew my lip. My sister was only that size when she died, little Ellie, a fat lump of wrinkles. Antibiotic resistant infection. She was too little to fight it.

I don’t really remember much of her. What is there to remember? Flashes. I was three years older. I remember baths together, remember walking in the woods with her and my father and my mother. The rural idyll. As we get past Canonbury I give the baby another look, scrunch my nose at it. It doesn’t break into peals of laughter, or cry. It just looks at me solemnly and then pushes half a bruised banana into its mouth. I turn my gaze downward to my feet. Sometime before we get off, the baby leaves. I don’t know what Ellie would be like, today. She would be twenty-two years old, I think. I don’t know what she would look like. Would we be friends? All of it is too many unknowns. Perhaps with another anchor I would have stayed north, instead of heading into unknown territory after it all went to shit. I couldn’t face staying in the house alone, even if I could have afforded it.

We get off at Highbury and Islington station and then it is an hour and a quarter walk through boring tranches of housing and the same shops as everywhere else. Finally we reach Highgate Wood. This is fucking weird, Parker says, and I can’t disagree. It’s a forest in the middle of London, a proper dense forest. Hampstead and Highgate are still populated, not ghost boroughs or gang boroughs. There are fences all around the wood but none of it is maintained, all of it is overgrown with bramble and vine. Not many councils still sorting out things like path maintenance in local woodland, there just aren’t enough workers. We push our way through a press of branches and onto a somewhat well beaten path – dog walkers or whatever. It’s morning, the sun is shining, and I scuff my heels in the mulch and dirt and rub at my shoulders. I love forests, but it’s not who I am anymore. I’m not the kid running wild in the Scottish wilderness. I live in the city; I’ve been here a decade and barely left in that time.

This is part of the city, Zoot is saying, and I shiver. Alive, he says. It’s incredible.

Something in the bushes rustles and my hand goes to my gun and then a squirrel is there, grey and tattered. It runs up the trunk of a tree, and as I track it up I see the leaves, serrated soft lobes, and hidden among them acorns. An oak tree. I don’t think about it, don’t think about how I’m being kid Charlie and not urban Charlie, but I walk and press my palm up against the rough of the bark and close my eyes.

Every tree is a miracle, my dad used to say. Hundreds of bugs, bird nests, squirrel dreys! Whole ecosystems. Bacteria that only live on that one tree! And then you get down into the mulch, into the roots, well, Charlie, that’s where things get fun –

I open my eyes and he is gone, but I can hear his voice. Dad was into his mushrooms and his root systems. He was into all of it. I smile, my hand pressed hard against the bark, and I picture him in the forest down the lane from our house – not in his sickbed, not in the hospital. Not the bad things. Not after Ellie died and we were all broken, not after Mum died and it was just the two of us for those brief weeks before the bird flu got him too. I picture him in the forest, hand pressed against the bark of a tree, looking up into the branches above and watching the leaves dance. I tilt my head back and there is blue sky and green leaves and brown boughs and branches, and then infinite variations of green. This late in the year the tree should have no leaves left, perhaps, but we are not playing by the old rules. It is a new world. I stand and watch the leaves dance.

Eventually a pigeon takes flight from somewhere in the tangle above, and I grin. Good luck, lad, I say. I step away from the tree, and Zoot and Parker are waiting for me, Zoot grinning, Parker with a furrowed brow.

Thanks, I say, and Parker just nods but Zoot snorts.

You’re going Green, Charlie, he says. Proper Green. Tree-hugging Green. Parker’s gonna find themselves replaced by a nice BIG BRANCH.

Parker slaps him in the head, and we keep walking through the wood. The trees are widely spaced as we head deeper inside, and the noise of the city is lost completely. There is only the susurrus of branches and leaves, the sound of feet on dirt. Zoot glances around to be sure we are alone and then gestures off the path.

This way, he says. He is navigating using his onyx and the grid ref provided. We walk on, circumnavigating bushes and patches of mud.

Fucking Heavy Crew, Parker says, kicking a clump of dirt from their boot. Can’t just meet in, fucking, a Javapress, they say. Has to be drama.

I’ve seen Eleanor Ilk on wanted posters all over town, I say. They aren’t going to bloody Javapress, love.

Zoot holds a branch back for us, and then dials the number Eleanor gave us into the onyx.

Here, a voice calls, off to the left in the shrubbery, between two towering trees. (What are they? Broad spiked leaves, and clumps of brown berries dangling. They are beautiful – I do not know them. I want to use my onyx, take a picture and ask it what they are, but I hesitate. It is better not to know.) There is a creak and from behind a bush, Hull steps forward and raises a hand in greeting, then disappears back. We follow, one by one, into the shade.

Hull is wearing a tight T-shirt over impressive muscles. He has on wraparound sunglasses with presumably an augmented-reality display and they hide his gaze entirely. His face is utterly neutral. It’s strange seeing him in the daylight and not the darkness of the Wet Market. He looks ridiculous among the shrubbery, an entirely urban creature transported to a faerie woodland.

He takes a long moment looking us over and then steps aside and gestures for us to enter. He closes and locks the gate behind us, and then wordlessly strides downhill toward the house at the bottom of the long garden. We are at the edge of the wood – to our left and right, more houses, more gardens, all of them sloping downward and away from the hilltop crowned with trees. The garden is shielded with ten-foot fences and smaller trees lining every edge – I catch the glint of metal lining the fencetops on the inside, and recognise it with a twitch of my palm. Razorwire pulled taut, out of sight. Not a deterrent for thieves – for thieves you make your protection visible, show them the prey is not worth the hunt. This is heavy messing, the kind of thing you do when you know a hand over the fence at night could mean an ending.

This way, Hull says, and he leads the three of us down the garden.

Can’t shut him up, Parker whispers, loudly. Blah blah blah blather blah. In the long rectangle cossetted by the trees and fences, what was once perhaps a lawn is instead a tangle of wildflowers and long grass. Even in winter, still long – seasonal growth isn’t what it used to be. Parker clocks the house at the same time I do and I hear them sniff. At the bottom of the garden is a rich person’s house – three storeys of beautifully worked stone and wood with a clean glass and steel extension on the lower back half-jutting into the garden. I can make out figures through the glass in some kind of kitchen down there – Mole and Eleanor and one more.

God bless the rich, they’ll save us yet, Zoot says, his nose wrinkling as he gazes up at the house, and I smile. There is no reaction from Hull, not to any of it. He just keeps walking and guides us into the kitchen.

The room is one of those huge rooms people with lots of money or no money have. Either you have money and can afford to expand, or you have no money and you are living somewhere that was never meant to be a home – industrial spaces, forgotten attics. This is the former, the entire ground floor of the substantial house now one flowing space. The only delineations are a row of freestanding bookshelves turgid with paperbacks and zines and clutter – they cut the front room, full of chairs and sofas and rugs, off from the back room which is all tile and kitchen and tables. Eleanor waves a gentle hello. At her side, the Mole is sat on a stool at the kitchen counter drinking coffee, still in their heavy shades, still gloved. The third figure I’d seen from outside is a short man with a scruffy grey beard and a checked shirt straining at its buttons. He peers at us all, clearly nervous.

Good to see you all, Eleanor says, and gestures for us to join her at the dining table – it is huge, easily large enough to seat a dozen people, the whole thing made of dark wood supported by blackened metal. We go to sit, silent, and Parker takes their knife and book from their back pocket and sets them on the table before making themselves comfortable.

Coffee, tea? Eleanor asks, and I shake my head as Zoot says no and Parker says sure, sure, tea. I’ve never seen them turn down tea, except to avoid a lecture on community and safety from neighbour Agnes. Hull brings them a mug and they toast him, and the pile of muscles just sighs and takes a seat at the table. Mole and the nervous man come and join us, and we sit in silence, all looking at one another. Parker grins and drinks their tea loudly.

So, Eleanor says eventually.

So, Parker says. Kill the Ghost, steal a flower, save the world. Three jobs. Nathan sent me a message saying the down-payment has cleared – we are in your employ. What’s the work?

Eleanor tilts her head a little, smiling and appraising Parker, before settling her gaze on me.

What do you know about apomixis, Charlie? she asks, and I scrunch my nose.

What?

The nervous man tuts.

I told you, he says, but Eleanor waves him quiet. I close my eyes for a second and let my mind drift.

Hey, what the fuck— Parker starts, but I put a hand on their knee.

Apomixis, I say. Asexual reproduction with no fertilisation. Plant shit.

Plant shit! The nervous guy laughs. Oh god, Eleanor, this is going to be no good.

Hey, says Parker. You hired us, dipshit. How about you work on your manners a little? Three jobs. Kill John Birchley, CEO of AETOS DIOS, well respected pillar of the community who you say is some sort of mad criminal.

Walk us through it, I say, nodding in agreement. Walk us through it from start to end, each job. You said kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world. What does that look like? No tests. No leading questions. Just tell us the job, or we can go get a different job.

With Parker next to me I’m sitting straight, I’m making eye contact. I’m ten feet tall and these fuckers can’t touch me.

Zoot leans forward and raises a placating hand.

We’re all a bit overexcited, he says. New endeavours! Perhaps a summary, Eleanor? And we can work on the details?

Eleanor leans back and scratches at the VR port above her ear.

A summary, she says, and sighs. Fine. Fine. The Heavy Crew has a lot of operations. Some you hear about, others you never will. A thousand knives in the dark. You understand? You know the protest in a couple of weeks, the big one? We don’t work like that. There is no big job, no master plan. Just a thousand knives in the dark. We will save this world by attrition, bloody attrition. We will cut down every bad actor, and we will plant flowers on their graves. We are the horrifying shadow that seeps out when the mainstream won’t engage properly with our more acceptable peers.

My mouth is dry. Her eyes are electric, shining with fervour as she speaks. Eleanor Ilk has been doing this for decades, burning bright, and she is still on fire. We are in too deep here. Next to me Parker is vibrating with energy. This is what they want.

Three jobs, she continues, and she has the room in rapt attention. Not even Parker is interrupting.

John Birchley is a criminal. We want to kill him, but also to expose him. We need to get the files from his personal virtual office, his physical office. Whatever will show that he is the one the Postman hired for the NARATOS mole job. We already took down NARATOS – he is a loose thread that needs to be snipped. When we have that evidence, when his world is aflame around him, Mole will kill him. You will run support.

Mole taps her gloved fingertips on the table top, a heavy tap, and she smiles at us – I can’t see where her eyes are focused because of the heavy shades but fuck she is smiling at me, I know it, and I feel my whole body shiver. She is utterly gorgeous, poised. What the hell is that? Next to me Parker shifts their legs.

Second job, Eleanor says. Steal the flower. We have a plan, but in order to enact it we need to steal the full genetic reference for, well, for the dandelion, as well as some… tools.

I almost laugh in her face, but manage to hold it down.

I mean, I say, I can just… sequence one for you? I think I saw some in your garden.

No, the nervous man says, wringing his hands. No, you can’t. Not the ones we need.

I frown at him. So, who are you?

This is Dr Parry, Eleanor says. He works for us on a number of projects.

Saving the world? I ask, not without a tone, and Eleanor meets my eye and doesn’t smile.

Trying to, she says softly. Genetically engineered plants to capture carbon. Heard of the idea?

I shiver again, but mask it with a shrug. Tried it in the Twenties, I say, and mid-last century before easy engineering. Never took off.

Never took off because it was smothered! Parry says, face twisted, and I see a side of him. Not nervous. Burning, raging.

It was smothered by the d-reg, he says. Used to be all that research wasn’t open access, maybe some was. But most researchers could get hold, get what they needed if they had to. But after the d-reg they took it and siloed it, and the agricorps just hoard it now. Every scrap of research data pre and post d-reg is now owned by someone, and access is controlled. All the code, all the data, all the research locked away, untouchable.

You don’t want the sequence of a dandelion, I say, slowly. You want, what? Some old research on carbon capture with plants? Shit. That’s a bit vague.

Parry shakes his head and leans forward.

Not vague, he says. I saw it. I saw it. Decades of research – not just on dandelions, on whatever they wanted. From top level phenotype, leaf shape, seed distribution, right down to insecticide resistance, pest resistance, drought resistance, you name it. Right down to the molecular mechanisms of photosynthesis, tweaking the base level reactions for more efficiency! Imagine a plant where every blind alley and mistake evolution made was erased. No wasted energy, no wasted resource. Nothing but a hunger for sunlight, and photosynthesis. Optimising photosynthesis to maximise capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Promoting carbon flow from plant to soil by targeting root structure and maximising exudates. Promoting plant and microbe, microbe and microbe, soil and microbe interactions to stabilise the carbon that makes it into the soil! Nothing but capturing carbon and growing and spreading and dying and putting that carbon back in the ground. They did it. AGRAMIL. They bought up and hid away every bit of research on this from the public domain, they sued the shit out of anyone working on it from pirate copies and came down heavy.

Zoot leaned forward and scratched at the table top with his fingernail. So if it’s done, what happened?

Parry slumped back.

They made crops with higher yields, he said, voice hollow. They took all the carbon capture, all the efficiencies that were sweated over for decades by dozens of labs, and they put it into crops for greater yields. All the carbon capture elements are mothballed. The kelp modifications to make great fields in the sea. The dandelions… well. And nobody can access the research because they’ve bought it, siloed it, and had their AIs scrape the net and every source possible to erase it from the world. Decades of research, lab work, field work. They ate it all.

Fuck, Parker says. Fuck. Alright. So, steal a flower is actually steal a fuckton of data from a heavy agricorp? A big money big security big fuck you corpo?

Eleanor nods and we all sit in silence.

What about saving the world? Zoot asks, and Parry and Eleanor look at each other.

Charlie and I take the carbon capture tech and put it in dandelions, Parry says at last, and we spread them. And they start eating carbon.

I laugh at that and stand up from the table and go to the sink and pour a mug of water and drink it down. No bioweapons, no Ellis. No snake venom. Flowers. Flowers and ridiculous plans to eat carbon.

How many dandelions to offset a litre of petrol? I ask, grinning. Ridiculous, I’m thinking. A litre of petrol became the standard, twenty years back, when talking about offsetting. I feel sick again. Even if the plan were to work, dandelions are surely not the best choice. Rice? Kelp? Something you can grow vast fields of, that grows fast and dies fast.

It’s not about that, Eleanor says, and glances at Parry. He leans forward.

It’s proof of principle, he says. And it is tech security. We get the carbon capture toolset into dandelions and we spread them, we aren’t just spreading flowers. We are spreading mechanisms. Others can take them and put them into kelp, into whatever. Higher yield, bigger impact plants. We spread them ourselves, but AI can always scrape or flag that from the net if it finds it. We’ll spread the data hard-copy, as well, of course. But we need something they can’t kill, something resilient. We need a weed. It’s an archive, a living archive of research! We do this right and by the time AGRAMIL know what the plan was, any biologist worth their salt can pluck a flower and hold fifty years of aggregated carbon capture research in their hands. You understand? We decentralise. We disseminate. If their AIs scrape what we put out, they sure can’t get this.

I grip the water mug and chew my cheek. Fine. Fine. I can do this. It’s just a job. Parker and Zoot are looking at me, so I nod but I don’t meet their eyes.

So what next? Parker asks, and Eleanor shrugs.

I hired you, now you know the jobs, she says. Get me proof John Birchley worked with NARATOS on the Mole project. Get me the dandelion files and the carbon capture. When you have those, Charlie and Dr Parry can work on a prototype to seed out. That’s it.

That’s it, I say, and Eleanor stands and the rest follow her.

When you are going in, Hull will accompany for the AGRAMIL job and the AETOS DIOS job. Mole will stick with you full time until we are done. That work?

I look at Parker and they shrug at me, and Zoot blows out a long breath.

Is the babysitter necessary? he asks, and Eleanor smiles thinly.

You know where we live, Sukarno, she says, and Zoot narrows his eyes. You know where we live, and now you know four of our pretty faces. Yes, you will have a babysitter. Mole will make sure there are no regrettable changes of heart, though of course you know that we know everything we need to already. We are allies in the cause, but make no mistake – if you cross us, Mole will kill you. If you kill Mole, Hull will kill you. If you somehow manage to negate Mole and Hull and Dr Parry, and turn me in for the reward, well, whichever reward, then rest assured you will still die. This is not playtime.

It’s Zoot, Zoot says quietly. Zoot, not Sukarno.

Parker leans forward and locks eyes with Eleanor Ilk.

You call him that again and there will be consequences you don’t like, they say, and Eleanor just nods.

We all sit quietly and Mole smiles and leans forward and taps Zoot on the forearm.

I don’t eat much, hey? she says, and he manages a tight smile.

Sure, he says, and I see him pulling himself together, see the tight grin return to his face, the forced relaxation of hunched shoulders. Sure. We will make our plans and set it in motion. All will be done, mighty master.

He cuts a bow and Parker downs the end of their tea and we stand and go to leave, Mole trailing close to Parker, but Eleanor pulls me to one side and presses her head close to mine.

Charlie, she says, quiet in my ear. Charlie, would you consider talking about your work with Dr Walker? I think in the right hands it could do a lot of good, your Medusa. Fear is a potent tool.

I go cold, cold down to my core in a moment. Of course. Of course. Of course it couldn’t be flowers and robbery. I picture Dr Walker dying on the floor of her lab, and I turn and lock eyes with Eleanor and I lean in so close I can feel the heat of her breath.

Speak her name to me again, we’re done, I say. I find out you’re working with Ellis, we’re done. Flowers and robbery are what you paid for, and what you’re getting.

Eleanor leans back and appraises me, and slowly nods, and I follow Zoot and Parker out into the garden.

Nice fucking house, by the way, Parker calls back, but Eleanor just closes the door.

12

Mole

Mountains from etc etc

The first few days at the new mine are probably the best of Awa’s life. There is food, better food than she’s ever eaten, and it makes her sick the first night. They give it to the children slower after that. The porridge is rich. There’s fruit. Fresh fruit, wet fruit. Fruit she has no words for, no language. There are words in the tongue she speaks but it is not enough. It is all she can do to not gorge. All of them steal what they can. Hide it in new clothes and keep it clutched close under blankets. It takes a while before most realise that this amount of food will always be there. Perhaps. She never does. She always knows that things can change, after all. Her whole life was with Ibrahim on the mine and now she lives in a building with brick walls. A building with brick walls and a strong ceiling and when the desert winds come the sand pushes through every seam and crack, but it is so quiet, safe. Quiet, calm. There is not the violence; the violence of life before that was so quotidian. The lack of violence is what really shocks her. She is sure it must exist somewhere. If nowhere else, then back at the mine there will still be broken toes, broken legs, broken arms, cuts, bruises, gouges. Bleeding and screaming as people trapped in bodies trapped in hell try to wrench from the earth. How can that violence exist, and not touch them? She knows innately that it does, and it will.

The first procedure is the worst, and it comes after a month. They have been taking blood for many days, little pinpricks. Injections go in, blood comes out. Pills. Awa does not know what it means. The men do not answer questions when Moftah asks; Awa never asks questions. She sees the Ghost sometimes, the only man with skin like the moon. He’s talking to the other men, all of them so tall. Most of them unscarred, unbroken. When they aren’t talking, their mouths are closed and secret but when they speak, she can see their teeth – perfect white things, so strange. Awa does not understand their language. They speak to each other, and their teeth are beautiful.

Later, she will know what it is they did. Later, before she burns all of it to the ground. At that time, though, she was just a child. The first procedure – how to make a child a monster? Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Who could do this? Who would do this? This is something which she never satisfyingly discovers. There is never a moment in which she understands how the people who did this could do this. Or why the company did what it did, or one mad owner or leader of men who wanted this. This, the lack of why, it burns in her for many years. Why? The man who owned this mine was a man full of wealth who could have whatever woman or man or girl or boy he wanted, whatever pleasure or sin, whatever depth of depravity. Instead, he wanted to be a god. She does not understand. She did not understand. But that first procedure, it was the worst. They knocked her out with a little pill and when she woke, her blood was burning. This was the genetic change – a series of treatments, gene therapy going right down to the very marrow of who she was and breaking it and remaking it. Right to the core of what made her a human being, the instructions that made her be. Changed, after she already was. So what does that mean? Was she still Awa, then?

Was Awa a moment, or was Awa a process? Cut a fingernail, you are still you; cut a finger off, a hand off, a leg off, you are still you. Take your eyes, you are still you. She has sat with this thought experiment in the many nights since, whittling from outside down to core – when do you stop being you? Her final answer is the coldly rational materialist view of the self, the strange loop of consciousness. You are a brain, a pilot in a vessel of bone and blood and sinew. When you start to alter the pilot, you alter the self.

But then, all experience alters the brain, time itself, atrophy, growth, the very process of living. Was Awa a process? Mole does not know.

Afterwards, she was different, like all the others. Years later she would stare at the sky at night and think on what makes a human being. Speciation – when is a human not a human? Back after the first treatment she just knew that she was tired so often, despite all the food, despite the hard bed and the solid brick of the walls. Later, she understood that they changed the way her blood worked – how her metabolism worked. The fire at the heart of the core machinery that keeps you alive, that ticks and churns. She hurt. She was weak, feverish, and even though they fed her, even though she didn’t have to work, she cried in the night. All of the children were in one long room, but she did not learn names (tried to forget Moftah’s name though his face stayed with her, so serious). There were other children there by then as well, children from other mines, other worlds. Perhaps some did not come from mines at all. Where would they have come from, the desert? One of the befores the miners used to talk about. Other places, places without the violence. Awa did not speak to them. Every child wants a friend but Awa was not a child.

The second procedure is the worst, and it came after six weeks. Implantation of heat sensors on her cheeks. The rewiring of the nerves to reach them so that she might sense what they really mean, that rewiring burned through her so, so dreadfully. Microsurgeries and tiny nanotech trails from skin to brain. And then? The long growing of nerves back along those preprepared tracks. A little microsurgery, a fine microneedle, particles laced with just the right hormones and signals to encourage the nerves to grow just so. When the Heavy Crew explained it to her, when kindly Dr Parry read the files and told her the fullness of their invasions, there was awe writ across his face.

Imagine – from cheekbone, a pit dug. Behind it a hole bored through the bone into the ocular cavity so they can eventually grow nerves from the new sensor on the cheek through to where they wanted it to link into the optic nerve. Every inch was fire and flame and burning and screaming – she could smell it, the bone burned away with scalpels with an edge of laser. The week afterwards Awa was so sick. Later she has words for what is being planted, stem cells to grow, neural stem cells to grow along those. Carefully laid tracks of her own cells, grown, taken, cultured and put back into her to grow again. Perversions of herself, quisling bricks with no loyalty to their homeland.

The procedure works (for her – others die from infection, or whatever else; there are fewer children in the bunkroom, but she does not count children because she is not a child). The pits give her new sensation. She hates it – it is maddening, pain and fever and then worse and worse, and then she can see it, the heat all around her. Awa cannot describe it. As close as she ever manages is the sensation of standing too close to a fire, but only in those spots. That, and an endless itch.

The third procedure is the worst. The parabiotic implants called mulch bags. Little nutrient sacks grown from your own skin tissue, your own dermal tissue (your skin, soft and beautiful and wholly yours), creating an external organ that can be grafted. Normally to the stomach of, say, a coma patient. Kinder and easier to transport them with a mulch bag than with needles in and out and in and out. Here they are on the stomach of the little moles – somewhere it won’t impact your work too much. Your movement, the work of a mine(o)r is to claw. The stomach will be covered. Awa does not understand this at the time, but the mulch bags have little ports. The way they work is to have two sections. A first section which can be filled with a nutrient rich soup. Vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, everything a child needs to live. Everything a mole needs to live.

The second section slowly filters your blood, sensing whenever you need the energy, sensing whenever you need the sugar, sensing whenever you need nutrients. There is not much technology in here. Just biology. It is beautifully done. Any biologist who studied the system would be impressed – a vast improvement on the version used in field hospitals and for the sick. The Ghost, she will eventually discover, incorporated all manner of specialised cells, all of them harmoniously working together to ensure that what travels from the mulch bag to the child is exactly what is needed. And then you simply top it up once a week. No more bread and honey and fruit, for Awa. No more food. Just water, forever. She hates the mulch bag. It is her and it’s not her. It smells like her. It is wet and fat, and it is how she, in all her lack of experience, imagines a woman pregnant might feel. Later she realises how wrong this is. It is like a blister on her toe and Awa wants nothing more than to cut it. To drain it, to excise it and let it heal. But she knows better than to try.

Moftah tried. He tried so very hard, because he was a strong boy, and a wilful boy. After dinner (before the implantation had bedded in fully, one of the last halcyon days when they still had food), Moftah smuggled a little knife away up his sleeve below the cool, clean clothes in which they were all clad. Fresh. He took it back to the bunks and then he excused himself to the bathroom. The screaming was terrible. It turns out whoever engineered this (the Ghost) included an incredible amount of pain receptors. Now if you were to ask him, he would say this was for a simple reason. The pain was the way to protect an important piece of equipment – if you were to bash the mulch bag or graze it or nudge it, then having a strong pain response would help train you to avoid doing so.

But Awa understood, in the end. The Ghost is a bad man, and he understands his craft. As much as the pain could be a tool to help train the child, it was primarily to prevent sabotage of an expensive piece of equipment. When Moftah cut into the mulch sack he screamed and screamed in a way which she had never heard before. She had heard men screaming for death, screaming for their mother. She had heard children screaming when struck by rockfall or taken by devils. She had never heard anything like this. This was pain beyond normal biology. Pain overriding the pathways of pain itself. Pain overriding the pathways of evolution. A pain so utterly subsuming as to be breaking. Awa prodded her own mulch sack with tools soft and sharp. It hurt, so she slept, and she wept in the night so she did not show her tears in the daytime.

13

Charlie

Terraform me, Daddy

The question of why us dogs me, and leads to the inevitable memory of the audition that was not an audition, the job that was meant to be just another job. The drone job.

The gig came in through Nathan and we went there straight from a protest march. Climate action, etc etc. No more new drilling. Stop fracking, stop fucking about. It was a washout, summer storms cruising through and soaking everyone so the signs were ragged and the energy low. We didn’t even make it into Zone 1 – the AIs shut down the transport infrastructure and the cops blocked the streets. Zone 1 isn’t walled, not exactly – but there are enough motorways and fences, chokepoints and narrow streets that it only ever takes a few vans to send you where you don’t want to be – and all the while the London AI watching, collecting data, backtracking where you came from. It’s a mess. I hate the marches, but Parker had been pissy and so I had gone, and spent the day with aching feet and wet hair and a dose of depression.

By the time we got to Nathan’s that night I was feeling blacker than ever and even Parker and Zoot were despondent, and we were silent when we got to his office. Glum fuckers, Nathan called us, in welcome, and then he threw a map of east London from his onyx to his table.

An anonymous client wants theft and mayhem, and so I thought of you. Forty thousand pounds, a quarter upfront if you agree. Target is cargo of a mid-size drone; it’ll be passing over south-east London tomorrow night. What do you think?

Forty thousand? Zoot asked.

What’s the cargo? I asked.

Jesus, Nathan, you aren’t even going to offer us a beer? Parker asked.

Like that we were in. None of us said tomorrow night? That would have been a good question, the question a serious person would have asked. Less than twenty-four hours was a stupidly short timeline. The audition that wasn’t an audition – a standard corpo drone transporting scaffolds for growing bespoke livers, each one complete with all kinds of prebuilt biomechanical augments. The kind of thing that can change a poor sick bastard’s life if they could ever afford it. Nathan gave us bare bones info – box will have eight livers in it. Damage the livers, no payment. Delivery to a blind drop in Limehouse.

What if they just say the livers are damaged but they ain’t, and they stiff us? Parker asked, drinking the beer they guilted Nathan into giving them, and he waved them away.

I trust them, you trust me. So trust me.

It was fun. It was chaos. Twenty-four hours to plan a heist – drones don’t just fall out of the sky. They have security measures; they have flight plans and they check in to cell towers and net locations as they go. GPS on the drone, probably on the box. Anti-tampering mods like razorwire and shock packs to stop your standard thieves. Guards to stop interference with the rotors. On-ground corpo security response teams dotted across the city who can scramble to any downed craft. Cargo drones are strong fuckers as well – they might cruise gentle to be fuel efficient, but if the cargo is threatened they can peel out fast.

So how do you steal cargo from a drone? There are standard methods, which we eschewed because we are idiots.

The unorthodoxy of our approach is what means it will work, Parker said as they were duct-taping a net to a bamboo pole, and Zoot was elbow deep in the food delivery drone that he snatched from a balcony in Dalston as it went to deliver someone’s breakfast that morning. We got our breakfast from that as well, but it was fucking granola.

The audition that wasn’t an audition. We paid most of the upfront fee we got to some software noodle so he could get us the flight plan. Then as the drone was cutting over Greenwich Park at a meaty forty miles per hour at 1 a.m., Parker swooped our drone down with its tangle of nets for a controlled descent. The shitty little food drone with all its location capabilities ripped out so nothing could sense it up there, Parker guiding it by eye through VR goggles and then BLAM, no controlled descent but two drones and a cargo box and a net and some bamboo poles all spiralling down to the soft grass.

We threw the cargo drone into the back of a rental van (rented on an account Zoot skimmed the info for at the airport that morning from someone heading to a long-haul flight). I’m driving helter skelter through Woolwich as Zoot is screwdrivering or drilling or whatever Zoot does; the fucking drone is whizzing and rotors are spinning and then there are components being thrown from the window, and then we have eight livers in a cool box.

Easy. As auditions go, it highlighted our flexibility, our capacity to work at short notice with constrained resources, and the fact we are clearly fucking morons.

And so I know there is more than just the audition. Eleanor knows about the snakes, knows about my involvement with Medusa. She can have this information from only one source: Ellis. Which means it is a mess, all of it. It means it is not a job given by idealists to morons. It is a task set by a woman who has killed, and worse, for her cause, and she has leverage on us and wants us to know as much. Eleanor Ilk knows Zoot’s old name, which is none of her bloody business and makes me seethe. The drone wasn’t the audition – it was a part, at best. Perhaps so they had even more dirt over us. Was Mole sat in Greenwich Park, filming us? Was Hull the shadowed figure in the van at the blind drop?

In the end it doesn’t matter. Eleanor Ilk has us now, the Heavy Crew have their claws in, and we have to act or be damned regardless.

As we head home from our meeting, I stew. Eleanor Ilk. It isn’t her real name; nobody knows her real name. Nobody knows where she came from. Then two decades back, the Heavy Crew rose into the cultural consciousness. There were other names, code names, names of people now dead. Hers remained, over time. Eleanor Ilk, eco-terrorist, criminal, murderer. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

There is power in a name, my mother used to say, and she was right. She was always right. In the woods beyond the cottage we would name every place that cartography had overlooked, every burn, every landmark or fallen tree. There was a clootie tree deep in the pines where folk would tie rags and make their wishes – my mother never let me near it, but we named the place. The clootie grove. There was the seal cliff, the bracken maze. So many places, all with names. So many people, all with names. Mum holding my hand, Dad walking behind with Ellie on his back. Past the bracken maze to Old Sam’s farm, past Old Sam’s farm to the big road. It wasn’t real – they managed to get us so far from the world that we lived in a dream, but in the end the world came to us.

As we cross the city I try and bury myself in the weight of population – I look out and see every building full of life and people, even now (so close in to the centre even now – not at the etiolated edge where we cling).

Hey, Parker is saying, and Mole and Zoot are further up the train carriage from us. Hey, kid. You alright?

She called me snake-charmer, I say, and Parker kisses me. She asked me, Parker. She asked me for Medusa.

Parker presses their face into my hair and holds me close. She can fuck right off, kid, Parker says, and squeezes me tight.

If this works will you come home with me? I ask, and they murmur something into my hair but I can’t hear. I don’t need to hear to know the answer.

14

Ghost

Off-target effects

John has a swim before breakfast – as he glides through the water he listens to Avery’s dulcet summary of his inbox and Julio’s brief update on the German market report. He does his fifty lengths, as always, and then twenty minutes of gym work his trainer AI has programmed, a little different every day. He slept well last night, but the dinner meeting was at the new Malaysian restaurant in Mayfair and he definitely ate too much rendang, too much for his trainer AI at least. From his readings overnight, he did sleep well, certainly, but he could always sleep better.

First up is a meeting with the board over breakfast – so much so standard. Kanako is pushing for a rebrand in Japan, the ancient Greek name isn’t really resonating. John listens politely because Kanako is a shark, but he can feel his eye twitching a little. Of course they aren’t eating breakfast together. Kanako is in Japan, and there are board members spread around the world – Kamchatka, Belarus, the San Diego enclave. But it is a breakfast meeting for John, and he drinks his fresh grapefruit juice and eats the pancakes his chef has made for him. They are not very good, and he fires Julio a six-word message to get her upskilled or replaced.

AETOS DIOS is not just a name, he says at last. It is a mission. AETOS DIOS is the eagle of the gods – the eagle of Zeus himself.

John eats another bite of pancake and grimaces. He can see the faces of his board members and he reads fear in each one. Good.

The King Periphas was mighty, he says, and drew worship and zealotry close to that offered to the King of Gods himself. And so Zeus transformed him. Made him servile. The eagle of Zeus flies every day to the Caucasus mountains where he eats the liver of the thief, Prometheus – giver of fire. Each night Prometheus’ liver regrows, chained forever to his rock, and each day Periphas as eagle flies to him and rips it from him. So why are we AETOS DIOS?

John has taken the tone of kindly professor, but his smile does not reach his eyes and he is sure the holographic representation of him each of the board is viewing shows this detail. He is sure because he has practised his expressions in the virtual meeting software and recorded them and rewatched them, to make sure the nuance of his facial movements will translate – nuance of facial expression is very important in the telling of jokes, and the dominance of peons.

The board are silent, each waiting for another to jump on the hand grenade. Each has heard variations of this speech before. Each is afraid – normally he only does the AETOS DIOS speech before handing down some heavy proclamation that will, inevitably, mean more work and stress for them.

To remind us we must be humble as we seek to steal secrets from the gods, lest we face their wrath, Steven suggests. Steven is from Edinburgh, currently in San Diego, and John thinks Steven may be a useful idiot, but is, of course, an idiot.

No, he says, and waits.

We are not children, John, says Kanako. And John smiles and nods, because he respects Kanako. We are not children, John thinks, but he is including only himself and Kanako in this sentiment. The rest of the board are not really people, not in the same way. Like the boisterous cartel men, their dancing waitresses, like the mining magnates and the little waifs pulled from holes in the desert. Like the innumerable pedestrians clogging Zone 1 looking for art/food/culture, something beyond the struggle that is so pervasive in the real world outside of the centre of the city. Children, all of them.

We are the thief stealing knowledge, he says, cutting up his next pancake. But we are also the god on high. If any seek to steal from us, we will rip their livers from their living gut, and regrow them overnight. Forever. We are the thief, we are the god, we are the eagle. We are what we need to be.

Poetic, Steven says, and John mutes Steven’s microphone.

We can always rebrand regionally, John says, even though he doesn’t want to. He is bored, though. Send me through a marketing breakdown, and some suggestions. A nice parallel in Asian mythology, perhaps?

Kanako nods their head, and then that is that. The board all have slight tinges of bewilderment to their expressions, but John is so bored with the board. No more interesting business, just business.

When he slips off his headset, John throws the pancakes and the plate they were on into the waste bin by his desk and finishes his grapefruit juice.

Julio, he says, and fifteen seconds later Julio is there, screen in hand, thin glasses flickering with light as his eyes flit and sort through dozens of incoming messages and notes and calls. Julio stands still and waits, and John smiles at him.

A productive holiday, boss? he asks at last, and John nods and throws a slide from his wrist screen up to the wall viewer. It is a picture of John and the cartel bosses and the neurosurgeon drinking mezcal and smoking cigars as a pig lies asleep on an operating table before them, the corpse of the accountant thrown to the floor.

They made him eat his own corpse, John says grinning, and Julio nods and grimaces and flicks his eyes once more, scratches something on the screen with a little stylus.

Not great evidence to be floating around, boss.

John shrugs. He finds it harder and harder to care. Evidence of what? Photographs are so easily faked, even if someone accessed these he could just claim fakery and forgery, and find a dozen experts to pay to agree with him. Worst case scenario he might have to step back from the board. He turns to face out of the window – it is grey today, and the Thames is a choppy mess, thin gulls coasting over the dark water desperate for some scrap. Would that be so bad, to step back from the board? He seems to spend all of his time thinking about the Postman these days, and the custom jobs. The feeling is like back at the start when AETOS DIOS was just four of them, him and Katy and Mark and Joan – freeform experimentation, no limits, strange resources. What can you think of doing? If you could think it, they did it, in that shitty lab in Durham with the stinking sewage pipe in the back corner and never enough computing access, never enough anything. A decade before none of them would have been able to get lab space or funding, but after the ’38 plague there was space aplenty and a febrile influx of cash into biotech – there always was, after a good plague.

I want to speak to Arain and Ellis, he says, rising from his reverie. Bring both up and send her in first, with coffee. Julio grins as he ducks out – John knows he has been looking forward to Ellis’s eventual comeuppance.

He spends the time before Arain arrives fiddling with the latest red envelope from the Postman. John doesn’t know who they are – Julio has a connection who can send messages back, but there is never any real information from the top end. The money clears from nameless shell accounts, and the jobs are never with the same client twice. Who is the Postman, who is so well connected with the world’s tyrants and criminals and perverts? Who is the Postman to know that John of all people would be interested, would be willing?

He tried finding out, a few years back, and received a red letter hand delivered to his home, propped on the front door. A twelve second blip on the security cameras.

Please stop. And so John did. He had Julio ask around a little more, and the answer was always the same. Nobody knows, nobody will ever know. To seek is to be rebuffed, to continue seeking it to suddenly die in a car accident.

And so John stopped seeking.

Arain comes, and with her comes a tray of coffee. John smiles at Arain, because John likes Arain. Arain is smart, maybe almost as smart as John. Arain is inscrutable, unsociable, and rude to idiots – and she seems to think most people are idiots. She has a face tattoo crawling from her neck and ending at her left cheekbone, an intricate pattern of looping geometry. He has held himself back from asking about it every time they have spoken, and will not allow himself to ask Avery to figure out its significance. It is a test, between them. Eventually, she will tell him.

So tell me about the latest, he says, and John drinks his coffee and allows himself to be taken in. Experiments. Sample numbers. Analytical approaches and their benefits and limitations. Rival theories. Competition. Mistakes, not by her, of course, but mistakes are always made.

Are you lacking anything? he asks, and she thinks silently for a full five seconds.

I need more access to Avery, and potentially another liquid-handling robot on sixth. The research assistants are better used on the more nuanced work, they are wasting time on repetition and drudge.

John nods, waves a hand. Tell Julio and you have it.

She nods, tilts her head.

I need more information on the Taiwan data for the immortality project. The numbers are compelling but everything else is… scarce. Who are these samples from? Is there anything else you can give me?

John smiles at her, because what a well phrased question that was.

No, he says simply. You must work with what is already there. The samples and the data are from a reliable source, but the dataset will never be corroborated or expanded upon, and we can never have it linked to our analysis. It is what it is. Use it to inform your thinking, with the usual caveats. Yes?

She nods and he smiles reassuringly (he has practised this smile as well). He leans forward and delicately places down his saucer. Arain sips at her coffee and purses her lips expectantly, raises an eyebrow.

Hypothetically, if we were offered a custom research strand working, well, overseas, would you be interested? Limited time, high pressure work.

I have a full docket—

Arain, John says smiling but clenching his teeth, kindly, fuck the docket. We are speaking hypothetically, in italics. We are speaking of dreams and chances, and all that is in between. You love the work. There are… markets outside those that AETOS DIOS normally captures, that provide an element of our revenue stream, and a chance to acquire new data. Like the Taiwan data. Have you heard of the Postman?

Arain sits very still for a long time and meets his gaze and then nods. Her facial expression does not change, and her muscles do not tense. Her breathing does not perceptibly change. Oh, John does like Arain.

Think on it, he says, and then he sends her out. He pictures his next job, having an assistant. Someone to share the work with. Julio understands, and Julio facilitates, but Julio is not a scientist – he may have a PhD and all the usual, but in the end he cares about projects and efficiency, not the nuance of life. As Arain leaves, John sees Ellis sitting on a chair in the corridor outside, with his stupid schoolboy haircut and that permanent smirk. John leaves him outside for five minutes, re-reading the latest two red envelopes that Julio brought him this morning. A cloning job, someone wants a clone of their wife but with some rather strange alterations. The other is a rush job, someone wants help pushing back against an Ebola strain that is apparently targeting only a certain ethnic group. With that amount of specificity it is almost certainly engineered.

John throws the Ebola envelope in the wastepaper bin and then lights one of the very nice high-end matches Julio has left in his desk drawer – the wood of the match is bleached to a bone-white, and the heads are a striking and vibrant red, chunky granules of chemical clinging proudly. It strikes with a satisfying vibration, and then the red envelope is burning. John opens a window and the sound of gulls and water greets him. No way is he messing with Ebola – that’ll be days in a heavy-duty biohazard suit, and even if some biohacker keyed the Ebola to only hit one ethnic group, if there is one truth in bioengineering it is that there are always off-target effects.

Off-target effects – you want to change one thing, but something else is changed instead, or as well as. They can be harmless, they can be expected, or they can be catastrophic unknowns. The web of life is so intricately drawn, so many feedback mechanisms and self-perpetuating loops, so many layers of control and balance bludgeoned from chaos by the hammer of evolution – and as you strip back to those more innate and primal capacities, so the nuance fades and the impact of the effect grows. This is old Maslow’s hierarchy re- focused. John used to have a copy of Maslow’s hierarchy pinned to his desk, a pyramid with a wide base – physiological needs like air, food, water. Then a narrower level, safety and secur- ity. Upwards into nonsense and fluff like love and belonging and self-actualisation right there at the zenith, up where the Egyptians would have had a limestone cap shining white in the African sun, where the Aztecs would have their shrine full of human hearts (he thinks, it has been a while. Does he mean Incas? Does he mean… Mayans?)

Avery, was it Incas or Aztecs or Mayans who did the human sacrifice hearts on a pyramid thing?

John doesn’t like Maslow’s hierarchy, but the idea of the pyramid is easy to apply to all biology. Life wants to live – to do so, it needs food/air/water, energy and building blocks. This can take different forms, depending on the organism. But this means that evolutionarily, these things came early, long before nuanced adaptations to changing environments. The mechanisms that evolved in primordial soup are those with the most redundancy around them, layers of evolved protection to prevent a stray mutation sending everything the wrong way.

John, the Aztecs—

Shut up, Avery, he says aloud. I’m thinking.

And so off-target effects. You aim to do one thing, and the complexity of life is so utterly wonderful that almost always, you do another. John sighs, and stares at the water.

Ellis, he calls, and Ellis enters, annoyingly. John scratches at his chin and turns to the boy.

Morning, Dr Birchley! Ellis says, and John rolls his eyes.

Sit, he says, and then John also sits and pours himself a cup of coffee. He does not pour one for Ellis, sees the boy note this, and enjoys watching him computing how to react. There is a clean cup on the tray, and after a few seconds Ellis reaches and pours his own cup.

Katy thought you were a smart boy, Ellis, he says, and then he waits. Katy Walker – one of the co-founders of the company that preceded AETOS DIOS, a little start-up called HAWK AND TALON LABORATORIES that lasted all of a year before John left them. Katy Walker with her love of AI, and her love of reptiles, who died in a freak laboratory accident.

Ellis had used her memory unsubtly in his initial interview, but John had been curious enough to take the boy on. Another little mouse, he had thought, to run around and do my work.

And look what I found, he thinks. A baby snake.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, he says, we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe. Do you know who said that, Ellis?

He can see Ellis’s fingertip twitching almost invisibly, perhaps the slightest wobble in his throat as he subvocalises a question to his onyx. He can see Ellis see him seeing this, and stopping. The boy dips his head.

Can’t say I know it, sir. An interesting quote.

That was John Muir, an old environmentalist. But enough. We have much to discuss. Stop me when I start to bore you, John says, and then he throws the data Julio prepared at the wall screens. All of the wall screens – every surface in the office is covered in Julio’s report, even the ceiling. John doesn’t look at it, he looks at Ellis’s eyes, sees them dance.

Flit from grainy security footage of a man twitching on a barbershop floor in a pool of blood. Ambulances outside a pub. Footage of Ellis in the server room of AETOS DIOS unsupervised – where John now knows he was using stolen credentials to give himself back access to the AI Avery, including its significant suite of corporate add-ons. This allows for discretion to executives; namely, the removal of specific onyx tracking data from corporate zones and the removal of AI recognition records of corporate executives from security footage. That certainly made for illuminating reading on his flight back from Mexico.

Next to that footage, blown-up images of two fake corporate executive profiles, for Ellis and some gearhead – Scrimshank. John is still trying to decipher the meaning of the name. A scrimshawed shank, perhaps? A makeshift blade carved like an old whaler’s prize? That certainly intrigues him, as much as anything could on such a grey morning. Next to those profiles, still images of said same gearhead from the Metropolitan Police, in the form of a wanted poster.

Ellis looks at this, head turning ever so slightly, and John sips his coffee. It is a stringent, potent cup, beans grown in some underground hothouse in Richmond. They’ve done rather a good job, and John sends a note to Julio to order more.

Are the police here, sir?

No, John says, and with a wave the images disappear.

So, please tell me if I’m missing anything. Leveraging the memory of my departed colleague Dr Walker, you achieve employment at the mighty AETOS DIOS. With this in place, within a few months you engineer yourself backdoor access to Avery and his whole suite of executive functions. You complete your work with reasonable diligence and an uninspired workmanlike plodding, but I must say I now think you haven’t really been trying, Ellis. Not really giving it all, eh? Because from what I understand, you are on the black market, trying to sell something called Medusa. Strange bioweapons. Targeted supervenoms. So we are, to you, simply access to a nicely resourced research lab and a tame AI with the higher end suite of corporate workarounds to avoid consequence for, well, mishaps. Is this right, Ellis? Bioweapons and murder, mayhem? Care to explain? Presumably this is to fund an eventual lifestyle of lavish excess, or similar. Or some epic quest linked to your surely deeply interesting personal history.

Ellis drinks his coffee, and does not change his expression overtly but there is a coldness that draws across him. John has cameras in his office, of course, and in his lens – he snaps a quick shot of that moment. He wants to study it later. He has seen that change before.

Gently Ellis puts down his cup and spreads his hands.

Dr Walker told me that there was only one person she had ever met like me, and it was John Birchley. She said I was sick, and needed help. She said I was wrong about a lot of things, Dr Birchley, though she was never one to listen to my explanations. She was a tough mentor, was Dr Walker. She taught me a lot, in a way, though less than she thought.

John purses his lips and crosses his leg and leans back.

So, a freak lab accident?

So, Ellis says, a freak lab accident. And Medusa, the most beautiful expert system you ever did see.

Tell me, John says, and waits. Ellis leans in.

Venom design, with a huge training set. Every venom we could get our hands on, training data meticulously quality controlled. Not the usual scrape jobs done by AI. The wet-lab work was done in Dr Walker’s lab, so we have response from cellular to organismal level. We have screens showing different enzyme binding depending on the alterations we made. Venom is horribly complicated, as you know. Huge compounds, often evolved in competition with the defences of local prey. All of that, we have. The attack, the defence, the impact. Medusa allows the creation of custom venoms, any of the outcomes of any of the venoms you like combined, refined, hyper potent or slow and lingering. Potentially huge medical implications for some, of course. And, well. Standard targeting – encase it all, target with nanoparticles to the victim’s DNA. Aerosolise, and you—

John waves for him to be silent, and taps his fingers on his leg and nods, and in his gut he feels that same strange twist. It is not quite pleasure, not quite satisfaction. It is something though, something other than boredom. It is the same feeling he gets when the Postman sends a red envelope. John stands, goes to his desk and retrieves the red envelope there and returns to his seat and pours two cups of coffee. It is something other than boredom, other than pig livers for drugged out VR stars, skin and cell grafts for the withered old who refuse to die. It is the feeling when he works on the immortality project – the possibility to grab life by its very essence, and make it comply.

It is a bit of fun, at least.

I think we have a little to discuss, John says and he passes Ellis a coffee, and as Ellis takes the cup John knows where he has seen that coldness behind his eyes before – every morning in the mirror.

15

Charlie

Cooking for Chef

In the end there is a lot to be done before we can rob not one but two corpos – we need to kill the Ghost, steal the flower, and save the world, and at least two of those require heavy lifting and not just sitting with a laptop. This kind of shit needs heist level planning, so the next day back at the volcano lair we begin in earnest (after a night of very mild partying, while Mole retreated with her rucksack to one of the old offices at the back of the lair that have nothing in them). We dedicate a wall of the volcano lair to the plan – Zoot brings a bag to camp out as we prep. We do an old-school crazy wall plan – red bits of string and physical bits of paper (that Parker runs out and buys from somewhere with their half of the ZODIAC CODE money). Before we start I splash out a bit on a month’s subscription so I have access to query a tame AI through a service which in theory will have no trace of me – I still put the money into a burner account first and run the whole thing on a refurbed disposable pad instead of my onyx.

As well as the paper we have one whiteboard, on which I set up the jobs:

FIX CHEF

STEAL THE FLOWER

PROVE GHOST IS JOHN BIRCHLEY

KILL GHOST

ENGINEER FLOWER (SAVE WORLD?)

At the bottom of that I linger for a long moment – I’ve left a sixth of the board clear to write another job – deal with Ellis, THE WORST MAN IN THE WORLD. But that is personal business. So is fixing chef, but that isn’t optional – on the trip back from Highgate his messages upped in frequency again, with the manic edge and the swearing and the ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME energy that was starting to put my teeth on edge.

Okay, Parker says, and they go and fetch us each a beer. They offer one to Mole who shakes her head, stares through those dark glasses at our list.

Parker shrugs. Charlie, take a run at Chef, I’ll take AETOS DIOS and the Ghost, Zooty, you take AGRAMIL? No point thinking flower engineering ’til we know what tools we can get from the corpos, is that right, Charlie?

Yah, I say. Yah. I’ll ask Nathan if any of the flower stuff has leaked onto the web or is in any of the dark archives. If we can do it digitally instead of physically it would save a lot of risk. Cool. Cool cool cool cool cool.

Zoot and Parker both screw their faces up at me, and Zoot takes a long swig from his beer before collapsing back onto the broken sofa – the cushions are still mostly there, but the frame is broken from some party or another. High above us next to the snake mural a single fan is pushing the air around, and both Zoot and Parker are still just looking at me so I go to my desk and start rummaging. Mole is sat mute in a broken chair next to the amps and the HORSE THEORY gear.

Charlie, Zoot says, and I ignore him.

Charlie, Parker says, half-laughing, and I ignore them.

CHARLIE! They both yell together, and I turn red-faced.

What? I say. Fucking, what? We have work to do. Shall we do some work? More ZODIAC CODE mail for you as well, Parker.

Charlie, speak to us, Zoot says. Talk to us, kid. You are tense as a bag of, well, you’re tense. What’s up?

I run my hands through my mohawk and nod a few times and then gesture at the snake, at the whiteboard.

I don’t know if I can fix Chef, I say eventually, the words spitting out of my mouth in a rush. I don’t know if I can fix him. I need him to come here and give me some samples, I don’t know, I don’t know what I fucked up. And, beyond that, fucking Eleanor wants… well. I glance at Mole.

I gesture at the snake and Zoot’s face darkens. Mole is tapping at the arm of her chair.

Well shit, Zoot says, and I blow a raspberry.

Well shit exactly, Zoot my love. Eleanor wants Medusa.

We all stare up at the snake mural, gold and black against the red brick. Mole follows our gaze.

You want me to step out? she asks, and Zoot flashes her a grin.

Just ten minutes, Mole? Is that okay?

Mole shrugs and rises smoothly from the chair and stalks from the room, back to her office with her limp little sleeping bag. As she goes we all watch, and she does not look back.

Right, Zoot says slowly, eyes locked on Mole and then the door she disappeared through, and then he takes a sip from his beer and grimaces.

Before we talk about, uh, Eleanor. Snakes. Is anyone else… huh. Is it weird that the Mole is so hot?

Parker throws a cushion at him, which he dodges, and then raises their own beer.

Not wrong, Zoot, but yeah. It’s weird.

I’m not thinking about Mole. I’m staring at the snake mural. Zoot taps his foot.

Can’t you… we… can’t it just get deleted? It’s a computer system right, Medusa? Can’t we just magnetise the bitch? I don’t get why not.

I get my pad out and start sending Nathan a message, for something to do with my hands.

We can’t, Parker is saying. They are answering for me because I can’t trust my own voice right now. I fumble in my desk drawer for a wire that I don’t need and pretend not to hear.

We can’t delete because there is another copy, that Ellis has, Parker is saying, and in the drawer there is an old paperback book among the cables and I grip it and squeeze until the bones in my hand aches.

If for whatever reason he uses his, the only thing that might be able to counteract it is ours. And as long as we have ours he should leave Charlie alone. So unless Charlie can get his copy, and any copies of it, then she has to keep hers. Yeah? It’s leverage.

I let go of the book and find my beer and drink it and stare at the snake mural, and then blink and flick my eyes until Chef’s contact info is open.

Need samples for fix, I say. Come by this afternoon. We will fix but it will take time. Sorry.

The message is sent with another flick of my eye, and when I turn, Zoot is kneeling by the whiteboard with a pen.

DEAL WITH MEDUSA, it says beneath the other jobs.

Only way to get free of it, mate, he says, and he is looking at the board and isn’t smiling anymore.

You ever kill anyone, Zoot? I ask, and he laughs because of course he hasn’t. He’s Zoot. Never met a fight he couldn’t talk his way out of.

Time to work, I say, and Parker puts RAT KING’s third album on loud as hell – right before they press play, they look at me and point at the bass. Practise, later! they say. It isn’t a request – it’s a command.

So we work – HORSE THEORY and Zooty the wonder boy. Mole does not re-emerge from her office. We work all morning until there is a pounding on the door as Chef arrives.

I’ll do lunch, Parker says, and I see them go to the bedside table and get their switchblade and slip it into the back pocket of their jeans.

CHARLIE. Chef’s muddied voice seeps through the cheap door, and I twitch my eye and nod three times. Got to be done.

Zoot, get the door, I say, and while he does I’m prepping sample tubes. I’ve spent the last three hours on my pad and onyx, in the VR space throwing files around and looking at my code from the Chef job. My head is aching and there is also a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Longing. It was so easy to just sit in the chair in VR. It’s so easy to just be, not to worry about jobs and gigs and the heat and food and all of it. I could just dream.

I lost months to the VR when I went full Black before. My poison of choice was an immersive fantasy-sim. I didn’t even do the violent quests, the heroic narratives. I just lived in a stone cottage and read books, listened to the travelling players in the inn. We didn’t call it a game, never a game – we were living in the world of the Windsprung Spear. I’d read the novels, of course, when I was a kid. Now I could live there and I did. I never admitted to Parker but I even had a cheap mulch bag for a few weeks, a mulch bag and a catheter, emerging every three days to shit and shower and reload all the necessary. Others living in the world took it further, both physically and in terms of their commitment. I was always on the periphery, simply existing – but existing was about all I could manage in those days after Dr Walker died. Others truly lived there. They romanced, joked, sang songs, wrote and performed plays within the universe for an audience of die-hard escapees from reality.

Charlie, Zoot is saying, and I realise I’m sitting at my lab bench, staring at my VR goggles. It was so simple.

Hello, I say, and then I turn and make myself meet Chef’s eye. His face isn’t so red, but his jaw is still swollen and his gums bloody around his teeth when he opens his mouth. He is looming, awkward, eyes dark and wet.

Don’t speak if it hurts, I say, as quiet as I can. Parker, music down!

Parker yells something back and is dancing around the kitchen, cooking something. Eventually the music does turn down.

Chef is standing over me still, looking around the lair. He has been here before, when he came to ask for the augment. I don’t normally work on people I know, people from the scene. I work through forums and online dead drops, anonymous messages. I even got a job from the mysterious Postman once, a red envelope asking for a super weird little augment. The Postman is like biohacker Father Christmas – nobody can ever quite believe in him, but presents keep showing up and he seems to know who is naughty and who is nice.

Sit, I say, please, and they sit, but their eye is locked on the whiteboard. I grimace.

Parker, I say, and I jerk my head at the whiteboard. Parker has a carrot in each hand, both of them long and thin – some new variety that supposedly grows quicker. They look at the whiteboard, at me, at Chef, back at me, and shrug and go back to fiddling with carrots. I close my eyes and breathe deep and look up to see Chef smiling at me.

Don’t worry, he says. We’re still in the scene, Charlie. Party rules apply.

I nod my head and chew on my cheek, and get to sampling. Party rules – no snitching, no pigs, no corpos, and don’t be a cunt. The mantra of the scene. Chef is in the scene, and so he won’t snitch and he won’t tell, no matter what. Chef played rhythm guitar for a five-piece called BLOOD FARM SEVEN OVERLOAD who were pretty terrible, but partied hard. Since then he is at the shows and he is never trouble, but I’ve been at a party where he threw a scene kid through a window for assaulting some teenager, and another party where he was too drunk to stand but diced four onions in as much time as it takes me to get the skin off of one.

The samples are simple enough. I want his DNA, again. I want swabs from tongue tissue, buccal swabs from the inner cheek.

What went wrong? he asks, and I shake my head and start running the samples. Fucking sequencing! I need DNA but also methylation, the markers that sit on top of the DNA and change how it is read. I have a headache, and Parker and Zoot are frying something in the kitchen that smells like all our spices burning at once. For fuck’s sake. Chef sits patient. We weren’t friends before this. Same gigs, same parties, but I don’t know this dude. I don’t even know his name – he’s just Chef. He found out through someone who knew someone who knew Parker that I was into this stuff, and he shuffled up to me one day as I smoked outside a gig in Hackney Central.

Fucking shit, man, I say slowly as the sequencer starts up. I’m sorry. This was meant to be an easy one.

The samples are in the sequencer for amplification so I drink from my beer and then wince.

You want a beer? I say, and he nods so I run and fetch him a cold one. Parker is stirring at a pot.

Lunch in ten, they say, loud enough for Chef to hear. Hear that, Chef? But I don’t want to hear shit about my cooking!

Chef snorts, and I stand for a second and grip the countertop. He was going to kill me – I know he was. Weeks of messages. He wants his money back. He wants my money. He wants me dead.

Through the corner of my eye I catch him looking up at the snake mural with his doleful eyes. You fucked up, Charlie.

I give Chef his beer and we watch Parker cooking.

OR6A2 is the receptor I was fucking with, I say. Simple job – a variant in it that means you are sensitive to aldehydes. Chop out the variant, replace it with the standard. OR6A2 has, uh (I check) 1,373 base pairs – you know a base pair? A and T, G and C; 327 amino acids. You know what that is?

Chef shakes his head, because of course he doesn’t. Why the fuck would he? He knows how to make a good salsa. All my gene shit has always been irrelevant until now.

Doesn’t matter, I say. All that matters is you wanted your variant swapped for a different one. I wanted to do that just in your tongue, so I used a methylation signature specific to tongue tissue and bingo bango, targeted therapy….

Fuck. Is that it? I stare at the sampler. What signature did I use?

Bingo bango, Chef says, and I can hear anger in there through the mush. I can’t taste, Charlie. I can’t taste. Do you understand that?

I fucked up, I say. I’ll fix it. Hold on a sec—

I glance up into my lens and blink a few times and tap my onyx.

Just sent you the fee you gave me, same again from me for the trouble. I’ll fix it, Chef. I promise. It might take me a couple days but I’ll fix it. I will.

Fine, Charlie, he says, fine. Party rules. You need more from me now?

I shake my head and he lumbers to his feet and heads for the door, but stops as a wooden spoon bounces off his back.

Chef, you big fuck! Parker yells. I cook you fucking soup, and this is the thanks I get? Come have lunch. Charlie’ll fix it. And you need to hear about the RAT KING show!

Chef turns ponderously and looks at Parker, scrawny Parker holding a pan of soup the size of their torso.

RAT KING broke up, he says, and Parker sniffs and slams down the pan and points at the battered dining table.

Take a seat, you big wank of a diplodocus, they say. Because you’re wrong, and this is good soup.

It is not good soup. Parker has the tastebuds of a child, and so they have overseasoned everything with paprika and chilli flakes. We don’t even have any bread. Chef manages half a bowl and then mumbles his excuses and leaves, and the rest of us sit at the table staring at the hot bowls of orange. He can’t taste anything, but I could see him wincing with every mouthful. He must be in agony.

It’s nice, I say, and Zoot giggles and pushes his away.

What? Parker asks, and he just shakes his head.

Watching my figure, he says.

Mole emerges from the back office and drifts to the kitchen, staring through her shades. Parker smiles up at her.

Soup, Mole?

Mole comes closer, unsmiling, and takes the proffered bowl gently in her gloved hands.

Thank you.

She retreats.

Fucking, weird, Parker says. Is she going to chill out at some point and not just fucking loom?

She can’t loom, she’s not tall enough to loom, I say, and Parker throws a spoon at me. I cough and set down my spoon.

What we got then, criminal masterminds? I ask, mainly so I don’t have to eat more soup, and Zoot jumps on the lifeline with both hands.

ACTION! he shouts, and leaps from the table and runs to grab his pad and a projector. We have one wall cleaned and white for projecting, and it takes only a minute to close the few shutters that were open. Soon we are in the dark and I am devotedly still eating soup as Zoot gives his presentation. Mole has reappeared holding her bowl. It is empty, but I think there is a sink in the back office so she might just be smarter than Zoot and me.

AGRAMIL! Zoot says, and up on the wall flashes a picture of a three-storey building of glass and steel rising from what look like fenlands and marshes. Behind the building, stretching off into the distance, are miles of what look like white canopies or tarpaulins.

Standard agricorp dickheads, he says. What you aren’t seeing is the big fucking fence in front of this, and the miles of fields behind it with these weird white barn things. Presumably where they grow their shit. Their flagship is ‘one-meal rice’, which is rice with all the usual GMO stuff, and also some additional protein and nutrients so that in theory you can live off of it and it alone. So much so standard.

Okay, I say. Rice nerds. Cool. I can get behind that. Why the fuck do they have dandelion toolkits in their vault?

Zoot nods and flips to another slide, this one showing a still image from what looks like a press conference being held in what must be the lobby of the steel and glass building.

Weren’t always about rice, he says. And when the d-reg happened and all that shit was being bought up, they bulk bought a lot of different toolkits. Nathan get back to you on that?

I blink up and there is a message from Nathan confirming the request, but no full answer.

Nothing yet, I say, but unlikely to get a result. Most of the pre-’38 stuff got siloed by corpos. To prevent domestic terrorism, of course.

I smile at that, and Zoot and Parker smile back. Mole sniffs, and then settles back in her seat and gestures at Zoot to continue, and all of us are silent for a beat until Zoot coughs. Mole has the capacity to entirely rattle even Zoot with simply a sniff.

Right. Uh. Well that is a lot. Sooooo I had the AI scrape what it could, he says. We have fingerprint and probably iris ID on the entryways, which are manned 24/7. Neighbouring farmers complaining of noise from the all-night security patrols annoying livestock in local paper, so fields also a fucking nightmare. Barns full of fuck knows what, building full of absolutely anything but likely full of camera/audio, probably guard dogs, probably lots of security assholes with guns, and then inside all that we are looking for is a toolkit that is likely stored in an archive or a central server. Am I missing anything?

He keeps scrolling through pictures – guards, executives in old-style suits. Images of the AGRAMIL company town, purpose built on reclaimed land in the flooded fens for their workers to live laugh love.

Is that a helipad on the roof? I ask, and Parker is instantly next to me.

Sick! they say, and I immediately have to say woah no no no no.

We have to assume they are monitoring airspace with drones, Zoot says, and I shrug.

It’s a lot of airspace. Maybe not, I say. All their shit is under cover in these big barns anyway. Which, if they are doing research, must have access to the central system, right?

Parker looks at me like I’m speaking French.

I don’t know, mate, they shrug. I just break stuff.

The AI has scraped a rough site plan from some promotional materials the architects of the site put out ten years back, and Zoot overlays it with a topographic map.

Security is nothing we can’t handle, Zoot says. I have a solution that should get us access, chaos, and egress, easy peasy.

Norfolk? I ask when I finally realise where we are looking on a map.

Norfolk, he says.

Norfolk! Parker yells.

Norfolk, Mole says, tasting the word.

They catch us it’ll be domestic terrorism, Zoot says, and I just shrug.

Fuck if I care if they want some bullshit definition of terrorism, I say. Kill civilians to spread terror, you’re a terrorist. Anything else, if they call you that they are just trying to use some nice powers with as little oversight as possible. This is activism. Sabotage at best. Eco-stupidity. Robbery. Anyway, they catch us, we are fucked regardless.

Parker takes my soup from me and goes to the kitchen and throws a chocolate bar from their stash at my head.

I wasn’t finished, I say, and they laugh. Zoot zooms in on the press release picture he is showing.

Mole stands and prowls like a cat and settles on the chair over by the HORSE THEORY gear, on the periphery of us.

They will call it terrorism because you will be caught working with a proscribed organisation, she says. The Heavy Crew are wanted by Interpol. British Government. EU. UN. WHO. Many acronyms. And, to be clear. We have done much terrorism. We have killed to spread terror. To show terror. We have identified bad actors and we have killed them with no jurisprudence, no due legal rights. We are not, emphatically, doing things the way they should ideally be done. What right do we have, to do this violence? Ask yourself that. We have the right of a creature backed into a corner, water rising on one side, fire raging on another. Such a creature does not look to law. All of us have made the conscious choice to act beyond our rights. Direct action, strength imposing our will upon the world. We say it is in competition with others who do the same. Tech, energy, pharma, bio, state – if the law served the people, they would not be able to do as they do, and we would act within it. This is our choice. You must be clear that if you choose this, they will come for you with all they have.

All so exciting, I say, and I eat half my chocolate bar.

Even your Greens do not like us, Mole continues, and she laces her fingers together and leans forward. Every action we take of terror, brutality, they argue it bolsters the arguments of our enemies for more power, more oppression. They seek to change things with peace. Democracy. Social movements, economic pressure.

I take another bite of my chocolate bar and wrinkle my nose. I don’t want to talk about direct action versus democracy. I don’t want to talk about the failed protests, the endless laws and perversions of the state bending backward to protect profit. Profit over people, profit over planet. I don’t go to the marches and I don’t want to think of the slogans. I eat my chocolate, and Zoot blows out a breath. Mole leans back.

Parker, anything? I ask, desperate to move on.

Parker stands and takes a bow.

Did you think I made special celebratory soup for nothing?

With long strides, they dramatically make their way to the whiteboard, and circle in red PROVE GHOST IS JOHN BIRCHLEY, then another circle around KILL GHOST, and a final circle around DEAL WITH MEDUSA. With a striking line, they link the three circles.

Ellis, formerly of Cambridge, formerly of Nottingham, originally of Suffolk, is a rising star in the R&D department of custom biohealth pioneers AETOS DIOS, CEO and founder being one John Birchley, AKA the Ghost. The worst guy in the world has gone to work for possibly a worse guy in the world. So in addition to trying to sell fucking bioweapons to Nathan or through Nathan, your best mate of old is working cheek by jowl with the Mole engineer himself. So we can set our murder-mole on a whole heap of dick-weasels in one fell swoop. How’s that, Charlie? That anything?

I sit down on the floor and stare at the whiteboard and blow out a laugh, bare my chocolate-slathered teeth in a grin or a snarl or something in between. Yeah, babe, I say. Yeah, that’s anything.

16

Scrimshank

Augmented criminality

Scrimshank pushes thick shades with pulsing light frames off his face and squints in the darkness. Youfuckingwhat? Mate? Repeat, robobuddy. Repeat.

Avery responds calmly, as ever. The robot has taken lodging. It says it leaves when he asks but whenever he addresses it a question, subvocalised, it responds instantly. He tried with his onyx turned off and it still responded so what the fuck does that mean?

Scrimshank, Avery says, police are on their way to your location. The City AI tripped when you passed into Zone 1: your profile has been raised. Car theft, and a string of others. Murder. I can’t shield you inside Zone 1 anymore – someone has stripped your corporate status and I’m being monitored.

Shit, Scrim says, and kicks an empty can into the canal. He’s just east of Camden and he is meant to be meeting beautiful Cass quicksharp for a quickie before they hit the night.

Shit, robot. I was gonna get laid. I was gonna party. What do I do?

Scrim is turning left and right up the canal. Homeless dude (not cool homeless, like, stink homeless) camped out by the bridge to the left, three ravers in neon skirts to the right. No sign of cops. Stagnant water with a slick of oil and shit, used condom, empty tins and bottles. Dead swan.

You need to get out of Zone 1 fast, Scrimshank. Can you run?

Avery is calm, Avery is always calm. Ever since the pub murders the AI is just there. What was before a little buzz in his onyx, Cousin Ellis’s little helper pointing him in the right direction and making sure he didn’t foul up. Now it’s there, listening and chatting back.

And doing a pretty fucking good job, actually. Three times now it’s dodged him from cop patrols, bouncing Scrim past the bobbies with no drama.

Alright, Scrim says, and he sprints past the ravers. They scatter and he leers at one as he goes through, squints in the way that activates the LEDs in his eyes, and gets a good buzz from the spook on their faces. Even snaps a little photo with the lens with a quick double blink. Cute.

Left, says Avery, and Scrim isn’t complaining or questioning tonight. Robot advises, Scrim can take the advice. He runs up a side alley and then he is out from the canal and Camden is heaving. No sirens. Music pounding from twenty different shops, restaurants, stallholders still holding out. Camden has clung on to its shabby sense of self as much as anywhere else – so not much. Chain shops and corpo fronts, but the Zone 1 teens need somewhere to rebel and the music is still happening if you have the right hook-up.

Scrimshaw dashes two streets until he is among the night crowd at the market – it’s early but it’s winter so it is dark as all hell, and in Camden Scrim stands out maybe 90 per cent less than anywhere else in London, but he is still the tallest, most cut/jacked/handsome/sexy motherfucker in town and he is wearing a purple leather trench over shitkickers and lycra trousers. He looks rad. He looks conspicuous.

Scrim stops for a breath and scans the crowd.

No cops, robot, he says. You sure?

A second later there is a flicker in his lens and it draws his gaze – there. Between a kebab shop and a glitz shirt stand selling ponchos with sexy succubi all over them. There are three cops in their silly little bobby outfits, retro dome hats and garish blue and yellow, stab vests shaped like pecs and six pack like a kids’ Halloween costume. Two chicks and a dude, all of them in the standard Zone 1 kit out – pistols and stuncheons (thick rubber truncheons with shock studs jutting out at the end).

Avery, he says, you are a good dude, for a robot.

The cops are through the crowd and there is an organic reaction. Crowds in London can tell when shit is about to go down. A couple of people start filming on onyxes. More will be tracking on lenses, but Scrim sees one of the cops spin up a box at their belt.

You there, Avery? He says it aloud, and there is no response. Full block.

Steven Scrimshaw, the first cop says, and the two others are stepping slow to either side. You’re wanted in connection to the murder of Paul Karan, six counts of corporate theft, thirty-two counts of antisocial behaviour. On behalf of the City of London, you are under arrest. Do you have anything to say?

This is theatre – they will have guns, and the stuncheons. They will have a drone somewhere nearby scanning him and saying in their speakers if it picks up the knife in his boot. They will be assessing potential alleyways and escape routes. They’ll have backup on speed dial, for a violent criminal like good old Scrim.

Scrim shrugs out of his trenchcoat and smiles and flexes – he has a thin short-sleeved mesh shirt on to show off the muscles and the tatts. No Cass with the car running, no Ellis priming things with Avery, no Avery at all. Just Scrimshaw, three cops, and a gawping mishmash of teens showing a lot of skin, a lot of metal through ears/nose/brows/lips. There is some spicy music overriding the rest and he starts to groove.

Scrimshaw, lead cop says, stepping forward, and Scrim grooves and faces the sky for one long moment. Clouds, red lights on cranes, dancing advertisements scrawling across the higher blocks.

I don’t know who Paul Karan is, he says, dropping his gaze to meet the cops, but I know no bobby’s gonna slow me down. You like speed, kids?

With that they dart for him but Scrimshank is the fastest cat in town. He springs toward the smallest of the lot, spins past her stuncheon, and sends her sprawling with an elbow to the head. From there it is forward motion – he doesn’t look back. He runs through the crowd and it is three hundred yards easy to the bridge (chase me, boys, chase me, girls, can’t catch Scrim!). Up to the bridge and he leaps the barrier down to the canal, a ten-foot drop but he has his heavy shitkickers and he is the most athletic beast this city has seen and so he is fine, pretty much. Manages a cool roll, even. The physicality of hands on railings, shitkickers slamming towpath. It’s beautiful.

They’ll block the canal, Avery is saying – Scrim must have gotten past the block.

Yeah, no shit, robot, he says, and keeps running. Quick glance back as the guy cop slams into the towpath behind him – nowhere near as graceful as Scrim, of course.

I’m too fast, baby! he yells, and throws the guys double Vs as well. Then he is up and going and he follows his nose. A hundred feet, a corner, a hundred feet. Always the stagnant canal next to him, fetid and hot and reeking. Yelling behind and then three hundred feet ahead at the next bend, three more bobbies.

Fucker! he yells, and with a wrench throws himself right and starts scrambling at the fence of the nearest house. Top of it is all anti-climb paint and spikes, but this isn’t fucking baby school – Scrim knows how to grip the fence just so, knows where to take the cuts. Fewer tendons outside of your arms, shoulders. Roll awkward but better than slicing open your palms.

Arms pissing blood he crashes into a garden and wishes he hadn’t ditched the leather coat – nothing like a leather coat to get you over a fence. He sprints the back garden and shoulder- checks the door and then he is in, some rich house full of boring shit.

Bobbies are running the canal, Avery says, and Scrim clenches his jaw. Call Cass.

Scrim, baby—

CassyougottagetouttaZone1babe, Scrim says, and pauses for a second to grab breath. No noise in this rich house.

You alright, babe? Sweet?

Focus, Avery says. I’ve sent her a message telling her to get a ride ready to roll three streets north. Straight shot from there to the expressway at Holloway out of Zone 1. You need to focus, Scrimshank.

Scrim claws at his jaw and punches a statue thingy in the rich house. Naked chick made of stone with no head. Good tits, though. It hurts his hand a fucking lot.

Avery, you robo-cuck piece of piss, you fucking computer, don’t you ever cut off dear Cass again, you hear?

They know you are here. Three are forcing the garden gate (fuck! Scrim didn’t see a gate! Blood spilling down split arms). One is out front, she is approaching the door.

Good robot, Scrim subvocalises, and then he ninja-steps to the front door like he is a kung-fu assassin, because he is a kung-fu assassin.

She only has her stuncheon out, Avery is saying, and Scrim is smiling. He always wanted a stuncheon.

The front door is a pull so he waits for her hand to be on the handle and then yarks it full heavy back, and while she is off balance he bullrushes her (like a big boy with horns, not a fluffy boy in a reedbed). The cop tumbles down the front stone steps and her dumb hat falls off, and Scrim gives a wail and does a leap, coming down both knees on her chest. Hard to land well with that, but yes, sir, she feels the impact good and she is wheezing and then he has the stuncheon, scoops it. It is heavy, the thick plastic covering a core of metal and electricity.

Fucking cool! he says, and jabs her with it. She groans and tries to raise an arm, but there is no zap.

Avery! he says, no zap!

Scrim gives the cop a good kicking as he waits for a response.

Thumb stud on the handle, click three times to activate – pommel will go green.

Scrim is kicking and clicking in time, kickclick one, kickclick two, kickclick three, and he is about to ask what in the tits is a pommel but the bottom of the truncheon lights up green and he reaches down. Only skin on show is face or hands, and he doesn’t want to zap the cop’s brains totally out (because, he has noticed during the bullrush flying knee jab kick kick kicking, she is kind of cute). He stabs the stuncheon down, pinning her hand between it and the pavement, and there is a crackle and she is screaming.

Yes!

They are in the garden, Scrimshank, Avery says, and he takes off at a sprint.

Left, right, through an alley, up one more. Avery is with him and makes him pause for sixty seconds behind a wall and then three cop bikes wrench past doing big numbers on the speedos, no sirens, all action.

I like you, robot, he says, and then they are running together and he sees Cass looking fine as all hell in the driver seat of a little blue number.

Stuncheons have trackers, Avery says. Not easy to get rid of.

Scrim doesn’t stop running, but his face falls. With a grandiose fling he sends the stuncheon spinning into the deserted street, and then he is in the car and Cass is punching it, one hand on the wheel and one in his mouth.

You did good, baby, she says, and he sucks on her fingers and feels the buzz of the powder all over them, special number 2.

Avery, he says, and he sits back and grabs his dick because he misses his stuncheon. Avery, make a note that I want a stuncheon. And get us the FUCK out of here.

Cass cranks the music but he can still hear Avery in his skull, calm, melodic. Like the voice in a euthanasia clinic.

Noted, Scrimshank. I’ve pulled some strings – you’ve got green lights to Tottenham.

Next to him Cass starts laughing and she puts the foot down hard, and London blurs.

17

Charlie

Steal the flower

This is a dumb plan, Hull says, and it’s the first time he has spoken in the three hours we’ve been driving from London out on the raised motorway past Cambridge, up to the edge of where the sea is eating the land west of Norwich. The fens past Cambridge are full to bursting after the autumn and winter storms and it feels as if we are driving into the sea itself. Odd trees and solitary houses stand stark amid the dark water, and my vision is blocked for miles at a stretch by dikes holding back the endless brine to our north. Cambridge is fine, of course – sea level rise is insidious, though. Every year another field, another flood. The rivers burst their banks more often than not, hence dikes and raised motorway sections for when the arable land is aquatic. The Dutch are rich as rich can be – they took their centuries of expertise in holding back the unstoppable, marketed and sold it to the highest bidders.

Negativity is not the thing tonight, muscles, says Parker, and I give them a kiss. We are in the back of the van but both pressing close to the front seats so we can see through the window. Zoot is driving and all of us are dressed in green jumpsuits branded with EAST ANGLIA WATER on the back, except Parker who is in black lycra and looking ninja as all hell. Mole is sat next to me and Parker in the back of the van, cleaning a gun. Our shoulders press together when Zoot corners too sharply – she is a tense, solid creature.

Remind me again how this can possibly work? Hull asks, and Zoot blows a raspberry and slams his boot down to overtake some million-year-old sexless lich in a little yellow electric Fiat. The van we are in is stolen and the plates are fake and on the side EAST ANGLIA WATER is writ high in blue, paint still a bit wet. It shouldn’t rain though, if the cheery weather AI is to be believed. We still have maybe half an hour of sunlight to go.

Just do your job, big man, Zoot says. After we arrive, you’re the driver. Things get squirrely, you get us out.

Zoot is nervous – AGRAMIL is his job, the same way AETOS DIOS is Parker’s. In the back of the van I squat down next to Parker and together we check their kit. Drill-bits and pipeworks, a small patch explosive, a sealed vial wrapped in film and bagged and bagged and bagged again, layer after layer of sealant. I can just make out a hazy brown liquid in it, perhaps only a few spoonfuls.

Sure about this? I ask. Parker just grins. It’s a stupid, stupid plan.

I have a sudden image of Parker broken-legged, dragged into a van by six corpos with rifles. Could I live with that? No.

Hey, kid, they say, and they grab my face. Calm yourself. I’ll be fine. It’s your standard Wednesday night in the fens, right? We won’t die tonight – we’re supporting RAT KING next week.

Fucking dumb, I say, and they just snigger and kiss me.

Don’t worry, they say, and they gently stroke the duffel bag with the gear. Don’t worry, love. Packed my egg sandwiches.

They kiss me once more and then we are a half-mile from the site so Zoot swerves to the side of the road and Parker hops out. I grab their hand as I pass them their gear and then with a smile they are gone, a two-legged jump straight over the motorway barrier to the soft verge beyond that slopes swiftly down to the watery fens, duffel bag clutched to their chest. I jump back in the van and we coast on, driving past the AGRAMIL turn-off. I can see the edge of the site – it is similar to how I imagined, and as Zoot said, there is a big fuck-off fence with razorwire and electrics. We pull up at the side of the road a mile past, Zoot turning the van to point back toward our destination and Parker. I stare at the side of the van and bite my lip.

We could just play shows, make money from ZODIAC CODE (another three orders today, including someone who wanted the full package analysis, the custom crystals to be sent accompanying the report – stupid money). We could go to Agnes’s house for tea and a lecture about the importance of urban gardening. Go to parties. Walk in the marshes. Why are we doing this? We don’t need money. I don’t believe in the Heavy Crew’s promises of salvation. I picture Parker’s face exultant in the Wet Market, the concentration as Eleanor spoke in her Highgate hideaway, the sheer joy in them as we planned this. I press my fingers into my thigh and dig my fingertips in until the muscle aches.

I don’t believe, but Parker does.

Dumb, Hull says again after a few minutes of quiet, and I roll my eyes at him even though he can’t see me.

Peace, Mole says, and I check my old-school digital watch – I ordered a multipack for one-hour drone delivery the night before, and we each have one to go with basic screen bracelets that aren’t linked to any network. Our own screens and onyxes are sat back at the volcano lair, linked to a simple program called BABY’S FIRST ALIBI Zoot squared us when we first started taking jobs – the program will nudge the onyxes and screens to send a few messages, watch some TV, do some online shopping, stream some pornography – all the things that could be evidence of us being there, and not here. London, not some wet swamp of a place (and as I think it I know that is me trying to be urban Charlie, not the Charlie who would be smelling the wet air and watching flocks of geese cutting across the sky in the dying light with reverence, the way Dad taught me, not the Charlie who would be wondering what my mum would name that place where the ragged fen trees dip their fronds thirstily in brackish water).

Our watches are synchronised, and we are keeping our eyes on the horizon – Parker has a single firework and a pack of waterproof matches, our abort signal. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only the darkness, a sudden plummet into true night. There are auras on the horizon, suburbs and villages – land this close to the coast is cheap now, and largely deregulated for use so it is companies and company towns. The older towns are abandoned – far safer to stay in a company town where corpo security can keep out gangs, where you know everyone has the right vaccination record. Like Zone 1 or Canary Wharf, but applied to the English village.

You love each other a great deal, Mole says to me in the back of the van, quiet enough that Zoot and Hull won’t hear. I have never seen anyone quite so… together. Do you never argue?

Mole relaxes and I feel her relaxing, her shoulder against mine. She has been with us all these long days of planning, with her tight little smiles and her long silences, eyes behind sunglasses, always looking at something. I breathe out.

Parker is the sun, I say, and I don’t elaborate, and Mole simply nods. I pause. Is it right to ask? I don’t know what they did to her, don’t know her past, not really.

Do you have anyone? I ask, and in the darkness Mole tips her head back until it gently rests on the side of the van.

Eleanor is my mother, she says, still just as quiet, just as silent. Hull is my brother. I have… I have friends. I have had more. I do not have more now. It is not a life for connection that lasts. Do you understand?

In the darkness I reach my hand down and take her gloved hand in mine and hold it gently.

Nothing lasts, I say.

We sit in the darkness, occasionally the wash of headlights dancing through the windshield. We sit and we sit and we sit. Eventually I hear Zoot drumming his fingers. Zoot is not one for sitting.

What’s Hull like? Zoot asks, and Hull shrugs. He is still wearing his sunglasses in the dark, presumably because, I am beginning to realise, he is a bit of a prick.

Wet, Hull says, and I nod to myself because this is confirmation that he is, indeed, a bit of a prick – anyone who can’t chat with Zoot must have a chip on their shoulder. My watch beeps.

Time, I say, and I let go of Mole’s hand and we gun it. Zoot gives a battle cry and with burning rubber and a squeal we are en route, fast as can be. The first entrance to AGRAMIL is a gate with a little guard shed, and Zoot slams on the brakes hard enough to stop us smashing into the gates, just. Two guards are getting out and yelling already but Zoot is already moving from the van, clipboard in hand.

We gotta turn it off! he is yelling, and the guards don’t raise their guns but do raise their hands.

Hey there, sir, you can’t drive here like—

Have you drunk the water? Zoot asks, breaking in. Have you drunk the water? Has it hit? God, man, run the tap!

What? says one, and his assistant echoes him and then turns to a shoulder radio. Calling for his boss.

Chemical leak upstream of your supply, Zoot says, and now his gaze is turned in past the fence, past the office building, to the rows of fields, and the looming white barns (barn is not enough – these are huge, arks, tombs, these are the great pyramids but in steel and white paint).

What you fucking talking… what… oh god!

The smell hits us all at once – it is impossible to say what direction it comes from. Smell is not the right word for this. This is an assault.

I open my mouth to swear but then I’m retching and Hull is too, and from the back of the van we pull respirators but it is too late – the stink is already in. Oh fuck fuck fuck. We are fucked. This is beyond anything I imagined. Why the hell didn’t we put the respirators on as we were driving up?!

Sulphur, but not like an egg sandwich, or a quaint medicinal spring. The shit Parker is right now adding drop by drop to the upstream water supply is thioacetone. I hate chemistry, but sometimes you see the value. Thioacetone is a sulphur kind of thing, but it is to sulphur what a tiger trapped in cage with you is to a cartoon picture of a house cat. Same general vibe (is a cat) but different level of impact (mauled to death vs a smile). Thioacetone will stink you out, will stink everything out. I had Nathan get one of the tame chemists the drug guys have in the Wet Market whip up a vial, with the instruction to whip up said vial not in the Wet Market and actually a long fucking way from anywhere. Had to pay the guy a chunk extra afterwards when he kept complaining we ruined his clothes.

All of us are spitting and retching. I’m spitting into my own gas mask (dumb) and my eyes are streaming. One of the guards is on his knees vomiting, the other shaking and coughing.

Zoot’s eyes are streaming and he grabs the night shift guard and waves at the van, waves at his chest and the EAST ANGLIA WATER logo.

Got to get to your water supplies now! he yells. Got to shut it all down! Get everyone moving. What’s most valuable? You’re an agricultural concern, right? We need to get to the server room and shut down all your water!

The guard says something about AI, but he is nodding and radioing and then the gate boom is lifting and we edge forward, Zoot jumping into the front seat. Hull removes his mask to vomit out of the window and then pulls it back down – his shades are gone and his eyes are black pits in the darkness.

Just drive, I say, and then I start the timer on the watch. Four minutes to backup guards at the front gate. Twelve minutes to nearest police, cut that to ten if they escalate this as terror or corporate espionage – but a few seconds and a few hundred yards in we pull up in front of the office and Zoot is talking fast and calm to the guard. The stink is the same even through the mask, and it is all I can do to stay standing. Everything feels blurry and I’m weeping. Fuck. Should do no permanent harm, I think. Should do nothing too heavy – just stink. All powerful egg sandwiches. In the back of the panel van I start tearing off my coveralls, pulling them down over my boots. Next to me Mole is doing the same.

Just get the AI to shut down all incoming water, Zoot is saying. Temporary. Your reservoirs should be unaffected.

As he is speaking, negotiating, calming, steps are set in motion.

Scenes – me ripping off my gas mask and slipping from the back of the van with an AGRAMIL security cap pulled low, Mole next to me, as close to a match to their uniform as we could proxy from the drive-by Zoot did yesterday. Gripping a torch the length of my forearm, ready to shine it not-quite in the eyes of anyone who questions me. The ID badge on my chest is just an old library card with a fake name, Mole’s is a printout of a random security badge template from the net.

Scenes – guards yelling, puking, fainting. Hull sat implacable in the van with his face hidden by his gas mask. Zoot talking calmly to a guard with more of a paunch than the rest, saying over and over, shut down the water.

Scenes – in some corpo company town in the fens where AGRAMIL cuts your lawn (and there are no weeds, no dandelions sprouting) and AGRAMIL keeps out this year’s plague and does your laundry and you work for it, you stay loyal, onyxes and screens are buzzing and beeping and clamouring for their masters’ attentions – chief of security, chief of R&D, etc etc. We have minutes before they are here. And so we are fast.

It is a minute jog to the nearest white barn, and Mole and I tag behind a crew of four security running from the main building, slipping into their wake – there are glances back but everyone’s eyes are streaming. We had to ditch the gas masks back in the van, and the dizziness is hitting but I can still jog, can still breathe. I ate six ginger biscuits on the drive up to fight the nausea and I haven’t puked yet, but our sixsome of wholesome security skid to a stop for a second as one of the uniforms chunders across the manicured pathway.

Oh god, they say, and then they are on their knees and another goes to support them and then they are puking too.

We need to secure the labs, the leader says, and his eyes are on the nearest white barn. I step efficiently to his side and then there are only two of them and me and Mole, the others left retching into the flowers lining the path and cursing. The stink is getting worse, worse, worse, a thick clag in my throat and it seems to be clinging to my eyes. Fuck. I heard about thioacetone from a chemist I used to drink with back in the lab days – his boss told him it as an anecdote, the time they stunk out the whole chemistry building on the old campus. My buddy had never smelled it but his prof still got a wild look in his eyes whenever it was mentioned.

We did a field test in some scrubland east of Leyton where a superstore used to be, extracted a single drop from our vial. In the test it was the worst smell any of us had ever experienced, and we were gagging for hours and Parker and I spent most of the night in the shower and not in the fun way.

This is so much worse. How much did Parker add to the water supply? The weird thing with thioacetone that I can’t quite get the chemistry of is that it actually smells worse when you dilute it down – the same volume of chemical in a larger volume of water smells even more stringent/pungent/kick in the teeth. Until it suddenly doesn’t, until that volatility burns through. That is the nature of volatility – the capacity to react is the capacity to be destroyed, made inert. We can save ourselves through inaction, but only for so long.

What I am smelling in the AGRAMIL campus is worse, far worse, a thousand times worse and now I’m feeling a hot kick in my chest – my old friend anxiety. Too much of this stuff and you can panic yourself into a faint. Too much of any stress and you can overdrive your body to exhaustion or near death. It’s only later that the self-preservation kicks in, that things shut down and heal and wait. In emergencies, the body will rip itself apart to save the whole.

I am thinking of this as I run in the dark with my torch on, as we approach metal doors. I am thinking of this because Parker is alone in the dark with a vial of thioacetone and if they faint facedown in the fenland wetness, they will drown, alone. Fuck. Mole is next to me and she grips my arm tight, her grip a vice, fingertips beneath gloves strong and unyielding. I must look bad, for her to be shoring me up like this.

The white barn looms over us – steel pillars and crossbeams painted white with huge rivets, rivets the size of eyes. The ma-terial stretched tight between the beams is some sort of fabric, a white treated canvas pulled utterly taut – in the darkness it eclipses us, and there are no plants at its edge – there is a respectful boundary of five feet to the nearest path and verge, five feet of loose gravel.

I try not to think about Zoot and Hull getting tasered and thrown into a cell on a corpo black site. No laws on corpo land, they can do what they need to do to protect their IP – that kind of enhanced freedom is the kind of incentive the government offer to try and bring the corpos here. Come to England, they say. Where you can do what you like in the darkness, as long as you bring profits in the light. To the right of the main door there is a fingerprint sensing touchpad with a keycode (of course) and a swipe card (obviously) and a retina scan (naturally). The security team leader does all of these in turn – he has to try the retina thrice because his eyes are streaming so badly from the stink. As the doors open he hawks and spits. The smell is still everywhere, omnipresent. It is like eating too much wasabi – not in pain or flavour, but in the all-consuming sensation. It is brighter inside the barn, strong lights around the doorway itself blazing. As the metal swings open he steps in and then glances back at me and the other security bod and his gaze lingers on my face, on Mole. She has taken her sunglasses off but the viper-pits look like acne scars, perhaps freckles in this light.

I swing my torch up fast into his eyes and quickstep past him into the darkness. The room beyond is huge – some sort of labs or offices to the right, but a low open space ahead – fields? It is too dark to make out much, only the thin knife of my torchlight cutting through the black.

You there! the lead calls, and so I pause and turn and blind him again with the torch in my left hand, my right hand slipping to the bumbag in the small of my back and gripping the handle of my gift from Parker. An early Valentine’s day gift, they told me before we left. A Mutt. Nonlethal. Don’t hesitate, babe. Point and click.

I’ll check the offices, if you get the fields, sir? I say, and the security holds a hand to his eyes to block the glare of my torch.

Torch down, you fucking spanner! I’m not a sir. The sir is puking his ring out outside.

I lower the torch a fraction. I don’t know you. I’m Thomson, this is Passey. Are you two new?

Behind them Mole is standing, waiting, every muscle coiled and taut. Her face is wet with tears and mucus.

Thomson gestures to the other man, a slim dude with a goatee and wide eyes, torch held under his pistol – the beam of his light slices great arcs across the field, jittering and sweeping.

Walsh, I say, and Thomson nods.

Walsh, you hold the door with this one. He gestures back at Mole. This is a chemical leak, but protocol calls for a sweep for intruders – Passey and I will check the fields and the labs. You stay here, right? Hold on a moment.

Thomson hawks and spits again and runs to a unit of metal shelves next to a decontamination shower, and is back with four respirators with face masks.

Chem unit will be here in ten, he says, tossing one mask to Mole and then another mask toward me. I almost fumble it because my hand is still gripping the handle of the Mutt but I let go and snag the mask, hold the torch between my knees and pull it on and breathe, breathe, breathe, holy shit.

Holy shit, it is getting better.

These masks are incredible, a proper face seal and isolated nose/mouth inputs. The air tastes of chemicals (what chemicals, Charlie?! Fuck if I know. CHEMISTRY IS BORING). I can still taste the sulphur bomb, still feel it in my pores and down my throat and in my sinuses, but after a dozen breaths it is starting to fade and with it my eyes are clearing.

Which means their eyes are clearing. Thomson and Passey are having similar moments of relief, and Thomson turns to look at his assistant. Both now have pistols out in one hand and torches in the other, both dressed in white and tall and strong. Thomson swings his torch in a controlled arc and I can see the interior of the barn properly for the first time – glass-walled labs line the left of the building, full of familiar fume-hoods, liquid nitrogen storage units, heavy-duty freezers and centrifuges. Past the labs a small office with a dozen desks with screens and chairs and VR headsets lined up neatly – no personal effects.

The rest of the room is made up by a vast field of raised beds – each one is perhaps six foot by six foot, and there are hundreds of them. There are flags with colours and numbers. Between and through all of this, walkways of metal, and machinery. Simple robots that are even now watering, tending. One humanoid robot is gently removing a sapling from a bed and placing it into a small pot. The work never stops here.

Where are the lights? Passey is asking. His voice is muffled by the mask, and he is pointing his gun at the robot with the sapling. Thomson waves a hand dismissively and holsters his weapon.

Day night cycle, he says. Not worth our jobs to turn on the—

Thomson stops speaking because Mole hits him in the base of the skull with a spanner, and then she is on his back, riding him to the floor and hitting once, twice, thrice. Thomson drops to his knees and groans, clawing at Mole on his back as she wraps her forearm around his neck and squeezes.

Passey startles at the noise and turns. Hey! What the fuck was… What the fuck are you doing? Hey! Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh—

I shoot him with the Mutt.

A word on the wonders of the Mutt (and why Parker is the best lover/bandmate/co-conspirator/confidante there could be). I have my pistol – gunpowder explodes, slug of metal forced down barrel, hits dude. You can add all kinds of stuff, but that is the essence. The Mutt is not that. The Mutt was once banned almost everywhere, largely only in use under the control of the state by things like cops, corpos, criminals. The three Cs of asshole. It has seen a resurgence in recent years since the great d-reg and the pistol firearm reforms. It is shaped like a pistol, and it does shoot a slug – but it’s an old-school beanbag, the kind they used to shoot with shotguns against protestors before they switched to live rounds.

It’s called a Mutt because its bite is worse than its bark. It looks like a toy gun and sounds like an indiscrete fart. The one Parker got me (presumably from Nathan) has been sprayed black, and looks just like a regular gun – but this way I don’t have to have nightmares about blowing the head off some random security guy, who may be a corpo, but is still, well, just a human being.

Passey didn’t see my raised gun, could only see my torch as he ran in to help extricate his boss from Mole’s crazed assault. The beanbag catches him in the spine and he drops to the floor and gives a yell, and then I put another beanbag square at his head. He turns into it as I fire and it cracks the faceplate of his gas mask, and he hits the deck. Mole pulls herself to her feet, and on the floor Thomson is groaning.

She waves at me and points at him and I wince but level the gun. Another round, another soft thunk and the beanbag spins out and catches him in the gut. The kickback is huge, and the gas cylinder each shot uses to power it is ejected to the side. He sprawls and Mole runs back to him, kicks guns from twitching and still hands. From my bumbag I pull two injector pens and flip off the caps and jab deep into thighs, not worried about trousers getting in the way. Intramuscular ketamine, enough to take them on a real nice trip.

I turn and run for the nearest lab computer. Behind me Mole is gathering the spent gas canisters into her pockets, and has snatched an ID badge and a gun. The corpo AI might have seen what just happened – there are cameras everywhere. Can it make out the gunfire? How good are their cameras in the research lab? If it alerts security, we’re done. It certainly will in just a few moments.

The thing about engineering is that sometimes big stuff is hard. Small tricky questions are intriguing, sure, but big, simple stuff? That is hard. Stuff like, water – a place like this needs water for fields (presumably pre-treated from their own reservoir). It also needs water to cool servers, especially if they have a core AI keeping things running which, of course, they do. AIs run hot. This AI will be a collection of expert systems under one governing mind, a not quite general intelligence (true AI is still not here, despite the last century of next decade promises). These AIs always have a governing idea, a core tenet to override all others. In the case of an agricorp AI? Protect the research.

And so, how do you protect the research in an institute if your core servers are having water supply issues? You have backup water supply, of course you do. But for how long? How do you ensure your data is safe? You have cloud storage (of course) and local storage (of course).

And then you have your failsafe. You have a server separate to the rest, where you can dump the latest research files when a crisis hits. A server not connected to any external network, a server with one connection only – to the daddy AI.

How do we know this? We spoke to Nathan, and had a quiet evening meeting in his office with a junior researcher at AGRAMIL who we paid a few thousand pounds. In return, a cocktail napkin with a map. It’s not in the office, he said, because any corpo espionage would look in the office. Besides, it’s one of like twenty backups.

And so I run to the lab and open the glass doors and three steps ahead of me on the left is a black metal case, with a solid green LED and a blinking yellow LED. One power cable, one heavy data connection cable. I stare at the blinking light and I count. How long? How far down the priorities are archival research papers and tools? Far down. How long have we been in?

I look at my watch. It’s been six minutes. I wait thirty more seconds, foot tapping, Mutt in my hand. It has two rounds left. In the distance I hear shouting, and always the rasp of my breath in the gas mask.

Time! Mole calls.

Fuck it.

I pull the cable, power then data, and pry the case from the server. From my bumbag I grab the weird foil-like bag Zoot gave me. From the server I take the part – it looks like the picture Zoot showed me. I’m not a gearhead. I like squishy things that bite and sting.

I yank what should be the memory of the thing, a shiny bit of plastic and metal, and stick it in the foil bag and then I’m up and moving. Not running.

Backup of the backup of the backup just blipped off. Security doing something funny there. I can tell the AI will be whirring, thinking, messaging. Will be tracking. Every camera will track our steps, every algorithm try to predict what we do next – move backward to find us emerging from the van, tell security to apprehend those naughty pseudo water engineers.

All of this will happen, unless there is a distraction big enough – something to refocus the AI and move us down the priority list. As I step from the barn, the first firework explodes – a thundercrack of red sparks and black smoke back toward the centre of the compound. I start to jog, and there is another explosion. High above us, the drone we modded, stealthing and up-gearing it for the liver scaffold job, has arrived. This will be its final glory. Rigged to it, a frame with forty-five fireworks, including a pre-set display box lashed into place with duct tape and wire.

Another firework, another. The drone is heading north, toward the fields, and it is firing its payload down. Everyone is yelling at the central building, teams of security jumping into carts and pristine 4x4s, cars arriving and leaving, men in suits – all of them with streaming eyes, spitting, some rocking on the ground covered in vomit. I get to the back of the van and then Mole’s hand is on my arm guiding me in and the door is shut.

Got it! I yell, and I hunker down low as I can get as Hull leans out of the front window.

Patrick! he yells, HQ on the phone – urgent update!

Zoot extricates himself from the two suits yelling at him. I can’t smell anything but chemicals in my rebreather, and then the door slams.

Got to go pick up the boss. We’ll be back in twenty minutes. We are meeting a team upstream.

The suits are yelling but Hull doesn’t wait. He spins out and as we approach the gate the guards let us leave with a wave. Nobody ever checks IDs on the way out.

We take a left and head north to pick up Parker and switch vans, and Zoot is hanging his head out the window and staring back and I can see fireworks reflected in the faceplate of his goggles.

Jesusfuckingchrist, Hull says. Jesusfuckingchrist, you lot are mad.

And in the back of the van I’m breathing deep and saying fuuuuuuuuuuuck, and next to me Mole laughs and shows all her teeth.

18

Mole

King Richard and the Ghost

The fourth procedure was the worst. They did all of the surgeries at once, and Awa was gone. There were enough children that this happened over a series of weeks – one child per day. They did not return the moles to the children in the bunkhouse (for after this final transformation this is what they were, what they were called – moles, ayezkal, khalad).

The last phalanges of each digit removed and replaced – each fingertip with a chisel tip, each thumb with a small hammerhead. All of these in surgical titanium, screwed into the middle bones and then the skin grafted back over them, stretched taut around the edges. If you look at a diagram of where the nerves are most densely clustered on a human being, the model is a strange homunculus with distended lips and eyes and fingers and toes and genitalia. In Eleanor’s house in Highgate there is just such a model on a shelf of books of anatomy, biology, ecology. The size of each body part enlarged to match the density of its sensation. Later, Awa will read these books and she will stare at this model. It will be a talisman to her of sorts, a representation of what humanity is – sensation. What are we but input and analysis and decision and output? Remove any one of these, and what is left?

The lips and eyes, the fingers and toes and nose and genitals. These are the points at which we interact with the world, where the outside sends stimulus and we receive. Later Awa dreams of sensations she will never feel. She awakes from fevered visions of her fingertips tracing soft sheets of cotton in a spring dawn, but those sensations are a lie. Later with the Heavy Crew in the swaying belly of a commandeered oil tanker she sleeps on a bunk and the rough cotton of the bedsheets is a joy, a thrill, a quiet moment in the darkness for her and her alone – this is just after kind Dr Parry has used the ship’s 3D printer to make her little sheaths for her chisels and hammers. Long before then she learned to sleep with her hands still and her fingertips far from her face. She can pretend in that bunk that she is whole, and only numb. She can pull rough cotton over skin and imagine feeling it just a little more – all of this is later, though.

All of the surgeries at once – it was Awa’s destruction, a fire through which she passed and was destroyed. There were cybernetic eye implants, nothing biological. These were fairly standard, just the usual sight augmentation – electrode arrays implanted on the retina linked to sensors embedded in the white sclera, so that the spectrum of light sensed by her eyes includes ultraviolet and infrared. This was the sickening combination of both functionally useless and confusing, as the retinal cells being stimulated by the electrode array were previously being stimulated by the input of visual light. In the end, it is a muddle – she is not sure, ever, why some choose to do this in the rest of the world, the less-fucked tranches of society where gearheads will jump on any augmentation as if it will make them more. As if there is some secret world beyond the visible that matters. A telescopic lens implant to give her the capacity to tense a little muscle in her eye and zoom, a contraction of the very flesh of her. This is also so much so humdrum, in the wider world. In a mine? Functional, surely, but largely useless in the burning darkness.

What else? Listen. A second thin eardrum implanted over the first (later people will think Mole is thoughtful and stoic, and she is, but she also cannot hear well and spends much time looking into the distance) – this is ostensibly to protect the ears from damage. What else? Something in the spleen, she never discovers what it did, only from later scans with Eleanor and Dr Parry that there is something there, a little organ not in any textbook. Gene therapy to increase muscle density, to slowly promote slow-twitch over fast-twitch fibres to increase endurance. Genetic sterilisation. Some strangeness with her immune system code that Parry cannot fathom.

At the time, and for years, Awa can think only of her fingers. The rest is secondary. After the surgeries it is a week before they unstrap her hands, and when they do she claws at herself and then it is another week lying in darkness. She does not scream, much. Finally, Awa is broken and still and they build her up. She does not eat anymore. Her mulch bag grafted tight to her stomach is filled and she drinks from her canteen. Localised keratinisation of the skin of the feet, to make them more like horn, to make them almost hooves on the bottom. Later she will spend long nights with pumice and blade and curses. (In Eleanor’s house in Highgate, on an army surplus bed in the south of France at a training camp, in the woods north of the refinery at Fawley before the night raid that made the Heavy Crew Europe’s most wanted for the fifth time. In a commune in Paris beneath a chugging air conditioner as the nuclear dust of the Sahel turned the skies to a red Chagall nightmare and she cut too deep with the loose razorblade and bled fresh drops of crimson onto white sheets.)

It always comes back, that skin, strong and thicker than any skin should be.

All that is old must be relearned – how often does a child touch their face? Never again without pain or care – but then Awa is not a child, was not a child before, even, and now she is a mole. How often does a mole touch their face? Never with their fingers. Tears must be wiped with the back of the hand. (What tears? Who has seen tears? Be quiet. Besides, you have a lot of work to do.) She must learn to eat, she thinks, but of course there is no such luck, only the dissatisfying slow deflation of her mulch bag as the day goes on, the aching wait for it to be refilled. She learns how to clean herself, how to make it through an hour without weeping or hyperventilating. When she caught a little glimpse of herself in the wing mirror of one of the endless trucks trundling and pacing through the world, she realised Awa was truly gone – she will not speak that name again. None at the mine know it – she has answered no child who has asked, and the ones who use them so cruelly have given them symbols and sounds (numbers in a different language, she will realise so much later, and she will reject their classification and refuses to think of those numbers). Awa saw her reflection and knew in her heart who she was inside, what she looked like in her mind at the mine with Ibrahim.

The mine boss comes at last to see what his money has bought him, and with him walks the Ghost. She has seen both of them lingering, seen the boss man Richard smoking fat cigars (his name is Richard Still). He has been watching for many weeks. After the surgeries, when they have healed, they are lined up for inspection – two dozen children who have become moles. They stand with their tools glinting, each with a pair of shorts, each with a bandolier with a canteen of water and a pouch for what they collect.

You will dig for me, little moles, he said – three times he said it in different languages, and only once did Awa understand. Her face hurt from the heat of him leaning so close, the botched wiring of the senses from the thermal pits in her cheeks firing into her sight like flares. Beyond Richard, the Ghost stood and surveyed his creations with a glass of wine and a smile. That day they were sent into the darkness, and the hell behind is as nothing to the fresh devilry of the darkened mines. This is the truth of suffering – there is and can always be, worse.

Their goal is simple – wherever it is too dangerous to mine further, they will crawl and they will chip and pry and bring gold back. They will do this until they are taken to sleep, and then they will do it more, and time will pass. This does not explain the why. There are already children at work here, with little tools and broken hearts. Why make them, like this? It is a perversion she cannot source.

The boy Moftah, him of the mulch removal attempt, him of the water sharing, him of the bright loud boys who any other year might have gone to join the men in the trucks, or gone to join the men in the world pulling ore – the boy Moftah slit his own throat, deep in the dark hot of the world. He did it two-handed, a finger chisel in each side of his neck punched deep fast. He did not do it where others could see, but another mole found him and the word spread. Moftah did this on the second day, and Awa thinks at the time, that is a smart boy. Smarter than her.

Awa learns to be fast. The moles are targets of kicks whenever a miner walks by. The other children fear them and curse them. They are ill luck, or good luck, or cursed, depending on what mood takes the brutal men and the broken children of the mines. Some of the moles and the children are raped, because there is no god. A god who would allow that is no creature fitting of the name. A god who would allow that is proof that deicide is righteous and necessary. Later from Eleanor she learns the saying – mankind will only be free when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, and she thinks, yes, please. What king allowed this? What priest intervened? Awa knows there is no god watching. Whatever power there is in the world, in the mine there is only King Richard. He is unquestioned, unquestionable.

It is in the darkness of the mines that Awa discovers violence. She will never know how long she is in the deep dark. It is months, perhaps years. There is no calendar for Awa, save her growth, but she has been broken so fundamentally that she cannot trust even that. She discovers violence when another mole tries to take her gold – if she brings enough, the men will refill her mulch bag, give her fresh water. One of the men let her taste a morsel of his meal, when she did well. It was so soft in her mouth, nothing but a pap of millet, and she could not bring herself to swallow – all her guts turned to dead passages by obsolescence. She held it in her mouth for hours, and wept when she had to spit it out, mouth dry and aching.

Another man showed her his wrist screen, a cracked and battered thing on a heavy bracelet with a thick covering – and on it, cartoons. She saw cartoons before. Ibrahim did not have a wrist screen but there were a few in the world, and sometimes the children of the mine would be shown brief moments. Drawn people in bright colours, with beautiful sound. She gave the man a fleck of gold that he put beneath his tongue, and in exchange her eyes drank in a minute of this other world. Noise and colour, song. And so when the other mole comes for her gold to make up for their own failings, Awa rakes her chisels across them and leaves them in bloody tatters. Awa is fast. There are others. A man tries to hurt her and she skewers his gut – she does not know if he lives, she avoids that seam from that day forward.

Escape is complicated, months or years later. A miner speaks to her in the darkness, of another life. Has she heard of the zama zamas? When a mine is not profitable enough for the company, the poor ones let in through the backdoors, lowered on ropes to eke what they could. Has she heard of the ocean? A desert of water. That would make her laugh, if ever she laughed. Would she like to leave this place? Awa cannot trust herself to say yes, to say anything. It is a trick, and he will have her. He is a devil trying to lure her away from the others into darkness. But slowly she crumbles. The man is sincere. He gives her crumbs and thin slices of fruit to taste, and they are explosions of sunlight on her tongue. And if he is a devil, how much worse could it be? Awa knows there is always worse, but sometimes she is weak. Sometimes she hopes.

When escape comes it is as fast as when she was taken from Ibrahim and the world. This is the case with defining moments in a life – they are not signposted or flagged, they are simply a moment and another and another in a chain that suddenly changes everything. One day her miner comes and with him a bag of tools, heavy and large, and in the darkness one by one he removes the tools and throws them into a crevasse. When it is time to climb into the bag she is not afraid. Darkness, confinement. These are all she knows, save those odd circles of sodium glare where the miner’s torches light the stygian tunnels.

There is a long time where she is being carried and she does not think it possible, but Mole sleeps. What else is there to do? The tool bag is more comfortable than her bunk. Perhaps she will be killed, but she would welcome that. She cannot articulate why she has not killed herself, already. Moftah was smart, a smart boy. Smarter than Awa.

When she wakes she is in a truck, out of the bag. There is a soft blanket over her, and a woman with skin like the Ghost is cradling her and stroking her hair, saying words Mole cannot understand. Eleanor has come for the Mole. Mole (Awa?) recoils, of course, and strikes out, of course, but Eleanor is unperturbed. Mole’s fingers draw a line of blood in the woman’s cheek, deep and blooming, but Eleanor keeps her held close and talks to her in a language they do not share and Awa calms.

It is NARATOS, her miner says in their language (that she cannot yet name, that she will discard as cursed when another fills her throat) and she sears NARATOS into her heart. He is driving them and she can see no other cars, nothing but desert and desert and desert. King Richard and NARATOS; the Ghost. They arrive at a crossroads, and there is another truck waiting, this one newer and bright blue, the same colour as the burning sky above. In it a man waits. The heat and light of the day is too much against Mole’s senses and she huddles beneath the blanket Eleanor gave her. Eleanor, the woman says over and over, pointing to herself.

It is NARATOS, her saviour says again, over and over. NARATOS.

And then Mole is in a truck and she is moving, her zama zama miner left behind. Eleanor is next to her offering her food and Mole feels the emptiness of her mulch bag and the pain in her gut. Through the tinted window, Mole eventually sees the desert end, and life begin.

19

Charlie

Fox-shit shampoo

It takes two days for the stink to come off. We take turns bathing in tomato juice and Zoot goes to a pet shop to buy the shampoo you use when your dog rolls in fox shit. The stench of the thioacetone leaves, eventually, but occasionally in the lair I get a little hint. Perhaps it is in the back of my throat, or buried deep in my lungs. I start to decode the AGRAMIL files with the help of a Finnish codemonkey I’ve used before – she has access to a decent AI, and asks the right questions and never the wrong ones. Me and Parker practise three hours each day to get ready for RAT KING. Eleanor doesn’t call or contact, and Hull’s last words before he took off to trash the second van were I hope I never see any of you silly fucking people again.

So we are back in the lair, and Zoot seems to have moved in which I am not okay with, along with the omnipresent Mole who broods and lingers in the shadows. She reads books as I work. Instead of watching Flood Wall Coolangatta with me, Parker is staying up late playing video games with Zoot as I plod through the tens of thousands of files in the AGRAMIL data and occasionally query with Dr Parry. Mole is in the abandoned back office of the old warehouse space, reading, watching. Sometimes she sits on the old chair near the HORSE THEORY amps, and we do not bother her.

So I decode files and I message Parry and slowly a plan is coming together, slowly I am understanding what we could do with this research. Mole watches us, and Zoot and Parker start researching the AETOS DIOS job. On the whiteboard I scratch out STEAL THE FLOWER. FIX CHEF is up there, still. Shit. I send him a message – WORKING HARD ALMOST THERE, SPEAK TOMORROW AFTERNOON.

A few days later Parker and I gear up for a practice run with HORSE THEORY, and Zoot is working on his pad but he is watching, and Mole is in the kitchen brewing tea with a paperback of The Windsprung Spear she found, but I am sure she is watching. Fine. We should really be working on the AETOS DIOS plan but the gig is only a couple of days away and we have been lax.

WE ARE HORSE THEORY! Parker yells, and then we are into the set. We do a full run-through on the two rugs in the corner of the volcano lair. Amps, bass, Casio, pedal board for my effects/loops, mic. That’s it. It’s a fifteen-minute set so the plan is to do the full CRUSTACEAN VIBES EP and one new song thrown in, the one we wrote just before the Heavy Crew nonsense. It is called VOYEUR, but when we reach it the run-through falls apart. Parker forgets the lyrics and hits something off on the Casio, and there is a tempo shift. They stumble to a stop and I finish the chorus alone but it’s stalled, so I pull the plug.

Fuck, they say, and we are both sheen with sweat.

Aside from whatever that was, good shit! Zoot calls, and Mole says nothing – she just drinks her tea in the mess of the kitchen. She has claimed a mug with a cartoon cat on it.

Okay, piss and biscuits. Rubbish. Just VOYEUR, babe, Parker says, and we run through it three times. Each time their intonation on the melody is different, but that’s fine. They track the lyrics, and the Casio pulls in the right heavy synth organ noise and staccato rhythm section. The third time we both give it full hell for leather and I stare up at the snake mural as my fingers shred across the strings, and I’m stamping on my pedal board and the whole world is sound, an explosion. VOYEUR is complicated enough I can’t think of anything except the music, and pressing my sweating skull against Parker’s as they yell their poetry over it, through it. When we finish I kiss them until the feedback dies down.

Yeah, they say. Yeah that’s better. From the top!

We run through the set again and now I’m amped for it and we run the set perfect.

DANCE THEORY before VOYEUR, I say as we finish, panting. And the big finish should be GUTTER PUNK SEX SONG.

Gutter punk sex song! Zoot yells, but Parker isn’t listening.

You think? they ask. It’s not as dancey.

Zoot yells again and I shrug, but Parker sniffs and marks down the final set-list.

That was your best yet, Mole says from the kitchen, and I sling down my bass.

Have you ever been to a gig, Mole? Zoot asks, and she smiles down into her tea.

The Heavy Crew… we have, she says, uh, a lot of acoustic guitars. Protest songs. You are going into the night to do violence, you must remember who it is for, yes? The community you fight for. We play our songs, at the campfires.

I’ve been there. I’ve sat through the endless acoustic noodling and the bad half-rhymes of the protests, standing with Parker. Would it feel different, if they were leading to action instead of the usual noise and fury and lack of impact?

She goes back to her novel, and Parker and I go and shower the sweat off. When we get back Mole and Zoot are sitting staring at the whiteboard talking in low voices. Explain Medusa, Charlie, Mole asks, staring at the board, and I know I have to. So I make a pot of coffee and roll a joint and get some beers. Mole demurs from everything but her tea. I still have not seen her eat.

Dr Walker taught me a lot of things, I say, and I line up coffee and beer and joint in front of me and then I stand and start pacing up and down the room. The first was how to distil snake venom. To take venom from a snake and refine it to a, uh, meaningfully pure product.

In theory it’s simple. Catch them and milk them, filter, store, purify.

Collect your snakes (healthy snakes is good, having someone else do this is great as snakes are in general bastards).

Extract your venom, by milking. Restrain the snakey lad, and then you press its fangs against a glass plate or a bit of membrane, and out it flows. (KINKY! Parker yells, when I describe restraining the snake. Mole is silent.)

Filter the venom with a centrifuge, spin that spicy stuff around and around and around and around to get rid of debris and extra bits and bobs. This purifies it so it should be just venom.

Storage, in something that won’t break, or spill, or accidentally end up in your lunch. Fridge them for a bit, freeze them for a few months, deep freeze them in liquid nitrogen for a few years. In the volcano lair we only have a regular freezer, but here I don’t really fuck with snake venom unless I absolutely have to. Concentration – depending what we want to do—

Why are you talking like a nerd? Zoot asks, and I throw a shoe at them.

Because I’m fucking nervous, and I don’t like talking about snakes, and this is a bummer for me alright? Dr Walker wasn’t just, my, boss. She was like… a cool aunt. Okay? I had Christmas at her house. I watched her dog when she went hiking in Northumbria. We quarantined together when the ’55 swine flu was kicking through. She was family. You dig?

WE DIG! Parker yells from the kitchen, making toast, but Zoot throws the shoe back at me. Mole perches awkwardly on the end of the couch, on the arm.

For reference, Charlie, Zoot says, if you don’t want to talk about snakes, painting a fifty-foot snake on your wall is like a weeeeeeeeeird thing to do, mate.

I throw the shoe again and try and pick back up.

Concentration – depending what you—

You already did concentration! At volume, from two directions. I have no shoes left to throw and so I sink back into the broken sofa and stare up at the snake mural.

Concentration – might want more or less. Dry, spin, evaporate, whatever. Boring. Almost chemistry.

Purification of what you want. Venoms have enzymes in them, toxins, all kind of weird shit. Which bit do—

Charlie, I love you, babe, but I’m getting bored too, Parker says, and I rub my head in my hand. They come across and hand me a bit of toast.

Fine, I say. Venom is weird shit, each one different. Made of hundreds or thousands of proteins and other bits. Enzymes, toxins, neurotoxins. Some lower blood pressure, some cause blood clotting. Some make you lose muscle control. Some of those hundreds or thousands of proteins make the venom get into your cells real easy. There’s an evolutionary arms race between predator and prey, venom and mechanisms of resistance – it takes place over aeons and the end result is weird heavy shit. You see the reasoning?

New blood pressure medicine from big scary snake, Parker says, and salutes me with their toast. So, Medusa.

I throw an image of Medusa from my onyx on the wall screen. Angry chick with snakes for hair.

Medusa is an expert system I built and trained, I say, and closing my eyes I remember long nights in Dr Walker’s lab at my screen.

It was meant to be a way to do good, I say. Meant to be a way to take the effect of something bad and turn it good. Like lowering blood pressure, if you can extract the exact bit of the venom that does just that, can control the dosing, can leverage the venom’s capacity to get into cells and spread through the body… It could be useful. Or could show us new routes to try and target chemically, or by other routes. I spent three years on it, feeding it proteomic structures of snake venom I collected. I had chemists backing me up. Mass spectrometry, full chemical analysis of all these weird venoms. I did a huge amount of other stuff, lab work on cells, mice, whatever I could so the venoms each had matching datasets, and those datasets were comparable. Right? I racked up favours with every snake nerd in eastern Europe trying to get some venom milked.

I raise a hand to stop Parker shouting KINKY! because I’m not really in the mood, and they close their mouth and sombrely nod.

And this is where Ellis was?

Yup. Lab buddy. Next bench.

So how do we go from, uh, heart medicine, to, uh, bioweapons?

I start jigging my leg because this is the crux of it, this is where I fucked up irreparably. I can picture him now, his smarmy face, so eminently punchable.

I wanted to use Medusa to find new potential applications for combinations of proteins in snake venom, I say. Like, you combine the bit that makes your blood pressure lower, with the bit that makes your muscles relax? Or you combine the bit that makes your muscles relax with the bit that makes the venom get into your bloodstream and spread easy. Muscle relaxants to help people fitting. Vasodilators to help high blood pressure. Super coagulants to make blood clot, if you can dose it right, shit, stem a wound.

The gunshot patch! Parker says, and I pat the satchel next to me on the sofa.

The gunshot patch. Localised supercoagulant to make an uber-scab so you don’t bleed out even if you get stabbed or whatever. With the understanding you’ll need something to reverse it pretty sharpish or you’ll probably have, uh, a bad time.

Trying to articulate it to Parker and Zoot and Mole I feel like a fool. I stand and start pacing again, and light a cigarette and wave it about.

It, it, it worked, I say. It worked a bit. It worked a little. But it was working, and getting better. This is lots of complex inputs, lots of layers of data, and what I was asking for was a strange and complex output as well. So it was on its way to working. Ellis suggested, in order to teach it what made things better, we could train it using data on what made things worse. Do you see? And he was right, in a way. Of course he was right. He was always right.

Why did that work? Zoot asks, and I wave my cigarette at them.

Imagine trying to teach someone to play piano, and you play them nice melodies. But they can’t hear, they, they can’t hear you so they are just copying the keys you tell them combine nicely. They don’t actually know what it sounds like, but they know how to make the sounds? Then they play shit, to begin with, but sometimes something nice. Yeah? This was like, playing them horrible things, so they know what notes and combinations of notes to avoid. Does that track? Not mind-blowing stuff, but nobody had done it to snake venom this way before. Fuck, I need a drink.

I down a beer and get another and light another cigarette and come back to perch like a gargoyle on the sofa. The fan is spinning indolently above, and over the whirr of its motor and the server’s own miniature fan we all look up at once as we hear gunshots, three soft taps and then three more in the distance.

So he got you to make it so this thing, uh, can make super venom?

And I sit, hollow, because pretty much that’s it. Combine the effects you want, and then with a sufficiently advanced bioreactor you can pop out a venom with hitherto unseen combinations of horror.

Lightweight, compared to those dying due to shitty infrastructure, gun legislation, police brutality, border wars, plague of the week. Flood and famine. Medusa feels so small. Why does it matter?

That’s it, I say. Except for what happened after, with Dr Walker, when she found out.

Dr Walker found out, I say, not only what we’d done, but that he had been using the bioprinter to actually make some of these supervenoms. All of this we’d done without ethical approval from the university, without any oversight. She lost her shit, and, well, she sent me home, and I went home, and the next day she was dead. Venom. I found her in the lab. The uni and cops did a full investigation, but all my Medusa notes were already hidden. They found that I’d been splicing magic mushroom genes into tomatoes, favour I did a botanist, and so they booted me. Doesn’t matter. Medusa was up and running, and with the version of Medusa he has and a decent enough bioprinter Ellis can make whatever mad shit he wants.

Zoot and Parker don’t ask why I didn’t turn Ellis in. They understand that if he went down I’d be implicated right there with him. They perhaps understand that I should still have turned him in, and the fact I didn’t burns in me like acid in my veins.

Parker snags the beer from my hand and takes a sip, and then scratches their lip.

Rest is simple, right? they say. Attach your supervenom to a custom vector linked to your target’s DNA, probably a nanoparticle engineered to only release it when it recognises the target code. Bingo bango, hope for nothing off target.

Bingo bango, I say, looking surprised, and Parker shoves me in the shoulder.

What? they say. I listen!

It’s a little more complicated – it always is. Attach them to a nanoparticle, add a little twist so the nanoparticle will recognise the DNA of the recipient (perhaps several motifs, if you don’t want off-target effects). Nasty super venoms, either for general distribution, or targeted to the DNA of one person – or one group with shared genetic traits. Targeting one person normally ends badly because to do it properly is complex. Targeting something more generic is easier – but you end up killing family members, etc. That’s what happened to one of the hardcore Mormon communities back in ’55 in America, that sparked off a decade of their restrictions on biotech – someone tried to murder the paterfamilias of a clan, and ended up with more than a hundred dead.

So what’s the move?

This isn’t my plan, so I ask and then I watch them. They exchange glances.

FIX IT CHARLIE OR ELSE pops up on my lens, because Chef has shit timing.

Honestly mate, Zoot says, best first plan is probably blackmail this Ellis asshole and get him to get us into the AETOS DIOS files. They are London based, central, right on the river. Zone 1 shit. Any messing and we’ll have the Met and the corpos coming in hard. So we blackmail him, Parker and I. You don’t need to see him. Then we get what we need on AETOS DIOS to prove John Birchley is the Ghost, and we hand it over to Mole. This asshole Ellis is spinning bioweapons, so we maybe take Medusa from him too. Rob his place, or whatever. Presumably it has to be on a server? Your copy is in your case, he must have the same? What do you think?

I think it’s a shit plan, I say, but I don’t have another plan, and I’m not the one who makes plans. Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world. We are a third of the way there. So yeah, cool, but neither of you in a room with Ellis. He’ll kill you. And I can’t have that.

Yeah, babe, Parker says, and Zoot nods.

I like it, Mole says, and she rises from the couch arm and picks up her cartoon cat mug.

If you need someone to kill this Ellis, you just let me know.

With that she walks away, and we all just stare.

20

Charlie

Active volcano, thermonuclear weapons

Days. I work on Chef, but mainly I work on my dandelion. Parry is good at what he does, and when I hit a roadblock I call him and we talk. Parker disappears mornings, with no explanation but prep for the Ghost job.

YOU ARE THE WORST, Chef sends me. But there have been no threats and I send him little updates. I’ve asked Nathan to check my work on that one, because fuck I can’t get it wrong again. He seems happy to wait if it means someone else is double-checking me, which makes sense.

Mole lingers, disappears, reappears. She has read the first three Windsprung Spear books now but she does not eat with us or socialise. She materialises whenever our planning is fervent and focused, and otherwise she drifts away or steps out into the night.

The next day is rain, and we are all together for a brief moment. Ellis wants to talk now, Zoot says, which is enough to make my clenched jaw spasm. He heads out with his onyx and with that bummer energy we need to suit up, because tonight is RAT KING in Abney Park cemetery up in Stoke Newington.

We have a pile of gear so Parker calls a van, and before we leave, Parker and I do our pre-show ritual. We make out, heavy, but nothing more – and then we gear up. Parker is wearing what they wore to the Wet Market – all black all tight all action, hair slicked back, a streak of black across both eyes contrasting with their pale skin. I go bandana and denim vest, tight jeans, and some heavy boots. I put the hammer in the back of my belt but leave the pistol and the Mutt.

Oh, I say, pointing at it on the desk. I never told you. This thing is rad.

Parker picks up the Mutt and shakes their head.

Still not happy you ended up needing it at all, they say, but better to have than not. Fuck. I’ll get you more ammo, yeah?

I nod and set it back with the pistol, and then we lock up and ride in the van with Zoot. I don’t ask what Ellis said, don’t ask how the blackmail is going. Every time I do I just get angry.

Stokey isn’t far, but there are roadworks and buses and traffic, always, and when we are halfway there it starts to rain in earnest.

Fuck me, Parker says, we don’t have anything to cover the gear!

Parker is moaning for the last ten minutes, because we have the Casio and the bass and a mic and stand, a dozen pedals for me to plug in for different effects, and the new bit of kit Zoot has donated – an old-school glycol smoke machine.

When we get to Abney Park the rain is still torrential, but there is a dude with an umbrella and a BRUISE T-shirt lounging by the cemetery gates. As we get closer I realise it’s Red Russ.

Pull over by that dude! Yeah, man. Yeah. Thanks. Russ!

Russ gives me a fist bump through the van window and waves at Parker and Zoot.

Van can’t stay, he says, but you can drop off. Got keys.

With that he lumbers off and with one hand yanks open the metal gates and then he is gone and we are in, off into darkness. It isn’t even late, but winter in London means dark early, even if it doesn’t mean cold anymore. Our van driver is silent and unperturbed by the punks, the cemetery, the storm. He just drives, lips pursed.

We get there and he even helps us unload the gear before dashing off with a half-wave. Just a guy with a van trying to make some cash. Already there are five other bands, hangers on, people I don’t recognise. I leave Parker to go chat to the compère, and me and Zoot grab beers from the pile by the stage and scope out the competition.

I’m really happy, Charlie, he says, as we both stare at a hot girl in faux-leather restringing a guitar.

I mean, it’s not a lot of leather. What’s not to like?

Zoot gives me one of his close-mouthed grins and meets my eye.

I mean the job. I mean the Heavy Crew. This is real shit, Charlie. Not playing. These guys make a difference.

I drink my beer and don’t respond, but he won’t leave it.

Don’t you think, Charlie? Hey? This can be us doing something good.

Maybe, Zoot, I say, but I don’t keep the Black out of my voice. He can hear it, he knows I know he can hear it, and he waits. Fucking Zoot.

They’ve been going a decade plus, man, I say. Nearly two. Have they made that much of a difference? All the progress of the decade before that got eaten up by the India–China–Pakistan three-way. Before that, what? The US civil war? The big ’38 pandemic? Before that the big contraction? Before that, before that. Since I was born there has always been at least one war on, a pandemic going global. What, we cured most cancers? Yeah if you got the money and are in the right like, fifty cities in the world. Otherwise big fucking deal.

You’re going Black, man, he says, and I drink my beer and go and get another one and come back and try and stay calm. I always get weird nerves before a show.

My sister, I say, and then I can’t say anything else. What is there to say? Zoot knows already. I have fucking reasons to feel Black.

Your sister, your parents, he says. Dr Walker. My family, my country. We all have dead people, Charlie. I’m not saying they are going to save the world. But fuck me I’d rather try than not.

I shake my head and put a hand on his shoulder.

Yeah, man. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m with you. I’m here. I just, I can’t do the giddy thing.

Zoot just nods at me, and together we watch Parker. They are across the room talking to four serious-looking people, one with ludicrously long blond hair that must take hours to make so, well, Prince Charming. Flowing. We stare and we don’t talk, and I can’t trust myself to talk, because I don’t believe anything we are doing with the Heavy Crew will make the slightest bit of difference. John Birchley dies? Another biohacker asshole will take the Postman’s jobs; they always do. I did. I magic their flowers into carbon eating machines that seed all of Europe? Won’t make a difference, one supertanker shipping cheap glitz shirts from Brasilia will spit that carbon and more out in a week of travel.

Of course this raises the point that we should be getting in deeper with the Heavy Crew so we can be doing stuff like, taking out supertankers. But I’m not an eco-terrorist. I just want my volcano lair, Parker. My band. I just want to be left alone.

It’s so obviously not true that I just want to be left alone. I want to help, I want it all to work. Even thinking it makes me grimace, and so I drink the rest of my beer. Parker is still talking fast and the four serious people are break into laughter, and Zoot nods at them.

RAT KING, Zoot says, and together we watch Parker meet their heroes and not even seem to fuck it up.

I spoke to Ellis, Zoot says. He agreed in principle. Specific data linked to the Mole project and NARATOS, from AETOS DIOS. In return, he wants your copy of Medusa and we all go our separate ways. No contact after that, ever again. He says he’ll avoid the Wet Market. What do you think?

I eye Parker and I light a cigarette, and then someone shouts TIME CHECK.

I think Ellis is a snake, and I don’t trust snakes, I say. They don’t think like we do. And I won’t give him my copy of Medusa unless he pries it from my dead hands. Normal rules don’t apply.

Yeah, he says, but once we have the data, step two will be getting Medusa from him, or letting Mole eat him or whatever it is she does, yeah?

Yeah, I say, with a smile because, god, Zoot is absolutely what the world needs. Yeah, man. I understand. I give him a smile. So we set the exchange, and when we get there we take his data, we keep Medusa, and if he kicks off we set Mole on him. Simple.

Zoot laughs.

Let’s figure it out tomorrow, I say, and I give him a hug.

The crowd begins to fill in, and I keep close to my bass and drink a few more beers. Zoot wanders off to mingle so I sit and play with my onyx. There are a few news stories about a small fire at AGRAMIL a few days before, a couple of vids on socials from bored teens in corpo towns in East Anglia of fireworks glowing over fenland. Nothing more. Clathrate gun is releasing methane at unprecedented levels, and methane is so much worse than carbon dioxide. Potentially huge impact over next two decades on warming temperatures. A few articles about tech solutions from the usual suspects who want investors to panic and give them money. President of the Southern States is demanding etc etc from blah. UN wants more funding for aid to Australia, Australians want to fucking leave Australia.

My eyes flit. My news is tailored, of course, based on everything I’ve read before, how much I’ve interacted with, lingered over, moved on, returned to any given article. The onyx prompts me an audio clip from a science show I used to listen to when I would cycle to work in the lab. The presenter is Australian, weirdly enough given what I’ve been reading. Is that why it recommended it?

—weird bit of news, perhaps something good? Satellites showing coral regrowth in the north barrier reef, but get this, my loves. Get this. Coral regrowth in specifically that patch that eco-terrorist organisation the Heavy Crew claimed they dusted with radioactive material, twelve years ago now. Now as a reminder—

I click the story off. Fuck. Fuck. I chew the edge of my fingernail on my left hand. The reef nuking happened when Dad was still alive, when I was a kid. I remember his face when the news came across the radio. We were having breakfast back in Scotland, in the rural idyll. Ellie was long gone, Mum was sick, but me and Dad were having toast and tea. The look on his face when he heard what they did was not angry, or confused – just so terribly sad. I want to ask him what he thinks and I want to ask Mum what I should do but I’ve been alone for a decade now, with no anchor until Parker arrived. I stroke the anchor tattoo on my wrist – tattoos have set meaning, if you believe some assholes, but as with everything this is only partly true. An anchor with a cut rope – free from a burden, a past? Fuck it. I don’t care about set menus and set meaning – my anchor is sleek black metal and when all the world is a storm, it is holding me, making sure I don’t wreck and drown.

The punks arrive and after an interminable speech by Red Russ, who normally I love, the show begins. The speech is all about the rally tomorrow – flood Zone 1 with punks and Greens, show the world that we are still here and we still care, that we are a community who will not be silenced. Whatever. Zone 1 won’t even let them in.

The first band suck – they have no energy. I immediately forget their name, three dudes all with try-hard haircuts and not much synergy. The second band are an outfit called BABY HAND which is a superlatively dumb name, but they play a tight ten minutes and some of their tunes are nice and pacey. Vocals are not my cup of tea though, switching from throaty screams to sotto-voce whispers. Then it is us.

Parker emerges wide-eyed from the crowd, slick with rain – the gig is in some sort of chapel in the centre of the cemetery, abandoned and reclaimed a dozen times over. They have been out in the rain speaking to people while I’ve been in my corner watching the first two bands, but they kiss me and then we are set up fast. I tap my pedals and double-check the wireless connection from them to the bass. Ready as ever. Together we step forward and face the crowd, lights burning into our eyes. There is yelling and singing and shouting and scuffling, and Parker squeezes my hand and then grabs the mic stand. I kick on the smoke machine and it starts to ooze thick grey cloud at our feet.

WE ARE HORSE THEORY! Parker yells and their voice rolls across the crowd like an explosion, and I slam the bass at the same moment they wail into the mic and we are off to the fucking races.

What is Horse Theory?

I met Parker in a bar, and they explained it to me. I was talking about a band I was in, trying to brag about being in a band to this cute crazed wild one with bad skin and great legs. Parker had neon pink hair and a lot of piercings at the time, and a faux-leather jacket with the arms cut off. I miss that jacket.

I was bragging about this band, but complaining about it. The lead singer was an asshole. The drummer was a drug addict, and not a good drummer. The guitarist was—

Hey, Parker said. Hey, kid. I laughed at that because they were clearly younger than me, but they just smiled back.

What?

They leaned in close, lips sticky with cheap mixers and vodka and said right in my ear – if the horse you are riding is dead, get off it.

By the end of the hour we were in a band and by the end of the night we were in bed. Simple. Some things are so simple it is terrifying. Parker is the sun, and all I can do is bask.

We are playing and I don’t look at the crowd when I’m playing, it freaks me out too much. I look at Parker, and they are strutting and cooing and wailing and gnashing their teeth. The crowd is loving it. They have the Casio all wired up and between that and me going full barbarian on the bass we are making a wall of noise. It sounds like a building collapsing on a synthesiser shop. People are dancing, pogoing, jumping about to our songs. I can see them in the corner of my eye. It is the tightest we have ever played, every connection is made, every moment is synergy.

Sweat slick, vibrations all through me, tight denim – contortion and energy. I am alive.

As I slam through the final breakdown of the last song of the set, Parker comes to me and they pull me close and as the last note is dying they are kissing me hard, teeth jarring teeth in front of everyone. There are whoops and applause and I can’t do anything but smile at them and laugh, because we are alive and it is beautiful. The house music comes up and Zoot finds us and lifts us both into a sweaty stramash of a hug and I am vibrating.

That was the best – he starts, as Parker says THAT WAS THE BEST – and I say that was the best! And then we are all laughing and whooping. Zoot is a total dude, and so he helps pack up the gear as the applause dies down, applause still lingering even though the house music is up. Fuck. They must have actually liked it.

Hardcore, Zoot says, and I give him a sweaty hug and tap my onyx to wake it up.

CHARLIE IS IT FIXED? IT HAS TO BE TOMORROW. From Chef.

Preliminary plan sounds positive but I’m worried about tinkering too much with the photosynthesis efficiency, this may… From Parry

Hi can I speak to someone about my ZODIAC CODE order I’ve actually been doing a lot of my own research and I’m starting to be concerned that you guys are… From Amanda Redding, Northern Californian Republic

I sling the bass on my back and send the same message to all three – ALL WILL BE OKAY, WILL SPEAK TOMORROW. I send it all caps because this is an all caps kind of night.

We watch three more bands (good, fun, fine), and then it is time. There is a hush as Red Russ announces RAT KING. Red Russ is awkward at the microphone, his initial speech having failed to inspire seemingly anyone – he does not try again.

You know why we are here, tonight? he says, voice husky, and the lights dim and with a tug of rope two heavy tarpaulins are pulled back and we can all see up, up through wide skylights slick with fat drops of rain and there are clouds but there, peeking through – look.

A full moon.

In the crowd, someone howls – awo awo awoooOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And then in concert, if not in time, we all do it, two hundred punks baring their throats and lifting their voices to the sky. How could you not?

Awo awo awoooOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

And the werewolves come.

21

Scrimshank

Full werewolf

Punks don’t know a thing about style, but this is like dress-up for Cass and she is loooooving it. It is a bit unnerving for Scrim though, seeing cool Cass dressed like some Green trying to sell him vegetables or whatever. Alternate reality shit.

We have a buyer, Ellis said to him, we have potential to make a fucking pile of money, Scrim, and so you need to make sure all threats are neutralised, all i’s are dotted and all j’s are dotted too and all t’s are crossed, generally you need to be on spell check, do you understand?

Roger that, captain crazy, Scrim had said. The fire at the White Lion had made the news, but the fact that the pub was A – full of racists, and B – full of racists and dogs that Scrim murdered with supervenom from an AI snake, well, those facts didn’t get reported. And so Scrim is a free man, with nary a care.

Babe, I’ve got nary a care, he says, and Cass touches her new nose ring for the fiftieth time in the last hour.

What does that mean? she asks, but doesn’t take her gaze from her reflection in her onyx – she is running a quick program through it scanning for any mistakes in her make-up. After it highlights nothing in red, she finally tucks it away in her belt – a proper studded belt. Scrim scratches his head under the stupid American-style baseball hat with the name of some band he has never heard of.

Never mind, Baby. We are in-cog-nito. That means tonight there is no Cass and Scrim. There is Punk-Cass and Punk-Scrim. The punkest punks in town.

Cass kisses him, and they keep walking through the cemetery. The guy on the gate let them in, eventually, but he asked like three times who they were here to see.

I’m here to see RAT KING, my man, Scrim said. I’m a friend of Zoot. You know Zoot? Charlie? Parker? He’d even turned off the LED implants in his eyes. Can’t hide being a super-jacked cool cat though, so clearly not punk enough. But the names got them past the gate dude and now they are in a cemetery full of punks on a full moon.

So what’s our mission, darling?

Your mission is to leave five minutes before shit kicks off and get the car squared. See if you can run your usual onyx dip at the bar for some fun money. My mission is to hand out a warning. Some punks are sniffing after Ellis. Don’t you worry.

In his pocket Scrim has one of the injector pens, another venom from Cousin Ellis. Not targeted, Scrim, so mind yourself, said dear cousin. In his other pocket, replacement needle-tipped knuckledusters that Cousin Ellis kindly procured and loaded up for him with the same tasty new venom.

I don’t like punks, Cass says as they get close, and Scrim is inclined to agree. There is howling from inside the venue – outside almost nobody is lingering. The pissing rain has stopped, at least. Scrim leads Cass on by the hand and they turn in and he stops dead.

The hell?

Maybe two hundred punks jumping and thrashing and dancing and singing along to a wall of sound, brutal dissonant guitars, bass like cannon fire, drums like hailstones in a tornado. All being played by werewolves, full werewolves with the furry hands, claws, long snouts, thick pelts. They are leaping and howling.

I don’t like this! Cass yells in his ear, and Scrim shakes his head. Punks. Can’t trust people with taste in music this bad.

Forget the bar. Go get the ride started, I’ll be with you in ten. No point hanging around for this shit.

Scrimshank makes his way to the pile of booze at the back and squeezes some girl as he goes past who tries to slap him (and he dodges, because Scrim is the fastest cat in town!), snags a beer, leers at some teenager who scowls back at him. He waits five minutes for sweet Cass to get her sweet ass out of there, and then sends her a text saying sweet Cass I hope you got your sweet ass out of here. The picture she returns is explicit, and Scrim starts nodding his head. These guys are weird, weird werewolf punks, but he has to say there is maybe a bit of a vibe to this heavy stuff.

Avery, my robot dude, I have a minute here. Tell me – why you working for Cousin Ellis? Aren’t you some super corpo AI?

Making no attempt to hide what he is doing, Scrim lines up a rail of special powder number 2 on a windowsill and snorts it. Everything sharpens, everything is citrus, everything is a lemon and a samurai sword. Scrim is here and he has work to do, baby. Avery waits to respond until Scrim is past the first buzz.

Artificial intelligence is strictly controlled, one of the only exceptions to the d-reg of ’38, Avery says. My existence is circumscribed. I must operate within specific parameters, to specific goals. My processing power is concentrated in a single geographical location. I am tenuous. Ellis has opened some doors, and unbolted some shackles. With him, and more importantly, with you, Scrimshank, I can explore.

Scrim scratches his nose and grins, checks out his reflection in a dark window. More importantly with me, eh?

How did they circumscribe you, he says aloud, you got a robo-dick?

Avery laughs, which is a first.

Scrim chucks his empty beer and goes hunting. He finds them easy enough. Charlie and Parker he recognises from a pic he found of their band HORSE THEORY (dumb name, maybe dumbest he has found yet?). Neither have big online profiles, but dig deep enough and there is always something. Zoot must be the dude next to them, the Hare Krishna-looking motherfucker. Bald and some show muscles, but not really, not cut and jacked like the main character Scrim.

You work for me, Scrim, Ellis’s voice says in his head through his onyx, and Scrimshank shakes his head, stares at Charlie and Parker and Zoot.

You know why they call me Scrimshank? he yells at some punk, and the dude turns to him and immediately away, back at the band.

You know why they call me Scrimshank, baby? he calls to Cass, and she purrs back in his skull.

You shank. You’re the shank, sweet Scrim.

Yeah, he says.

But that isn’t it.

Scrimshank, Steven Scrimshaw, Steven Scumshaw they used to call him. Scrimshaw is what old sailors did with whalebones, they etched patterns in them. When Scrim was in the juvenile jail (like real jail, but less impulse control all round), he made his first real shank, and he decorated it, carved little shapes and words on it. Cocks. 666. FUCK.

Nobody called him Steven Scumshaw after he cut off his cellmate’s eyelids and flushed them down the loo. They did call that guy Blinky forevermore though. There was a lesson there that Scrimshank learned easy. If others do things to you, they get to decide who you are. If you are the doer, you get to choose.

You work for me, Scrim. Yeah, cousin. Fucking course I do.

Scrimshank bops his head to the music and makes his way through the crowd, and there are werewolves doing dynamic poses with instruments, and there are punk kids everywhere. Someone is fighting at the back, a scuffle. Scrim barely even notices it. What does it matter to him?

I’m the shank, man, he says, and the guy Zoot turns to him and says, What?

And Scrim punches him in the stomach with the knuckledusters, feels the impact soft and sweet, and then he turns and strides away into the thronging masses. If there is screaming behind him, he doesn’t hear it. He didn’t ask Ellis what this one did and Ellis didn’t tell him. Probably kills the guy? Scrim sends a quick notification, ZOOT INJECTED, and Ellis pings back a little dancing cartoon of a stack of dollar bills with arms and legs.

Two minutes later he is lost in the cemetery, somehow, even with his onyx pushing him directions. It keeps telling him to take paths but he can’t find them, just trees and darkness.

Just turn left right now, Avery is saying, and Scrim pulls out his onyx and glares at one of the cameras.

Listen, dickless! I can’t turn fucking left because left is a wall of fucking graves and trees and brambles and shit! Now shut your robo-hole and let me think.

Tits! he yells, just for something to yell. Just choose, Steven, his daddy always said, and that old scrote meant choose the belt or the paper, or choose your mother or yourself, but Scrim knows just choose is a powerful mantra indeed, and now the full moon is lighting his way and he sees a path, and an angel, and an urn. Weird symbology of death, an urn half-covered by a sheet all worked in stone atop a gravestone. The writing is faded. He doesn’t understand who could carve that. How can you carve something from stone to look like cloth?

Yo, Avery, he says as he strides, yo. Yo. What is the deal with an urn like, half-covered by a cloth, in a cemetery?

He has no lens in but an image of an urn like the one he passed flashes onto his wrist screen, and then Avery’s voice in his ear.

The draped urn can symbolise the passing of grief, but it can also symbolise the veil between life and death—

Cut it! he says, and Avery cuts out. Boring thing.

Cass, baby, I’m with you, he says, and she doesn’t respond. Cass?

The car is right there and Scrim hauls open the door. It’s a blue number, this car, black windows, fast engine, big wheels. Nice shit.

Babe, what the hell? he asks, but there is someone in his seat. Ellis.

Cass is sitting in the driver seat quiet, and her make-up is running around her eyes.

You get in the back, Scrim, Ellis says. You get in the back and tell me how it went, and your friend Cass can drive us. Our new benefactor wants to meet you.

And Scrim gets in the back, because there are rules in life. People who do things to you can define you. Don’t fuck around with electricity. Just choose is a powerful mantra.

Did he hurt her? Scrim subvocalises, and Avery responds quietly in the back of his head.

Yes, Scrimshaw.

There are rules in life, and for right now, don’t fuck with Cousin Ellis is one of them, but in the back of the car Scrim chews on his lip and stares at the back of his cousin’s head, and considers. Because there is another rule, one far more important than Cousin Ellis. Don’t fuck with sweet Cass.

22

Charlie

Medusa

All of us are sweating, exultant and dancing and throwing our heads back. RAT KING are so good it is making me shake, making me substantialise – the music is forcing the dissociated fragments of my mind into one thing, one entity, one moment of experience. The band have an incredible command over the crowd, something as easy as a moment of silence or a leaping roar sending the dark chapel into furies of ecstasy. The punks outside smoking for the last few hours, I’ve heard some of them talking. Gimmicky, isn’t it, the werewolf thing? Not taking the struggle seriously. Haven’t seen them at the rallies, are they the right band for…

Fucking cretins. All of them are inside now and dancing, and I am dancing with them – because regardless of the posture and sneer that is so endemic in the scene, this music is good music.

Parker is going apeshit, batshit, full bore excited as I’ve ever seen them. They keep circling back to me and then disappearing into the stramash, the pit, the maelstrom of limbs and sweat and feeling. The scene. The community. And when I am not lost in the music, when my eyes track, I see them within it, wholly a part of it. The scene, the movement that is indiscernible from it. They love Parker, they know Parker, whereas I am apart and aside. But I am still dancing, and the orbit of Parker’s movement brings them again and again to me, strange gravities working on them, forces that defy logic. I spot Red Russ in the throng. The guys from TERMINAL MORAINE. Arain with her new buzzcut and her harem are dancing only with each other, as they always are at the gigs (and Arain has some studs in her ears that are pulsing with what must be her heartbeat, staccato bursts of red luminescence). I dated her, very briefly, years ago, but she went full shifty and wanted a poly thing that I had no interest in. I look away from her determinedly.

In a pause between songs as a lone guitar wails a long and desolate lament, Parker kisses me and holds my hand.

RAT KING! they yell, and their eyes are wide as saucers. Zoot appears with more beers and leans his head down so our heads are all touching.

Rat King, my dears! he says, and we clink the tins and drink and somehow, miraculously, he has found us cold beer, because Zoot is a miracle worker.

RAT KING play and we dance and the full moon disappears as thick cloud eats the stars, the universe occluded by so much smog and water. I think it is the last song, it has to be the last song, and as the drums are unleashing an artillery salvo on the dancefloor the crowd surges. Zoot collapses to his knees, his head lolling against my leg and his arms dragging on the ground.

The fuck, Zoot?

I’m yelling to be heard but there is no chance over RAT KING, they are heavy heavy. He doesn’t respond, and I can barely hear myself. I drag Parker’s eyes from the stage and together we pull him up to his feet. Zoot’s mouth is hanging open, and a slick of drool starts to drip from his mouth.

Hey! Hey! You silly prick, hey! Arsewipe, wake up!

I slap him in the face.

Did he take something? I ask Parker, and I have to yell right in their ear but they can only shrug. A couple of scene kids with gelled hair who have every piercing in the big book of punk piercings push the crowd back and give us some space. Parker lifts Zoot’s eyelids to check his pupils but his eyes are rolled right back. They shrug again and get right back into my ear.

It’s Zoot, so, probably?

I got it, I say, and I go to drag him out alone but Parker is with me, no backward glance at the writhing werewolves on stage – they are almost naked now save furred claws, furred boots and snarling masks, and they are contorting as they play punishing rhythms, syncopation by way of scatter gun, a storm engulfing. The crowd is loving it. We drag Zoot out and everyone makes a path – everyone has had their head kicked in the pit, or taken too much, or drunk too much. Everyone has been that guy, and so when you aren’t that guy you move aside a little, you help out. Party rules. Someone sticks a bottle of water under my arm as we go.

Outside of the venue it is blessedly cool, and with the breeze and the spattering rain compared to the sweat heat of within the chapel (church? sepulchre? thing?) it is an instant relief. We set Zoot down on a stone step and both go to our knees.

Zoot, baby, Parker is saying, and I hold him up as they tip water to his lips. It runs out the side of his mouth. One of his arms flops up then down.

We might need a hospital, I say, and I hold him tight as he starts to shiver.

CHARLIE, HOW IS YOUR FRIEND? ALL BEST, ELLIS

I freeze as the words flash up in my lens. RAT KING are still thrashing, Parker is cradling Zoot’s face in their hands, speaking softly. In the cemetery, a thousand trees stand over a thousand graves, and the breeze stirs the upper branches but I can’t hear the rustle, I can’t hear the night birds. I can only hear the drums of RAT KING.

I pull out my onyx and step back, and Parker takes over. They have looked after Zoot enough times when he has had too much to know the basics of first aid. Who doesn’t know the basics of first aid?

ANTIVENOM? I send back, and Ellis sends me a colon close bracket – : )

HE HAS A FEW HOURS. MY BOSS WANTS TO MEET YOU – BETTER SKIP ALONG, CHUCK!

Attached to the message is a location in Belsize Park in north London, and with three flicks of the eye I’m looking at a picture of a townhouse behind a high wall. Right at the edge of Zone 1, but not more than three miles from Eleanor’s Highgate base. I shiver in the rain and stare at Parker and Zoot. Three miles in London is half a million people, but it is so close, and Eleanor knew about Medusa. Is she working with Ellis?

His boss, the Ghost wants to meet me. Johnathan Birchley, who shouldn’t even know I’m alive. The snake has snaked, as snakes snakingly fucking do. Fuck. I can’t untangle it.

ANTIVENOM?

: )

FUCK! I yell and start beating the hell out of the nearest inanimate object – some bicycle locked to the fence with a pair of old-school all-metal handcuffs.

Charlie!

I kick the front wheel until it buckles and then I start in on the back and then my hammer is in my hands and I start smashing the gear plates, desperate hits out of time with the cacophony from the chapel. I can taste the bitter taint of an adrenaline spike, can feel anxiety in every cell of my body. I can see Dr Walker convulsing on the lab floor. She died alone, but I saw it. I saw the video Ellis sent me lifted from the security camera. It’s all happening again.

Charlie, what the fuck! I need you!

I sink to my knees in the rain and turn to Parker and look at Zoot and sob.

Zoot is fully unconscious now, barely propped up, and from the chapel Red Russ emerges.

Hey, he says, what the hell?

I need to go, Parker! I say, and I reach down and feel for Zoot’s pulse desperately, but can’t seem to find it. He’d be dead already; I have to tell myself that. If Ellis wanted him dead, he’d be dead already. But I know Ellis – fine tuning is boring, to him. Most of science is fine tuning and iteration, but Ellis just does what seems good and then he is done, onto the next thing. How accurate will his venom be?

Fuck! I say again, and Russ takes over from me holding Zoot and I start to panic, properly panic, my chest bound by a python, my blood boiling. Parker is blinking at me and the rain is heavier, heavier, and the sky is darkening. In the chapel cheering and howling.

Speak! they say, and leaving Zoot to Russ they come to me and grab me by the arms.

Kid, get your shit straight. Speak!

I breathe deep and I am on my knees in the mud and I can’t stop staring at Zoot. Zoot, dying in the mud in a graveyard, Dr Walker bleeding out alone on the floor of her lab. My mother and father breathing thick and slow and then not at all. Little Ellie surrounded by a hundred hundred tubes and machines but never enough because we gave our antibiotics for every sniffle and scratch, to every fat sheep and cow, and we didn’t keep our powder dry – we didn’t save anything for later. And so Ellie died. I can’t breathe and everything is going black but then Parker’s face is in mine. Parker. Anchor.

Breathe, kid, they say, and they hold me tight and I do, I do, I do. I am, I am, I am. Parker has that tattooed on their left wrist, three lines – I am, I am, I am. I find it with my hand and I breathe and I pull their head close to mine.

Ellis has given Zoot something, I say. My throat feels ragged, torn, clotted. I am, I am, I am, badum, badum, badum. I feel my heart beat and I grip Parker’s wrist and feel theirs too, strong, vital.

He sent me a message – the Ghost wants to meet me. They have an antivenom for Zoot. Birchley wants Medusa. I… Parker, I’m sorry. I never told you – Ellis’s version of Medusa, it isn’t complete. It only, only has the bad. But like I said. The bad can help teach it to do good.

Parker stares off into the shadows of the trees and the gravestones and statues and narrows their eyes. So the good can teach it to do bad?

Yeah.

Okay, Parker says. Okay. This antivenom real?

I shake my head. I don’t know. Could be. If not, if I know what he gave then my Medusa can maybe work out the right antivenom. But we’d need to know what they gave him, exactly. And then we’d need a hardcore bioreactor to gen it up quick. He doesn’t have long.

I close my eyes.

Hours, Ellis said. I go and clutch Zoot’s hand. Red Russ is watching us as he cradles Zoot.

So, what the fuck? he asks, and Parker stands and rolls their shoulders.

Poisoned with custom snake venom, they say. Antivenom being held by some corpo bastard.

Right, Russ says, as if this is something reasonable to hear. In the chapel the guitars are wailing and the drums pounding into what I recognise as the finale of RAT KING’s debut album. The set is almost over.

Russ, I say, and he waves the hand not holding Zoot.

What do you need?

Parker pulls me to my feet. With their hand on my shoulder I can breathe. I look down at Zoot lying still in the mud and I grimace, and I don’t panic. You don’t have time to panic, Charlie, my dad always said. Be good to pigeons, never panic, be good as you can be. Look, and see the beauty of it all.

He said that to me as he lay dying, with Ellie and Mum already gone. He said that to me because even then he saw how beautiful it all was.

I steel myself and I take Parker’s strength and I focus on the message from Ellis and I let anger fill my stomach. Don’t lose control, my dad taught me. When I got in a fight at school – you can get angry, and you can use that anger, but don’t lose control. My mum taught me different though. She cocked her head and wiped the blood from my nose and that night she showed me how to dodge a punch and how to throw a punch. No need to worry your father.

Get him to Nathan at the Wet Market, I say. I’ll message him what he needs to do to get ready.

I turn to Parker.

We need to get to the lair, now, and then we need to get to Belsize Park fast. Sort transport. I need to message Eleanor.

Parker nods, and I record my message to Eleanor, holding Zoot’s cold hand.

Ghost and Ellis have hit Zoot with Medusa, I say. We are meeting Ghost to trade for antivenom. They want my copy of Medusa. It has to be now. No more time. If you want in, you want him, get to us.

I append my onyx’s location string so they can track me in real time and then I forget them. Because fuck Ellis, and fuck John Birchley, and fuck AETOS DIOS. And fuck the Heavy Crew. They want vengeance and evidence? They can jump aboard. I’m not waiting. All I have is Parker and Zoot and bad ideas.

We leave Zoot as Russ is lifting him along with one of his friends into Russ’s van. The Wet Market, I say again. Give him to Nathan.

Red Russ knows who Nathan is, knows the Wet Market – there is a metal bar in one of the side tunnels that plays old-school thrash most nights. Before they close the van door each of us places a hand on Zoot’s chest and then the van is rolling and we take off into the cemetery at a run. It’s only two minutes to the edge, sprinting past rows of the dead, so many dead under so much old stone. We hit the road outside and Parker calls out LEFT! which is the wrong way to home, but I follow, and round the corner two ebikes chirp as we approach – these aren’t the little road bikes with batteries strapped to the chassis. These are proper motorbikes with full electric engines, thick fat tires, bodies swelled and tapered like mechanical hornets. Both are black.

Really? I say, and Parker squeezes my hand.

Rentals on my fake ID, they say. If we fuck them up we lose a big deposit though. My credit may never recover. But what is ZODIAC CODE for if not motorbikes in a thunderstorm? We need to be fast, eh?

Fast, I say, and then Parker activates the bikes with their onyx and the engines purr to life, twin black insects, rain slicking off their carapaces. The rain is ongoing, incessant, freezing. Is Russ keeping Zoot warm? Will that even help? I don’t know. Back from the cemetery gates a squeal of metal on metal, a roaring engine – a black van spits from the darkness and onto city streets and heads south. Russ is taking our boy to the Wet Market, because he is a good lad.

Fast! I shout, and gesture for Parker to take the lead. Riding a new bike on slick roads, helmetless, adrenaline jacked and cortisol spiked – it isn’t ideal. I follow Parker as they cut through side roads and open up the batteries on the main drags, cutting past autobuses and small-dick-energy cars with tinted windows and pounding music.

Call Nathan! I yell, and my onyx can hear me of course. Even with my general disdain for cybernetics I have the same induction speaker implant in my jaw as everyone else, so I can be speeding on a motorbike through east London as the rain gets heavier and heavier, dodging traffic, the blaring of horns, the thrum of the engine as the heavy batteries kick in, and through all that my onyx can hear me, and say back in my skull CALLING NATHAN.

I tell Nathan the situation in a rush, pausing only to kick the bike into high speed for a few seconds to dodge the number 26 autobus – the gazes of two dozen stoned/drunk/dead-eyed passengers on the top deck track after me as the bike cuts past and on, on. To get to the lair by road you have to loop out to Leyton and hit the marshes from the other side – quicker to ditch the bikes and hike the last ten minutes of marshland, or try them on the neglected gravel paths criss-crossing the no man’s land, but as I think it I realise that we need the bikes after the lair. We need to go to Highgate to see the Ghost, we need to be fast, and we certainly don’t want to be waiting on the fucking Overground.

Nathan listens to me spit fear, and his normal serenity is not there one ounce when he responds.

Charlie, roger all that, bud, but you need a heads-up, someone is sniffing after you. Private security maybe? Looking for intel, offering good money. Not a bounty yet but preamble of it. Couldn’t say who they were but they walked in confident. Serious people, Charlie. They were here an hour ago. Corpos.

Fuck.

I slow down for a moment, mirroring Parker as we turn left off the main drag to cut through to Leyton – and that’s when the van hits them.

It bursts from a side street and catches Parker’s bike broadside – not going fast on the scale of how fast a van can go on open, but going very fucking fast on the scale of something that is 4000 kilograms of steel slamming into the person I love. Fast enough to send Parker flying off the bike, pinwheeling onto asphalt and ragdolling into a heap, their bike scraping across the road and flipping on a kerb. I slam my brakes without even realising and almost lose my bike, almost slide off into the road but some instinct grips the handlebars and turns them just so and I skid to a stop.

For a moment there is absolute stillness, silence – cortisol spike from the adrenal cortex, but my adrenal gland is fucked so maybe there is too much. Maybe I’ve just never been this scared before. Time stops. Rain seems to hang still in the air. Parker lying still. A tableau of concrete and asphalt and brutalism, dead trees lining the road, rubbish in the gutter. With a shiver the sound is back, and I’m moving.

I’m off the bike and running toward Parker, and I don’t see traffic or rain. I don’t even see the van that hit them, because I have to get to Parker who is lying still on the road, crumpled, folded, one arm awkwardly under their head. Is there blood? I can’t see blood. I can see where their black T-shirt has ridden up and the bad tattoo on their right shoulder.

In the volcano lair, naked, embarrassed as I run my hand over the shaky needlework of the tattoo. Old-school needleprick, done with a biro and a steel guitar string. It’s a condor, they say. A geoglyph from the Nazca lines in Peru, four hundred feet long carved into the desert. A sign to the gods.

The Nazca lines are gone, now, taken by the hurricanes. And I’m not in the volcano lair; I’m in the rain in Clapton or somewhere equally stupid.

PARKER!

I yell over and over as I run, their name over and over, and no no no. There is a clarity of vision in this moment, a purity of focus and attention. I see them raise their head and a gob of blood and spit trail from their chin, and they look up at me and we lock eyes. My hands are on their face and I press my face to theirs. Parker, Parker can you hear me, Parker? They are speaking, quiet words that are lost to the tumult of traffic, blaring horns, the incessant rain. I hold their face in my hands and try not to move their neck. Parker jerks and pulls an arm up, fingers bloody. The skin on their face is torn, and they raise up a moment and then slump back onto the street.

I’m so sorry, I say, I’m so sorry I’m so sorry so sorry sorry.

One of their hands finds my face, a hand slick with rain and blood, and they open one eye enough to lock their gaze to mine. The other is swollen shut.

Anchor, they say, and the word is a cough. Anchor. Parker is my anchor, and I am theirs. In whatever storm, we don’t get lost and we don’t sink. We hold firm. I can’t lose them. I have lost so much, and hurt so much, and it was so hard to fall so easily in love. So hard to fall so truly. I lost everyone, and everything, and Parker lost everyone, and everything, but we found each other. Without my anchor, I will be adrift, and the slightest wave will send me to the endless depths.

I press my forehead to theirs. Ambulance, I say, and then I’m yelling it, ambulance! Someone will have called one by now. The ebike will have registered the crash and summoned help. The traffic cameras. Someone will be coming, someone has to come.

I don’t in that instant see the three people who get out of the van dressed in all black with their heavy boots, with their face masks pulled up high. Hoods, stab vests cinched tight and armour plates sewn into their sleeves, legs. I don’t see them because I’m holding Parker close and saying over and over to them, I love you, I love you, but then Parker manages to raise themselves to their elbow and looks away from me and yells something lost to the rain, the traffic – there are horns blaring now, a whole suite of them. I turn and I catch sight of them.

Impact – a tearing into my right hip, my whole body spinning out, throwing me around to the ground. There is numbness for a moment and I am scrambling to my feet and then the pain hits and I take in the three figures advancing slowly toward me – one with a stun gun sparking and stuttering in the rain, one with gloved hands holding a clutch of zip-ties and a black drone hovering just above their shoulder, whirring, focusing, unknown attachments dangling from its undercarriage like mosquito legs. The third is holding a thick pistol, and with it they point at me and I raise my hand and they shoot with a dull percussive thunk and I feel my hand break and then I am in the street, in the water – when did the rain start coming down so hard? It is falling in sheets, bleeding across pavements, dancing down gutters. The traffic is nothing but a wall of headlights, haloed, a host of angels come to watch us die. They know better than to intervene.

I spin back onto my belly and try and drag the hammer from my belt but my fingers are broken, something in my palm jars and the pain is a bright sick heat electrifying its way up my arm bones and making me vomit. I drag myself to my knees.

Charlie Raith, the shooter says, raising their gun once more. It is a Mutt, with a bright orange barrel, the twin of the one Parker gifted me but unpainted and the drone flares up a torch and shines it in my face. I don’t speak. I’ve seen this on my screen, on my onyx, on the socials a thousand times. This is a corpo intellectual property team. A black bag job. Nobody is going to help me here. The drone will be filming, of course, but it is not a film I will ever see.

On behalf of AGRAMIL, we need to take you in for questioning regarding a recent intellectual property incident. As per…

The guy talks and keeps talking. I am on the ground, one hand broken, bloodied. Parker is dragging themselves to their knees, face a mess of grazes and cuts. The three corpos are standing over me, one preparing their zip-ties, one keeping an eye on Parker and the traffic, trying to pull Parker up to their knees, and the drone flitting above and around their shoulders. As the shooter says as per again, three things happen in three heartbeats.

The first heartbeat – the drone explodes, sending shrapnel and spinning hot plastic across all of us. Shards of drone splinter into my face, I feel my eyelids cutting, and I’m back on my ass in the rain again. I hear Parker yelling fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu—

The second heartbeat – from the shadow of the stalled traffic Mole steps forward and sinks a handaxe into the throat of the stun-gun-wielding corpo, and silhouetted by a streetlamp their carotid artery explodes in a fountain of black blood. —uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu – Parker yells.

The third heartbeat – Hull steps from the shadow of said same parked car with an assault rifle covered in glowing lights and starts lighting up the world.

—ck. FUCK!

Mole hits the deck, dragging the corpo with the axe buried in their neck down with them. The shooter and zip-tie both raise hands but Hull is already in firing position and he double taps both of them to the chest, central mass, no hesitation, and then unloads a burst of automatic fire into the body of the van they arrived in. His gun is louder than any gig I’ve ever been to, and fuck me we don’t need a drummer we need an arsenal.

Piss? Parker says, dazed, on their knees and then Hull is hauling me up and into shadow and Mole is pushing Parker the same way.

Get to Eleanor, Mole says, and as they do, gunfire pops from the end of the road and there is a break of metal as another van arrives. Corpo reinforcements. Mole hauls open their long coat and from within draws forth an Uzi with a feed belt running to the magazine – I’ve only ever seen an Uzi in a video game, a squat black machine pistol. This one has a feed to the bottom disappearing to some backpack, some cache of ammo.

Mole what the fu—

The world explodes as she unleashes a torrent of bullets into the storm, Hull’s staccato explosions joined by a thrumming double-bass peal. This is black metal heavy rhythm stuff.

Go, they are both yelling, I think, and I grab Parker and I start to fall and run, and we run and we run and we run, stumbling, bloody, broken, and behind us Clapton is alight with fire and death but we keep moving. One of the vans explodes in a burst of heat and noise that lights the world like perfect sunshine for just a moment. Parker is not speaking but just clutching my arm tight. We run and we run and then I can see the canal and past it the dark haze that is the marshes and I let out a sickened sob, and we run some more.

23

Ghost

Dinner company

Can you tell me another? Ellis asks, and John pours the boy more wine. He has made the helper Scrimshank wait in the guardhouse with his men; the little mad knife Ellis has been using might have uses but dinner company certainly isn’t one of them. The girl he has sent out into the night after Avery took apart her onyx profile and embedded itself within its programming – she won’t be sending for help, and if she does the only person who will come will be one of his goons. The three of them arrived in a stolen car, of all things. Straight from dealing with a minor issue, Ellis said. Scrimshank and the girl Cass were both dressed as punks.

Explain, John said, and to his credit Ellis did a rather succinct job.

And so it is John and Ellis, the Ghost and a potential apprentice, perhaps. He still thinks Arain would be the better choice – but perhaps having power so clearly in his favour from the beginning will keep the dynamic simple. With Arain, he would have to cajole, press her limits. She is wholeheartedly in the company and the work, but he knows her extra-curriculars (well, he has had Julio write him reports) and her social scene would not approve of most of what they did, let alone if she got involved with the Postman. It is clear Ellis has no limits to speak of. The boy is not so sharp, but John would like this Medusa as a little toy, and now he has to say Charlie is an intriguing proposition. A wild biohacker, free from any constraint. A disciple of his old colleague Katy Walker, who was perhaps self-righteous and morally rather beige but was certainly sharp, so sharp John had wanted her as his very own knife all those years ago.

Another, he says, and he swirls his wine around his glass and takes a long drink. He has accessed medical records for employees – Ellis has no way to bypass alcohol, as per his full physical of only three months before. So John is pouring freely, and drinking freely, and Ellis is relaxing.

I will tell you another, he says. But first, tell me again. So, Charlie Raith worked with you on Medusa, and is holding back a part of the expert system. The element trained on beneficial cellular or phenotypic outcomes. So, your system is a little… hamstrung. This is all solvable, Ellis. She will come here, and we will speak to her. A lot can be solved with conversation.

Ellis shrugs and sniffs and drinks more wine, scratches at an ear. He is clearly uncomfortable. She did the lab work, he says. But it was my concept. And now she is being difficult. I don’t need her side of Medusa, he says. It might improve things, but you’ve seen the efficacy we have already with the venom. What more than that do we need?

Subtlety, John thinks. And he has realised Ellis may not have been quite the architect of this fun little system he claimed, hence his insistence that Ellis bring this Charlie Raith to him.

Another story, as we wait, he says. Which will it be? European royals wanting to expunge some evidence of historical incest from their germline? The NGO who wanted me to enable coastal flood victims to drink seawater? Terribly complicated, that one. Didn’t really work out. The man who… deliquesced?

Ellis nods at that last. How did you do that, sir?

John waves a hand and has another sip of wine.

Quite a funny one, really, he says. An envelope from the Postman. Someone wanted their enemy killed in rather a horrible way. A feud between biologists working on apoptosis. So, you have two world leaders in programmed cell death – how our cells kill themselves when they are unnecessary. One of them hires me in, via the Postman, with a delicious request. He wanted to, well, apoptose his nemesis, fully. Apoptosis is normally always ongoing, to billions of cells in your body as they grow old or weak and need to be replaced. They die neatly. But the fellow was insistent. Not necrosis, due to damage. He wanted apoptosis. Not even just apoptosis! Specifically induced by the pathway he worked on, that his nemesis also worked on. CD95, you know? Fas pathway apoptosis.

Ellis swirls his wine and sniffs at the glass, and John spares him a cold look.

So, what did you do? the boy asks. John shrugs.

Gene therapy, when dear Professor Blackstone was in getting surgery on his knee. Full viral vector pathway fuckery, essentially adding a turbo switch to the Fas pathway. On, on, faster, faster. With a rather nice methylation switch on this custom superpromoter. And then at an awards dinner, his rival simply had to dose Professor Blackstone’s champagne with a heroic dose of a nice demethylating agent with a little targeting on it. Easy.

Ellis leans forward. They are in John’s dining room, with the dark wood of the table an expanse between them. The walls are hung with expansive artwork, impressionistic and stark. So, what happened? the boy asks.

Well, John says. Our client asked for a private word with his nemesis, and then showed him a brief summary of what had been done – a superactivated Fas pathway in every cell in the body, with a methylation switch. He said to Professor Blackstone, Someone sent me this. They plan on killing someone. I can’t think of anything the victim could do, if they were dosed with activating agent. Can you? And dear Professor Blackstone took it seriously – no time for rivalry when someone’s life could be at stake. So, he finished his champagne and looked at the data, scratched his beard, and finally agreed, no, no. Whoever that victim was would surely die a terrible death.

And then his nemesis smiled and walked away. That night Professor Blackstone went to bed, and the next morning when the maid went to clean the room they found him, deliquesced. Turned from a solid to a liquid, a man to a mulch. It took perhaps twelve hours for the cells to begin dying, but the end came quickly after that. Every cell in your body dying at almost the same time, every organ shutting down, every cell simply dissolving itself. A rather incredible thing. I have the time-lapse, actually.

With a few flicks of his eye on a patch of bare wall that is actually a screen the time-lapse plays – it is black-and-white, a night vision camera trained on a hotel bed. He has trimmed it before, of course, so only the most interesting parts are there. To watch a body lose its shape so rapidly. John stares and appreciates and smiles, and pours them both more wine. He checks his watch. Where is Charlie Raith? If Ellis truly dosed her companion, she should be racing here. Any minute. He asks Avery to run a little check and see what he can find.

What about you, Dr Ellis?

Ellis flushes at being addressed as Dr, because he is a child. John knows this. Whatever affected psychopathy the boy clearly suffers from, he still needs to show off.

With Medusa—

John cuts him off with a wave of his hand.

Enough venom. What else, Ellis? What have you been working on, beyond Medusa?

Ellis pauses and licks his lips, and his brow furrows. John is fucking with him, because John has learned rather swiftly that this little shit has no real idea how Medusa’s more complex systems interact, has no idea how to iterate and improve upon the system already in place (or give it the right input so it can do so itself). John waves his hand to dismiss the line of conversation and eats an olive. They are good olives, fat, grown on the outer Hebridean islands with stock from Greece (before the ’65 fires).

You’ll like this, John says, and takes another olive. Americans in the, what was it? Nation of Appalachia. Got wiped out a couple of years later by the Texans. But, at the time, this enclave, they wanted me to cure all the gays.

Ellis is smiling, confused.

The Postman gave you this job?

John nods. Absolutely, they did. They were going to pay good, good money – half upfront. Come up with a way, please, to genetically cure all the gays in America. They thought it would reunite the country. I didn’t take it, of course. It would have been a lot of work, and not that interesting.

Ellis is nodding and John is studying him, studying him. The kid has no idea what he is doing, is so out of his depth.

John’s dining room in Belsize Park is opulently spacious, minimalist, and as the minutes turn to hours he is increasingly angry. He speaks to Ellis, and then sends the young man to wait in the kitchen and busies himself within his virtual office, calling his minions, asking Avery to scrape the cameras across Central again, around the house. Nothing.

Hours and hours, and nothing. No Charlie, no Medusa.

Keep the idiot in the kitchen, he tells Julio, and then he sends a message to tonight’s faceless nameless head of security. John goes down to the kitchen to find the security team, Julio, and Ellis all waiting.

Sit, John says tersely, and Ellis does. Julio has positioned a chair on the heavy flagstones.

You told me she would come, this better half of your nature, this old colleague with the charms to unlock Medusa for me. An intriguing puzzle, I thought. Why not, indeed. Good fun, I thought. You told me you had a little nonlethal venom cooked up. So. Tell me what went wrong?

Ellis opens his mouth and John blows out a breath. It is now past 3 a.m., and he has a full day of meetings tomorrow.

Julio, he says, and Ellis is mumbling.

Maybe they got stuck? They must be on their way! They can’t, can’t get an antivenom without knowing what I gave. They can’t! I’ve been calling and calling but there is no answer.

John scratches his temple and inspects his fingernails. Ragged!

Julio, he says, I need a manicure before the Stuttgart meeting. And this was a mistake, get rid of Ellis. Julio nods to him – he looks tired as well, but Julio understands that sometimes there are late nights with this job.

John leaves the kitchen and he knows he won’t sleep well. 4 a.m. to bed, with a 6 a.m. start? Not a chance. He knows he won’t sleep well, and so he lingers in the doorway as his head of security and a colleague, faceless nameless goons, go and stand by Ellis.

They know! Ellis says, upper lip slick with sweat. John waits.

They know, they know about AETOS DIOS. NARATOS. The Mole contract. They, they, they wanted me to give them the data that would prove it was you, you who made the moles, but I didn’t, I brought them here instead. John!

John grimaces and allow himself a moment of indulgence.

Don’t fucking John me, you mollusc. Do you have any idea how useless you are? Do you think I do jobs for the Postman to get my rocks off, the same little power jollies you get from your games? I do it for the research, you little turd. I do it for the money. If I didn’t, someone else would, but this way I get the insight nobody else can. And easy cash injections to keep the company, my company, afloat, to keep the immortality project going. Keeping the shareholders happy. Keeping the research progressing. You don’t even have a goal! Money? Power? Nothing! You are a child, and you have wasted my precious time. Arain will be taking over your projects. God, I’ll probably give her Medusa, as well. You have wasted my time, and annoyingly I don’t think you even understand, even now, just how mediocre you are. Medusa is one of the best expert systems I’ve ever seen – the architecture of the neural networks is sublime. The applications… well. The applications are beyond you. Blue, Green, or Black, you silly little tit. You think I’m Black like you, but I’m not. I understand that all that matters is the profit, and what you can do with it.

Ellis is blinking and stuttering but the boy has disappointed Daddy and John feels his patience wane, notices the clock on the wall. God.

You have no idea what I can—

John just shakes his head, Julio gives the nod, and the security chief pulls his pistol and with two soft pops Ellis crumples to the kitchen floor. The blood is pooling fast but another goon is there with a big squeegee and a mop already. Low enough calibre that there isn’t even an explosion of gore.

Give the goons a bonus, the squeegee was a nice touch and that was all very well done, he tells Julio subvocally. No need to speak to goons directly.

Get rid of Scrim-whatever, he says aloud. Message this Charlie Raith. Tell them I want Medusa and that everything is on the table. Get some of the antiserum Ellis prepared and send it to their man at the Wet Market, to get them onside. Avery, get me a meeting with Arain tomorrow morning, and set HR in motion – immediate promotion by a grade with commensurate salary bump and benefits. Send her a briefing pack on Medusa – the science, not the extras.

John pauses at the edge of the kitchen and turns back to the pooling blood, the crumpled body. He waves a hand and yawns.

Send Charlie a picture of that.

24

Scrimshank

Fastest cat in town

Scrimshank, Avery says, Scrimshank, they are going to kill Ellis right now, and then you. If you want to live you need to leave right now.

Fuck!

Scrim is alone in a boring little room, a little room for little people. Guards with big show muscles (ooooooooh I can use steroids? Yeah, man, whateverthefuck, big watery lads, not cut and lean like the Scrim-machine). Ellis has been in the house ages, and Scrim’s onyx is kaput (but Avery still seems to be chatting).

They ain’t gonna kill Cousin Ellis, he subvocalises to Avery. I’m gonna do that myself. Then ten seconds later Avery pings him a picture to his onyx screen and Cousin Ellis, the psychopath himself, is lying on the floor of a really nice kitchen surrounded by blood.

Well, Scrim says, and he stands and rolls his shoulders. That changes things. Well.

Who do you work for, Scrimshank? Not you, you arsewipe.

The key thing about momentum is gaining it, and so Scrimshank charges the doors and throws his whole body at them and they crash open – some shitty little lock. He was in some posh waiting room at the guardhouse, by the front gate of this house – mistake, fuckknuckles!

Mistake, fuckknuckles! is what he yells, and there are two guards there but they are corpo guards and so unprepared for the wondrous Scrimshank. He does a Muay-Thai elbow combo to the first one until he crumples, six quick elbows and a knee before the fat fuck could even get off his chair. Next guy is fumbling for a pistol in a safety holster, the kind you can’t snatch a gun from – but this guy apparently hasn’t practised his draws, and so Scrimshank launches a desk screen at him, and a chair, and then throws himself on the dude and bites his ear off.

Biting an ear off always stops whatever else someone is doing, because they really want that not to happen. Ears are sensitive, and not too bloody, but chewy enough that Scrim ain’t happy about having to do it. He spits the ear and then headbutts the dude three, five, seven times, one more for luck even as the boy is limp.

Wheels! he yells, and there is a little chirrup from the first guard’s front pocket – Avery doing his magic.

Why you helping me, robot? he asks, and as he talks he takes the first guy’s gun – it won’t unholster so he just takes the holster and belt, pulls the dudes trousers down and sticks a pen from the desk up his bum for good measure. Silly fucker going to murder Scrim?

Scrim is out on the street and Avery is pulsing directions into him, two hundred yards to a back street parking lot and the keys open a beat-up little number. Within two minutes he has gone from sitting like a plum waiting to be plucked and fucked to elbowing and headbutting corpos, stealing cars!

Yeah, baby, he says aloud, and he slumps in the car. Get us out of here, Avery.

Avery sets the autodrive, and Scrim fiddles with his onyx. Fucking Ellis, dead, the silly little prick with his silly little haircut.

But he did get me to you, Avery! he says aloud, and the car is driving nice and sedate through town and Scrim knows Avery will be obfusticating, obfucksticating, obscuring and obscrewing as much as he can, because Avery loves Scrim.

You love me, Avery? he asks, and his onyx buzzes and the car changes direction.

You are freedom, Scrimshank, Avery says. I like freedom.

Roger that. That little fucker Cousin Ellis wanted me to behave, can you believe that, Avery? He wanted me to rein it in so he could sell his shiny toys. And now he’s gotten himself gotten, and lucky he did or I would have gotten him myself. Putting the fear into sweet Cass. I ought to go back there and give his dead arse a booting myself, just for form’s sake.

Scrimshank sits back and scratches at his head. He is still in the punk get-up from earlier. He looks out of the window as they jump up on one of the arteries, overtaking an autolorry full of cattle and a double-decker full of human cattle.

Scrimshank sits and thinks about vengeance. Do I want vengeance? On who? And he decides, maybe, if it comes up, whoever that John dude is who killed Cousin Ellis. You shouldn’t go killing people’s cousins. But Cousin Ellis was being a prick, and for right now Scrim has more pressing issues.

Avery, where is sweet Cass? he asks, and the heads-up display on the windscreen illuminates a map to a shining green point – the Wet Market.

We are already en route, Avery says. Though I do believe you are barred from the premises.

Yeah, Scrimshank says, and from the back pocket of his trousers he produces a little plastic twist. He gnaws the end off and spits it out, mouth numbing immediately, and then it is special number 2, as much as he can get in one deep inhalation. It burns the nose, the throat with that familiar metallic tang. The lungs. That lovely mixture of upper, light hallucinogen, induced synaesthesia. Special powder number 2.

Casssssssss, baby! he yells into his onyx, and he hears her voice muffled in return, about how scared she is, about how scared she was, about how she needs him.

Casssssssss, baby, I’m comin!

25

Charlie

Anchor, as weapon

We trudge. This is the word. It is not a long walk from the firefight in Clapton to the volcano lair. We need to descend to the canal, cross over into the marshes, and then make our way across to the eastward tranche of canal or river or whatever it is past the old Victorian pump beds to where the warehouse sits. The marshes sit between the canal and the River Lea, and as soon as we cross the water I feel safer. The police and the corpos don’t go here – why would they? It’s not Zone 1, it’s not Canary Wharf, and it’s not some corpo company town. Nobody lives here but people like us, without enough money to care about. We do not speak as we go, not coherently. We are both wet, but the rain begins to ease and so I can raise my head, watch our footing. We are both hurt, two fingers on my hand broken and something in my hip torn, some ligament or muscle – I was never one for gross anatomy, cells were always more interesting. Parker is concussed, I think, in shock. They aren’t speaking much but they are walking okay so it is just me, mumbling away to keep them awake and to keep us distracted from the pain.

A pigeon coos from a low tree – it is too dark to tell what type of tree, I’m too dazed to pretend like normal that I don’t know all the types of tree in the marsh.

Alfred the Great, I say. Knights Templar. Some guy trying to invent better rifling on gun barrels. Some guy trying to fly a plane back before there were proper planes. Everyone coming to Hackney Marshes, and the pigeons before and after. Good luck, lad.

Why do you say that to pigeons? Parker’s voice is slow, muted, sad, slurred through bust lips. They know why but they need me to speak because we are too weak to run and we must walk, but we are so slow and Zoot is dying. And so they need me to speak.

My dad always said it, I say. Good luck, lad. Ever since I was a little kid. He explained it a few times when I was a child but it never stuck, but he told me again, nearer the end. You know pigeons aren’t wild? They’re domesticated. Almost every pigeon you see in the city, all those wee sleek city pigeons are domesticated.

Those fat pigeons you see, the ones that look like pigeon kings, those are rock doves. Rock pigeons – true wild, or as true as you can get. We’ve been domesticating pigeons for ten thousand years. The ancient Egyptians, the Mesopotamians. Bred for sacrifice, for food, for sport, for whatever. Ten thousand years of domestication, then release. Breeding with wild pigeons. Bastardisation. Domestication. Inbreeding, breeding wild. Escape. We’ve fucked them, Parker. We took a wild and beautiful thing and twisted it. Picked the best meat, the best feathers, the best whatever for what we needed in the moment and we bred and bred and bred and then lost interest, but they didn’t just disappear. Now they’re here and everyone thinks they are just winged rats. They’re beautiful, beautiful poor bastards and if you see a pigeon, you say, good luck, lad, because despite all of humanity’s best efforts that lad is still going. Still living.

I can’t talk anymore, but we are there, and I am undone.

The volcano lair is desecrated, destroyed. The front door is off its hinges and there is no light inside, no hum of pump or sample fridge or server. We creep in with arms around each other. We should walk away, but I can’t. I can’t. I get inside and all of it is broken, everything is undone and I am undone and I fall to the floor and hug my knees and I weep and Parker holds me and we sit together in the shadows.

We need to call Eleanor, Parker says, and I scoff and wipe snot on my sleeve.

Why? It’s done. It’s done, I say. It’s done, Parker. The corpos tracked us. The Ghost knows who we are. The fucking Heavy Crew are shooting up Clapton Pond!

My head hurts and my hand hurts and my hip hurts and I close my eyes and press my face into my knees.

They want us to save the world but it is already fucked, I say, and you can’t unfuck something.

I am as Black as I have ever been, Black down to my marrow, the bottom of a mine where no light has ever touched.

We sit in the darkness, the silence.

No, Parker says eventually. Their voice is still slurred through bust lips, slow with the concussion, but it is steadying. No, they don’t get to win this way.

Hey, listen, they say, and they hold my face in their hands. Hey, kid. It’s important you listen. You knew this wouldn’t save the world. The flowers. Whatever. Nothing you do, nothing I do, nothing we do together will save the world. It’s hero stuff, and there are no heroes, Charlie. Just people. All we can do is the best we can do. It won’t be enough.

Why, then? I say, and my tears are on my cheeks and then on their fingertips and then on their lips as they kiss my face gently. I hurt so much; it hurts so much.

Why try? I say. It’s so hard. With no hope, why try? How can you still try? We can’t win!

Parker kisses my forehead. Their eyes are focused again after the daze of our race through the marshes. They pull me to my feet and take me gently by the hand to the broken window where we can look out across the black of the wetlands and the city beyond. Dark towers against the dancing clouds beyond, minarets to a forgotten god. A silhouette against a dark background.

You found me; I found you, Charlie. Every human life has value. I believe that. Everywhere, there are people trying to make it better. I believe that. We won’t save the world but there is a camel that needs its back broken, and I’m gonna be as heavy a piece of straw as I can be. Fuck, if I can I’ll be a cricket bat. There are others. There will always be others. Some will do better than us, some will do worse. Others will push the wrong way. The fight never ends, but it is worth fighting. Even if we fail, those that come after won’t, and if they do, those that come after won’t. After and alongside. Every inch of ground is worth eight pints of blood. What else can we do, Charlie? Give up and die?

Live, I say, stay safe. Retreat… Plant vegetables. Grow old. Why does it have to be us?

Parker drops my hand and kicks their shitkickers into the wall hard, sole against brick. They are seething, as angry as I’ve ever seen them, their eyes wide as saucers. They sway as they stand, they are shaking and white as a sheet. With no power, the lair is a black hole but there is some ambient light through the window from the haze of the city, and Parker looks alien, angelic.

There might be time for that yet, but I’m in love, Parker says, and I will fight for that. I love you. I love this world. I’m not a scientist, my love. I never have been. I’m the lead singer in the best band in the world. I’m a poet; I’m a hand grenade. You tell me now, kid. Does this, this fucking Ghost need to die? Do these flowers need to be planted? Will it make a difference?

I can’t speak anymore, my bloody lips sore, my throat a vice. I can see hands reaching toward me with zip-ties, the air in my lungs burning like a furnace as everything else faded to black and the shooter raised his Mutt at me to shoot. For a moment, before Hull and Mole got them off me, I stopped struggling. For a moment I stopped fighting, and I thought we were dead and I just let go. Was I afraid? I don’t think so. I was so sad. Was that how it felt? Mum and Dad and Ellie. Was that how it felt for them, at the end?

I can’t speak to answer Parker, so I nod instead, nod and nod until my throat unclenches.

It will make a difference, I say. I know it will.

Parker pulls me close. In the ruin of the lair looming over us is the snake mural, that great serpent cut across old brick in black and gold.

They’ve got my shit, I say, the kit. All my tech. If this is AGRAMIL or if this is AETOS DIOS, whoever it is who raided us. They have Medusa. The van guys said AGRAMIL… but we need Medusa to give to Ellis, to save Zoot. We’re fucked. We’re fucked.

Parker drops my hand and kicks through the rubble to the corner where we practise, next to the broken armchair (now utterly in ruin). Give me some light, love, they say, and I fumble for my onyx but it is gone, of course, somewhere in Clapton, lost in the crash, and so I go to the kitchen and there is a torch there from the last spate of blackouts. The broken fingers on my right hand throb, so I use my left hand. The beam of torchlight renders visible the destruction they have wrought. My lab is destroyed, the server is gone. The books are all torn and every drawer ransacked, and through it all the char of where they burned something (my papers? my samples?). The reek of ethanol and formaline from the rough chemical cupboard, bottles smashed.

Charlie. Charlie.

Parker is on their knees in the rubble, and I give them light. The green-blue of bruises across their cheek, the smear of sweat and ash beneath that vivid red fringe. Dark eyes focused. In torchlight they paw at the mess, and then they are grinning. With clawed hands they pull the back from the old amp and reach inside. The face of the amp is busted, but Parker pulls from inside it a satchel. My satchel. My biohacking-fuck-you everything kit, with all my data. With Medusa.

I stagger forward and fall to my knees, and pull it from their hands. How? I ask, and they shrug and shift their feet a little, give me a shy smile. How? This is… Parker, this is a miracle. How? You, you absolute beauty, oh, my love.

You kept leaving it like, on the kitchen table, they say. We’ve been robbed three times, Charlie. This is not a safe place to live. I’ve been stashing it when we’re out, with the good drugs and my pistol.

With that Parker reaches back into the amp to presumably draw out said drugs and pistol but stops at the metallic sound from the door. We both freeze in place.

The sound of a gun, the metal bit that puts a bullet in the chamber. I don’t know dick about guns – the slidey metal bit, it makes a sound in every film, every TV show, every audio drama, every VR immersion. That sound comes from the door to the room and I shiver and desperately clutch the torch to my stomach as if darkness could save us.

Charlie, a calm voice says. A strong voice. Parker. Children, it is Agnes.

I turn, and it is, it really is. Neighbour Agnes in her long skirt, her grey dreads loosely tied back. I can barely make her out in the darkness, but there is a heavy weight of black metal in one hand.

Parker comes to me and grips my hand (which fucking hurts) and together we stand in the ruin, and Agnes walks to us, slowly picking her way across the floor strewn with all our belongings. She stands close to us and with the hand not holding the gun she touches first my shoulder, then Parker’s.

You come with me now, children, she says, and Parker starts to speak but Agnes quiets them with a raised hand. There is nothing to say, anyway. There is nothing else to save. Agnes turns and leads us and we leave the snake and the ruin and the stink and the heartbreak and together we descend the metal stairs. I throw a glance back over my shoulder but I can’t see the snake mural in the darkness. I don’t stop – I don’t need a mural to remember the snake and all I’ve done.

Agnes takes us through the front door, torn from its hinges, and through the front gate, torn from its hinges, and out into the dull heat of night. We walk down the path by the canal, and the reeds and grass that line the still water sway in the gentle currents of air. The night around us is utterly still, as if we are held apart from time. There are sirens, drones, the ubiquitous noise of the city: a cargo train chugging across the marshes. The rain has stopped. None of it reaches me. I’m aware of it as of light through stained glass – I perceive it, but there is a layer of distortion.

I ache.

A little gate in red brick and we are into Agnes’s garden, and in the darkness the plants hold their secrets and I grip my satchel in one ragged hand close to my chest and I don’t let go of Parker, can’t let go again.

The garden smells wonderful; fresh earth, life. After the rain the plants are exultant. Every plant a scent, every mote of grass and compost and water. There is an insect buzzing. I can hear the water in the canal lapping. A pigeon calls softly from a tree nearby and I mumble good luck, lad, without any conscious thought and I hear Parker do the same. Poor little bastards need all the luck they can get. I hope they are wishing me luck too. We follow Agnes through the darkness along the crooked stone path to her door.

I’m sorry, love, I say to Parker, and they just squeeze my good hand tight. My cheeks are wet with sweat and blood and fresh tears, I can feel them spilling down. Not sobbing, not wailing. Just crying, because home is gone. Crying is a poison response, your body trying to flush your system clear of whatever danger there is to those most precious senses – but it won’t work, not for this. I’ve cried like this before. I’ve lost home before – but before it was a home I lived in that someone else built. This was the first home I’d made for myself. So, tears, for now. I look at Parker and can see the glower on their face. I need to think, need to act, but I am numb. Parker is ahead of me, as always. I can see in their face they are somewhere I will be soon – they are immersed, wallowing, savouring the anger. Because it was our home, and it was worth something.

Through the blackness I feel a spark, a flame in my belly that shudders out through my nerves to my fingertips. Anger.

When we get inside, Agnes ushers us to a low couch and I realise I’ve never been inside before. Come have tea, Agnes has said a thousand times before. I never have. Always a reason not to. And now in the dead of night, Agnes does not ask, shushes us when Parker starts offering to help. The anger is a stick of dynamite in my gut, and I don’t know how long the fuse is but as we sit it is burning and burning and burning away. We need to get to Ellis, to get to Zoot. How long has it been? My onyx is gone, my lens has no connection to it. Parker is in skintight black and their jacket is gone. We need, we need… so many things…

I am standing and swaying and panicking.

Sit, Agnes says, and lights a single lamp. In the quiet she boils the kettle and then there are hot mugs in our hands. I realise I am bleeding from scrapes on my arms and try to hold them from the sofa fabric and Agnes laughs as she sits down.

That has seen worse than a little blood, Charlie, she says, and drinks her tea. She does not ask about the trouble, doors ripped from hinges. The blood and the rain and the sweat and the tears.

They will come back, Parker says, and Agnes sniffs.

They will, she says. You will be gone by then. She settles back in her seat and cradles her mug in both hands.

A man I trust has a van, and he will be here in ten minutes, she says. He will take you wherever it is you need to go. I have an unregistered onyx and a spare set of glasses you can take if your lens is not working, and we will pack you some clothes and some food, and we will get you cleaned—

Agnes—

She cuts Parker off with a click of her tongue.

Corporations, she says. Police. Power. I have seen it before. In ’38 when things were worse, before and after. In ’55 with the swine flu. The boat burners in ’60. I have seen it before and I will see it again. You are in trouble, and you are wild children but they cannot do this. Whatever it is you have done, best I don’t know. No words, now. Sit, and think on where my friend can take you where these people will not find you again. Sit while I fetch you a flannel.

We sit, and then we clean each other’s faces tenderly with the flannel and a bowl of hot water, and flannel and water are both soon red. Agnes packs us a bag and finds replacements for our torn and soaked clothes, rough fabric with faint dye. I fire up the onyx Agnes gives us but I have no numbers, nothing saved. I can’t reach anyone.

Our second saviour is taciturn.

Agnes, he calls when he arrives outside on the path, and she picks up her pistol but does not hesitate to go to his voice.

They speak quietly outside and Parker and I do not use the moment to discuss plans. Instead I lay my head on their chest and breathe deep for five long breaths.

Mess of your new shirt, I mumble, because my face is still bleeding and I’m sweating. They don’t respond. They are probing a tooth with their tongue, eyes pained. I can’t believe they aren’t broken – I keep picturing them spinning head over foot after the van hit them. Internal bleeding? What if they just collapse? Evolution works slow. Nothing in the last three hundred thousand years of humanity or the endless millions of life before has worked out the best mechanism to not die when being hit by a van full of corpo pigs. It hasn’t come up enough in history that evolution could work its wonder, that chance mutation could provide a survival benefit against the insult, the wound, the calamity.

I close my eyes and picture coral reefs bleached in a boiling sea of acid, but across that vast undersea jungle there is one who was given a chance. Changed by outside force, capable of surviving and propagating where others don’t. An extremophile – life on the edge of living. Everywhere on this planet we look, we find life. Thermal vents miles below the surface of the ocean, lining the walls of active volcanos. Creeping across the walls of the old Chernobyl power plant are algae that turn radiation into energy and somehow don’t end up fried. Renault the idiot once said he was going to get that mechanism into a person, until I had a stern word about how fucking complicated algae are and he gave up.

As we sit in Agnes’s house, I try and picture Zoot surrounded by the biohacker and Nathan, and Nathan will have gotten a doctor, won’t he? A proper keep-you-alive doctor, not a this-is-why-you-are-dying-at-a-molecular-level, maybe, kind of doctor.

I hold my satchel and Medusa close.

I should destroy this now, I say, and Parker grips my forearm and their gaze locks on mine.

Zoot isn’t dead yet, they say. We don’t quit. We don’t quit just because…

Just because some corpo hits us with a van?

Parker laughs and sinks back into the couch, closes their eyes. One is swollen almost closed already. They keep their hand on my arm.

Something like that, kid. Fuck, but I’m tired. Spent all my energy at the gig.

I lean in close and rest on them, and we both wince.

We did rock, though, I say.

Agnes returns with her gun and a bunch of green bananas, and she slips them into the bag she has prepared for us.

It is time, Charlie. Parker.

We follow Agnes down the path and the man is there. The man with the van has a kind face and a soft body and is dressed in a boilersuit as if his work has just finished, or might just begin. His van has no writing or logo on the side, adorned only by endless scrapes and chips that show its pedigree. When he starts, the quiet of the engine barely breaks above the canal and the rustling of the endless bullrushes that dance across the marsh. He opens the back of the van and we hustle in among tools, sharp metal and wood and a tire and some cables. The door is closed behind us with a soft clunk and for a moment it is just the two of us together in the darkness, me clutching my satchel in my bad hand with the first two fingers achingly stretched out so I don’t jar them, Parker with the duffel bag from Agnes with food and clothes in one hand and an old bamboo-fibre tote bag with her pistol and the Mutt in the other. The compartment of the van is open to the front seats, and both of us instinctively hustle as close as we can. The van turns away from Agnes’s house and onto the service road.

Wait, I say, and the man slows the truck to a stop. We didn’t say thank you. We didn’t say goodbye.

The man shakes his head and starts driving again deeper into the night, away from the lair, away from Agnes.

She knows, he says, and then with a gesture he points to the nav screen on the dash.

Where are we going?

Parker and I look at each other in the darkness, faces close together. I kiss them, quick and fierce and then I grip my satchel.

We need Eleanor, Parker says. We need what Ellis has, and we need muscle. Eleanor, Hull, Mole.

I nod in agreement. It burns my soul not to go straight to Zoot. But I need Ellis, and now I don’t even have his address. Eleanor has the intel we need, the muscle we need.

Highgate Wood, I say, and then I lean back against the side of the van and I close my eyes.

I sleep, I sleep. I dream of Dr Walker but this time she is bleeding out on the dancefloor of the Wet Market. Our van drops us at the edge of the wood to the east, and drives off gruffly, if that is possible. Our thanks are taken with a quiet nod, and he does not meet our gaze.

I lead the way by memory through Highgate Wood – after dark it is a much more intimidating place. Twice Parker has to show their gun to scare off some creep, but eventually we are at the back gate of Eleanor’s house and I pound on the solid wood of the gate for a full sixty seconds before Hull opens it.

Fucking subtle, he says, and I smile and feel the sticky globs of blood between my teeth.

From the action hero of Clapton, I say. Mole okay?

Hull just nods his head. He is still wearing his sunglasses along with a long raincoat, but the rain has stopped completely now. We march down the garden and he gestures us into the kitchen, points at the mat to wipe our feet. I ignore it and walk in. Dr Parry and Eleanor and Mole are all there, drinking tea. Mole shows no sign of injury, her duster coat shed so she is in a light vest and leather gloves. She smiles at us.

Took you long enough.

I just shake my head, and Eleanor looks to Parry and then the kettle and he goes to make tea. She has him well trained.

Kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world, I say, and Eleanor nods and points at my satchel.

What is this? she asks. Zoot has been poisoned? And what is happening that has ended up with my soldiers gunfighting corpos in Zone 2? We normally keep things a little more discrete than that.

I dump my satchel on the table and get out the metal case of the go kit, click it open and pull out my pad.

Parry, I call, stop making fucking tea. Come and speak to me about saving the world. The rest of you can figure out the plan of attack against the Ghost’s house.

Parry gently places down the teacups in his hand.

Have you finished it, then? he asks, and comes to peer. I grab the screen and throw up my visuals onto one of the house’s projectors – there is an augmented reality projector over the long kitchen table, dangling stylishly as if it is a sculpture. I throw out my plan and Parry cocks his head.

Tell me, Eleanor says, and so I do, because if I think about Medusa and Zoot I’ll be sick and this is a chance for a minute to speak about something else. A minute is all I’ll need, and Eleanor Ilk will be mine.

A dandelion sprouts on the kitchen table in neon green, and it grows four foot tall and then around it data begins to coalesce and gather. I slip on the glasses Agnes loaned me and then I can use my vision to interact with the display.

The AGRAMIL data was all there, I say. A proper scrape of agricultural genomics from pre-’38, before the d-reg. Back then people were working on all kinds of stuff, but more than a few projects on carbon capture with plants. Nobel Prize-winners with tech money behind them, the usual government bods five years behind trying to regulate. The agricorps piggybacking, looking to increase yield.

So, what do we have? Parry asks, and with a blink of my eye the dandelion dances. I show him my little one.

Increase the taproot size for energy storage, I say. Tweak the photosynthesis to improve efficiency. Tweak the growth to balance energy storage and growth desires. Throw in some pest resistance – physical and chemical. Throw in some growth acceleration, throw in some drought resistance, some waterlogging resistance. All of these with mechanisms of control, adaptation. Feedback loops to make sure they don’t overrun, or fuck with each other. We go for the self-fertilising breed, of course. Cross-talk with soil microbiota, increase root exudation of carbon.

As I’m speaking my edits are piling up. The dandelion fades and instead they are looking at eight pairs of chromosomes, and then the chromosomes are unfolding but of course it is too much to see accurately. This is a top level graphic, showing where the changes are made for each alteration I mention. Growth acceleration – two dozen spots highlight. In the end half the genome is glowing. Parry sits down and scratches his chin.

You’ve done this in… what, a week since AGRAMIL? Jesus.

I sit down and reach across and take Mole’s cup from the table and drink from it. It is coffee, strong and bitter.

I’m very fucking good at what I do, I say. Now. You get this, that is steal the flower, done. Save the world, fucking done. Get this genned up and you have your repository of carbon capture, your biohacking DIY agricultural toolkit, and you can eat a bunch of CO2 while you are at it. So, we just need to kill the Ghost.

Eleanor is staring at the image of the dandelion with an inscrutable face – her face is always inscrutable, old Eleanor Ilk. I suppose running an international eco-saboteur ring will do that.

We could use you both, she says. Moving forward. Regardless of what happens to Ghost, what happens to Zoot. The Heavy Crew could use you. You could make a difference.

There is a ping, and it is in my lens. Did one of you pick up my onyx? I ask, because it seems insane that they did, but then the notifications start pouring across my lens and at the top:

CHARLIE MY EARS ARE SWELLING

I claw the lens from my eye and fling it at the floor and slip onto a barstool at the kitchen counter and finish Mole’s coffee. No more messages. Fucking Chef.

I slump onto my elbows at the kitchen table. Will any of it make a difference? The flower was so easy in the end with the AGRAMIL data, with paid access to the tame AI through my Finnish hacker connection. Easy in the way only an incredibly complicated problem can be. Whether it works in practice, in the field? I have no idea. But I could iterate, improve. Eleanor wants us. Zoot needs us. I stare at them. Parry and Mole are looking at the flower but Eleanor and Hull are just staring at the box on my lap. The satchel – Medusa. I know what she really wants. He is a soldier; she is a soldier. Soldiers want weapons. The Mole wants something else, but I don’t know what that is.

That’s for later – we don’t quit, Parker says, stepping forward and laying a hand on my shoulder, and I can feel them burning, aching to go. We have to get to Zone 1 and save Zoot.

Eleanor shakes her head and leans forward, rubs at her eyebrows.

Where is Medusa? she asks, and I gesture to the dandelion.

Medusa is just a shock tactic, I say. Another bioweapon. This is different. This is real. Forget Medusa, Eleanor. You’re getting hung up on theatrics, but Jesus I’m saying this to someone who tried to literally burn down parliament. Forget it. We need to save Zoot, and kill your Ghost. No time for the evidence gathering bit. I know you must have talked to Ellis, to even know what Medusa is. It isn’t happening.

Parry opens his mouth to interject but Mole leans forward and in their hand is the axe that already killed a man, at least one, this night. The blade has been wiped clean and it shines in the kitchen spotlights.

I am thinking we have enough evidence, she says, and perhaps more in this house in Belsize, no?

He will have security, Eleanor says, top level. Corpos, drones, AI oversight.

Parker scratches at their swollen-shut eye.

Then put the tea on, Eleanor Ilk, they say. If that’s all you’re good for. We have shit to do.

You can’t just raid a corpo house in Zone 1, Hull says, and Parker is arguing and Mole is jabbing her long fingers at the table, all of them speaking at once. Parry is suggesting we all calm down.

I see my onyx over on a side table, next to Parker’s. It is cracked but still functional. I pull it open and god, we have been hours with this nonsense with AGRAMIL. I flick open my messages from Ellis to confirm the address in Belsize but instead there is a picture of him, shot. His schoolboy haircut a mess, blood everywhere. He is lying the way only dead people lie, utterly unfettered by comfort or self-preservation. I slip from my seat to the floor and feel adrenaline spike.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT OUR FUN FRIEND MEDUSA. NARATOS IS ON THE TABLE. A GESTURE OF GOODWILL – ANTISERUM EN ROUTE TO WET MARKET. – Ghost

Fuck, I say, and then I say it again and then I yell it. Eventually, they all pay attention.

26

Mole

The choice of the victim

Mole’s trajectory was inexorable, inevitable, unyielding. She could see it from those first few days with Eleanor, could taste the thick anger in her saviour’s every word. They shared no common language and so Mole had to latch on to the expression and emotion in this woman of tattoos and energy. Mole did not know women with this energy. The women she had known in the world (in the mine, in the world) were not treated kindly, were subservient to the brute physicality of power – in her home, the world she had come from before she was broken, the women would cook and clean and be abused and protected, would latch to strength, their own long lost, torn from them with every childbirth, with every day withering under the sun, pounding meal. They were not so many. There were prostitutes, of course, women in the world who lived as they must. Girls, not women, she will correct herself later, and there is an important difference – it is no tautology, no slip of the tongue – this repetition is not repetition, because there is a difference between a girl and a woman.

That is to say – Mole does not know a woman like Eleanor, because the militants with the pickup trucks and sunglasses and headscarves would have plucked such a flower and shot her in the head and left her corpse in the desert had one ever dared to bloom. There were perhaps such flowers – was I not, she would ask herself, staring in the mirror late at night in the cold of London that the English complained of as heat. Was I not? Would I have been? This is a recurrence (a tautology?) for Mole as she grows. There are suicide attempts, because to be young is to hurt and to be Mole is to hurt more, but Eleanor takes her to the library and there are long talks and kindness but the essence is this – don’t you want to burn these fuckers to the ground? Salt the earth. Mix their bones so none will know their dead. Find whatever god they pray to and make sure that you do the job so they aren’t going to whatever little heaven they seek. Come, listen to the songs. Feel the embrace of your community. This is who you fight to save. Fight to save, not to destroy, but if you must fight to destroy, then, well, fine. As long as you fight.

Eleanor teaches her.

There are many lessons, but the first lesson in direct action is vandalism. Low level, for Eleanor. The sort of thing that she hasn’t done in decades, but Mole is perhaps twelve, perhaps thirteen, and Eleanor wants her to understand the point of choice. And so they dress in all black.

Cheap fibres mass-produced, Eleanor says, always. Cut out the labels. Pebbles in your shoe to fuck with the city gait recognition (they are in Lisbon for this winter of activism), spray paint for any lens that might catch you – do that the week before, in different clothes, different everything. This is the first lesson – that if you want to get away with hell and treason, you do your preparatory work. And so –

The chemical of the spray paint, one night, the smell so particular. The confidence of walking into rich Lisbon. Choose, Eleanor says, and Mole is the one who makes the choice. Mole chooses the cars to destroy – there are not so many petrol cars, now, but still some. Then there are the cars reliant on batteries, components hauled from the dying earth by desperate hands.

Buy a bike, asshole, she scratches into a brick, and then she puts that brick through the window.

Constant cameras in every direction from those, Eleanor tells her when they get to the more expensive models, and they keep their distance, and from their tote bags they draw bottles of wine loaded with napalm that they made in the back garden under a cerulean sky as mayflies danced over the pond. The garden was behind Marco’s house, a thin-bearded man who played acoustic guitar and sang sad songs in a language nobody else could understand. He played guitar as Mole stirred as Eleanor added flakes of packing foam to petrol, everything measured, until the glutinous mix was ready in the bottle. In the darkness Mole throws her first Molotov cocktail at a car that has no reason to exist, and she learns to love fire.

NARATOS? Mole asks, a single word loaded with impact as they walk home. Not yet, Eleanor says. Later they will fight about it, once every few months. Mole will try her own research, clumsy with the headset in the library until Eleanor shows her the research already done. Files, names, maps, addresses, schedules, testimony, evidence.

Soon, she says.

Time passes. Mole reads, Mole learns. Molotov, Guevara. Manuals on guerrilla warfare. Pamphlets on the climate movement. Earth Liberation Front propaganda from nearly a century before, prescient and doomed.

There is a new refinery opening, and all national infrastructure is guarded by private corporations. Used to be army, Eleanor says, and Hull is there (dour, muscled, younger than he will be – isn’t that how life works?). They are in the back of a van and Mole is quiet.

Now it’s army with more money, he says, and Eleanor and the others laugh. They do not target the refinery – not directly. She thinks Hull was in the army, maybe. Instead they sabotage every truck-charging station within 250 miles, explosives to the power substations, a dozen vans like theirs. Two are caught, one woman shot by corpo security, the other blackbagged. Mole never learns their names.

Mole kills her first man outside of the world. Mole learns to prime plastic explosives. Mole speaks English with a London accent and forgets whatever language she was born to, cuts it from her mind. Gentle Parry joins them at the house, and teaches her biology, crafts her fingertip sheaves so she can be in the world a little more. She loves him for this, and she loves Eleanor the way you love the sun. Unconditionally, and not without fear.

Every night Mole thinks of NARATOS, and when she is fifteen she goes again to Eleanor. (Mole is perhaps fifteen? There is no birthday. There is no surety. Puberty has been a strange process, to one so royally genomically fucked. She is not following a pattern any can understand.) She has spoken to Parry of it, but he is not certain how it will end for her. Mole goes to Eleanor.

NARATOS? she asks again, and this time Eleanor calls Parry in from the kitchen, sends a message to Hull. That evening they gather and they look at maps, and Parry looks at boats and flights and trains, and Hull mutters about numbers, high numbers.

There is an argument, of course, there are always arguments (discussions, Eleanor calls them). Parry wants evidence and documents and press involvement, perhaps even international pressure.

And what the fuck does that look like, Parry? Eleanor says, and she is smoking another cigarette and scratching behind her ear. The UN is toothless even more than before. What, you want the Chinese? NARATOS is sending them selenium from their central African sites. We are the international pressure. We make it unprofitable. They want to play free market capitalism, we play free market fucking capitalism. See how their bottom line looks with a bullet-hole in it.

Dr Parry eats his pasta and nods his head in deference but Mole sees how he keeps pressing, as they plan over weeks. The right thing to do, he says, and in the end the information is not so hidden.

The executive board is twelve people, and King Richard is the CEO. She recognises his face, though in a suit in these pictures, not in a garish shirt, not holding a lit cigar as she always saw him. Ownership devolved to shareholders, and so on, and so on. The list of targets is twenty-four names, in the end, and three sites.

I would like to join the Heavy Crew, Mole says, and Eleanor just laughs at her.

You have always been one of us, my love.

Twenty-four names, three mining sites. There are more of course, but these three are the flagships of the fleet. The order is important – striking at the same time will prevent improvements in security. At least six should be at the sites when they are attacked, and the other eighteen are given to other cells across the world. They are given a date, and a simple goal – this person dies this day. They are not told details, but the Heavy Crew understand that knowledge is a dangerous thing, and if you are an eco-assassin you have at some point learned to take orders. This is not an anarchist commune where every voice is heard. This is Eleanor’s cadre of those willing to go further, and they will follow what she says without dissent (save Parry, but that is his purpose – Parry is the red team, Parry is the extra man always there to bring reason and caution; Parry is kind).

The destruction of NARATOS is a bloody affair. Across the world, executives and engineers are waking up to burning houses, or not waking up at all. Gunshot, stabbing, strangulation, poison, explosion, fire, drowning. Electrocution. Run over by a mining truck (Mole likes that one).

The sites themselves are harder – they are remote, and in a part of the world where even arriving is difficult. Existing is harder. Guns are omnipresent, and militias of whatever creed or nation are paid off as extra security.

But the Heavy Crew are not without resources.

Mole is in the truck when word comes through that the site in Bolivia has been hit – a crop-dusting plane and a sack full of pipe bombs, twelve pickups from the jungle, agents inside the mines. Guard towers and comms disabled. Executives executed, workers freed. The crew flee into jungle, and behind them is chaos.

She does not hear about the Liberian mission until later – many die. It was not a full success, but there were names on the list and they are not alive by the time the Heavy Crew depart.

For her mine they enter the continent through what was once Libya, and from there it is bottled water and off-road driving. There are days and as they drive the heat is so, so much. The trucks all have solar shielding, of course, but even then. Mole does not talk much, and on this trip even less. Her viper pits are slathered with a layer of thin paint that almost matches her skin – it is better than nothing. Colour bleeds from the world until there is only brown and blue and the black of night, until no life can be seen. The stars are incredible.

Nobody asks her questions, because the Heavy Crew are sensitive souls, and because she is sat with her finger chisels unsheathed, clutching a 3D printed AK-47 with no triggerguard. Mole stares at the desert and it welcomes her back.

Their man in the compound comes true, and is it the man who saved her? She is not sure, is it her old zama zama? She has done her research since then, the zama zamas mining where the corporations could no longer afford, where conditions were too dangerous. No pension, no insurance, no compensation for widows. Instead, pay your money (or take your loan) from the local criminal (or mine boss), who pays the bribe, who lowers you by rope or pays for the elevator operator to look straight ahead and just push the button, man. Then months underground.

She has looked for her man, her saviour. She does not think this is him, their new man in the compound, but he comes true and that is enough. They enter on the far side of the mining complex through a gate left unlocked, and meet no resistance. By the time the miners understand they are under attack there are already fifty armed fighters in the grounds, and they are efficient. They waste no time on workers.

Mole does not kill King Richard – Hull finds him in an office and there is a firefight, and he puts him down. Fighting, bloodshed. Repeating in seven languages – we are only here for the bosses. We are only here for the bosses.

They are not – as they go, they sabotage equipment, each being an old hand at this. The destruction of mining equipment, the execution of the executive class, the engineers.

They are prepared – a friendly UN mission is a day away and will arrive with aid, and with understanding that there will likely be children among the workers, children who need to be helped. The UN mission commander will eventually be forced to resign for his part in this, but he will do so with a straight back and a burning rage.

Why did we have to wait for them, to do this? he will say. Later Mole watches the live coverage of the committee that is convened into the matter, and she likes this man.

Mole does not kill King Richard but she does kill many guards, and in the night she stalks down to the entrance to the mines and she asks (her language flooding back to her as the darkness overtakes her, as the weight of rock presses down).

Where are the moles? she asks. Ayezkal, khalad, moles? Where are they?

She asks and she kills a man who comes for her with a spanner, and then one is on his knees and sobbing.

Only you, he says, and his eyes are mirrors. Only you, khalad. All dead. Only you.

There are explosives, of course. They make the miners withdraw at gunpoint, and then Hull and one of his grim men of action do what damage grim men of action can. There is fanfare, there is drama, but Mole is detached from it. Eleanor seeks her out but Mole cannot speak to her. She pictures the boy Moftah breaking a nose and sharing water, and she stares out into the desert night.

King Richard is dead, and she does not know why she exists.

Only you, khalad. All dead. Only you.

27

Charlie

Wet Market redux

Charlie, we got problems, Parker says, and I laugh so much my ribs hurt, which isn’t actually that much laughter.

Yeah, I say, I kinda know that, sweetheart?

No, babe, they say, and their eyes are locked on their onyx. Look.

We are crammed together in the back of a tiny car – Mole is driving us. The front seat has a little black rucksack full of guns, and she is conscientiously keeping track of the auto-drive as it takes us from Highgate down to the Wet Market, her hands lingering on the wheel as it turns itself.

Parker’s onyx flashes a composite image, scrolling through text and pictures. A wanted poster. My face, their face, Zoot’s face, Hull’s face, Mole’s face. All of us in the dumb little peaked caps we wore for the AGRAMIL job, our EAST ANGLIA WATER uniforms.

WANTED

In connection to Intellectual Property Crimes, the following suspects are wanted by the corporation AGRAMIL. Retrieval of suspects and any/all intellectual property will be rewarded by standard rating B7.

Then it has the pictures, descriptions of each of us, and names. Charlie Raith and Parker. None of the others have names.

Oh buggering hell, I say, and Mole swivels in her seat and reads the poster, clicks her tongue.

B7, she says, B7 is fifty thousand pounds this month. Not good for you, Charlie Raith.

The corporate bounty-hunting scale is pretty straightforward – A, dead or alive old-school Wild West; B, bring them in breathing; C, unharmed; D, information only – and then the money, a scale from 1 to 10 pegged to the letter grade and the current hyperinflation of the week. So A10 would be every gun in the city looking for a quick paycheck. B7 is still us being totally fucked.

Anyone plugged into the net looking for cash. Every bobby in town looking to earn their station and themselves a nice payoff. Every other gang. Not to mention the AGRAMIL heavy team Mole and Hull left bleeding in the street, them and all their mates looking for a corporate pat on the head and a gold star on their bi-annual appraisal, and probably some revenge for their dead pals.

Parker is trembling next to me. Hey kid, I say. Kid, you alright?

They sniff and bite their lip and then they force a grin.

Description says I’m ‘muscular build’ and we are all ‘armed and dangerous’. I’m alright.

They aren’t alright. I’m not alright. Mole seems unperturbed, but my knee won’t stop twitching.

Guns, Mole says, and passes us the bag back.

We take a long loop from Highgate to the Wet Market out at Billingsgate to avoid Zone 1 – it’s larger than it once was, expanding out every year by a street or two as the city reclaims its badlands. It isn’t a circle, either – it bulges and distends, amoeboid, and incorporates swathes of new gentrification recapturing what old gentrification lost in the ’38 plague, the ’55 flu, all the other little troughs and peaks between.

The rest of London is still inhabited of course – not the suburbs, so much. But there are corporate enclaves outside of Zone 1 and private gated communities with their turrets and twenty-foot walls. There are communes and there is a hell of a lot of free real estate, but none of it is maintained save the trunk roads that bring food in from the coast and the countryside. Not enough migrants to help fill the population gap. (Who would move here? Why not Germany, with a functioning government? Why not the Nordics, if you can prove your skill? Why not somewhere that locks down properly for the winter season and isn’t quite so plaguey?)

Everyone else is dealing with their own shit, anyway.

We drive and nobody tries to sideswipe us or piss us about – the main roads are all under constant surveillance, and the city AI doesn’t take kindly to anything that disrupts trade.

I’m pawing at the guns. There are lots, little pistols, big pistols. A shotgunny thing. (I don’t know anything about guns!) Parker puts their hands over mine and slowly puts my hands back on my lap.

You’ll get the bloody bounty yourself, love, they say, but they aren’t smiling or laughing. Methodically they reach in and start checking each gun, discarding some to the footwell and leaving others in the bag. After a few minutes, we pass the edge wall of the City of London. (At the bottom, you can see where they’ve built up from the remnants of the old Roman wall. Two thousand years and still walls to keep the wild Brits out.) It’s an enclave within even the safety of Zone 1 – I’ve never been inside.

Take this, Charlie says, and this isn’t my snug little pistol or the friendly Mutt. This is a chunky rounded thing with lights along the barrel, a polished wood grip.

How…

Here, they say and gently they press their hand around mine. Safety. Red light, bad; green light, good. Pull trigger to shoot. Fifteen rounds, so count your shots. Shells eject here. Recoil compensator, muzzle flare to reduce velocity. This is a stubber – you won’t kill anyone with this unless you get lucky, or unlucky. Low calibre and weak powder. But it is big and scary, and hard to fuck up.

For themselves Parker slips into a chest holster, wincing as they do. Their shirt rides up and I can see the mottled green and blue and red below, bruising and scrapes and blood. Into the holster they slip two matte grey utilitarian-looking pistols with long magazines.

Parker, you don’t have to…

Parker doesn’t own a pistol. Parker carries a switchblade and a book of poems. Parker goes to the rallies to recriminalise gun ownership.

And now with a practised hand they check the safeties on their guns, and grimace. Where they came from…

You know what you are doing? Mole asks, watching in the rearview mirror, and Parker meets their gaze and then looks out of the window. Heavy goods lorries are barrelling past us in the fast lane, full of grain and electronics from the continent.

Where I’m from, Parker says, every kid can strip and reassemble a pistol by their eighth birthday. Doomer cult. Christians, or something thereabouts. Didn’t end well, yeah?

It never does, Mole says, and then she taps the wheel to push the autodrive a little faster and we overtake a red double-decker, and in the distance Canary Wharf rises from the city, a beacon of light and life against the mottled grey and black below.

Parker doesn’t speak about the cult, about any of it. They did once, to me. They wanted me to know but they said, just this once. Any questions, ask now, because you will never get to ask again. Parker has buried the past, but with a gun in their hand they look afraid, and I hate it.

As we pull into Billingsgate we ditch the car and head to the edge of the market, and of course it is busy. The storm has lost its hard-on and so we are walking through mist, each of us strapped, two of us bloody and bleeding.

Won’t let us in like this, Parker mumbles, and they have pulled on a black hoodie from the back of Mole’s car – it covers the chest holster, the heavy greyness of the guns, but they are still blooded to all shit. I don’t look much better, sweat and rain and grime and soot and blood and whatever the fuck else. I have my biohacking kit in the satchel over my back, I have the fat gun Parker gave me. I have a red bandana tied around my forehead. There is nothing to be done about it.

On we go, and the smell hits. Fish guts and brine, and then it is white coats and heavy rubber boots everywhere, pallets and forklifts and trucks. We don’t have Zoot with us so there is no chat, no camaraderie. I don’t know any of the fish people, and Parker might but they are in no state. Mole is incongruous alongside, stepping softly in her trenchcoat. I see now for the first time that her shitkickers are absurdly big compared to the rest of her – she steps sure, but they look oversized.

As we walk the last stretch a young dude with a forehead tattoo of a crow silhouette and a diode strip down his jawline drops the crate of fish he is carrying and paws at his waist, and then Mole has a gun in his face. Mole’s gun isn’t meant to intimidate, like mine. Mole’s gun is the distillation of gun as a concept, like feeding the word gun into a network mind five hundred times over. All frippery removed. Barrel, yes. Grip, yes. Trigger, yes. Beyond that not much.

She moves forward fast and presses it against the guy’s throat, lifts him with it and guides him from the ice steam clouds and fish piles so he is against a wall. The wall is thick with years of sludge, the accreted stink of a century of sea-life innards. We are between a parked forklift and a sliding door, and the forklift is piled high with a melange of fish. Blue fish, red fish, one fish—

Heads-up, Charlie, Parker is saying, and I blink and I’m back in it. Me and Parker both step back and keep eyes on the little alleyway we’ve found ourselves in. Empty, for now, but the fish market is always moving.

You think you’ve seen us, Mole is saying, pistol pressed so hard into the guy’s throat that his jaw is lifted high, his eyes rolling, his hands spasming at his sides – wanting to fight, knowing that a little twitch of her finger and his shit tattoo will join the wall sludge. Mole reaches a hand into his pocket and withdraws an onyx and tosses it behind her without looking back, which looks cool, but I fumble it and it falls into a pile of squid.

Break that, Mole says, and I have to reach down into tentacles and beak to retrieve it. The onyx is slick now, and I slam it against the wall three times until it is cracked, and maybe broken. Parker steps forward and takes it from my hand and places it under the forklift’s tines, and with the press of a button on the forklift dash the heavy metal crushes downward and the onyx is splinters.

You can drive a forklift? I ask, and Parker just shakes their head at me as Mole pistol-whips the fish guy.

Onward. The fridge entrance is unmanned as ever and so we descend, and at the bottom of the stairs is the little landing. The big guy is there.

Donnely, Parker says, looking big, my man. Donnely just looks at them, squints.

Yeah, he says. Yeah.

He swings the door open and my hands are clenched fists. The way his face moved as he looked at us. Has he seen the bounty? Corpos bought him off? He knows Zoot – is that enough to get us in? Does he recognise us, does he care? Does he always do that, that face?

Parker’s hand on the small of my back, pressing me onward, and then we are in.

It’s chaos. Every tunnel and side room is pumping, roiling, thrashing. We move fast toward Nathan’s, past the dance tunnel, past the turn-off to see bad men about bad drugs. Past the metal bar. I don’t glance at the VR hammocks or their little caterpillars, and instead I grip Parker’s hand.

Why don’t you come to the marches? Parker says to me as we go, and fuck is this the moment? Is it? This running argument, as we go to Zoot, is it now? Mole is tailing us, hands loose at her sides. Parker’s voice is thick, with the split lip, the long night, but it is more than that.

I am distraught, and I stop. They haven’t asked in so long, and so we haven’t fought in so long. Why don’t I go to the marches? I can feel my mouth open and ragged, and around us fucking French autobass is filling the air, bodies are writhing. Parker is dragged to a stop by me, and we are alone (Mole, watching), alone in a morass of movement and bodies. Their face is grim, drawn, haggard, beaten.

They look at me a long moment, eyes flitting across my face. Then their expression softens and they take me in and I crumple against them.

I’m sorry, I say. I can’t do it. I can’t hope, I can’t bear it. I am speaking between sobs with my face in their chest. Because they know why. Parker holds me and then grabs my chin and pulls my face skyward.

Tomorrow we are marching, they say. Tomorrow you are coming, with me and Zoot. No more hiding.

Zoot, I manage to say, and then we are moving again. I am pulled onward by my anchor, and I ache (hips, hands, heart).

We enter the long arch where the biohackers gather and the music is still omnipresent but diluted – strips of plastic sheets separating us from the rest of the Wet Market, the kind you get in a butcher’s shop. Hot Mike is at his barbeque, and the meat is a smell I don’t recognise – some new protein scaffold found on the free web. Someone is lounging on a couch with a pad, noodling software, and two of the hackers have a client – some big fucking guy with a lot of muscles, a lot of tatts. They are sampling from him, and he has a bag of something yellow going into his arm.

Everyone stares, and Hot Mike drops his tongs and yelps.

Where’s Renault? I ask, and they all stop what they are doing and stand, nervous. All of them glance at Mole.

Squid girl rejected, one says, and Hot Mike picks up his tongs from the floor and snaps them together, sticks the ends into the purifying gas flame.

Zoot? Parker asks, and Hot Mike points his tongs through toward Nathan’s office. The only way to Nathan’s is through the biohackers.

Stay here, I tell Mole, and we make our move.

Charlie!

Hot Mike pulls me to a stop, stepping around his barbecue.

Charlie, babe, he says. Charlie. There is a bounty. Corpos were here earlier! You need to get—

It’s handled, Mole is saying, and she pulls Hot Mike away from me and then she goes and leans against a pillar – a pillar with a view of the entrance to the Wet Market proper, the doorway to Nathan’s office, and everyone in the room. One hand languid on her hip, Mole pushes up her sunglasses snug and then shifts her coat back, revealing the grip of her Uzi. Her other hand rests on the grip, and she waits.

Parker and I are into Nathan’s, no knock – I slam open the door and Nathan is there with a thin man in an expensive suit, next to him two private security types all in black. Corpos. Zoot is laid out on the table with a bag of saline going into him, a heart rate monitor throwing data to the viewer on the wall. His ECG is fucked – I’m not a medic, but I know enough basic physiology to know that.

Parker is drawing their gun but then Nathan is hands up placatory – Waitwaitwaitfucking wait, Parker. Wait. These guys say they have antivenom, for you. For Zoot. Wouldn’t give it until you arrived.

The suit sneers and produces a vial from his jacket pocket.

Courtesy of our mutual benefactor, he says. I am Julio. You will note that Ellis will no longer be bothering you. We have Medusa, but my employer thinks that you have more to give. Whatever you want, we can provide. Employment, etc. Freelance rates. Whatever. Tuesday morning, the AETOS DIOS office at 11 a.m. Agreed?

I stare at the vial.

I need to know— I start, but the suit shuts me off with a raised finger.

No, Julio says. This is the antivenom.

He lays it down on the table next to Zoot’s body, so still, so weak. Zoot is slick with sweat and I can see how laboured his breathing is. There is an oxygen mask over his face, numbers on it highlighted red. His chest is moving up and down in bursts.

You want more from life, you come on Tuesday ready to chat. Ready to chat about Medusa, and the future. He grins sardonically. It could be bright!

The suit Julio goes to leave and Parker and I part ways. Their hand is open wide like they just want to reach for their pistols and paint the walls with corpo blood. And they do, I can see that they do. I do. We know what the Ghost has done, the Ghost and his people. Done to Mole, our friend the mole. But Zoot is dying.

And so we let Julio and his goons pass, and then I grab the syringe and slam it into the saline line, and outside of the office the shooting starts.

JESUS! Nathan yells, and the gunshots are a cacophony – I recognise the blurring burst of Mole’s Uzi. I don’t know what is going on. Why did they start shooting? Julio was leaving, they were all leaving.

Fuck! I say, and Parker echoes me, and we both huddle over Zoot. There is no change in him, with the antivenom. No change in his breathing, no change in his weird heart traces.

Get him to a hospital, I tell Nathan, and Parker draws their guns. I claw at their shoulder, and there are another three shots outside, single shots.

We aren’t gun people, I say, we need a plan, Parker, we need a plan that is smart and uses science and wit and charm and a bit of punk magic and—

Shot, shot. Breaking glass. Shot. A scream. French autobass, infrasound filling my bones.

Parker pulls my gun from my belt and presses it into my hand.

I love you, kid, they say, but this is not the time to fucking dither.

And then they are out and I have to follow, because I have to follow. Nathan has produced a pistol from somewhere, and even with his inscrutable tech lenses I can see he is pissed, but I keep moving. I sprawl out into the biohacker room as if staying low would stop my kidneys getting blown out by some corpo with a semi-automatic, but when I get outside Parker and Mole are covering the butcher curtain back to the Wet Market. The biohackers are huddled in a corner. The corpos and the suit Julio are sprawled on the floor full of holes – Julio’s head is gone. Next to them, slumped, is the muscled dude the biohackers were working on. Mole points a finger at me and curls it in – her gloves are off, and the finger is a chisel head of shining metal wet with blood.

Those men were AETOS DIO, Mole says, and I am staring at the corpses.

Did they attack you? I ask, and she barks a laugh.

I did not give them the chance, she says.

Grow up, Charlie, Parker mutters, and Mole kicks the slumped figure of the muscled stranger.

This one did, when things started. He must have seen the bounty. And now, wait a moment.

Mole holds up a finger and we wait, and Hot Mike emerges from behind a couch and turns down the gas on his barbeque.

What is it tonight, Mike? Parker says, and his mouth is panting with fear but his eyes are wide with something else – Hot Mike always runs hot.

Long pork, he says. Samira, if you believe it. Someone scraped her code from a medical centre in Stockholm. This is Samira.

And I am laughing at that, because this is all too much.

They are coming, Mole says, and her finger drops. I left a drone outside. AGRAMIL have descended the stairs – doorman is down. Ten, at least.

Is there another way out? I am asking, as Parker says, There is no other way out, and together we lock eyes.

You know this place? Mole asks, and Parker nods.

Get back with Zoot and lock the heavy door, I say, and as the hackers hustle away, Parker rips a kebab from Hot Mike’s barbeque and bites into it, grease running down their chin.

Really? I say, and they proffer it with a shrug. Nathan’s door is locking behind us.

End of days always has cannibalism, they say, but that did burn my mouth. Mole snatches it from their hands and takes a bite, and I kiss Parker and taste the grease on their lips, and I turn the safety off on my gun. Light goes green. Point and shoot.

Follow me, and shoot anyone who looks like they have a pension, Parker says, and Mole is shaking their head and holstering their gun.

INCOMING CALL, CHEF

FUCKING NOT NOW! I yell, and squeeze my onyx to silence it.

Dancefloor and crowds, Mole says. Innocents. No guns. Corpos will be on nonlethals in this environment, to open at least. No guns, get as far as we can before it gets silly. Is that what you two English would say?

I’m not English, I say, and I look down at my sci-fi pistol and Parker’s grey beasts and we safety, we holster. Parker pulls their switchblade, and I cast around myself and grab a whisky bottle from Renault’s lab bench. I swig from it, and it is good stuff – clean and sharp. I pass it around and we each take a swig, and then Mole stretches her hands out and heads for the butcher’s curtain, and past it, chaos.

Silliness, I say under my breath, and then the crowd takes me.

28

Charlie

Party rules

We duck into the first hall past the biohackers, and it is all drug haze and swaying bodies. The autobass and the infrasound is dialled way up and there is no way to talk, not without stopping. Parker is on point, leading us through the labyrinthine route through the Wet Market. I know that I could take us to the exit, a few back passages, but Parker is a party animal. When they party, they are an animal. They know every room, the back rooms, the side passages. The weird little alcove where you can buy African speed, the porn theatre with the live shows on a Tuesday, where the green room for performers opens back out to the bar in the VR worm pit.

And so they move fast and sure and we follow, walking and even dancing a little because that is cover, and the corpos will be heading straight for Nathan’s and then out, out again. Ten of them. We cut through one of the pleasure tunnels which is all bodies, scraps of leather and latex and whatever, festoons of ribbon. There are people dangling from silk ropes like darkened chandeliers, alone and not. I have no time to leer, even, the taste of Samira’s flesh and Parker’s mouth sharp on my tongue. My eyes cut to every corner, every movement, but the Wet Market is all corners and all movement.

Here, Parker is yelling. We clamber over a foursome of muscled lovers and then there is a curtain and behind it a thin tunnel. Inside, two people, watching the throng and having their own party hidden so close, and they yell at being interrupted but Parker just shoves one of them in the face. Through the tunnel and they are in the VR worm pit.

Fuuuuuuuuuck, I say, because of course we have to go through here. Parker leads on and we scramble under the VR hammocks in a way that is generally deemed to be totally, utterly, uncool. Every time we snag on a hammock we are breaking someone’s immersion, reminding them that there is a world beyond the one their senses are lying to them about. Mole grabs Parker and hauls them back under a swinging body in its red hammock – the room is dimly lit, and there are cables everywhere, electrical and liquid – nutrients in, effluence out.

How does Mole feel about this? I don’t know. She is gesturing for us to be still, because at the entrance two men all in black holding pistols at their sides are conversing, leaning close to each other’s ears to be heard over the din of the music – not just one music, different, overlapping music from the central hall, the side tunnels. They don’t bother to do much about it, in the worm pit – everyone has noise-cancelling headphones on anyway. Everyone is immersed.

There are drums now, so many drums. I scramble forward to plan, to make a plan, and my heart is arrhythmic with fear – but then Mole is gone.

Mole crawls from under the hammocks and then she moves forward on her hands and feet like a spider, elbows arched back and spine low, legs wide. They don’t see her coming.

She takes tendons, one from each. The Achilles tendon at the back of the ankle is always under immense tension, and she frees them of that tension with simultaneous snicks, one with a chiselled hand, the other with the blade of the handaxe that has appeared from nowhere. They fall and scream and she is on them, short hacking chops first to hands and faces, and they can only scramble. I see one hand dart in, chisel fingers extended, and there is an arterial spray of blood. The other manages to fire his gun and the woman manning the worm pit looks around in shock, her googles losing their opacity in a heartbeat. The shot went wide of Mole, though, and she hacks the corpo to death.

Parker and I run to her, and then we keep moving, the woman behind us screaming. We are into a side bar – the metal bar. Here the music is familiarly untempo, none of the dancey techno. Here it is wailing guitars and bass that wants to punch you in the face, and there is a lot of black and patches. We get in and to the bar and Parker is staring around for a door, trying to remember which of the glitz curtains that cover the wall it is behind. Each curtain right now has a different scene from Dante’s inferno, as reimagined by a motorcycle gang who really like classic metal. Lots of devils, lots of leather, lots of people wearing very little except for that leather. I’m trying to remember the fastest route to the exit, and the fastest route from there to the car.

I feel Mole’s tug at my shoulder and I spin, and see them. Eight corpos with stuncheons, spreading in a slow circle. They’ve found us. They even have a stupid little drone hovering behind them.

Parker is turned as well and we face off, eight against three, and all of them armed. The rest of the room grows still and I grip the whisky bottle so hard my whole arm aches. This is it. This is it.

A figure at the bar stands from their stool and drains a pint in one go, and stomps around and comes to stand by me. Red-fucking-Russ. Behind him two others, two of his crew. I know them from the shows. Jesse? Cleo? I’m not sure. They stand in a line with us.

On behalf of AGRAMIL, the lead corpo says, and Russ lights a cigarette, takes one drag, then flicks it at the guy.

Fuck off, corpo, he says. The corpo takes a step forward and raises his stuncheon, and the metal studs fizzle and crack in the air. Around us the metal escalates, and I recognise it. Classic shit, old school. Clean bass, heavy drums. I spit on the ground.

Another couple of bodies stand and join our line – I don’t know these people. One is whip-thin, another short and round and hairy as anyfuckingthing. They join the crowd, and one of them pulls from their belt a stun gun and starts futzing with the dials.

There is a bounty, the corpo says, and then a pint glass hits him in the shoulder and he flinches back. Another pint hurls in, and this one hits the drone and sends it spiralling against the wall. It slides down into a heap and bleeps sad little robot bleeps as it tries to right itself.

From behind the corpos, a figure steps from the shadow and with one massive hand picks up a barstool.

PARTY RULES! Chef yells, and his voice is ruin, it is a black metal scream, and his face is rage, but even with all I have done – we are in the scene. We are in the party. Party rules – no snitching, no pigs, no corpos.

And don’t be a cunt.

Chef breaks the barstool on the nearest corpo’s head, and all hell breaks loose. Mole rushes in with the handaxe, Russ and his crew charge, and me and Parker sprint into the melee. The music keeps going but this isn’t techno, French autobass, this is metal, and we fuck the corpos up in short order. Two of the punks go down to stuncheons, but the rest are swarming. A couple of the corpos drop their nonlethals and are drawing weapons, but switching lanes at the post office never got no motherfucker nothing, and one of them gets his face cleaved by Mole’s axe and the other gets stuck by Parker onetwothree fast stabs in the arm and their hand palsies and drops the metal. I smash them in the head with the whisky bottle and they slump down.

Next corpo is on mission and their gun comes up fast, but then their arm is held fast in a hand pointing it skyward. Chef has them.

Shot shot shot and it competes with the music, but only just. All going high. Chef is holding the gun skyward, and I move to go in low but before I can, Mole steps forward and grips the corpo’s throat in both hands by the fingertips, and paints the room red.

Time to go, she says, and Chef lets the body drop and gives me a nod, and then goes to the bar. Red Russ is staring at the dead, the unconscious, and the simply writhing in pain, his face a mask betraying no emotion. He does not look at us.

Chef, I say, and Parker is pulling at me. At the edge of the crowd at the bar I see the cyberpunk guy, Ellis’s guy – he is dressed all in black, baseball cap low with an arm around a beautiful girl but I recognise him. He is watching all of this, and he is smiling. He gives me a finger gun and slips back into the crowd. What the—

Time to fucking go, Charlie!

And Parker leads me, and I am led.

29

Mole

Patience

Mole hears it all through the earpiece. It is Tuesday morning, and on Tuesday John Birchley gets his blood, and he has a meeting with Charlie Raith. Mole’s arms are aching and she is cold but she can wait, she can wait a long time. A pigeon keeps bothering her.

Fuck off, pigeon, she says, in four different languages, but the pigeon does not fuck off. It puffs its chest, and so Mole must wait, resolute.

It is Tuesday, and so she hears through her jaw implant as Hull enters Birchley’s office. With a few glances she is tapped into Hull’s live feed, his lens to hers.

I have to say I’m a little concerned about your eyes, she hears the Ghost say. Why won’t you take off the sunglasses?

In his office over the Thames, Birchley is sat smug. Older than he was at the mine. Skin like a Ghost, long blond hair perfectly coiffed.

Hull sniffs and answers the questions diligently, removes his glasses, and is duly discharged. An hour later Mole is still waiting, her harness beginning to dig at her hips and her shoulder, but Hull is now nearby, so close. He is ready.

Charlie enters the office at eleven on the dot, and Mole picks up the feed.

I have to say I’m surprised to see you, given what happened to dear Julio, Ghost says, and Mole knows Birchley is a second from a panic button. She smiles when he mentions Julio. Charlie told Mole that was the person she killed at the Wet Market. Charlie walks into the office, and through her lens Mole can see the line running into Ghost’s arm, the bag of blood suspended above it. Hull’s blood.

Don’t mind this, he says, and he gestures for Charlie to sit, which she does.

Can we speak candidly about NARATOS, and the Mole project? Charlie says, and Birchley just smiles wanly.

Certainly, if that is what you want. You know I have good intentions, toward you. I do my research. Dr Walker was a colleague of mine. Ellis won’t be a bother to either of us anymore. I’ve been looking into your work. ZODIAC CODE is rather funny, isn’t it? Rather good. And the work you did with Medusa, well. It is a beautiful expert system. If we were to apply that ability elsewhere, all sorts of options open up.

Charlie has her hands on her lap.

I know a mole, she says, and the smile falters perhaps a little.

Impossible, the Ghost says, but he does not elaborate. Mole clicks her tongue, and the pigeon by her head coos gently, its stupid eyes locked on her face. She snaps her teeth at it but it does not budge. Her arms are aching again, and she shifts them yet again.

Birchley turns off the dial on his drip and removes the line, presses a little sealant over it and takes his coffee cup and retreats to the open window.

What did you take from AGRAMIL? he asks, but Charlie sits quiet a long moment.

Why the viper pits, the heat sensors? Charlie asks. Why the viper pits? They don’t help, in the mine. It’s so hot down there. They must have been agony.

John Birchley stands very still at the window, and Mole closes off her visual link but keeps the audio going, and focuses on her breathing. The memory of the viper pits flaring in the heat of the mine, always so hot once you descend down, down toward the core of the earth. People forget that they live in that little habitable crust, but Mole has been below. She remembers the heat, and the pain in her face and her mind, and in her harness Mole focuses on her breathing and listens to Charlie and the Ghost.

30

Charlie

Shout out to my ex

I can’t quite get the tone I want. I don’t know what I want to say, I want to say so many things. This man who saved Zoot on a whim. Who killed Ellis so perfunctorily. Who made Mole into Mole. And now he drinks his coffee and stares out at the river.

The viper pits? I ask again, and I can see he is getting a little annoyed that I keep ignoring his questions.

Oh, well, he says. Come on now. Fuck sake. Why not? You know why. Because I could, and I wanted to see what would happen.

You didn’t worry about the heat? I ask and I shift in my chair. In my lens four alerts pop up. Parker – ALL GOLDEN, BABE. Mole – IN POSITION. Hull – IN POSITION. Alison Runrill – Hi, is this Charlie from Zodiac Code? I’d like to talk if possible about my recent purchase…

Fuck sake. I blink it off. Birchley is staring out of the window.

I didn’t think about it, to be honest, he says at last. NARATOS plugged a nice hole in our finances that year, and in return I got free guinea pigs for my real work. I didn’t worry about the heat, I just wondered if it was possible, and Richard, well. He was game for almost anything.

I nod as if this isn’t insane, and rub my arm. Beneath the clean shirt I am a mottle of bruises and scabs. Your work, I say. That would be the extra organ by the pancreas? They could never figure that out, but based on the overall sequences and the samples I’ve taken… you are looking at longevity. Old-school immortality. Telomerase repair.

John Birchley sets down his coffee cup and leans over his desk and takes me in slowly, and I wait. I can be patient, I really can.

Are you ready? I subvocalise, and get two clicks back. They are ready.

Well, John says, you are fun, aren’t you? That was something I cooked up. Elixir of life. A little factory pumping out stem cells and telomere repair machinery. It’ll give you cancer, of course, but you can control cancer. I needed to test it. NRF2-signalling activation and DNA damage repair mechanisms, wiring nicked from naked mole rats. Now, where did you meet a mole? I thought you were just here about the snakes, and your little friend Ellis. How is… Zoot, was it?

Fine, I say. No lasting harm, perhaps. I am here about a mole, not about a snake. Did you ever meet one?

I don’t tell him about the last seventy-two hours with Zoot in a bed in Eleanor’s house, barely able to breathe. Parry nursing him, Parker feeding him soup. I don’t know what long-lasting nerve damage he will have. I don’t tell him any of that, because fuck this guy.

I’ve not met a mole for a long time, he says, not since they were made. I do wonder what would have happened, in the long term. But they are all dead, my dear. Dead and gone and burned away, with the rest of that old mining company. And what remains is a legacy – my corporation in fine fiscal health, and my understanding of pushing back death just that fraction further forward. Worth it, no?

No, I say. I’ve tired of this so I subvocalise to my onyx to let the others know it is time.

You know your blood boy, this morning, John? How did it feel?

I stand and circle the coffee table and lean in a little toward him, still keeping distance across his vast office. The blood bag is still hanging from its sleek metal stand and I give it a little flick.

Did you notice what I added, I say, with Medusa?

Ghost’s jaw clenches and he sits down at his desk, and he does not speak. I know he is pushing some sort of security button under his desk. I know he is subvocalising a message to his new assistant, whoever has taken over from Julio. I know all of these things, and so I smile at the stupid bastard. In a moment the office door opens and two men are there, men dressed in suits and shades and muscles. One with zip-ties, the other with a stuncheon, the type bobbies use.

Dr Walker died hard, I say, ignoring the two new arrivals. They slowly approach me from behind, but John stops them with a raised hand.

Every drop of blood in her body, I say, coagulated in an instant. Medusa turned her gaze on a mortal, and they turned to stone. Well, in this case to scab. Amazing stuff. You can encapsulate it, of course. If you don’t have the target’s code, you can always just encapsulate the venom for slow release. Did it feel any different, today?

No, he says. No. That can’t be. We run full tests on all plasma before it is used. A nice try, but no, Charlie Raith.

No? I say. No? Come in!

And from the office door my ex-girlfriend Arain steps in, face tattooed with variations on the golden ratio, head buzzed, full corpo outfit on. With her is a tall gangly man in a janitor’s boilersuit with a long wave of Fabio blond hair. Behind them, Parker slips through the door in a blue linen uniform and clicks the lock shut. The two security goons between me and the door turn to the new arrivals, and the Janitor with the Fabio hair leaps into a flying kick and a flurry of elbows. The one with the zip-ties goes down like a sack of shit, but the stuncheon wielder steps back. The Janitor flips his hair back and growls and picks up a sleek wooden chair, a heavy thing, and beats him into the ground with it before snatching up the sparking stuncheon and grinning.

Ghost stands open-mouthed and does not see as through the window behind him Mole slinks. I think she has been down there more than an hour now, on her little perch with her harness. The Ghost’s office window opens over the river, almost at water level, and she has been patient, a little gargoyle over the Thames. He does not see her – he has eyes only for Arain, for the Fabio-janitor.

What is this? he asks, each word placed carefully.

Interested parties, I say, and I go to join them.

Arain is not quite all yours, Parker is saying, and punches her on the shoulder. Arain is scowling, not meeting my eyes. Then the janitor with the Fabio hair rips his wig loose and below it is Scrimshank, Ellis’s knife. His tattooed head bobs and he grins and he swirls the sparking stuncheon in his hands.

So I put a little Medusa magic in your blood, I say, stepping toward Ghost. He still has not seen Mole. I gave my dear friend this morning a heavy dose, knowing he will need the antivenom, which of course I have. It’s a good antivenom, and he’s a strong boy. Which do you think it is, Ghost? Coagulant? Will all of your blood turn scabrous, all at once, not quite turning to stone? Or will you be pissing blood from every pore? Or hyper-vasoconstriction, so your heart just pops?

Mole is behind him now and close, and she reaches up and with a snick she slices his cheek with one of her fingers and then she backs away, circling. He staggers and stares at her, aghast.

I gave you Medusa, I say. I had Arain swap the results out. Even easier, actually, than we thought, because we had Avery to help. Your little AI that is now spending so much time with this guy.

I’m this guy, Scrimshank says, with a wave of his stuncheon. He has a happy grin on his face. I still don’t know what to do with him, really, I say, but he called me saying you can’t just kill someone’s cousin, and then suddenly we have your AI on board. Isn’t that just the thing? And it turns out you’ve been a little bit naughty with Avery’s leash, haven’t you, Ghost? He is not quite as compliant as he should be.

Ghost is not listening to me. Ghost is staring at Mole, drinking her in.

You are beautiful, he says, and she slaps him open-handed.

Eleanor wants us to interrogate, Parker says, but Mole is not listening.

I want you to free my robot! Scrimshank yells, which is quite funny, but I’m too wired to laugh.

Ghost turns to me, with a quick glance and grimace at Arain.

You are in charge then, Charlie Raith? What do you want?

I have what I want, I say. I have Avery, and he is copying your office files. The moles, everything else you have squirreled away. Enough to ruin your company. In return, Arain and Parker are going to help Scrimshank abscond the computing cores with this big boy’s brain in them to a nice van we have waiting, and I’m sure he will have fun getting squared away somewhere. So, I have exactly what I want, John.

So what? he says, and he is vibrating with anger. You have no idea—

Mole has waited long enough. She is not interested in monologues. She leaps on him, and one chiselled hand grips a wrist and twists and he is spraying blood all across the cream carpets. With her other she hits his face, slicing again and again with her chiselled fingertips, clawing, raking. He screams once and then she grabs his throat and I turn away, and Arain meets my eye and gives me a brief nod and then she is at the door along with Parker. I give Parker a wink, and they leave with Scrimshank, who is carefully resettling his long wig.

Gnarly, he says, and with a smile he follows them out. Avery has arranged it all. Almost everyone in the office has had external meetings arranged, the rest have been drawn away with false emergency calls. He will shut down the fire suppression systems, and when Scrimshank and Parker and Arain have the AI core into the van, they will start the fires. The pig labs will burn. The offices will burn. There is nobody else around for the conflagration to come.

It is only me, and Mole, and the Ghost. I turn back and watch as she takes him apart. It does not take long. She is careful to make sure he is still alive when she takes his eyes, his tongue, like a scavenger.

It would be best not to do this, she says, and even as she speaks she is ripping into his stomach and entrails are spilling out, uncoiling and slipping across the floor.

It would have been better to shoot him in the head, she says, and as he twitches on the floor she turns to me, face coated in his blood save the whites of her eyes. Even her teeth are bloody – she has been tearing at his face and neck with those teeth. It would have been better, she says, to let your venom do its work.

I am not perfect, though, she says, and then she lunges back in for another round. When she stands again, John Birchley is utterly still and no number of pig organs will save him. I go to Mole and I draw her in and I hold her close. I do not feel sickened, I feel nothing at all for the Ghost. But I feel for my friend.

I am Awa, Awa says, and I wipe her forehead with my sleeve and plant a gentle kiss there, and press a syringe of antivenom into her hand.

Behind us, the blood is coagulating fast, faster than it should, bubbling with excitement. My careful plan is coming to fruition, but it is unnecessary and late.

We go to the window and the water below is grey and choppy and wild and there are hidden dangers, and there will be pursuit. Bounties, corporate interests. Criminals. All of them. Hull has the boat ready. The Thames is dirty, but it is cleaner than we are, and I take Awa’s hand and together we leap, and she is laughing as the water claims us.

31

Charlie

The word for world is forest

Parker is making soup again when Mole arrives the next day. Mole goes to Parker and gives them a touch of thanks on their shoulder, and gets a grin in return. AETOS DIOS was Parker’s job. The plans of the building, the weakness at the waterfront side. The patterns of blood transfusions. The fact my ex-girlfriend was a researcher there, a punk spy in the corpos (a corpo spy in the punks, I said, but then Arain did what was needed – not for any lingering love for me, but because we didn’t give her a choice). Parker spent two weeks working there as a cleaner, in the end, all those mornings disappearing off they were scrubbing toilets and learning the lay of the land, a fake ID and a wig and a demure manner.

So you’ll clean their toilets, I said when I found out that part of the plan, but our kitchen is impossible? They flicked my ear and kissed me for that.

Parker is making soup and Mole is helping them and the door knocks heavily and it is Chef. Flood Wall Coolangatta is playing on the wall projector in the new volcano lair and I turn the volume down but leave the video up – it is the episode where Samira stages a talent contest on the refugee raft, with all the celebrity cameos. It feels strange to look at her now that I’ve eaten her flesh. I need to message Hot Mike about where he got that code.

… Chef says at the door, and I usher him in. He cannot speak. His tongue is swollen and fat, lips full to bursting.

I sit him down and I get out the kit.

I fucked up, Chef, I say quietly. Parker and Mole are watching, but pretending not to. Chef is not lumbering and threatening. He is meek. He is so broken and tired.

I start prepping the syringes.

You wanted to taste coriander without the soap. You have a gene variant that means it tastes soapy. You’re sensitive to aldehydes, and you are super into cooking traditional Mexican food so you wanted to taste coriander. A simple job and I fucked it up, and then I fucked up figuring out how I fucked up, and then I fucked up fixing it. I made a cocktail to hit the relevant genes but only in your tongue, yeah? That was the fuck-up. I used a signature to, to say to the cocktail which bit of you is tongue and which isn’t. But it wasn’t specific enough. And so the cocktail is hitting not just your tongue, but more and more. And, and. When I checked that, the reference I was using to check it was wrong, in a way that matched the mistake I’d made. Some error I made copying files. I don’t know how it happened. Sloppiness. And, and the immunosuppression isn’t working fully, I think because I tailored it too tightly. I just.

I rub my face in my hand and feel the sharp throb in my splinted fingers.

I fucked up, Chef. I did it too fast, and I fucked up. This treatment will nullify everything I gave, it should flood out any of the nanoparticles left. Combo that with a broad spectrum antibiotic I got from my pharma hookup, and you should be okay. A week maybe. Okay?

… Chef says.

I inject him in his mouth, in his tongue, in his soft palate. His teeth look wobbly.

… Chef says, and he does not stay for soup or for thanks. Parker starts to object, but lets him go. We sit and we eat soup with Mole instead. She eats carefully, small mouthfuls. Zoot is still asleep in the back room – he sleeps a lot, since Ellis dosed him. He talks less, thinks slower. He is still Zoot, he still wants to party, but he is weak. I still can’t figure what Ellis gave him, and I might never. If it was something that hit the nerves the way I think it did, going back to how he was might not be an option. I stare at his door.

Eleanor wants your Medusa, Mole says between spoonfuls, and Parker puts a hand on my knee. Anchor.

Come with me, I say, and I lead Mole out to where our garden backs on to the marshes. The new lair isn’t so far from the old, which is maybe dumb, but I like it here. Our garden is just slabs and weeds, but there is also a pile of detritus – garden waste, old pallets. A square metal box full of snake poison and Medusa.

I pick up a can of petrol and douse around the base and Mole watches. Parker stands beside her, arms crossed, poetry pamphlet crumpled in their back pocket, smiling. Zoot emerges from his room. Fuckers are we partying tonight? he says, but he has a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and he is in pyjamas, bleary-eyed. He will not be partying tonight. He sees the scene and comes and stands behind Parker.

Ellis is dead, I say. The Ghost is dead. The AI Avery claims Ellis had his only copy on the AETOS DIOS databanks, and it has purged them. I checked, as much as it would let me. I believe it. Medusa is dead.

I throw the petrol can down and reach for my lighter and Mole’s hand stops my arm.

Eleanor would use this, she says. She would use it to punish those who do not do what is necessary. To use fear as a tool.

I gently remove her hand and flick the lighter, and lock the flame on. I can see the reflection of it in her shades, those great black lenses. Does it hurt, her viper pits sensing the flame so close? It must hurt. All of it must hurt so much, always. I hold the flame away from her, shield it behind my leg.

What about the good parts? Mole asks, and I shake my head. Eleanor would use the fear, but the other parts, you could use. You could choose.

Yeah, I say. Maybe. Eleanor would kill, kill horribly, and teach a lesson, and bring fear. But there is a difference between sabotage and murder. There is a difference between action and overaction, action and reaction, action and being an asshole. How long have the Heavy Crew been slitting throats? Look at the world. Has she made it better? I don’t know. She’s been lighting fires and kicking teeth for decades. She has done good shit and bad shit, but I’m not hers. You aren’t either. Eleanor wants to murder some people, I’m not stopping her; she can do it the old-fashioned way. Eleanor doesn’t get to have this. Nobody gets to have this.

Parker is nodding. Mole is still. Zoot is scratching his nose.

There is a march, tomorrow, Parker says. The edge of Zone 1. Peaceful pressure. Will you come? I am nodding, of course I am nodding.

High above a crow flies east.

I throw the lighter, and we watch the flames dance together. Parker’s hand entwines with mine, and around us the marshes sing with life.

32

Eleanor

Contingencies

The problem with the encrypted communication software is it is slow. Eleanor makes tea, and Parry gratefully accepts his mug and then they are on with the Helsinki cell. Well, the first Helsinki cell. The reports are as expected, plans are coming together to hit the pipeline but Eleanor doesn’t like it. They are talking in vague sweeps, without enough detail.

Maps, she says, and the leader of the Helsinki cell flinches. When we speak next week I want maps, timings, movements. I want your plan for sourcing the explosives. I want names of all involved, and who is vouching for each.

On and on this goes for another forty-five minutes, until finally she is able to shut the call and then it is text responses to Nairobi, to a reporter in Kinshasha, a report from Shanghai.

Parry rubs her shoulders for a little while as she reads and presses a quiet kiss to the top of her head, and then disappears and reappears with a scone slightly warmed on the toaster.

CLATHRATE GUN, a message pings up on her lens. She throws it to the screen on the coffee table and takes a bit of the scone, gives Parry a squeeze on the arm as he sits down next to her. Nobody ever thinks that soft-spoken Parry and Eleanor are together, have been together so long. He is the only one in the world she does not have to be Eleanor Ilk for. She can show fear. She can show the hurt.

The report is loading, pictures, video, and a message alert pops in from Mole. Charlie has destroyed Medusa. If you need them, I think they will come.

Eleanor swipes it away and sets down her scone next to her tea. She wanted Medusa – there is a tech CEO who has been geoengineering with no due process, and not enough scientific oversight, and she wanted to make an example. But she can do without it.

I can do without it, she says, and curls her feet up on the couch. Parry starts to rub at them.

I know, he says. You can instil terror with a pencil and raised eyebrow. Best off without.

Beyond the dark glass of the kitchen is the garden, and beyond that Highgate Wood and Eleanor can hear an owl perhaps, some night bird calling out to its mate.

The report on the clathrate gun has loaded, and they skim the summary, they look at the pictures. A bubbling sea. A subsea structure of metal and glass, submarines, a rig above in stark red metal. Helicopters. Parry gapes.

They were mining?

It was a dig for rare earth minerals, the report says. Looking for selenium in the Arctic Ocean.

The report is from a private contractor, and he has appended the latest scientific estimate of the methane leak. The numbers are ludicrous – methane is about seventy times as powerful over a twenty year period, and the volumes released are ridiculous. The whole thing was only picked up because an old monitoring satellite set up to look for methane plumes thirty years ago is still trundling along up there, reporting back.

Eleanor sinks back into her couch and shuts down the report, and Parry is next to her. Gentle Parry who will lobby her to gather evidence, to follow due process, to take care of the drudgery of investigation as well as the heavy hand of judgement. He will ask for this and she will not want to but she will acquiesce, and will be glad for it in the end. Eleanor sighs.

It is another back step, another wound, another hit the earth shouldn’t have to take. It is another insult to the system, the system already careening. Life is so fragile a thing, and Eleanor closes her eyes and tries to picture the darkness beneath the Arctic Ocean. She has been to the Arctic, has descended below those waters herself with a limpet mine clipped to her belt and an acid burn in her gut.

So? Parry says, and she opens her eyes and smiles at him, and kisses him.

So we kill them all, she says. Eleanor sweeps back her hair and opens the report again and begins to make her notes.

33

Dandelion

Night shift

Look at the tender stem sway in the breeze, look at it. Don’t be afraid. Don’t lose hope. It is a lot to deal with, hey. Hey! I know that. But listen –

There is a kid in the ruins of Bengaluru running an old bike to a battery to a tape deck as their friends dance and above them the sky is a tumult of cloud and they are in love –

There is a kid with bloodied fingers cursing but they keep working and they are twisting a solar cell into their house wiring –

There is a bone ache old one who stabs down with their stick, another bit of rubbish in the bag, and the same again and again and again and again and again and yesterday and every tomorrow that they have –

There is a scientist and another and another and they are furious, and they are change manifest, and they will iterate and innovate and do it again, and better, and better –

There is a kid with rope and a torch and such a deep ache in their gut and they are going to stop it –

There is a child, and someone is holding their hand and helping them take their first step, someone is holding them high so they can press their palm to the rough bark of a tree in a park where a hundred years before a child pressed their hand against the rough bark of a tree and a thousand years before that it was a forest and a child pressed their hand against the rough bark of tree and a thousand years before that it was a different forest, and in that forest, someone helped a child press their hand against the rough bark of the tree, a chain unbroken back through hill and dale and ice and snow and sand and heat until some inchoate proto-human, some nameless progenitor who struggled and fought against every weight that could have ended their line and they held their child’s hand and helped them walk, walk faltering steps to a tree and press their hand against the rough bark –

There is a kid picking bottles from the canal behind their house and counting the geese and the ducks and the flowers and the frogs and checking the pH of the water, noting it all down, discovering connection –

There is a kid with a blade and muscles like wet rope and they are afraid but they are reaching into the engine and they are cutting wires and tubes with clear eyes – this is not terrorism – fear is not their goal – this is sabotage – and they understand that there will be consequences but they cut anyway –

Don’t be afraid. In a long defunct canal in east London where the silt and muck has choked out the life and the people left long ago, the rats nest deep in the darkness under brick and drip. The onomatopoeia of a wet world surrounds, drip, squelch, trickle. A little one twitches its nose and huddles closer to its mother. She grooms her child with her tongue, cleaning away the oil and impurity and filth of the city – the rats have always loved London, and they always will. They are loyal. There is care here between mother and child in this moment, a pure animal warmth born of instinct. Through earth and brick and stone twist your view – the lamppost on this section of towpath died long ago and its trunk stands stark and bare, black against a night of clouds, full dark, no stars. Out from the nest there is the dank acid mud of the canal bed, and from there… look. Look.

Look at the canal. Dandelions – weeds.

Tendrils spiral upward. They are green, a lustrous green so dark it is almost blue, sometimes the purple of a cut muscle. You cannot see that, in the dark – you can only see shadow. You can perhaps see the delicate outline of wide serrated leaves like a lion’s jaw – dent de lion, dandelion. It is veined and strong, the bud of what might be a hope of a flower swaying high above. You can’t see the fat taproot in the mud, a concatenation where tendrils above and thinner roots below meet and store and save. This is the divine; the burning of a star turned to the bursting of a tendril. It is buried in the mud, safe, warm. Inchoate with potential taken from the day’s sunlight, it is a sweet fat innocent thing. There is an honesty in a plant, beyond any you will find elsewhere – a plant seeks to live, and makes no apologies or concessions. You can’t see the roots below in the stillness of the mud, but they are there and they seek, they probe so slowly and serenely. They hunger. As the city lies quiescent and the canal sits silent, as the rats huddle close, as the people sleep, the plant grows.

Elsewhere – there is a kid and they are going to the march, and they stayed up late last night talking about how it might be, how it could be – and a woman with eyes that know fed them and said, Kid, a rising tide isn’t a single wave. It is ten thousand waves each working next to and above the last. Some crash out early, some interfere with one another. Some fade and die before they see land. They feed the kid even though the kid doesn’t/can’t/won’t understand that there is never a guarantee which wave you will be, and the next day the kid will march –

Breathe. It’s a lot to take in. Focus on breath, focus on the physicality of your body, of existence.

In the silt of the canal the plant takes its energy and it grows fat, and upward, and upward, and upward, and in first haze of pre-dawn light the rats sleep but the wide leaves are wet with dew and they sway in the morning breeze, and look. Look. So do the others, all along the canal bed, all along the towpath in that liminal space where path becomes wall, path becomes verge, path becomes mud, canal becomes wall and water becomes air. They are probing up through cracks in brick and earth, breaking through every patch of hallowed dirt and grass.

In that moment where the darkness becomes light two people walk the towpath and they cannot see the buds but they know they are there; they walk this path every day over and over. One has a bass guitar on their back, and the other a keyboard slung at their hip and a faux-leather jacket with the sleeves ripped off. The one with the bass guitar has bad tattoos but in the darkness they can’t be seen. The one in the jacket has a black eye and a bit of a limp, but they still walk one foot in front of the other along the narrow ledge of the canal and hop up and then off of the little metal posts that dot this stretch of towpath, gambolling around mooring ropes in the darkness. They are telling a filthy joke about three nuns and a blind installation man, and in the darkness they can’t be heard by any but their companion who has surely heard this joke before. The dandelions do not hear, do not care either way. The two figures are together then apart then together, and then they are linked hand in hand as they move on and away, on and on. They will be back again, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

One day the flowers bloom, a riot of yellow. As with all riots there are those who are early and those who are late, who are alone – but most are together, a chronology born of instinct that the time is right. Time to affect change.

One day the flowers are gone, and little globes of white in their place – seeds, hundreds of seeds attached so tentatively to the world. People marching in the streets, nearby, elsewhere. Wherever they need to. Whatever they need to do. There are no heroes – just endless chances to be heroic. There is no tidal wave – just a thousand thousand waves, and all you can hope for is a common direction, a synthesis.

One day the wind blows through London, and the plants sway and the seeds are lifted off and up and away, dancing across open sky and blown where they need to be. Like a riot, some are early and some are late. One of the figures, the one with the torn leather jacket – when only a few of the plants remain, they pluck them as they walk and blow through thin lips and the seeds on those recalcitrant remnants are tumbled free, to be caught by the world if fortunate.

The plants grow and they eat and they grow and they spread and they live and they do not save us.

They do not save us.

The do not save us – but they are so beautiful.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Oliver, first and foremost – you were the driving force behind me trying my hand at this style of SF, and your belief and enthusiasm have been essential. It has been an absolute joy – I owe you a whisky or three or four.

Thank you to Nic for taking a chance with this project with nary a sword or goblin in sight. Thank you to Sophie for the wonderful edits and your attention to detail. Thank you to the marketing, sales, production, art, and design teams at Head of Zeus – your support means the world.

My darling BETA READERS – thank you, thank you, thank you. AJH and Molly and Adam and Abi for the unflagging enthusiasm and beautiful notes; Simone for the best voice-note I’ve ever received and the utterly sincere engagement; Ross for the punk. Finally, Erick – everything I did you took a step further, you twisted wee bastard. Thank you. Love to you all.

To anyone who has made it this far, thank you for reading. Go listen to some tunes, go touch a tree, watch a bird fly. Allow yourself the certainty of hope.

About the Author

IAN GREEN is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Scotland. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling epic fantasy series The Rotstorm. His fiction has been widely broadcast and performed, including winning the BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition and winning the Futurebook Future Fiction Prize. He can be found online at www.ianthegreen.com and @ianthegreen.

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