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The Doctor had shaken his head. ‘Gynoid.’

‘Gynoid?’

Roz stumbled as she made her way down a slope, regaining her balance but feeling something twist and pop in her ankle.

The thing was gaining on her. Had to be.

‘Did you ever stop to think about the word "android"?’

he’d said, addressing himself as much as anyone else. ‘Did you ever stop to think about what it means?’

Cwej had shrugged. ‘Robot. Machine that looks like a man, right?’

‘No.’ The Doctor had turned away, and the split skin of the dead thing had sealed itself up in seconds. ‘Android. From the Greek "Ana-, Andros", meaning "man". "Oid", meaning

"like".’

Cwej had looked confused, which was hardly a novelty. ‘A machine that’s like a man. That’s what I said.’

‘You said a machine that looks like a man. There’s a difference.’

‘Er, what?’

There was a moment’s silence as the thing hit the bottom of the slope behind her, and for a moment Roz wondered if it had broken its neck; but a second more and it was whispering to her again, bright coppery syllables that licked at the nerves along her spine. Should’ve known better, she thought.

Gynoids probably don’t even have necks. ‘Gynoid’. Stupid name. Like a make-believe alien out of an Imperial propaganda simcord. ‘Earth Versus the Gynoid Menace!’

Goddess, it’ll look bloody awful on my headstone.

And then, with almost cinematic timing, she tripped.

‘... the witch-skulls of Peking, a perfect pentagram burned into the forehead of every one. Our investigators believe that their owners were still alive when the marks were made, no doubt being involved in some long-forgotten pagan rite. Here, the Clockwork Fantastique, found in the ruins of an eleventh-century village, yet inexplicable even today. And here, a set of Egyptian manuscripts, found by our own Cardinal Scarlath, describing a world built by one-eyed supernatural horrors...’

Absently, Cardinal Catilin realized that he should have been enjoying this more. In all the years he’d been custodian of the Collection, this was the first time he’d had the opportunity to show the curiosities to anyone from outside the church; at the very least he should have been showing off his encyclopaedic knowledge of the ‘exhibits’, explaining the Satanic rituals described in the Borianu tapestries, pointing out the heretical hidden messages in the da Vinci portrait of John the Baptist... but the French woman seemed unresponsive, somehow unconcerned, as if she’d seen it all before.

Which wasn’t very likely, Catilin reflected.

The woman stopped in front of one of the larger glass-fronted cases, and Catilin risked a good long look at her. She was a tall woman, her body not so much thin as somehow pained, her spidery limbs cloaked by a mud-coloured chemise, dark hair trickling down her back Her sharp, wide-eyed face had that haunted (some would say ‘scared’) look that Catilin had noticed in many survivors of the French Revolution, the skin interrupted by a circular red mark set into her left cheek.

Catilin briefly wondered what had happened to her. The mark looked like a burn, about the same shape and width as a decent-sized coin. A thin layer of make-up just failed to disguise it.

He was about to turn away when he noticed the way she was standing, back curiously crooked, fingertips against the glass. She looked like she was in pain.

‘Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle Duquesne?’

The woman snapped into an upright position.

‘Cardinal? There is, ahhh, a problem?’

‘You look... unwell. If there’s anything wrong...?’

‘No. No, not at all. Please, continue. It’s all most interesting. Please.’

She attempted a smile, and Catilin noticed her hand reach for the base of her spine, as if to scratch it. Something about the movement was familiar –

Ah. Of course.

‘If I might ask a question, Mademoiselle,’ he said, before he had a chance to think about what he was saying, ‘were you at all familiar with, ah, Cardinal Roche?’

‘Roche. No. No, I don’t believe so.’

‘The previous