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'Hallo, Aunty,' said Kadiatu.

The mobile half of Francine's face formed into a smile.

'Kadiatu,' she said, 'you got big.'

Kadiatu knelt down by the divan and put her arms around the old woman. Francine caught hold other braids and playfully shook her head. 'I suppose it was bound to happen,' her hand traced the contours of Kadiatu's face, 'still got your daddy's nose though.'

The angel Francine.

Falling from orbit with the thin Martian air screaming across her wings. Terminal dives into the twisting canyons of the Noctis Labyrinthus with a bellyful of tactical nukes. Knitted into the cockpit, her mind blitzed on Dobennan and Heinkel the air turbulence lit up like neon, doing the missions too dumb for the smart weapons.

Lost it in the east over the Gangis Chasma, shaking apart in the grip of a pop-up cannon - one of those little oversights by military intelligence. Francine fighting all the way down to the dunes, the violet sky whirling around her. Dying amidst her broken wings of carbon fibre.

It was Kadiatu's father that pulled her out, holding the LZ clear for a swift medevac back to the world. Riding up on the running board, so the story went, bagging Greenies all the way.

Francine opened white marble eyes and looked at Kadiatu.

'Who's the man?'

Rumour said that Francine's eyes were coded into the high ultraviolet and low infrared, nothing in the visible spectrum at all. Kadiatu wondered what it was like living in the world of the invisible.

'Calls himself the Doctor,' said Kadiatu.

'He the problem?'

'No.'

'Money trouble?'

Kadiatu told Francine about the deal with Max, about the moneypen gone missing in a park outside the Forbidden City. 'You want this Blondie bagged?' asked Francine. Kadiatu hoped she was joking and said no, she'd take care of that herself. Francine offered some walking-around money and promised to put a trace on the moneypen.

As Kadiatu was leaving Francine said one more thing. 'You might ask your friend what he needs two hearts for?'

The Stop

I'm not going to do that again, thought Benny, whatever it was that I did. She was unwilling to move her head just yet, above her a shaft three metres across vanished upwards into the gloom. It was lit by a single strip of xenon lighting that tinted the walls the colour of ancient gunmetal. Half way up, the xenon strip was broken by a rectangular shadow. Facing it on the other side of the shaft was an identical door-shaped hole. Even from where she was lying Benny could see that the edges of both holes were razor clean, the kind of cut a force field makes. They were two, maybe two and half metres tall, about a metre wide and at least twenty metres up the shaft.

It was a long way to fall.

A fall like that would break your back, grind your vertebrae flat, shatter ribs. The absence of pain scared her, it indicated such a massive trauma as to put the whole body into shock. Better to breathe shallow and wait for help.

Waiting for help, like the shelter, packed in with the stink of vomit, urine and fear. The small children screaming in terror as the lights went out. Benny pressed up against the porthole, the silhouette of her mother burnt on to her retina, bright rainbow flashes as the radiation conflicted with the shelter's preservation field. An adult voice behind her called out the survivor statistics on the deep transmitter. 'Shallow breathing exercise, children,' said teacher from somewhere near the back, 'help's coming.'

Benny moved, she didn't believe in teacher no more.

There was no pain as she got up but when she ran a hand down her side to check for broken ribs her skin felt dry and cracked. She picked at a flap just above her hip and a long strip peeled away, an oily purple under the xenon lights. Not her skin then, but something that she'd been coated in, perhaps during the cave in. Her coverall was missing its sleeves and most of the back. What was left was glued to her skin.

Benny looked up the shaft at the rectangular hole above and tried to remember which