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Dee doesn’t understand what this means, exactly, but it sounds hopeful, especially the way Tamara says it.

‘Can you provide sanctuary?’ Dee asks.

‘We’re probably your best bet,’ Tamara says abstractedly. ‘There hasn’t really been a proper fight on this issue. It’d be quite something to be the ones to pick it. Bloody hell. This could shake up the city, the whole damn’ planet!’

Dee tries to think of a reason why this should be so, but apart from a bit of handwaving from Scientist there doesn’t seem to be any information on file.

‘Why?’ she asks.

Tamara stares at her. ‘You are definitely a machine,’ she says, smiling past the side of her hand. ‘Or you’d know the answer.’

Dee considers this, trying to formulate Scientist’s bare hints into speech.

‘It’s because of the fast folk, isn’t it?’ she suggests brightly. ‘And the dead?’

Tamara’s eyebrows flash upwards for a split second. ‘That’s the smart worry,’ she says. ‘It’s the stupid worries that are the real problem…I think you’ll find. Anyway. Are the greps likely to be hanging around outside?’

Dee thinks about this.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not now. But there might be others.’

Tamara drains her glass. ‘Let’s go,’ she says.

They’re just getting their things together when the door opens and a young man and an old robot walk in. The man looks haggard and is wearing desert gear, and the robot’s just a standard construction rig. Tamara doesn’t give them a second glance but Dee watches as the man pauses at the doorway and looks around the room with a curious intentness.

He sees her, and his gaze stops.

He takes a step forward. His face warps as if under acceleration into an awful, anguished look, more a distortion of the features than an expression – it’s unreadable, inhuman. At the same time Dee can feel the robot’s questing senses scan her body and tap at her brain. Spy and Soldier and Sys move dizzyingly fast in the virtual spaces of her mind, repelling the hack-attack. Her own reactive hacking attempts are deflected by some shielding as impenetrable as – and perhaps no other than – the robot’s hard metal shell. The robot makes a jerky forward lurch as the man takes a second step towards her. All of Dee’s several selves start screaming at her to get out.

She has her pistol in both hands in front of her and the table’s kicked over and Tamara’s beside her. The bar falls silent except for the thudding music and the baying of a stadium audience on the television.

‘Out the back!’ Tamara says through clenched teeth. She shifts, guiding Dee to the right, walking backwards, pushing through a door that swings shut in front of them. They’re in a corridor, dark except for smudges of yellow light and thick with smells of beer and fish.

Dee enhances her vision and sees Tamara blinking hard as she whirls around. From the way she’s moving it’s obvious that Tamara can see in the dark at least as well as Dee can.

‘Come on!’ Tamara calls, and plunges along the corridor. Dee kicks off her shoes, snatches them up and races after Tamara, down a flight of steps and around a couple of corners into an even darker, smellier corridor, in fact a tunnel. Dee can hear the traffic overhead and taste the water-vapour in the air increasing with every step. She glances back and there’s no indication of pursuit. The water in the air tastes rusty as they slide to a halt before a heavy metal door at the end. Tamara fumbles with bolts at the top and bottom of the door until they clang back. She pauses, listening, then pulls the door slowly open, keeping herself behind it until it’s almost parallel to the wall. She peers around it all the while, looking out and not behind.

‘Wait,’ she whispers. The warning isn’t necessary: Soldier has kicked in and Dee is standing flat to the wall of the tunnel two metres from the doorway and only very slowly edging forward. As her cone of vision widens she sees that the door opens on to a narrow stone shelf barely above the surface of the canal, which is about fifty metres wide at this point. The lights from the opposite street,