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‘Knew it!’ he said. ‘Bloody bolishies! Right, that’s it. We know where to look for her!’

Stuffing the newspaper and the poster in their pockets, the two men stalked out through another silence. The doors banged again. The music came back on. The hominid behind the bar looked at Wilde with an expression of deep rue, then shrugged his wide shoulders and spread his broad hands, his long arms comically extended. The shrug completed, he turned away and switched the music back on, louder.

Wilde returned to his meal, and downed his glass of spirits in a gulp that brought tears to his eyes.

‘I still want to speak to her,’ he said.

‘If you’re concerned about the gynoid,’ the machine said, ‘don’t worry. If she’s with abolitionists she’ll be legally and physically safe from repossession, at least for a while. And if she isn’t…’ It moved the upper joints of its forelimbs in a parody of a shrug. ‘They aren’t going to harm her. Just fix a programming error. It’s not important.’

‘Because she’s just a machine, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, it may be tactless to point this out, but so are you.’

‘Of course,’ the machine said. ‘But I’m human-equivalent, and she’s a sex-toy. Like I said: just a fucking machine.’

Surveillance systems? Don’t make me smile. Any recording made around the centre of Circle Square is irredeemably corrupted, hacked and patched, spliced and remixed. Even Dee’s memories are understandably giddy: Soldier and Spy just shut off in disgust, leaving only simple reflexes on the job. Humans pass drugs from hand to hand, machines pass plugs. The music has amplitudes and electronic undertow that work to the same effect. Dee sees Tamara talking to a tall fighting man with an industrial arm, finds herself talking to a spidery gadget with airbrushes and a single mind. It thinks, and can talk, of nothing but murals. It knows about concrete surfaces and the properties of paint and the physics of aerosols. It tells her about them, at considerable length.

She could have listened to it all night. She’s a good listener. But the artist sees a builder, and without an excuse or goodbye skitters away through the crowd to chat it up.

Tamara catches Dee’s elbow and stares after the machine. Then she turns and Dee can, as they say, see the wheels going round as the speech centres overcome intoxication.

Eventually the words break through.

‘Not human equivalent!’

‘I’ve talked to worse men,’ Dee says.

Dee’s mindlessly bopping – this is a Self-specific skill – when she notices the man she’s bopping opposite, who’s moving as if he presumes he’s dancing with her. Her gaze moves up from his shiny leather fake-plastic shoes to the trousers and jacket of his fancy but unstylish suit, past the miasma of disgusting scent rising from the sweat-stained tee-shirt neckline inside the open-necked shirt-collar to his –

face!

– and the shock of recognising one of the greps, the repossession men, sends an adrenaline jolt that rouses Soldier. Everything slows, except her. (The music goes from disco to deep industrial dub.) A quick glance around sets Surgeon swiftly to work on the tendons and cartilages of her neck and brings back the intelligence that Tamara is writhing sinuously a couple of metres away, her back half-turned, and behind Tamara, sideways on to Dee, is the other grep. His movements and stance are as if he’s fucking a virtual image of Tamara a metre or so in front of the real one, but that’s just disco-dancing. His gaze doesn’t leave the real Tamara for an instant.

She sees the sweat flick from his hair as his head flips. He looks fully occupied for at least the next couple of seconds.

The other grep, the one who’s got his eye on her, has definitely noticed Dee’s mental shift (that sudden blurred head-movement’s a dead giveaway) and his pupils are shrinking to pin-holes even as his eyelids are opening wider. Dee is aware of her pistol as a heavy shape in the soft leather of that silly, cissy bag at her feet, aware of her narrow skirt as drag that’ll impede the tactically obvious lethal kick.

She could