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‘I guess not.’

Unlocking the door doesn’t require any of Dee’s deeper abilities. It closes itself behind them as soon as they’re out. They walk down the long ramp in silence. Near the bottom a side-ramp leads to a nearby residential door. Dee scans its electronics.

‘This’ll do,’ she says. ‘Somebody’s home.’

Ax stops walking. For a moment, he looks like a stubborn child.

‘This isn’t what I meant,’ he says.

Dee tries not to wheedle.

‘It’s important,’ she says. ‘It’ll help your cause, as well as your case.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about a case,’ Ax says. ‘That shit is over.’

Dee regards him levelly while recalling the things he’s said earlier.

‘The dead may rise,’ she says, ‘and you may be right, but one way or another, this will all come to judgement.’

Ax stares back at her for a moment, then nods.

Together, they walk down the small ramp to the door. Dee pings the bell. They wait. A little screen above the bell lights up, a woman’s face appears.

‘Yes?’ she says.

Dee stands a little straighter and taller.

‘This is Dee Model and Ax Terminal,’ she announces firmly. ‘We have just killed your neighbour up the way, Anderson Parris. Call you witness.’

The woman gives an exaggerated blink.

‘W-witnessed,’ she says shakily.

‘Thank you,’ Ax says.

‘Goodbye,’ says Dee.

Then Dee and Ax hurry back to the main ramp and down steps and slopes to a level walkway, and up in a lift to a high platform, where they join a small queue of well-dressed people waiting at the air-stop to catch a flit. Ax occupies his time by tuning in to the stop’s news-service. Every so often he shakes his head and smiles at Dee: no hue-and-cry yet; and uses these interruptions in his glassy trance to study a list.

Dee sees he’s already crossed off one name, and that there are a lot more to go.

Tamara looked at the little stack of incriminating material on the table: the Talgarth file on Wilde, the picture Dee had made, and a scrawled apocalyptic rant from Ax. Wilde had just finished reading it.

‘God,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of suicide notes, but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a murder note.’

Tamara was holding her hands to the sides of her head.

‘I’ll murder the little pervert, if I ever get my hands on him,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Comrade Wilde, if I’d even suspected he was capable of going off the fast end like this I’d never’ve let Dee out of my sight.’

Wilde reached over and caught her hand.

‘Easy,’ he said, ‘easy. What have I ever done to you to make you call me “Comrade Wilde”? My name’s Jon, OK? And you’re no more responsible for losing Dee than I am for losing Jay-Dub. They’re both free agents, isn’t that what this is all about?’

‘I suppose so,’ Tamara said. ‘And Ax is claiming he wasn’t, when he did some…degrading things. I can see why, too, in a way, but then…Aaach! It’s so complicated! What do we do?’

‘Tamara,’ Wilde said gently, letting go of her hand and sitting down, ‘how long have you lived?’

‘Twenty years.’

Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘New Mars years?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve lived in an anarchy twice as long as I ever managed to, and you surely know the answer to that, or the way of finding the answer.’

Tamara sat down at the table and looked back at him, baffled and defiant.

‘I don’t get you,’ she said.

‘Look,’ Wilde said, ‘when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law.’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. ‘I know that. It’s not going to be much help to Ax and Dee, if they get caught. Or us, if we wait too long before trying to stop them.’

‘It’s worth a try, OK? And if the law really lets you down, and you can’t live with it, then –’ He spread his hands, smiling.

‘What?’

‘You’re back in the state of nature. You fight. OK, you might die, but so what? Same as if the market lets