MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

spares

For Paula,

who lights up the forest.

Our kind. Us people. All of us that

started the game with a crooked cue,

that wanted so much and got so little,

that meant so good and did so bad.

JIM THOMPSON

‘The Killer Inside Me’

Table of Contents

Epigraph

Part One: Dead Code

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: The Gap

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Three: New Richmond

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Michael Marshall Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE Dead Code

One

Wide shot.

New Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond, the historic capital of historical old Virginia, that sprawl of creaking tedium, but the New. The old Richmond was destroyed over a century ago, razed to the ground during riots which lasted two months. After decades of putting up with dreadful shopping facilities, a bewilderingly dull Old Town and no good restaurants to speak of, the residents suddenly went non-linear and strode across the city like avenging angels, destroying everything in their wake. It was great.

Spin doctors blamed downtown decay, crack wars, the cast of the moon. Personally, I think everyone just got really bored, and either way good riddance to it. The old Richmond was a content-free mess, a waste of a good, level patch within sight of the pleasingly pointy Blue Ridge Mountains. Everyone agreed it was much better off as a landing strip, a refuelling point for the MegaMalls.

The MegaMalls are aircraft – five miles square, two hundred storeys high – which majestically transport passengers from one side of the continent to the other, from the bottom to the top; from wherever they've been to wherever they seem to think will be better. The biggest oblongs of all time, a fetching shade of consumer goods black, studded with millions of points of light and so big they transcend function and become simply a shape again.

When oblongs grow up, they all want to be MegaMalls.

Inside are thousands of stores, twenty-storey atriums, food courts the size of small towns, dozens of multiplex cinemas and a range of hotels to suit every wallet which has a Gold Card in it. All this and more arranged round wide, sweeping avenues, a thousand comfortable nooks and crannies, and so many potted plants they count as an ecosystem in their own right. Safe from the rest of the world, cocooned 20,000 feet up in the air.

Heaven on earth, or cruising just above it: all of the good, clean, buyable things in life crammed into a multi-storey funhouse.

Eighty-three years ago, MegaMall Flight MA 156 stopped for routine refuelling on the site of old Richmond, and never took off again. It was merely a bureaucratic problem at first – the kind that the massed brains of all time could never have got to the bottom of, but which some poorly paid clerk could have solved instantly. If he'd had a mind to. If he hadn't been on his break.

After a few hours, the richer patrons started leaving by the roads. They didn't have time for this shit. They had to be somewhere else. Everybody else just complained a little, ordered another meal or bought some more shoes, and settled down to wait.

Then, after a few more hours, it transpired there was a minor problem with the engines. This was a little more serious. When you've got a problem with a car, you open the hood and there it is. You can point at the errant part. When the engine's the size of the Empire State Building on steroids, you know you've got a long night ahead. It takes fourteen people just to hold the manual. The engineers sent repair droids scurrying off into the deep recesses, but eventually they came back, electronically shaking their heads and whistling through their mechanical teeth. It was only a minor problem, they were sure, but they couldn't work out what it was.

More passengers started to leave at that point, but on the other hand, some people decided to stay. There were plenty of phones and meeting rooms, and the Mall had its own node on the Matrix. People could work. There were enormous quantities of food, consumer goods and clean sheets. People could live. There were, frankly, worse places to hang around.

They never got the engines going again. Maybe they were fixable, but they left it a little too late. After a couple of days people started to make their way in from the outside; people who'd been homeless since old Richmond went up in flames; people who lived in the backwoods; people who'd heard about the food courts and just wanted a spot of lunch. They came off the plain and out of the mountains and hammered on the doors. Initially, security turned them back like they were supposed to, but there were an awful lot of them and some were pretty pissed. For them the only thing worse than having to live in Richmond had been not having it to live in any more.

The security guards got together and came up with a plan. They would let people in, and they would charge them for it.

There was a period, maybe as long as six months, when Flight MA 156 was in flux, when no one was really sure if it was going to take off again. Then the tide turned, and people knew it was not. By then they didn't want it to. It was home. Areas inside the ship were knocked through, torn down, redeveloped. The original passengers staked out the upper floors and began to build on top of the Mall, competing to see who could get furthest from the mounting poor on the lower levels. A secondary town grew up around the Mall at ground level – the Portal into the city.

Eventually, the local utility companies just plumbed the whole lot in, and New Richmond was born. Apart from its unusual provenance and extreme oblongness, New Richmond is now just a city like anywhere else. If you didn't know, you might think it was just a rather bizarre town planning mistake.

But it's said that in a lost room, somewhere deep in the bowels of the city, there remains a forgotten suitcase, left there accidentally by one of the first families to leave, a mute testament to the city's birth. Nobody knows where this room is, and most people believe it's just an urban myth. Because that's what Flight MA 156 is, these days. Urban.

But I've always believed it, just like I wonder if sometimes, on some nights, the city itself must raise its eyes when it hears the other MegaMalls trundling slowly overhead. I wonder if it watches the skies, and sees them pass, and knows in some way that's where it should be. Up there in the heavens, not battered onto the Earth. But then which of us doesn't believe something like that, and how few of us are right.

‘Two hundred dollars,’ the man said, his eyes trying to look cool and watchful at the same time, and making a fearful mess of both. He wasn't talking about what I was trying to sell. I wasn't even in New Richmond yet. It was after eight o'clock at night and I was losing patience and running out of time.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘Fifty is the rate.’

The man laughed with genuine amusement.

‘You been away or something man? Shit, I can't barely remember when fifty dollars was the rate.’

‘Fifty dollars,’ I said again. I guess I was hoping if I said it often enough I'd end up neurolinguistically programming him. I was standing in front of a door, a door which was hidden in the basement of a building in the Portal settlement, the high-rise nightmare of ragged buildings and shanty dwellings which surrounds New Richmond proper. I was there because this particular building had been constructed right up against the exterior wall of the city, inside which I needed to be. I'd put up with being frisked on entry by the street gang which was currently controlling the building, and had already paid twenty dollars ‘tax’ on my gun. I didn't have two hundred dollars, I barely had a hundred, and I was in a hurry.

The man shrugged. ‘So go in the main entrance.’

I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets, fighting back anger and panic in equal measure. ‘And don't be thinking about bringing out your gun,’ he continued, mildly. ‘Cos there's three brothers you can't even see with rifles trained on yo ass.’

I couldn't go in the main gates, as he well knew. No one came to this part of the Portal town if they could enter New Richmond through one of the legitimate entrances. Going in that way meant running your ownCard through the machines, thus broadcasting your name to the cops, the city administration and anyone else who had a tap on the line.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I've been this way before. I don't need a guide, I just need to get past you. Fifty dollars is what I have.’

The man turned away and signalled into the darkness with an upwards nod of his head. I heard the sound of several sets of feet padding out of the darkness towards me.

‘You still piecing your action from Howie “The Plan”?’ I asked, casually. The footsteps behind stopped, and the man turned to look at me again, eyes watchful.

‘What you know about Mr Amos?’ he asked.

‘Not much,’ I said, though I did. Howie was a medium-time crook operating out of the eighth floor. He ran some girls, owned a bar, and had pieces of the drugs action so far down the chain that he was tolerated by the real heavy-hitters above. He was a fat, affable man with a surprising shock of blond hair, but he was fitter than he looked and knew how to keep a secret. Late at night, when most of the customers were gone, he'd been known to sit in with his house blues band and play a hell of a lot better than you'd expect. He didn't have the Bright Eyes, but he could have done. He was a stand-up guy.

‘Just enough,’ I continued, ‘to tell the wrong people about some of the deals they don't know he's into. And if he thinks that information came from you guys, well …’

‘Why would he get to thinking that?’ the man asked, though he was losing heart. These guys were below bottom-rung lowlife: hardly on the ladder. They most likely didn't even know where the ladder was, and had to use steps the whole time. Running this door was as close as they got to operating in New Richmond. Guys like that don't want to tangle with the jungle inside. It bites.

‘I can't imagine,’ I said. ‘Look. Fifty dollars. Then on my way out I give you the other hundred fifty.’

For all he knew I was never coming out, but fifty was better than no cash and a lot of potential grief. He stepped aside. I peeled the notes off, and he opened the door.

‘And I'll give you an extra twenty,’ I added, ‘if you keep any mention of me off the list you sell to the cops.’

‘Don't know what you're talking about,’ he said stonily, but there was a change in his attitude. ‘But I'll take your twenty.’

I nodded and walked through the door. It shut behind me, and for the first time in five years I was inside New Richmond.

The door led into an old service corridor, which meandered towards the lower engine block through miles of dank and creepy corridors. There's nothing of value to be had there, and that's why nobody had cared when external construction had covered up the entrance. The one thing no one was going to be trying to do was get the engines going again. There's an old story which says one of the original repair drones still toils away down there somewhere, grown old and insane, but even I don't believe that.

For a long time the door was forgotten, and then somebody rediscovered it and realized its potential value as a covert entrance to the city. An adjunct to the service corridor leads via the exhaust ducts to a hidden and little-known staircase, which leads up to the second floor of the old Mall.

But I wasn't going to be going that way. I quickly followed the corridor for two hundred yards, past panels etched and stained with rust. It's eerily silent down there, perhaps the only truly quiet part of the city. The corridor took a sharpish right turn, and you could see the dim and intermittent lights in the ceiling disappearing towards the next turn, about half a mile ahead. Instead of following them I gathered myself and leapt upwards, arms straight above me, hands balled into fists. They hit a panel of the roof and it popped up and over, revealing a dark space beyond. I took a quick glance back to ensure no one was watching, jumped up again and pulled myself up through the hole.

When I replaced the ceiling panel I was left in a darkness broken only by yellow slivers of light which escaped through cracks in the floor. I straightened into the slight hunch which is required for New Richmond's lost ventilation system, and hurried forwards into the gloom. Every now and then I heard some fragment of life floating down from the city. An aged gurgle, soft clanks grown old, the occasional ghost of speech caught accidentally in some twist of corridor above and echoed down to the graveyard below. I had always felt that walking this corridor was like creeping through New Richmond's ancient and barren womb, but then I've always been a bit of a moron.

After about half a mile I passed under one of the main entrances. You can tell because of the sound of hundreds of feet coming in, going out. I stood underneath it for a moment, remembering. I used to come the covert way sometimes for kicks, but the main gates are the way you enter if you want to appreciate what you're getting into. You walk into a foyer which is twenty storeys high, a taster of the opulence you can expect if you've got clearance to go above the 100th floor. There used to be glass windows on all of the levels which tower above you, but they were walled in once they'd become lowlife areas. It's like standing in the biggest and gaudiest shower cubicle of all time. You walked up to the desk, ran your ownCard through the machine, and established your clearance. I used to live in the 70s, and so I'd walk over to one of the express elevators, get in, and be shot up into the sky.

Not tonight. Tonight I was threading my way like a snake through endless tunnels, and I wasn't going to the 72nd floor because there was nothing left for me there. I was in New Richmond because I needed money, and had only one way of getting some. I was going to go in, get the money, get out — and then turn my back on Virginia for good.

We'd reached the Portal settlement in the early evening. It had been raining all day, and was getting colder and darker by the minute. Virginia doesn't fuck around in winter, especially not these days. Virginia says, ‘Here, have some winter,’ and then delivers. The spares had been on their last legs by then, a joke I'd made to myself knowing it to be in bad taste and not altogether caring. They'd never felt the cold before, and the scraps of my clothing I'd distributed amongst them weren't anywhere near enough.

There hadn't been many people on the streets, thankfully. You don't go to the Portal to promenade, particularly not at night – it would be less trouble to stay in your apartment and mug yourself in the comfort of your own home. Howie Amos once ran a service which did just that; you called him up, said you were thinking of going out into the Portal, and he'd send someone to rough you over within half an hour or you got a dollar off. It was surprisingly popular.

I corralled the spares into a tight group and herded them down the streets in front of me, sticking close to the walls and out of the light, trusting Suej and David to help me keep the others in line. I'd explained why we had to come here, and why it could be a problem for me. They all did what they were told, and I hurried us along for about a mile until we were outside Mal's building.

I paused outside and looked back the way we'd come. The roads in the Portal are very straight, running out from New Richmond in the centre like a giant spider's web. You can stand in the middle of one and see as far as the rain will let you. Yellow streetlights lined the way, throwing pools of light which were rich and sickly, like cream ten minutes before it goes off. Beyond the limits of my vision was the edge of the Portal, and beyond that the road which led out into the dark Virginia countryside. A long way down that road were the Blue Ridge Mountains we'd come from, matter-of-fact geology covered with a hell of a lot of trees. For the first time it struck me how much the roads in the Portal looked like tunnels, and that was when I began to accept that the last five years really had happened to me.

I shouldered the outer door open and led the spares into the hallway, which was an inch deep in chill water. Loud music was thumping from somewhere up above. I told the spares to stay still and to hide if anyone came, and vaulted up the wooden staircase which spiralled up into the darkness. When I got to the 3rd floor I took a deep breath, shook some of the water out of my hair, then knocked on Mal's door.

Mal did a double-take which would have done a cheap comedian proud, and then he just stood there, mouth hanging open, hand still holding the door. He was wearing a pair of battered cut-offs which showed off the scars on his legs, and a ragged T-shirt which hugged his new paunch and looked like about five people had lived and died in it without showing it any water other than rain. He was backlit by a bare bulb, and from somewhere deep in the bowels of his apartment came the smell of cooking – noodles, almost certainly. In all the time I'd known him I don't think I'd ever seen him voluntarily eat anything else.

Finally he got it together, blinked and tried to smile.

‘Jack,’ he croaked, eerie calm coming about level with utter stupefaction. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Social visit. Old times.’

‘Yeah, right. The pope's due later too.’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and pinched himself on the bridge of the nose. ‘You in trouble?’

‘Yep,’ I grinned, trying to keep myself from hopping from foot to foot. Tension, of about seven different kinds. I nodded towards the gloom of the apartment. ‘What's cooking?’

‘Noodles,’ he said, eyeing me warily. ‘You want some?’

‘Depends how much you've got. I'm not alone.’

‘How many guests are we talking?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Including me, seven,’ I said. His eyes opened wide and he shook his head – not in negation, just bewilderment. I tried to make it easier on him. ‘Well, six and a half, I guess.’

‘That's a lot of noodles.’

‘Too many?’

‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘I buy in bulk.’ He turned back towards his apartment for a moment, biting his lip, considering. I noticed that he wasn't wearing his shoulder holster and wondered whether that meant he was out of the Life, or just less paranoid these days. More likely he'd been cleaning his gun when I knocked. The two things I didn't think Mal was ever going to get were less paranoid or out of the Life.

Then he turned back to me, eyebrows raised in friendly resignation. In one sighing breath he asked, ‘Where are these guests now and just how much unhappiness am I risking by letting them into my life, however fucking briefly?’

‘I left them downstairs,’ I said, realizing that I ought to get back to them very soon, whichever way this went. Mal's building is where bad people go to have fun. That's why he's paranoid – and also why he likes it. ‘I just need to leave them with you for an hour, then we're out of here.’

‘Why didn't you call ahead?’

‘When I want to ask old friends for lunatic favours I like to do it in person. Also, I didn't have any change.’

‘And the trouble rating?’

‘What scale are you talking?’ I was gabbling, strung tight. I had to let Mal see I was okay, because otherwise he was likely to get freaked. Being freaked would in fact have been a reasonable reaction, but I didn't want him to know that yet.

‘One to ten.’

‘I don't know,’ I said, suddenly giving in and getting panicky. ‘At least ten, possibly higher, certainly getting worse by the minute.’

Mal let go of the door.

‘Get them up here.’

I let out a short exhalation of relief. ‘Mal …’

‘Yeah, all that,’ he said, brushing my thanks aside. ‘And then you're going to go get me a jar of Japanese pickles. I forgot I'd run out.’

‘I'm going into the city. On the way back I'll get you the biggest jar of Samoy I can find.’

Mal rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Samoy pickles are from hunger. Get me Frapan or nothing.’

‘For a guy who eats so much you've got terrible fucking taste.’

‘You got that right,’ he said, shaking his head again. ‘Look at my choice of friends.’

I grinned and walked the couple of yards to the shadowy stairwell. I thought I was going to have to shout, but I saw Suej's face in the darkness, upturned anxiously towards me, and just gestured instead. She turned to David and they corralled the others up. Mal and I waited while they trooped upstairs, Mal's face eloquent with laconic intrigue. Out in the slightly less murky light of the corridor the skin on his face looked a little ruddier than it had, and there were lines around his eyes which hadn't been there when last I'd seen him.

We're getting old, I thought. Suddenly we're nearly forty and getting old.

David was the first to reach the landing. He came up with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans, limping slightly from where his leg had been operated on. The jeans had originally been mine, and were inexpertly folded up at the bottoms and belted tight around his waist. He looked younger than his fifteen years, even though his face was still set with the belligerence it had assumed the moment we left the Farm. Jenny came up right behind him, huddled into her coat and still looking frightened and alone. I'd tried to patch things up with her in the last twenty-four hours, but she still thought she was to blame, and I hadn't really had time to convince her otherwise.

Suej came up next, leading Nanune by the hand. Suej looked okay, like a normal fourteen-year-old, apart from the scar on her face. Nanune looked scared shitless, and with only one leg was having difficulty climbing the stairs. When she reached the top she caught sight of me, and appeared momentarily relieved, which was nice. It's been a long time since anyone has looked relieved to see my face.

And then finally Mr Two, carrying the bundle in his arms. Mal coped reasonably well with the rest of them, but when he saw a teenager who stood about six five, carrying a small brown sack with a head protruding from it, I did catch a twitch on his face. Mr Two stood straight-backed on the landing, glared abruptly both ways, and then let his head drop as if he'd been switched off. The spare in the bag said, ‘Nap.’

Come on guys, I thought to myself. Let's try to act like normal people.

‘Is your friend letting us rest here?’ Suej asked.

I nodded. It was going to be a while before they directly addressed anyone other than me. She beamed, and whispered to Nanune.

‘Is it nice? Is Ratchet here?’ Nanune asked, and I shook my head.

‘No and no, I'm afraid,’ I said, winking at Mal. ‘But at least it's not raining.’

I introduced Mal to the spares by name. Suej and David shook his hand, and I caught him noticing David's missing fingers. Then Mal stood to one side and gestured them into his apartment. They trooped in, Mr Two ducking his head to get under the lintel.

Mal's apartment was pretty much as I remembered it. In other words, I knew what to expect. The spares didn't. Ten years ago he'd knocked down most of the internal walls, so that from anywhere in the apartment you could see the huge window he'd put in. This gave a view straight onto New Richmond. Mal had chosen to live outside New Richmond proper. He claimed he liked to get away from it every now and then, from the dark fizz and spark of the life inside – yet he'd deconstructed his apartment so he could see the building from wherever he stood. The interior decor was about what you'd expect from a single man who spent half his time drunk and the rest painfully sober. It was a mess, to be honest: baroque chaos overlaid with the smell of countless noodle-based meals.

Nanune actually started crying. Mal scowled at her and started kicking piles of stuff towards the walls.

‘Do you still have your display up?’ I asked quietly. Mal looked at me and nodded. ‘You couldn't, like, drape something over it?’

Mal grunted and trudged down the end, towards the window, and pulled a rope which ran down the wall. A sheet dropped from the ceiling, covering what was pinned on the walls – pictures of people who had been murdered in New Richmond. It covered them only briefly, unfortunately, because it carried on falling to the ground. Mal swore softly, grabbed a chair, and set about repairing the set-up.

Meantime, I led the spares into the area which served as his sitting room. I shoved huge piles of crap out of the way until there was enough space for them to sit fairly comfortably. Jenny's arms were wrapped tightly around herself, and her eyes were far away. In a nimbus of light from some partially hidden lamp, she looked beautiful and frail. Nanune still looked terrified, but Suej sat close to her, murmuring something. There were no words in what she was saying, but even I could feel the comfort in it. It was tunnel talk, I guess. Mr Two looked like he would withstand a direct hit by a tactical missile, and so I guess the spare on his lap was alright too. Considering the current circumstances.

‘How long are we going to be here?’ David asked. I realized he looked tired, though like a child trying to prove it was worthy of staying up late, his eyes were still wide open.

‘Not long,’ I said. ‘A couple hours. Just enough for me to go get some money. Then we're going to buy a truck and get out of here.’

‘To where?’ This had been David's constant refrain for the last twenty-four hours.

‘I still don't know,’ I said. ‘Somewhere safe.’ Jenny looked up at me and I winked at her. A ghost of a smile.

‘Florida?’ Suej asked hopefully.

‘Maybe,’ I said. A long time ago I'd told her about a place I knew there, and it had become fixed in her mind as a kind of nirvana. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was very unlikely we'd make it halfway there before we were caught.

I turned to Mal. ‘What's your water like these days? And don't say “wet”.’

‘There'll be enough if they don't all stay in too long.’ Mal had always known what I meant, especially when I was asking favours. I nodded to Suej, who understood, and she started drawing up a rota for the spares to wash. They weren't used to being dirty, and I knew that the one thing I could provide which would increase their short-term standard of living was a shower. It's good that there was that one thing, because there wasn't a lot of everything else, and wasn't likely to be in the foreseeable future.

‘We'll get your clothes washed … later,’ I said, vaguely, and wandered over to the window.

It was still raining outside. It always seemed to be raining in the Portal. In summer it's fat drops of dirty rain, in the winter thin biting lines of sleet – but it generally seemed to be dropping at least something out of the sky. The locals believe that it's rich people on the roof of the city, taking delight in pissing off the edge onto the lowlife below. Judging by the colour of some of the rain, they could be right.

New Richmond looked the same as it always had. Eerily so. That shouldn't have been surprising, and yet it was. I'd seen it in the distance on the way through the Portal, but that had been different. Seeing it through Mal's window was like seeing myself in one particular mirror again after a very long time away. I stared out at the points of light, the studs in the mind-fuckingly large expanse of wall. It still looked extraordinary, still said to me, as it always had, that I had to be inside it.

‘Are you okay?’

I turned to see Mal standing beside me, proffering a cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ I said, lighting one and savouring the harsh scrape of carcinogen on lung. I'd run out that morning, and not wanted to risk going into a store until the spares were safely stowed. He let me stand for a moment, then asked what he wanted to know.

‘Where have you been, man?’

For a moment, in the darkness of his apartment, Mal looked just as he always had. As if no time had passed, as if things were still the same and I had a home to go to after I'd finished chewing the rag with him. I shivered, realizing that I was crashing, that adrenaline was turning sour.

‘Didn't Phieta tell you? I asked her to let you know.’

‘I never saw her again, Jack. No one did. After you disappeared I put the word around, in case she knew something. But she was just as gone as you.’

‘I'm sorry, Mal. I thought about calling you. I just couldn't.’

He nodded, and maybe he understood. ‘I'm really sorry about what happened,’ he said. I nodded tightly. I wasn't going to talk about it. ‘If it's any consolation, the word is Vinaldi's having problems recently.’

I was glad that Mal was still enough my friend to simply say the name out loud. ‘What kind of problems?’

Mal shrugged. ‘Rumours. He's pretty much the man these days. Probably someone's just trying to climb over him. The usual shit. Just thought I'd let you know.’ He shook his head. ‘You really only staying a couple hours?’

I nodded tightly. ‘This shit's too deep to swim in. We've got to disappear and stay that way.’

‘Again.’ He smiled. ‘Something I want to tell you about later, though, before you go.’ Then he clapped me on the back with his massive hand and turned towards the spares. ‘You guys about ready for some noodles?’

They stared at him with wide eyes. ‘They've never had noodles,’ I said.

‘Then they haven't lived,’ he replied, and of course he was right.

I walked a long way through the bowels of New Richmond, my stomach growling, wishing I'd stayed to have some noodles with the spares. There hadn't been time. We had serious people after us, and were only safe for as long as it took them to realize that I'd given them a false name and previous address when I was taken on at the Farm. As soon as that was blown, all hell was going to break loose.

It was about two miles from my entry point to the stage where I started to climb, two miles of textured darkness and muffled sounds. When I saw the familiar shaft in front of me I stopped walking. I rolled my head on my shoulders, wishing briefly and pointlessly that I didn't smoke, then climbed up the metal ladder attached to the wall.

Ten minutes later my arms and legs were aching and I'd reached the horizontal ventilation chute on 8. The MegaMall's original ventilation system is now completely disused, and most of it is filled with refuse, sludge and unnameable crap from a million different sources. It's like a lost river – paved over and diverted and hidden, but still there in the gaps and interstices. All but a couple of the original inspection hatches were welded shut a long time ago. I was hoping that no more had been sealed while I'd been away, or I'd be in trouble.

I swung myself out of the shaft and crouched down in the horizontal corridor, using a pocket penlight to peer into the gloom. The way was still clear, so I walked quickly north for about eight hundred yards until I found the wall panel I was looking for. I loosened the bolts and put my dark glasses on. This wasn't a matter of vanity. I didn't want anyone to make me while I was in New Richmond. It was a small chance that someone would recognize me, but I don't like to take chances of any size unless they seem like fun. The other reason is that the hatch opens into a cubicle in the women's toilets in a restaurant on 8.

I pulled the panel back about a millimetre, saw the cubicle was empty, and clambered through the hole as quickly and quietly as I could. It wasn't easy. I stand over six feet tall and am kind of broad in the shoulders. Ventilation hatches aren't built for people like me. I could hear the thump of music beyond the door to the john, but it didn't sound as if anyone was there.

I replaced the panel, pulled the door of the cubicle open and stepped through. A woman was standing there. Nice one, Jack, I thought. At least you haven't lost your touch or anything.

She was hunched over by the sinks at the far end. She was very slim, had thick brown hair and was wearing a short dress in iridescent blue. Good legs in sheer stockings led to shoes with very sharp and pointy heels.

Uh-huh, I thought, making a guess at her profession. As I glanced at her she shifted slightly, and I saw the mirror over which she was bent, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill in her hand. I took a quiet step towards the door, assuming she was sufficiently occupied to miss me.

Wrong. She looked up vaguely but immediately.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘A big man. Intense.’ Her face was caught somewhere between pretty and beautiful – her nose a shade too big for everyone's pretty, but the bone structure too perfect for beautiful. Her eyes were clear and green, and looked natural.

‘You've got good hearing,’ I said.

‘Yeah. It's a feature.’ She sniffed, and bent to do her other nostril. Then a thought occurred to her, and she peered at me again. ‘What are you doing in here?’

‘Pest control,’ I said.

‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘Well I got a licence. I'm allowed to be a pest in here. You, I'm not so sure about.’

‘Is there any way,’ I asked, ‘that I could just walk out of here, right now, and you'd think nothing more about it, ever?’

She looked at me for a long moment, considering. Then she shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ she said, bending back over her mirror, and I turned and walked quickly out of the door.

A short corridor led out into the restaurant proper, and I skirted round the edge of the room toward the exit. With the time now coming up for nine o'clock, the place was in a transition period. The 8th floor runs on a kind of shift system. It romps twenty-four hours a day, but in practical terms this breaks down into three evenings of eight hours each. I once went round the clock twice. I can't recommend it, except as an expensive suicide attempt. The restaurant was about half-full of people from floors in the 60s and 70s, most of them either on the edge of unconsciousness or so wired you could hear their teeth vibrating. The others looked spruce and enthusiastic, rubbing their hands together in anticipation.

No one saw me walk out of the ladies, and no one paid any attention as I walked through the restaurant. Feeling light-headed at seeing so many normal people at once, I escaped into the avenue outside.

Floor 8 is an anomaly in the lower levels of New Richmond. It's fairly civilized. Floors 1 to 7 and 9 to 49 are bad. Each varies, depending on who's got control of it at any given time, but basically they're places you don't want to go, especially the 20s and 30s. They're dead code, cut out of the loop of normal life and left to fester by themselves.

You probably wouldn't actually want to go to the 8th floor either, but at least it has pretensions. Originally, it had been the lowest food court in the MegaMall, and it was still predominantly a place where you came to eat, drink or have a good time. Whatever the focus of your sexual inclination, you can go to the 8th floor and watch it dancing on a very small stage. You can also score recreational quantities of pretty much whatever you want, without danger of being caught in a fire storm. Most of it is only one storey high, and they keep the ceiling lights off, relying on orange street lamps which run along either side of the thoroughfares. If you don't check the corners too closely the floor has a kind of lop-sided charm, like a run-down but cheery portion of some European capital, or the Old Quarter of New Orleans. The ceiling is covered in creepers and foliage, making the roads feel like paths in a forest. Forests usually give me The Fear, but I like 8, and always have. It's full of neon, autumn jazz, the smell of good food and, for some reason, the feeling that it has just stopped raining. It never has, of course, but it always feels that way to me.

I walked quickly down the centre of the street, noticing what was new and what remained. The streets were quiet but music slunk out of most of the open doors, buoying up the desultory strippers who swayed on table tops. A few down-and-outs sat on street corners, stuck in main() with their handleMouseDown() mitts held out, but from the look of them I didn't think anyone's cursor was ever going to find them. It's an image problem, I think. Maybe they should all club together and hire a PR consultant, put out a few TV ads, find some way of making begging seem cool. I'm sure there's money to be made in it somewhere.

I had to be out of here quickly, but I wanted to make my last visit right. I stopped at one corner to catch a few minutes from a news post, just like I always used to. New Richmond has a twenty-four-hour local events feed on every corner. Flatscreen monitors hang like banners wherever your go, twisting and turning to foist information on the unwary public as they approach. It helps the upper floors think they know what's going on. They don't, of course, but they spend so much time talking about the twenty per cent it covers that no one even guesses at all the rest.

Arlond Maxen had opened a new school on 190, I learned. Big fucking deal. The people who lived that high had so much money they had to be sedated every morning to stop them going berserk with glee. The only floors richer than 190 to 200 were the ones built on top of the MegaMall – all owned by Maxen himself, the de facto king of the heap. In the news footage, Maxen looked the same as he always had: distant, a man who was always the other side of an LCD panel or cathode tube. It was some times hard to believe that he was anything more than a pattern of lights, moving across the face of New Richmond, always at one remove.

The next item said that Chief of Police McAuley was lobbying to relocate people out of 100 and fill it with concrete, to finally stop the plebs from accessing the higher floors. Cunning, I thought, and never mind that the real lowlife have fuck-off great houses on 185. The C of P in New Richmond is one of the world's premier dickheads, and also one of the best kickback receivers in the country. Never known to fumble a play.

The new hobby for the young and stupid was wall-diving: jumping out of upper-storey windows without a rope or parachute. And some woman had got psychoed and spread over twenty square yards of 92: the murderer had wrought ‘unspecified damage to her face’, and the cops were hopeful of an early arrest. Yeah, right.

Nothing much had changed.

Passing all the food stands wasn't easy. The one thing Ratchet hadn't been able to cook properly was burgers, and after five years I'd almost turned the idea of them into a religion. I took a turn off Main and walked some sidestreets until I reached the place I was going. The sign outside had been made bigger and more ostentatious, but apart from that the bar looked exactly the same. I stood outside for a moment, looking past the wooden window frames, stained deep brown with polish, at the dim pools of light within. I came here a lot, at one time, when things were different. Seeing it again made me feel old, and tired, and breathlessly sad.

Just as I was reaching for the door, something odd happened. I thought I felt a hand try to wheedle itself into my palm, down where it hung by my side. It was plump and warm, like the hand of an eight-year-old girl. I felt it try to pull me away.

As soon as I noticed it properly the feeling was gone, and though I turned and looked both ways up the sidestreet, there was no one there. I stood still for a moment, breathing shallowly, aware of a small tic under my left eye. So far, I'd managed to blank the things I should be feeling, but I knew I couldn't keep it up for ever. For the first time in years I wanted something which came in small rolls of foil, wanted it suddenly and completely with a need that defied all reason.

I forced myself to push open the door and walk into the bar. It was mainly empty, a few hopheads nodding over their drinks. I went straight through into the back area, which is smaller, cosier, and also where the owner tends to hang out.

‘Jack Randall,’ said a voice, and I turned.

Howie was sitting at one of the tables, piles of receipts and general administrative junk strewn all around him. That kind of stuff makes me want to go back to barter economy, but he lives for it. An unopened bottle of Jack Daniels was at his right elbow, next to a large bucket of ice and two empty glasses. He was slightly rounder, had lost a little hair and gained an alarming scar on his forehead, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same. He grinned at me affably, a picture of relaxation.

‘Guess you're not surprised to see me,’ I said.

‘To see you, no. To see you alive, always, and especially today. Dath? Paulie?’ Howie gave an upwards nod towards the couple of steroid abusers lurking round a table near the back. They rose and split up, one going to cover the front entrance, the other the back. I'm a cautious man, but Howie sleeps with a bazooka under his pillow. Dath nodded at me as he passed. ‘The guys at the back door gave me a call,’ Howie said, dropping a couple of cubes of ice into the glasses, and then filling both with whiskey. ‘Sounded like it had to be you.’

‘That's a big drink,’ I said, accepting a glass.

‘By whose standards? Come on Jack, I've seen you unconscious earlier than this. Time was you thought by nine o'clock the evening was getting old. You want any Rapt while you're here?’

I shook my head, silently cursing Howie for being able to read my mind. ‘I've cleaned up a little,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘You just think you have,’ he said, and lifted one of the glasses. ‘A man who lays it on like you did only ever goes on holiday.’

I chinked my glass against his and drank. Howie drained his in one, leaned back, and patted his stomach comfortably with both hands.

‘How's tricks?’ I asked, looking around the bar.

‘Tricky,’ he said. ‘But what about this? Couples, okay, they're always ringing each other up, inviting each other round for dinner. Sounds like a great idea at the time – some wine, fine conversation, a chance to peek down the other woman's blouse. But then the day starts to approach, and everyone's thinking Jesus H – why did we agree to this? The hosts are dreading all the admin – restocking the drinks cabinet, cooking fiddly food, making sure all the tubes of Gonorrhoea-Be-Gone in the bathroom are hidden. The guests are thinking about getting expensive cabs and babysitters and not being able to smoke. Complete downer all round. You with me so far?’

‘Yes,’ I said, though I wasn't sure I was.

‘Okay. So the idea is this. A Date Cancelling Service. The day before the evening's supposed to happen, the guests ring up and cancel. They call it off, politely, just before anyone has to actually do anything. Everyone gets a nice warm glow about agreeing to see each other, but no one has to tidy up afterwards or schlep baby photos halfway across town. Everyone can just sit in their own apartments and have a perfectly good evening by themselves, and they'll enjoy it all the more because they thought they were going to have to go out.’

‘Where do you come in?’

‘I come up with an excuse for cancelling – won't even have to be a good one, because no one wants to go through with it anyway. You can say, “My head has exploded and Janet has turned into an egg” and it'll be, “Oh, sorry to hear that, some other time then, yeah great, goodbye”.’

‘Where does the money come in?’

‘I take the cut of what it would have cost to buy the food and drink and cabs. In the early days it's nickel and dime, I admit, but wait till it gets into the upper floors. I'll make a pile. What do you think?’

‘I think it's a crock of shit,’ I said, laughing. ‘Even worse than the mugging service.’

‘You could be right,’ he admitted, grinning. ‘But you didn't come here for this – you can wait for the autobiography. What can I do for you, boss man?’

‘Has the word gone round?’ I asked, knowing the answer.

‘The word has gone round and around and met itself coming back. “Jack's in town. Everyone beware.” ’

‘Not any more,’ I said. Howie looked at me soberly.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And I have to admit, that's not what people are saying. You were spotted out in the Portal, that's all.’ Howie lit a cigarette and looked at me closely. ‘How are you doing, Jack?’

I knew what he was asking. I wasn't ready to go into it yet, not even with him. Possibly not ever, with anyone.

‘I'm okay,’ I said. ‘But I'm in very deep shit.’

‘That I will believe. What can I do for you?’

I reached into my pocket and brought the chip out. It was a small oblong of clear perspex, about four centimetres by two, and five millimetres deep. Along one of the short edges was a row of tiny gold contacts designed to interface the unit to the motherboard of a computer. The number ‘128’ was printed matter-of-factly on the front. I'd found it in my bag after we'd left the Farm. I hadn't put it there, which meant Ratchet must have done. Howie took it from me, peered closely at it, and sniffed.

‘What's this?’

‘I think it's one-twenty-eight gigs of RAM,’ I said.

‘Don't recognize the make. Where's it from?’

‘A friend gave it to me.’

‘You're in luck,’ he said. ‘The market's volatile, and this week it's up. I can probably give you about eight for this without fucking myself up too badly.’

‘I'm in kind of a hurry.’

He reached under the chair and brought up a large metal cashbox. He placed it on the table and opened it, revealing bundles of dirty notes. All of the money in New Richmond is dirty, figuratively at least. There can't be a dollar bill which hasn't been involved in something illegal somewhere down the line, hasn't been handed over in a suitcase at some stage in its life. Howie counted off eight hundred dollars in fifties and held it out to me between two fingers of one hand. ‘You want a loan on top?’

I shook my head. ‘Thanks, but no. Don't know when I'll be this way again. Maybe never.’

‘So pretend I'm your friend and call it a gift.’

I smiled and stood up, slipping the notes into my inside pocket. ‘You are and I'll be okay.’

Howie pursed his lips and looked up at me. ‘You know there's a whack out on you?’

I stared at him. ‘Already? What, an old one?’

Howie shook his head. ‘Don't know, but I think it's new. Heard twenty minutes ago.’

‘How much is it for?’

‘Five thou.’

‘That's insulting. Let me know if it goes above ten,’ I said. ‘Then I'll start seriously watching my back.’

At the door, Dath stepped to one side to let me out. I paused, and looked up at his face. Dath looks like your basic worst nightmare, except he wears expensive clothes and gets a nice close shave. There'd always been a rumour that before working for Howie he'd been a made guy in Miami: starting at the bottom, in the mail room, before deciding to specialize as a hitman. The word was he'd worked his way up the ladder in the old-fashioned way, beginning by being cutting to people: for a hundred dollars he'd march into someone's place, look them up and down and go ‘Yeah, great suit,’ in a really ironic way, and then leave. His speciality was the ‘overheard conversation’ hit. Wherever the target went – in a restaurant, in a bar, in the john – Dath would be somewhere just out of sight, talking loudly about postmodernism. It eventually drove them crazy.

He always denied it. I was never sure.

‘You heard about the contract on me?’ I asked. He nodded. ‘You a player?’

‘Nah,’ he said slowly. ‘Think I'll wait till it goes up to ten.’

Then he winked, and I smiled as I walked past him back out into the streets.

Goodbye to all that, I thought.

Two

The guy behind the counter was looking at me strangely, but I went quickly about my business, walking the mart's dusty aisles and picking out what we needed. I got a couple packs of soya bars, powdered milk, cheap food in heataTins – and the biggest jar of Frapan pickles I could see. Every couple of minutes I glanced down the end and saw the guy was still looking at me. Not all the time, but enough. It was beginning to piss me off.

At the exit of the service shaft, I'd given the guys the 170 dollars I owed them. They were pleasantly surprised, said it had been a pleasure doing business with me, and gave me their card for future reference. The main man also said that Mr Amos had sent a message saying that I had a free pass in future. I told them I wouldn't be coming back.

‘Yeah, he said you'd say that,’ the man said.

Which left me with a little under 700 dollars, just about enough for a beaten-up truck and the gas to get us out of the state. After that, who knows what was going to happen? Certainly not me. I was in kind of a bad mood by then; wishing I'd had another drink with Howie, wishing I'd had several more, in fact, and just forgotten about the spares. I've never been good with responsibility. That much at least seemed not to have changed.

All I could sense for the future was the sound of road beneath tyres and the chill of winter evenings in places I didn't know. After so long away from New Richmond I could hardly believe this was it: a quick score, and then scurrying away back into the wilderness. The feeling got so strong that I actually stopped walking, turned and looked back up at the city. Other pedestrians had to pass either side of me, muttering and glaring, and what they saw was a man just standing, staring up at a building, probably with an expression somewhere between love and hate in his eyes.

Halfway back to Mal's I'd stopped at the Minimart, knowing there were things we needed. I expected a fast and joyless shopping experience. I didn't expect to be stared at. I knew my clothes looked ragged, and I've got a couple of scars on my face – but who hasn't, these days? This is a time for scars. It's a feature. The counter man didn't look especially charming himself. He had the slab knuckles of someone who'd grown up fighting, and the flat eyes of a man who could watch bad things and not feel too much about them. He was big in the shoulders but going to seed out front, and his face looked like someone had spent a happy afternoon flattening it out with a spade. The few other customers I'd seen were fumbling for the cheapest brands of alcohol and shambling up to the counter to pay with heaps of small change. Derelicts, in other words, in a store run by an ex-hood where the lino on the floor was yellowed and worn with age and curled up at every join to show the stained concrete underneath.

Maybe I looked too refined.

There was a convex plastic mirror hanging at the end of the aisle, bent in the middle from some past impact and so dirty as to be nearly opaque. It was there to stop people lifting stuff from the dead zone, but I doubt the proprietor could see much more in it than ghosts. As I walked slowly towards the cold goods I caught sight of my battered reflection. I guess I might have looked a little wired, and in certain lights my eyes can look a little weird. I have the Bright Eyes, for a start, though it generally requires a certain kind of slanting light to show, rather than the sickly haze which oozed out the Mart's tired strip lighting.

I knew he could still see me, even though he was wrapping up a bottle for some huge black guy down the end, so I got out my wallet and made a big thing about counting through my cash. ‘I've got money,’ was what I was saying. ‘Don't worry. You'll get paid.’ His big, impassive face showed no sign of having got my message. There was insufficient depth in his eyes to show if he was even looking, or just had his head pointed my way.

Maybe I was just being paranoid. I turned my attention to the stuff in the chest fridge instead.

‘I wouldn't if I were you,’ said a low voice. I didn't straighten, but just swivelled my eyes from side to side. I couldn't see anyone, and it didn't feel as if anyone was behind me. ‘Seriously, I can't advise it,’ the voice added, and I had my hand halfway in my jacket before I realized it was the fridge talking.

‘What?’ I said quietly.

‘Don't buy the cold goods.’

‘Why?’

‘They aren't cold. I've been broken for six months, and he won't get me fixed. Says it's cold enough outside.’

‘You don't agree.’

‘See that cream cheese? Been there a month. Another couple of days and it's going to explode. And he won't clear it up. That stain on the side there is from a yoghurt that went critical a month ago.’

I glanced round to see if the guy was looking, and saw that I was pretty well masked from him by the racks. I leaned on the front of the cooling unit and spoke quietly.

‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘He's a slob,’ the fridge said. ‘That's all she wrote.’

‘Anything else? Like what his problem is?’

‘Look, I'm just a fucking fridge. Don't buy the cold goods is all I'm saying.’

I reached in and grabbed a pot of soft cheese, and then turned away.

‘You'll regret it.’

‘Probably,’ I agreed.

The other side of the aisle had household goods, and I picked up a box of large band-aids and a couple of bars of soap. Then after some thought I picked up some disinfectant and the floor cloth that looked least like it was second-hand, before heading down to pay.

At the counter another random loser was stocking up on the necessities of his life. A pack of cigarettes, a bag of dope and a half bottle of Wild Thyme. Looked like he had a perfect evening ahead of him, but maybe not so good a life. I saw a flicker down by the side of the cash register and glanced to see an ancient eight-inch television. It was hotwired to the insides of a CD ROM player that had lost its casing somewhere down the years. An old porn film flickered and hazed on the screen. The customer kept his eyes on the action while the counter man gave him his change, and then left grinning vaguely at a scene still playing in his head.

Nice one, I thought. Skim a buck off every bonehead who's too busy watching the skin, and each day you've got a little something extra for yourself.

I dumped my goods on the counter, running my eyes over what else he had behind there. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing self-evidently dangerous.

‘Have you got a bag for that?’ I asked as he started to ring in the goods.

‘One dollar.’

‘You're kidding me.’

He shrugged, put his hand on the next item and waited, eyebrows raised but not even looking at me. I got out my wallet and put a one on the counter. I had a way to walk.

‘Your fridge is broken,’ I said, looking away from him, wondering what I was doing, why I was rattling this man's cage.

‘It's cold enough outside.’

‘Thought you'd say that.’ I opened the pot of soft cheese. The grunge inside was covered in half an inch of lurid blue mould. The counter man smiled meaninglessly, eyes dead. Even his lips weren't up to the job. The left side of his mouth barely moved, as if there was some deep damage there.

‘So don't eat it.’

‘Where can I buy some real milk?’

‘It's in the fridge.’

‘I'll pass,’ I said, and he got on with making up the bill. Quiet, tinny grunts came from his TV set, and I added: ‘I'll be checking my change.’

‘Sure you will,’ he said, reaching under the counter to bring up a battered brown paper bag. I put my purchases into it, trying to make sure the heavy stuff went at the bottom, like Henna had taught me to. Sometimes things like that swam up through the years. Then on an afterthought I reached behind me and took down a bottle of Jack Daniels. Actually, it wasn't an afterthought. It had been a first thought and an in-between thought. I'd been trying to make it an ex-thought, but something inside me gave up.

The bill came to nearly sixty dollars. I had no obvious way of getting hold of any more cash, and I couldn't use my ownCard without setting off a large flashing sign saying, ‘Anyone interested in bringing unhappiness into Jack Randall's life will find him right here’. But most of the food was concentrate, and we were going to have to eat wherever we went. Running out of money would simply bring the inevitable on a little sooner. I paid the man, picked up my bag, and made for the door.

‘Lieutenant.’

I froze. It was very dark outside, and I could see flecks of cold rain hitting the cracked glass, cutting lines across it.

‘Don't remember me, do you.’

I turned slowly. The man was still standing behind the counter, arms folded. Something almost like life had crept into his eyes when I wasn't looking.

‘Should I?’

‘You put me away.’

Oh shit, I thought. I briefly considered facing him down, but the look in his eyes killed the idea almost before it was born. He'd made me. I looked away and then back, and in that moment realized that the last five years were apt to blow away to nothing, and that in some sense I'd never been away.

‘I probably had a reason.’

‘Three years. That's a long time.’

‘I'm surprised I don't recall the circumstances.’

‘You never met me. I was just a mule.’

I stared calmly back at him, trying to work out how I was supposed to play this. It was the last thing I needed. The very last thing. We looked at each other for a while and I could hear the blood pumping through the arteries in my head. It stepped up a notch when I realized that I was holding the grocery bag in front of me with both arms. He could have had me in pieces before I got my hand anywhere near my jacket pocket.

‘You've bounced back nicely,’ I said eventually.

‘I took someone's fall, and they looked after me. They still do.’ ‘I'm not The Man any more,’ I said, abruptly. His face changed then, as a broad vicious smile spread slowly across it.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Guess we all heard about that.’

‘You want to say something funny?’ I asked, and his grin dropped. The light went out of his eyes and they went back to looking like two very old coins pressed into dirty white Plasticine. Like so many of his kind his face looked far away and unformed, as if imperfectly glimpsed through a layer of water.

I smiled faintly, nodded, then left. The wind had picked up outside and the rain was turning to sleet. As I stepped out of the store I heard his voice again.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said. I didn't turn round but kept on walking, and the rest of his words were blurred by the sound of the wind and a siren in the distance. ‘Be seeing you.’

When I was round the corner I picked up the pace, swearing dully and repetitively. A quick glance behind showed that no one was following, but that was no consolation. A phone call would be all it took, a phone call from a man so far down the food chain that plankton probably made fun of him behind his back.

All I'd wanted was to sell the RAM and get an hour by myself. It should have been so easy. Most people manage it, just walking around, without bringing grief into their lives. But now we'd been in town less than three hours and trouble was already taking a bead on me. Trouble's always a good shot, and in my case it's got a fucking laser sight. A run-in with an ex-wiseguy and a five thou contract hovering somewhere over my head. Great going, Jack.

Time to get out of town before I slept with God's wife.

The door on the first floor of Mal's building was open, allowing the music from within to really let itself be heard. Two guys were conducting a drug deal in the hall. They glanced quickly at me as I passed, but I shrugged to show I was harmless.

I was wearily trudging up the second flight of stairs, grimly anticipating getting the spares moving again and wondering whether I could impose upon Mal to look after them a little longer while I went to buy a vehicle, when a shot sang through the air past my ear and smashed the shit out of a wall panel behind me.

I dropped to my knees on the stairs, spilling the groceries, fumbling for my gun and trying to work out whether the shot had come from above or below. Another cracking sound and half a yard of banister disappeared, my question answered: the shots were coming from above. My gun finally out, I cranked a shell up into the breach. Footsteps clattered down the stairs and I stepped quickly and quietly back away from them, round the corner – trying to work out what to do, and hoping Mal would hear the shots and come out to help me.

There was a moment of silence, the shooter listening for what I was doing. I poked a foot forward and deliberately pressed a loose board. There was a creak, and then another shot gouged a trail of soggy plaster out of the wall.

I decided what the fuck, ran forward and turned spraying shots upwards as I ran.

Two went wild, another close enough to send the guy back up the stairs. I pressed the advantage, leaping the stairs three at a time, feeling a wavering sight on the back of my neck and brazening it out. I slipped on a wet stair and slid into the wall, saving my life – another shot spanged past and buried itself in the woodwork. I hauled myself up with one hand and turned to see a man leaning over the banister on the next floor, gun already raised, finger tightening. I realized I didn't have time to move or much to lose and just unloaded the gun at him.

The first shot caught his shoulder, sending his wide; the second parked in his lungs and sent him stumbling backwards. I leapt up the stairs still shooting, piling shots into the darkness, the gun jumping and bucking in my hand.

After the seventh shot he was no longer firing. I saved one and ran in a crouch up the remaining stairs, being careful when I turned the corner but opening out on seeing him twisted on the floor against the wall.

When I reached him I kicked the gun out of his hand and yanked his head up. The face was unknown, one eyelid fluttering and his breathing ragged. The body below was a mess which wasn't going to survive. I slapped the guy across the face and leant in close to him.

‘Who sent you?’ He just stared at me, eyes glazing. I slapped his face again to keep him perky. ‘Give me a name.’

‘Fuck you,’ he said eventually. ‘You're dead.’

‘Not yet, I think you'll find, and not nearly so close as you. Who sent you? SafetyNet?’

His lips managed a smile. He said nothing.

‘Last chance,’ I said. He tried to form the words ‘Fuck you,’ but it was too much of an effort. I looked in his eyes, and knew he wasn't going to tell me. I respected that. So I dragged him by the throat to the banister and swung him into the slats as hard as I could. They broke, he went through and tumbled down the stairwell.

His legs hit the banister going down, twisting his fall so his head caught it the next time round. When he landed far below he hit the earth like a bag of wet sticks landing in a shallow pool.

Mal's door looked shut, but when I got up close to it, I saw the panel of the door wasn't quite snug with the jamb. I held my breath, listening, and slid another clip into the gun.

I couldn't hear anything. I debated quiet versus noisy, lost patience and just kicked it in.

The long room. Empty and dark. A pot of noodles tipped over the floor in the foreground, still steaming. Down at the end, spread in front of the window, a body.

I took a step into the room, swung right. Nobody. Walked to Mal's room, the bathroom. No one. Then I ran over to Mal.

One through the temple, one in the mouth, and one to the back of the head.

I lost it for maybe five minutes.

When I got it together again my throat was raw, and I realized I'd been shouting. Mal's body lay still on the floor, not in any way healed or made less dead by my lack of control. Now that I was no longer making noise, I could hear movement in the corridor. I loped to the door and swung it wide.

It was the two men from the floor below, standing at the top of the stairs. Come to see what was going on, to see if there was money to be made from it.

‘Fuck off,’ I suggested. The rat-faced one in front leant against the banister, all cool indifference.

‘Or what, homeboy?’ he said, with a blank-faced smile. I knew the look. You learn it on the day you discover that with most teachers, if you just front them down, they won't be able to do anything. It's a lesson you can take out into the world, into any number of grimy situations. Most people, if you front them hard enough, will not call your bluff.

I am not most people. That's part of my problem.

I jammed my gun into rat-man's forehead hard enough to dent his skull, and spoke very clearly.

‘Or,’ I said, ‘I blow your head all over your friend's face. And then blow his head off. And then go down to your apartment and kill everyone I find until I run out of bullets or you run out of friends.’

He looked at me, eyes wide, and took a step backwards onto the staircase. Then he spat fluently at the floor beside me. He was going, but protocol required some exit line. I felt like ricocheting off the walls, but I waited for it. You've got to let them have their line. It gives them a sense of closure, and the episode finishes for good. If more people let their enemies have the last word the world would be a safer place.

‘Be seeing you,’ he said, eventually.

‘That's getting old,’ I snarled. ‘You're not even the first person this evening to say that. Think of another and e-mail it to me.’

They clattered sullenly down the stairs.

I turned and saw Suej standing in Mal's doorway, her eyes wide and filled with terror.

The others were gone.

I hadn't taken Suej away from anything, simply brought her somewhere worse. I held her close, watching over her shoulder as Mal's blood hardened on the floor, and knew that we weren't going anywhere tonight.

Three

Suej sat in an old and bedraggled armchair in Howie's private office, sipping from a mug of coffee. The smell of it filtered across to me, as I sat in front of Howie's desk and looked at my hands. It reminded me momentarily of Ratchet; a strong, rich coffee aroma, in a place which was secure.

Maybe we should have stayed at the Farm, I was thinking. Maybe this was just one long fuckup, and all that could happen was that it would get worse. I glanced at Suej, and then looked away. I should have been worrying about the spares, but all I could think of was Mal. The things we'd seen, the things we'd done. Right back to The Gap, twenty years ago. All that was gone now, turned into a dream because there was no one alive to share it with.

The guys at the hidden entrance yukked when we arrived, evidently thinking, ‘Mr Howie was right: here's the strange dude again, lurching towards his fate.’ They started trying to charge for Suej, took one look at me and decided it wasn't worth it. Or maybe it was Suej's face that did it, the blank incomprehension and loss. This was the first time in her life David hadn't been within reaching distance, and she looked miserable and alone – almost like a real human being. It was also the first time I realized that I wasn't going to be enough, that being surrogate Daddy only went so far. Exactly the sort of news I needed at that stage.

On the way through New Richmond's tunnels I'd got the bones of what had happened from Suej. Mal had been doling out the first bowls of noodles when he'd thought he heard a noise outside the door. He tried to get the spares into the loft space of his apartment. Only Suej and David had understood; she went up the ladder first, David trying to herd the others towards her. Panic, incomprehension and fast, flashing movement: it must have been just like when we left the Farm, except that I wasn't there and they had to try to cope with it on their own.

Then a knock at the door – hard – a ‘Let me the fuck in’ knock. Mal opened it, gun held behind his back, first turning out the light. Usually a sound tactic – but it just meant that the killer mistook him for me, and blew his lights there and then. As the killer planted another couple in Mal's head, two other guys ran into the apartment. They cracked David and Mr Two across the face and dragged everyone out. Suej watched through a crack in the roof, knowing there was nothing she could do and rightly judging that I'd want her not to get killed. The men fumbled round Mal's apartment and then left, leaving the killer to clean up any stragglers who arrived.

Me, in other words.

It had to be SafetyNet. Somehow they'd tracked us. I didn't know how and it didn't make much difference. The result was the same: Mal got wasted, when it should have been me.

The men who'd done this had to be found, had to be killed, and it was going to be my job. Finally, I had a task I could understand.

When I got back to Howie's bar my plan was simple. Dump Suej, borrow all the bullets Howie had and go fuck somebody up. Though a little rough round the edges, the plan had worked for me. It hadn't for Howie, and he – with Paulie slightly shamefacedly helping – had physically prevented me from going. There would still be, he opined, plenty of people who'd like to whack me for free, and never mind the five thou gig. He didn't know about the spares, and I didn't try to explain any of the history or mention SafetyNet, so he probably just thought I'd gone nonlinear.

But he wouldn't let me go, and he was probably right, and that's why I was sitting in his office and smoking furiously. Howie had people out asking questions for me, against his better judgement. He thought I should just take Suej and get the fuck out of town. I'd refused, and we were waiting for word to come back. In the meantime he sat in his chair opposite me, watching through the one-way mirror as the bar filled up for the small hours session.

Eventually he turned, and looked at me shrewdly for a moment. ‘I've had a better idea,’ he said. ‘I don't think there's any money in Date Cancelling.’

‘You could be right.’ I lit another cigarette and waited, as I had so many times before.

‘So try this. You know how women eat cake?’ I didn't answer, so he filled in for me. ‘Instead of having a normal-sized piece – you know, like a proper slice – they have a tiny sliver. A tiddlywiddly bit. Generally, my research shows, it's about a twenty-degree angle of pie. You know why they do this?’

‘No,’ I said. I knew what he was doing, and was content to play along. He was relaxing me, in his roundabout way. I thought that was okay. I felt I could do with some relaxing.

‘They do it because they think that if they have a piece that small, then in some way it doesn't count. It's too tiny. It slips through the calorie net, like candy you eat in a car. Then they can have another piece a bit later on – less than twenty degrees, of course – and that piece won't count either.’

‘Howie, what are you talking about?’

‘You watch, next time you break bread with a babe. You'll see I'm right. So this is the plan – I come up with a new diet. All you have to do is buy circular food. Whatever you want, you can have it – so long as you make sure that you never have more than twenty degrees at one time. What do you think?’

‘Complete and utter nonsense,’ I said.

‘Possibly, possibly – but who knows? Women understand some weird shit. Maybe they're on to something.’ He winked, leant over to a small fridge and pulled out a couple of beers from the multitude inside. ‘As you can see, there's a lot of beer. More than enough.’

‘For what?’

‘For however long it's going to take you to explain. I still say you should blow town, but I'm not letting you out of here before you calm down. Against my better judgement, you're going to be crashing in my storeroom tonight, Jack. These are aggressive people you're dealing with. Tell me what the hell's going on.’

I knew I was going to have to tell someone sooner or later. I'd assumed it would be Mal. As I took my first sip of beer in a long time, I looked at Howie's face and realized that it was going to be him.

I met the spares five years ago. I was thirty-four. I was put in a car and driven out of New Richmond in the middle of the night by someone, a woman who wasn't my wife but who'd taken the trouble to find me when everyone else had given up. There's a two-week period of my life which has just disappeared, and one of the very few things I'm sure about is that I want to leave it that way.

I didn't really know what the Farms were back then. Well yeah, I did know. Vaguely. I'd driven past one once, wondered what they were, asked someone, got half the story. I knew more or less what they were for, but not how they did it, and at the time I didn't really care too much.

We arrived in that scrag-end of night when the sky turns from black to blue just before dawn. The complex was a couple of miles outside Roanoke, handy for the hospitals. It was a two-storey concrete building up against a hillside, a drab grey structure which from the road you'd probably assume was something to do with the military. In front there was a small compound where collection vehicles parked for the brief periods they spent at the Farm. The whole place was ringed by an electrified fence, like so much else these days. In back were the tunnels, but you couldn't see them. They went straight into the rock.

I was left outside the compound, and waited shivering for the dawn and the representative from the parent company who was supposed to be coming to meet me. I waited two hours, two of the most wretched hours of my life. I'd evidently shot up from a bad batch and my head was completely fucked. I didn't really know where I was, but that was giving me no relief. It was like being dead without the peace.

Finally, the man came. I was in several different kinds of pain by then and doing my miserable best not to show any of them. This guy was the last thing I needed. He was a small, fussy man in an expensive suit, a man who lived for the ticks he made at regular intervals on the sheet of paper he carried with him. He had a fashionable haircut and fashionable small, round glasses, on an unfashionable small round head.

He took one look at me and smiled. Clearly I fitted the type.

It doesn't take much to run a Farm. A caretaker and two support droids. The droids do the bulk of the work – all the caretaker has to do is keep an eye on things and deal with the white vans when they arrive. They're token humans in the decision loop, installed in the way that a hundred years ago foremen were always white men, no matter how intelligent or educated their black or female workers. The caretakers are generally ex-security guards or farmers who've lost either their land or the will to work it. Men with no special qualities, because none are really needed – apart, perhaps, from a lack of imagination. Most stay on the premises all the time, day in, day out. The company doesn't like to have to organize relief cover, and few of the caretakers have much to go out for. I was no exception. I had no reason to go out at all.

The inside of the main building was arranged around two corridors at right angles to each other. The outside door gave pretty much straight into the control room where I spent most of my time. At the bottom corner of this room was a door which led to the main corridor. As you walked down that passage you passed three large metal doors, each with a small perspex window. These led to the tunnels and were supposed to be opened only at feeding times and when a collection was made. A little further down was the second corridor which led to the operating room. There were a few further rooms off the opposite side, a kitchen and various utility areas. The walls and ceilings throughout the complex were painted an entertaining shade of drab grey, and it was always quiet, like a mortuary, because everyone except the caretaker lived in the tunnels.

I was told my duties, and shown how to operate the few pieces of equipment which were my responsibility. It was explained to me when the shipments of food would arrive, and how little I had to do to them. I was given the phone numbers of relevant people in Roanoke General, and told the circumstances in which I was to call them. I stood, and nodded, and listened, though I wasn't really there at all. Hooks embedded in my mind pulled in three different directions at once, leaving me with a jittery blankness that occluded the outside world.

Then I was shown to the tunnels.

I won't forget the feeling I had when I first stood at the observation window and peered into the twilight beyond. At first all I could make out was a colour, a deep blue glow chilled at intervals by white lights shining up from the floor. It looked like the coldest dream you ever had. Then I began to discern shapes in the gloom, and movement. When I realized what I was seeing I shivered, a spasm so elemental that it wasn't visible on the outside. For a moment it was as if I was back in a different place altogether, and it was all I could do not to run. I should have trusted that intuition, and made the connection, but of course I didn't.

The representative from the company stood behind me as I watched, and told me that each of the three tunnels was eight feet wide and eight feet tall, and housed forty spares. Experience had shown that it was best to keep them warm and humid, and he tapped the indicator panels at the side of each door. These I had to check every two hours, even though they were computer controlled. The instruction was repeated, and I turned to glare at the representative to show I understood. Our eyes met for the first time since he'd arrived, and I could tell what he felt about me. Distaste, primarily, together with boredom and a little amusement. To him I was merely a new component of the Farm, a replacement part, ranking in importance well below the electrified fence.

I hoped he couldn't read what I was feeling for him, because as I turned back to look once more through the window I felt my hands tightening in the pockets of my battered coat, and heard the sound of blood singing in my ears. Perhaps it was from that moment, from within a minute of seeing the spares for the first time, that I knew I would not be quite the caretaker they were expecting.

Or maybe not. At the time I didn't really know what I felt about anything. I couldn't do joined-up thinking for long enough to finish a paragraph I could understand. It's always easy to look back and assume a purpose in one's actions. At the time I suspect I had about as much purpose as a streak of shit along a wall.

The man left eventually, once the opportunities for patronizing me had been thoroughly exhausted. As he got into his company car he looked at me over his elegant spectacles, and snorted quietly to himself. I realized that I'd probably only said about ten words in the entire time we'd been there. He pulled slowly out of the compound, the gate shutting automatically after him.

Inside, I emptied the bag my friend had packed for me and stowed my few belongings in places that seemed sensible. This process took all of five minutes. Then I shakily made a pot of coffee, took it to the table in the centre of the room, and prepared to wait out the rest of my life.

A week after I arrived, I received a parcel from Phieta, the woman who'd brought me there. It contained some more clothes, a couple of paperbacks, and a large quantity of Rapt. No note. I never heard from her again.

It was three months before I got my first call. I just sat in the main room for most of that time, staring into space and periodically frying my brains to dust. Now and then I'd go out into the compound. The view to the front showed a gradually sloping hillside, dotted with trees, that eventually led to the outskirts of Roanoke. You could see points of yellow through the trees at night, proof that — somewhere in the distance — life was going on. I wished it well and hoped it would stay the hell away from me. I soon found I couldn't enjoy the sight of the steep hillside behind the compound as much as I should. There were far more trees in that direction, and at that stage I still occasionally thought they moved and distrusted their leaves. Sometimes I thought I could see blue light coming out of fissures in the rock, beams of blue sunlight piercing up towards the sky. I couldn't, of course. The tunnels were deep in the rock and lined with concrete.

Then one day, at around three o'clock, a siren went off and ten minutes later an ambulance arrived. Two doctors made their way immediately to the operating room, and I warily accompanied an orderly into one of the tunnels. It was the first time I'd been past the heavy doors.

I stepped into a cramped, wet space, claustrophobic with humidity and thick with the smell of damp bodies and excrement. Naked children lay all over the floor, curled into foetal positions, sprawled on top of each other or huddled upright against the walls. I carefully stepped over them as I tried to find the particular spare we needed. The orderly kicked them out of the way with the casual impatience of a butcher walking through a slaughterhouse. The older spares seemed to know what was coming, and flinched and squirmed as we approached, turning their faces to the walls or attempting to burrow underneath other bodies. My heart started to beat unnaturally hard, and I began to sweat not entirely from the heat. I felt unsafe. Not because the spares were threatening – they were docile, brainless, without purpose of any kind. It was the tunnel itself triggered bad memories in me, memories I didn't want to place. The smell was at the back of it, I guess, and the absence of hope.

In the end we found the right one, Conrad Two, and the orderly took him away. Half an hour later he was returned without his right eye. The crater where it had once sat had been roughly stitched together, painted with antiseptic and carelessly bandaged. As the orderly shoved him past me back into the tunnel a smell I recognized crept into my mind, and my stomach cramped violently. It was the sweet, sickly odour of skinFix, a material used to seal incisions when cosmetic niceties are not an issue. I'd never heard of it being used anywhere outside the army, and hadn't smelt it in over a decade. It's not something you forget.

After the ambulance left I returned to the corridor tunnel, and stood for a while in front of one of the windows. In the blue, the bodies staggered and crawled like blind grubs, disturbed by the periodic moans of the spare who'd had part of his face ripped out. The body nearest the window looked up suddenly, a motion that was random and meaningless. She had only one arm, and the skin on the left side of her face was red and churned where a graft had been removed. Her eyes flicked across the window and her mouth moved silently, and the worst thing was that her face and body were not yet sufficiently destroyed to hide how attractive her counterpart must be. I walked unsteadily back to the main room, shutting the door behind me.

I drank half a bottle of Jack, injected two mg of Rapt into my arm and lay face down on the bed with cushions pushed hard over my ears. And still, as I drifted into the twilight of an overdose which left me unconscious for over seventy-two hours, I thought I could hear the sound of bodies twisting unknowing against each other in the gloom.

Luckily, I guess, Ratchet the droid found me. I'd vomited onto the bed and, sharp thinker that it was, the machine had worked out I was not in the best of shapes. It monitored me for the next two days, turning me over when I threw up again, and made sure the spares were fed at the regular times.

Maybe it also whispered to me in my sleep, because when I eventually made it back into the land of the living, I returned with a sense of purpose that seemed to come from nowhere. You're going to need some back story to understand. Bear with me on the medical stuff, because it isn't really my field.

The deal with the Farms is this.

The world's a dangerous place, even if you don't go looking for trouble. Chances are your body's going to take some knocks. Diseases, cuts, bruises. Most of these can be dealt with pretty effectively now. There's only one area where we're still consulting tea leaves and waving dead chickens at the problem.

There seems to be some inherent difficulty with getting damaged bodies to accept replacement parts. Tissue-typing and testtube organs never really got sorted out, despite the fact that any number of apparently more difficult conundrums have been tidily solved. Donor organs or limbs would be rejected, and wither and die, and more often than not they'd fuck the patient up in the process. The doctors furrowed their collective brows over the matter, dallying with drugs and toying with synthetic antigens, nanotechnology and degradable bone scaffolds seeded with cells, but it just didn't happen for them. The success rate climbed, but it was still too hit and miss, especially as the only people who could afford such treatments were exactly those who'd sue the ass off the hospital if the transplant went down the pan.

And so, nearly twenty years ago, SafetyNet was born.

The company was founded by a biochemist who combined scientific ability with genius for cold-hearted, bloody-minded pragmatism which I trust will earn him a long stretch in the hottest corner of Hell. Almost certainly not, though. I'm sure Heaven takes Amex just as readily as everywhere else.

The idea was very simple. ‘Hey,’ this man said to himself, one long dark evening in the lab, ‘we've got a problem here. People keep fucking up bits of themselves, and their bodies respond with a hard-line “accept no substitutes” approach. Maybe we have to stop trying to fob them off. Perhaps we should try giving them something they'll recognize.’

He approached his richest clients, got a positive response and venture capital, and so the Farms were born. For a sum which is not generally known, but which must be well in excess of a million dollars, when you have a child you can take out a little life insurance for it. You do this by creating a life, and then systematically destroying it.

After the child has been conceived, surgeons remove a couple of cells from the emerging foetus. These cloned cells are grown in a variety of cultures, test-tubes and incubators, the process matched to normal development as closely as possible. As soon as the fake twin can breathe, it is left with droids for a while, until it's got the basic motor-skills and perception stuff worked out. Then they bring it out to a Farm, put it in a tunnel and forget about it until they need it.

Twice a day, a medic droid checks vital responses and gives each spare a carefully designed package of foodstuffs to ensure that it grows and develops in tandem with its twin. Sometimes they'll get them to move around a bit, so their muscles don't atrophy. Apart from that, all the spares know is one long endless twilight of blue heat, the mindless noise of other spares, and the slow blur of meaningless movement that takes place around them. Then, when a spare's real-life twin is injured, or takes ill, the alarm goes off and an ambulance comes. The doctors find the right spare, cut off what they need, and then shove it back in the tunnel. There it lies, and rolls, and persists, until they need it again.

Example. There was a spare on the Farm called Steven Two, and I read his records. His brother out in the big room was a real piece of work. When he was ten he smashed up his right hand by getting it crunched in a car door. Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely his fault, but the way life is you're supposed to have to deal with the consequences of your actions. The real Steven never had to. The ambulance came and the doctors put Steven Two's arm on the table and hacked his hand off at the wrist. They went away, and sewed it onto Steven. A little discomfort for a while, some tiresome physio sessions, but he ended up whole again.

At sixteen, Steven rolled his car while drunk and lost his leg, but that was okay because the doctors could come back and take one of Steven Two's. After the operation the orderly carried him back to the tunnel, leaned him against the wall just inside the door, and locked it. Steven Two tried to shamble forward, fell on his face, and remained that way for three days.

At seventeen, Steven got a pan-full of scalding water in the face from a local woman he'd been cheating on. Not only cheating on, in fact: he'd stolen her car and forced her to have sex with two of his friends. But Steven probably looks pretty much alright now, because they came and took his brother's face away.

That was what the spares' lives were. Living in tunnels waiting to be whittled down, while mangled and dissected bodies stumped around them, clapping hands with no fingers together, rubbing their faces against the walls and letting shit run down their legs. Once every two days, with no warning or explanation, the tunnels would fill with disinfectant. A warning would have been irrelevant, of course, because none of the spares could speak. None of them could read. None of them could think. The tunnels were a butcher's shop where the meat still moved occasionally, always and forever bathed in a dead blue light.

They have no clothes, no possessions, no family. They're like dead code segments, cut off from the rest of the program and left alone in darkness. All they have is the Farm droids, and the caretaker, I guess – though they're generally worse than nothing. There's no ‘duty of care’ crap in the caretaker's job description. All he does is sit and do nothing at all while the worst parts of his soul fester and grow. Some let people in at night — for a small fee, of course. It was rumoured that one of the shadowy venture capitalists was a big customer of this illicit service. Sometimes the real people would just drink beer and laugh while they watched the spares, and sometimes they would fuck them.

When I woke, Ratchet was hoovering the sick up from around my face, and a pot of coffee was already on the stove. The sounds and smell filtered slowly into my consciousness, like water through semi-porous rock. Eventually I got up, showered and dressed, and then I sat at the table as I always did. My brain felt as if it had been roughly buffed with coarse sandpaper, I had the chills from the Rapt I'd taken, and my hands were shaking so much I spilt coffee all over the table.

But this time it was different. For the first time I was thinking of people other than myself, and of the changes I could make.

For better or worse, I made them.

That afternoon, I went back into the tunnels. I picked my way through the bodies and chose some of the children that had been least used so far. In the first tunnel I found David and Ragald, the second Suej and Nanune, and in the third Jenny. At that stage all were unharmed apart from Suej, who'd lost a swathe of skin on her thigh. I brought them out of the tunnels and into the main room, and got them to sit on chairs. Tried to, anyway: they'd never seen chairs before. David and Nanune fell off immediately, Suej slumped forward onto the table, and Ragald stood up unsteadily and careered away across the room. Eventually, I herded them into a corner where they sat with their backs up against the wall. By then they'd stopped squinting against the relative brightness of the light and were goggling wide eyed at the complexity of the room — its surfaces and objects, its space, the fact the walls did not slope.

I squatted down in front of them and held their faces in turn, staring into their eyes, trying to find something in there. There was nothing, or as good as, and for a moment my resolution wavered. They'd gone too long with nothing, missed out on too many things. Most of them couldn't use their limbs properly. They sat unsteadily, like babies whose bodies had been accidentally stretched by years.

I wasn't qualified to make up everything they had lost, or perhaps even any part of it. I couldn't make a reasonable stab at my own life, never mind give them one of their own. The wave of decisiveness I'd ridden all morning was ebbing fast, leaving me adrift in a tired and anxious dead zone.

‘What are you doing?’

I turned, heart thumping. Ratchet and the medic droid were standing in the doorway. For a moment I built a lie to tell, but then gave up. People always think that it's what happens when you're awake that shapes your life and makes decisions, but it isn't. When you're asleep and go away, things happen. That time counts too, and in my case the last seventy-two hours had altered me. Unless something changed, I was going to have to go back out into the world. It would probably be the death of me, but if I stayed and watched the children slowly dismantled over the years I would die just as surely. I would be no different to them except I didn't live in the tunnels.

That's what I told myself, anyway. But I didn't think I could have left the Farm then, couldn't have faced going back outside again. Don't ask me which was the deciding factor, the children or my own inadequacies, because I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter.

‘I want to help them,’ I said. Both droids watched me impassively.

‘How?’ Ratchet asked. Behind me Nanune slumped sideways onto the floor. I turned and propped her back up.

‘Let them walk around. Teach them.’

Ratchet held up one of his manipulating extensions and I shut up. With nothing being said on an audible wavelength, the medic droid appeared to suddenly lose interest, turned and disappeared back into the corridor. Ratchet waited until it had gone.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Why do you fucking think?’ I shouted, hoping he could provide an answer. When he didn't, I tried to find one myself. ‘They have a right to be able to speak. To see outside. To understand.’

‘No they haven't, Jack.’ Ratchet was impassive but interested, as if he was watching something in a Petri dish which had suddenly started juggling knives. ‘The spares only exist to fulfil their function.’

‘Half the people outside were born for worse reasons than that. They still have rights.’ I was beginning to shake again, and the bands of muscle across my stomach had cramped. I wasn't really up to a metaphysical discussion with a robot. A bead of sweat rolled slowly down my temple and dripped heavily onto my shirt. That's the problem with Rapt. You don't get much time off.

‘Do they?’ asked the droid, but he didn't wait for an answer. ‘You're proposing, against the express instructions of SafetyNet, to allow spares out of the tunnels. To attempt to teach them to read. To give them a pointless scrap of life.’

‘Yes,’ I said, with weak defiance, sensing how stupid and idealistic I sounded. The strange thing was that it wasn't like me. I had my idealism kicked out of me many years ago, round about the time I learnt about skinFix. If you'd have asked me, I'd have said I didn't give a shit, that I didn't really care about the spares or anything else. I didn't know why I was doing this.

‘You'll need help,’ the droid said.

It took a while for this to sink in. ‘From you?’

‘There is a price,’ Ratchet said, and then the bad news came. ‘You come off your drug.’

‘Fuck off,’ I said, and strode unsteadily out of the room.

Half an hour later Ratchet came and found me. I was slumped at the end of the long corridor, as far away as possible from any life forms either carbon-or silicon-based. My teeth were chattering uncontrollably, my long muscles twitching in true Rapt withdrawal style, and I was losing it. Cold so bitter it felt like liquid fire was spreading up my back, and I was starting to hallucinate. I looked blearily up at the droid when he appeared, and then turned away again. He wasn't interesting to me. Certainly not as interesting as the inch-high men who were trying to climb onto my leg. Some of them looked like people I had known in the war, people I knew were dead. I was convinced they were trying to warn me of something, but that their speech was so high-pitched I couldn't hear it. I was trying to turn myself into a dog so I'd have a better chance.

You know how it is with these things.

The droid didn't leave, and after a moment his extensible tray slid towards me, bearing a syringe. I stared at him, my eyes hot and bright.

‘The dose you take would kill four normal people,’ he said. ‘Immediately, within seconds of injection. You need this today, or you're going to die. But tomorrow you have less.’

‘Ratchet,’ I mumbled, ‘you don't understand.’

‘I do. I know why you are here. But you will kill yourself in weeks like this, and I want you to remain alive.’

‘Why?’

‘To teach them.’

In the end I don't know which of us won – whether I'd convinced Ratchet with my initial inarticulate outburst, or he blackmailed me into colluding in some bizarre impossible idea that had seeped into my mind while it teetered on the edge of slipping forever beneath deep water. Maybe Ratchet was Jesus all along, and I was just his fucked-up John the Baptist.

Either way, I kicked Rapt over the next eight months, and life within the Farm began to change.

Four

The phone rang in Howie's office, and he reached across to pick it up. The first part had taken an hour to tell, and Suej had fallen asleep, lying crumpled in the chair. As Howie listened to whoever was on the line I stood up, took off my coat, and laid it over her. She stirred distantly, a long way away, and then settled down again. Her eyelids were flickering, and I wondered what she was dreaming about. I hoped it was something good.

Howie put the phone down. ‘That was Dath,’ he said. ‘No one below thirty knows shit.’

‘What about Paulie? Nothing from him?’

‘He's out in the Portal.’ Howie shrugged. ‘He'll call if he gets anything.’

He sat, and waited, and I told him the rest.

The first thing I did was introduce some new wiring into the Farm complex, setting up a subsidiary alarm system. Then, with Ratchet's help, I disabled the automatic relays which would trip if the tunnel doors were left open for longer than five minutes. As the relays would flash lights on panels in both Roanoke General and the SafetyNet headquarters, they had to be cut out before step one of the plan could be put in place. We couldn't just destroy them, because that would set off a different alarm.

When we were convinced that it was safe, we opened the doors. From then on they were left that way all the time, unless the alarm went off. I let the spares pretty much come and go as they pleased in the facility, distressing though that sometimes was. It was never a relaxing experience to look under the table and find a naked man with no eyes or a girl with no legs lying underneath.

I didn't make any other changes for a few days, waiting to see if freedom of movement caused any of them distress. It didn't appear to. The spares Ratchet and I were especially targeting soon seemed to prefer being outside the tunnels, though they usually went back there to sleep. The others reacted in a variety of ways: from occasional accidental excursions into the main facility, to never leaving at all.

Then I started the classes. I could never have done what I did, or even a fraction of it, without Ratchet. I got through a year of college, but I studied history. I didn't tangle with child psychology, language acquisition, or any kind of teaching practice. I was starting with kids in their teens, none of whom had received any human interaction in their lives. It ought to have been impossible to overcome that, and I think that had I been on my own it would have been pitifully little, far too late.

But Ratchet was more than the cleaning drone I'd largely ignored until the night of the overdose. For a start, he did something to the medic droid. It was a company machine, designed and built to do what SafetyNet wanted. Yet at no point in the following five years did it ever show any sign of turning us in, or complain about having to chase the spares all over the compound in order to monitor and feed them.

Second, and most importantly, it was Ratchet who did the teaching. Sure, I was the one who sat with the spares and hauled them upright, held their heads still so they could see the letters I waved in front of them and hear the words I repeated, over and over, in their ears. And yes, it was me who stood behind them, arms looped up under theirs forcing them to learn how to use their limbs properly. Their muscles were ludicrously underdeveloped, despite all the magic in the medic droid's food preparations. The day in, day out hauling around of the spares was probably the only thing which kept my own body from wilting into oblivion.

I did these things, and talked to them non-stop, and held them when they were unhappy, though such contact comes far from easily to me. But it was Ratchet who did the real work. He insisted I be the front man, on the grounds that the spares needed human nurturing, and I worked hard years of watchfulness and manufactured warmth. I tried to guess at the things they would need, and as they finally started to hold rudimentary conversations I did what I could to ensure that their intelligence gained some hold, and some independence. But without Ratchet's apparent understanding of the ways in which a dormant human brain could be hotwired into life, none of it would have passed step one. He planned the lessons, and I carried them out.

After a while, the project — because in some ways I suppose that's what it was — took on its own momentum. I became less dependent on Ratchet's advice. I let the spares watch television and listen to music. I tried to explain the stuff that Ratchet couldn't — like how the outside world really worked. But throughout, Ratchet was there every step of the way.

I often wondered how Ratchet came by his knowledge, and never came to any real conclusion. Except one, which may or may not be relevant. I wondered if Ratchet was broken.

I didn't begin to suspect this for a long time — the droid was so capable in so many ways that the idea would have seemed preposterous. But I began to notice things. Sudden changes of activity, occasional brief periods when he seemed to stall or slip into a quiet neutral. He had some weird theories too, about unifying the conscious and the unconscious, which I never understood. And then there was the coffee.

Every day I was on the Farm, Ratchet made enough coffee to waterlog about twice as many people as the place could hold. Each time I went into the kitchen I was baffled, amused and increasingly concerned to see the huge pots on the stove, each of which would quickly be replaced when it became stale. Unless the machine had spent time in some large hotel as Droid in Charge of Beverages, I couldn't imagine why he might do such a thing.

I asked him about it once, and he said simply it was ‘necessary’.

Years passed, and gradually the changes in the spares consolidated. The ones we spent most time with now understood, at a basic level, what was said to them. They also began to talk, though for a long period there was a kind of crossover where some of them, notably Suej, spoke in an odd amalgam of English and what I thought of as ‘tunnel talk’. This was an incomprehensible system of grunts and murmurings, and I'm not even sure it was a proto-language of any kind. More probably it was simply a form of verbal comforting. As time went on they settled into using English most of the time, and of course most of them ended up sounding oddly like me, because mine were the only verbal rhythms they'd heard face to face. I let them watch television too, so they could learn about the world outside. Possibly TV isn't much of a role model, but then have you seen real life these days?

Almost none of the other spares picked up anything at all, even though some were hauled into the classes regularly and the younger group were encouraged to pass things on to them. A few, like Mr Two, gained a shadowy grasp of a handful of forms and words, in the way a cat may learn to open a door. Most learnt nothing, and just rolled and crawled round the Farm for a little while each day, before returning to the tunnels to sleep and wait for the knife.

Because it kept happening, of course. The ambulances kept arriving. Sometimes it seemed that the people out there in the real world delighted in living recklessly because they knew they had insurance. At intervals the men would come, and go again, leaving someone maimed. Nanune lost her left leg, a hand and a long strip of muscle from her arm. Ragald's left kidney went, along with some bone marrow, one arm and a portion of one lung. In addition to the graft which had been taken before I got to the Farm, Suej lost a strip of stomach lining, a patch of skin from her face and then, six months before the end, her ovaries. By that time, Suej had learnt enough to know what she was losing. David lost two of his fingers and a couple other bits and pieces. The group got off comparatively lightly.

And you know, it didn't have to be this way. If the scientists could clone whole bodies, then they could have just grown limbs or parts when the need arose. But that would have been more expensive and less convenient, and they are the new Gods in this wonderful century of ours. If parts had been made to order, the real people would have had to wait longer before they could hold a wine glass properly again. This way spare parts were always ready and waiting.

It didn't take me long to realize the trap I'd backed myself into. When the orderly grabbed Nanune out of the tunnel the first time, I only just managed to hold myself back from violence at the last moment, converting my lunge into a pretence of helping the orderly which was, in any event, ignored. As the years went on, it got worse, because there was nothing I could do. Literally nothing. If I caused trouble of any kind, however small, I'd be out. SafetyNet owned me. They housed me, fed me, paid me. Even my ownCard was theirs. If I lost the job, I was in trouble, but that was the least of my worries.

If I stopped being the caretaker at Roanoke Farm, then someone else would take my place. Someone who wouldn't help them, who would shut them back into the tunnels and make the taste of freedom I'd given them the bitterest mistake of my life. A man who would shut the tunnels and keep them that way, except maybe to yank Jenny or Suej or one of several others out in the middle of the afternoon, rape them, then throw them back on the pile. With rotten empty men left alone, you never can tell what they'll do. Morality is all about being watched; when you're alone it has a way of wavering or disappearing altogether. Ratchet knew stories about a caretaker who finally slid inside himself one long, cold night and started playing Russian Roulette with the spares. He pulled the trigger for both of them, obviously, and as fate would have it the first time the hammer connected with a full chamber the gun was pointing at his own head. They say a fragment of the bullet is still embedded in the tunnel wall, and that when the body was found one of the spares was licking the remains of the inside of his skull.

I've also heard about complaints being made when spare hands turned out to have no fingernails left, only ragged and bleeding tips, when internal organs were found to be so bruised they were barely usable, when spares' skins showed evidence of cuts and burns which did not tally with any official activity.

Maybe they should have hired proper teams of professionals to look after the spares. Perhaps SafetyNet's customers thought they did. But they didn't. That would cut into the profit. People sometimes seem to think that letting financial concerns make the decisions produces some kind of independent, objective wisdom. It doesn't, of course. It leaves the door open for a kind of sweaty, frantic horror that is as close to pure evil as makes no difference.

I might have been okay if I'd just done the job I'd been hired to do, that of sitting and letting the droids get on with the tending of livestock. But I didn't, and once I'd started, there was no possibility of just walking away. I've turned my back on a lot of situations in my life, too many. Each time you do so a sliver of your mind is left behind, cut off from the rest. This part is forever watching the past, glaring at it to keep it down, and the only way you know it's gone is because the present begins to bleach and fade. A smell grows up around you, a soft curdled odour which is so omnipresent that you don't notice it. Other people may, however, and it will prevent you from ever really knowing what is going on again, from ever understanding the present.

When David lost his fingers I sat him down and explained why the men had done that to him. As I talked, conscious of the smell of Jack Daniels on my breath, I looked into his eyes and saw myself reflected back, distorted by tears. For the first time in six months I wanted some Rapt, something to smooth away the knowledge the pain in his eyes awoke in me. I was the nearest thing he would ever have to a parent, and I was explaining why it was okay for people to come along every now and then and cut pieces off his body. I was honest, and calm, and tried to make him realize I was on his side, but the more I talked the more I reminded myself of my own father.

For the next three years, two feelings shifted against each other inside me, like sleepy cats trying to get comfortable in a small basket. The first was a caged realization that I had created a situation which I had to see through, for the sake of both the spares and myself.

The second was a hatred, for the Farms, whoever owned them, and everything they stood for. I knew something had to be done, but neither Ratchet nor I could think of what it might be. In the end the decision was taken out of our hands.

On December 10th of the fifth year of my time at the Farm, I spent the morning sitting in the main room. Several of the spares were there with me, talking, watching television, some even trying to read. Others, in various states of repair, were dotted all over the complex, wandering with purpose or wherever their rolls and crawling had taken them. I went for a walk round the perimeter at lunchtime, my breath clouding in front of my face. Winter had settled into the hillside like cold into bone, and trees stood frozen in place against a pale sky like sticks of charcoal laid on brushed aluminium. It was good to come out, every now and then, to remind myself there was still an outside world. I was also checking the weather, hoping for a fog or snow. On a couple of previous occasions, when I was sure no one could see from the road, I'd let a few of the spares out into the yard.

The afternoon passed comfortably in the warmth of the Farm. I helped Suej with her reading and showed David some more exercises he could do to build up strength in his arms. I did my own daily ration of push-ups and sit-ups too, trying to keep myself in some kind of shape. I still wanted Rapt every day of my life, but it had been a year since I'd had any at all. Exercise and work, along with Ratchet, were keeping me clean. I took a shower, helped myself to a cup of coffee from the ever-present vats in the kitchen, and settled down with a book in the main room.

Just another winter's evening at the Farm, and I felt relaxed. I almost felt worthwhile.

At nine o'clock the alarm went off, and my heart folded coldly. Why today, I wondered furiously — as if the day made any difference — why can't they just leave us alone?

The main spares quickly helped herd the others into the tunnels, and when everything was secured I turned the alarm off and waited in the main room for the doctors to arrive.

Just let it be one of the others, I was pleading, conscious of how unfair that was, of how similar it was to the thinking which had generated the Farms in the first place. Protect those who I care about. And fuck everyone else.

The doctors arrived. They wanted Jenny.

I led the orderly into the second tunnel, swallowing compulsively. I knew Jenny wasn't there, but I took as long as I could finding out. After about five minutes of pantomime the orderly shoved me against the wall and pushed his gun into my stomach.

‘Find it,’ he said, and partly he was just being an asshole in the time-honoured fashion of grunts. But beneath the off-the-rack anger there was something else, and I began to suspect that Jenny's twin must be someone pretty important.

We went into Tunnel 1. I moved round David and Suej, who were a few yards apart, facing into the walls. The orderly kicked Suej hard in the thigh, and then leant over to squeeze her breasts. For a moment I saw his neck before me, perfectly in position for a blow that would have killed him immediately. I didn't take advantage of it. I couldn't, then, though I wish I had. Suej goggled vaguely at him for a moment, rolled over, and then craned her head back towards him with a look of such vacancy that he recoiled in distaste. I found myself nearly smiling: Suej understood how to behave. Better so than David, who looked a little self-conscious and was keeping his front carefully turned towards the wall. I let the main spares wear various bits and pieces of my clothes, and they'd got used to it. Being clothed may not be a natural state, but for them it was a badge of belonging to a world outside the blue.

In the end I didn't have much choice. I pointed Jenny out, and the orderly looked her up and down before dragging her out of the tunnel. From the way his hands crawled over her body I thought it was lucky the doctors were in a greater hurry than usual.

One of them met us as we turned into the corridor to the operating room and impatiently motioned us forward. I tried to send some message to Jenny as the door closed between us, and then I strode back down the corridor again, hands clenching.

I passed Ratchet on the way. The droid generally waited outside the OR in case there were any special instructions after the operation. Usually we exchanged some word at that point, some verbalization of futility. That day we didn't. Neither of us appeared to be in the mood.

I went back to the main room, poured a whiskey and waited for what could only be bad news. In those last few moments at the Farm my mind was filled with alternatives, parts that could be taken without scarring Jenny too badly. A finger joint, maybe. A ligament somewhere unimportant.

But not her eyes, I was thinking – they're too beautiful. Please don't take her eyes.

Then suddenly I heard shouts and the sound of an impact. Seconds later, the medic droid shot into the main room and zipped out of the front door without even looking at me. I shot a bewildered glance after it and then instinctively ran towards the OR. As I reached the turn I saw Ratchet speeding down the corridor towards me, dragging Jenny, who looked bewildered and terrified. The door to the operating theatre was locked, and I could hear the sound of the doctors banging their fists against it. Jenny tripped and fell towards me, and I caught her in my arms.

‘What the fuck?’ I asked.

‘She spoke,’ Ratchet said.

Jenny cowered away from me. I tried to soften my face and to smile. I don't imagine it looked too convincing.

‘It's not her fault,’ Ratchet added quickly. Jenny's twin had been involved in a fire, and had internal injuries together with third-degree burns over eighty-five per cent of her body. Jenny would not have survived the operation. They were going to use her up in one go; were, in short, intending to skin and gut her. The surgeons had hurriedly discussed technique as Jenny was strapped to the table, not for a moment realizing that she could understand if not the detail, then certainly the gist of what they were saying. The operations on the spares were never made under anaesthetic, and as the head surgeon had bent over her to inject the muscle paralyser, Jenny had allowed two words to escape from her mouth.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don't.’

Only little words – but she shouldn't have been able to speak at all. Ratchet, eavesdropping outside, had immediately smashed through the doors, slammed the surgeon out of the way, grabbed Jenny and ran.

He knew as well as I did that it had finally all come down.

‘Jack,’ the droid said suddenly, and I turned to see the orderly sprinting along the tunnel corridor towards us, holding a pump-action riot gun at port arms. I pulled Jenny and Ratchet back into the other corridor. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘This,’ I said, waited a second, then stepped out in front of the orderly. As he whipped the gun round into position I snapped my hand into his chin, palm open, and his head rocked back on his neck. I punched him in the throat, put my hands on his shoulders and whipped my knee up while yanking his face down towards it. He grunted as his nose spread across his face and tumbled forwards, already unconscious. Before he hit the floor I caught the back of his head with a swinging kick that broke his neck.

I turned the body over and pulled the gun out of twitching hands. Then I grabbed the revolver from his holster and shoved it into my belt.

‘Keep them in there,’ I said to Ratchet, stabbing my finger towards the OR. Both the droid and the spare were staring at me. I avoided their eyes and grasped Jenny's hand. Nice Uncle Jack betrays his real skills, I thought, with a sinking feeling.

She fought against me for a moment but then gave in and was dragged behind me as I ran to the tunnels where I shook David and Suej to their feet, hustled them out and pushed them through into the control room. I stepped into the room where I slept, grabbed an assortment of clothes and threw them at the spares, shouting at them to get dressed. As they clambered into a ragged assortment of my cast-offs I heard the first shots coming from the OR. At least one of the surgeons had his own weapon and was trying to shoot his way through the door. SafetyNet doctors aren't your usual kindly men in white coats. Their backgrounds are kind of checkered, and at least some of them are ex-Bright Eyes. The spares turned their heads back and forth at the sound, faces white and eyes wide with complete incomprehension, and I motioned at them to hurry.

I snatched my travelling bag from the cupboard where it had lain unused for over five years, and swept more of my clothes into it, selecting the thickest sweaters I had. I'd been out that afternoon, of course, and knew how cold it was going to be. I scrunched a couple of lightweight folderCoats into the top of the bag, propped the shotgun against the wall for a moment while I dragged a jacket on, and then stepped out into the control room. The medic droid popped urgently back through the main door, paused for a moment, and then disappeared into the corridors. I made to follow but Ratchet appeared in the doorway.

‘They're getting through and I can't kill them,’ he stated simply. I knew the medic droid couldn't either. To that extent, at least, they were both still company men. ‘Go now.’

‘Ratchet,’ I said, and I'm not sure what I was going to say. I knew he couldn't come with us, that he would be like a big red beacon amongst the group, trackable by radio from the sky. Perhaps I was going to ask advice, or thank him. I never got as far as doing either.

‘One of them is using a mobile,’ Ratchet interrupted suddenly. ‘Go. Go. Go.’ As he repeated the word, over and over with eerie similarity like some verbal siren, I heard a crash from down the corridor. I ran to the spares and shoved them out into the compound as footsteps ticked down the OR corridor. The steps paused for a moment, presumably by the body of the orderly, and then thundered towards us: aggressive, purposeful slaps of leather on dry tiles.

‘Get in the ambulance,’ I shouted at David, who just stared at me. He knew what a van was – he'd seen cars and trucks on television. As for how you got into them, that was a different matter, and not something they go to great pains to explain in films. It's generally taken as read. He started banging his hands, palms down, against one of the doors, frustration spiralling into fury.

Suej stared at me, ready to do something, anything, if I would only tell her what it should be; and Jenny stood to one side, head down, holding one of Suej's hands and crying into the wind. I felt a toxic gout of hatred of myself, for making her feel to blame for what was showering all around us. Then suddenly six cubic inches of the door frame exploded into my face.

I believe some moments in your life collapse into themselves, that some things never really happen at all except in the grainy slow motion of retrospect. Perhaps those moments, those sparks which flare and fall out of your life, are drawn together somewhere, to make a whole that stands apart from you. Maybe they are all part of some other life. The killing of the orderly had been a simple, savage act. The surgeon was different, was a glimpse of this other void swimming into vision out of darkness.

In silence, I turned slowly to see the surgeon bursting into the control room, his body surging towards me. His face was hard, with straight lines of bone, skin stretched with effort and two chips of ice in his eyes; his gun was steady in his hand. His mouth opened as he shouted something at me, but I never heard what it was. My hands pumped the gun, fired it from the hip, but I watched the effect it had as if my eyes were cameras and I was sitting in some entirely different room somewhere far away. The round caught him squarely in the stomach and it looked almost as if his lungs and bowels stayed where they were while the rest of his body leapt forward.

Then time hit me like a truck from the side and I stumbled backwards into the yard as Ratchet kept repeating his alarm, over and over again. There was something damaged and empty about the sound, and I wondered if he'd been hit.

The yard was brightly lit against the darkness by arclights in each corner. In less than a second I realized where the medic droid had been going when he left the complex: to cut the tyres of the ambulance. I guess he couldn't have known we'd make it there first and, since it couldn't harm SafetyNet employees, had done his best to destroy their means of pursuit. Nice thinking on his, or – more likely – Ratchet's part, but not everything goes the way you expect. As I stared bleakly at the vehicle I heard an excited squawk from behind me, and turned to see Ragald standing shivering in the door. Nanune was hiding behind him, gaping at the mess in the control room. Both were completely naked.

I got within an inch of shouting at them to go back inside, caught sight of Ratchet, and clamped my mouth shut. Wincing against the sound of David's continuing attack on the ambulance, I threw my bag at Suej and told her to get them dressed. Then I grabbed the neck of David's coat, hauled him away from a door which was now covered in dents from his fists, and ran towards the gate. I trusted Ratchet to keep the other doctor out of my hair for a few minutes at least.

I fired a round at the gate's lock mechanism, and then two others at the hinges. The metal bent and split, not completely but enough. As David and I kicked and shouldered the remains of the gate, we heard a bellow behind us. I whirled with the gun, teeth unconsciously bared, and came very close to blowing Mr Two to pieces. When I saw he'd brought half a body out with him I shut my eyes and nearly pulled the trigger anyway.

Suej held her hands up, took a coat and pair of overalls out for the latest addition to our merry band, and put the half spare in my bag, which was by now empty of clothes. What would have been enough to keep four people warm was now spread thinly over six and a half.

When the gate finally gave way, eventually aided by another round from the riot gun, I shouted at the spares and they straggled towards the gate with maddening slowness. When they reached the fence they all stopped as one, looking out through the hole in the gate like a litter of kittens; in front of an open window for the first time and not knowing what on earth to make of the possibilities beyond.

An hour later we were on a CybTrak train, trundling round the outskirts of Roanoke and heading for the mountains. CybTrak wouldn't have been my first choice of transport, maybe not even my second or third. Like anyone else, when something's after me I want to be getting the hell away as quickly as possible: making a getaway on CybTrak was like taking part in a car chase while riding a pogo stick. The network is only there to transport non-perishable goods slowly round the backwoods. I could have made better time just running. But within a few minutes of leaving the compound I saw that there was a higher priority than speed: getting the spares somewhere contained, manageable and away from normal eyes.

They tried their best, David and Suej in particular. They'd all sat up nights and dreamed aloud of some day setting foot beyond the fence. I used to hear snatches of these conversations sometimes, as I dozed over a book at the other side of the control room. I'd let them talk, though I knew – or thought I did – that it could never happen. A release from pain, some better place. Everyone needs a religion, some unseen good to yearn towards.

The moment I actually got them out, they froze. It was too much. Way, way too much. Most stopped dead in their tracks, trying to inventory the new things one by one. As the new things started with the black road at their feet and continued indefinitely in every direction, I sensed it could take a while. Ragald went to the other extreme, tuning everything out and thrumming instead with a blind and nervous joy which pulled each limb in a different direction and threatened to tear him apart. Mr Two gazed meditatively across the hill, turning in a slow circle and intoning the word ‘spatula’ at regular intervals, and Jenny stood slightly apart, trying to occupy as little space as possible.

I got them moving eventually, but it was like trying to hurry a group of children on acid through a toy factory. Every step was too magical to understand, never mind leave behind.

There was a T-junction thirty yards up the hill. I couldn't remember where the two choices went, and squinted in both directions. One seemed to head round a hill, probably towards the town; the other looked as if it headed off towards the south end of the Blue Ridge Parkway. We didn't want to go to Roanoke – hell, who does? – so I took them right instead.

It was impossible. By dint of shouting at them I managed to focus David and Suej, but that was all. Mr Two wouldn't walk in a straight line, but in large bowing curves like a cat. Nanune was still trying to hide behind Ragald, and whenever the male spare turned to stare at something new she shuffled round behind him until they were suddenly walking in another direction altogether. I could have made quicker progress walking backwards on my hands. It was pitch dark, and the temperature was dropping like a stone. I was torn between a rising panic and insane calm. The two fed each other, melding together until they were transformed into some larger feeling of swift and glittering dread.

Then two yellow eyes appeared ahead, and I bundled the spares rapidly off the road. By the time the car had passed I knew that we couldn't simply keep on walking.

I got us a half mile up the Parkway, to a point where the trees were thickening on either side of the road. Then I collected the spares into a group, led them into the trees, and impressed upon them the importance of shutting the fuck up.

It was like being in the tunnels when the operating men came, I said — only even more important.

I walked away, turned back to check they were out of sight and saw Ragald obliviously following me. I returned him to the group under Suej's supervision, and then walked away again. From twenty yards they were invisible. They'd be safe for a little while — at least until SafetyNet came with dogs. Holding the gun up against my chest, conscious of how few cartridges I had left, I ran off to see what I could find.

I was too wired then to feel what I experienced the following morning in the CybTrak compound — a sudden delirious joy at being back in the world. Instead, I concentrated on keeping myself invisible, trying to work out a way we could get out of the area. The fact that the road wasn't crawling with SafetyNet security or Roanoke police already was almost eerie. We had very little time to vanish.

I found the CybTrak rails after about ten minutes and ran back to collect the spares. They were terrified by then, and so cold they could barely walk, but I got them back to the track. We waited, and it was not long before a train meandered past. I walked alongside the train hauling the spares one by one into a carriage full of computer parts.

Then I jumped up myself, pushed the panel shut, and we left the Farm behind for ever.

Howie sat staring at his hands, as he had for much of the second part. I'd seldom met his eye, just let my mouth run. It was the first time in five years I'd had a real conversation with someone who wasn't a droid or a spare. Even though I'd been describing a disaster area, it had felt good. Except now I'd finished I remembered it was all true, and that there were people who wanted to punish me for it.

I told Howie the rest, how we'd fetched up in a backwoods CybTrack compound that morning, and how Ragald had been cut in half by two security droids which had disguised themselves as an abandoned snow-covered carriage. Then I stood up, bones creaking, and fetched another beer from the fridge.

When I sat back down at the table Howie raised his eyes and looked at me. Then he started slowly shaking his head.

Five

I woke the next morning from dreams which had been confused and bitter. When my eyes blinked open and I found myself lying stiffly on the floor with my head on a balled-up coat I was seized for a moment with weary dread, the kind you get when you find yourself somewhere you have no recollection of going to, somewhere you can't even understand, and all you know is a churning confidence that you have done something wrong which you don't even remember.

Then I realized where I was, lying on the floor to Howie's storeroom, and fragments of dreams danced in front of my eyes. Trees, alive with flame, blackening leaves flicking back and forth with faces which were not there. Then real faces, faces ruptured with fear, studded with eyes which wore terror like milky cataracts. A smell, like the worst of the tunnels, but with a downwards slope towards death, a stench which had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with a final dissolution. A flock of mad, happy orange birds, disappearing behind a hut.

I screwed my eyes up and pushed my fists into them, morphing the flames into geometric patterns which swirled and jumped. Then I let go and they disappeared. I sat up, reaching for a cigarette, and looked around.

Suej was still asleep. After Howie and I had finished I carried her through and laid her on the sacks which looked softest. She woke and we had a talk, mainly about David and where he might be. It felt different, being with her. She was just one person in the world now. After years of being there for her and the spares all the time, I'd started to go away. Maybe it wasn't my fault. Perhaps it was just an inevitable consequence of returning here, like my increasing desire for Rapt. Ratchet once told me that you remember things best in the state that you learnt them in the first place. Being back in New Richmond and trying to remember how to behave while straight was like trying to balance a chainsaw on my chin while bombed out of my mind.

I'd lain on the floor thinking of Rapt the previous night, thinking of it for hours. Thinking of how the worst addictions are the easiest to get hold of. Like alcohol. There it is, in stores, in bars, in people's homes. It's right there. You can see it, reach out for it, fall into it. People don't have Rapt in their drinks cabinets, but it's not too hard to get hold of it if you know where to go, and I knew.

I could hear the sound of revelry from the bar, and checked my watch. Seven a.m. The first shift. I watched the smoke from my cigarette curl into the air, and wondered what I was going to do. Just about every part of my mind knew that I shouldn't be here, that I should take Howie's advice and get out. I'd had no right to bring the spares into this in the first place, into a city they didn't know and problems they couldn't understand. Now the city had stolen them, and at three a.m. there'd still been no word on where they might be.

I was finding it increasingly hard to believe it was SafetyNet who'd taken them. Before we'd gone to sleep I'd pressed Suej hard on exactly what happened when the men came to Mal's apartment. There was something about the way she described events that made me wonder if they hadn't been bargaining on finding the spares. I was also intrigued by the fact they'd blundered round the apartment before they went. I'm not a small guy – it would have been fairly evident if I'd have been standing there, not least because I would have been firing a gun. Finally, only leaving one guy to finish me off: why not two, or more?

Maybe it was some gang making good on the contract Howie had warned me about, and then just picking the spares up as booty. All of them, except maybe the half-spare, could have been sold on for some purpose. Jenny alone was worth good money.

I needed to know which was true. If it was SafetyNet, chances were it was all over. If not, then maybe there was still time to get the spares back before anything happened to them.

But first Mal needed burying. I wasn't going to leave him spread over his apartment to rot.

I rose quietly, used the men's room for a shave and then sat for a while on a bench in the street outside the bar, with a café au lait bought from a food stand on the corner. I knew there were only two questions worth answering – who the killers were and where they'd gone – but I felt as if I'd missed some train in the night. It was like I knew the rules but not the game any more; or maybe it was the other way around.

The news post on the corner kept distracting me; burbling the day's current factoids. Another woman had been found dead, this time on the 104th floor. The story rated slightly longer than the previous day's, because the victim lived the right side of a certain horizontal line. Her face had also suffered ‘unspecified damage’.

I frowned – two homicides with the same MO, on different floors, on consecutive days. ‘Unspecified damage’ smacked of the cops holding back something distinctive to weed out hoax confessors. For just a moment my mind clicked into an old frame of reference, stirred sluggishly towards interest.

Then I told myself it was none of my business any more.

The rest of the bulletin was fluff. New advances in some technology or other, recent statistics on something else. Some guy believed to be a mob figure had been found dead, and someone had discovered that Everest wasn't the highest mountain after all.

‘Beignet?’

‘No,’ I said. I hate breakfast. I turned to see Howie standing beside me, contentedly munching.

‘You should eat something. It gives you a good start on the day.’

‘It gives you brain tumours,’ I said. ‘I read it somewhere.’

Howie sat on the bench next to me and took a sip of my coffee. He chewed for another few moments, ostensibly watching the newscast. Then he turned his round face towards me.

‘I know this is turning into a constant refrain,’ he said, ‘But what you're thinking about is not a good idea.’

‘What am I thinking about?’

Howie pointed at me with a beignet. ‘You should go bury Mal, if that's what you're going to do. Then find some wheels, and I'll get Paulie to deliver Suej to wherever you are. You could be in the mountains by lunchtime, who knows where by tomorrow. That's what you should do. To be frank, Jack, you're not the guy you used to be — and I mean that as a compliment. I don't look at you and think “Christ — a psycho” any more. You've already fucked off the guys who owned your Farm. Topping that by paying a visit on a certain spaghetti-eater of our mutual acquaintance isn't such a hot idea.’

‘What makes you think I'd do that?’

‘Your head gives you away. It glows when you're about to do something stupid. And that would be really stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It would.’

When I was outside Mal's door I hesitated for a moment. I'd seen a lot of bad things happen to friends, admittedly usually while Rapt, but none of them had ever truly gone away. Sometimes I could feel them, just out of sight, as if I could turn my head quickly and catch them for a moment, bright and backlit and eternal.

On the other hand, if I didn't do this now it wasn't going to happen at all. I unlocked the door and opened it. The apartment was cold and it hadn't really been that long: while I wasn't expecting the smell to be bad, I wasn't anticipating enjoying it.

I was surprised to find it wasn't there at all. Slightly relieved, I shut the door behind me and crossed the room. I stopped abruptly halfway.

Mal's body wasn't there.

I stood there stupidly, waving my head this way and that, trying to see it differently. I couldn't. His body simply wasn't there. Closer inspection revealed that the floor was clean, with no sign of the blood, bone chips and brain smear which had been there the night before.

I checked the john, Mal's sleeping area, the cupboards. The latter were stuffed full of Mal's patented brand of junk. Everywhere else was empty.

Mal's body had been taken away, taken by someone who'd unlocked the door and then locked it again behind them.

The only person who could have known about it was someone connected with the killer – whose own body had not been in the bottom hallway when I'd entered the building.

Leaving Mal's apartment unlocked, I ran downstairs a flight and knocked on the door from behind which, for once, no music was coming. After a pause it opened. The rat-faced man stood and glared at me.

‘What you want?’ He looked nervous as hell.

‘Have you seen anyone go upstairs in the last twenty-four hours?’

‘No. Been too busy fucking your mother,’ he said, and pushed the door back at my face. I stuck my foot in the jamb. It probably hurt, but I was too wired to notice. Rat-man's head appeared again. ‘Go 'way before trouble starts, man,’ he advised, face pinched.

‘It's already started,’ I said, kicking the door straight back at him and crunching it into his nose. He clattered back into the hallway and fell somewhat awkwardly on his head. I strode a couple of paces into the apartment, which smelt bad, looking for more fun. Rat-face's friend appeared in another doorway, recognized me, darted back the way he'd come. I followed, and found myself in a room with a gun pointing at my head.

Sitting at a table in the corner was a large black man, head shaven, the whites of his eyes luminous in the gloom. A line of blue LCDs was tattooed into his scalp from front to back, blinking softly in the twilight. His features were broad and brutal, and his skin was greasy. He stared impassively at me. Narcotics were spread out in front of him, arranged into piles of various sizes. I'd interrupted a buy – no wonder people were kind of edgy. I stood still. It seemed the thing to do.

After a moment the big man lowered the gun. He looked at me a little longer, moving his head slightly as if trying to catch a glimpse of me in a different light. Something about him struck me as strange, though I couldn't put my finger on what it might be.

Rat-face reappeared raggedly from the hallway and started squawking, hungry for blood. ‘Say adios to your brain, motherfuck,’ he snarled, and my head was suddenly knocked forward as he jammed the barrel of his gun into my neck.

‘Ain't no call for that,’ the big man said mildly. ‘Leastways not until we find out what he wants.’

‘I want to know if anyone saw someone go upstairs since last night,’ I said, trying to avoid looking at the man's flashing head. I thought I could hear it blinking on and off like a car indicator.

‘Well?’ the man said, raising his eyebrows at the other two men. In variously bad tempers but with apparent sincerity, the men denied having seen anyone. The big man looked back at me. ‘This be anything to do with the dead dude in the hallway?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And who the fuck are you?’

‘No one in particular,’ he said. ‘Just passing through, doing a little deal with my new friends here. I ain't seen anyone either, and I didn't recognize the bag of bones lying downstairs. You want him, you can find the body in the bins behind the back of Mandy's Diner out on the edge.’

‘You moved it there?’

‘Surely did. It was lowering the tone.’

‘Okay,’ I said, starting to back out of the room.

‘Now I'm going to blow his face off,’ said Rat-face, getting excitable again. The big man tutted.

‘No you ain't: can't you get that into your head?’

Rat-face stuffed his gun into the front of his pants and squared up to me instead. ‘Okay, well Marty and me'll just beat the shit out of him, then. Okay?’ He glanced at the black man for confirmation, and I wondered what the power structure was here.

Marty looked less than enthusiastic at the prospect, and quietly relieved when the big man shook his head. ‘You welcome to try,’ he said, ‘but the dude has the Bright Eyes and in my experience they tend to be some crazy motherfucks.’

He winked at me, and went back to sorting his piles of drugs. Rat-face glared. Marty had taken a step backwards at the mention of Bright Eyes, and took another as I turned to him. I walked unmolested through the gap and out of the apartment.

Back in Mal's I stood for a while, wondering what to do next. Then I noticed something, and walked slowly to where Mal's display hung on the wall down by the window. When the sheet of cloth was pulled away it confirmed what I'd suspected.

The display had gone. The board was still there, covered in tiny holes where pins had been, but all of the photos and notes had been removed. I let the cloth fall again.

Who'd done this? Not Mal. He wouldn't have had time before being killed. And why would he take it down? He was a cop. It was his work. He was entitled to have what the fuck he liked on his walls. So who?

Whoever cleaned the place up.

Or, I thought, maybe it had happened earlier than that. When I'd come back to find Mal dead, checking whether his board was still intact had been the last thing on my mind. Perhaps the fumbling Suej had heard was a scrabbling as they ripped everything off of the board.

Either way, it begged questions: why remove evidence of what Mal had been working on? What did that have to do with me?

Answer, nothing.

So maybe it wasn't me they'd been after. Maybe Mal had been the target all along.

I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window until I'd finished it. I was thinking, I guess, though it was like swatting flies off a piece of meat. Then I locked the door so I wouldn't be disturbed, and tossed Mal's apartment. Not all of it, you understand; the cupboards alone would have taken months. Just the places a cop would hide things.

I found nothing, not even a computer, which I knew Mal had. My eyes turned upwards, and I saw the loose panel in Mal's ceiling, a panel which was presumably the entrance to the place where he'd tried to hide the spares before opening the door to his killer. The hiding place which the people who'd whacked him hadn't found.

I grabbed a chair and, standing precariously on its back, opened the panel. I boosted myself up into the darkness, and rested for a moment on the edge with my legs dangling down. I couldn't see anything, but it felt right. Mal was a secretive bastard — when he played poker he kept his cards inside his chest. I stood and wandered around like a zombie, arms outstretched, feeling for a switch. Eventually found one, a pull cord which lit a hanging bulb and threw the area into harsh shadow.

It was surprisingly neat — untypical Mal. A pile of boxes lined one wall — autopsy reports and other documents, hardcopied from police e-Files. Illegal — Mal out on a limb about something. Down the other end was a desk, and on it a computer. Nothing in the drawers. Everything looked bright and shiny, as if this was some new venture, a recent hidey-hole. The computer was his old one, a cellular Matrix connection plugged in the back. A digipic lay next to it.

On the wall above the desk, photographs. Three women dead; close-ups showing that their eyes were missing.

Unspecified facial damage.

I sat down heavily on his chair, and I found I was swallowing involuntarily. I forced myself to concentrate on the images, on these three women and not on any others.

Three murders, plus one in the early hours of today which he'd been too dead to know about. And maybe … I checked the fact sheets tacked under the pictures. He didn't have yesterday's either — too busy dealing with me and the spares. Five murders in ten days, each with the same MO.

He'd said he wanted to tell me about something.

I yanked the hard drive from the computer, slipping Mal's digipic into my pocket alongside it as an afterthought. Then I climbed back down into the apartment, resealed the roof and left for Mandy's Diner.

Howie's place was nearly empty.

I have a talent for arriving between shifts, for finding gaps and walking into them. As I went in the back way I heard a voice call out from Howie's office.

‘Is it nice?’ he asked.

‘Is what nice?’ I said, turning to look at Howie through the door. He was standing by his desk, holding a sheaf of invoices.

‘The truck you've bought. The truck you went out to buy. Is it a nice colour? Is it comfortable? Did you check it thoroughly for rust spots and thunking noises?’

‘I haven't bought it yet.’

Howie sighed. ‘I know you haven't, Jack.’

I walked into the office and stood in front of him. ‘Have you been out to Mal's today?’

‘Of course I haven't. The Portal is from hunger. I only ever go out there to collect money from recalcitrant sub-contractors.’

‘Mal's body has disappeared.’

There was a pause. ‘Say again?’

‘The floor's been cleaned. It's like it never happened.’ I didn't mention Mal's display.

Howie shrugged. ‘So someone buried him as a random act of kindness, and tidied up as an encore.’

‘I locked the door when we left yesterday. It was still locked when I got there.’

Howie looked at the papers in his hand. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘I'm asking if we can stay another night.’

‘Are we on the same page here, Jack? Someone who is both very organized and quite tidy is trying to kill you, and you want to hang around?’

‘I also need to borrow your computer.’

‘To work out how much petrol it'll take you to get a long way from here?’

‘Turn speech recognition on, Howie. You know I'm going to stay.’

Howie sighed and jerked his thumb in the direction of his machine. ‘Help yourself. Then come out into the bar and have a beer. You look like you need it.’

When he'd gone I flipped the drive out of his machine and slotted Mal's in. Then I connected the digipic up to the serial slot and turned the whole lot on.

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