Dead Inside
Author: Barry J Hutchison
Date: 2017-11-26 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Humour; Fantasy
Description: Dan Deadman is having one of those days. After saving the grim and gritty alien city of Down Here from something big, mean and mind-bendingly horrible, Dan is looking forward to unwinding in the closest available bar. Annoyingly, the universe has other ideas. Instead, Dan finds himself investigating a cheating husband, two horrible murders, and the potential enslavement of everyone in the galaxy. With his caseload stretching his woefully limited detective skills, his car in pieces, and the whole 'being dead' thing not doing him any favors, Dan has no choice but to ask his friends for help. And
Publisher: Zertex Books

DAN DEADMAN, SPACE DETECTIVE

“DEAD INSIDE”

By

Barry J. Hutchison

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ALSO BY BARRY J. HUTCHISON

Copyright © 2017 by Barry J. Hutchison

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Published worldwide by Zertex Books.

www.barryjhutchison.com

Also by Barry J. Hutchison

SPACE TEAM SERIES

Space Team

Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle

Space Team: The Search for Splurt

Space Team: Song of the Space Siren

Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan

Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy

Space Team: Planet of the Japes

Space Team: The Holiday Special

DAN DEADMAN SPACE DETECTIVE SERIES

“Dial D for Deadman”

OTHER STUFF

The Bug

For Fiona.

CHAPTER ONE

An ancient, battered, barely-hanging-together Jonta Exodus screeched sideways across all four lanes of a city street, its tires churning out plumes of white smoke. A dead man was in the driver’s seat, although the casual observer would be forgiven for not realizing this, what with the way he was wrenching the wheel, gritting his teeth, and muttering angrily below his non-existent breath. His name was Dan Deadman, and while he was technically deceased, he wasn’t about to let a little thing like that stop him.

A much smaller man clung to the dash, his fingers gripping the edges of an air vent, his legs sliding across the plastic behind him every time the car swerved to avoid oncoming traffic. He had blue skin, a bushy green beard, and was barely six inches tall. Unlike the driver, he was very much alive – although the night was still young, and he wasn’t certain how long that situation was likely to last.

“Holy fecking shoite, Deadman! Are ye tryin’ to finish me off?” he demanded.

“Sorry, Artur,” grunted the driver. His hands tightened on the car’s scuffed steering wheel as a set of high-beam lights sliced through the darkness towards them and a horn blared out a warning.

“Truck! Big fecking truck!”

“I see it,” Deadman said.

“I should hope so! Are ye going to do somethin’ about it, or what?”

Dan’s eyes narrowed in the glare as the Exodus and the truck raced towards each other. The horn blared again, a deep resonating tone that made the old car rattle and shake.

“Turn the fecking wheel, ye big mad bastard!” Artur hollered.

“Wait… Wait…” Dan muttered.

“Wait for what? For me face to get smashed out through me arsehole? No thanks. Just get us out of the fecking—”

Dan swung the car towards a side street, cutting across in front of the truck. Light flooded the car. The horn blared again, and Dan floored the gas, lurching the Exodus out of the truck’s path with inches to spare.

Artur let out a string of expletives as he lost his grip and thwapped against the driver’s side window, the momentum of the turn holding him spread-eagled in an X shape against the glass. Dan grabbed him before he could fall, then tossed him backwards over his shoulder into the rear passenger seat.

“Well that was dignified,” Artur complained, scrabbling into a sitting position on the cracked leather upholstery.

“Hold onto something.”

“Yer fine. I don’t need to, I’ve got me balance now. I’m right as—”

Dan braked suddenly as a sleek hovering vehicle pulled out ahead of them, launching Artur off his seat. He hit the windshield at an angle that was not dissimilar to the last one, then flopped back down onto the dash.

“Ye did that on purpose, ye scrotum-faced bastard!”

Dan slammed a hand against the center of the wheel, but the car’s horn - like most of its paintwork, the front fender, and its ability to reverse – was damaged beyond any hope of repair.

“Get out of the damn way!” he roared, rocking violently in his seat as if this would somehow force the vehicle in front to pull over. When it didn’t, he yanked the wheel to the left, swung out in front of an oncoming air sled, and frantically pulled back in again.

“Ye’re gonna lose them, Deadman!” Artur warned.

“Ah… fonk it,” Dan grunted. He hit the gas and the Exodus lurched forwards. The front of it met the back of the hover car with a crunch of folding metal and a tinkle of breaking glass. The floating vehicle swerved towards the sidewalk and the Exodus roared past, steam hissing from somewhere beneath the hood.

A dozen or so warning icons were illuminated on the dash. But then, Dan couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been lit up, so he continued, as usual, to ignore them.

“There they go!” cried Artur when, at the far end of the street, a black two-man buggy thundered through a stop light, blue flames pulsing from its rear thrusters. Dan caught a fleeting glimpse of a logo emblazoned on the side before the buggy whizzed past the junction and out of sight.

“Well bugger me, ye really did know a shortcut,” Artur said. “I owe ye an apology, Deadman.”

“Thank you,” said Dan, crunching down a gear and forcing the engine to give him everything it had.

“I said I owe ye an apology. I didn’t say I was giving ye one,” Artur pointed out.

“Fair enough,” Dan grunted. He jerked the wheel and Artur tumbled around inside the car as it skidded around the corner, smoke and flames belching from the exhaust.

“There you are,” Dan said through gritted teeth. The blue glow of the buggy’s thrusters was a few hundred feet ahead, fading as the vehicle slowed. They were heading east towards one of Down Here’s least reputable industrial districts. Considering the kind of reputations the rest of them had, this was really saying something, and explained the lack of traffic flowing in either direction.

Artur spat out a string of barely comprehensible insults from down in the passenger footwell. He had landed upside down, and the long floral dress he was wearing had flopped down over his head. It took him several seconds to extricate himself and return to his spot on the dash.

“You know you’ve got guy’s clothes now, right?” Dan asked, not taking his eyes off the car ahead.

“I’m aware of that, yes,” Artur said, and that was the end of that discussion.

He squinted ahead through the windshield. The glow of the buggy’s thrusters was barely noticeable now, and the black paintwork was blending the vehicle with the night’s darkness.

“How come they’ve slowed down?” he asked.

“Not sure,” Dan admitted. “Ran out of thruster fuel, maybe. That stuff burns up fast.”

“Or maybe they reckon they’ve lost us,” Artur said. He grinned. “The eejits probably don’t even know we’re here.”

A spot of orange flashed at the back of the buggy. A second later, the road ahead of the Exodus erupted, spraying chunks of fiery rock into the air. Dan twisted the wheel, dodging the flaming pothole just as another explosion went off a few feet behind them.

“They know we’re here,” Dan said. A third explosion obliterated a chunk of road beside them, shattering a window and briefly rocking the Exodus onto two wheels.

“Oh, ye think so?!” Artur yelped, once the car had regained full traction. “What are ye waitin’ for? Shoot them before they get us.”

“Can’t,” said Dan, swerving to avoid another street eruption. “Might hit the kid.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like it’s a real kid, is it?” Artur pointed out.

“You want to be the one to tell its mother that?”

Artur stared blankly ahead, then shuddered from head to toe. “No. No, maybe best not.”

“Sensible,” Dan grunted, then he swung the Exodus onto an exit ramp and out of the line of fire.

Artur kept watching the buggy until the Exodus dipped below the level of the main road and the vehicle went out of sight. “Great. So now what do we do?” He thought for a moment. “I mean, I suppose we could find a pub. Ye know, drown our sorrows. Sure, we did our best, right? And that’s what counts.”

Dan ignored him and jabbed a button on the dash. It didn’t budge, so he jabbed it again until it eventually relented. A light illuminated. Unlike the others, this one was supposed to be glowing.

“Ollie, you there?”

There was a long, pregnant pause from the dash before a female voice crackled from behind a plastic grille. “Hello?”

“Ollie. It’s me.”

Another pause.

“Who?”

Dan rolled his eyes and tightened his grip on the wheel. “It’s me. It’s Dan.”

“Ye alright there, peaches?” Artur called, leaning closer to the communicator. “Ye missing me?”

“Oh! Hello!” said Ollie. “How did you get in there?”

Dan and Artur exchanged glances. “In where?” Dan asked.

“The little box with the buttons.”

“She thinks we’re in the phone! Like actually inside the fecking phone!” Artur whispered. “Is that not the most adorable thing ye’ve ever heard?”

Dan chose not to answer that question. “Long story,” he told Ollie. “Explain later. I need you to help with something.”

“Getting you out?” Ollie guessed. There was a rustling sound from the other end. “Maybe if I hit it against the wall…”

“What? No! No,” Dan said, trying very hard to hold onto what little patience he had. He thought back to the side of the buggy and the glimpse he’d caught of the logo. “There’s a business directory on the filing cabinet. I need you to look for an address.”

Artur shifted awkwardly on the dash. “Wait. Business directory? Big book, soft pages?”

Dan shot him a sideways look. “That’s it.”

“Right. Yeah. It’s not on the filing cabinet. It’s in the bathroom,” Artur said. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Well, some of it is.”

“The bathroom? Why is it in the…?” Dan’s eyes widened. “Aw, no. Tell me you didn’t.”

“Like I say. Soft pages,” Artur explained. “But before ye go mental, I’ve barely used two letters worth. Most of it’s still perfectly legible. Just, ye know, wash yer hands afterwards,” he said, raising his voice to the communicator again. He met Dan’s withering stare and frowned. “What? Hygiene’s important.”

Dan muttered something too quietly for Artur to hear, then shook his head. “It’s in the bathroom,” he said. “Go get it. I need you to look something up, assuming Artur hasn’t flushed it.” He glanced up at the underside of the road running directly above them. Despite the explosions, he couldn’t hear any Tribunal sirens approaching. They knew better than to get involved in this part of town.

“I just hope we’re not too late.”

CHAPTER TWO

Twenty minutes later, the Exodus rattled to a stop outside a set of locked gates set into a high chain-link fence. Artur peered out at the grimy sign attached to it. “Scrap ‘n’ Shizz,” he read. “Classy. Ye sure that’s what the buggy said on it?”

“Pretty sure,” said Dan.

“What would a scrappy want with a baby… thing?”

“Probably kidnapped to order,” Dan said. “Malwhere stuff changes hands for a lot of money.”

Artur hopped down onto the passenger seat. “I can go take a look around, see if I can spot anything suspicious, or what have ye. We don’t want to go charging in and getting ourselves—”

Dan pushed down on the gas pedal. After a moment of resistance from the chain, the Exodus’s grille threw the gates wide.

“Oh. Wait. No. Apparently that is what we want to go doing,” Artur said. He smoothed down the front of his dress. “Well, if you go getting me blown to bits, Deadman, I will come back as a fecking ghost and I will haunt yer every waking moment. And not like in a wooo, I’m a sheet with eyeholes kind of a way. In a genuinely terrifying and emotionally upsetting kind of way that will damage ye on all kinds of levels. Now, that’s not me threatening ye or nothing, I’m just putting that out there on the record so we both know where we stand.”

“Artur.”

“What?”

“Shut up,” said Dan.

The Exodus cruised through the open gates and into a maze of scrap metal. The track between the stacks was easily wide enough for two cars to pass, but the height of the scrap piles still managed to make it feel oppressively narrow.

Away from the streets, the Exodus’s lack of headlights was problematic. The blue glow of the vast city engines high overhead painted a watery patina across the junk, but if it wasn’t for the fact that Dan was better equipped than most to see in the dark, he’d have been driving blind.

“I’m starting to think this might not be the place,” Artur said. “On account of it being totally fecking deserted.”

“It’s the same logo,” Dan pointed out.

“Sure, but so what?” Artur asked. “Ye’ve got a card in yer pocket that says, ‘Deadman Investigations’ but that don’t mean ye’re sittin’ there back at the office with yer feet up, does it?”

He shook his head and crossed his arms. “Ye have to face facts, Deadman. They’re not here. Ye lost them. Or they lost you. Either way, we’re screwed.”

Something heavy hit the car from above, filling it with the sound of thunder and crumpling a near-perfectly circular outline in the roof.

“Well that ain’t going to beat out easily,” Dan muttered, then he grabbed for his seat as the Exodus lurched sharply upwards, its wheels jerking free of the ground.

“Would ye look at that now?” said Artur, gazing out at the stacks of junk passing the Exodus. “We’re flying!”

Dan wound the window down and leaned his head out. He sighed as he looked up, then pulled his head back inside the car. “Not flying. We’re being lifted.”

“By what? A fecking giant?” Artur snorted, then became suddenly serious. “It isn’t, is it?”

“No. A crane,” Dan said. He pointed to the imprint in the roof. “Big magnet.”

“Ah yeah. That does make more sense, right enough,” Artur conceded. “Bit of a relief, if I’m honest wit’ ye.”

“Find a way to get the car down,” Dan said, reaching into his coat with his right hand, while grabbing for the door handle with his left.

“What? How am I meant to do that? And what are you going to be doin’?”

Dan opened the door and a breeze whistled through the car. “I’m getting the kid back,” he said, then he leaned sideways through the door and plunged thirty feet to the ground below.

He landed with a thwump that managed to sound both painfully solid and upsettingly squishy at the same time. The impact made a number of things inside him go crick, but the main parts of him were all pointing the same way they’d been before he’d jumped, so he was calling it a win.

The Exodus swayed overhead, rising higher and higher as the crane winched it up like a disappointing sideshow prize. If Dan squinted, he could just make out the shape of a tiny man in a dress clambering out through the window, before disappearing as he continued upwards onto the roof.

Something in Dan’s right knee bulged in a way it really probably shouldn’t. He took a moment to force it back into place, then brought his gun up alongside his head. It was, as far as he knew, a one-of-a-kind hand cannon with a muzzle the size of a tin can, a series of lights running around the barrel, and a unique range of firing modes.

“Mindy, stun shot,” he said. The cylinder spun, then locked in place with a satisfying thunk. Dan flexed his fingers, adjusting their grip on the handle. He’d lost the arm recently – twice, in fact – but Ollie had proven to be surprisingly adept at stitching on a new one. It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was the right gender, roughly the same length as the other one, and facing the correct way, which was pretty much all he could hope for these days.

Dan shrugged his shoulders and twisted his neck, clicking a couple of other joints back into position. He peered around at the scrap stacks, then along the track in both directions. “OK, you shizznods, where are you?”

The scream that followed, he decided, was his best lead. It came from up ahead somewhere, a high-pitched inhuman squeal of pain or terror, or some heady mixture of both. The sound bounced and echoed around the stacks, making it hard to pinpoint the distance, but the direction was all Dan really needed.

He had never really been one for running, even while alive. Especially while alive, in fact. All that puffing and panting had seemed so undignified. The breathing part was no longer an issue, but his original limbs were, for the most part, long gone, and the replacements had been sourced from a number of quite varied donor corpses. His left leg was slightly longer than his right, the foot a fraction wider and turned inwards a couple of degrees. It didn’t make running impossible, just ungainly.

He ran anyway.

Dan’s coat swished out behind him as he sprint-shambled through the stacks, Mindy humming gently in his grip. The kid screamed again, muffled this time, like they were trying to shut it up. First sensible thing they’d done all day.

A corner loomed ahead. Dan slowed as he approached it, taking cover behind the wall of haphazardly stacked metal and—

There was a flash, a boom and a searing sensation of heat as an incendiary round took out a chunk of the corner. Dan stumbled into the open, egged on by the squeals and creaks of the scrap as it collapsed around him.

Through the rain of debris, he spotted two figures, one holding something big and gun-shaped, the other wrestling with something small and not-really-anything shaped.

Gun guy first.

Dan spun, avoiding a cube that had once been some kind of vehicle. Mindy kicked in his hand and a yellow bolt streaked through the night, its glow painting brief and brilliant horizontal stripes along the junk stacks.

The man with the gun spun, too, although not voluntarily. Even over the crashing of the collapsing corner, Dan heard the guy emit a strangled, “Urk,” then he toppled backwards onto the ground. The gun went off in his hand, and an explosive round fired straight upwards into the air. The guy holding the squirming infant stood his ground, watching it rise higher and higher.

Dan groaned. “Oh, you have got to be fonking kidding me,” he said, then he launched into another lumbering run, gesturing wildly as he tried to catch the guy’s attention. “Get out of the way, you dumb-ams piece of shizz!”

The man holding the infant blinked four eyes, but otherwise didn’t move. If Dan didn’t know better, he’d have thought he’d hit him with a stun shot, too. But no. It was just that he was an idiot.

The energy projectile was still rising, but more slowly now as the effects of gravity took their toll. Four-Eyes’s gaze went from the squirming shape in his hands to Dan and back again. From this distance, Dan could see the child flickering like a bad TV picture. No great surprise, as it shouldn’t really exist here in the first place.

Dan’s eyes flicked upwards to where the incendiary bolt had now reached its peak, and was accelerating downwards once more. Four-Eyes was still rooted to the spot, and was in danger of soon becoming a greasy one that covered quite a wide area.

Cursing to himself, Dan raised his gun and took aim. He had no idea if this was going to work, but it was the only chance. “Mindy,” he barked. “Slowdown, ten per cent.”

The cylinder spun, and when it stopped three blue lights shone out from the cylinder. Slowdown rounds drank the battery, but he was all out of options.

Still running, he raised the weapon and took aim at the falling projectile, trying to match its descent. He squeezed the trigger and Mindy ejected a shimmering energy bolt. It screamed past the falling explosive round and sailed harmlessly into the night.

Well, not entirely harmlessly. When it eventually came back down several dozen blocks away, it hit a Tribunal wagon, dropping its speed to a crawl just as it pulled out at a busy junction. The subsequent pile up caused a number of minor but painful injuries, mostly to the Tribunal officer who’d been driving. The fact he experienced them all in slow motion did not make them any more enjoyable.

Dan fired again, but the wobbly bit in his knee chose that moment to poke out, making him stumble and sending his aim way off. The round struck one of the stacks of metal, temporarily making it rust more slowly than the others around it.

Jamming his knee back into place, Dan stopped running and took aim. The flickering infant had now wrapped a number of abstract shapes around Four Eyes’ head and neck. They might have been arms or legs, but could equally have been tentacles, hair, or the concept of disappointment. It was hard to tell with some of these Malwhere things. Whatever it was doing, any thoughts of fleeing that may have been forming in Four Eyes’ panic-stricken brain would now almost certainly have been replaced by thoughts of getting this thing the fonk off me.

The explosive round was thirty feet above them now. Dan had a second, maybe two. He wasted half of one squinting down the sights, then Mindy kicked in his hands. The slowdown round whipped through the air, intercepting the tumbling orange ball somewhere around twenty-two feet from impact. Its velocity dropped to a fraction of what it had been, but it was still moving downwards, and that fonking idiot still hadn’t got out of the way.

Dan shouted as he ran, but soon realized it was no use. Whatever the infant was throttling the guy with had fully cocooned his head, and even if his quota of ears matched that of his eyes, he was highly unlikely to be able to hear a thing.

When he passed beneath the incendiary bolt, Dan felt the heat of it even through his hat. Mindy was out of power now, so he shoved her back in her holster, which gave him both hands free. He grabbed the ankle of the stunned guy with one while the other found a handful of Four Eyes’ jacket. Neither man protested when he dragged them both back the way he’d come, something grinding damply in his knee as he stumbled backwards out of the path of the explosive.

They were a little over twenty feet away when it hit the ground. It fell with the speed of a balloon on a breeze, then set about the slow, laborious process of exploding. Even as he continued to pull the men clear, Dan couldn’t help but marvel at the way the air and the ground both rippled lazily, and the tear-shaped bolt became a fiery orange liquid seeping outward in all directions at once.

Had the bolt itself been all Dan had to worry about, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The eruption of flame was still moving at ten per cent speed, and he’d be well clear before it could come anywhere near him.

Unfortunately, the slowdown round only applied to what it hit, not whatever that then subsequently hit, and so when the hard-packed track erupted, the molten lumps of rock were ejected up and out at regular explosion speed.

If Four Eyes and his stunned buddy got hit, it was their own fonking fault. Dan couldn’t risk the kid taking a shrapnel wound, though, so he released his grip on the gun guy’s leg, and spun Four Eyes around so he was shielded by Dan’s bulk.

The debris rattled against Dan’s back like machine-gun fire. He pushed Four Eyes on, taking a grim sort of satisfaction from the muffled whimpers and sobs that managed to escape whenever the infant flickered in and out of reality.

As Dan shoved Four Eyes around the partially collapsed corner, the rain of shrapnel stopped hitting him. The slow boooooooooooom of the explosion was still going on, each inch of its progression throwing up more chunks of rock. They were out of harm’s way here, though, and Dan relaxed enough to study the child more closely. This made his head ache as his brain rebelled against the thing’s very existence.

It had no shape as such, although it could equally be said that it had every shape, all at the same time, including several that shouldn’t have been possible. Trying to focus on it was like trying to empty the ocean with a sieve, albeit without the inherent risk of being swallowed by a fonk-off big fish.

Four Eyes wore Mal-Mitts, of course. It was the only way he could have grabbed and held the child for any length of time. The gloves were technically illegal, but the average Tribunal grunt wouldn’t know what they were if they woke up wearing them, so they were easy enough to get your hands on – or in – if you knew who to ask.

“You really shouldn’t mess with this stuff,” Dan grunted, pulling the gloves from the end of Four Eyes’ arms.

From within the infant’s tangled shape came a muffled mumble that may have been, “Now you fonking tell me,” but might equally have just been a series of panicky sobs.

Even with the numbness of his not-quite-alive nerve endings, Dan felt his fingertips tingle as he slipped them into the Mal-Mitts. Cupping his hands out in front of him, he made a series of low coos and high whistles. The child stopped squirming almost immediately. Its abstract shapelessness became marginally less chaotic for a moment, then it unwound itself from its captor’s head and hopped into Dan’s arms.

A mind-bending series of fractals filled Dan’s view as the thing excitedly licked his face. “Alright, alright,” he grunted. “Knock it off.”

Four Eyes watched him in wonder, his peepers all blinking in turn as he wheezed some air back into his lungs. “H-how did you…?”

Dan cut him off with a forearm across the bridge of his nose. The kidnapper dropped, every one of his eyes blurring with tears as snot and blood oozed from both nostrils.

“You have no idea what you almost did,” Dan spat. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”

Dan strode off, doing his best not to look at the thing in his arms for fear it brought on a migraine, a panic attack, or a profound sense of hopelessness and despair. The fact it kept trying to jam itself into his face made this difficult, and he’d barely walked for half a minute or so when he decided he’d gone far enough.

“This’ll have to do,” he said, shutting his eyes and giving his brain a break from trying to process the unprocessable. He’d need it. The kid was bad enough, but things were about to get much, much worse.

Dan made another series of whistles and coos, louder this time. It was almost a tune in the same way a floor is almost a ceiling. The elements involved are broadly similar, but the whole thing is upside-down and back to front, and mistaking one for the other could ultimately prove harmful to your health.

A patch of air directly ahead of Dan bent at right angles to itself, folding and unfolding simultaneously. Dan knew to keep his eyes closed for this part. It was that or projectile vomit himself inside-out, and that wasn’t something he’d put high on his list of priorities.

Dan counted in his head, not opening his eyes until he was well into double figures. Even fully realized in this dimension, the infant’s mother made Dan’s brain flatten itself against the back wall of his skull. It was fat and thin, short and long, 2D and 3D and every color under every sun that had ever – would ever exist. It was simultaneously taller than Dan, smaller than Dan, neither of those things and both.

Most of all, it was wrong. That was the easiest – perhaps the only – way to truly describe the thing. It was exactly the wrong thing in precisely the wrong place, and its timing was off, too. It was a thing that all rational thought said shouldn’t exist. Couldn’t exist. And yet, here it was, gazing down at him (he assumed – it was hard to be sure) and waiting for him to hand over its kid.

“I told you I’d find it,” Dan said, raising the infant towards its mother. It was difficult to judge just how far to raise it, as the mother was both billions of light years away and close enough that Dan could feel her cold heat on his parchment skin. Dan decided just to put both arms out straight, and hope he hadn’t touched her anywhere inappropriate.

Both shapes – all shapes – blurred as one absorbed the other. The mind-bending pulsating spiked, and Dan jerked back as if icicles had been jammed into both eyes. The air around the thing grew hotter and colder, the atoms cracking and popping audibly.

“We had a deal,” Dan said, forcing himself to gaze into the twisting heart of the thing, no matter how much his brain felt like it was about to melt. “I get the kid back, you don’t bring the whole world down around our ears.”

Reality itself creaked and groaned on all the entity’s infinite sides. “I kept my end. Now you keep yours.”

It took Dan several seconds to realize he was talking to himself. The thing had gone. Long gone. Some niggling little part of his subconscious told him it had left long before he’d even arrived, although he knew that couldn’t really be the case.

Or maybe it could. Fonk knew with those things.

Whatever, it was gone now. The planet and the rest of the galaxy still seemed to exist, so all things considered it could’ve gone a whole lot worse.

“Don’t move,” hissed a voice from behind him.

Dan turned, sighing. The gun guy was standing well beyond reach, the flames of the explosion still creeping through the air in the adjoining alleyway behind him. He looked in bad shape, his face and arms lacerated and dented by the hail of flying rocks Dan had abandoned him to.

“I said don’t move!”

“I know. But I ignored you,” Dan replied. The guy was too far away from him to reach, but close enough that even if the guy shot and missed, the explosion would reduce Dan and everything in his immediate vicinity to a colorful mist. “Put down the gun, son. It’s over. The holluck’s gone.”

“The what?”

“Seriously?” Dan said. He jabbed a thumb into the space behind him, which was now mercifully free of brain-twisting entities. “The pan-dimensional demi-god you tried to kidnap. And, more importantly, its extremely ticked off mother. They’re gone. It’s over. Now, it’s been a long night, so put down the fonking gun.”

“That was our payday,” the gun guy said, his teeth clamping together as he fought back tears. “That was going to set us up for life. And you ruined it!”

“Son, I saved your life and the lives of everyone you’ve ever known. That thing would’ve torn the galaxy apart trying to find its kid, and it would have started with you.” Dan flexed his gloved fingers, then balled them into fists. “Now, put down the gun, and say ‘thank you.’”

Gun guy snorted as if he’d just heard a joke he didn’t quite get. “You what?”

“You heard,” said Dan, tilting his hat back a little. He both loved and hated the expression of horrified revulsion the man adopted when his face was fully revealed.

Four Eyes staggered to a stop beside him. When he saw Dan’s face, his expression quickly switched to match that of his partner.

“Wh-wh-what are you?” Four Eyes whimpered, his voice muffled by the corks of dried blood bunging up his nose.

“Right now, I’m the best chance you two have of surviving the next few hours,” Dan told them. “I know you stole the holluck to order. Probably didn’t even know what you were getting into. Whoever was paying you to get it, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to make sure you don’t talk. That’s how these guys work. Trust me.”

The two men exchanged a nervous glance. The gun waivered.

“I can keep you safe,” Dan told them. “Tell me who the buyer was, and I can take them out before they can get to you.”

There was an exchange of frantic whispering between the two men. Four Eyes gave a resigned nod towards the gun. When it didn’t lower, he put a hand on the barrel and nudged it downwards. Gun guy didn’t resist, just sighed and looked defeated as he lowered the weapon all the way.

“We… we didn’t know,” he mumbled. “We didn’t know.”

Dan put a finger behind his ear and pushed it outwards, indicating he was waiting to hear something. It took gun guy a few moments to figure out what.

“Thank you,” he said, fixing his eyes on the ground at his feet.

Four Eyes wiped a smear of blood from below his broken nose. “Thank you,” he said, visibly grudging every syllable.

“You’re welcome,” Dan said. “And I know you didn’t know what you were doing. You’re clearly idiots. So, how about you tell me who’s behind—”

A Jonta Exodus fell on the men from above, cutting Dan’s line of enquiry short.

He blinked, but otherwise didn’t move as a spray of blood spattered across his face. He watched in silence as two of the car’s four wheels rolled off in different directions, before wobbling to a stop and falling over some distance away.

A six-inch tall figure dropped onto the car’s crumpled roof, the dress it wore billowing out around it like a parachute.

“Got it,” announced Artur, straightening and dusting himself down. He put his hands on his lower back and cricked his spine, then looked around him. “Now then,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “What’d I miss?”

CHAPTER THREE

There was no fixing the Exodus. Not tonight, at least, and probably not ever.

The crane – or its magnet, at least – was similarly ruined, and it took Dan a full hour to find the kidnappers’ buggy, then use it to drag his car somewhere that wasn’t sitting directly atop two squishy piles of humanoid remains.

He eventually abandoned it beside the rotting hulks of several other wrecks. Most of them looked like they’d been there for months. All of them were in better condition than the Exodus.

“This is a nice vehicle,” Artur said, nodding appreciatively up at the open roof. The blue glow of the city engines rippled over them, making the buggy feel like a miniature submarine at the bottom of a rolling ocean. “We should keep it. It’s the least they can do, what with the trouble they put you through.”

“It’s too hot,” Dan said.

“I’m sure if you press enough buttons one of them’ll be the aircon,” Artur suggested. He pressed a button. It wasn’t the aircon. Nor, as far as he could tell, was it anything else.

Dan pressed it again, switching off whatever – if anything – had been switched on.

“No, I mean it’s too hot. It belongs… belonged to two low-lives who, in case you didn’t notice, were recently crushed to death by a falling car.”

Artur snorted. “What? And you’re worried the Tribunal might come poking their nose in? Ye think they give a shoite?”

“Not the Tribunal,” Dan said, clambering out of the buggy’s bucket-shaped driver’s seat. “But whoever hired them to steal the kid might come looking for answers, and I’d prefer to meet them on my own terms.”

He pulled his collar high and his hat down low, then began marching in the direction of the exit.

“Wait, we’re not walking, are we?” Artur called after him. “Are ye kidding me? It’s fecking miles away! And, though you may not know this about me, I’m by my nature a very lazy person.”

He looked up as he scampered along after Dan. “Also, it’s getting late, and you know what my temper gets like in the wee small hours. Sure, I can’t help meself.”

Dan opened his mouth to retort, then decided against it. He held open a pocket of his coat, and waited for Artur to clamber inside. “Fine,” he grunted. “We’ll try to get a cab.”

“That’s more like it.”

“But you’re paying.”

“Oh yeah,” said Artur, snuggling himself down into the folds of Dan’s pocket. “Good luck with that.”

* * *

Dan trudged up the creaking staircase with Artur’s voice chattering from inside his pocket. It had been chattering from inside his pocket for some time now, and no matter how much effort he put into ignoring it, it kept finding its way to his ears.

“All I’m saying is ye could have warned me them lads were standing where they were standing before I dropped the car on them. I mean, it’s all very well ye sayin’ I should have looked, but sure, ye don’t think of these things in the heat of the moment, do ye? Ye gave me a job to do – get the car down – and I did it.”

“I wanted it down in one piece,” Dan said, turning at a landing before continuing on upwards.

“Well ye should’ve specified that,” Artur pointed out.

“I assumed it was implied.”

“Well clearly ye thought wrong,” Artur countered. “Which is your fault, not mine. Ye know what they say about assuming, Deadman?”

“No. What do they say?”

Artur shrugged. “Feck knows, but I’m sure it applies in this instance.”

After another landing and another staircase, Dan finally reached the top. The outer office door stood dead ahead, light shining through the frosted glass. At first, he thought he could hear Ollie talking to herself, then realized that while she was talking, it wasn’t to herself.

“Someone’s in there,” Dan whispered. It was late. Really late. Too late for clients. That left a few other options, none of them good.

His hand crept inside his coat, before he remembered Mindy was out of charge.

“Want me to go in and batter the shoite out of them?” Artur asked. From the way he said it, Dan knew he was itching to be given the go-ahead.

“Maybe,” Dan said. He held a hand over his pocket, stopping Artur before he could leap out. “But not yet. Let’s see who it is first.”

Artur wrinkled his nose. “Seems a bit wishy-washy, if ye ask me. Violence first, questions later, that’s my motto,” he said. He shrugged. “But, ye know, whatever ye think yerself.”

“Be ready,” said Dan, then he pushed open the door, stepped into the office, and came face to face with the most flawlessly beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

Even sitting, she was tall and slender, dressed from head to toe in a pristinely white and effortlessly expensive-looking outfit that probably cost more than the entire block. Dan had only met a handful of people from Up There, but he knew one when he saw one. The idea that this woman belonged anywhere Down Here was absurd. Yet Down Here she was, and specifically in his office.

To her credit, she didn’t faint, scream, or throw up in her mouth at the sight of Dan. Her only reaction was a subtle widening of the eyes and a flaring of the nostrils, and even they didn’t last.

“Mr Deadman, I presume?” the woman said in a voice that suggested several generations worth of good breeding. She rose in a fluidly elegant motion, presenting a flawless hand for Dan to… do what with? Kiss? Surely not. He regarded it for several seconds too long, before making a gesture that suggested his hands were full, despite the fact they patently weren’t. He offered her a curt but professional nod which she seemed both surprised and relieved by in roughly equal measures.

Artur’s head popped up from inside Dan’s coat pocket. He looked around the room, then let out a little whistle of surprise when he spotted the well-dressed woman.

“Well, would ye look at that?” he said. “Who’s this now?”

When the woman made no attempt to introduce herself, Dan looked expectantly across at Ollie. She was leaning against the inner office door in a way that was presumably supposed to make her look relaxed and at ease, but actually had completely the opposite effect.

To the untrained observer – and probably to many trained ones, too – Ollie looked more or less like any other young woman, albeit with pink, purple-patterned skin and an expression of either confusion, excitement or surprise, depending on what happened to be flitting through her head at the time.

In reality, though, she didn’t belong in this dimension. She was the daughter of a powerful and somewhat terrifying Malwhere Lord. Thanks to Dan’s inadvertent assistance, she had managed to escape the Hell-like dimension she’d been imprisoned in for years and now, somehow, Dan was stuck with her. He wasn’t quite sure how that had transpired, but transpired it had.

She’d only been living with him in the office for a couple of nights, but Dan was already starting to miss the peace and quiet.

“Hi!” Ollie said, catching Dan’s look and bouncing it right back to him as a smile. She shot the comm-device on the desk a puzzled look, but chose not to ask how they’d managed to get out. “Good night? Catch the guys with the thing?”

“I did,” Dan said. His eyes crept sideways and he tilted his head in the finely-dressed woman’s direction. “Are you going to introduce us?”

Ollie seemed to take a while to make her mind up about this. “No,” she finally decided.

Dan sighed wearily. He tried to smile, but everyone conspired to turn it into a grimace. “No?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“I mean, yes. I mean, no. I mean… I would, but she won’t tell me her name,” Ollie said.

Dan frowned, and turned his attention back to the stranger. She stiffened, just slightly, and drew in a slow breath through her nose. Considering the pungency of Dan’s body odor, this was a bold move, and the tears that formed at the corners of the woman’s eyes suggested it was one she wouldn’t be making again.

“I wasn’t certain I could trust her,” she said, anticipating Dan’s question before it came.

“You can,” said Dan. “She wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t.”

Ollie’s eyes widened in surprise. “Whoa. Really? Thanks!” she chirped.

“Don’t mention it.”

“I mean… I didn’t think you trusted me at all! You keep saying you don’t…”

Dan shot her a look he hoped would shut her up. It didn’t. Fortunately, the door pulling open behind her did, and her words came out as a sudden yelp before she toppled backwards into the inner office. Dan, Artur and the woman in white all watched as a wrinkled gray figure in a hard hat and luminous yellow vest leaned through the doorway.

“Alright?” the mole-like old builder said, his stubby nose twitching anxiously.

“Wait. You’re still here?” said Dan. “You were supposed to be done hours ago.”

“It’s a tricky job,” the builder wheezed.

“You’re fixing one fecking window,” Artur pointed out.

“And a bit of wall,” the builder countered. “These things take time.”

Ollie sprang to her feet. “I’m up! I’m OK! No harm done! Totally didn’t even hurt. Thanks for asking.”

The builder licked his cracked and dry lips. “Quick question. You definitely want the window, yeah?”

Dan’s eyebrows met in the middle. “What?”

“The window. That’s a definite, is it? Or is it?”

“Yes. Yes, I want the window,” Dan told him. “That’s literally the only reason you’re here.”

“Right. Yeah. Right. Gotcha. That’s what I thought,” the builder said. He nodded, then retreated back into the other room, muttering: “Yeah. He wants the window.”

From the inner office, a younger voice replied.

“Fonk, seriously?” he groaned, and then the door closed, and the conversation became a series of unhappy mumbles.

“I think perhaps I’ve come at a bad time,” said the woman. There was a note of impatience to her voice that suggested this was everyone else’s fault but hers. If it was an apology she was looking for, she’d come to the wrong place.

“Yes, you have. Office hours are listed on the door,” Dan said.

“Are they?” asked Ollie, craning to look. Dan continued before she could point out that no, they weren’t.

“But you’re here now, so how about you tell me what I can do for you?”

The woman’s nostrils flared again. Her eyes grew cold as she peered down her long straight nose at Dan, Ollie, and the office in general. Dan waited for the cutting insult he could practically see forming itself behind those thin, perfectly symmetrical lips.

To his surprise, she didn’t make any disparaging remarks. Instead, she sort of folded down onto Dan’s best chair, her slender shoulders shaking as her body was wracked by silent sobs.

“Oh shoite,” said Artur, watching tears glisten on the woman’s impeccably smooth cheeks. “This is way beyond me realm of expertise. If ye’ll excuse me, I think I’ll turn in for the night.”

Dan fished the little man from his pocket and carried him over to the wall safe he locked him in most nights. This was partly for Artur’s own safety, but mostly for everyone else’s.

“Goodnight,” said Ollie.

“Night, peaches,” Artur said, then he stepped back from the door as Dan closed and locked it. He took a framed picture from the top of the filing cabinet and hung it from a hook above the safe, hiding it from view.

When he turned back to the woman she had made a valiant attempt to pull herself together, but hadn’t quite managed it. Dan gestured to Ollie, then to the stranger. “Tissues,” he whispered. When she just stared back at him, he motioned to his eyes and nose.

“Oh!” said Ollie. “Right.”

She tore a page from the business directory and held it towards the snuffling woman. Dan grabbed it before she could notice, shot Ollie an annoyed look, then quickly tossed the paper onto the floor.

“You OK?” he asked, lowering himself into a sitting position on the edge of the table.

“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Yes, of course,” the woman said, her voice croaking through her tightening throat. She forcibly cleared the blockage with a series of short coughs, then smoothed down her already immaculately smooth white hat. “Kooriashian.”

Dan frowned. “Uh… Kooriashian?”

“My name. It is Kooriashian. I would like to employ your services, Mr Deadman.”

“Figured it wasn’t a personal call,” Dan said.

Kooriashian’s brow developed a single flaw as she frowned. “I’m sorry?”

“Nothing. Please,” said Dan, motioning for her to continue.

Kooriashian smiled. It was the kind of smile a visitor to another country might make when they couldn’t work out if the fast-talking little foreign chaps were making fun of them or not.

“Yes. Yes, quite. It’s…” She lowered her head, took a moment to compose herself, then continued. “It’s my husband. Tressingham. I think… I rather fear he’s been…”

“Screwing around?” Dan guessed.

Kooriashian flinched as if she’d been physically struck.

“Conducting extra-marital activities of an untoward nature,” she said, managing to put emphasis on each and every word. “Yes. Quite so.”

“And you want me to catch him in the act,” said Dan. “I’ll be honest, it’s not what I usually do. See, I’m a little more… specialized.”

“I appreciate that, Mr Deadman, but I have spent a lot of time considering the options, and you are my preferred vendor for this matter.”

“Any detective Down Here could do what you’re looking for,” Dan said. “I could give you a list.” He gestured to the business directory. “Well, maybe not a complete list, but enough to get you started.”

“You are not listening, Mr Deadman,” Kooriashian said, in the same tone she almost certainly used to reprimand her staff with. “I carefully considered my options. I elected to choose you for this… case or mission or job, or whatever you wish to call it. My mind is made up. It’s simply made up.”

Dan crossed his arms and shook his head. “Like I say, not my kind of case.”

“I can pay you five thousand credits now, another ten thousand once you’ve completed the assignment.”

A voice came from behind the painting, muffled by several inches of hardened steel. “Holy fecking father! Take the case, ye daft big shoite!”

A thought occurred to Kooriashian. Dan watched it flit across her face. “You do use credits down here, yes? You don’t have your own…” She waved a hand vaguely. “…currency?”

“We do,” Dan confirmed. “Use credits, I mean.”

“Super. Then it’s decided.”

“Is that a lot?” Ollie wondered.

“Which of us are you asking?” said Kooriashian.

Ollie hesitated, then pointed to Dan. The woman in white looked him up and down. “Ah. Then yes. It is rather.”

Dan thought about saying no. He really did. A beautiful yet mysterious woman turning up at the office of a private detective with an offer that sounded too good to be true? After dark? His every instinct told him to palm her off somewhere else, make her someone else’s problem.

And he would have, had the sound of a power tool not chosen that moment to reverberate from within the inner office. The new window was expensive. A replacement for the Exodus wouldn’t be cheap. Nothing Down Here ever was, with the exception of talk, life and certain street foods of dubious origins.

Still, he thought about it. Much later, once the screaming had stopped, the chaos had been contained, and everything had blown over, he’d console himself with that. He thought about it. He at least came close to making a different decision even if, ultimately, he didn’t.

“Sure, why not?” Dan said, removing his hat and coat and hanging them on a hook behind the door. He rolled up his shirt sleeves, enjoying the woman’s growing discomfort as his mismatched forearms were unveiled. “Now, tell me what’s been happening, and take it from the top.”

Kooriashian’s tale was pretty much what Dan had expected. Her husband, Tressingham, was an older man with an eye for younger women, who’d suddenly started working late most nights and paying his not-as-young-as-she-used-to-be wife less and less attention.

She spoke of the whispered calls he would cut off when she entered the room, his too-broad smiles when she’d walked in on him furtively tapping on his comm-pad, his insistence that of course he wasn’t up to anything, daaaahling, and his blatant attempts to make her doubt the evidence of her own eyes, not to mention her own instincts.

He had started traveling to Down Here (although Kooriashian called it ‘Down There’ with a particularly harsh emphasis on the ‘there’ part). She’d found out quite by chance, after accidentally paying a very discrete individual to hack into his travel records. Whenever he claimed to be ‘working late’ he was actually descending to the city below. He’d fabricated an entire business trip so he could spend three full days Down Here, and had never once mentioned it to his wife.

“Why don’t you leave him?” Ollie asked. Kooriashian looked utterly perplexed by this, so Dan answered for her.

“Because he’s the one with the money, right? You don’t want to just leave him without making sure you’re set up for life.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” Kooriashian asked. “Why should I walk away from what’s rightfully mine and leave him with everything?”

Her mouth opened briefly, as if there was more to be said, then quickly drew tight. It didn’t go unnoticed.

“What else?” Dan asked. “You were going to say something. What else?”

Kooriashian was a picture of perfect stillness for several seconds, as if she’d frozen solid. Dan stood up and gestured towards the door, but before he could suggest she left, her demeanor thawed.

“I don’t want to leave him. Well, no, of course I want to leave him, but I can’t. I daren’t.”

Dan sat down again, his chair creaking beneath him. “Why?” he asked, but a high-pitched grinding noise from the inner office drowned the question out. He waited for it to pass, realized it wasn’t going to happen any time soon, so raised his voice and tried again. “WHY?”

“Well, I mean… isn’t it obvious?” Kooriashian said. She didn’t shout, but her voice had that confident boom that only comes from a very specific type of upbringing, and it carried well.

Ollie leaned closer to Dan. “Is it obvious?” she asked.

“Not to me,” Dan said.

Kooriashian appeared uncomfortable at having to spell the difficulties of the situation out. “Well, I mean… he’s clearly having an affair.”

“That’s certainly a possibility,” Dan agreed.

“He’s having an affair with someone… Down There.” Kooriashian shuddered. “Or Here, or… whatever you wish to call it.”

“So, you should leave him,” Ollie said.

“Are you mad?” Kooriashian snapped, her voice taking on a frosty edge. “I can’t have everyone finding out that my husband has betrayed me with a… with a…” She looked Ollie up and down, the gestured to the window. “Well, you know. I don’t want to say ‘commoner’ but… You know.”

She shifted in her chair and smoothed down her flawless outfit again. “I daren’t even confront him. I simply cannot risk anyone finding out. I’d be a laughing stock. An utter laughing stock.”

Dan clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “And we can’t be having that.”

“Precisely! I’m so glad you understand,” said Kooriashian, brightening a little. “Hence me coming to you. I wanted somewhere utterly grim, you know? A real – what do you call it? A real dive. No-one Up Here – There – would ever think about setting foot in a place like this, or dealing with someone like you, so it minimizes the risk of you ever coming into contact with anyone who knows me.”

Dan blinked. He didn’t think the woman was going out of her way to be offensive. It was just the type of person she was – one who brusquely steamrollered through any social situation with no real regard for the feelings of those she considered beneath her. Which, Dan reckoned, was probably everyone.

“So why find her?” Dan asked. “Or him. Or it. Or whatever. If you aren’t going to leave your husband or confront him about it, why go to the expense of finding out who he’s banging?”

He relished the flicker of discomfort on the woman’s face that the directness of his phrasing had caused, although to her credit she recovered quickly.

“That is not your concern,” she said. “I simply need you to identify the… ‘culprit’, shall we say? Once you have provided me with that information, your role in proceedings will be complete, and I shall pay you the balance of our agreed compensation.”

Dan drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “So, you’re going to kill her?”

Kooriashian’s expression didn’t falter. “Once you have provided me with the information, your role in proceedings will be complete,” she reiterated.

Ollie leaned on the back of Dan’s chair. “Sorry, lady. We don’t kill. Do we?”

Dan made a weighing motion with his hands. “Well, I mean… Sometimes. If we have to.”

“Quite a lot, actually,” came the muffled voice from the safe. “Seriously, when ye start countin’ them all, it fair adds up.”

Ollie looked shocked. Dan thought about pointing out that she herself had killed someone right next door – hence the expensive repair work going on – but reckoned it probably wasn’t the time.

“I am not asking you to kill anyone,” Kooriashian said. “I simply wish you to find out who my husband is having an affair with, then I shall… talk to them.”

“Talk to them?” Dan asked.

“Yes. I shall ask them to stay away from my husband, taking pains to explain that I will not take ‘no’ for an answer. I can be rather persuasive when I want to be.”

“Has he done anything like this before?” Dan asked. “Cheated, I mean.”

“Of course not!” Kooriashian replied, her voice taking on an incredulous tone that suggested the mere idea was utterly preposterous. “He makes toys, for goodness sake. Silly little robots that do silly little tricks. He spends his days scrabbling around with…” She waved a hand that suggested she had no idea what he spent his days scrabbling around, and no inclination to find out. “…gadgets and whatnot. It’s all quite pathetic. Frankly, this affair is the closest he’s come to impressing me in a long time. I didn’t know he had it in him.”

There was a soft bleep and Kooriashian glanced at the back of her hand. A series of numbers were projected there, hovering just above her bone-china skin. As Dan watched, the numbers ticked down.

Kooriashian stood up in a way that didn’t appear to involve any of her limbs bending. “I should go before I am missed. I need your answer now. Will you take the case, Mr Deadman?”

Dan hesitated. Looking back later, he’d realize this was another moment where he could have made a different decision. A simple “No,” and everything might have been different.

He stood up. “Fine. I’ll take the case,” he said.

Kooriashian nodded, as if there had never been any doubt. “I shall transfer the funds in the morning, as well as an additional… shall we say thirty per cent for expenses?”

“Should cover it.”

“I’ll also transmit you a holomod of my husband, along with all the requisite details.”

“What’s a holomod?” Ollie asked.

Dan frowned. “Well, it’s a…” He shook his head and shrugged. “No idea. What’s a holomod?”

“Holographic Model?” Kooriashian said, her immaculate eyebrows arching in surprise. “An interactive three-dimensional image? You do have a projector, yes?”

Dan looked around his sparsely decorated office. Besides the small table and three chairs of varying degrees of ricketiness, there was only a dented filing cabinet and a pot plant that had been dead for so long it had probably been reincarnated somewhere else.

“No,” he said, although he felt it didn’t really need saying. “Can you give me a photograph?”

It was Kooriashian’s turn to look confused. “A… photograph? As in...”

“As in the paper thing,” Dan said. “Or we can probably do a digital image, although I prefer print.”

“A photograph?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Kooriashian’s expression suggested that, yes, she personally had a problem with it, but her words said otherwise.

“No. No, I suppose that can be arranged,” she conceded. “Although it will take me a few days to get it to you without arousing suspicion.”

“We still get our money tomorrow, right?” Artur bellowed through the safe door.

Kooriashian looked from the painting on the wall to Ollie, then swept her gaze around the room before settling on Dan. A drilling sound from next door made the filing cabinet vibrate. For a moment, it looked as if the woman was having second thoughts about the whole endeavor, but then she gave a single nod and swept gracefully towards the door.

“You shall have it tomorrow,” she said.

And with that, she was gone.

Ollie watched the door for a while, in case Kooriashian returned. When it was clear the door wasn’t about to open again, she spoke.

“Well, she seemed…”

Ollie left it there, realizing she wasn’t sure what Kooriashian seemed. Not nice, certainly. Not horrible, exactly, but definitely not nice.

“Yeah,” Dan agreed. “Yeah, she did.”

The drilling became an uneven rattling and grinding, then stopped. There was some muttering from inside the inner office, before that door was opened just enough for a hard-hatted head to emerge.

“This window,” said the builder. “Do you want it to be able to open?”

“Ideally,” said Dan.

The builder’s face crumpled. “Right. Right. Gotcha.”

He retreated inside. “He wants it to open.”

“Oh, for fonk’s sake,” said the younger man, before the door was closed and his rant became a stream of barely audible and heavily censored curse words.

Ollie sat on the chair Kooriashian had been using and smiled awkwardly. “Bet you’re wishing you hadn’t broken the window in the first place,” she said.

Dan regarded her impassively. “I didn’t. You did,” he reminded her.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. Right,” Ollie said. She pulled a sort of ‘whoops’ face, then her smile returned. “Anyway, g’night!” she said, then her head thonked forwards onto the table and she immediately fell asleep.

Dan watched her sleeping there, trying very hard not to get jealous. It had been a long time since he’d slept, assuming you didn’t count brief periods of unconsciousness brought on by head injuries. If you counted those, it had barely been forty-eight hours, but if you took the more traditional view of sleep – one that didn’t involve being bludgeoned atop the skull with blunt instruments – it had been months. He hadn’t slept since he’d somehow woken up from the biggest sleep of all, and staying awake all the time was really starting to lose its charm.

Still, it wasn’t like he had nothing to fill his time.

Reaching for the hook, Dan retrieved his hat and coat. The back of the coat had been punctured by several dozen of the flying shrapnel shards, and chances are there were still several pieces sticking out of his back. He could deal with those later, though. It wasn’t like he was going to a fashion show.

Pulling the hat and coat on, he took Mindy from her holster and slotted her into the charging port. It made sense not to bring the gun with him. If he didn’t have it, he wouldn’t be tempted to use it.

With a final glance at the sleeping Ollie, Dan stepped out of the office and pulled the door behind him with a click.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dan wandered through the Down Here streets, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the route ahead. It would’ve been quicker with the car, but not necessarily by much. Shornack owned a sizeable chunk of this sector, which meant he could take his pick of places to stop by.

He settled on a bar he knew had given the gangster problems back in the early days. Not major problems, of course – she simply had the owners publicly killed and their corpses devoured by gryocks – but enough that she’d installed some of her own people to run the place and funnel all the profits off-world to her.

The place was locked up for the night, the windows in darkness. Dan knew enough to wait out front, being sure to take his hands out of his pockets so anyone watching could see they were empty.

A few minutes passed, then the door clunked and swung inwards a few inches. Nodding at a thumbnail-sized circle of glass set into the wall, Dan pushed on into the empty bar. He saw several chairs balanced upside-down on tables, then the door closed behind him, drawing a dark veil across the whole place.

“Upstairs,” said a voice. It had a tinny edge and a soft echo that suggested it came from a speaker system.

The darkness was deep enough to challenge even Dan’s night vision. He considered asking for some light, but thought better of it. Instead, he headed in what he guessed, from memory, was the right direction, and fumbled around until a draft hit his face at a downward angle.

A pale orange light illuminated two stories above, cutting a dim shaft down through the gap in the stairwell. The bottom step groaned as it took Dan’s weight. Each subsequent step made a slightly different creaking sound as Dan ascended. If someone listened to the sounds often enough, they’d be able to tell what step someone was standing on merely from the noise it made. Useful.

Two of Shornack’s goons were waiting on the third floor. Dan recognized one of them - a shark-like Symmorium mercenary with one cold black eye and one milky white one. It took Dan a moment to remember the name. Arka. That was it. He stood a full head taller than Dan, and his bulk suggested he clearly hadn’t been going hungry. Despite his size, Dan knew from experience that he was fast and agile, although not particularly bright.

He didn’t recognize the other thing. It was mostly metal, but with a transparent container of liquid fixed where its head should have been. Suspended inside the liquid was an enormous pink brain. It was so big it was squished up against the container’s walls, like a kid pressing their face against a toy shop window.

The metal body looked solid, if uninspired, with a sturdy chest plate, chunky arms, and hands that could probably punch through concrete.

“Arka,” Dan said, nodding at the Symmorium. The shark-like thug curved up his scarred lips, revealing his most valuable assets. While other species often put themselves out there as guns for hire, only the Symmorium and a handful of others truly excelled as teeth-for-hire.

Dan turned to the mechanoid. “You must be the brains of the outfit,” he said. “Name’s Deadman. Dan Deadman. I’m here about the debt.”

“We know you-you are,” the mechanoid said, the voice stuttering from a rounded metal nodule at the bottom of the glass tank. “And why-why you are here-here.”

Turning to Arka, Dan jabbed a thumb in the mechanoid’s direction. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing,” Arka growled. “He always speaks like that.”

“Wow,” said Dan, sucking air in through his teeth. “That must get pretty fonking annoying.”

Arka’s face remained non-committal, but he didn’t deny it. “The boss wants to see you,” he said.

Dan nodded. “That’s why I’m here boys. How about you lead the way?”

Arka’s mismatched eyes narrowed. “You don’t tell us what to do, goik.”

“Goik? What’s a goik?” Dan asked.

“You’re a goik, goik,” Arka spat.

“Right,” said Dan. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, then turned to the mechanoid. “What’s a goik?”

“Don’t ask him,” Arka began, but it was too late. Bubbles rose in the mechanoid’s brain tank.

“Goik. Definition: Street slang-slang derived from the Norkienian word-word ‘Unaragoik’, meaning ‘painful anal fissure that does not respond well-well to medical treatment.’ Goik.”

Dan wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. “Uh, thanks for that. Good to know.” He folded his hands in front of him, and stared meaningfully in Arka’s direction. “You kids and your fancy insults. It’s cute.”

The Symmorium stared back, not giving an inch. Dan flicked his eyes very deliberately to one of the closed doors along the corridor behind the guards, then back to Arka. “You’re going to keep him waiting, then?” he asked. “Just so I know. I mean, I’m assuming he’s watching, so he knows I’m not the one causing the hold up, right? I’d hate him to think the delay was my fault.”

Arka resolve faltered, just a little. His eyelids scraped across his mismatched eyes, and the tension cracked. His big hands roughly patted Dan down, then he turned and led the way along the corridor, the mechanoid remaining behind at the top of the stairs.

From a distance, the door they were heading towards had looked pretty much like any other. Now Dan was closer, he could see the frame around it was much bigger than the others, suggesting it had been heavily reinforced.

The door gave a solid thunk and swung open a crack as Arka approached. The hefty Symmorium had to put a lot of his weight and muscle mass into pushing it wide enough for him and Dan to step through. As Dan entered, he saw that what he’d thought was wood was actually a thin veneer on a foot-thick metal barricade that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a vault.

“Mr Deadman. Well, color me surprised,” said a voice from over on Dan’s left.

He turned in the direction of the sound and tried to hide his surprise. Most of Shornack’s higher ranking thugs were Igneons like she was – lumps of living rock whose granite fists and cliff-face jaws made them virtually unbeatable in a straight fight. This guy, though, was something else.

He was maybe half Dan’s height, if you excluded the long, tapered quills sticking up from his head, the pointed tips of which reached to somewhere around Dan’s shoulder level. The spikes continued onto his back, too, and undulated softly like seaweed on an ocean current. He appeared to be completely naked, although he had no obvious genitals flapping around.

There was something oddly adorable about his pudgy little face and stumpy limbs, and he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a children’s picture book about talking animals and their life-affirming adventures.

Dan’s first instinct was to say something like, “What the fonk are you?” but he resisted it and went for something less likely to cause issues.

“Are you the boss?”

“Ha! ‘The boss.’ I don’t like to think of myself like that. Call me Dehog. We’re all equals here. We all have our job to do, our parts to play. Dehog. Please. Please, I insist.”

“Fine. Dehog,” said Dan.

Dehog’s chubby face brightened, showing off a mouth filled with triangular teeth that gave the Symmorium’s a run for their money in sharpness, if not in size. “Good. Great! Like I say, I don’t like to think of myself as ‘the boss’. I don’t find labels especially useful, you know? I don’t like to define myself and others based on some arbitrary title we may or may not have earned.”

He was standing in front of a modest-looking desk that must have been twenty years old, and probably not great quality to begin with. On the wall behind it was a framed poster showing a sun rising above an ocean. Printed across the image were the words: ‘Don’t count the days. Make the days count.’ Someone – presumably Dehog – had underlined the last ‘count’ in pen. Twice.

“You were on my to-do list, actually,” the not-boss said, some of his spines folding neatly out of the way as he tucked his hands in behind his back and strolled slowly across the office in Dan’s direction. “I find lists important. They help keep the mind focused. It’s like I always say – where focus goes, Arka?”

“Energy flows,” said Arka, the words coming out like a reflex action.

Dehog’s smile broadened. “Energy flows. And I believe that, I really do.”

“Good for you,” said Dan, resisting the urge to point out the phrase didn’t actually mean anything, or even make a whole lot of sense.

“Do you make lists, Mr Deadman?” Dehog asked, stopping in front of him.

Dan shook his head. “Can’t say I do.”

“You should try it. A mind that is stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old dimensions. You know where I got that from?”

“A fortune spizzcuit?” Dan guessed.

Dehog pointed behind Dan to another motivational poster framed on the wall directly across from the desk. “From there, where I read it every day.”

“Right,” said Dan, eager to move on. “So, anyway…”

“I suggest you start making a to-do list, Mr Deadman,” Dehog continued. “And at the top – right there at the start – I suggest you put ‘Pay my debts on time.’”

As he said that last part, Dehog’s face became far less adorable. Every one of his spines stood straight and erect. “And follow through. That’s important. A promise made is a debt unpaid. You know what I mean?”

“Uh, yeah. Great,” said Dan. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“See that you do,” Dehog suggested. “Make lists, Mr Deadman. That’s my advice. You’ll thank me for it.”

“Right.”

Dehog waited.

“Oh, you mean… now?” Dan shrugged. “Thanks for the advice.”

“You’re welcome,” said Dehog. He about-turned and made for the desk. He had to stretch to retrieve a tatty old notebook from near the center. Licking a thumb, he began flicking through the pages.

“So, I came to let you know that—” Dan began.

Dehog held up a hand for silence, but didn’t look up from the pad. He flicked through a few more pages, then his spines did their undulating thing again. “Aha! Here we are.” He tapped the paper and raised his eyes to Dan. “Lists. What would I do without them? Where would I be? Lost. Lost and in a tizzy, that’s where.”

He read in silence for a few moments, then gave a curt nod. “Here it is, black and white. Pay a visit to Dan Deadman.” Producing a pencil from somewhere, he made a mark on the page. “Tick!”

Dehog shuddered with pleasure. “There’s nothing quite like that feeling. Turning a to-do into a to-done. You can’t beat it.” He hopped up so he was sitting on the desk, and carefully replaced the notepad. “Now, you tell me why you’re here, and we’ll see if we were going to visit you for the same reason.”

“I’m coming into some money,” Dan said, relieved to finally be able to get down to business. “I’ll be able to pay down some of what I owe.”

Dehog’s face, which had brightened through the first part of Dan’s sentence, darkened again. “You will be able to? Uh-oh. Alarm bells are ringing. Hear that? Ting-ting-ting-ting. I think what you’re telling me is that you’re not here to pay us now.”

“Tomorrow,” Dan said. “I’ll have the money tomorrow.”

The gangster’s spines quivered. His voice, when it emerged, was flat and controlled. “Tomorrow.” He sighed. “Remember what I said about promises, Mr Deadman? ‘A promise…?’”

Dan puffed out his cheeks. “Is a wish your heart makes? I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening.”

Dehog’s eyes became glassy and cold. “Arka.”

“A promise made is a debt unpaid.”

“A promise made is a debt unpaid, Mr Deadman.” He retrieved the notebook from the desk. “Let’s see, were we coming to visit you so that your debt could continue to remain unpaid?”

Dehog clicked his tongue against those pointed teeth as he read the notes written in the margins of his list. “No. No, it looks like we’re at cross-purposes.”

Taking out his pencil again, he turned it around and used the eraser on the end to remove the tick he’d written there just moments before. “Oh. Oh, now that is disappointing,” he said. “A to-done undone. I do hate it when that happens.”

He nodded, just a fraction, and something hard and heavy hit Dan across the back of the head. Light exploded behind his eyes and he staggered forwards. Another blow came out of nowhere, hammering against his eye socket and spinning him all the way around.

Dan’s instincts screamed at him to put his hands up, but he fought against them. Fighting back was a bad idea. Even if he took out Arka and the other two, Shornack had an endless supply of grunts, an assortment of industrial power tools, and a terrifyingly creative imagination. There wasn’t a whole lot she could do to him, but – much as he hated to admit it – he had others to think about, and whatever she did to them, she would take an enormous amount of pleasure in making him watch.

And so, he let Arka hit him again – an elbow this time, that caught him in the throat. If he’d needed to breathe, that might have been a problem. His vision began to clear just in time to see the Symmorium’s scarred snout snapping towards him. Arka’s height advantage meant the headbutt hit Dan above the nose, which was good, but it hit like a battering ram, rattling his brain around in his skull. Which was less good.

Dan tried to angle himself to make his torso a more appealing target. His body, for the most part, didn’t feel pain, and anything that got too badly damaged could always be replaced. But the Symmorium clearly knew enough about him to focus on the head, and when a downward-angled left hook caught him across the cheek, Dan’s sense of balance abandoned him, and he sunk to his knees on the floor.

Dehog’s face emerged from the brain-fog and appeared in front of him. Dan blinked, trying to stop the guy drifting in and out of focus.

“Learning is a gift, Mr Deadman,” Dehog said. “Even when pain is your teacher.”

“Where’d you get that one? From a t-shirt?” Dan asked, his jaw grinding together unpleasantly as he slurred the words out.

Dehog’s quills bristled. He stepped back and nodded up to the towering Arka. “Continue the lesson.”

Dan tried to relax. Bracing himself would only make it worse, he knew. Best to try to roll with the punches and minimize the damage.

The next blow was interrupted by a voice from the door.

“Boss-boss.”

A flash of irritation troubled Dehog’s face. He turned to the door. “I told you not to call me…”

His voice tailed off. Dan looked up at Arka’s fist, which had drawn back to prepare for another hammer-strike, but hadn’t yet moved to deliver it. The moment of respite was nice. He tried to enjoy it while it lasted.

“Who’s the girl?” Dehog asked.

Dan felt something cold slither in the pit of his stomach.

No.

Oh no.

“I caught her trying to climb-climb through the window.”

Oh no.

Ollie.

“A thief? Trying to break in and steal from Shornack? Wow. That’s ambitious. I love it!” said Dehog. “You know what I always say about ambition?”

The knot in Dan’s gut tightened when he heard the voice.

“No.”

Definitely Ollie.

“Ambition is about believing in yourself, even when no-one else in the world does,” Dehog said, rhyming it off like a message in a greetings card. “Makes you think that, doesn’t it?”

There was a pause for a moment, then Ollie spoke again. “Does it? About what?”

Dehog smiled, but it was the smile of someone tired of having to suffer fools. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. He gestured to the robo-brain, then to Arka. “You. Kill her. You. Knock him around a bit more. I want to make sure we leave an impression.”

“You got it, boss,” said Arka, who knew better than to take Dehog’s ‘no labels’ schtick at face value. His face twisted in glee as he brought his fist down again. To his surprise, this time Deadman blocked it.

“Sorry,” Dan said, sounding genuinely pained about the situation. “Didn’t expect her to follow me.”

He brought his other arm up sharply between the Symmorium’s legs driving a forearm strike into where he hoped the thug’s balls would be. From the reaction, it was mission accomplished. With a grunt, he slammed his elbow into the inside of Arka’s knee, buckling the leg outwards.

Dan rose quickly as the Symmorium dropped. The top of his head met the tip of Arka’s snout. The thug squealed as pain went off like a bomb blast in the cluster of nerves that were gathered there and he staggered backwards towards the desk, forcing Dehog to jump clear.

Spinning, Dan started lumbering in Ollie’s direction, the beating he had taken making his head spin and turning every step into a game of chance.

When Ollie had first arrived, she’d had a necklace – some kind of magical Malwhere amulet that had protected her from harm. Its power had blown one of Shornack’s Igneon Enforcers to pieces, but the necklace was gone now, and so she was completely helpless in the grip of the brain-bot. Dan had to reach her before it was too late.

But then, all of a sudden, it was too late. A long sliver of a blade slid from the mechanoid’s arm.

Ollie screamed.

There was a loud bang.

Dan threw up his hands to protect himself as several thousand pieces of scrap metal and glass came whistling past. He looked up again in time to see a substantial amount of brain matter go splat against the ‘A mind stretched by new experiences can never go back to its old shape’ poster, which actually felt like quite a fitting end.

Silence descended. Or near-silence, at least, punctuated only by the wheezing of Arka and the dripping of the robo-thing’s brain mush.

Ollie stood near the doorway in a state of mute shock. She gaped at her hands as if she didn’t quite recognize them, turning them over and back so she could examine them from both sides.

“Um… Was that me?”

“You blew up another one,” said Dan, looking more than a little shocked himself. “You blew up another one of Shornack’s guys.” He frowned, as the obvious question formed in his head. “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Sort of… pktchow. You know what I mean? Like… katchoom! Like roooosh—”

Dan sighed and spoke over her before she could finish the sound effect. “Well, let’s not get too bogged down in the science, shall we?”

He turned to Dehog, his mind racing as he tried to figure out what to say, or what best course of action to take. He needn’t have bothered. Dehog was bent backwards across the desk, a large serrated cog embedded halfway through his forehead. A variety of other metal parts had either buried themselves in the Enforcer’s torso, or punched straight through it. Dan and Ollie both watched as Dehog’s body slid sideways, then fell face-first to the floor, forcing the cog right out through the back of his spiny skull.

There was silence again. Proper silence this time. The brain had stopped dripping. Arka had stopped wheezing, too, thanks to the lengthy piece of robot shrapnel that was jutting out of his windpipe.

Dan had his fair share of lacerations and piercings, too, although nothing anywhere vital. He plucked the worst of them out, then let them fall to the floor with a series of clunks.

“Well,” he said, once that was done. He turned to Ollie and gestured to the bodies. “This is a problem.”

Ollie cast her eye across the room. “Is it?”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” said Dan. “You’ve now killed… what? Four of Shornack’s guys. That’s problematic.”

“They were trying to hurt you,” Ollie pointed out.

“So? They rough me up a little, makes them feel good about themselves and stops them paying the office a visit when I’m not around. I pay down my debt tomorrow, and everything just cruises along without any issues. Everyone’s happy.”

He jabbed a finger in Ollie’s direction. “You shouldn’t have come after me. This is nothing to do with you.”

“I heard you go out. I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

Dan’s face screwed up in anger, but he managed to hit some kind of release valve and most of his rage ejected out through his nostrils as a long sigh. “That’s not your job,” he said. “Everything was going just fine until you turned up.”

“I was just trying to help,” Ollie said.

“Well you didn’t. You made it worse,” Dan said. He gestured to her hands, which she still held raised. “And do me a favor? Point those somewhere else until you work out how to use them.”

Ollie let her hands drop, but looked down at them by her side. “How did I do that? How did I make that metal man explode?”

Dan shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, gesturing towards the door. “For now, let’s just get out of here and…”

He stopped talking when a siren wailed from just outside. It was quickly joined by another, then another. Colored lights licked across the ceiling beside the window.

“Aw shizz. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dan whispered, darting over to beside the window. Six Tribunal hover vehicles glided to a stop in the street below. Distant sirens indicated more were on the way.

“Hey, isn’t that those police guys?” Ollie asked, appearing silently at Dan’s side and almost making him jump out of his skin.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that,” Dan snapped. “And yes. It’s the Tribunal.”

“That’s good,” said Ollie, although the expression on Dan’s face quickly made her doubt it. “Right?”

“Shornack has half the Tribunal on her payroll,” he explained. “Dehog must’ve pressed an alarm button or something while he was dying. They ain’t here to help us, they’re here to kill us.”

“Oh,” said Ollie. She thought about this for a moment. “What, even me?”

“Even you, kid,” Dan confirmed. He watched the officers fan out around the building. A moment later, there came the crash of a door being smashed off its hinges.

Without looking, Dan pointed towards a narrow door in one corner of the room. “Closet,” he said. “Go in and wait until the coast’s clear. No matter what you hear, don’t come out until you’re sure the place is empty, OK?”

“But what if…?”

“No matter what you hear,” Dan repeated. “Go. Closet. Now.”

Ollie did as she was told and scurried over to the door. “What about you?” she asked, holding the door half open. “You’ll be OK, right?”

“I’ll be OK.”

“Promise?”

Dan glanced out at the street below as more Tribunal cars arrived. “You know what they say about promises?” he asked.

Ollie wrinkled her nose. “No. What?”

Dan shrugged. “Fonk knows. Wasn’t really listening. They’re worth two in a bush, maybe? Just shut the door and shut your mouth,” he said, turning and cracking his knuckles. “And leave the rest to me.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Dan stood at the top of the staircase, listening to the officers approaching. There was no attempt at stealth or secrecy. No effort to hide their approach. Instead, emboldened by the sheer weight of their numbers and the weapons they almost certainly carried, they swarmed up through the building, their jackboots creaking out a chorus on the steps.

Shock and awe. It was a tactic Dan knew only too well, and one he’d employed himself back when he’d been wearing that same uniform. A lot of armed men making a lot of noise. Most days, that was all it took to get the job done.

Most days.

But not today.

Dan placed one hand on the stairwell railing, and jumped. He landed on the steps one level below, more or less exactly in the middle of the Tribunal squad. Technically, he landed on two Tribunal grunts and they landed on the steps, but it wasn’t really the time to split hairs.

Heads, yes. Hairs, no.

The tone of the men’s shouts changed from angry and in charge to angry and clueless as to what the fonk was happening right now.

Shock and awe, Dan thought. Never failed.

A nose exploded beneath his knuckles. Testicles pancaked against the sole of his boot. He caught a wrist before a shock-rod could crack against his skull, and twisted until something inside went snap.

They were wearing armor, of course, but one of the few advantages of having been inside the stuff himself meant he was painfully aware of every weak spot and flaw. He knew, for example, that bringing a knee up just here would crack a couple of ribs, or that a solid uppercut to the chest would force the rigid edge of the armor plating up into the windpipe with enough force to make breathing nothing more than a fond memory for the next few minutes.

Dan whirled around in all the chaos, punching, kicking and gouging, dropping the officers one by one. Most of them had guns, but this close up they couldn’t use them, so they became more of a hindrance than a help.

One of the grunts had figured this out, and was backing away, taking aim as he retreated down the steps. Dan ducked, and another officer lost his head as a kill-shot found the wrong target.

A knife slid between Dan’s ribs to the left of his chest. It wasn’t a standard issue Tribunal weapon, but most of the street-level grunts carried one. Dan saw the sneer of satisfaction on the officer’s face, then watched it become a flicker of doubt as Dan wrenched the knife free again without any obvious ill-effects. After cracking the former owner across the bridge of the nose with the hilt in an attempt to teach him not to be so careless with it, Dan hurled the knife at the gunman. It caught him on the neck before he could line up a second shot. He fired wildly as he fell backwards, blood fountaining from the wound.

Two of the shots went wide and punched holes in the staircase above. A third and fourth managed to take out three Tribunal grunts between them, and Dan sensed panic take hold and start to spread through the squad like wildfire.

He dropped another one with two solid punches to the head. There were only four left standing now, at least one of them nursing a broken bone. All four of them were trying to get away from him, tripping and stumbling up the stairs, which was exactly the direction Dan didn’t want them to go.

He couldn’t catch all of them, so he began to hurry down the steps instead, trying to lure them after him, or at least keep them away from Ollie’s hiding place.

Dan had just turned onto the bottom set of steps when he met the riot squad coming the other way. Unlike the standard armor, the riot squad’s outfit was almost impenetrable. Add in their full-face helmet and blast proof visor, the flickering blue ion shields that seemed to grow organically from the wrist of one arm, and the sonically charged batons they carried, and these guys became a force to be reckoned with. And one that, if you did reckon with them, would almost certainly club you to death.

Going low, Dan took the legs out from under one of the riot officers. He’d hoped for the others to be taken down in a sort of domino effect, but they were either too well-trained or too damn lucky for that. As the first trooper fell, a blast of concentrated sound caught Dan on the side of the head. It was barely a glancing blow, but enough to make his stomach flip and his legs turn to damp sand.

An ion shield hit him with the force of a charging grimtork – a mostly docile creature with a top running speed of sixty miles an hour, and a body weight equivalent to three small family cars. Dan hit the wall, lost his footing, and tumbled down the steps.

The riot squad, like police officers the galaxy over, took the opportunity to stick the boot in whenever it was presented. As Dan slid gracelessly down the stairs, kicks and punches and thwacks from batons helped him on his way. He landed in a tangled heap of coat tails and limbs at the bottom of the steps, and had barely pulled himself upright when another shield-charge sent him staggering into the bar area and crashing through a table.

An upturned chair smashed between him and the floor, and Dan snatched up a piece of the broken wood. A sonic blast screamed at him, but he rolled clumsily clear. Fumbling to his feet, he dodged behind the shield of one of the grunts, and stabbed the pointed tip of the wood into the guy’s wrist. The officer wailed inside his helmet as the shiv stuck all the way through his arm, and Dan tore the man’s shield generator free.

Spinning in a semi-circle, Dan used the flickering blue energy shield to knock another of the grunts aside. He charged towards one of the others, shield raised. A sonic shot caught him side-on, and this time it was no mere glancing blow.

Up became down and left became right and everything that was inside Dan seemed to be trying to force its way outside. And vice versa.

His eyes rolled backwards. His tongue unfurled. Two trickles of black, treacle-like blood oozed from his nostrils. Dan’s brain told him he should really have a quick lie down, blissfully unaware that he was already face down on the floor with a boot pressed against the back of his head and another playing xylophone on his ribcage.

Some primal instinct or muscle memory made him put his hands on the floor and try to roll clear, but the boot on his head pushed harder. Another soundwave blast filled his head with a burning fog and his mouth with cold vomit.

His hands were wrenched behind him. His wrists were bound together. Someone stamped down on his back. Once. Twice. He felt none of it. He didn’t even notice his skull cracking as a baton smashed against it, and so was mildly surprised – and, if he were honest, a little relieved – to find the shadows darkening behind his eyes as everything faded into black.

* * *

Pain. That was the first thing Dan noticed.

It was closely followed by noise, the taste of vomit, and more pain, though not necessarily in that order.

He only listed pain twice, despite the countless individual aches, throbs, stabbing sensations and general unpleasantness that currently seemed to have set up camp all over his head. For simplicity’s sake, though, he sectioned the pain off into the two areas of his skull that hurt the most – a single spot on the back being one, and every other inch of his head and face being the other.

The noise was uncompromisingly annoying. It was somewhere between a high-pitched eeeeeee and a tooth-shuddering sort of drilling sound, as if something was trying to bore through his cranium.

Which, he realized, would explain at least one of those two pain points he had identified a moment ago.

Someone was drilling through his head.

Great.

Dan opened his eyes, but the level of darkness didn’t change. The pain and the noise continued. The taste of vomit was starting to fade. It was remarkable he’d been able to taste it at all, given the state of his taste buds. It must’ve been particularly pungent for them to have taken notice.

The darkness bothered him. His night vision would usually have been able to pick out something – some detail or suggestion of an outline that would help give an indication of his surroundings.

But no. Nothing.

He thought back to a moment before, when he’d opened his eyes. He decided he probably hadn’t actually opened them at all, and so he put some more concerted effort into doing so now.

They were stuck together with something. Possibly glue. Probably puke. He tried to peel the lids apart with his fingers, but his hands were tightly bound behind him.

This was getting better and better.

With a lot of scrunching and stretching, he managed to force one eye open. To his amazement, he saw himself squinting back at him. His brain, which had its hands full with the pain and the noise and everything, took a moment to figure out that he was looking at his reflection in the polished glass of a riot goon’s helmet visor.

Fonk. He looked rough. Admittedly, he always looked rough, but today was definitely not one of his better days. He’d lost his hat, too. That was annoying, although nowhere near the same league as the pain and the noise. More so than the diminishing taste of vomit, though, which was now pretty much just a memory.

Using the reflective visor, Dan was able to check if anyone was indeed standing behind him and drilling into his skull. They weren’t. Or, if they were, they were invisible, too small to see, or had no reflection. Any of those things were possible, he knew, but unlikely.

Ish. Unlikely-ish.

The noise and the pain had both begun to ease off. Or, more accurately, he’d become vaguely accustomed to them, and so was able to dedicate a small portion of his brain power to the task of figuring out where he was and what the fonk was going on.

It didn’t take him long to realize he was in a Lock-n-Talk. He’d been in plenty of these featureless interrogation chambers over the years, although until now had always been where the Tribunal grunt was sitting.

No, not a grunt. The guy’s helmet insignia suggested someone high ranking. Dan didn’t know enough about the riot squad’s levels of progression to be able to identify where exactly the officer stood in the internal pecking order, but it was somewhere nearer the top than the bottom.

“Holy shizz,” said the helmet. The voice was deliberately distorted, but the amplification settings had been turned down to normal conversational levels, as opposed to their usual megaphone screech. “It is you. Isn’t it?”

“Who?” Dan asked. The rumble of his own voice made fingers of pain burrow through his skull. If it could, his brain would almost certainly have punched him in the face to stop him saying anything more.

“There were rumors. I’d heard them, but… I mean… How was I supposed to believe it?”

“Believe what?” Dan uttered, much to his brain’s dismay.

“You died, Slam. I mean… You died.”

Dan’s eyes widened, forcing the previously stuck-shut one to open. Slam.

“How do you know that name?”

“Because I know you, Slam Ripley,” said the helmet. It let out a hiss as the locking clamps disengaged and it rose upwards on the officer’s head. The scaly green face that was revealed was one Dan knew only too well. “Because we were partners.”

Dan felt his jaw start to drop, but caught it before the other man could notice. “Noops,” he said, as matter-of-fact as he could manage. “Been a long time.”

“Been a long… what? Are you fonking kidding me?” Noops hissed, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. He leaned in closer, then drew back a little when Dan’s smell hit him. “You’re alive, Slam! You’re alive. I mean… How is that…? How can you…?” He shook his head, as if trying to clear out all the wrong questions, leaving only the right one. “What the fonk is going on here?”

Dan raised his eyes to the ceiling. “You got me a Lock-n-Talk,” he said. “That’s about all I know. Fact is, I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Noops leaned all the way back until he was almost reclining in his seat. His eyes took Dan in, looking over every inch of him as if the answer to it all was written somewhere there.

The Lock-n-Talk shuddered just slightly, but enough to tell Dan they were moving. The movement seemed to make Noops’s mind up about something. He leaned forwards, and this time didn’t flinch at the smell. “Look, like I say, I’d heard rumors you were… still around. Or, you know, back, or whatever. They said you’d changed your name. That you’re some kind of investigator of weird shizz now.” He tilted his head sideways, listening to something, then turned his attention back to Dan. “That true?”

Dan ignored the question. “Who did it, Noops?”

The scales on Noops’s forehead creased. “Who did what?”

“You know, don’t you? You know who killed me.”

This was one of two questions Dan had been itching to ask from the moment his ex-partner’s face had been revealed. He wasn’t ready to ask the other question yet. Or, more importantly, to hear the answer.

“What? No!” Noops protested, his voice climbing higher around the edges.

Dan grunted. “I always knew when you were lying.”

The box shuddered again. Concern flashed across Noops’s face. “We don’t have long. They’re taking you in. They’ll kill you for what you did to Shornack’s guys.”

“Good luck with that,” Dan said.

“Slam, listen to me,” Noops said.

“That’s not my name.”

“Well… whatever the fonk you’re calling yourself,” Noops whispered. “I’m going to get you out, OK? They don’t know who you are – your prints brought up two different matches, both dead – so I’m going to get you out.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because that’s what friends do, that’s why! Holy shizz, man, after everything we’ve been through? Why? Fonk!”

Reaching under his seat, he tapped a series of buttons. The restraints pinning Dan’s hands to his back retracted. Now free, he lunged across the box, his hand wrapping around Noops’s throat, his face twisting into a snarl.

“You know, Noops,” he spat. “You know who did this.”

Noops pulled free and shoved Dan away. “So what if I did know?” he asked. “You think you can do something about it? You’re not an idiot, Slam. You know how this works. You knew what you had to do. You poked around in the wrong people’s business. I warned you, man. How many times did I fonking warn you? But you didn’t listen. You never listened.”

Dan wanted to try the lunging throat grab approach again, but even those few moments of exertion had made his headache return with a vengeance. The Lock-n-Talk was orbiting around him now, bringing with it the very real possibility of another vomit-related incident.

He contemplated the other question he wanted to ask.

But no. He couldn’t. He daren’t. Not yet.

The box leaned a few degrees backwards for a couple of seconds, before straightening up again as the vehicle it was attached to slowed to a stop.

“We’re out of time,” said Noops. “I can either open the door and you can make a break for it, or you can go face the music. Your choice, partner. What’s it to be, but the clock is ticking.”

Dan tilted his head towards the featureless wall on his right. “Open the door,” he said, grudging every word. “Let me go.”

“Wise move,” said Noops. He pressed some other hidden button and the wall on Dan’s left slid open. “Kind of gives you a different perspective, doesn’t it? Sitting in that seat.”

Dan said nothing as he ducked out through the opening. A cold breeze flavored with a thick aroma of salt slapped him in the face, and he knew he had to be somewhere near the shore. As the shore ran all the way around the whole of Down Here, though, that revelation didn’t narrow the list of possible locations down by all that much.

Once outside, he saw that his Lock-n-Talk was just one of a dozen or more attached to the back of a hovering flatbed vehicle. It had pulled up at a tall fence, and a gate was sliding aside up ahead to let it through to the bleakly officious-looking building beyond. A Tribunal Vault – the final destination for anyone caught, or even suspected of, carrying out a criminal offence.

“Slam, wait,” said Noops before Dan could slink off into the night. Dan kept close to the box to avoid being spotted by the vehicle’s driver.

“It’s Dan now,” was all he said.

“Dan? Right. Dan. OK,” Noops said. He unsealed one of the front pockets on his armored jumpsuit and withdrew a rectangle of card. “Is it true what they say? That you’re investigating weird shizz?”

Dan didn’t respond in any way at first, but then nodded. “Sometimes.”

“Right. Right,” said Noops. He turned the card over and over in his hands a few times, studying it.

Dan almost lost his balance as the truck began to cruise through the open gate. “Why do you ask? And, in case you need reminded, clock’s ticking.”

Noops’s lips moved as he read the card, then he nodded as he came to a decision. He held the little white rectangle out to Dan between two gloved fingers. “This one came in a couple of hours ago. Got ‘weird’ written all over it,” he said, smiling grimly. “You ask me, I reckon it could be right up your street.”

CHAPTER SIX

Dan stood in the center of the room, trying to visualize step-by-step what had gone down here. It was an old detective trick he’d picked up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at it. All he had been able to figure out so far was that two people had died here, and the only reason he could be completely sure of that was because their bodies were still lying on the floor.

He’d thought about ignoring the address Noops had given him at first. Come damn close to it, in fact. He should have gone back to the office, made sure Ollie had made it home safely, then maybe had her patch up some of his more gaping wounds. His head still felt like it’d been on the wrong end of an Unglarian orgy, and while the drilling noise had dropped by a few dozen decibels it was still making its presence felt. He should’ve been resting.

But he didn’t want to go back to the office. He didn’t want to sit down and take time to recover. If he did that, he’d start to think about the question he hadn’t asked, and the answer he’d been too afraid to hear. And so, he’d read the card, found the address, and was now standing slap bang in the middle of a murder scene.

His detective skills might not have been up to much, but Dan was certain neither of the bodies had died of natural causes. Had they passed away peacefully, their torsos wouldn’t have been split open down the middle the way they were, and their internal organs would most likely still be where they were supposed to be rather than…

He looked around the room, but it was completely devoid of guts, hearts, or purple knobbly bits in general. That’s probably what Noops had found odd about the case, although it was the kind of thing Dan was finding himself becoming increasingly familiar with. At least their eyes had been left in place this time.

The apartment was on the first floor, at the bottom of a squat stack of other homes, and opened up onto a small rectangle of concrete that technically qualified as a garden. The bodies, he’d been able to find out from poking around in drawers, were Tock and Sanarok, a father and son originally from… elsewhere. He didn’t recognize the species. Mostly humanoid, but with pointy ears and devilish downwards-sloping eyebrows.

After some searching, Dan had found their ID cards. The father’s was faded, his age hard to read. The son’s was easier. Thirteen.

Dan clenched his jaw.

Thirteen.

A floorboard creaked behind him, and Dan spun, fists raising, ready to swing.

“Whoa, whoa! It’s just me!” said Ollie. She smiled and waved as Dan lowered his hands. “Hi!”

“What are you doing here?” Dan demanded.

“I followed you,” Ollie said. “Again.”

Dan’s eyes narrowed as he thought this through. “I told you to wait in the closet. You followed the truck.”

“It was dark and boring,” Ollie said. “So I followed you.”

Dan took a sudden step closer and caught her by the skinny upper arms. He wanted to shake her, to make her listen, but settled for just squeezing her arms and hitting her with both barrels of a meaningful glare.

“I want you to listen, kid, and listen good. You have no ID, which means you have no job. Either of those things on their own are punishable by death Down Here. Do you understand me? If the Tribunal catches you and finds out you’re not a productive citizen, they will kill you. This is not a game. You screw up, people die. Starting with yourself.”

He tightened his grip. Ollie let out a little hiss and something flared behind her eyes. Dan watched it burning deep in her pupils, then released his grip. The fire faded away almost as quickly as it had appeared.

“Also, you can’t just keep blowing people up.”

“What if they’re bad people?” Ollie asked.

“We’re all bad people, kid,” he said, turning away. “Some of us are just worse than others.”

Dan regarded the grisly scene before them in silence, trying his visualization thing again. Two people dead. No organs. So, what had happened here, and why?

“I have no idea,” he muttered.

“About what?” asked Ollie, stepping up beside him.

“Any of it,” Dan admitted.

She looked down at the bodies for a while. “Are they dead?” she whispered.

Dan shot her a sideways glance to try to gauge the sincerity of that question. From her face, it was one hundred per cent genuine. “Yes. They’re dead. They have no internal organs.”

“Oh. Right. Why do they have no internal organs?” she asked. “Did something eat them?”

“No. I mean, maybe. But it’s all a little too neat,” said Dan. “Someone extracted them. Probably took them away to use in some sort of ritual.”

He blinked. A ritual. That made sense. A lot of the more intricate Malwhere-summoning stuff involved body parts.

“Are there only two of them?” Ollie asked.

Dan was about to confirm that when he remembered the photo in the bedroom. He’d only half-noticed it while checking to make sure whoever had killed the apartment’s occupants weren’t still here, but now it rose up from his subconscious like its time had come to shine.

“Three. There was a woman. But she’s not here.”

“Where is she?” Ollie wondered.

“I don’t know. You’re asking a lot of questions.”

Ollie nodded. “Do you want me to stop?”

“When have you ever done what I want you to do?” said Dan. “But no. No, keep asking.” He pointed to a shelf unit in the corner that he’d rifled through earlier searching for ID cards. “There’s a… like a gadget thing in there. With a screen. Make some notes.”

He squatted to examine the bodies again while he waited for Ollie to find the datapad. Something about them was odd, beyond the obvious lack of innards. He couldn’t quite place what it was, though.

“The window’s broken,” Ollie pointed out. “That’s how I got in.”

“I used the door,” Dan said. “You know, like a normal person. But yeah, it’s broken.”

“So, someone broke in?”

“Guess so,” said Dan, but something niggled at him, just like the picture had.

“Even though the door was open?”

“It wasn’t open when I arrived. I unlocked it.”

“You have a key?”

“I have a shoulder.”

He stood and turned to the window. Ollie had come in that way, and yet he hadn’t heard her until she was right behind him. “No glass,” he said, examining the stretch of floor between where he was and the window.

Ollie regarded the mostly empty frame. “There’s a bit down at the bottom there. It almost cut me on the way in.”

“On the floor, I mean. There’s no glass on the floor.”

He crossed to the window and leaned out into the cool night air. The blue glow of the Up There engines reflected off a carpet of shards that had been strewn across the concrete.

“No-one broke in. Someone broke out,” Dan realized.

“Oh,” said Ollie.

Dan turned and passed her, tapping the screen of the datapad. “Write that down. Write all of this down. Since you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful. What else do you see?”

Ollie looked around. “The floor.”

“What about it?” Dan asked, looking down.

“Nothing,” said Ollie. “You asked what I could see. I can see the floor. And the walls. And the sitting thing.”

“The sofa,” Dan said. “No, that’s not what I…”

The sofa. The floor. Shizz.

There were indents in the carpet. Four of them, forming the corners of a rectangular patch of pristine flooring that was had been trodden on far less regularly than the rest.

“Someone moved the sofa,” Dan said.

“Should I write that down?”

“Write that down,” Dan confirmed. “Someone moved the sofa. Why?”

Ollie waited until she’d finished writing, then looked up again. “It does look quite nice there,” she said. “Maybe that’s why they moved it.”

Dan examined the piece of furniture, running his hand down the back of the fabric, then tilting the whole thing backwards so he could look underneath. Nothing.

He lifted the cushions. Other than some loose credits, a lot of fluff and half a spizzcuit that had shriveled with age, there wasn’t anything to report.

Turning back, Dan looked at the bodies again. The father’s arm and the child’s foot both crossed into the untrodden patch of carpet where the sofa had been. If it had been capable, Dan reckoned he would have felt his heartbeat speed up.

“They needed room.”

“Who, them?” Ollie asked, pointing to the bodies with her pen.

“No, whoever killed them. That’s what’s been bothering me. The position they’re in – the bodies – it’s not natural. It’s staged. They’ve been laid out this way on…”

He stopped. “Wait. What’s that?” he asked, nodding towards the pen in Ollie’s hand.

“It’s a writing thing,” she said. “You told me to write everything down.”

Dan took the datapad from her. The screen had been covered with cryptic markings he didn’t recognize, the symbols becoming increasingly tiny and tightly-packed as Ollie ran out of space.

“I didn’t mean write on the screen,” he told her. He tapped a button on the side and the display illuminated. As he drew in the air above it, the text appeared. “Like that.”

He spotted a small icon tucked away up the top of the display. As he pointed at it, the screen changed to show a view of his and Ollie’s feet from above. “Camera,” he said. He passed the device back to Ollie. “Take some pictures.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything,” Dan said, looking around. He pointed to the bodies. “Starting with them.”

“OK,” said Ollie, studying the screen. “So how do I…?”

A flash went off in Dan’s face, almost blinding him. “Shizz. Not me. Them.”

Ollie laughed with sheer delight. “Your face is on this!” she yelped, then her moment of joy passed. “Oh. It’s gone.”

The light flashed again, making Dan recoil.

“It’s back!”

“Cut it out,” Dan told her.

“Wait. It’s gone again.”

Dan placed a hand on top of the datapad and aimed it at the corpses. “Them. Not me.”

“Gotcha,” said Ollie. She began snapping pictures. Far too many pictures, Dan thought. She took at least twenty to thirty photographs of the bodies from the same position before shifting a couple of paces to the right and starting again. Still, at least she had stopped focusing on him.

“Three or four from each angle, then move on,” Dan instructed. “We don’t have long.”

“Why? Are they going to come back to life?” Ollie asked.

Dan snorted. “Doesn’t work that way. People don’t just come back to life.”

Ollie looked up from the datapad and frowned. Dan anticipated the question before she could even open her mouth.

“That’s different. What happened to me was… a one-off,” he said. “These two aren’t going to wake up any time soon. At least, for their sakes, I hope not.”

He gestured with a thumb towards the door. “But the Tribunal are going to be here any minute, and we don’t want to be around when they turn up.”

Ollie glanced at the door, then resumed camera duties with a little more haste than before. “Will they find out who did this?” she asked.

“Who? The Tribunal?”

Ollie nodded as she click-click-clicked with the camera.

“No, they won’t find out who did it. They won’t even investigate. They’ll send a clean-up wagon to take the bodies away for burning. Maybe board the place up, if they’re feeling energetic,” Dan explained. “The Tribunal doesn’t care who did this.”

“But you do,” said Ollie. “Right?”

“I’m… interested,” Dan said. “Professionally.”

Ollie stopped clicking and looked up. “Oh. So, you don’t care?”

Dan snorted, sneered and scowled at the same time. He was about to say something withering and dismissive – something that kept his cool, impassive demeanor intact. But that was when his eyes crept down to the bodies again, all on their own.

Thirteen.

The kid was thirteen.

Someone had taken his insides, then spread him out on the floor.

Although possibly not in that order. Dan hadn’t really figured that part out yet.

“Maybe,” was all he decided to say on the matter. He gestured around the room. “Now hurry up and get those pictures before…”

Flashing red and blue lights licked across the walls and ceiling as a clean-up wagon glided to a halt outside. “Damn it,” he muttered, grabbing Ollie by the back of her shirt. “Time’s up, kid. We gotta go.”

He dragged her through into the kitchen just as the front door opened. “Ugh,” said one of the Tribunal grunts as he entered the room. “This place fonking stinks. Smells like they’ve been dead for months.”

And that was the last Dan heard before he quietly unlocked the back door and, shoving Ollie ahead of him, slipped out into the night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The office was quiet when Dan and Ollie finally made it back. Cabs tended not to stop for corpses in raincoats, and without the Exodus getting around the city was slow at best, borderline lethal at worst.

“Nice window,” Ollie remarked, gazing up at the recently-repaired hole in the wall. She rapped her knuckles on it, then prodded the glass, as if testing for freshness. She nodded, evidently satisfied by her findings. “Yep. Really nice.”

She knocked on it again, as if to demonstrate.

“Please stop doing that,” Dan said.

To his surprise, it looked OK. He’d expected to find the workmen still trying to figure out which way up it went, or discover that they’d mistakenly put a door in the frame instead of a pane of glass, but no. It looked like a job well done.

“You should be more careful with this one,” Ollie said.

“Again, you’re the one who broke it. Not me,” Dan pointed out. He wiped a layer of dust off his new desk. Or new to him, at least. Someone in one of the other offices downstairs had tossed it into the little yard out back, and he’d rescued it before it was taken away. Better it serving its intended purpose in his office than rotting in one of the trash pits south of the city.

Sure, one of the legs was a little wonky, the top drawer was missing, and someone had carved a gargantuan cartoon penis into the writing surface, but on the other hand it was free, and free trumped most things.

“Sit down,” Dan said, gesturing to what was currently the room’s only chair.

“I’m good,” Ollie said. “Thanks, anyway.”

Dan sighed. “Sit down. We need to talk.”

“We are talking,” Ollie said. She pointed to her lips. “See?”

“Not talk in general, talk about something… Look, just sit down, will you?”

Ollie shrugged, but sat down. “There. Like that?”

“That’s fine,” Dan said, barely looking. He walked around to the other side of his desk, a finger idly tracing across the scuffed top. It was only when it occurred to him that he was following the outline of a massive ejaculating penis that he stopped.

He leaned forwards, both clenched fists on the desk, the corner lamp casting long shadows across the crags of his face. It wasn’t that he was trying to intimidate Ollie, exactly, but he wanted her full attention. If that meant playing bad cop for a while, then so be it.

“You killed that robot guy,” he told her.

Ollie shifted in the chair. “Which robot guy?”

“The robot guy,” said Dan. “The only robot guy we saw tonight. The one you exploded.”

“Oh. Him. Right,” said Ollie. “Are we sure I did that?”

Dan frowned. “Well, I assume so. He was touching you when he blew up.”

“I thought he did that himself,” Ollie said.

“You thought he exploded himself? Why would he explode himself?”

Ollie pulled a ‘beats me’ sort of face. “For a laugh?”

Dan’s glare went on for quite a long time. “No. He didn’t blow himself up ‘for a laugh’.”

“Then why did he blow himself up?”

“I don’t know,” Dan admitted. “Maybe he just… Wait. No. What am I talking about? He didn’t blow him up. You blew him up. Like you blew up the last guy. Right here.” He pointed down.

“On the desk?” Ollie asked.

“No, not… Here in the office. Shornack’s guy. You blew him up,” Dan reminded her. “I thought it was your necklace or pendant or whatever, but I guess I was wrong. You did it. You exploded them both.”

The chair creaked as Ollie shifted around on it again. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Irrelevant,” Dan said. He rolled his tongue around in his mouth a few times, sizing Ollie up. He knew she’d been raised in some terrifying Hell-dimension by one of the more powerful and fearsome Malwhere Lords. Despite her upbringing, she seemed to be a pretty good kid. There, though, his knowledge of her started to run out. She was good at climbing, somewhat naïve, and often irritating. Beyond that, Dan pretty much drew a blank.

“What else can you do?” he asked her.

Ollie considered the question, then patted her head and rubbed her stomach at the same time. Or she gave it her best shot, at least.

Dan’s face remained completely impassive throughout.

“Impressive,” he said, once she’d finished. “But not really what I meant.”

He began to pace the room. “When he was looking for you – your father or… whoever. He couldn’t see you. Was that the pendant, or was that you?”

“The necklace, I think,” Ollie said.

“You think. But you don’t know?”

Ollie shook her head. “But I think so.”

Dan stopped pacing. “Are you a danger? To me? To others?”

“What? No!” said Ollie, sounding offended. “Of course not. I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Tell that to the robot guy.”

Ollie clasped her hands loosely in her lap and fiddled with her fingers. “That’s different.”

Dan gazed out through the new window at the city beyond. Even this late, a billion pinpricks of light blazed in windows and doorways, and swept through the congested late-night streets. Above it all, the Up There engines painted their blue haze across the night sky.

“Maybe,” Dan said, shrugging.

“Can I ask you a question now?” Ollie asked.

“No.”

She asked it anyway.

“Why did they let you go? The Tribunal, I mean. You keep telling me how mean and horrible they are, but they can’t be that bad. They let you go.”

“They did,” Dan said.

“Yeah. So… why?”

Dan half sat on the edge of the desk. “For old time’s sake,” he said. “Or, you know, that’s what they wanted me to think. Truth is, they wanted me to do something for them. They didn’t say as much, but that’s why they really did it. That’s why they let me go.”

“Oh,” said Ollie. She blinked. “And are you going to do whatever it is they want you to do?”

Dan reached into his coat pocket and retrieved the datapad. He held it up for her to see. “Already have.”

Ollie looked confused. “I thought you said the Tribunal didn’t care about that.”

“It doesn’t. It’s complicated.” He squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then ran the hand back across his bald head. The dry skin made a soft rasping sort of sound. “And it’s late. You should get some rest. Tomorrow, we’ll get you set up with ID. I know a guy.”

“A friend of yours?” Ollie asked.

“I don’t have friends,” Dan replied.

“Except me and Artur,” Ollie said.

Dan’s brown dipped in irritation. “We’re not friends,” he told her.

“Yes, we are.”

“You’re… people I know.” He got back to the matter in hand before she could say anything more. “Anyway, this guy I know, they call him the Worm.”

“Why do they call him that?” Ollie asked.

“A lot of reasons. He lives underground, and he’s got a lot of books.”

“Oh.”

“Also, he’s a big worm,” Dan continued. “That’s probably the main one.”

He gestured around at the office. “You can sleep in here tonight. I’ll be out front. I’ll make a few calls, try to get the Worm to fast track us in case the Tribunal comes calling. You try not to break anything or blow anyone up.”

“There’s no-one else here,” Ollie pointed out.

Dan shrugged. “Even so.” He opened the door to leave. “Good night.”

“Are you going to look into it?”

Dan paused in the doorway. “Into what?”

“The dead people. In the house. That’s why you got me to take pictures, isn’t it? You’re going to look into it.”

Dan looked past her to the window again, and saw his misshaped reflection looking back. “I already have a case,” he said. “A real case, with a real payday. That’s my priority. Until someone starts paying me to investigate mutilated corpses…” He shrugged, which said it all.

Ollie’s eyes widened. “But if you don’t look into it, who will?” she asked.

“Beats me, kid,” Dan said. “Beats me.”

He stepped through and closed the door before she could say anything else. To his annoyance, he found himself standing there for several seconds, gripping the handle, waiting – hoping? – for her to carry on. To both his relief and disappointment, she didn’t. The only sounds that emerged were a soft thud like a head might make when flopping onto a desk, then a soft, rhythmic snoring like a person might make when falling asleep face-down on said desk.

Dan made a noise. He wasn’t quite sure why, or even what sort of noise it was. It was kind of a ‘Huh,’ or a ‘Hm,’ that rose up the back of his throat and emerged through his nose. He had no idea what it meant, but he made it again anyway before turning away.

The message indicator light was blinking on his comm-unit. He tapped the button and began removing his coat as the robotic voice informed him there was one new message.

A voice like the first rumble of an avalanche rolled out from the unit. Dan paused midway through hanging his coat on the rack and listened to the start of the message.

“Mr Deadman,” thundered the voice. It was perfectly level and controlled, but the natural boom and the way certain words were emphasized gave it an air of precisely calculated menace. It took only a syllable and a half for him to identify the owner of the voice. Shornack. She was calling him personally. That wasn’t good.

“I appear to be missing some associates,” the gangster said. “Again. I thought that you might know something about that. I’d appreciate it if you would contact me at your earliest convenience to discuss this matter. And by ‘your earliest convenience’ I mean right away. Just in case there was any confusion as to—”

Dan clicked the ‘delete’ button and the blinking light went dark.

“Can ye keep the feckin’ noise down out there?” barked Artur’s voice from inside the wall safe. “Or I’ll come out there and smack the mouth right off yer face.”

“Sorry,” Dan said. He listened for a response, but if one came he didn’t hear it.

Dan took a seat at the table, then set the datapad in front of him, face up. After a moment, he turned it the other way, so the screen was hidden from sight.

He’d figured out the real reason Noops had sent him to the address during the walk back. It was obvious, really. He should’ve seen it from the start and just tossed the card as soon as he was out of the Lock-n-Talk. He shouldn’t have gone to the address and started poking his nose in. It wasn’t a case. It never had been. He wasn’t going to get involved.

Dan leaned back in the chair and noticed the datapad’s screen was facing upwards again. Had he done that?

He picked it up, then snorted out a fairly mirthless laugh. Ollie had taken over three hundred photographs of the room. Or so the numbers next to the little icon claimed, at least.

“That is a lot of pictures,” Dan said.

He put the datapad on the table.

He turned it face down.

He drummed his hands quite loudly on the arms of the chair.

“I’m feckin’ warning ye, ye scrotum-faced sack o’ shoite!” Artur hollered.

He stopped drumming.

It wasn’t a case. It wasn’t.

He shouldn’t get involved. He wouldn’t.

And yet the glass had been outside, and the sofa had been moved, and the kid had been just thirteen years old.

The datapad was in his hands. Three hundred photographs were open on screen.

“OK,” he said, keeping his voice low so as not to incur Artur’s wrath. “Maybe just a quick look.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Worm’s place was three miles up town in an area that was bordering on respectable. Down Here respectable, that is. This was an entirely different level of respectable to anywhere Up There, and largely just meant there was slightly less graffiti, fewer things on fire, and you had to work a bit harder to get yourself stabbed in the throat.

Down Here had an underground system, although that definitely wasn’t respectable in any sense of the word. It also required ID to ride, which meant it wasn’t an option. After three cabs had slowed, then rapidly accelerated again when they’d caught sight of Dan’s face, he and Ollie had elected to walk.

The further north they went, the busier the streets became, but Dan kept his hat pushed back and his collar down, and a path miraculously cleared ahead of them.

Ollie’s eyes were practically out on stalks, her gaze constantly shifting from faces to places and back again.

“What’s that thing?” she asked, blatantly pointing at a hulking hairy figure with patches of leathery skin on its face and long fleshy hooks for hands. It was squeezed into a chef’s outfit, complete with a variety of knives tucked into its waistband.

“A Groonshack,” Dan said, lowering Ollie’s arm for her. “They don’t appreciate being pointed at.”

“Oh,” said Ollie. “Groonshack,” she said, as if testing how the word felt in her mouth. She stabbed a finger towards a group of cone-headed people in flowing purple outfits. “Who are they?”

“Brotherhood of Mish,” Dan said, lowering her arm again. “Don’t make eye contact.”

“Will they attack us?” Ollie whispered.

“Worse. They’ll give us pamphlets.” He shuddered at the thought, then altered his route along the sidewalk to give the brotherhood as wide a berth as possible.

Ollie followed in his wake. She pointed again, but at an upwards angle this time. “What’s that?”

Dan blew out his cheeks and rolled his eyes before following her finger again. She was gesturing towards a tall building that was just visible through a gap between two other buildings which weren’t quite so tall, but much closer. The early morning light reflected off its harsh, angular outline.

“That’s the Tribunal Watchtower,” he said. “It’s their surveillance hub. Among other things. Not somewhere you ever want to find yourself.”

Dan lasted two more questions before telling her to knock it off. He was impressed with himself for making it that long, as his initial instinct had been to shut her down midway through question one. So much here was new to the kid, though, so he saw the time spent answering her questions now as an investment. If she knew what things were – and how dangerous – she was less likely to go bumbling into a situation she wasn’t prepared for, which meant he was less likely to have to get her out of it and undo whatever damage she’d caused.

Still, there was a limit to his patience. Five questions were enough. He wasn’t a fonking saint.

Of course, despite his request for her to shut up, she kept talking anyway. He managed to ignore most of it, only getting involved once when she almost offended a bounty hunter by saying he had a funny hat, and again when she literally walked into a Tribunal patrolman. That had been a nerve-wracking few seconds, but Dan’s pungent odor had made the guy think twice about hanging around to do an ID check.

And so, it was a relief when they finally reached the Worm’s lair. It was tucked away down a narrow alley, sandwiched between a shuttered liquor store and a burger joint so sketchy-looking the food poisoning had likely become airborne.

Ollie looked the Worm’s door up and down, taking in the peeling paint and the bars on the narrow window. She leaned back, expecting to see a few floors stretching out above, but there was only this first floor, and even that looked lower than normal.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“This is it,” Dan confirmed.

“It looks pretty small.”

Dan shrugged. “Only from the outside.”

He approached the door and rapped out a complex series of knocks.

“Wait… what? It’s bigger on the inside?” Ollie asked. “You mean like… magic?”

“I mean like it has a basement,” Dan said. He took a step back as a number of locks clunked and thunked on the other side of the door, before the whole thing swung inwards with a low, almost theatrical creak.

Dan stepped inside, gesturing for her to follow. “Stay close, don’t touch anything, and if the Worm offers you a drink, do not – I repeat, do not – take it.”

“Stay close, touch nothing, don’t take a drink. Got it,” said Ollie. She followed Dan into a rickety cage-like cargo elevator beyond the door, and watched as he heaved the door shut. “What if I get thirsty?”

“You won’t get thirsty,” Dan said, jabbing the lower of two buttons on the elevator’s rusted control panel.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

There was silence for a moment.

“I’m thirsty now.”

Dan tutted. “Just don’t drink anything. Trust me. I’m not carrying you back to the office. We’ll get you something when we leave.” He slapped her hand away before she could push the other button. “And what did I just say? Don’t touch anything!”

“Sorry,” said Ollie, tucking her hands into her pockets as the lift noisily began to descend. “Forgot.”

The Worm’s voice drifted up to meet them before the elevator was even halfway down. It was shrill and high-pitched with a rather grandiose overtone that suggested it probably thought quite a lot of itself.

“Greetings, my friends! I am excited for your arrival. You will be with me momentarily. Please brace yourself for the bump as the elevator comes to a halt.”

There was a bump as the elevator came to a halt. Through the gaps in the cage, Ollie saw a room that had probably started out three or four times the size of Dan’s office, but which was now so crammed full of books, boxes and assorted random objects that there was barely any floor space left.

Much of what was left was taken up by a bloated, vaguely gelatinous-looking figure that seemed to be permanently installed in a nest of books and papers. The Worm had no head, as such. Instead, his broad, grinning face was positioned on a sort of bulging nodule that rose directly from his huge spongy body.

His naked torso was like a road map of shallow wrinkles, the pinkish-orange skin all shiny and slick. He had arms, but they were thin and stubby with tiny grasping hands on the end, and arguably more annoying than useful.

The lower half of his body was coiled up in his paper nest, a tangled knot of wobbly flesh. His eyes were bloodshot and slightly bulbous. They bulged even more when Ollie emerged from the elevator, and he smacked his slimy lips together as if anticipating the taste of something delicious.

“Why, hello my dear,” the Worm oozed. “And, may I say, what an enchanting vision you are at so early an hour.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Dan, stepping in front of Ollie. “Cut the shizz.”

“Dan. Dear, precious Dan,” said the Worm, his rubbery smile growing. “While somewhat less enchanting a vision, it is always a pleasure to see you. Pray tell, what brings you here to my Onyx Vault?”

Ollie leaned out from behind Dan’s back. “Onyx Vault? What’s that?”

“It’s his name for his place,” said Dan, making no effort to hide the weariness in his voice. “And yes, it’s ridiculous.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said the Worm. “It may sound a little…” He waved a stubby arm, searching for the perfect word. “Pompous, perhaps, but I’m really rather fond of it. The Onyx Vault, the final resting place of objects both mysterious and mystifying! Have you come to be stupefied and bewildered by the wonders of my collection?”

“No,” said Dan. “We’re here for ID.”

“Oh. Well, how very disappointing,” said the Worm. His flesh made a series of low farting sounds as he shifted around. “For you? Another name change?”

“Not me,” said Dan. He jabbed a thumb in Ollie’s direction. “I need you to hook her up.”

The Worm’s eyes almost popped out of their slimy sockets.

“With ID, I mean. Not like that.”

“Ah. Again, how very disappointing,” said the Worm, dragging his gaze all the way down Ollie and all the way back up again. “I’ll need to take some photographs, of course.”

“Yeah, we’ve got that covered,” said Dan, fishing the datapad from his pocket. “Took one this morning before we left.”

“I should probably take some more,” said the Worm, flecks of saliva forming at the corners of his mouth. He licked them away. “You know, to be on the safe side.”

Dan flicked a finger across the screen of the datapad. In the nest behind the worm, a screen illuminated, and a tightly-framed headshot of Ollie appeared. “Like I said. We have it covered,” Dan told him. “Keep your camera in your pants.”

“He’s not wearing pants,” Ollie pointed out.

“Ooh. Prying eyes,” said the Worm, waggling the smooth expanses of skin on his forehead that passed for eyebrows. “Take a peek, did we?”

Dan glanced past a stack of boxes to an unassuming-looking door tucked in at the back. “How long?” he asked.

The Worm blinked. “How long is what?”

“Until the ID’s ready. How long?”

“Oh.” The Worm’s stunted arms made a weighing motion. “Thirty minutes, maybe.”

He turned his attention back to Ollie, and squelched as he leaned closer. “What, pray tell, is your name, my dear?”

“Cut the charm offensive, Worm,” Dan said.

“Wait,” said Ollie. “He’s the Worm?”

The Worm shot Dan a questioning look. Dan answered it with a weary raising of his eyebrows. “Yes. He’s the Worm. Of course he’s the Worm. Look at him.”

“It isn’t the girl’s fault, Danny, my boy, you failed to properly introduce us. Yes, my dear, you are indeed in the presence of the Worm. Soak it in. Take your time.”

He inhaled deeply, as if breathing in a pleasing aroma. It made two little flaps in his face open and close. “Now, I didn’t yet catch your name…” he continued.

“Like I said, drop the charm act,” Dan warned. “Just get working on the ID.”

For the first time since they’d arrived, the Worm’s face took on just a hint of annoyance. “I need the name for the ID,” he pointed out. “I mean, I could pick something amusing like I did for those last cards you ordered, but I’m sure the young lady would prefer her own name. Correct?”

Ollie looked to Dan, as if unsure what the right answer was. He rubbed his hand across his chin like he was agonizing over the best course of action.

“Oledol,” he said. “Her name’s Oledol.”

“How lovely,” said the Worm. “Oledol what?”

“Just Oledol,” Dan replied. “Make up the rest.”

He beckoned Ollie over to him. “Thirty minutes?”

“Thereabouts,” the Worm confirmed.

“OK. I need to use the library. Shout me when it’s done.”

“Very good,” said the Worm. “Oledol is more than welcome to stay out here. I could fetch her a drink.”

“Thanks. But she’s good with me,” Dan said, then he caught Ollie before she could say that she would, in fact, quite like a drink, and dragged her into the darkened room beyond the door.

Ollie opened her mouth to speak, but Dan shushed her until he’d closed the door again.

“He seemed nice,” she said, once he’d indicated she could go ahead and speak.

“Yeah, well, you’re an even worse judge of character than I thought,” Dan replied. He took a step into the darkness and waved an arm above his head. A motion sensor which hadn’t been paying attention suddenly took notice, and overhead lights began to clunk on. A lot of overhead lights, all of them spaced well apart.

“Whoa,” Ollie whispered, as the darkness was pushed further back to reveal more and more of the room.

“I know,” said Dan. “It’s pretty huge.”

“Hmm?” said Ollie, frowning. She held her hands out in front of her, palms facing each other about a foot and a half apart. “It’s not that big.”

Dan looked at her hands, then at her face, then at her hands again. “What the fonk are you talking about?”

“This thing,” said Ollie, darting over to something that may have been a sculpture, a sex toy, or a guided missile. Or possibly some combination of all three. “What does this do?” she asked, reaching for it.

Dan caught her by the wrist. “Nothing you want to get involved in,” he said, in a way that suggested at least one of those guesses was probably right. “And I told you, touch nothing.”

Ollie had already turned away, the object apparently already forgotten. “Whoa!” she said again, her eyes becoming circles of surprise. “This place is huge!”

Dan released his grip on her arm. “Yeah,” he confirmed. “It is.”

What the Worm referred to as ‘the Onyx Vault’ was one of the largest private collections of Malwhere-related items anywhere in the galaxy. Unlike the cluttered front room, this was a vast space with neat rows of display cases, a maze of bookshelves, and a thirty-feet long skeleton of something twisted and monstrous hanging from the surprisingly high ceiling.

Most of the floor was carpeted, aside from a square of vinyl flooring in the middle that was bigger than Dan’s entire office. Rows of solid-looking wooden crates had been set out on the carpet along three of the square’s sides like benches with additional bonus storage options.

The items on display ranged from the banal to the outlandish, with no obvious strategy behind what went where. One case contained an unremarkable piece of gray rock, while the next held something soft and fleshy suspended in viscous orange fluid. There were things that looked like guns, things that looked like limbs, and things that looked unlike anything Ollie had ever seen and, ideally, would never see again.

“This looks fun,” she said, jabbing a button on some sort of metal backpack before Dan could stop her. There was a sound like concentrated whale song, and the pack rocketed off its plinth, a blue flame trailing behind it.

Dan lunged, caught the jetpack-like thing by one of its straps, then was immediately yanked off his feet by its momentum. He wrestled with it for a few brief but action-packed seconds, then the flame died, the acceleration stopped, and he rolled to a stop on the carpet.

“Hands in your pockets,” Dan instructed, picking up his hat and getting to his feet.

“But I didn’t—”

Dan replaced the jetpack on its stand. “Hands in pockets,” he repeated. “Now.”

He waited until Ollie had done as he’d instructed, then motioned for her to walk ahead of him in the direction of the bookshelves. “Go in front so I can keep an eye on you. You can’t mess around with this stuff. It’s dangerous.”

Ollie trudged along, dragging her feet. “What about the books? Can I touch the books?”

“The books are even more dangerous,” Dan told her. “So, no. You can’t touch the books.”

“Aw, but…”

“You want to touch something?” Dan asked, stopping. Ollie’s face brightened, then quickly fell again when Dan pointed to an armchair just outside the maze of towering book cases. “Touch that with your butt. Sit there and wait for me to come out. Do not move. Do not mess with anything, and if anyone comes in you shout for me. Understood?”

Ollie’s shoulders slumped, like her arms had suddenly become heavier than lead. “OK. Fine. I’ll wait here. Will you be long?”

“No,” Dan said. “I just need to check something.”

The armchair molded itself to the outline of Ollie’s body as she slumped down into it. When she wriggled around, it shifted to accommodate.

“It’s pretty comfy, I suppose,” she said, but she still didn’t sound particularly happy about it.

“Remember, go nowhere, touch nothing, shout if anyone comes in,” Dan said, then he stepped into the gap between two book cases and made his way through the maze.

And it was a maze. The stacks all varied in height, but each was much taller than Dan, making it impossible for him to see anything beyond the corridor he was currently standing it. After every few sets of shelves, an opening would appear, leading off into another section of the library. Each new corridor would then branch outwards into an increasingly elaborate labyrinth of reading material.

There were no signs to indicate different areas of interest, no arrows pointing towards the exit. There were only the shelves and the books, and the further Dan ventured through the maze, the more he wondered if he’d stumble upon the skeleton of some previous visitor who had failed in their quest to find a way out.

Since coming back to life, Dan had gradually grown used to being the most disturbing thing in pretty much any given room. This place, though, made even his skin crawl.

It wasn’t the maze that was the problem, but the books themselves. Each ancient, leather-bound tome oozed menace. Some of them oozed other things, too, but fortunately those weren’t the ones he was looking for.

A few of the larger volumes seemed to whisper to him as he passed, the sound bypassing his ears and scratching itself onto the surface of his brain, instead.

Free us. Use us, said one.

Make our power yours, said another.

Nice hat, said a third, although it sort of sniggered a bit at the end, which made Dan suspect it was being sarcastic.

He ignored them all. Those weren’t the books he was looking for, either.

Several twists, turns and the occasional backtrack later, Dan stopped before a rack of shelving. Like the others, this one was overflowing with a variety of different-sized volumes, all jammed in wherever space could be found.

They ranged from ancient things with worn spines, faded lettering and titles like Bronshok’s Arcanium, to more modern texts complete with full-color interior pictures and smiling author photos on the back cover. These had titles like Arcane Symbols for Beginners and Making the Most of the Malwhere, and Dan disregarded them immediately.

He found one that looked promising. It was old, but still in readable condition. The binding was yellow and waxy, and if you ignored the fact that there was an eyebrow on the back cover, you could convince yourself it was simply an uncommon kind of leather. Which, technically, it was.

The book’s title was written as a series of symbols in faded gold leaf. Dan waited for the translation chip in his eyeball to do its thing, but the symbols remained steadfastly cryptic.

The spine creaked as he opened the book to a random page. Because of its size, this involved propping it against the edge of a shelf so as not to drop it. The pages he opened to were a random mishmash of shapes and squiggles. Over the years, a number of people had written notes in the margins, to the point where the handwritten text outweighed the printed stuff by a ratio of around three to one. He could read some of the scribbled notes, but the meaning of the print continued to confound his chip.

With some effort, he flicked through a few more pages until he found something that looked promising. A whole spread had been turned over to what Dan guessed were Summoning Symbols – arcane shapes used in ceremonies designed to connect this universe with one of the adjacent Malwhere dimensions.

Wedging the book between his body and the shelf, he wrestled the datapad out of his coat pocket and swiped above the screen until one of the corpse pictures appeared. Dan had traced the shapes the bodies made on the pad, and a selection of shaky white lines now covered the grislier elements of the image.

The lines had confirmed the theory that had been niggling at him since he’d realized the couch had been moved. The bodies had been positioned very deliberately in order to form a very specific shape. No, not a shape. A symbol.

Unfortunately, he had no idea what the symbol represented, and there was nothing similar on either of these two pages.

Balancing the book between one arm and his knee, and holding the datapad in his free hand, Dan attempted to turn the page with his elbow, with limited success. He muttered to himself as he tried again, wobbling unsteadily on one foot as he tried to elbow-wrangle the book into submission. He had just about managed to turn the page when the voice spoke in his ear.

“Whatcha doing?”

Dan was so focused on not crying out in fright, he lost control of pretty much everything else. The datapad flew into the air. The book flopped to the ground. He tried to catch both at the same time, failed miserably, and winced as the datapad cracked against the carpet.

He turned to find Ollie standing behind him. She pointed to the items on the floor. “You dropped that.”

“I told you to wait out there!” Dan barked.

“You were taking ages,” Ollie said.

“I was gone for less than five minutes,” Dan said, sighing as he knelt and retrieved the datapad. A spider’s web of cracks covered one corner of the screen, but it least it still seemed to be operational. “You could’ve got lost in here,” he said. “How did you even find me?”

“I can always find you,” Ollie said. She knelt beside him and started struggling with the heavy book. Dan stared at the top of her head as she wrestled with the thing.

“What? What do you mean?” he asked.

Ollie looked up and blinked, like the answer was so obvious she couldn’t figure out why the question was even being asked. “I mean I can find you. I always know where you are.”

“You always know where I am?” Dan echoed. “What do you mean, you always know where I am? How do you always know where I am?”

“Magic,” she said, then she grinned. “Actually, no. Just kidding,” she said. “I just followed the smell.”

She finally managed to turn the book over, and looked down at the gold leaf on the cover. “Malignancies of the Malwhere,” she read. “That sounds like fun.”

Dan gave himself an experimental sniff. “Oh. Right. Yeah, I guess that makes…” The significance of what Ollie had just said hit him. “Wait. You can read that?”

Ollie nodded. “Why? Can’t you?”

She noticed the screen of the datapad, and the image half-hidden by the cracks. “That’s the dead people!” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “You are investigating! I knew it.”

“I’m not investigating,” Dan said. “I’m just… I’m interested. There are aspects to the whole thing that…” He sighed. Her puppy-dog grin told him there was no point in protesting further. “OK, yes. I’m investigating. But I probably won’t find anything, so don’t get excited.”

“I’m already excited!” Ollie cheeped. She put her hand on her chest and her grin widened further as she felt her heart beat. “Yep. I’m definitely excited! That’s going really fast!”

She kept her hand in place, and a note of concern colored her expression. “Maybe too fast. Ooh, it’s thumping.” She bit her lip. “Am I dying? Is that what’s happening now? Am I going to die?”

“Only if I shoot you,” Dan told her. “Which I’m not ruling out at this stage.”

He replaced the datapad in his pocket, then heaved the book up onto his shoulder. “Let’s go find a table,” he told her. “Maybe you can make yourself useful, after all.”

CHAPTER NINE

After some exploring, they had found a small square table with a couple of chairs tucked underneath it and a selection of magazines spread artfully on top. Dan had swept them onto the floor and deposited Malignancies of the Malwhere on the table with a thud that threatened to buckle all four of its spindly legs.

He’d pulled a chair out, physically guided Ollie into a sitting position by pushing down firmly on her shoulder, then had handed her the datapad, opened the book at the first page, and stood back.

In a perfect world, he’d been hoping for a quick result. He’d have liked Ollie to flick through a few pages, let out an excited, “Aha!”, and point to a symbol that matched the shape the bodies had made. Ideally, there would have been some informative text alongside the symbol that explained its significance. Even more ideally, there would also have been a written confession in the margin from whoever had killed the man and his kid, along with details on the killer’s current whereabouts, but he appreciated that this was probably a bit of a stretch.

An hour passed. Maybe more. Ollie, to her credit, kept turning the pages, her eyes flicking from the paper to the screen and back again as she tried to find a match for the shape. She was nearing the end of the book now, and with each page turn, Dan felt his hopes drain out through the soles of his feet.

“Anything?” he asked, once she’d reached the end of the book. She closed the back cover, frowned, and gave the eyebrow an inquisitive stroke. Dan put his hands on the table and leaned over her. “Ollie? Find anything?”

“No. Nothing like that,” she said, indicating the white scribbles on the screen. “It’s not in there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” she confirmed.

Dan straightened and sighed. “Check again.”

Ollie glanced down at the book. “I don’t think it’s in there.”

“You don’t think it’s in there. That doesn’t mean it isn’t,” Dan said. “Check again. I’ll…”

His voice ground to a halt. He tilted his head a fraction, listening.

“What—?” Ollie began, but Dan put a finger to his lips to silence her. His eyes darted left and right along the corridor of book cases, his hand slipping inside his coat to where Mindy was nestled in her holster.

“Get under the table,” he told her, drawing the gun.

“What, this table?” Ollie whispered.

Dan resisted the urge to point out that it was the only fonking table in the immediate vicinity, and so of course he meant that table. Instead, he just nodded and raised his gun, taking aim at a pool of shadow further along the stacks.

He listened again, then turned and took aim in the opposite direction. Ollie was on her knees under the table, looking more confused than afraid. Then again, what did she have to be afraid of? She could make gangsters explode just by touching them. She was under the table more for his safety than for her own.

The shadows were deeper down that direction. Two particularly tall sets of shelves blocked the light in both directions, forming a virtually impenetrable chasm of black. Were it not for his knack of seeing in the dark, Dan wouldn’t have noticed the shape squirming towards them, or the lecherous look on its slick, slimy face.

He lowered the gun as the Worm wriggled out of the darkness. “There you are! I was worried you’d gone and got yourselves lost,” he said, his shrill voice echoing around the cavernous chamber. “Thought I’d come and make sure nothing untoward had happened.”

He tried to cup a hand around his mouth to deliver a stage whisper, but couldn’t reach. He cupped a small patch of air about three feet from his head, instead, and winked down at Ollie. “Like their owner, some of my books can get a little frisky at times. If you know what I mean?”

“Not really,” Ollie admitted.

The Worm giggled. It was not a pleasant sound. “Well, who knows, perhaps you shall find out someday. That would be fun.” He regarded her down on her knees under the table. His swollen body farted and parped again as he shifted excitedly atop his fat, bloated tail. “Yes. Yes, that would be fun.”

Ollie smiled, but it was the smile of someone who hadn’t understood a joke, but didn’t want anyone else to know. “Um. Yeah. Who knows?” she said, and the Worm’s eyes blazed with anticipation. “Can I get out now?”

Dan helped her up, then stepped between Ollie and the Worm, Mindy still clutched in one hand. “We’re fine here,” he said. “We’ve got everything under control.”

“Malignancies of the Malwhere,” the Worm replied, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “An interesting volume. Seventeen different authors, all claiming to have channeled the same entity, often decades apart. They’d never met, but the language and structural flow of the narrative is remarkably consistent.”

He waved a stubby hand. “Rather dry for my tastes, and lacking any real overall coherence, but a worthy addition to the library, all the same.” He slithered closer. “Find what you were looking for?”

“No,” said Ollie before Dan could speak.

“But we will,” Dan added.

Ollie held up the datapad to show the murder scene with Dan’s white lines superimposed on top. “We’re looking for that.”

“Oh.” The Worm craned his neck left and right, studying the symbol from a range of angles. “Oh, I see.”

Dan didn’t want to ask, but asked anyway. “You recognize it?”

“Hmm? Oh, no. No, I’ve never seen that before in my life,” the Worm said. He squelched around the table until his tail had completely encircled it, his eyes never leaving the pad. “I’m afraid I have no idea what it means,” he added. His bloated lips parted into another gummy grin. “But I may know someone who does.”

* * *

Dan and Ollie stood across from each other at either side of the vinyl square, watching as the Worm smeared something green and gungy onto the smooth flooring with his tail. The Worm had taken the stuff from one of the crates positioned around the square, and had given the plastic container some sort of blessing before pouring a big glug of the stuff onto the floor.

It was probably some kind of mucus or bile, Dan thought, although it was impossible to say where it had come from. From the size of the bottle it had to be something big, he guessed, or a lot of something small. Whatever it was, it was pungent enough to make even Dan’s eyes water, and he stepped back onto the carpet as the Worm’s tail painted the stuff in an arc just a few inches from where he had been standing.

“You must stay in the square,” the Worm warned. “For the summoning to work, you must remain on the linoleum at all times.”

Dan hesitated, but then returned to his original spot. “You sure this is a good idea?” he asked.

“Yes. Of course. It’s nothing to worry about,” said the Worm. “Scryers are small-fry. Even running wild they pose very little threat, so bound they’re completely harmless.”

“What’s a Scryer?” Ollie asked.

“It’s like a… like an informant,” Dan explained. “From the Malwhere. One of the minor unnamed dimensions. They kind of tap into what’s going on in different, you know, places.”

“I see,” said Ollie, even though she didn’t. “Now could you explain that again, only better?”

The Worm slithered in before Dan could have another go. “Scryers are small, largely harmless Malwhere-based entities. Demons, if you like,” he explained. “Only itty-bitty little ones who are attuned to the frequencies and resonances of other dimensions. Their brains are tiny, but they hold vast amounts of knowledge, and they are usually more than happy to share it. If anyone knows the meaning behind your symbol, then it’s a Scryer. They know everything.”

“They’re more dangerous than he’s making out,” Dan said. He gestured to the slimy green shape on the floor. “Stay alert. Don’t step on any of that stuff, and if I tell you to run, you run. No questions.”

“What if—?”

“No. Questions,” Dan reiterated. “And I know it’s a difficult concept for you to grasp, but keep quiet. OK? Say nothing, keep still, and leave everything to us.”

Ollie nodded her understanding, although Dan knew better than to assume that meant she would do what she was told. Following basic instructions didn’t seem to be one of her strong points, and he wondered if it would be better to tie her up or something before they started.

Before he could really give the idea any serious thought, the Worm tossed a handful of something small and gritty into the center of the mucus-daubings, and began to mutter in some ancient tongue that Dan’s translation chip was completely clueless about. Dan could pick out the odd familiar word here and there, but they were all things he’d learned phonetically and didn’t know the actual meanings of.

The was the worst thing about all the Malwhere stuff. Even those who knew what they were doing had no idea what they were doing. When amateurs got involved – like those guys at the junkyard – then all Hell could break loose. Often literally.

“What’s he saying?” Ollie asked. Dan shushed her and watched the green smear on the floor. The spots where grit had met gloop had begun to bubble and fizz. Long strands of glowing green grew from each one, snaking and tangling together as they traced the route the Worm had marked for them on the vinyl.

“Is it supposed to be doing that?” Ollie asked.

“Yes. Stop talking,” Dan instructed.

There were machines for this sort of thing these days, of course. Devices that could weaken the walls between dimensions, open portals, punch holes – that sort of thing. Proper science stuff that you could probably convince yourself made total logical sense if you sat down with an instruction manual, an open mind, and a sufficiently large quantity of booze.

And yet, there was something oddly comforting about doing things the old-fashioned way. The fact it had become ‘the old-fashioned way’ suggested people had been doing it for years, and had survived at least long enough to pass the knowledge on. And if that were the case, then how dangerous could it be?

Then again, regardless of the methods, they were still creating a hole from one universe into another. That sort of thing, in Dan’s experience, usually had a tendency to backfire.

“Relax,” the Worm said, reading either his thoughts or his face. “I’ve done this a hundred times. More. The stones and the fluids have only a weak energy resonance. Just enough to open the doorway a crack, nothing more. Trust me, it’s perfectly safe.”

“Yeah, well,” Dan said, but if there were more word to come, he was hanging onto them for now. A swirl of green vapor was rising from the smeared outline, dozens of individual wisps all twisting together to form a growing cloud in the center of the square.

Dan caught Ollie’s eye through the thickening mist. She looked worried, but a whispered, “It’s fine,” from him brought a nod and a shaky smile.

The Worm resumed his chanting, his voice undulating between piercingly high and inhumanly low as he recited the words. It was tuneful in its own way. Not in any meaningfully pleasant way – it was one of the worst sounds Dan had ever heard, in fact – but there was definitely a melody of some sort woven through it. Possibly even two or more all competing with one another, and all losing badly.

A shape flickered in the fog, as if it was forming from a bolt of lightning. It was there one second, then gone the next, only to return again a moment or two later. The details were still impossible to make out, but it was roughly the size of a human baby, only with arms that were both thinner and greater in number. Dan was pretty sure it had four of them, but the number of legs was harder to pin down. The shape hadn’t fully solidified below the waist, so it alternated between having no legs and having infinite legs, often at the same time.

It flickered again. Gone. Back. The Worm’s chanting became faster and more frantic, his stubby arms waving around like he was conducting an orchestra.

“What’s happening?” Ollie whispered, Dan’s instructions for her to keep quiet long since forgotten.

The Worm let out a shrill screech that reverberated around the room, then folded his lips into that rubbery smile. “It’s drawing tiny – minute – amounts of Malwhere energy residue from the stones and fluids,” he explained. “That’s how we can open the doorway, and how our little friend there can take physical form.”

Something tingled across the back of Dan’s neck like the beginnings of an electrical storm. At first, he assumed it was something to do with the pan-dimensional portal currently in the process of opening on the floor in front of him, but no, that wasn’t it.

Something the Worm had said had triggered the sensation. What was it?

“Who dares summon us?” chittered the shape in the fog, despite the fact there was very clearly just one of them. “Who dares disturb the Scryers?”

“So much for knowing everything,” Ollie said. She caught Dan’s glare through the fog and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Just saying.”

Dan watched the figure continuing to take form in the fog. It was drawing energy from the shape on the floor, becoming more solid with each moment that passed.

“You wish to know the meaning of the symbol,” the creature said, shooting Ollie a pointed look. “This is why you have reached out across the barrier. Yesssss?”

The last word was a long, drawn-out hiss, like air escaping from a bike tire.

“You are correct, as always,” said the Worm. “We believe the symbol was used to summon someone.”

“Becausssse you are mewling infants, with no idea of what you speak,” the Scryer said. “The symbol is not for summoning. It is for… what is your word? Aaadvertising.”

The Worm frowned. “Advertising? What do you mean?”

“It’s a calling card,” Dan realized. The Scryer turned to him, its upper half now completely solid, and its lower half becoming increasingly more so. “Whose?” Dan demanded.

“Aranok,” the Scryer said, squirming with either pleasure or pain. Possibly both. “The Inhabitant.”

“The inhabitant? The inhabitant of what?”

If the creature heard the question, it didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, it emitted a high-pitched, borderline orgasmic yelp as it arched its back and stretched out all four of its arms.

“This power,” it uttered. “It is a most welcome gift.”

The Worm’s bulbous eyes went to the glowing goo and the scattered pebbles. “Trinkets,” he said. “Enough to summon you, nothing more.”

Something about the way the Scryer was moving was making Dan uneasy. He felt that tingle across the nape of his neck as he replayed the Worm’s earlier words again.

Malwhere energy residue.

The phrase ticked over in Dan’s head. It was well-known among those with any involvement in such things that objects from the Malwhere brought with them a sort of invisible ‘power’ that clung to them like radioactive particles. For the most part, it was completely harmless, but certain species – Scryers included – could manipulate this energy, channeling it for their own ends.

The specimen currently suspended in the fog in front of them was almost certainly doing just that, but assuming the Worm hadn’t miscalculated, there should barely be enough energy to keep the Scryer corporeal in this dimension, and yet Dan would’ve sworn the thing was looking stronger by the second.

The fog swirled outwards, spreading tentatively towards the edges of the shape the Worm had drawn, as if searching for some gap in the outline’s defenses.

Dan looked again at the grit-sized pebbles the Worm had tossed onto the floor. The smear of mucus or bile or whatever it was continued to glow a luminous green, but its vibrance was fading, as if all the life was being sucked out of it. The Scryer should be fading, too, and yet…

Oh.

Oh, shizz.

Malwhere energy residue!

Dan’s head snapped up. “Ollie. Look out!” he bellowed, but the fog had already reached out for her, its wispy tendrils entwining around her wrists and ankles. The figure in the mist screeched as it doubled in size, then doubled again. The fog became a thundering tornado that stretched towards the ceiling, whipping and spinning and almost pulling Dan off his feet.

Ollie screamed. The sound was notable for two reasons – the first being its volume, the second, its brevity. She was wrenched off her feet as if she’d been hit by something big, heavy and fast-moving. Her whole body flipped as she was yanked into the fog. The shape that had been forming there howled in triumph and then Ollie tumbled down through the floor into the swirling nothingness beyond.

“Shizz. Oh… fonking shizzing fonk!” Dan hollered.

The demon-thing spun towards him, hissing and spitting as its jaws unhinged themselves, revealing a cavern of a mouth lined with hundreds of teeth.

The fury that had been etched on its face became a look of surprise when it spotted the hand cannon being levelled at its head.

There was a brief moment of confusion while the thing tried to decide whether to attack or flee. Just as it finally reached a decision, its head exploded, showering the room with grisly lumps of brain matter and skull fragments.

“Bring her back,” Dan said, motioning to the floor with his gun. “Worm! Bring her back!”

The Worm was gazing into the fog, transfixed. The skin on his forehead had crinkled in confusion, and the confidence he’d displayed prior to that moment was now nowhere to be seen.

“What is she?” he asked, not really aiming the question at anyone in particular. “The Malwhere energy. It must be…”

“Worm!” Dan barked, snapping him out of it. “Bring her back. Now!”

The Worm turned to him, as if only now realizing he was there. “Hmm? What? No. I can’t. She’s… She’s through there. She’s in the Malwhere. I can’t just pluck her out.”

Dan mumbled something fast, low and angry. Slamming Mindy back into her holster, he stepped closer to the column of fog. If he really peered into it, he could see a vast dark opening on the floor that seemed to stretch downwards towards infinity. Black lightning crackled in the darkness, doing very little to illuminate the gloom.

“Fonk it,” he said, raising a foot and preparing to step off into the abyss.

He stopped just in time, and returned his weight to his back leg. What was he thinking? He couldn’t just go jumping in after her. Not like this.

Spinning on his heels, Dan pointed to a plinth a few feet behind the Worm, and the object standing atop it. “The jetpack.”

The worm’s wet skin squelched and farted as he turned. “The what?”

“The jetpack. Throw me the jetpack,” Dan ordered, shaking off his coat and tossing aside his hat. He peered down into the chasm of darkness. “I’m going in.”

CHAPTER TEN

Dan fell. He’d love to be able to say he flew, but knew this this would be deluding himself. The flame-spewing thing on his back wasn’t so much keeping him afloat as it was rocketing him downwards. If anything, it was the exact opposite of flying, and was instead a sort of jet-assisted version of falling.

The air around him was thick with flecks of ash. They swirled around him like snow as he plunged down through the green-tinted darkness. Breathing here would probably be hazardous. Fortunately, he didn’t need to.

The hole in the Worm’s floor was somewhere behind and above him. Technically, of course, it wasn’t. There wasn’t a physical hole at all, in fact, and the oval of light Dan could see was merely the manifestation of an intangible passageway between dimensions.

Or something like that, anyway.

Dan fell. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, if not to the wind roaring upwards into them as he hurtled in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see the ground yet. This was good in that it would allow him more time to figure out what to do about it when it did appear, but bad in that he’d be traveling even faster when he inevitably smashed face-first into it.

He called Ollie’s name into the void, but the sound was ripped from his lips and torn to pieces by the oncoming wind.

Jumping into the Malwhere had seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Not a ‘good idea’ necessarily, but not a terrible one, either. As the air around him became hotter and more turbulent, though, he was starting to reconsider this.

Voices whispered in the darkness, sharp and sudden and close enough to make him lash out at empty space with both arms. Despite their closeness, he couldn’t make out what they said, but got the impression it was nothing particularly flattering.

There was another sound, too. A sound that made something coil itself into a knot somewhere deep down in his gut. He knew the sound, but couldn’t quite place it – a chinkt, like metal hitting gravel. It came at him over and over, slow and steady and rhythmic.

Chinkt.

Chinkt.

Chinkt.

Dan fell.

And he kept on falling.

* * *

Ollie blinked in the glow of a fire. Its blistering heat laughed in her face, its smoke snagging at the back of her throat. She took a step back from it, and something squirmed and wriggled on the ground beneath her feet. Lots of somethings.

“Sorry! Sorry! Coming through!” she said, hopping clumsily aside. The firelight picked out several ink-black leech-things that seeped into the ground as she watched. Something about them made her body convulse in horror, and she quickly scanned the area immediately around her to make sure no more of the things were nearby.

Once she was satisfied that there was nothing fat and slug-like hanging around her feet, she took in her surroundings. This basically amounted to ‘big fire’ as the darkness meant there weren’t a lot of other surroundings worth mentioning.

The fire was certainly noteworthy, though. Mostly because of its size – which was enormous – but also because of its color, which was yellow. Only not a normal fire yellow that mixed and mingled with shades of orange and red, but a cold, green-ish yellow that made Ollie think of illness and disease, although she couldn’t quite say why.

The flames crackled and spat, and as they did Ollie became convinced she could hear them calling her name.

“Ole. Dol. Ole. Dol.”

“Hello?” she said. She took a step closer, but the heat pushed her back. The smoke swirled insistently into her airways, filling her lungs with fumes and her head with shapes and colors and twisting shadows.

“Oledol. Oledol.”

She realized it wasn’t the fire talking, but something just beyond it in the darkness. Something big. Something wrong. Something that made her hair hurt and her eyes bleed and her fingers turn into long flowing strands of delicately patterned flesh.

Although, come to think of it, some of that could’ve just been the side-effects of the fumes.

The voice and the shape, though, those were real.

“Hello?” she said again, but the word got tangled somewhere in the smoke and didn’t make it out of her throat. She exhaled slowly, then tried again.

“Who’s there?” she asked, but as the glow of the fire picked out some of the details of the thing beyond it, she realized she already knew the answer. She knew it like it was etched on her bones, like it had been there all along, even before she’d ever set foot in this place.

Ollie swallowed. The smoke and ash left a bitter taste in her mouth.

“Hey, Dad,” she said.

And then, she ran.

And she kept on running.

* * *

Dan didn’t remember hitting the ground. Presumably he must have, because he was now lying on his back in a shallow crater, which he was reasonably confident he hadn’t been just a few moments before.

There was a hole in his chest roughly where his heart should be. He couldn’t recall that happening, either, and yet there was something familiar about it. Something that wormed its way into his brain and set alarm bells ringing.

He tried to sit up, but pain burned across his torso, oozing from the wound like molten lava. His breath left him in one big, panicky puff. He watched it swirl upwards into the suddenly frosty air, before dissipating.

His breath. His breath.

But that didn’t make sense.

The pain flared up again, forcing him to grit his teeth and arch his back and hiss out curses until it eased. It had been a long time since anything had hurt like that. Anything that wasn’t his head, anyway.

He inhaled and exhaled again. The cold air tightened his lungs, but it felt great. Despite the hole in his chest, despite him lying in a crater in the ground, it felt great.

Dan tried sitting up again, bracing himself for the pain this time. It was only when he failed to get very far that he realized his hands were tied behind his back. His ankles were bound, too.

He definitely didn’t remember any of those happening, and yet there it was again, that niggling itch deep in his brain that knew this scene only too well.

Chinkt.

The sound came from somewhere beyond the edge of the hole, out of sight. It was dark up there, the hole in the sky now nothing more than a distant star, but even if there had been light the steep walls of the crater would have made it impossible to see the source of the sound.

Crater.

No. It wasn’t a crater. It was a… hole. That was the word Dan forced to the front of his mind. Hole. He was in a hole.

There was another word lurking behind that one, too. A word he tried not to think about, but this only made it stronger.

Grave.

He was in a grave.

He had been tied up, shot, and was now in a grave.

Chinkt. The sound came again, a shovel digging into gravel. Two figures leaned into view, their faces mostly obscured.

“No, wait, don’t!” Dan bellowed.

As the first of the soil fell on him, Dan kicked and roared and thrashed.

And he kept on thrashing.

* * *

The Malwhere Lord, Kalaechai, was what Artur might refer to as “a right wrong ‘un.” The ruler of one of the more Hellish of the Hell-like dimensions, Kalaechai’s hobbies included child-snatching, mass-torture, and genocide. It was the first of these which had most directly had an impact on Ollie’s life, having been snatched from her own world by the demon king’s minions when she was an infant.

She had grown up there in that terrible place. He’d called her his daughter, although had treated her as anything but. The closer she got to adulthood, the worse her treatment became, and if she hadn’t escaped when she did she knew she wouldn’t have lasted much longer.

Other than his top ten favorite torture and humiliation methods, Ollie didn’t know all that much about her ‘father’. This would’ve made choosing birthday presents tricky, but fortunately Kalaechai was an ageless eternal being, so she’d never really had to worry about it.

On her own ‘birthday’, which could be any day Kalaechai decided, she’d be given the gift of having her worst, most private nightmares play out inside her head. The visions were so vivid, so real, so horribly tactile, that she’d often scream for days.

Kalaechai liked it when that happened.

And now, here he was again. Ollie had been an idiot to think she could ever truly escape him. He had come for her a few days ago, but Dan had stopped him. Now, though, there was no Dan. There was just her and her ‘dad’ and nowhere to run.

She ran anyway. The darkness was all around her, the fire a speck in the distance somewhere far behind. Things slithered and squirmed on the ground around each frantic footfall as she powered on, searching for somewhere to hide.

Ollie couldn’t see the demon king in the dark, but she could sense him. No matter how fast she ran, he always moved just a little faster, got a little closer. He was toying with her, she knew. He could move as fast as he liked. He could lunge at any point, grab her, take her with him. She couldn’t even guess which direction he’d come from. Behind? Ahead? Inside?

What if the darkness was him? What if she was running through him even now, desperately trying to avoid a fate that had already befallen her?

What if she’d never escaped in the first place? What if Kalaechai’s latest form of torture was hope? A brief glimpse of how life could be, only for it to be cruelly stolen from her again?

That last thought made her stumble to a stop. Could that be it? Could Dan and Artur and everything else in Down Here have been some dream the Malwhere Lord implanted in her head? The idea of it made her chest tighten, forcing out a howl of raw, primal terror.

The darkness unfolded behind her, taking on the shapeless form of her adopted father. It had taken Ollie years to be able to see him properly – to decipher the way he seemed to be a million different things all at the same time.

She saw him now as she had seen him since childhood – as a man. He was tall and imposing, a cruel smile warping his face into something unnatural, his hands bending and unbending a thick leather strap.

Ollie thought of Dan and Artur and Funplings and sunlight. She thought of freedom and kindness and all those other concepts which she was scared now may not be real. May never have been real.

She screamed.

And she kept on screaming.

* * *

The weight of the soil was immense. It pressed down on him, clogging his nose, trying to find a way into his tightly-clamped mouth. Dan heard two car doors close, muffled and distant. He heard an engine hum into life, then listened to it until it had faded into silence.

The pain in his chest had also faded a little, but Dan didn’t know if that was a good sign of a bad one. Given that he was buried alive with no oxygen and no hope of escape, though, it was probably irrelevant. If anything, a jolt of fiery agony might be a welcome distraction from everything else that was currently going on.

He tried to think logically about this. He was tied up. He was buried. Those were both bad. But there was always a way out, he just had to think rationally about it, that was all.

Sadly, the part of Dan’s brain that was devoted to logical, rational thought was nowhere to be found. It had teamed up with the part of Dan’s brain that was devoted to being utterly incapacitated with terror, and they were both now rioting in the canteen, spray-painting ‘THE END IS NIGH!” on the walls.

The best he could do was squirm and tug on the restraints that held his hands behind his back. The pain as the bonds tore into his wrists was immense, and as he shifted around the movement forced soil further up his nostrils until the smell of wet dirt made him choke and gag.

His mouth opened, and as a whole lot of damp earth rolled down into his throat, Dan died.

And he kept on dying.

And then, he stopped. Or something stopped him.

It was in the soil, whatever it was. The soil was now in him, but something within it was seeping out and being absorbed into the more mucusy of his membranes.

Something was different. No, everything was different. Those parts of his brain that had been screaming and wailing and throwing things around were now just standing around in mute confusion, wondering why the lights were still on.

There was no pain in his chest now. Even the pressure of the soil felt like some distant memory. Dan heaved on the restraints holding his hands together. If they cut into his flesh this time, he didn’t feel it. There was a jerk as the bonds snapped, and Dan’s hands were free.

He didn’t feel the rush of euphoria he’d been expecting. There was no whoosh of endorphins to reward him. He knew why, of course. There were two reasons, in fact.

Firstly, he was dead. And dead men didn’t have much in the way of active brain chemistry or rushing hormones.

Secondly – and more importantly – this wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It was a memory. A rerun. Some of the less inventive Malwhere dimensions could do that to you. They didn’t have the means to inflict real nightmares on you, so they dug around until they found one you’d tried to bury, and brought it back to life.

Appropriate, Dan thought, all things considered.

This isn’t real, he told himself, trying to visualize himself back on the surface. I’m not underground.

He tried to open his eyes, but the soil held them shut. He tutted his annoyance.

Oh well. Guess I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, he thought, then he wriggled his arms out from beneath him, forced them upwards, and clawed onwards through the murk.

* * *

The more Ollie thought about Dan, Artur and everything else she’d seen, the more convinced she became that it couldn’t have been real. How could she have escaped? How could she have evaded her father long enough to make her break for freedom? And how could she fool herself into thinking anyone would risk their own lives to protect her, the way Dan and Artur had both done?

The more she thought about how she’d been tricked, the louder she screamed. Something about the scream had changed, though. It was no longer the primal squeal of terror that it had been, and was morphing into a piercing screech of anger and fury and rage.

Ollie’s fingers ignited. She didn’t know how or why, exactly, but it felt good. It felt right. It felt powerful.

The Malwhere Lord, Kalaechai, chose that moment to place a hand on her shoulder from behind. This was his first mistake.

When Ollie turned and Kalaechai saw the expression on her face, he stood his ground. The idea of running didn’t even occur to him.

This was his second mistake.

Ollie’s scream became a howl, then a roar, then a soundless vibration that flayed the skin from the demon, leaving him nothing but a quivering tangle of exposed flesh and bone. His form squirmed and shifted, but Ollie’s hands raised without her telling them to, and ten jets of blue flame erupted from her fingertips.

Kalaechai wailed as the fire cocooned him. For a moment, he thrashed and flailed. For a longer moment, he sizzled and popped.

And then, without a sound, he was gone.

The fire died in Ollie’s hands. The one in her gut faded, too, when she realized Kalaechai wasn’t coming back.

She stood there in the darkness, breathing heavily, her mind a jumble of thoughts yet somehow empty at the same time. What had happened? What had she done? And what would she do now?

A hand clamped onto her shoulder again. Ollie spun, the fire igniting in her fingertips again.

The flames illuminated a mess of scar tissue and gray skin, and eyes that were far kinder than they wanted anyone to know.

“Hey kid,” Dan grunted. He raised a finger and pointed up to a pinprick of light far overhead. “Want to get the fonk out of here?”

Ollie’s voice cracked. Her eyes moistened. He was real. It was all real.

“Yes,” she told him. “Yes, I do.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Worm shuffled backwards onto the carpet as Dan and Ollie rocketed out of the floor, looped clumsily in the air, then smashed into a bookcase. He watched as the rack of shelves toppled like a falling tree, depositing hundreds of priceless antique books in an unceremonious heap.

“You OK?” Dan grunted, before the jetpack activated again, sending him screaming horizontally across the room. He found a wall waiting for him, and while he wasn’t going fast enough to smash straight through it, he had a fonking good go.

The pack shuddered and died. Dan peeled away from the wall, fell a few feet, then crumpled to the floor.

“Fine, thanks,” called Ollie from over by the bookshelves. Dan shakily raised a thumb, then heaved himself to his feet.

The jetpack spluttered, briefly lurching him into the air. He shrugged it off and stamped on it until he was sure it had stopped, then cricked his neck and turned to face the others. The Worm was staring at the ruined jetpack in horror.

“Do you have any idea how much that cost?”

Dan shook his head. “No.”

He drew his gun and shot something large and ominous that had poked its head out from within the swirling Malwhere portal. “You might want to close that,” he suggested.

The Worm’s tail flicked, wiping away the smears of bile. As the pattern was disturbed, the glow was extinguished. The fog rolled upwards towards the ceiling and vanished. Silence returned to the Onyx Vault.

Dan slid Mindy into her holster, then crossed his arms and shot the Worm a stony-faced look. “So,” he said. “How did that go, do you think?”

The Worm’s blubbery lips opened and closed a few times, like he couldn’t quite settle on a reply. He settled for a question, instead. “What is she?” he asked, looking Ollie up and down. Unlike previously, there was no salacious glint in his eye this time. Instead, he regarded her with something closer to awe. Maybe fear, if you looked hard enough.

“Long story,” Dan said. He retrieved his hat and coat, and pulled them both on. That done, he held out a hand. “Got the ID?”

The Worm blinked and peered down at the hand, as if he’d never seen one before. “Oh. Oh, yes. The ID,” he mumbled. He leaned back just far enough for one of his fleshy rolls to lift up and peel away from the one below. Ollie’s face gazed out of the sweaty crevasse from a rectangle of semi-transparent plastic. “Here. Just like you asked.”

“You could have just left it on the counter,” Dan said, visibly horrified as he reached into the flesh fold and plucked out the card. He flicked it a couple of times to remove the worst of the slimy pink ooze, then wiped it on his shirt.

“Hey, that’s me!” said Ollie, appearing behind him. She squinted at the text beside it and frowned. “You wrote my name backwards.”

“That’s your surname,” the Worm said. He smiled at her, but it was an anxious smile that was as much of a defense mechanism as anything else, like the last thing he wanted to do was make her angry. “I didn’t know what to put, so I just reversed your first name.”

“Oledol Lodelo,” said Dan, trying the name out. He nodded, then held the card up for Ollie to take. “Happy?”

“Lodelo. Oledol Lodelo,” Ollie said. “Ollie Lollie.” She nodded, her smile widening. “Happy.”

“Good, because you’re stuck with it,” Dan said. He turned to the Worm. “Put it on the account, I’ll square you up at the end of the month.”

“You said that last month,” the Worm reminded him. “You still owe me for Nob Muntch.”

Despite himself, Dan chuckled. “Ha. Yeah. That poor son of a bedge.” He pulled the collar of his coat up around his ears. “Like I say, I’ll square you up at the end of the month. Really, this time. I have a big payday coming.”

The Worm made a face that suggested he’d believe it when he saw it, but didn’t bother to argue.

“Ever hear of the Inhabitant?” Dan asked. “What was it? Aranok?”

“Can’t say I have,” the Worm admitted. “But ‘the Inhabitant’ sounds nicer than ‘the Devourer’ or ‘the Castrator’ or whatever else they usually call themselves. Compared to those, this one sounds borderline harmless.”

“It isn’t,” Dan said, remembering those organless bodies. “Do me a favor and keep your ears to the ground.”

“I always do,” said the Worm. His gaze shifted to Ollie, but struggled to maintain eye contact for more than a second or so. “Nice to meet you, Oledol,” he said. “And apologies for the… unpleasantness.”

“No worries,” said Ollie. “Oh! I don’t suppose I could get that drink now?” she asked.

The Worm’s face fell. He shuffled backwards on his tail. “You know,” he began. “I think I’ve completely run out. Another time, maybe.”

“Or maybe not,” said Dan, then he slapped Ollie’s hand away before she could prod at an intricate carving of something monstrous and demonic-looking, and ushered her towards the exit.

* * *

It felt good to be heading back to the office. The more distance they put between themselves and the Worm’s place, the less vivid and intense their respective Malwhere experiences seemed. As they walked, Ollie had spoken at length about what had happened to her. Dan, for his part, hadn’t said a word.

They’d managed to flag down a cab. Dan had hung back in the shadows until Ollie had opened the door, then jumped in before the driver was able to catch sight of him and go speeding off.

As it turned out, the driver – a Horthian Gnullusk – wasn’t all that discerning when it came to who he drove around, and he didn’t seem all that bothered by Dan’s grisly features and decaying flesh. Like all Horthian Gnullusks, he had no nose, which probably helped quite a lot, too.

They’d got off a couple of blocks from the office, and Dan had picked up three breakfasts to go from one of the many food stalls that seemed to open up for a few days before lack of money, customers, or adequate hygiene regulations promptly closed them back down again.

He wasn’t sure exactly what the long sticks of meat were, but they looked interesting, the guy selling them wore gloves and a hair net, and they were cheap. This was, as far as Dan was concerned, the holy trinity when it came to buying food from street vendors, so he’d handed over the cash, taken the increasingly grease-stained bags, and headed for home.

Dan pushed open the outer office door, waited for Ollie to follow, then closed it behind her. He tossed the bags of food onto the table before unhooking the painting from the wall.

“Hey, Artur. We’re back,” he said, keying in the code to open the safe door. “Sorry we took a little longer than—”

The door swung violently outwards, slamming into Dan’s forehead with a hollow thonk. Hissing, Dan staggered backwards, clutching the point of impact and swearing through his teeth.

“Ow! Fonk! What was that for?” he demanded.

Artur stood inside the vault, now dressed in a silky white blouse and red pleather leggings. His hair and beard were practically standing on end, and his whole body was trembling with rage.

“What was that for? I’ll tell ye what that was for!” he said. “For not being here when those feckin’ eejits came in, that’s what for.”

Dan rubbed his head. “Who? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, what am I talkin’ about? he says. The burglars! The feckin’ people who broke in and stole…”

He gestured around the office. Slowly, his arm gestures became less emphatic. “Nothing at all,” he said. The arms dropped fully to his sides. “They must’ve taken something.”

“Who?” Dan snapped. He looked around, but the office was exactly as he’d left it. “Who took something?”

“I heard them. From in there,” Artur insisted. “There I was, minding me own business trying on some new outfits, when I heard them. Two or three of them, from what I could tell. Sneaking around, up to no good. Or, you know, so I thought, anyway.”

Ollie opened the door to the inner office. She poked her head through, looked left and right, then turned back to the others and shrugged. “Looks OK. Window’s still there.”

“To be fair, they were unlikely to steal the fecking window,” Artur pointed out.

“Why would anyone try to steal anything?” Dan asked. “There’s nothing here to steal.”

“Well how should I know? Maybe if ye’d let me out at a reasonable time, I’d have been able to find that out. But oh no, off ye go, swanning around just the two o’ ye, leaving yer old pal Artur locked up while ye have a high old time to yerselves.”

“We went to see the Worm,” Dan said.

Artur winced. “That creepy big bastard? In that case, I take it back. Thank feck ye went without me.” He hopped onto Dan’s shoulder, scampered down his coat, then dropped onto the table. “Sure, what did ye want to see him for? And, by the way, is that some delicious new meat product I smell?”

He eyed the paper bags hopefully, then clapped his hands and rubbed them together as Dan slid one of the bags towards him. “Knock yourself out.”

“What’s this now?” Artur asked, pushing the bag open and peering inside. Ollie sat across from him and unfolded the bag that contained her own meal.

“It’s a stick made of meat,” she said.

“I can see that,” Artur said. “What’re they called, I mean?”

“Meat Sticks,” Dan said, taking his seat. “Least, that’s what guy at the stall called them.”

“Feck me, he must’ve been up all night trying to come up wi’ that one,” Artur said. “I hope his marketing committee got a big fat bonus for that particular flash o’ brilliance, that’s all I can say.”

He gnawed off a gray and lumpy corner and chewed noisily for several seconds. “Holy father. Meat Stick? Fecking Gristle Pole, more like. Sure, that’s one of the worse things I’ve ever tasted in me life, and I’ve fallen into raw sewerage with me mouth open. More times than I’d care to recount, in fact.”

He took another bite, chewed it into submission, and grimaced when he swallowed. His whole body shuddered in revulsion, then he gestured to the third bag on the table in front of Dan. “Ye going to be eating that, Deadman? I advise against it, to be honest. Sure, it’s foul stuff. Stick it over here my way and I’ll dispose of it for ye.”

“I was going to try it, yeah,” Dan said.

“Ah come on, it’s not like ye even need to eat, ye selfish big boggle-eyed bastard, ye,” Artur told him. “Come on, quit acting the maggot and pass it over. Ye’ll thank me for it, trust me.”

Ollie took a bite of her Meat Stick. “It’s quite nice,” she said, chewing thoughtfully.

“Don’t listen to her. Ye know what she’s like, always talkin’ the old bollocks,” Artur said. He beckoned for Dan’s bag. “Come on now, pass it over. I’m trying to do ye a favor, so I am, ye ungrateful great gobshoite.”

With a sigh, Dan slid the bag over. “Good on ye, Deadman,” Artur said. He unfurled the bag and ducked his head inside. When it emerged a few moments later, his beard was shiny with grease. “Just so ye know, I’ve licked it now, so I wouldn’t go takin’ it back if I were you.”

Dan watched them both eating for a while, then got up from the table and closed the door of Artur’s safe. He paced slowly around the room, wandered into the inner office, then sauntered out again.

“So, you heard someone?”

“Hmm?” said Artur, looking up from his half-eaten Meat Stick. He swallowed. “Oh. Yeah. I mean… I thought so, but there doesn’t seem to be anything missing, right?”

“Right,” said Dan.

“So, why would someone sneak in, take nothing, then sneak out again?” Artur wondered. “Sure, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe they didn’t sneak out,” Ollie said between mouthfuls. “Maybe they’re still here.”

Dan’s eyes went to all the possible hiding places in the room. There were none, so this didn’t take long. He returned to the inner office, where he checked behind the door and under the desk. Finally, he investigated the bathroom. Like everywhere else, it was completely devoid of intruders.

“Nope,” he said, returning to the outer office, where Artur was now getting started on his second Meat Stick. “No-one here.”

Artur shrugged. “Maybe I imagined it, then. In which case, smashing the door into yer face may have been an error of judgement on my part, for which I’ll apologize.”

“Right,” said Dan.

“One day.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” said Dan.

“Great stuff. Just, ye know, don’t hold yer breath or anything. I’m a stubborn and complex man, Deadman. There’s no telling how long such an apology is likely to take. Although, it’ll be a feckin’ while if past experience is anything to go by.”

Dan took his seat at the table again. He interlocked his fingers in front of him and went back to watching the others eat. Or he tried to, at least, but his attention kept drifting and diverting his eyes around the room.

Artur probably had been imagining it. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d once become convinced than an entire squad of Xandrie gangsters were running a gambling den under the floorboards. Granted, he’d taken his own body weight in drugs just hours before – which explained why every member of the gang had his grandmother’s face and spoke only in rainbows – but seeing and hearing things that weren’t really there was nothing new for the guy.

Besides, he was right – why would someone sneak in and not take anything?

“So, what did ye think of the Worm then, peaches?” Artur asked. “A big ol’ creepy bastard, am I right?”

Dan’s hands banged down on the table before Ollie could reply.

The force of the impact tossed Artur several inches into the air. “What was that for, ye daft…?”

Dan held a finger to his lips and held the other hand out to indicate Artur should shut up. Showing quite remarkable restraint, Artur managed to contain the barrage of expletives he had been about to hurl in Dan’s direction, and instead just smoothed down his leggings and tucked in his blouse.

Ollie swallowed a chunk of Meat Stick. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

Dan straightened the finger in front of his lips and scowled. “You do know what this gesture means, right? You know what I mean by this?”

Ollie puffed out her cheeks. “Fingermouth?” she guessed.

Dan let his hands fall back onto the table. “Fingermouth? What the fonk is that supposed to…? Forget it. It means be quiet.”

“Oh. Right! Gotcha,” said Ollie. “I didn’t know.”

“Well now you do,” said Dan, pointedly. “So stop talking.”

“But you’re not doing fingermouth now,” Ollie replied.

“Just shut the fonk up,” Dan whispered, then he eased back his chair and carefully got to his feet.

It couldn’t have been burglars. There was nothing much of value in the office, but they’d have taken something or at least trashed the place while looking for something worth swiping. Amateurs would have turned the place over. Pros would have known to check for a safe.

So, if it wasn’t someone here to take something, it had to be somebody looking to leave something. Once he’d worked that part out, the rest was obvious.

“The Tribunal,” he said. “We’ve been bugged.”

“The bastards!” Artur whispered. He shook a tiny fist at the office in general and raised his voice to a shout. “Hear that? Ye’re a shower o’ bastards, the lot o’ ye.”

Dan crossed to the filing cabinet and wrestled with the bottom drawer. It screeched as he heaved it open, revealing a knot of cables and an assortment of home-made looking gadgets. He rummaged around among the devices until he’d found the one he was looking for, then spent several increasingly frustrating minutes trying to untangle the fonking thing from the web of wires and charging cables.

He practically sobbed with relief when he finally got the thing free. It didn’t look like anything especially noteworthy, and was essentially just a chunk of metal the size of a cigar case with two semi-flexible wires protruding from the top and a single dial on the front.

“What’s that for?” Ollie asked.

“Is it for rammin’ up the arses of those eavesdroppin’ Tribunal shoitebags?” Artur asked, raising his voice to a holler. “Because if so I’ll gladly be the one to do the shoving.”

“Not exactly,” said Dan. He turned the dial and the wires became rigid. They both trembled at slightly different speeds, then something on the outer door let out a warble of feedback. Dan traced the sound to a circular sticker just a fraction of an inch in diameter. It was hard to spot from even a couple of feet away, and had it not been for the feedback increasing in pitch when Dan brought the scanner device closer, he’d likely never have found it at all.

Sliding a cracked fingernail behind the sticker, he teased it from the glass. Light glinted off the miniature lens as he peered down at it, briefly wondering if someone was watching from the other end. With a shrug, he squeezed the camera until the feedback stopped.

“What is that?” Ollie asked.

“A camera. They were watching us.”

“But you’ve got rid of it?”

“I got rid of one,” said Dan, adjusting the scanner’s dial. Another wail emerged from inside the inner office. “Let’s see just how inquisitive these shizznods are.”

Ten minutes of searching later, Dan had found seven of the tiny cameras, and destroyed six of them. He had swept the whole place, even checking the stairs leading up to the office in case any of the spycams had been set up there. They seemed to all have been inside the office, though, and he was confident he’d found them all.

Dan sat at the table, balancing the final surviving camera on the tip of his finger. He held it up, the shiny black lens pointing towards him.

“We both know how much these things cost,” he said, eyeballing the unseen person who was either watching this live, or would watch the recording later. “And we both know it’s almost impossible to get authorization to use the fonking things. So, either you think I’m about to mastermind some global catastrophe, or you haven’t gone through the proper channels, and are spying on me illegally.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Now, I know that word doesn’t really mean anything to you – it’s not like anyone’s going to arrest the Tribunal now, is it? – but if I report this, if I go through the proper channels, then you’ll either be buried in paperwork for the rest of your life, or rank-stripped and kicked out of the service.”

Dan brought the camera closer until he could see a tiny version of himself reflected in the lens. “How do you think ex-Tribunal grunts do out there in the real world? Not well. If you want to avoid finding out for yourself, stay out of my office, and keep out of my business.”

He placed the camera down on the table, lens pointing to the ceiling. “Thus endeth the lesson,” he said, then he brought a fist sharply down on the thing, obliterating it.

Artur, who had been standing on the table making a succession of increasingly obscene gestures in the camera’s direction, applauded loudly. “Marvelous speech, Deadman. Right on the feckin’ money. Sure, I’d probably have sworn at them a bit more, maybe cast aspersions on their parentage or what have ye, but that’s a matter of personal taste and no criticism of yer performance.”

Ollie emerged from the inner office, where she’d been instructed to wait while Dan disposed of the cameras. She bit her lip nervously. “Is that them all?” she asked. “Are we safe now?”

“Ah, ye were always safe, peaches,” said Artur. “Sure, who in their right mind would try to mess with three hardy bastards like us? They’d have to be out of their feckin’ mind.”

The office door opened. Dan stood and drew his gun in one fluid motion, the lights around Mindy’s chamber illuminating as his finger found the trigger.

A middle-aged mailman with a face that somehow managed to seem bigger than the rest of his head screamed and thrust his arms in the air. “Aeerk! N-no! Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”

Dan lowered the gun.

“Smooth,” said Artur.

“Sorry. Thought you were someone else,” Dan offered as way of explanation.

The mailman nodded and smiled gratefully, trying to make every line of his body suggest that no harm had been done. Dan was still holding the gun, and though he’d quickly lowered it, he could almost certainly raise it again just as swiftly.

Bowing and scraping his way into the room like a toadying subject before a cruel king, the mailman slipped a rectangular envelope onto the table. He then beat a hasty retreat, openly weeping tears of relief as he backtracked out of the office and closed the door behind him.

“Thanks,” said Dan, but the mailman’s footsteps were already two stories down, and getting further all the time.

Putting Mindy back in her holster, Dan picked up the envelope and tore it open. A handwritten note slid out, followed by a headshot of a late middle-aged man. The photograph was in color, but may as well not have been, what with the man’s charcoal skin, snow white hair, and eyes the color of icicles.

The note was from Kooriashian, and was short and to the point. It read: ‘Photograph, as requested. Transfer has been initiated. Speedy result appreciated. K.’

A label had been affixed to the back of the photograph with some additional details about Kooriashian’s husband. Name. Age. Planet of origin. That sort of thing. Nothing that would make tracking him down any easier.

“Transfer has been initiated,” said Artur. He had clambered up onto Dan’s shoulder to read the note. “Meaning what, exactly? We’re rich?”

“Meaning we – I – have been partially paid for a job,” Dan said. “And no, before you ask, we can’t go and spend it on booze. I’ve got to find this guy.”

“Ah, putting our detective pants on, are we?” Artur snorted. “This I want to see. Just how d’ye propose to find that one guy in a city of a billion people? Hmm? Put up posters, maybe? Ask around the place? Beat the shoite out of some lowlife somewhere until he tells ye what ye want to know?”

“I don’t know,” Dan muttered.

Artur cupped a hand to his ear. “Say what now? I didn’t quite hear that.”

“I said I don’t know, OK?” Dan said.

“We could all go out looking,” Ollie suggested.

“Alternatively, we could tell yer woman that ye tried yer best, what with yer woefully limited abilities and everything, and then we could all head out to the pub and have ourselves a feckin’ marvelous time,” Artur suggested. “I know which one I’d prefer. Also, peaches, no offence, but that suggestion ye just made? It’s a load of old shoite. Sure, how many sets of eyes d’ye think we have between us, exactly? Because I make three, and I’m pretty sure that’s not enough to search through the whole city.”

He clapped his hands, winked, and pointed to the door. “So… pub?”

“Maybe later,” Dan said. “We can head to Bluey’s. I’ve still got a tab there.”

Artur tutted, but didn’t complain. ‘Later’ was better than ‘never’. “Right. Fair enough, so. What’s the plan in the meantime? Are we just going to stick it out around here doing feck all, or what? Not that I’ve anything against that sort of thing, ye understand? It’d just be nice to know what the plans are.”

Dan pressed a fingertip against the squashed spycam on the table, picked it up, then squinted as he studied the tiny fractures on its lens. “We’re going to see about borrowing us some extra eyeballs.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Ye sure about this, Deadman?” asked Artur, his voice making it very clear he had grave reservations about the current situation. “Sure, I can’t help but feel it’s a bit… mad, ye know? We’re headin’ straight into enemy territory here. Strolling right up the drokkan’s jacksie, as they say.”

“What’s a drokkan’s jacksie?” Ollie asked.

“It’s a very inhospitable place that ye don’t want to ever find yourself, peaches,” Dan told her. “That’s all ye need to know.”

They were standing just inside the mouth of an alleyway, partially hidden by a rusting dumpster. The area around the Tribunal Watchtower had been pedestrianized a few years back, after a spate of kamikaze attacks against the place with a range of motorized vehicles. Nowadays, the rows of concrete barricades and metal spikes meant nothing short of a tank could drive within ten feet of the walls. Several automatic cannons up on the tower’s roof protected the airspace around it, and launching an attack or trying to break into the place was generally considered a bad idea.

Fortunately, Dan had no need to break in. One of the side doors opened just as he’d been expecting, and a figure in Tribunal riot gear emerged. After glancing around to make sure no-one else was watching, the guy beckoned for Dan to come inside.

“You two wait here,” Dan told them. “I won’t be long.”

“Ye what?” Artur spat. “Wait here? Just hang about here by the bins, will we? Ye dragged us all the way out here so we could just mill around with all the rubbish?”

“I’ll be five minutes,” Dan said. He looked back at Ollie as he walked away. “Don’t let him go anywhere,” he instructed. “And don’t you go anywhere, either.”

“What about if—?”

“Go. Nowhere,” Dan ordered, and then he hurried across the sidewalk, nodded once to the Tribunal grunt, and they both vanished inside the Watchtower.

Ollie shivered as she watched the door close. The streets on the way here had been packed with pedestrians, but the closer they got to the Tribunal building, the thinner the crowds had become. Now, only a handful of people were crossing the plaza, and even those seemed to be hurrying to vacate the area.

“He told me this place was dangerous,” she said, leaning back to look up at the tower. It stood taller than any of the other buildings nearby, with a curve of endless glass taking up the top several stories. “He told me I should never come here.”

“Yeah, well, it might not seem like it sometimes, but he knows what he’s doing,” Artur said, trying to sound reassuring. He sucked on his beard and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I hope ye do, Deadman. I really hope ye do.”

* * *

Dan followed Noops through the building in silence until they reached some sort of monitoring station up on the fourth floor. Noops’s rank allowed him access to priority elevators and stairwells with just a scan of his fingertips, so they’d avoided any awkward encounters with the Watchtower’s three hundred other staff members, and had made it up here unnoticed.

There were dozens of monitoring stations located throughout the station. Most were fairly expansive, with multiple staff members working from several stations to snoop on the citizens of Down Here, usually without their knowledge or consent.

The room Noops had brought Dan to was a private booth, usually reserved for the most discrete spying missions. If the Tribunal was trying to get dirt on any of its own officers, a crusading politician, or a visiting royal dignity, then this was where they did it from – away from prying eyes and, more importantly, free from the need to complete any of the proper paperwork.

Banks of screens lined one of the walls, each screen showing a different color image. Some of the screens displayed fairly standard-looking security footage. City streets. Car parks. An underground station. That sort of thing.

Some of the other feed showed less obvious places. A hotel bedroom. Someone’s kitchen. There were even a couple of bathrooms on there. All the rooms except the bedroom were currently empty, and the most interesting thing happening on that screen was someone sleeping. A waveform peaking at the bottom of the display suggested they were snoring.

Another wall was almost completely taken up by a single square screen showing a map of Down Here. Several hundred yellow dots were spread across the city, with five or six red ones mixed in amongst them. Most of the dots were stationary, although a few were moving at various speeds.

A curved desk took up most of the middle of the room, reflections dancing across its polished glass surface. Dan tapped it, and watched as the desktop illuminated with dozens of individual displays and readouts.

“New model?” he asked.

“What? Oh. Yeah. Not rolled out fully yet, but….”

Noops shook his head, visibly annoyed. “What are you doing here, Slam? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait?”

“This,” Dan said, reaching into his coat. Noops tensed, his hand grabbing for the gun at his hip, the visor of his helmet swinging down and locking over his face. “Hey. Easy!” Dan said, slowly taking the picture of Kooriashian’s husband from his pocket. “Just a photograph.”

Noops remained on high alert for a few seconds, then his visor retracted to reveal a slightly embarrassed smile. “Sorry. Habit.”

Dan nodded. “You think I’m going to shoot you because you bugged my office, Noops?” he asked. “Come on. What do you take me for?”

“Bugged your office? I don’t know anything about that,” said Noops, holding Dan’s gaze without even a flicker of a flinch. “But give me the details and I’ll see what I can find out.”

He was lying. Dan had worked with the guy for years. He knew when he was lying. Hell, Dan had practically been the one to teach him how to.

“It’s fine. No harm done,” Dan said. “But I need a favor.”

Noops raised his eyebrows. “A favor?”

“A couple of favors, actually.”

“I can’t… I mean, I know we go back and everything, and I feel for your current situation, I really do, but this is the Tribunal, Slam.”

“Dan.”

“Fine. Dan. This is the Tribunal. It doesn’t do favors.”

“I’m not asking the Tribunal,” Dan said. “I’m asking my partner.”

Noops looked down at the offered photograph. He sighed, saying nothing for a long time. “I assume you want me to run a search?”

“I do,” Dan confirmed. “He’s—”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know,” Noops said. He snatched the picture from Dan’s hand, placed it face down on the desk, then squiggled with a fingertip on a featureless area beside it. He pointed to the map screen, and the words, ‘Search in Progress…’ appeared in the bottom right corner.

“It’ll take a few minutes,” Noops said.

Dan nodded admiringly. “Faster than it used to be.”

“Most of the time,” Noops confirmed. “What else?”

“Huh?”

“You said you had a couple of favors to ask. What else?”

“Oh. Yeah. First thing’s first,” Dan said. “I checked out the address you gave me. Nothing for you to worry about.”

Noops shifted on his feet, a little startled. “Worry about? I wasn’t worried about it, I just thought—”

“You just thought someone else might be moving in on your turf,” Dan said. He pointed upwards, indicating some higher authority somewhere up above. “Polani’s still got you running that sector for him, right? You thought maybe it was some sort of gang thing. You were worried Shornack or Paradise West or someone new was trying to muscle in and take it from you.”

Noops tried to laugh it off, but said nothing.

“You couldn’t tell Polani, because if someone had moved in on your turf he’d see it as weakness, and we both know what he thinks of that. You couldn’t trust anyone else on the force, because you don’t know for sure who’s straight and who reports directly to him.”

Dan crossed his arms and leaned against the edge of the desk. “That about right?”

Noops had stopped laughing. He glanced around the room, as if making sure that none of the people being watched were somehow watching back.

“You’re sure?”

Dan kept perfectly still. Almost supernaturally still, in fact, all things considered. He had suspected, of course. You didn’t spend ten hours a day with someone and not figure out at least some of their secrets.

No-one on the Tribunal was an angel, Dan knew that. He’d been as bad as the rest. Worse than most, sometimes. But there was being a bad cop, and there was being a bad guy who dressed as one, and he’d always hovered just on the right side of that line. As soon as you started reporting to Polani, that line had been crossed. Then probably double-crossed, framed for the murder, and clubbed to death with a baton.

Dan had wanted to be wrong. More than anything, he’d wanted to be wrong.

“I’m sure. I think it was some sort of cult thing. You get these clowns who think they can summon up devils or whatnot. One of them did it.”

Noops let out a breath he’d been holding in for too many hours now. “Oh, thank fonk,” he said. “Wow. Haha! Hoo. That is… That is good news. Great news. Thank you. Seriously. I mean it.”

“You could’ve just asked,” Dan said. “You don’t need to keep secrets from me, Noops. We’re partners, right? We were like brothers, you and me.”

Noops shrugged and pulled a face that said, of course. On screen behind him, the map zoomed in to show a four-sector square as it narrowed the search.

“Which brings me to my second favor,” Dan said.

“Name it,” said Noops. “I owe you one, Slam.”

“Dan.”

“Dan. Shizz. Yes. Sorry. Shoot.”

“Who did it?”

Noops’s smile remained locked in place, but his eyes were no longer providing backup. “Did what?” he asked.

Dan gestured down at himself. “I don’t remember much,” he admitted. “There was a case, I think. Some kind of trafficking thing. Women? Kids, maybe? It’s kind of hazy. I had a lead, but you didn’t want us to check it out.”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to,” Noops explained. “It was just… it was thin. As leads went, it was really thin, and there was that whole drugs thing going on at the time, and… It was thin.”

“That’s when I first suspected,” Dan said. “See, the tip-off I had, it pointed to Polani. He was the one bringing those people in. And when you tried to steer me away, that’s when I first guessed you were reporting to him. No, when I first knew.”

“Come on, Slam…”

“That name is dead. I am dead,” Dan said, his voice becoming a low, rumbling growl. “There was a gunshot wound. Right here.” He tapped the center of his chest. “I don’t remember much, but I remember that.”

He ground his teeth together. His fingers creaked as he flexed them in and out. “And I remember the hole in the ground. It was cold. I was cold. Shivering. And then the soil started to fall. Shovelful by shovelful. I tried to get up, but my hands were tied. I screamed. Don’t even mind admitting it. I screamed, but they ignored me.”

Dan’s fingers stopped flexing.

“You ignored me.”

Noops shook his head. “What? No! What are you even talking about? Come on, man, you know I’d never do anything to hurt you. You said it yourself, we were partners.”

“It was you, Noops.”

“Uh, no. No, it wasn’t!”

“I saw you pouring the concrete.”

Noops’s face lit up as he saw a way out. “There was no concrete!” he exclaimed before realizing, too late, that what he’d thought was an escape route had been a dead end all along.

Behind him, the map zoomed in to focus on a single sector of the city. Dan ignored it.

“I told you we shouldn’t get involved,” Noops said, his voice flat and level as he resigned himself to the truth. “I warned you we shouldn’t go poking around, but you didn’t listen. You were too fonking stubborn. That was always your problem. Too fonking stubborn for your own good.”

“So, Polani ordered it?” Dan asked. It was the only answer that made sense, but he wanted to hear it, anyway. “Polani had you kill me.”

Noops shifted uneasily. He put his hands on his hips in a way that tried to subtly bring the gun that was slung there into easy reach. “Come on.”

“Say it,” Dan said. “You owe me that much.”

“I can’t…” Noops began, but then he looked up at the ceiling, shook his head, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “Yes. Polani ordered it. OK? Happy, now?”

“Ecstatic,” Dan replied, although his demeanor didn’t really support the statement. “Why did he bring me back? And how?”

This time Noops’s response seemed genuine. “How should I know? That wasn’t us. We – I mean, he – wanted you dead, not… not…”

He gestured to Dan.

“Whatever you currently are. I don’t know how you came back, but it was nothing to do with us.”

“Match found,” Dan said.

Noops blinked. “Huh?”

“The search,” Dan explained, indicating the map screen. “Match found.”

Noops started to turn, then thought better of it. Barely taking his eyes off Dan, he made another series of tight circular gestures on the desktop and a 3D map rose up from the surface. “We don’t have a live feed, but this was his last known location,” Noops said, indicating a warehouse-sized building in the center of the holographic image.

Dan made a show of very slowly opening his coat again, and took out the cracked datapad. “Can you send it to this?” he asked.

Noops flicked a finger and the datapad let out a soothing chime. “You got it.”

“Thanks,” said Dan, slipping the device back inside his coat. He buried his hands down deep in the outer pockets, gave the room a final look over, then shrugged. “Guess I’ll be going.”

“Great. I mean, yeah. Probably best you do. You know, prying eyes, people might start asking questions, whatever,” Noops said. He gestured towards the door with his left hand, the right one still hovering around his hip. “Please.”

Dan started to turn, then stopped. The question – the other question, he had been afraid to ask – forced its way free. His voice, when it came, was a dry husk of a thing, like crackling leaves. “And what about Vanshie?”

Silence.

Then, “Vanshie?”

“I looked for her,” Dan said. “Not right away, but after. I looked for her.”

“And?”

“And you tell me.”

Noops, to his credit, sounded almost remorseful. “Look, I tried to talk him out of it. I told him Vanshie knew nothing, but… you know what he gets like. He’s like you. He’s a stubborn son of a bedge. You know what he gets like.”

Dan clenched his jaw and kept his hands down deep in his pockets.

“But I did right by her. I mean, I figured I owed you that much, right? I did right by her, Slam. Really put my neck out for her,” Noops babbled. “I swear she didn’t feel a thing.”

Death had dulled Dan’s brain chemistry, but hadn’t stopped it completely. Provoked enough, it could still produce sufficient levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline to make Dan’s gut twist and coil in rage, for example. Like here. Like now.

“Polani,” was all he managed to say.

“It was nothing personal. He assured me of that. It was a business decision, that was all, OK? Nothing more. He could’ve made an example of her, but he didn’t. She didn’t even know it was happening.” Noops held out a hand, as if trying to guide a potential jumper down from a ledge. “Don’t do anything stupid, OK?”

Dan closed his eyes, nodded once, then opened them again. “I’ll try,” he said. “But you know what I get like.”

One of his pockets exploded. At almost exactly the same moment, the bottom thirty per cent of Noops’s face where it met his throat did likewise. His protective visor engaged too late to do anything but catch the blood spray before it could arc across the room.

Noops gargled for a half second or so, then he fell backwards against the map screen and slid into a sitting position on the floor. He was dead before his knees had even started to bend.

Dan stood over him, watching his old partner’s blood pooling on the floor. Pulling Mindy from the remains of his coat pocket, he returned her to her holster.

“You didn’t feel a thing, Noops,” he muttered. “Figured I owed you that much.”

Turning, Dan made for the door, but the squawking of Noops’s comm-unit made him stop.

“Noops, we have a C-Eleven-Dash-Delta in progress at Ronsco Elementary in Sector Five.”

C-Eleven-Dash-Delta. Dan knew that one. Hostage situation. Multiple casualties.

“It’s another of those weird ones you asked me to tell you about,” the voice on the comm continued. “Bodies split open, organs all gone. Real nasty stuff. Witness report says the suspect identified herself as ‘the Inhabitant’, although we have no match for that name. She’s now holed up in the school. You know, with the kids and whatnot? Anyway, we’ve got a lot of worried parents assembling unlawfully outside the premises. Boss wants them moved on ASAP. I’m arranging it, and also sorting a clean-up squad to dispose of whatever’s left when it all blows over. But you said you wanted to know. About the organs thing.”

A pregnant pause followed. Dan took another step towards the door, but that was as far as his legs would take him before his feet rooted themselves to the spot.

Kids and whatnot.

“Noops, you reading?”

The arm was limp and heavy as Dan squatted beside the body and raised Noops’s wrist comm-unit to his mouth. He cleared his throat before hitting the ‘respond’ button.

“Noops here,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A sleek Tribunal cruiser hummed to a stop at the mouth of an alleyway. The passenger door rolled upwards, revealing a figure in riot armor and a blood-smeared helmet sitting in the driving seat.

“It’s me,” he said. “Get in.”

Ollie poked her head out from behind the dumpster, then Artur poked his head out from behind hers.

“Deadman?” Artur said, his fuzzy eyebrows almost raising all the way to the top of his forehead. “Have ye lost yer feckin’ mind or something? Ye do know that’s a Tribunal car ye’re driving, right?”

“I know. Get in. I’ll explain on the way.”

Artur tugged on Ollie’s ear. “Well come on then, peaches, ye heard the man. What are ye waiting for, a written invitation?”

Ollie scampered out of cover and over to the car, keeping low. She jumped into the passenger seat, and Artur hopped off her shoulder onto the dash. Ollie wriggled uncomfortably as the door closed and the car pulled away from the plaza and into traffic. Artur scrambled into a cup holder that was indented in the plastic dash, and wedged his legs against the sides.

“There’s something on the seat,” Ollie complained, squirming and reaching beneath her. She pulled out an object roughly the size of a human hand. Roughly the shape, weight and texture of one, too.

“There’s a hand,” she said. “On the seat. There was a hand on the seat.”

“Yeah,” said Dan, taking the severed appendage from her and tossing it into the back. “Had to get through the fingerprint scanners. Seemed like the obvious solution.”

“Well of course it seemed like the obvious solution,” said Artur. “Because ye’re a frightening bastard, Deadman. A frightening big maniac, in fact. I thought ye had a friend or someone who was going to let ye in and out.”

“I did,” said Dan.

“Then why not just…” Artur’s voice stuttered to a stop. “Oh. Right. And, again, that brings me right back to ye’re a fecking maniac.”

“Wait,” said Ollie. “You cut your friend’s hand off? Didn’t he mind?”

“He didn’t object,” said Dan.

“Oh. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to bring the rest of him, too?”

“Actually, no,” Dan said. “No, it would not.”

He swung the car left as he changed lanes, and watched as the other vehicles parted to let him through. Man, he’d forgotten how nice it was to drive one of these things.

“Why not?” Ollie asked.

“He was heavier than he looked,” Dan replied.

“I thought you said you didn’t have friends,” Ollie reminded him.

“I don’t. Now hold on.”

The road ahead was blocked with five lanes of slow-moving traffic. Dan hit the sirens and mounted the sidewalk. Pedestrians dived for safety as the cruiser screamed past, reds and blues sweeping across the store fronts.

Much as he hated to admit it, he’d missed this. Other cars had never pulled over to let the Exodus past, and its distinct lack of blaring sirens and flashing lights had really limited his opportunities to tear across pedestrianized areas at high speed.

The cruiser tilted to one side as Dan roared back onto the road and powered across a junction. If it’d had wheels, two of them would’ve been off the ground. But since it didn’t, they weren’t.

“Look out!” Artur hollered, covering his head with his hands as a truck thundered towards them, horn blaring. Dan jammed the accelerator pedal to the floor and the cruiser zipped out of the truck’s path. Its air current hit the back of the car like turbulence, rocking it violently. Artur was tossed out of his little nook. He flipped twice, then thudded back down into the same spot, albeit now the wrong way up.

“It’s high time someone invented a cup holder with a feckin’ seatbelt built in,” he muttered, scrabbling back into a sitting position. “Where are we going, anyway? And what’s the big rush?”

“A school,” Dan said, taking a sharp bend too fast and skidding across two lanes of oncoming traffic. Ollie clamped her hands over her eyes. Artur swore a number of times, loudly and in quick succession.

“Relax. Nothing to worry about,” Dan told them, jerking the car back into the right side.

“Easy for you to say, ye’re already dead!” Artur pointed out. “Some of us don’t have that luxury. And what d’ye mean, ‘a school?’ Sure, I spent me whole childhood avoiding those places, I see no reason why I should change that now.”

“There’s a Malwhere… thing. The Inhabitor, or something.”

“Inhabitant,” said Ollie. She still had her hands over her eyes, and showed no signs of taking them away any time soon.

“Right. The Inhabitant,” Dan said. “It’s taken hostages.”

“The kiddies?” Artur asked.

Dan nodded, then weaved the car through some crawling traffic and gunned the engine again.

“What kind of a monster goes and takes a load of kiddies hostage?” Artur asked.

Ollie parted her fingers and peeked out with one eye. “That guy from the other day,” she said.

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Nona’s father, ye mean? Yeah, he was a wrong ‘un alright, but – credit where credit’s due – he only kidnapped one child.”

Ollie frowned. “Didn’t he take three or four of them?”

“At a time, I mean. He only ever kidnapped one child at a time. Obviously, he nabbed a few over a period of, you know… I mean, I’m not defending him, like. He was a right rumbly bastard, and that’s the truth. But my point is… My point is…”

“What’s your point?” Dan asked.

“My point is…” Artur threw up his arms. “I’ve lost me train of thought now. Thanks a bunch. I was probably about to say something really profound, and now it’s gone forever.”

“We were talking about the kids,” Dan said.

“Oh aye! That’s right! The kiddie snatcher. Now I remember what I was going to say. Let’s go kick the feckin’ shoite out of the bastard.”

“Well now,” said Dan, swinging the cruiser onto another street. “That is certainly profound.”

A barricade of armed Tribunal officers had been set up in the road ahead. They stood with their backs to the school building, staring impassively at the throngs of wailing men and women they were holding back. The parents, Dan assumed. If they didn’t back off, the Tribunal would start spraying stun shots into the crowd. Causing a public disturbance brought stiff penalties, and the way the parents were howling and sobbing was undoubtedly disturbing to witness.

“Keep your head down,” Dan said. Ollie nodded, then waited for Artur to comply. “You, I meant. He’s hiding in a cup holder. I’m not overly concerned about anyone spotting him.”

“Oh. Right,” said Ollie. She leaned sharply forwards and thonked her head on the dash, but tried very hard to pretend she hadn’t. “Better?”

“Let’s hope so,” Dan said. He flashed the cruiser’s headlights. The barrier of cops parted, and two of them beckoned for the car to drive through. Engaging the helmet’s visor so it covered his face, Dan waved an acknowledgement as he prowled through the gap and rolled on up to the school’s front gate.

There were more Tribunal grunts standing around here, none of them doing anything useful. From their uniform and general demeanor, Dan knew this had to be the clean-up crew the dispatcher had mentioned. Their job wasn’t to try to save the kids, or even to catch the hostage-taker. Their job was to pick up the pieces, hose the place down, and ensure everything got back up and running as soon as possible. The school would receive a bill for their services, of course. The Tribunal wasn’t a charity.

Dan rolled down his window as he brought the car level with one of the lower-down grunts. He’d deliberately picked someone of lesser rank, as they were always easier to push around or confuse with technical jargon that they should all have learned by now, but invariably hadn’t.

“What’s the status?” he asked.

The clean-up crewman had been busily trying to dangle a trail of saliva all the way from his mouth to the ground. It sprang upwards as he sucked in again, become just a bubble on his lips as he peered into the vehicle.

“Uh, yeah. It’s pretty bad, I think, sir,” said the grunt. His nostrils flared as he caught a whiff from inside the car. He swallowed a couple of times, but said nothing. “I mean, I don’t know the whole story about what’s going on, exactly, but they’re expecting a pretty sizeable clean-up job. They’ve got three different crews here. They must be bracing for something big.”

“Are we inside?” Dan asked. “Have we made contact?”

“Don’t think so. Uh… Made contact with who?” the cleaner asked. “Sorry, they don’t really tell us much. But no, there’s no-one from the Tribunal in the building. As far as I know.”

He pointed into the car. “Is, uh, is she dead?”

Dan glanced to his right, where Ollie was still folded forward with her head on the dash. Her attempts at hiding had not gone unnoticed.

“No. She’s just resting,” Dan said.

“Right. It’s just… something kind of smells pretty dead in there.”

“Yeah. It’s not her,” Dan said, then he raised the window and the car crept ahead through the open gate.

While not having a job Down Here was a criminal offence punishable by death, education was no longer compulsory. It had been, once, until the Tribunal-run local government had decided that knowledge was a potentially harmful thing, and the fewer people who had it, the better. Besides, there were lots of jobs that children could do better than adults – cleaning narrow spaces, or programming video recording equipment, for example – and so schools and libraries had been quietly closed until only a handful of educational facilities remained.

The schools that had kept their doors open had seen their funding slashed year on year. If the Tribunal couldn’t kill them with a single blow, they’d damn well bleed them to death. If it hadn’t been for the whole Malwhere monster element, Dan would’ve suspected the Tribunal had set the hostage situation up itself. What better way to destroy a school’s reputation than with a spot of mass kidnapping and child murder?

Dan stopped the car beside something oozing and bloody. The body – or the remains of one, at least – was splayed out beside some playground equipment, its insides missing, its eyes staring blankly Up There.

It was an adult. Dan knew that shouldn’t have really made it better, but it did.

“Is she dead?” Artur asked, craning his neck to peer out through the windshield.

“For her sake, I hope so,” Dan replied. He got out of the car and made a cursory check of the woman’s vitals, despite the lack of heart and lungs making the result a bit of a given.

She had a kind face, Dan noted. Even in death, even with it frozen in a mask of terror the way it was, she had a kind face.

Returning to the car, Dan pulled Mindy from beneath his seat. The gun was too big to fit into the riot armor’s hip holster, so Dan was just going to carry it. He suspected an opportunity to shoot something might well present itself fairly soon, so keeping the weapon out and ready made sense.

“Can I sit up now?” Ollie asked.

“Yeah. Go ahead,” Dan told her.

Ollie straightened and reached for her door handle. “But stay there,” Dan told her. “And I mean it this time. There are kids in there. If you come wandering in you might get them killed. Is that understood?”

To his surprise, Ollie didn’t protest. “OK,” she said. “Understood. Be careful.”

Dan nodded. “Artur, you’re with me. You can get places I can’t.”

“Ye can say that again,” said Artur, scurrying across the dash, jumping onto the driver’s seat, them trampolining up into the empty holster on Dan’s hip. “Sure, one time I climbed right up the pee-hole of…” He caught Ollie’s wide-eyed expression. “…a wildly inappropriate story,” he concluded.

Dan began to close the door, but Ollie leaned down and shouted through the narrowing gap. “What if someone comes? The Tribunal, I mean.”

“Sit tight. Don’t leave the car,” Dan said. “It’s blaster proof, and it’ll take them a while to activate the override that’ll open the doors. If you need to get out of here, use the hand.”

Ollie glanced down at her own hands. “Which one?”

“That one,” said Dan, pointing into the back. “The car’s locked to its prints. Press the fingertips against that panel and you can drive away.”

“Great. OK. That’s great,” she said. The door started to close again. “Wait!”

Dan raised the door. “What?”

“How do you drive?”

“You’ll figure it out. Don’t leave the car.”

Dan closed the door before she could ask anything else. After a quick glance back at the gates to make sure no other Tribunal squads were about to storm the place, he headed for the school’s open front door.

“Mindy, stun shot,” he instructed. The gun’s cylinder spun and illuminated. He had full charge, which was a nice change. Hopefully, he wouldn’t need it.

“Stun? Ye sure about that, Deadman?” Artur asked. “If we’re dealin’ with what ye think we’re dealin’ with, wouldn’t it be best to, ye know, blow it to bits? I mean, far be it from me to tell ye yer business, but that would seem sensible, wouldn’t it?”

“Can’t risk it,” Dan said, closing in on the door. “If I stun a kid, that’s one thing. If I disintegrate one…”

“Yeah. Yeah, fair point, well made,” Artur conceded. “So, we’ll just stun the bastard, then start layin’ boots into him.”

“Her,” Dan corrected.

“Ye what?”

“The report said the hostage taker is a woman.”

“I thought ye said it was yer monster man. The Inhabitant, or whatever he calls himself?”

“I did,” Dan said. “But that’s what the report said. Guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

The door wasn’t open all the way wide enough for him to fit through. Swapping Mindy to his left hand, he held the gun ready as he eased the door the rest of the way, revealing a hallway beyond.

Dan stepped through into a cacophony of color. The walls themselves were a dirty-yellow sort of white, with brown and black staining in the upper corners. Almost every available inch had been covered in charmingly amateurish artwork, though, showcasing a variety of textures, techniques and talent levels.

“Holy shoite, I don’t fancy yer demon-boy’s chances in this place,” whispered Artur. He gestured to a wall adorned with a selection of self-portraits. “I mean, look at the mugs on that lot. I’ve had nightmares that are less terrifying than some o’ those faces.”

Dan glanced at a strip of paper pinned up beneath a couple of the portraits. “They were drawn by three-year-olds,” he pointed out. “I doubt they’re all that accurate.”

“I feckin’ hope not,” said Artur. “Sure, half of them look like they’ve melted, and that one’s eating his own eyes.”

“Quiet,” said Dan. “Listen.”

Artur listened.

“What am I supposed to be hearing?”

“Anything,” said Dan.

Artur listened again. “Well, I can’t.”

“That’s my point,” Dan said.

Artur looked up from inside the holster. “Shoite. Ye don’t think we’re too late, do ye?”

Dan gestured to another open door at the opposite end of the hall. Thirty drawings, all different, plastered the walls around it. They showed tall, shimmering buildings, blossoming trees, smiling faces. According to the studiously hand-written note beside the display, the drawings showed the kids’ ideas of what Up There might look like. Dan didn’t really notice any of that, though. All he noticed was the bloody handprint on the drawing nearest the door.

It was small enough to be an older child’s, he thought, but large enough to belong to a slightly-built adult. As Dan approached the door, he saw spots of blood leading like a trail into the corridor beyond.

Like the hallway, the corridor was deserted. More drawings and paintings and cut-out creations lined the walls, broken up only by five doors – two on one side, three on the other. The spattering of blood spots led into the first room, then crossed to the second. The trail continued to zig-zag along the corridor until it reached the final door. It didn’t come out again. Whatever was leaving the trail had visited each of the classrooms in turn, and as Dan approached the first of the open doors, he found himself holding a breath that hadn’t been planning to go anywhere anyway.

“Careful now,” Artur whispered. He’d clambered up onto Dan’s shoulder without him noticing, and the sudden voice in his ear almost made Dan jump out of his skin.

“Don’t do that,” Dan hissed.

“Oh, man-up, ye big eejit,” Artur told him, then he ducked inside the visor of Dan’s riot helmet and watched through the glass as Dan edged the classroom door all the way open and swept his gun across the chaos inside.

There was more blood on the floor, but it was smeared, as if something had been dragged through it. A row of desks had been knocked over, and most of the chairs now lay on their backs. A bright yellow bean bag was stained partly orange with blood, and most of its foam beads had spilled out of a wide split along the seam.

Several datapads lay smashed on a carpeted area near the entrance. Dan saw a child-sized footprint on one broken screen, the shoe tread pointing towards the door. There was a spot of blood on top of the print, suggesting whatever had been dripping the stuff had followed behind the child.

Dan tried to do his detective step-by-step replay thing again. Monster comes in, trashes the place, kids run away, monster leaves. That was about as far as he could get, and he had no idea how accurate even that was.

He checked the next couple of room, spending less time at each than the one before. The final door was where the action was going to be, he knew, and he couldn’t put it off any longer. Noops’s ill-fitting boots creaked softly as Dan crept towards the last door, Mindy held in both hands, his finger hovering lightly on the trigger.

“Go,” Dan whispered.

Artur immediately ducked out from beneath the visor, slid down Dan’s back, and scampered across the floor until he reached the door. He peeked through the gap between the door and the frame, then held up a hand for Dan to stop. The hand remained raised for several seconds while Artur tried to figure out what was going on inside the classroom, then became a shrug when he realized he couldn’t.

Moving quickly and quietly, he reached the other end of the door, listened at the edge for a moment, then peeked around the corner.

“Oh bolloc—” he ejected, before a hand slapped down on him and dragged him into the room.

“Shizz,” Dan spat. He stormed into the room, Mindy held in front of him.

“Wait, Deadman, don’t shoot!” Artur yelped. He was clutched like a toy in the hand of a short, pudgy child with tightly-cropped silver hair and a slack, virtually lifeless expression.

Forty or more other kids of various shapes and sizes stood to a sort of relaxed attention all around the room, their eyes glassy, their mouths open, their arms hanging limply by their sides.

Behind the wall of children, a woman in business attire was on her knees, her face buried in the torso of what Dan guessed was a teacher. She was facing away from the door and didn’t appear to have noticed him, but all those kids standing between Dan and her meant he couldn’t risk taking a shot.

Instead, he put a finger to the visor of his helmet and ushered the kid holding Artur towards the door. The boy didn’t move at first, but then his mouth opened and a voice that wasn’t his – couldn’t be his – emerged.

“It’s useless,” he said in a scratchy whisper that oozed wickedness. “They’re mine now.”

Another child continued in the same voice – a girl this time, over on Dan’s right. “They’re all mine.”

“Who are you?” Dan asked.

Several of the children all whispered the word, one after another.

“Aranok.”

“Aranok.”

“Aranok.”

Artur cleared his throat. “I reckon she’s probably called ‘Aranok’,” he said. “Though don’t ask me how I know. Intuition, maybe.”

He wriggled a little to indicate his arms were pinned to his sides. “By the way, for a stubby little fat lad, this kid’s got one helluva grip. Sure, if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was trying to squeeze me till me head popped off.”

“The Inhabitant,” Dan said, the name now making a lot more sense. “You’re controlling them.”

This time, the children all spoke as one, the same voice emerging from them all at the exact same moment. “I am them. I am inside their heads. I am inside your head, too.”

The woman, who had continued gnawing away at the inside of the teacher’s body, turned her face in Dan’s direction. Even through the mask of blood, he recognized her. She was the woman from those family photographs back in the apartment Noops had sent him to.

“Freeze,” she said in that same scratchy male voice.

Dan froze, his gun still held in front of him.

“Deadman?” said Artur. “Deadman? Ye alright there, Deadman? Deadman? Are ye alright there?”

“Silence,” said Aranok through the boy holding Artur. Artur’s mouth continued to move, but no sound emerged.

At the back of the room, the woman stood up, revealing just how awash with blood and gore she really was. Her face, neck, hair and hands were all caked with the stuff, and unless her dry-cleaner was some kind of miracle worker, that suit was almost certainly ruined.

Her movements were slow and jerky, like she was still getting used to having legs. She shuffled back and forth behind the wall of kids, blood dripping from her chin, nose and fingertips.

“What do you want?” Dan asked, his voice hissing through his clenched teeth.

“What everyone wants,” she replied, before the children explained further.

“Power.”

“Power.”

“Power.”

“To rule this place,” she concluded.

Dan managed a snort. “Ain’t much here worth ruling.”

“All here,” Aranok said. The woman’s arms jerked upwards. “The world. The stars. The everything.”

“Well, she’s ambitious, I’ll give her that,” said Artur. “Hey! Check it out, I can talk again.”

“Silence,” said the boy.

“Aw, ye nasty…” Artur began, then his volume dropped to zero.

The woman had to be Aranok’s principal host. He’d somehow come through to this dimension, taken over her body, then used it to kill her husband and son. The organ-eating had to be about the demon building its strength, so if it was still hungry it hadn’t yet reached full power.

The bad news was that there were an army of kids between Dan and the demon.

There was good news, too, but he wasn’t quite ready to share that yet.

“There is power here,” Aranok said, the host’s legs jerking unevenly as he lurched it back and forth. “Close by, but not you. Outside. Such raw, untapped power. I must have it.”

She fixed her gaze on Dan, and he suddenly felt like lots of tiny fingers were rifling through his brain. “Who? Where? Tell me.”

“OK,” Dan grunted. “But can I tell you something else first?”

The woman cocked her head. “Tell me what?”

Dan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not really frozen,” he said. “Mindy, Brown Noise.”

As the cylinder spun, Dan lowered the gun towards the kids and squeezed off a couple of shots. The two children who found themselves on the receiving end blinked their lifeless eyes in surprise as the contents of their bowels noisily evacuated into their underwear.

Sweeping the gun across the sea of upturned faces, he fired several more times. The room erupted into a chorus of parps and squelches, and Aranok stumbled backwards in his stolen skin.

“What is this?” the demon demanded.

“Figured you were still getting used to the whole physical form thing,” Dan said, blasting another kid with a bolt of Brown Noise. A stream of hot, steaming effluent splattered down the girl’s legs and out through the bottom of a pants leg. “Thought I’d give you a crash course in some of the… more visceral aspects.”

Three of the affected kids clutched their stomachs and began to wail, their slack-jawed expressions becoming a range of horrified ones. At the back of the class, Aranok’s host clutched her stomach and staggered, a moan of demonic distress bursting from her lips.

Several of the kids who Dan hadn’t forced to spectacularly shizz themselves began to blink rapidly. The smell hit them like a physical blow, making them recoil in disgust.

“Ew, there’s poop!” yelped one girl, which immediately kicked off a chorus of squeals from some of the other kids. “There’s poop everywhere!”

“I can’t stop!” hollered a boy, doubling over as a gush of brown liquid erupted right through the seat of his pants. “I can’t make it stop!”

The squealing intensified. A bigger girl made a break for the door, the neck of her school uniform pulled up over her nose and mouth to block out the smell. Emboldened by this, several other kids raced to join her, wailing, dry-heaving and occasionally sliding in puddles of shizz as they made their escape.

The kid who had been holding Artur released his grip. As Artur fell to the floor, he relished the sensation of freedom, relieved that he no longer felt like his intestines were about to be squeezed out through his face. Then he plopped into a waist-high pile of runny feces, which really put a dampener on the moment.

Dan stepped aside to let the kids past. The route to the demon was clear now. Time to end this.

“Mindy, stun shot,” he commanded. Maybe he could still save the woman. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe this could all work out.

He took aim, but as he squeezed the trigger he felt those probing fingers through his brain again. His arm jerked upwards, and the bolt screamed harmlessly over the demon-host’s head.

Well, not ‘harmlessly’ exactly.

An ancient metal pipe running along the top of the wall exploded. There was a roar like some great wild beast. Dan, Artur and the woman all looked up as the ceiling above her collapsed and a large metal filing cabinet dropped through from the floor above, killing her instantly.

Dan stood there for several seconds, gun still raised, watching the now mostly-headless corpse twitching on the floor. He didn’t even look down when a shizz-sodden Artur waddled over to stand beside him.

“Ye know what?” Artur said, squelching in his pleather leggings. “That actually went quite a lot better than I expected. Sure, a lot of sweet, innocent children will likely have their arses hanging in tatters thanks to ye shootin’ them, and whatnot, but all things considered? I call that a result!”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

They collected Ollie from the car, retrieved Dan’s own clothes from where he’d wedged them under the driver’s seat, then snuck off via the school’s back gate while the Tribunal clean-up squads were contending with the army of fast-moving, shizz-spraying infants.

They found a public bathroom a few blocks away and, after scoping the place out for a while, Dan and Artur risked venturing inside. It was better than most other public bathrooms in that the water was working, two of the six cubicles had doors, and there wasn’t a predatory sex-pest lurking in any of the corners. In Down Here terms, this was bordering on decadence.

Dan changed out of the Tribunal gear while Artur rinsed himself off in the sink. The water alternated between icy cold and blisteringly hot, so much of the time was spent hovering right at the edge of the rust-colored flow, ready to jump clear whenever the temperature started playing silly buggers.

Once he’d finished changing, Dan held Artur under the hand-drier for a while. The warm air turned Artur’s hair and beard so fluffy they appeared to double in size. This amused Ollie no end when they finally emerged from the bathroom.

“Artur! You’re all…” She puffed out her cheeks as big as they’d go. “Seriously! You’re like…” She blew her cheeks out again, but this time added in some hand gestures to indicate her face wasn’t really doing the scale of Artur’s beard justice.

“True, but on the other hand, I’m not dripping with a fat lad’s shoite,” Artur said. “So, swings and roundabouts, eh?”

He was perched on Dan’s shoulder, holding onto an ear for support. “Now, since we’ve, ye know, probably saved the entire universe from whatever that bastard of a thing was, I think we should all go to the pub. I reckon we earned ourselves a day on the lash after all that. And that kid squeezing me has worked up a terrible thirst, so it has. Sure, I’ve a mouth like yer granny’s vagina.”

He patted Dan’s ear. “No offence, like, I’m sure she was a fine woman.”

“We’ll go later,” Dan said, much to Artur’s dismay.

“Later, he says. Always with the later. What’s so important that we have to put off valuable drinking time?” he asked.

Dan took the datapad from his coat and swiped a hand above the screen. He looked up at the buildings around them, then compared them to the map that appeared on the pad. “Tressingham. The cheating husband? He was last seen near here. Some kind of warehouse or factory or something.”

“Was it an alcohol factory, Deadman? Hmm? Because if not, I can’t say that I’m all that interested.”

Dan started walking, checking the map as he went. “It’s just a couple of blocks away. We’ll go check it out, swing by the office so you can get changed and I can pick up a coat that doesn’t have a gunshot hole in the pocket, and then we’ll go to the pub.”

Artur sighed. “Fine. But the first round’s on you,” he said. “And all subsequent rounds, also.”

* * *

Even before the whole death and reanimation thing, Dan seemed to spend a disproportionate amount of time snooping around in warehouses. There were a lot of warehouses Down Here – huge swathes of the city were nothing but hangar-sized industrial storage units and smoke-spewing factories – and a lot of untoward stuff went down in and around them.

The warehouse Noops had given him the location of was, like the bathroom they’d encountered earlier, better than most. From the outside, it looked almost clean. Its windows were mostly unbroken, probably on account of them being too high and small for the average wandering thug to be able to hurl a brick through.

The whole place was protected by a ten feet tall electrified fence, topped by coils of laser wire. Dan’s central nervous system had deteriorated well beyond the point of being troubled by a few thousand volts, though, and he’d managed to widen a gap in the fence enough for Artur to squeeze through. By the time he and Ollie had walked around to the gate, it was already sliding open.

There were two little guard huts by the gate, one outside the compound, the other inside. Neither one had any guards stationed in them, and the pristine sparseness of the insides suggested there never had been.

Artur hopped on the button to close the gate behind Dan and Ollie, then jumped from the hut’s window onto the top of Dan’s hat.

“Oh, wow,” he said, sitting propped up in the folds of the fedora’s fabric. “I can see for miles up here!”

“Can you?” asked Ollie. She stood on her tiptoes, trying to imagine what it was like to be sitting on the head of the much taller Dan. “Can I have a go next?”

“No,” said Dan, marching in the direction of the warehouse’s front entrance. “You cannot.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Artur asked. “Shoot first, ask questions if the opportunity arises?”

Dan shook his head, forcing the little guy to hold on. “Sorry, forgot,” he mumbled. “But no, it’s a cheating husband thing. I won’t be shooting anyone.”

“Ye say that now. I’m pretty sure ye said the same thing last month about that old woman’s missing cat.”

“That was different,” Dan said. “It was very different. It was a very big cat.”

“And it could fly, mind?” Artur said. “And spat acid out of its eyes.” He frowned and shook his head. “Sure, now I think about it, I’m not convinced it was even a cat at all.”

They found the door closed and locked, which came as no great surprise. Dan knew there were any number of clever ways to get inside. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what any of them were, so he kicked it twice, drove a shoulder against it once, then blew the lock off in a moment of angry frustration.

“What’d I say? Shoot first…” said Artur, and Dan could picture the smug look on his face.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, easing open the door and stepping inside. “I’ll pay for the damage.”

“Well, ye’ll pay for it out of yer own share,” Artur said.

Dan stopped just inside the doorway. “What do you mean, my own share?”

“Yer share of the proceeds,” Artur said. “Fifteen thousand credits, split three ways. Plus expenses. Forty, forty, twenty, on account of herself not really doing much that’s actually useful. No offense, peaches.”

Ollie, who hadn’t really been listening all that closely, shrugged and smiled. It was nice just not being endlessly tortured in a Hell-dimension, really. Anything else was a bonus.

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Dan said, stepping all the way into the room. As he did, a series of motion-activated lights lit the place up, revealing a mostly empty space with just three or four tables gathered together in a corner like space cows standing in a field.

On the wall closest to the tables were several large pieces of paper, each one covered in inch-high letters, symbols and numbers. Dan recognized it right away as ‘science shizz’, which instinctively made him pull a grimace. He didn’t have a great track record when it came to science types. Then again, he didn’t have a great track record when it came to most people, so he probably shouldn’t single scientists out unfairly.

“What’s all that on the table?” Artur asked. He leaned forwards in the dip of Dan’s hat, as if he was steering him. “Over there.”

Dan crossed to the group of tables and stopped at the first one he came to. As he looked down at the tools and random bits of junk that were spread out on it, Artur slid off the hat, waved his arms for a few panicky seconds, then thudded onto the tabletop.

“My bad,” said Dan.

“Ye did that on purpose, ye big stook!” Artur complained, but his grumbling stopped when he spotted something two tables over. He pointed. “Over there. Take me over there, quick.”

Dan showed no sign of moving, so Ollie picked Artur up and carried him across to the other table. She set him down beside some kind of child’s doll or action figure that was roughly his size, but maybe ten to fifteen per cent scaled up.

Where the figure’s face should have been was just a series of neatly-printed circuits and a couple of eyes on metal stalks. Despite the lack of facial features, its curves, long legs and perky plastic breasts clearly marked it as female.

It was dressed in a crudely sewn dress that looked more like a medical gown and stopped just above her knees. Its hair was long and blue, and made Artur think fondly of a dream he’d once had about mermaids.

He drew himself up to his full height. “Well now, what do we have here?” he said, eyeing the figure admiringly. He wasted no time in groping one of the doll’s breasts, which promptly made her fall over. She landed flat on her back with her legs sticking in the air. Artur’s expression took on a note of disapproval.

“Sure, ye shouldn’t go making yerself so available, sweetheart,” he said. “Ye think anyone’s going to respect ye if ye just throw yer legs open like that at the first opportunity?”

He turned and beckoned Dan over. “Stick that in yer pocket,” he whispered. “I’m going to do a number of unspeakable things to it when we get back home.”

“It doesn’t have a face,” Dan pointed out.

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Deadman,” Artur said. “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

A door swished open. A gasp caught in a throat. Both sounds echoed around the cavernous warehouse.

Dan turned to see a charcoal-skinned older man standing frozen in a doorway, his ice-white eyes darting between all three intruders as confusion and terror both wrestled for control of his face.

He looked identical to his picture, other than a couple of additions. The pristine lab coat that probably cost more than Dan’s last three cars was one. The fragile domed helmet that covered his head down to just above the eyebrows was new, too. It was a delicate, mesh thing, like someone had enlarged a snowflake and bent it to fit the wearer’s head.

“Tressingham?” said Dan. This seemed to briefly tip the balance of power in confusion’s direction, but terror rallied quickly and managed to take control of the old man’s eyes.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” he pleaded.

“You are Tressingham, right?” Dan asked. “And we’re not here to hurt you.”

Something in the empty space behind them caught Ollie’s eye. “Um…” she said.

“You want money? I can get you money,” Tressingham croaked. “How much do you want? Name it.”

“Um…”

Dan was growing impatient. “Look, we don’t want anything. We were just snooping around, and… You are Tressingham. You’re from Up There.”

“Guys,” Ollie said. “You might want to see this.”

Tressingham straightened. His hands shook as he balled them into fists. “Who I am is none of your business,” he said, sounding nowhere near as brave as he’d been aiming for. “You made a big mistake coming here. Or, should I say, lots of little ones?”

Artur blinked and looked round at Dan. “What the feck’s that supposed to… Holy shoite, what is that?”

Dan turned in the direction Ollie and Artur were already looking. He was surprised to see that the floor was rising up like a vast ocean wave, rolling and undulating as it stretched higher and higher towards the ceiling.

It moved like a single living organism, and yet reminded Dan of a shoal of fish all swimming tightly together.

Whatever it was, it was getting closer, looming over Dan and the others as if it was about to come crashing down on top of them.

Dan shot it. Twice. The explosive rounds detonated against the thing, punching two man-sized holes in it. The edges of the holes quickly knotted together, until there was no evidence they’d ever even been there.

“You can’t shoot it,” Tressingham scoffed.

“Fine,” said Dan. He turned the gun on the old man. “I’ll shoot you. Call it off.”

Tressingham’s face, which had recently introduced a sense of growing confidence into its range of expressions, surrendered fully to terror. He raised his hands and quickly yanked off his mesh headgear. There was a sound like thunder as the rising floor collapsed in on itself and crashed down. It lay in an inert pile that looked like a hillock in the center of the warehouse floor.

Dan lowered the gun. “Like I said, we’re not here to hurt you. We don’t want anything. We just want to talk,” Dan said.

“And can you tell us what that thing was?” added Ollie.

“And, so you know, I’m taking this doll home with me, and it’s probably best if ye don’t ask me why,” Artur concluded.

Tressingham shuffled further into the room, fiddling with his mesh and wire helmet. “Are you from Up Here? Are you here to shut me down?” he asked. Tears of panic welled up in his eyes as his throat tightened with worry. “I did everything by the book. That’s why I’m here. They don’t have the same regulations. It’s allowed here. I checked, and it’s allowed!”

Dan slid Mindy back into her holster and glanced back at the unmoving mound of floor. It had moved like liquid, but now seemed fully solid. “What’s allowed?” he asked. “And do we look like we’re from Up There?”

Tressingham flitted his eyes across all three of them, as if only seeing them for the first time. “How should I know?” he asked, but he sounded a little less uptight than he had just a few seconds before. His voice started to take on that same brusque, officious tone his wife’s had. It was a tone that suggested he was better than everyone else in the room, that he knew it, and that he was damn sure everyone else was going to know it, too. “Who are you, then? What do you want?”

Dan briefly considered some elaborate lie, but he didn’t have the energy. “Your wife sent me,” he said.

Tressingham blinked. “My wife? I find that very hard to believe.”

“Kooriashian,” Dan said.

“Nice woman,” said Artur. “I mean, bit of a stuck-up cow, maybe, but nice enough.”

“Koori? But… but why? Why would Koori send…?”

His fingers tightened on the headgear and he took a step back. “What do you want? Are you here to hurt me? Is she seeing one of you? All of you? What is this?”

“I’m a detective,” Dan said.

“If ye use the term quite loosely,” Artur added.

“Your wife believes you’re having an affair with someone Down Here. She hired me to find out who with.”

Tressingham spent the next several seconds blinking in surprise. Finally, he let out a high-pitched, ‘Ha!’ that was part relief, and part disbelief.

“An affair?! Me? With someone Down Here?!” He laughed. It was a breathless, sniveling thing, and was almost certainly the same noise he’d make if he were crying. “How preposterous. How utterly, utterly preposterous. What gave her such an idea?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Dan, shrugging. “The secret phone calls, the clandestine conversations, the sneaking around Down Here when you said you were working late. To be honest, she has me convinced, but if you want to try me with another explanation, I’m all ears.”

Ollie shot him a sideways look that didn’t go unnoticed.

“Not literally,” Dan said, not breaking eye contact with Tressingham. “So, if you aren’t banging some ‘commoner’, what brings you Down Here?”

“Tiny robots,” the old man said.

Dan hadn’t been expecting that answer. He’d been prepared for a number of different possible explanations, but ‘tiny robots’ hadn’t made the cut.

“What, like this thing?” asked Artur, hoisting the fallen doll up by one foot.

“Hmm? No! No, of course not that. They built that. I was testing their fine motor control,” Tressingham explained, without really explaining anything. “Or my fine motor control using them, I mean. It’s rather tricky, operating so many for such a complex task. Caused quite the headache.”

“What’s he talking about?” Ollie asked.

“I have no idea,” Dan admitted. “What are you talking about?”

Tressingham glanced around at the doors, and then up to the high windows overhead. The blue glow of the city-sized engines was just visible through the glass. Once he was sure no-one was listening in, he continued.

“We have certain rules and regulations Up There. Safety issues, mainly. The continued health and well-being of all citizens is of paramount importance, and while that is, of course, a good thing, it slows progress, as it prevents those of us with such interests from testing our more radical theories. It’s a small price to pay for Utopia, but a price all the same.”

He gestured to the building around them. “Down Here, you have no such regulations. You treat public safety as something of an afterthought. With a relatively small amount of money, someone from Up There can make great inroads into science Down Here, provided they don’t attract the attention of the Up There authorities, of course.”

As he was speaking, Tressingham’s entire demeanor was gradually changing. He no longer looked terrified, and his words were starting to tumble out of him as his hand gestures became bolder and more animated.

“Down Here affords such freedom, you see? Freedom to… to… to push the boundaries. To try new things which we can’t try Up There. Which we are not allowed to, for the collective good. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, we’re all about freedom Down Here,” he said, but if Tressingham picked up on the sarcasm, he chose to ignore it.

“Precisely!”

Artur raised a hand. “I’m still waiting for the part about the tiny robots,” he said. “And also, if ye could maybe throw in an explanation about how the floor rose up like it was going to kill us, I for one would really appreciate it.”

“Not the floor,” Tressingham said. “Tiny robots, each one smaller than the eye can comprehend, all working in unison. Together. Controlled by this.”

He held up the mesh headpiece, presenting it for them all to see. He put such ceremony into raising it aloft that it almost felt as if a shaft of sunlight should come through a window and strike it, and a Heavenly chord should fill the room.

When neither of those things happened, he lowered it again.

“Nanobots,” said Dan. Tressingham’s constantly in-flux expression became one of surprise.

“Yes. Yes, that’s correct,” he said, smiling at Dan like a parent might smile at a child who’d finally stopped eating crayons and started drawing with them instead. “Well done. Nanobots.”

“Wait,” said Artur. “Go back to the tiny robots, I want to hear about them.”

“They are the tiny robots,” Dan said. “Nanobots. They’re… what? Molecular level size?”

“Not quite. Not yet,” said Tressingham. He puffed up his scrawny chest. “But I’m getting closer. Although, at this stage, size isn’t the issue. It’s control. That’s the difficult part.”

His excitement was starting to build again. It was as if he’d been holding the secret in for so long that now he had started talking about it, he couldn’t shut it off.

“I’ve been able to make basic shapes, issue simple commands, but maintaining the concentration required is difficult. It thinks like one entity, but with a trillion individual minds. It’s easier to work with small batches…” He gestured to the lump on the floor. It didn’t look like a particularly small batch. “But even then, it takes its toll.”

Ollie looked from Tressingham to Dan and back again a few times. “So… what’s happening? He isn’t seeing someone else?”

“Of course not!” the old man said. “I love my wife. I’d never do anything to hurt her. I’m doing this for her. Once perfected, the nanobots will earn me great acclaim, and us both more money than we know what to do with. We’ll be able to go anywhere in the galaxy, see anything we like. I can finally give her the life she deserves.”

“Yeah, well, she thinks you’re a cheatin’ scumbag,” Artur said. “So, there’s that.”

“I’d destroy all of this, here and now, if she asked me to,” Tressingham said, straightening his back and clearing his throat. “I’d activate the self-destruct and end it all. She comes first. She’s always come first.”

Dan put his hands on his hips and looked around the place. “I don’t think she’ll want you to do that,” he said. “If it’s going to make you richer, I’m sure she’ll get behind it. But tell her the truth.”

“But that advice only applies to this particular situation right here,” Artur pointed out. “Ye don’t want to go telling her the truth all the time, that way’s a slippery slope. Take it from one who knows.”

Tressingham looked as if he was weighing his options up, but then nodded. “I’ll tell her. You’re right, of course. I should never have tried to keep it a secret.”

He bit his lip, turning the helmet device over and over in his hands. “And what about Up There? You won’t report me, will you? I can’t have them finding out until I’m finished. Not when I’m so close.”

Dan shrugged. “You want to spend your days playing with little robots, that’s no business of mine,” he said. “I was hired to find out if you were having an affair, and I don’t believe you are.”

“I’m not! Honestly, I’m not.”

“Like I said, I don’t believe you are,” Dan continued. “No need to protest your innocence. Just…” He gestured around them. “… do me a favor, and don’t let this get out of hand. You might think no-one cares enough about the people Down Here to worry about this sort of thing, but that’s not quite true.”

“It’s mostly true, though,” Artur added.

“It is mostly true,” Dan conceded. “But I care. Why? I don’t know. But I care. And I’ll be keeping an eye on you and your tiny robots.”

“I thought they were too small to see,” Ollie interjected.

“Metaphorically speaking,” Dan said, gritting his teeth. “I meant… Forget it. Doesn’t matter.” He touched the brim of his hat and gave Tressingham a nod. “Tell your wife what you’ve been doing.”

“And tell her that the balance of payment is now due,” Artur added. He pointed to the doll still lying, legs raised, on the table beside him. “Also, would ye happen to have a face for this one lying around somewhere?”

“Uh… no. No, sorry.”

“Not to worry,” Artur said, indicating for Dan to put the doll in his pocket. “Sure, ye don’t look at the fireplace when ye’re poking the fire, am I right?”

Tressingham shot Dan a quizzical look. “Trust me,” Dan said. “You don’t want to know.”

* * *

The gate slid closed behind Dan and Ollie. Tressingham waved at them from the inner guard station, then scampered off towards the warehouse.

“Well, that’s that, then,” said Artur, his head and shoulders poking up out of Dan’s one remaining coat pocket. “All’s well that ends well. Mission accomplished. Job well done, case closed, and all that bollocks. Ye did grand there, Deadman, a fine bit of detectiving all round. First, we save the galaxy from yer monster woman thing, and then we save a marriage from an even worse monster – unfounded suspicion.”

“I wouldn’t say it was unfounded,” Ollie said. “He’d been acting pretty suspiciously.”

“Was he having an affair?”

“Well…”

“Was he having an affair?”

“No, but…”

“There ye are, then. Unfounded,” Artur said. He stretched and yawned. “Yep, it’s been a productive old day, alright. Now, ye were saying something earlier about us all heading to the pub, am I right?”

“Office first, then pub,” Dan said.

“Ye drive a hard bargain, so ye do, but fair enough,” Artur said. “Sure, after the day we’ve been having, we’ll probably find a pot o’ gold sitting on the doorstep.”

“Yeah. I doubt that,” Dan said.

“Who knows?” Artur replied, rolling in Dan’s pocket as he and Ollie set off walking. “It feels like one of those rare days where – with the exception of falling into a child’s shoite – everything’s just going to go right.”

* * *

Dan realized something was wrong just before the baton cracked across the side of his head, turning half the room into a column of white light, and half the floor into quicksand.

He stumbled across the office, hand slapping the front of his coat as he tried to find a route to the gun holstered inside.

Something jammed against his throat and electricity surged through his head, turning his brain into a twitching mush of incoherence. He swung with a wild punch that rattled harmlessly off a blast proof visor, then cried out in shock as another baton-strike smashed against the back of his skull, sending him crashing into the filing cabinet.

“What the feck?” cried Artur, pulling himself out of Dan’s pocket. Six Tribunal Enforcers rushed in to join the two who had been lying in wait – four from the inner office, two others thundering in through the outer office door. “So, it’s a fight, yer after, is it?” Artur asked, rolling up the sleeves of his blouse.

The top drawer screeched as Dan tore it free and swung it in a wide head-height arc. One of the Enforcers went down hard, but the momentum of the swing threw Dan even further off-balance, and two of the other grunts slammed into his legs and upper body, bringing him to the ground.

“Hey! Leave him alone!” Ollie cried. She made a move to grab for one of the Enforcers, a faint outline of blue light flickering around her fingertips.

“W-wait!” Dan spat, the word slurring out of his mouth. “Don’t.”

Ollie hesitated. Artur didn’t. He raced at one of the men, roaring and holding aloft a stub of a pencil he’d found in Dan’s pocket as if it were a spear.

Dan pulled himself together enough to lunge and swat Artur aside, then hissed when a boot stamped down on his back, pinning him to the floor.

“Stay down, citizen,” the Enforcer currently standing on Dan’s back barked. “We are the Tribunal. You have been tried and found guilty of the murder of Enforcer Gorandon Noop.”

“I swear, ye big bollocks, leave him alone,” Artur warned, but Dan motioned for him to calm down.

“Don’t,” he grunted, shifting his gaze from Artur to Ollie’s feet, which was pretty much the only part of her he could see from his current position. “Just… Don’t.”

“The sentence is death,” the Tribunal grunt intoned. Dan gave Artur the briefest of nods, then braced himself for the gunshot.

It never came.

The boot was removed from Dan’s back. Two pairs of hands grabbed him roughly by the arms. “But first, the boss wants to see you,” another of the Enforcers said.

Dan caught just the briefest glimpse of Ollie’s terrified expression, before something hammered him on the head for a third time, and the world rolled upwards into darkness.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Time passed.

Dan heard voices somewhere. Far away. Or maybe very close.

One of those, anyway.

He said something, although he didn’t know what or why. It was important. Or it might have been incoherent gibberish.

Again, one of those.

It had taken him an hour or two to go from ‘fully unconscious’ to ‘marginally awake’. He hovered at that sort of ten per cent awake stage for a while, not aware of much apart from the pain in his head and the numbness in his everything else.

He panicked for a moment that he might be dead. Then he remembered that he definitely was dead, which calmed him down again.

The remaining ninety per cent of the waking up process happened suddenly, and all at once. He snapped his head up and lunged for the figure sitting directly across from him, only to find his arms and legs were fastened to the uncomfortable metal chair he sat on, and the Enforcer sitting opposite was therefore well out of reach.

“You’re awake,” the man said

Three individual pain points in Dan’s skull all voiced their disapproval at his sudden burst of movement, and he sunk deeper into the completely rigid chair. He wanted to squeeze the bridge of his nose, gingerly rub his temples, and generally spend a few minutes feeling sorry for himself, but the expression on the Enforcer’s face told him both sympathy and patience were in short supply.

“I’m awake,” Dan confirmed. His voice sounded even rougher than normal, and he wondered how long he’d been out for. He slowly turned to take in his surroundings, being careful not to anger the gods of head pain by making any sudden moves.

The room was small, with four gray brick walls, one gray metal door, and several hundred different torture devices in an assortment of colors. These were spread out on stainless steel worktops that were fixed to each wall, and which made the place feel like an industrial kitchen or workshop.

Dan recognized several of the tools. Although he wasn’t exactly proud of the fact, he had used them himself in the past. He knew from experience which of them were the most effective at extracting information from a witness (the tooth poppers and eye rubs) and which were mostly there for the torturer’s own amusement (the nail plucks, the flay blades, and anything involving the genitals).

He also knew that they were very rarely actually put to use. The mere fact they were there on display and ready to be used was more often than not all that was required of them.

So, a bog-standard Tribunal interrogation chamber, then. No real surprise there.

With the room dealt with, Dan took stock of himself. His hat and coat were gone. Mindy, too. His boots had been removed, his head felt like it had been split into three different parts, all of which were currently on fire, and whoever had shackled him to the chair had made an annoyingly good job of it.

That done, he turned his attention to the Tribunal grunt. Dan didn’t recognize him, although there were tens of thousands of cops in the city, so there was nothing unusual there. His uniform was the standard black leather and shiny metal combo, with an insignia on his chest suggesting he was reasonably high ranking in whichever one of the organization’s three hundred plus divisions he was a part of.

Dan had no idea if the guy sitting across from him had been one of those who’d stormed his office. He had removed his helmet, revealing a pock-marked face with flamboyant nostrils and oversized lips. When he sneered – which seemed to be his default facial setting – Dan saw a covering of yellow scum on his wide, evenly-sized teeth.

He had large hands, with six fingers on each, and wore leather gauntlets that creaked as he balled and unballed the fingers into fists.

“Can you stop that?” Dan asked. “It’s fonking annoying.”

The grunt clenched his fists even more tightly, then stretched the fingers as wide as they would go.

“No,” he said, then one of the fists slammed upwards into Dan’s chin, knocking his head against the chair’s high back.

“Fine. Then can you stop doing that?” Dan asked. He spat a wad of black blood onto the floor between them. “It’s even more annoying than the creaking thing.”

The other fist took its turn, catching Dan with a left hook that snapped his head around until his chin almost rested on his shoulder.

“I mean it,” Dan said. “Don’t. Only warning.”

The first fist flew towards him again, then jerked to a stop just a few inches away. Dan didn’t flinch. The grunt’s sneer became a mocking grin as he extended his index finger and pointed it in Dan’s face. “Or what? Eh? Or what?” he demanded.

Dan bit his finger off.

The thickness of the leather made this something of a challenge, but it was one Dan rose to admirably. The glove itself remained mostly intact, but the digit within was severed completely. The grunt rolled sideways out of his chair, screaming as blood rapidly filled the glove and began to ooze out at the wrist.

“Or that,” Dan said.

An alarm sounded. A door behind him opened and several footsteps rushed in, then something heavy hit him on top of his head. Dan barely had time to wink at the now eleven-fingered grunt before the darkness returned and welcomed him back to its bosom.

* * *

When Dan awoke next time, the chair across from him was empty. The floor was shiny, as if it had been recently mopped, and the three individual pains in his head had all joined forces to become one single lump of agony.

Otherwise, things were pretty much as they’d been last time. Same room. Same chair. Same torture paraphernalia.

What Dan couldn’t figure out was why he was still alive. Or as alive as he had been earlier that day, at least. If the Tribunal decided you were guilty, you were guilty, and that was that. No trial. No appeal. Just a kill-shot to the head if you were lucky, or a lifetime in the Hollows if you weren’t.

A murder conviction – especially one where the victim was a serving Tribunal officer – was an immediate brains on the wall sentence. That had been standard protocol for as long as Dan could remember, and so he was surprised that his own brains were still residing inside his head.

Of course, it was possible they were just dragging the sentencing out by gradually cracking his head open in order to manually extract his brain by hand, but it seemed unlikely. No, he was being kept alive for a reason. The grunt back at the office had said something about it, but unconsciousness had been coming up fast at that point, and everything beyond that second head strike was all a bit hazy.

“Hello again.”

The voice came from behind Dan, where he knew the door to be. Something about the way the sound echoed in the room told him the door was closed, meaning whoever had spoken had been standing there waiting for him to wake up.

It didn’t sound like the guy whose finger he’d bitten off, but the voice did sound familiar. Someone he’d known back in the old days? No, he’d heard it more recently than that. One of the cops who had stormed the office, then? Yeah, that was probably it.

It was only when the figure lurched into view like he’d only just acquired legs and hadn’t bothered with the instruction manual that Dan realized where he’d heard the voice before.

Aranok the Inhabitant twisted the young officer’s face in a way it was clearly never designed to twist. Dan watched as a split appeared on the man’s tightly stretched top lip, and a drizzle of blood trickled down his chin.

“Surprised?” Aranok asked.

Dan shrugged. “Meh. Not really. Disappointed? Yes. But surprised? No. You things have a habit of coming back.”

“Do we?” the demon asked. “I wouldn’t know.”

Aranok folded at the middle and slumped heavily into the chair across from Dan. The officer he had taken control of looked barely old enough to have completed basic training, but his insignia announced him as a division captain. Probably the son of someone important, Dan reckoned, although he might just be from a species that aged well.

He sat scowling at Dan for a long time, and Dan would swear he could see the thing staring out from behind the young cop’s eyes. The expression the grunt wore was far removed from anything human. The fact he wasn’t screaming in pain suggested Aranok didn’t feel any. Or not while inhabiting a host, anyway. It was a theory Dan hoped to put to the test.

“Was this just a social call, or are you here for a reason?”

“Power. I seek power,” Aranok replied.

“Yeah, you said that already. Good luck with that. I hear if you take a whizz on the underground rails it really charges you up. You should give that a try.”

“You smell of power.”

“I’m told I smell of a lot of things,” Dan said, shrugging. “Power very rarely makes the list.”

Aranok lunged forwards, his fingers splaying as his hands slapped down on Dan’s head. He brought his face close to Dan’s parchment-thin scalp and sniffed long and deeply.

Dan thrust himself upwards in the chair, trying to drive the top of his skull into the end of the demon’s nose, but the hands on his head held him down, and he could do nothing but sit and wait as Aranok snorted and snuffled over his head and down his neck.

At last, the Inhabitant slumped back into his seat. “Not you. The power does not belong to you. It belongs to someone close to you.”

“Buddy, that’s the closest anyone has got to me in a long time,” Dan said, glancing upwards towards the top of his head. “I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.”

Aranok’s leather uniform creaked as he leaned forwards in the chair. “You lie. Tell me who it is, and I shall make your ending swift. Fail to tell me…”

He turned his head to look very deliberately at the torture tools. “The choice is yours.”

Dan furrowed his brow. “Hmm. How long do I have to decide?”

“Decide now. Answer now.”

“Wow. Not long, then,” Dan said. He sighed. “I mean, I don’t want to be tortured. Who does, right? So, there’s that. But then, on the other hand, I really like the idea of shizzing all over your plans for the afternoon, so… It’s difficult.”

He shrugged again. “I guess what I’m really trying to say is, ‘go fonk yourself’.”

Aranok’s borrowed face slackened. A string of bloody saliva stretched out from his bottom lip, slowly extending all the way down to the floor.

“As you wish,” the demon said. He turned towards the torture implements again.

“I’d start with the toes and work upwards,” Dan suggested. “Research shows that’s effective, without ever becoming too repetitive. Because if you’re going to kill me, we don’t want it to be with boredom, right?”

“I do not require such trinkets,” Aranok said, dismissing the tools with a clumsy wave of his hand. “Nor do I need instruction.”

His right eye twitched. At first, Dan thought it was another of the demon’s involuntary motions, but then something in his brain exploded and the cell became a swirling vortex of fire and pain and screaming.

Everything rushed together like a collapsing black hole, leaving Dan in an icy cold black. He tried to breathe, but there was no air down here in the darkness. There was nothing but the damp soil forcing its way up his nostrils, and the sound of his heart’s panicky pounding.

It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. He didn’t need to breathe, and he couldn’t remember if he currently even had a heart. But it was big and bold and vibrant, and every fiber of him screamed for it to stop.

And it did stop. Twenty minutes later.

Dan shuddered violently as he was snapped back to reality. The room resonated with the dying echo of his howls, and there was a pool of tar-like vomit in his lap and spattered down the front of his shirt.

“Where did you go?” Aranok asked. “Where did I send you?”

Dan’s chest heaved from the memory of trying to breathe. He could still taste the bitter soil way at the back of his throat, and could still feel the pressure of it pinning him down.

“Not sure,” Dan grunted. He spat the final remnants of his puke onto the floor. “But I think I left my wallet there. Any chance you could…?”

Aranok’s eyes narrowed. He twitched again. Dan just had time to mumble a quick, “Thanks, man,” before the pain and the panic and the pressure returned, and he was once more lost to his nightmares.

Dan spent the next hour or so dipping in and out of steadily escalating terror. He’d thought he’d learn to adapt, to get used to it, but his attempts to find some happy place down there in the darkness proved to be a big old waste of time.

After the fourth – or fifth? – return trip to his shallow grave, he knew he couldn’t go back. His brain felt like soup. His lungs, which until earlier that day he’d gone months without even thinking about, now roared at him to inhale, exhale and repeat.

“No, don’t. Wait,” he said, stopping the demon mid-twitch. “Wait.”

He shifted in the chair, twisting his wrists inside their restraints. He knew four different ways to get out of these things, only one of which involved the loss of his hands. He could have got his hands free at pretty much any time, but the legs were the problem. There was no way of getting himself out of the leg shackles without becoming a double amputee, and while that might not be too much of a problem at any other time, he doubted Aranok would give him the twenty-minute head start and the sewing kit he’d need to make his escape.

The hands would just have to do.

“What do you want it for? The power,” Dan asked, stalling for time.

“I already explained,” the demon said. “To rule. To rule everything.”

“Yeah, but why?” Dan asked. “I mean, ruling the galaxy, isn’t it a bit of a cliché? How would you rule a whole galaxy? Why would you even want to? I haven’t seen much of it, but what I have seen… It looks like it’d be hard work.”

He leaned his weight to his left and leaned forwards a little to cover what was going on with his wrist. “Take public services, for example. You know, trash disposal, education, cops, even. Bad enough trying to deal with that shizz for one city, never mind billions of planets. And that’s just for starters. Trade routes, planetary disputes, hostile takeovers from other galaxies. You can’t be everywhere at once, so you’re going to need people you trust to keep order. Where are you finding them? And how are you paying them if and when you do? You need to keep those guys loyal, so are you offering benefits? Who’s providing them, and what’s in it for them?”

Dan leaned to his right this time. “Look, I admire your ambition, I do. But, to be honest, I don’t think you’ve really thought it through. You’ve set your sights on ruling the galaxy without even the faintest idea what that actually involves, or how mind-bogglingly fonking tedious it would be. Personally, if I were you, I’d go back to whichever bug-infested shizzhole I crawled out of and find something else to do with my time. Suicide, maybe. Just a suggestion.”

Throughout all this, Aranok’s face had been growing tighter, as if the demon was getting larger inside his stolen skin. He was trembling now, fury blazing behind his eyes.

“But OK, OK,” Dan said. He beckoned with his head for the Inhabitant to come closer. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

The leather uniform creaked again as Aranok bent forwards at the waist. Dan lunged, throwing himself across the gap, his arms outstretched, his legs still fastened to the unmovable chair behind him.

Aranok twitched, and Dan felt the soil start to pour over him again, but then his hands found the demon’s head, and a thumb found one of his eyes.

Dan’s legs jerked as he reached full stretch. For a moment, he lost his grip on the demon-cop, but a frantic scramble found a handhold in the uniform’s chest plate. They both crashed to the floor and Dan drove a forearm into Aranok’s exposed throat, partially crushing his windpipe. Let’s see how he fonking liked it.

That sinking sensation began to drag Dan down into the darkness again. He grabbed Aranok by the hair and smashed his head against the floor. Once. Twice. The darkness pulled back as the demon diverted his efforts into wrestling himself free, but Dan had no intention of letting him get away.

He told himself he shouldn’t feel sorry for the kid. He was a Tribunal captain, which meant he was arguably worse than the demon. Still, it was hard not to feel a pang of guilt as he grabbed him by the head and wrenched it around until his neck splintered and the life left his eyes.

For a moment, everything was still, and Dan almost allowed himself to believe it was over.

And then the figure appeared beside him. It was more a suggestion of a figure, like a shadow of a shadow standing upright beside him. He swung an arm, trying to knock the thing over, but there was nothing solid to connect with.

The incorporeal form of Aranok dropped into a squat, and Dan felt the demon’s cold fingers reaching inside his head, searching for somewhere to install itself. He sensed the thing’s increasing confusion as its probing became faster and more insistent.

“Good luck setting up shop in me, you son of a bedge,” he muttered. “Guess you can only inhabit the living.”

The icy fingers retreated. The shape rose silently upwards out of sight, like smoke on the wind.

Dan heard the door open behind him and footsteps rush in. He remembered the bleeding, broken-necked corpse of the captain pinned beneath him.

“Ah… fonk,” he grunted, and then pain exploded through his skull and he was reunited, once again, with sleep.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ollie paced back and forth, her eyes darting to the door every time she about-turned. Artur sat cross-legged on the table, his chin resting on one tiny hand.

“Ye’re expendin’ a whole lot of energy there for nothing,” he told her. “He ain’t coming back, and that’s that. I’m sorry, peaches, he’s gone.”

“Where?” Ollie asked. “Where has he gone? Where is he?”

“My guess? Probably in a number of different pieces waiting to be tossed into a furnace,” Artur said. He caught the look of horror on Ollie’s face and winced. “Sorry, I maybe could’ve sugar-coated that a bit more.”

Ollie turned and started walking back across the office again. “We shouldn’t have let them take him. We should’ve stopped them.”

“There’s no point beating yerself up. Or beating me up, for that matter. Even if we’d have managed to stop them, ye think there weren’t more of the bastards lurking around, watching on and waiting to come battering the door down?” Artur said. “Anyway, he told us himself to stay back. He might be a bastard, but he’s not a fecking bastard, ye know? He didn’t want to go dragging ye into it. Best if we keep out of it, keep our heads down, and stay out of trouble.”

Ollie looked him up and down. Due to his size, this didn’t take her long. Artur shifted uncomfortably, wilting beneath her stare.

“Alternatively, ye know, on the other hand, we could always track down the feckers what took him, and I could murder them all with me bare hands,” he suggested. “It’ll be getting late soon, and I do love me a bit of violence when it gets late. We might not have been able to save him, but we can have a high old time to ourselves avenging his death.”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Ollie said.

“Have ye seen him?” Artur asked. “Sure, I’ve seen fossils with more life in them.”

“I don’t think he’s more dead, I mean,” Ollie said.

Artur’s caterpillar eyebrows knotted together. “And what’re ye basing that on, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Kind of…” She pointed to a spot on her head just above the bridge of her nose. “Kind of there.”

“Well sure, that’s cast iron, that is,” Artur said, standing up. “That’s good enough for me. If ye can’t trust her own forehead to tell ye if a guy ye basically just met is dead or not, then who can ye trust, am I right?”

Ollie wasn’t familiar with sarcasm, so she just nodded. “Right.”

Artur clicked this tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I don’t suppose yer forehead can provide us with an address, or directions to where we might find him?”

Ollie frowned in concentration. “No. I don’t know.”

“Then we have a problem. It’s a big city, there are lots of Tribunal stations dotted all around the place. It’d take us weeks to check them all, and even if Deadman is somehow still alive, he sure as shoite won’t be by then.”

“I don’t know,” said Ollie.

“Yeah, I got that, peaches. Ye said already.”

Ollie’s eyes widened. “But I might know someone who does.”

* * *

“Oledol Lodelo, as I live and breathe,” oozed the Worm, a gummy smile taking up most of his face. He waited for the bump as the elevator touched down, then beckoned for her to step out.

A tall, broad-set man with a rough, chalk-white hide and a wide assortment of body piercings stood beside a stack of books, his muscular arms folded across his chest. He watched Ollie in silence, his long ears twitching occasionally as if flicking away bugs.

Ollie emerged from the elevator and the Worm’s smile grew wider. “I did wonder why someone was thumping on the door. Remind me to teach you my secret knock.”

There was something salacious about the way he said those last two words that made Ollie’s skin crawl, although she couldn’t quite figure out why.

“It’s funny, actually,” the Worm continued. “Janus and I were just talking about you. Weren’t we, Janus.”

“Yup,” said Janus.

“And now here you are. And without a chaperone this time!”

Artur chose that moment to pop his head up from behind Ollie’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t exactly say that now,” he said. When he saw Artur, the Worm’s face fell.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Ye bet yer bollocks it’s me,” Artur said. He nodded towards the brute by the bookshelves. “Who did ye say this was?”

“Janus,” the stranger intoned.

Artur frowned. “Janice? Sure, what kind of name is Janice for a big lad like yerself?”

“Not Janice. Janus,” Janus corrected.

Artur looked at Ollie. “Is it me? Is it my ears, or something? I’m still hearing Janice.”

“Ja-nus!”

“I’m pretty sure ye’re still just saying ‘Janice’ at me,” Artur said. “Or… wait. D’ye mean like ‘anus’ with a ‘J’ at the start? Is that it? Like Jay Anus?”

Janus smiled, but in a way that showed a lot of teeth, and bore no relationship to his current level of amusement. “It’s Janus. Yes.”

“If it’s alright with you I’m going to call you Jay Anus,” Artur said. “It’s just easier for me, ye know? More convenient.”

The Worm, who had been twisting his neckless torso to look between Janus and Artur, let out a high-pitched and painfully artificial laugh. “Ahaha. Such fun!” He pointedly ignored Artur and fixed his attention on Ollie, instead. “Now, what brings you back to my Onyx Vault, my dear?”

“We’re looking for Dan.”

“Oh. And here I thought you missed me,” the Worm said, his face squelching lightly as his bottom lip stuck out.

“No,” Ollie said. “I didn’t.”

The Worm made a show of looking hurt. “Ouch! Careful, my dear. If you cut me, do I not bleed?”

“Dunno,” said Artur. “But we could find out if ye like.”

“Haha. Perhaps not,” said the Worm, shooting him the briefest of glances. He gestured around the place with his stubby arms. “Well, as you can see, Mr Deadman isn’t here. Sorry to disappoint.”

“We know he isn’t here,” Ollie said. “We came to ask where he was.”

The Worm shrugged. At least, he made some sort of shoulder movement, but without a neck it was difficult to pin down what it was. “I’m afraid I have no idea.”

Ollie shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean that,” she said, turning towards the library door. “We didn’t come to ask you.”

* * *

When Dan next woke up, his hands and feet were free. Or free to the extent that they weren’t shackled to anything, at least. As he was lying flat on his back in a locked prison cell, though, they weren’t all that free in the overall grand scheme of things.

He sat up, but his head demanded to know what the fonk he thought he was doing, and he was forced to lie back down again until the world stopped spinning and the red-hot spikes stopped stabbing him through the eyes and cranium.

From flat on his back, he took in what he could see of his surroundings. The ceiling made up the bulk of the view. It was padded with a soft material, and had a single light fitting designed to be physically impossible to hang a body by the neck from.

He had seen similar rooms often enough to know the other details without having to look. The walls would have the same uniform padding, with smooth corners leading down to the similarly soft floor. One wall would be a semi-transparent counterweight shielding, and any attempts to push through it would be met by an identical amount of force pushing in the opposite direction. Anyone running at the shield would find themselves decelerating just as quickly as they had accelerated, before finishing up on the same spot they’d started from.

Dan rolled slowly onto his side and propped himself up on an elbow. Sure enough, the wispy fog of the counterweight shield hung in the air just a few feet away.

So, he was on suicide watch. The irony of this didn’t escape him, but nor did the meaning of it. It meant someone didn’t want him getting off easily. The Tribunal didn’t care whether prisoners offed themselves in custody – it was practically encouraged. The only time these rooms were used was for prisoners destined for the Hollows, who’d jump at the opportunity to check out of life rather than check in for a life sentence. Someone wanted him to suffer. Figured.

Dan made a deal with his headache that he wouldn’t make any sudden movements and his headache, for its part, made no attempt to shoot his brains out through his nose. The floor felt soft and spongy beneath him, although he couldn’t be sure if that was the padding or a problem with his legs. Probably a little of both, he decided, as he struggled into a standing position.

The room tilted like the deck of a ship. Dan shifted his weight backwards and forwards, struggling to keep his balance.

It was only once he had found his footing that he addressed the figure on the other side of the shield. She had been there since Dan woke up, but he had been in no mood or condition to give her any real thought.

The expression on her face was unmistakable. It was the same one the grunt in the interrogation room had worn.

“Still here, huh?” Dan said. He limped towards the woman, but the counterweight effect of the shielding nudged backwards against him, stopping him getting too close.

“Yes. Still here,” Aranok confirmed. The female officer’s arms jerked upwards, indicating either the rest of the building, the whole of Down Here, or possibly the Universe in general. “And soon everywhere.”

“Wow. You haven’t let that go?” Dan asked. “I thought after our little chat…”

“The power. Who is it?”

Dan rolled his eyes. “You really don’t get it, do you? I’m not going to tell you. You can mess around inside my head, bury me alive, smother me with dirt, whatever floats your boat. But I’m not going to tell you.”

“Interesting,” said Aranok. One of the woman’s eyebrows raised cartoonishly high. “So much for your surface fears. Let’s see what happens when we go deeper.”

Inside his skin suit, Aranok twitched. Dan felt the room spin again. He saw a face, sad but beautiful. He saw an old friend, gun in hand.

No. Please. Not her. Not that.

Dan convulsed as a nightmare swallowed him whole.

* * *

Ollie stood well back from the square of vinyl flooring this time, in case her power fed the Scryer’s portal again. The Worm had recreated the mucus-textured symbol on the floor, tossed in his pebbles, and was now muttering below his breath.

Very little seemed to be happening.

Artur stood on the carpet at Ollie’s side, fiddling with the neck of the pink and yellow sweater he wore. The sweater was ludicrously soft and comfortable, but the floppy roll-neck was annoying, and it pushed upwards into his beard whenever he moved his head.

In hindsight, he should’ve taken the suede jacket with the elbow pads. Maybe paired it with a floaty vest top underneath. Combined with the ankle length denim skirt he currently wore, it would’ve made a powerful statement.

Quite what that statement would be, he had no idea, but it would’ve been a powerful one all the same.

“So, he’s summoning some kind of Malwhere gossip?” Artur whispered, although his understanding of the word ‘whispered’ was quite different to everyone else’s.

“Yes,” Ollie replied.

“And this thing is somehow going to know where Deadman is?”

Ollie sounded less convinced about that part. “Yes.”

“And it’s all going to go fine, and nothing terrible is going to happen?”

“Yes,” Ollie confirmed. “Probably.”

“OK, then. Just wanted to make sure I was up to speed,” Artur said. He tapped a high-heeled foot, fiddled with his roll-neck, then puffed out his cheek. “Sure, he’s taking his time about it.”

He raised his voice. “I said, ye’re taking yer time about it.”

“Shh,” the Worm urged, not turning.

The mumbling resumed.

“How come ye know about this?” Artur asked. “The Malwhere guy, I mean.”

“We summoned one earlier,” Ollie said.

“Oh, did ye now? Right. Fair enough, then,” said Artur. “And how did that work out?”

“We got dragged into… I don’t know. Like, have you ever had a waking nightmare, but one that feels completely real?”

Artur blinked. “I’m going to stop ye there, peaches. I’ll be honest, that feels like something that should maybe have been mentioned at an earlier opportunity. No-one said anything about waking nightmares.”

“It won’t happen again,” Ollie assured him. “It was my fault. That’s why I’m standing back here out of the way, and the Worm’s doing it himself.”

Artur nodded, but frowned. “Why is he doing it himself?” he wondered. “Why not ask his old pal, Jay Anus to give him a hand? Hey, Jay Anus, where are ye hiding?”

Artur turned and found himself face to toecap with Janus’s boot. “Oh! There ye are. Sure, why are ye lurking there behind us like a creepy big—” he managed to say, before a metal bucket clanged down around him, and something heavy was deposited on the upturned bottom, pinning it in place.

“Hey watch it, ye big bollocks!” Artur protested, his voice echoing inside the bucket. He hammered a fist against the side and pain exploded through his knuckles. “Owyebastard!” he spat. He kicked the smooth curved walls of his pitch-dark prison, but the plastic pointed toes of his heels weren’t getting through it any time soon. “What d’ye think ye’re doing?”

Janus’s hand caught Ollie by the hair and spun her around before she could scream. The Worm stopped chanting and squelched around in a semi-circle, his tail curling beneath him. “Careful. She has power, remember?” he warned.

“Yeah? Well, so do I,” Janus hissed, his voice close in Ollie’s ear as he wrapped an arm around her throat and pulled her backwards against him. Ollie struggled in his grip, but he tightened his arm across her windpipe and sniggered. “Oh yeah, she’s real powerful.”

The bucket on the floor shifted half an inch as Artur hurled himself against the inside. He was still shouting, but his voice was too faint and muffled to make out a word of what he was saying.

Ollie stopped struggling as the Worm slithered towards her, the lights reflecting off his slick, slimy skin. “As I said, Janus and I were talking about you just before you arrived. I was asking him to bring you to me. Imagine my surprise, then, when you came here of your own free will.”

He inhaled deeply, making his nose flaps open. “Meant to be, I think. Truly meant to be.”

Ollie tried to speak, but the arm across her throat was too tight, so only a cheep emerged. The Worm gestured for Janus to ease off. He did, but not by much. His other arm slipped around Ollie’s waist, pressing her bottom half more firmly against him. The Worm twitched with an annoyance born of jealousy, but said nothing of it.

“I just want to know where Dan is,” Ollie said, something shrill and primal coloring the notes of her voice. “Let me go.”

Something flashed behind her eyes, making the Worm shrink back a little. He reached quickly into one of the folds of flab on his chest, and withdrew a sachet of what could have been magic powder, but might equally have been a blend of herbs and spices.

Ollie coughed as the powder hit her in the face. The Worm spat on her, then muttered something unintelligible. Ollie’s head went light, and her will to struggle drained out through the bottoms of her feet.

“Sorry about that, my dear, but we can’t have you demonstrating that delicious power of yours just yet,” the Worm told her. The tip of his tongue flicked in and out of his mouth like it was playing peek-a-boo. “See, I want it. Whatever’s inside you. Whatever you are. I want it. I want you. And if you’re anything like what I think you are, it was important for me to subdue you, lest you unleashed all that power on yours truly.”

Shuffling closer, he ran a stubby finger down Ollie’s cheek, scraping up some of the spit and dust mush. “This is a binding agent. It holds back that power. Keeps it in. Temporarily, of course, nothing lasts forever, but long enough for me to take what I want.”

His tongue came out again, but this time licked slowly across his lips as his eyes flicked across Ollie’s face. “Everything I want.” He oozed in close and tight, so his face was just inches from Ollie’s own. She could see herself reflected in the slimy sheen. “I’m afraid you’ll be quite conscious during the process. I’m not being unkind, it’s simply necessary so that I can—”

He stopped talking when Janus flew backwards across the room and crashed into a rack of books with enough force to buckle the metal shelves. The Worm’s eyes widened as he tried to back away, but something held him in place. The claggy clumps of damp powder on Ollie’s face sizzled, turned black, then fell to the floor as dust.

“I just wanted to know where Dan was,” she said, her voice emerging as a scratchy whisper. The Worm continued to push backwards, but succeeded only in flattening himself against some invisible wall that had appeared behind him.

Behind her, Janus had extracted himself from the shelves. He hurried towards Ollie, moving surprisingly quietly for a thing his size.

He was around halfway to his target when every one of his countless face and body piercings were torn out, and an immense force swatted him across the room. He screamed as he cartwheeled through the air, before smashing through a glass display case.

“Now summon the Scryer,” commanded Ollie, in a voice that was only a reasonable approximation of her usual one. Sparks flickered across the gaps in her hair. “And tell me where my friend is.”

* * *

Dan gasped awake, Vanshie’s dying screams still clawing their fingernails down the blackboard at the back of his brain. How many times had he watched Noops or Polani kill her now? One hundred? Two? How many ways, each one slower and more visceral than the last?

“You’ll tell me eventually,” Aranok said, his voice rumbling from the female officer’s mouth. “Perhaps in an hour from now. Perhaps in a month. You’ll tell me. You think you won’t, but you will. You’ll tell me who has the power, and then I’ll have the power, and all this will be over.”

Dan’s arms shook as he pushed himself up. He’d managed to stand after all the previous nightmares, but this time he remained on his knees, either his legs or his willpower calling it a day.

“This is all so unnecessary. I don’t want to be doing this,” Aranok said. “But you are forcing me to.”

He/She leaned forwards, bringing his/her face more sharply into focus through the fog of the counterweight shield. “So, tell me. Tell me who it is, and where I can find them,” the demon said. “And the nightmares will be over.”

“S-so you’ll bring her back?” Dan wheezed. “If I tell you, you’ll bring her back?”

Aranok’s brow furrowed. “Bring who back?”

Dan nodded, as if his question had been answered. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Fonk willpower. Fonk his legs.

He stood up.

“That the best you got?” he asked, then he held his arms out at his sides and laughed as Aranok’s face twisted into a snarl, and he watched the love of his life die screaming again and again and again.

* * *

The Worm huddled over by the markings on the floor, his whole body oozing sweat as he recited the summoning chant.

Ollie had freed Artur from beneath his bucket. He now stood beside the partially decapitated remains of Janus, trying to avoid getting blood on his sweater.

“Yep, I’m pretty sure old Jay Anus is dead, alright?” he announced. “Unless he can survive a big spike of broken glass through the neck. Can ye, Jay Anus? Can ye survive that?”

Artur listened.

“No. No, it seems like he can’t.”

He returned to Ollie and looked up at her. Her faintly purple skin was going red around the cheeks, as if she was either embarrassed, or struggling to hold something in. Artur was no expert, but suspected it was probably the latter.

“Ye alright there, peaches?” he asked her. “Ye’re looking a little uptight there, so ye are.”

“I just want to know where Dan is,” she said, her voice hissing out through her teeth. “Find him,” she barked, and the Worm spasmed.

“I’m trying!” he said. “I’m trying!”

He resumed his muttering. Artur rubbed his beard. “Ye seem a little, how can I put this? On edge. Maybe ye should try to cool yer boots a little? Sure, I don’t want ye exploding on me or nothing.”

“It’s taking too long,” Ollie said.

“It’s not easy,” the Worm protested. “The summoning chant is like making a bargain. I have to persuade a Scryer to appear, tease it with the offerings I have made. I can’t make one appear just like that.”

A Scryer appeared, just like that. It materialized above the symbol with a soft pop, then looked around, apparently as surprised by its sudden appearance as anyone.

Bewildered, the Worm turned to find Ollie holding a hand out in front of her face, fingers splayed, a sparkling blue aura wrapped around it like a glove.

“What’s all this, then?” the Scryer demanded. “Who’s dragged me here?”

The Worm seemed to shrink under the demon-thing’s gaze. “Uh, she has,” he said, pointing in Ollie’s direction.

The Scryer looked over and saw the expression on Ollie’s face. He felt the power rolling off her in waves and decided that, on balance, it might be best not to make too much of a fuss.

“Uh. Right. Fair enough, then,” he said. “Um, any particular reason, or…?”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” said Ollie.

“Great. I’m all for that,” said the Scryer. “I don’t want you to hurt me, either.”

“But you will tell me where my friend is.” Ollie made a grabbing motion with her hand. The Scryer was yanked across the room, then came to a stop in the air just in front of her. “And you will tell me right fonking now.”

“I’d probably do what she says there,” Artur added. He glanced up at Ollie, then back to the Scryer. “Because between you and me, like, I’m not sure she’s entirely in her right mind.”

* * *

Dan jerked from his nightmare too late to see Aranok’s eyes widen, and his stolen face contort in delight. He missed the demon-thing billowing like smoke from the cop’s mouth, and rolling under the door as a swirl of dark vapor.

Despite not seeing any of it, he knew immediately what had happened. The female officer was curled up on the floor, sobbing and retching and clawing at her own face.

“Where is it?” Dan asked. “Where did it go?”

The woman didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. Instead, she just wailed and scratched and choked on the floor, the mere memory of the demon inside her reducing her to some primitive animal state.

Aranok was gone, and the only reason he would leave was if he’d found what he was looking for.

Ollie.

Dan got as close to the counterweight shield as he could without it nudging him backwards. “Get me out of here!” he said, barking the words out in the hope they somehow got through to her. “I can stop it. I have to stop it.”

Down on the floor, the cop was lost in her own nightmarish bubble. Dan’s demands washed right over her as she pulled her knees in to her chest, and screamed at all the many horrors running rampant inside her head.

* * *

The Scryer placed the notebook carefully on the floor, then clicked the button on the pen and sat it neatly on top. “There we go,” he said, trying to inject a note of lightness into his voice to disguise the panic. “All done. That’s where you’ll find him.”

Ollie’s face was devoid of all expression now. Her pupils were spiraling hollows that seemed to bore down into infinity. The blue aura around her hand had spread so it covered both her arms, and her hair floated in the air around her as if she was suspended in water.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” she demanded.

“Uh, because I don’t want you to kill me?” the Scryer said. He laughed awkwardly, then swallowed when he realized Ollie wasn’t joining in. “No? OK. That’s… that’s…” He swallowed again and indicated the notebook with one of his many arms. “But seriously, that’s where you’ll find him. In a holding cell at Tribunal Station 42. I… I drew a map. I’m telling the truth.”

“I reckon he’s being straight with us, peaches,” said Artur, pushing the pen aside and flipping to a page filled with scribbly scrawls. “I mean, it makes sense. It’s only a few blocks from the office, and… This is quite a good drawing, by the way,” he said, nodding up at the Scryer. “I’m impressed.”

The demon nodded nervously, his eyes darting across to Ollie. “Thanks.” He jabbed three thumbs in the direction of the glowing floor symbol. The Worm still lurked there, looking terrified and perplexed in equal measures.

“So, if that’s everything, I’ll just be off,” the Scryer continued.

Ollie’s face softened. Whatever invisible force had been levitating her hair faded along with her aura, and she blinked as if snapping out of a trance.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice fully her own again. “That’s really useful.”

“Please, any time, the pleasure was all mine,” the Scryer said, bowing and scraping as he drifted back in the direction of the symbol. He had almost reached it when he looked over Ollie’s shoulder in surprise. “Oh, what’s this now?” he wondered, and then a knot of black vapor clamped over Ollie’s head from behind and forced itself in through her nose, mouth and ears.

“What the feck?” Artur yelped. He pointed a tiny finger in the Worm’s direction. “You! What was that thing? What’ve you done?”

“It… it wasn’t me,” the Worm said, then he screamed as he was propelled vertically upwards. Artur watched him smash against the high ceiling, then flop to the floor like wet pancake batter. The Scryer quickly sized the situation up, realized he didn’t want to hang around, and was about to hurl himself back into the glowing circle when he was neatly cleaved into sixteen evenly-sized cubes in mid-air. They fell like lumps of fleshy rain, pitter-pattering onto the vinyl floor.

“Oh yes,” said Ollie, in a voice that wasn’t even attempting to sound like her own. She held her hands up and examined them front and back. Her aura returned, but this time the blue was marbled with purples and reds.

Artur opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it when Ollie lifted several inches off the floor and sparks spat from every one of her pores. He scurried inside the metal bucket and held his breath as Ollie whooshed up towards the ceiling. There was a crash of shattering stone and splintering wood.

“Oh yes!” came that voice again, louder this time, but much further away.

“Oh, Holy Father,” Artur muttered, once the voice had tailed off into silence. “I knew we should’ve just gone to the pub.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Dan sat with his back against the wall, waiting for something to happen. What that something was, he didn’t know. He didn’t know much at this point beyond the fact that the Inhabitant was out there somewhere, either hunting for Ollie, or already installed inside her head.

The female cop had stopped crying and clawing at herself, and now lay almost completely motionless on the floor, giving only the occasional faint whimper to suggest she was still alive. Dan had expected someone to come in when they’d spotted what was happening on the security cameras, but Aranok must have switched them off.

Gritting his teeth, Dan thumped his head against the padded wall behind him a few times, then got to his feet. He knew throwing himself at the counterweight shield was pointless, but he did it anyway. As expected, he wound up right back where he’d started.

“Damn it!” he spat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried that approach in the past hour or so, and it had proven completely useless every time before, but he wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice when it came for alternatives.

“Officer down! Repeat, officer down! Can anyone hear me?”

He listened. No response. No sound. No real surprise.

Wait.

He had heard something. Voices shouting far in the distance.

Gunfire staccatoed along the corridor outside. More voices followed, then something solid hit something wet and a man screamed in agony. No, not a man, several men. A chorus of suffering.

An alarm wailed. More blaster shots howled past the cell, their glows briefly lighting up the narrow gap beneath the door.

The wall of the cell shook. There was another burst of gunfire and another round of screaming.

Something exploded not too far away, making the fog of the counterweight shield become thinner and more faint. Dan lunged for it, but while it was less forceful with its pushback than before, it still resisted his attempts to force his way through.

Dan cursed. “Hey, you. Get up. You have to get up right now!” he told the woman, but she was still unresponsive, blissfully oblivious to whatever was closing in along the corridor.

A shadow appeared at the bottom of the cell’s outer door. Dan stepped back, clenching his fists and bracing himself for Aranok in an Ollie-skin to come stumbling inside.

The door shook as something was slammed against it. It flew inwards to reveal a figure in badly dented body armor framed in the doorway.

Dan watched the Tribunal grunt topple forwards onto the floor, probably unconscious but very possibly dead.

“There ye are, ye big ugly bastard,” said Artur, clambering up onto the fallen officer’s back. He was stripped to the waist, his chest and face smeared with streaks of blood. He looked up through the fog at Dan and winked. “Now, am I a sight for sore eyes, or what?”

* * *

With Dan’s guidance, it took Artur five minutes to find the controls for the counterweight shield. It would’ve taken a lot less time had it not been for the riot squad turning up. They’d seemed pretty confident when they’d spotted Artur scurrying along the corridor towards them, but appeared much less so now that they were all unconscious, screaming or – in one case – stuck part way through a wall.

Once the shield dropped, Dan stepped out of the cell and into a warzone. Or the aftermath of one, at least. Groaning bodies lay scattered along the corridor, piled up in doorways, or upside-down and partly folded against various walls. An assortment of Tribunal weapons were strewn all over the floor. Most of the guns would be locked to their assigned owners, so Dan grabbed himself a shock rod and tested it by jamming it into a semi-conscious Enforcer’s neck.

Yep. That worked.

“We should get out of here,” Artur said, leading Dan back through the trench of destruction he’d left in his wake. “Much as I enjoy kicking the shoite out of these fellas, we’ve got bigger bastards to bake, if ye know what I’m saying?”

“Ollie?” Dan guessed.

“Bingo. She’s… How can I put this? She’s behaving a little oddly,” Artur said. “In that she’s flyin’ around the place and probably getting up to all sorts.”

“It’s Aranok,” Dan said. “Aranok has her.”

“I thought something like that was probably the case,” Artur said. He lunched at an armed officer who appeared around a corner, delivered a powerful flying headbutt to his testicles, then fell back into step beside Dan. Behind them, the cop crumpled to the floor. “Although, to be honest, she was acting kind of weird before yer man set up shop inside her. Sort of scary, like. She summoned some demon fella just by waving her hand. It was pretty cool. If, ye know, a bit terrifying.”

“It must’ve sensed her,” Dan realized. “It was able to get a lock on her power, that’s why it left.”

“She also killed Jay Anus, but he was asking for it.”

“Who the Hell’s Jay Anus?” Dan asked.

“Just some dead guy,” Artur said, shrugging. “No-one important.”

Up ahead, a squad of Enforcers filed through a doorway, energy shields crackling from their wrists.

“This way,” said Dan, turning down a side corridor and hurrying along it.

“But that’s not the way out,” Artur said. “We need to get past that shower of rumbly arseholes to get to way out.”

“I’m not looking for the way out. Not yet,” Dan said.

He ducked around another corner just as a bolt of blaster-fire streaked along the corridor behind him.

“Want me to slow them down for ye?” Artur asked, his eyes wide and brimming with hope. “Keep them busy while ye do what ye have to do?”

Dan slowed. He looked down. “Would you mind?”

Artur snorted. “Would I mind, he says!” With a roar, her beat his tiny fists against his blood-slicked chest, then double-backed. “Right, ye boss-eyed bastards!” he cried. “Pick one someone a fraction of yer own size!”

Dan hurried on to a soundtrack of screaming, gunfire, and breaking bones. It had been a while since he’d been down in the bowels of a Tribunal station, but they were all more or less the same, so he had a good idea of where he was going.

Hanging a right at the next junction, he jammed the shock-rod against the neck of a clean-up grunt who picked the wrong moment to step out of a storage cupboard, then pressed on to the evidence lock-up further along the passageway, dragging the babbling cop behind him.

The door opened to the grunt’s fingertips. Dan slammed the butt of the rod against the side of the guy’s head, tipping him over into unconsciousness. As he stepped into a room lined with industrial steel shelving, a volley of blaster fire screamed towards him.

Ducking, Dan scrambled for cover. He found some behind a stack of metal crates that were presumably all waiting to be processed. More gunfire hammered against the other side and the top two crates came crashing to the floor, missing Dan’s head by inches.

The contents of the crates spilled out around Dan. Drugs. Hacking modules. Someone’s severed ear.

And a hat, bashed and dented and scuffed.

And something else, too.

Across the room, the lock-up manager peeked out from behind his tipped-up desk, his gun trained on the stack of crates.

“Surrender now. Final warning,” he barked. He waited for a response that didn’t come. “Surrender now, or I will shoot you.”

“Funny,” said Dan, standing upright. He raised a hand, levelling Mindy’s yawning barrel at the Tribunal guy’s head. “I was about to tell you the same thing.”

* * *

Dan stepped into the corridor, closed the evidence room door behind him, and walked around the unconscious grunt on the floor.

He met Artur a few twists and turns later, surrounded by the groaning and whimpering riot squad. “Ye alright?” Artur asked. He nodded to Dan’s hat and coat. “I take it I’m right in thinking ye got what ye were after?”

“I did,” said Dan, holding Mindy up for him to see.

“Great stuff,” Artur said. “Now, I think the exit’s somewhere back this way, so we’d best get a move on.”

“Relax, I’ve got it covered,” Dan told him. “Mindy. Explosive rounds,” he said, then he took aim at a nearby wall, squeezed the trigger, and created a whole new exit all of their own.

“I like yer style, Deadman,” Artur said. “I mean, subtle as a stripper in a school yard, but I like it.” He gestured towards the opening, and the dark city street that lay beyond. “Shall we?”

The cool night air helped clear the last of Dan’s brain fog, although this only served to bring his headache back into sharper focus. He shook it off and looked both ways along the sides of the Tribunal building, expecting to see squads approaching from both directions, but spotting no-one.

Getting out of the building itself had been too easy, he knew. There should have been dozens more officers in there. Hundreds, maybe.

It was only when he noticed the caterwauling of distant sirens, and the thundering booms of assorted explosions that he realized why. There was an all-units emergency underway, and most of the city’s law enforcement had rushed to respond.

Lightning crackled across the sky, illuminating several of the city’s taller buildings. Something bright and colorful screeched like a firework, before erupting with a bang that trembled the city beneath Dan’s feet.

“What the fonk is going on out there?” Dan asked.

“I tell ye what, I’ll give ye three guesses as to who’s making all the fuss,” Artur said. He smiled and winced at the same time. “And the first two don’t count.”

“Ollie,” said Dan. “Aranok.”

“I’d have accepted either of those answers,” Artur told him. “But bonus points for getting both.”

“We have to stop him. Her. It. You know what I mean,” Dan said.

“And just how d’ye propose we do that?” Artur asked. “She’s stronger than she looks. Sure, we’d need an army to stop her.”

“We have to… Wait. What did you say?”

“When?”

“Now. We’d need an army to stop her.”

Artur tutted. “Well, if ye already knew why did ye bother asking? That’s just wasting my time and yours. But mostly mine.”

An army. Artur was right. If Ollie was as powerful as Dan suspected, and Aranok was now in control, then an army was exactly what they needed.

Fortunately, he knew just where to find one.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ollie watched helplessly as she compacted a squadron of Tribunal officers into a sort of gelatinous cube of flesh and then fried it to a crisp, all without raising a finger.

A hail of explosive rounds detonated on the ground around her. The flames crystalized as they rolled in her direction, becoming tiny pebbles with smooth edges that tickled as they bounced off her body.

The officers who had fired the shots tried desperately to resist as they turned their weapons on each other. There were a number of whumpfs, a succession of booms, then an assortment of fast-moving body parts flying in every direction at once.

Trapped somewhere at the back of her brain, Ollie was equal parts horrified and amazed by what she – or perhaps the thing that had taken control of her – was capable of.

Then she made an old man’s head implode with a single glance, and the balance tipped fully in favor of ‘horrified’.

“Stop!” she screamed, except her thoughts weren’t currently connected to her mouth, so the word went nowhere. She tried to look away as a group of bikers emerged from a bar with knives, clubs and coshes raised, but her eyes were no longer hers to control. They were merely a window she had no choice but to watch through as first the clothing, then the skin, muscle and bones of each biker were whittled away into nothing.

She could feel the Inhabitant inside her, swelling in her head like some fast-growing tumor. She could feel its hatred and rage, its uncontrollable thirst for power and its desire to rule and destroy, in no particular order.

She felt like she knew it, somehow. Like she shared not its memories, but the feelings and emotions they evoked. Through those feelings, she knew that it would not stop until everything lay in ruins before it, and everyone was cowering on their knees. It would destroy without thought, kill without remorse, and it would use her to do it all.

Ollie had long thought her self-proclaimed ‘father’, Kalaechai, to be the personification of evil itself, but she had never experienced hatred and darkness like this. She had never witnessed such rage, such desire, such an all-consuming hunger for chaos.

If Kalaechai was a monster, then Aranok was the thing that lurked beneath his bed. The thing that other monsters whispered about round campfires late at night.

And it was inside her now, using her power as its own, turning her into a weapon to be wielded.

Something sleek and fast-moving flew in low through a canyon of skyscrapers. Gunfire churned along the street towards Ollie, throwing up chunks of molten rock and debris.

Her hands raised, then came sharply back down. The fighter craft flattened like a tin can beneath a boot. Now a spinning disc of razor-sharp metal, it hurtled harmlessly high above her head, before cleaving an apartment block in two.

Aranok savored the screams of the people inside the collapsing building, which left Ollie no choice but to listen, too. She roared inside her head, desperately trying to take control, to force the Inhabitant out, but it pushed back against her, shoving her deeper down into the murk of her own subconscious.

It wasn’t her favorite place in the world, because it wasn’t very nice in there. It was full of bad memories and dark thoughts that she’d fought long and hard to suppress. She welcomed them now, taking comfort in the familiarity of her old nightmares as the new latest in a long line of them wreaked havoc around her.

Even down there, though, in the deepest recesses of her mind, Ollie couldn’t miss the worst of the Inhabitant’s rampage. Cars imploded. Buildings crumbled. Most of the Tribunal officers had realized they were on the losing side and had begun to flee, but Aranok picked a dozen of them off for fun, twisting them until their top and bottom halves faced in opposite directions, or their legs were folded backwards over their heads.

Ollie burrowed down, trying to lose herself somewhere to deep to notice what the Inhabitant was doing – was making her do.

She felt long-dormant memories rise up like swamp bubbles around her. Normally, she’d push back against them, try to force them to stay buried, but the memories of her past were better than the reality of her present, so she focused on them, dredging them up until…

A baby cried.

Out there. Not in here.

Ollie realized the swamp was burbling up around her, its gloop gathering around her ankles and dragging her down.

A baby cried.

Ollie kicked against her memories and clawed up through the murk. The warm wet darkness gurgled and hissed in complaint, but she ignored it, forcing herself higher and higher, faster and faster, until those windows were before her again and the world snapped back into view.

A woman ran, a sobbing infant clutched against her chest. Ollie saw her own hand raise, felt her own face contort into a grin of anticipation.

A baby cried.

Her fingertips flared.

Ollie screamed, and this time the sound slurred from her mouth as a whisper.

She couldn’t move the hand much, but she moved it enough. A crackle of energy spat from her palm and went wide of the woman. It turned one of the many abandoned Tribunal cruisers into a puddle of molten metal, and Ollie felt the Inhabitant’s hypothetical hands around her metaphorical neck as it directed its fury towards her.

Pain tore through whatever part of Ollie was still her. She knew she wasn’t choking, not really, but the panic of asphyxiation was flooding into her, making her brain go light.

She felt like she was getting smaller, shrinking beneath the weight of the Inhabitant. She had a vision of herself collapsing like that squadron of Enforcers, only not so wet and pulpy, and with fewer pairs of boots sticking out at various awkward angles.

No, she wasn’t being compressed like them, she realized. It was more like a star. She imagined the immense gravity of the demon inside her collapsing her into a black hole that sucked in the world around her.

Ollie struggled, but now Aranok’s attention was on her, it was like trying to wrestle the wind. He was all around her, behind her, inside her, squishing her down and stretching her out as he scorched the earth inside her head.

She looked out through the windows of eyes that no longer belonged to her, taking one last look at the burning street with its gallery of chaos and gore.

It was then that she saw him, silhouetted against a dancing wall of flame. A man who wasn’t running. A man who wasn’t afraid. A man wearing a hat that didn’t particularly suit him, but she’d never have the heart to say.

“Aranok!” the silhouette said, in a voice like grinding gravel. “How about you do us both a favor and get the fonk out of the girl?”

Ollie felt the demon slither around inside her head and her power begin to flare. She tried to stop her hand raising, but it didn’t waiver by a single inch. Energy buzzed along her arm.

And then an enormous mass of undulating nanobots slammed into her from behind, lifting her into the air before crashing down on her like a breaking tidal wave.

Dan cracked his knuckles, cricked his neck, then stepped forward into the light. “Or do we have to do this the hard way?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Aranok leaped up onto Ollie’s feet, and a rippling wave of energy rolled away from him. Dan was tossed backwards like a rag doll, but the nanobot cloud took the brunt of the attack. It rippled and folded in on itself, then reformed into a vast wrecking ball suspended in the air above Ollie’s head.

The Inhabitant raised both hands, pushing upwards against the sphere. While the demon was distracted, Dan pulled Mindy from her holster and blasted it with a couple of stun shots. It flinched at each one, but didn’t so much as stumble.

A pillar of white light screamed upwards from Ollie’s hands, punching a hole straight through the ball and turning it into something resembling an enormous metal donut.

The donut became a twisting whip of metal that swung at the demon as if it had been spring-loaded. Aranok made a chopping motion with one hand, and the whip was cut in two. He had to concentrate to wrestle Ollie’s face into a tight smile of victory, and failed to notice both the shape’s severed halves come rushing towards him from opposite directions.

He caught them both right before they could crush him, his arms shaking as he forced each half apart. As he did, both pieces became flowing streams of liquid metal that wrapped themselves around Ollie’s arms, then tightened across her shoulders and chest. A band of them tangled around her legs, forcing them together. Dan caught a glimpse of the panic behind Ollie’s face before the nanobots swarmed over her head, cocooning her completely.

Dan raised his wrist and barked into a comm-device. “You sure she’s safe in there?” he barked. “This better not kill her.”

“It shouldn’t,” said Tressingham, although that rock-solid conviction that comes part and parcel with vast amounts of wealth was notable by its absence. “She should be protected enough that it’ll do no lasting damage, just knock the wind out of her.”

Dan sucked air in through his teeth. Aranok was still stumbling around inside Ollie’s body, clawing at the silver covering as he fought to be free. The nanobots might hold them, but what if they didn’t? This could be their only chance.

“OK. Artur, go!” Dan ordered.

“Be right with ye,” Artur replied. Along the street, a Tribunal cruiser roared into life and powered along the street towards them.

Aranok had just torn away a fistful of nanobots and was shrieking in triumph when the car slammed into him at full speed. The hood crumpled. The back end raised. Artur swore loudly, tumbling around inside the vehicle as it flipped up into the air, before coming back down again on Ollie and Aranok’s combined head.

She didn’t fall. That was the first thing Dan noted. Whether it was Ollie, the demon, the nanobots or some combination of the three, but the two successive impacts from the car weren’t enough to bring her down.

Artur darted out of the tangle of wreckage, his long skirt torn, his beard very slightly on fire. He gave Aranok a wide berth as he staggered over to Dan’s side.

“So much for that then, eh?” he muttered. “Maybe we should’ve hit her with a fecking tank.”

The nanobot swarm tightened around Ollie’s body, bunching up around her throat and making her arms fat and cumbersome. Still the demon clawed and grabbed for them, covered hands tearing and swatting at the smothering suit of Tressingham’s tiny robots.

Dan switched Mindy to five per cent slowdown rounds and took aim. If the demon broke free, it might buy them some time. Time to do what, Dan didn’t really know, but he’d cross that bridge if they came to it. With a bit of luck, the nanobots would do their job.

“Come on. Come on. Quit fighting them,” he muttered, shifting the gun from one hand to the other. “Let her go, you piece of shizz. Let her go.”

Ollie’s metal-clad body stumbled, then fell to its knees, the fight seeming to go out of it. The squirming suit of tiny robots conveyed the impression of movement, but the body beneath it now lay perfectly still.

Dan approached slowly, Mindy still raised and ready. He retreated a couple of steps again when the nanobots that had been covering Ollie’s head exploded off her, jerking her into a sitting position and becoming a whirling tornado in the air above.

“Did it work? Is it working? Is that what’s happening now?” Artur asked, as more and more of the nanobots left Ollie and joined the increasingly lengthy metal tube wriggling and squirming above her.

“I don’t know,” Dan admitted.

The rest of the nanobots billowed upwards in one sudden swoosh. Ollie slumped backwards onto the ground, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow.

“Is that good?” Artur asked. “Is that what we wanted to happen? Because I don’t feel like I’m fully up to speed with this plan if I’m being honest with ye.”

Dan was on his knees beside Ollie. He shook her, then slapped her gently on the side of the face a few times. “Ollie? Ollie, wake up.”

Artur crept up behind Dan. “I swear, if her eyes do that big flicking open thing now like ye see in the movies, I will shoite myself,” he whispered.

“Mr Deadman?” said Tressingham over the comm-device. “Mr Deadman, are you there?”

“Here,” said Dan. He glanced up at the snake of nanobots spiraling in the air above them. “I think it worked, but be ready.”

“Yes, but—”

“Ollie!” Dan snapped, slapping her a little harder this time. “Ollie, wake up. You hear me? Wake up!”

A faint whimper of a groan exhaled through Ollie’s lips. Dan spun on his haunches to Artur.

“That was her, right? That sounded like her.”

“What? How should I know? She just went ‘hff.’ I’m not convinced ‘hff’ is enough of a representative sample to be able to form an opinion on whether it’s her or not.”

“It’s her,” Dan said. “I mean, I think it’s her.”

“Mr Deadman, I’d be grateful if—”

“Tressingham, give me a damn minute here,” Dan grunted. He hoisted Ollie onto his shoulder and stood up, ignoring the shakiness that still wobbled his legs, and the assortment of pains that cut into his skull like a fonking hatchet.

“Let’s get her out of here,” he said, setting off towards a row of stores and other commercial buildings that had escaped the recent carnage with only superficial damage. “Before Aranok comes back.”

“Comes back?” said Artur, trotting along behind. “What do ye mean ‘comes back’? Didn’t we kill it?”

Dan shook his head. “I think we drove him out of her.”

Artur looked around. “Then where is the fecker? Where did it go? Is it still around? Shoite, it’s not inside me, is it?”

“Pretty sure you’d have noticed,” Dan told him.

Artur nodded, then punched himself hard in the face, just in case. He didn’t feel any demon-type objecting inside his head. He reckoned that meant he was safe because, frankly, the punch had fecking hurt.

Dan raised the comm-device to his mouth. “Tressingham, keep the nanobots ready. If you see anything that might feasibly be the host for an evil demon creature, try to keep it contained.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Tressingham replied, a note of accusation in his voice. “I’ve lost contact with the cloud.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean it is no longer under my control,” Tressingham said. “It isn’t responding.”

Dan stopped.

Dan turned.

The column of nanobots now stretched more than halfway to the blue glow of the Up There engines high overhead. It still spun like a tornado, but it was rippling and contorting in a few different ways now, as if someone was tentatively trying out a few different tricks.

“Ye alright there, Deadman?” Artur asked. “Sure, ye look like ye’ve seen a ghost. And it was shagging yer ma. What’s the problem this time?”

“Artur, run,” Dan whispered. He began backing away from the nanobot column, picking up speed as he did. “Run. Now!”

“What? Why?” Artur asked, not moving.

Dan doubled-back, snatched the little man up, and shoved him into a pocket. “Because I just figured out where Aranok is.”

“Great!” said Artur from inside the pocket. “Then let’s go sort the bastard out, once and for…”

Artur’s voice tailed off. There was movement in Dan’s coat, then the little bearded head popped out. “Hold on now. Ye’re not saying what I think ye’re saying, are ye?”

Dan forced his legs to go faster as the column unfurled, becoming a vast monstrous shape in the sky behind him.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I probably am.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

“Just so we’re clear, are ye saying that yer monster fella has jumped out of Ollie and into a giant swarm of tiny flying robots?” Artur asked. “Because I want to be absolutely sure we’re on the same page here.”

The nanobot shape became a giant spiky ball. It hit the ground like a meteor strike, shattering the windows of buildings all along the street.

“Yeah,” Dan sighed. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying.”

“Or, to put it another way, ye’ve arguably gone and made everything worse?”

“We got Ollie,” Dan said. “We can deal with the nanobots.”

“Can we now? Sure, that’s great,” said Artur. “How are we doing that, then? Taking their batteries out one at a time, maybe?”

“I’ll think of something,” Dan retorted. “Just give me a—”

“In there!”

Dan looked over to his right. A bar stood thirty yards away, the glass frontage shattered. “Seriously? Now is not the right time to go drinking.”

“Just do what I fecking tell ye for once,” Artur snapped. “In the pub, now. Trust me.”

Dan hesitated, then swung towards the bar.

“Good man,” Artur said. “And just for the record, it’s always the right time to go drinking. Don’t ever let me hear you spouting such bollocks again.”

There was a boom from out on the street as the nanobot cloud destroyed something else. Dan didn’t bother looking to find out what it was, and instead clambered over a pile of toppled mag-bikes and into a dimly-lit bar.

Judging by the bikes outside and the discarded leather jackets inside, the place was a biker bar. It was one of the nicer examples Dan had seen, though. Sure, there was blood on the walls, teeth on the floor and a generous helping of graffiti covering every available surface, but that was par for the course with these places.

Unlike most, this one had a few tables and chairs that were still intact, a reasonable selection of drinks behind the bar, and even a poosh table. Granted, the poosh sticks had all been snapped in half so each one now more closely resembled two long wooden stabby things, but still. Compared to some of the other dives he’d been in, this one was practically opulent.

“Get peaches up on the bar,” Artur barked. “What she needs is some of Mammy’s Old-Fashioned Wake-up Juice.”

Dan swept one arm along the bar top, sending several abandoned glasses and bottles crashing to the floor. He rolled the still unconscious Ollie off his shoulder and onto the sticky surface, then scooped Artur out of his pocket and deposited him beside her.

“What do you need?”

Artur turned and regarded the rack of spirits on the wall behind him while Dan ran around behind the bar. “There,” he said, pointing to a bottle filled with glowing green liquid. “Farkaan brandy. Get me that and the biggest glass ye can find.”

Dan snatched the bottle from the shelf and clunked it onto the bar beside Ollie. The pub’s lights flickered as an explosion rocked the street outside.

The was another thunk as Dan placed a tankard-style mug beside the bottle. “What, have they no clean ones, or something?” Artur asked, running a finger down the outside of the glass.

Muttering, Dan swapped the mug for another one. “There. What else?”

Artur’s index finger began to swing across the racks of alcohol. “The Voosh Juice. Both those bottles of Greyx whiskey, the blue label and the white. The vodka.”

“Which one?”

“All of them,” Artur said. He squinted. “Is that a bottle of Nargian Spuk?”

Dan picked up the bottle, read the label, then nodded.

“Fecking marvelous!” Artur exclaimed. “That’s a bonus. This little lot should do nicely.”

He held a hand up to the side of the mug, indicating a spot an inch or so from the bottom. “Right, brandy first, fill it to here,” he instructed.

Dan removed the bottle’s lid, then followed Artur’s instructions until the glass was almost completely full. Each pour was accompanied by a soundtrack of explosions, gunfire and screaming from outside. Someone was trying to fight back against the nanobots, but by the sounds of things they weren’t doing a great job of it.

“Tressingham, what’s going on out there?” Dan barked into his wrist-comm.

“I don’t know. I can’t see.” Tressingham was panting heavily, the words jerking from his lips as if…

“You’re running?”

“Well, of course I’m running!” he sobbed, then there came a series of muffled rummaging sounds, followed by a bleep as Tressingham shut his comm-device down.

“Feckin’ coward,” Artur spat.

“Can’t say I blame him,” said Dan. He indicated the mug of alcohol. All the different colors had blended together to form a murky and somewhat ominous-looking brown. “Now what?”

“A straw. I need a straw.”

“A straw? In a place like this?” Dan snorted. “Not a chance.”

“Oh no? Then what’s that then, ye judgmental bastard ye?” Artur asked, pointing to a cardboard container along the bar containing fifty or more flexible drinking straws in an assortment of cheerful neon colors.

“I stand corrected,” Dan said, snatching one from the box and depositing it into the drink. Artur stretched up and bent the top part of the straw down until it was level with his face. With some effort, he wrapped his lips around it and sucked. The level of liquid in the glass dropped by a full inch, then Artur took his mouth away and smacked his lips together a few times.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s good,” he said. “That’s perfect, in fact.”

He took another sip. Dan watched the surface of the liquid drop another two inches or so.

“Well?” he urged.

Artur burped and raised an eyebrow. “Well what?”

“Are you going to give it to Ollie?”

“Ollie? What, this?” Artur said. “Shoite, no, are ye mad? This stuff’d kill her.”

Dan looked from the glass to Artur and back again a number of times. “Wait, what? That’s not for her?”

“Of course it’s not for her. We’re trying to wake her up, not put her in a coma for the rest of her life,” Artur said. “Ye asked me what I needed, and what I needed was a stiff drink. Sure, all this excitement has shot my nerves to pieces.”

The wreckage of a Tribunal truck bounced along the street outside, throwing up sparks as metal skimmed across stone.

“But… what about the wake-up stuff?”

“Mammy’s Old-Fashioned Wake-up Juice?”

“Yes! I thought that’s what you were making?”

“Oh no. I don’t know where ye got that idea,” said Artur, admirably feigning innocence. “Most pubs usually keep that stuff in a bottle under the bar. Ye know, in case they need to sober up some chancer who’s got himself too langered to walk.”

He drained another two inches of the cocktail while Dan squatted and searched under the bar. There, standing worryingly near an assortment of cleaning fluids, was a slim bottle with a drawing of a disapproving-looking old woman on the label. Below her, in stark black on white print, were the words ‘Mammy’s Old-Fashioned Wake-up Juice.’

By the time Dan had unscrewed the lid, Artur’s straw was burbling up the final few dregs of his alcoholic concoction. Cradling Ollie’s neck, Dan brought the bottle to her lips, only for a shout from Artur to stop him.

“Whoa there! Holy shoite, Deadman, what are doing?”

“I’m waking her up.”

“Not like that ye’re not. That stuff’s not for drinking,” Artur explained. “Ye pour it in the eyes.”

“In the eyes? Why the fonk would you pour it in the eyes?”

“Because that’s how it works. Read the label if ye don’t believe me.”

Dan read the label. Outside, four different parts of a Tribunal grunt hit the ground with a succession of splats.

“Fonk,” Dan muttered. “In the eyes.” He looked at the bottle, then at the unconscious Ollie. “Will it hurt?”

“Sure, she’s out for the count, she won’t know a thing about it,” Artur said.

Satisfied, Dan moved the neck of the bottle closer to Ollie’s face.

“Although, once she wakes up, she might be blind. Temporarily.”

Dan’s arm jerked back.

“Blind?!”

“And deaf.”

“Why would she be—?”

“And mad,” Artur added.

“Crazy?”

“Angry, I mean. Fecking furious,” Artur said. He chuckled. “But, I mean, I’d be pretty upset meself if someone poured that shoite into the old peep holes, ye know what I’m saying’?”

“Right,” Dan said. He gritted his teeth, then pulled open one of Ollie’s eyes and lined the bottle up.

“But also, yes, crazy mad, too,” Artur confirmed. “Ye know, she might not remember who we are, exactly. Or she might think she’s got no legs, or that she’s made of living sound waves, or whatever. I’ll be honest, the side effects vary quite wildly from person to person. First time I was given one of Mammy’s eye-baths, I was six foot five, and just look what happened there.”

Dan blinked, then his eyes became two circles of surprise. Artur snorted.

“Look at ye, ye gullible big bollocks,” he said. “None of that shoite’s true, it’ll just wake her up. I was just having a laugh with ye.”

Outside, several people screamed. A Tribunal helmet, complete with head, rolled past. Artur’s grin didn’t falter. “Sure, if ye can’t have a laugh at times like this, then when can ye?”

Dan said something, but it was too quiet for Artur to hear. He was able to get the gist of it, though, and concluded that Dan hadn’t seen the funny side.

“Ah well, feck off, then,” he said, still grinning.

The liquid sloshed into Ollie’s eyes. It was thin and watery, and so also went in her hair, up her nose, and pooled in at least one of her ears.

Dan watched for any sign of life, but Ollie didn’t move an inch. The floor rumbled as part of a building collapsed along the street.

“It didn’t work,” Dan said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of falling rubble. “Why didn’t it work?”

“How should I know? Did ye check the use by date?”

Dan held the bottle up and turned it, searching for any sign of—

Ollie sat up.

Ollie screamed.

Each and every one of the bottles on the shelves exploded, spraying the bar with flying glass and a rainbow of alcohols. Dan’s back shielded the others from most of it, despite Artur’s attempts to catch some of the alcohol droplets in his mouth like a kid catching snowflakes.

A light flickered in Ollie’s eyes, like a spark igniting. Dan snatched Artur and ducked behind the bar as a burst of fiery energy obliterated the shelving, shattered the mirror behind it, and took out part of the wall.

“She’s awake, then,” Artur pointed out.

Ollie momentarily paused in her screaming, then resumed with all new levels of vigor. The lights exploded, and the poosh table went grinding across the floor away from her.

“Although, I’ll be honest, I’m not convinced that’s a positive development right at the moment,” Artur added.

“Ollie. Ollie, it’s us,” Dan said. He raised a head above the bar, then quickly ducked as a crackling shockwave of energy scorched the sticky top.

“Maybe yer monster guy’s still in there,” Artur suggested. “Sure, maybe waking her up wasn’t such a great idea, Deadman.”

“It was your idea!”

“Oh, throw that in me face, will ye?” Artur tutted. “Just shoot her and let’s be done with it.”

“I’m not going to shoot her,” Dan said.

“I don’t mean kill her. Stun her, or slow her down, or whatever. Make her shoite herself, if ye think that’ll work. But we can’t just hide here forever.”

Dan shook his head. “Can’t shoot her. We need her.”

“To do what? Melt our feckin’ faces off?”

“I have a plan,” Dan said. “Do you trust me?”

“No,” said Artur. “No, I do not.”

“Good call,” Dan admitted, then he grabbed Artur and thrust him up above the level of the bar.

Artur’s features all expanded in panic as Ollie spun towards him. “Deadman, ye bastard! Ye ugly, rotten-arsed bastard!”

Dan pulled himself up until he was fully standing behind the bar, putting both himself and Artur directly in the path of anything Ollie might unleash. She had stopped screaming, but now huffed and puffed like a cornered animal. Her dark eyes flicked between Dan and Artur, tiny lightning bolts of power fizzling from her fingertips.

“Ollie, it’s us,” Dan said, holding out a hand in what he hoped was a soothing motion. “Look. It’s me and Artur. Say something, Artur.”

“Please don’t kill us,” Artur said.

“We’re your… friends,” Dan said, almost choking on that last word. “There. I said it. We’re friends. And friends don’t kill friends. You know, unless they have to. Which you don’t.”

“Marvelous speech, Deadman. Sure, if that doesn’t convince her, I don’t know what will.”

“Then shut up and help me out,” said Dan.

“Help ye do what? This? This is yer plan?” Artur hissed. “This is a shoite plan. Sure, it’s not even a plan. It’s barely a feckin’ notion.”

“This isn’t the plan. I need to do this before we can do the plan.”

Artur launched into a curse-filled tirade about the merits – or lack of – of Dan’s still-unspoken scheme, but Dan squeezed him until he shut up. Ollie still had the look of a cornered beast about her, but she had made no move to annihilate them, which Dan was taking as a positive sign.

“Look, kid, I know you’re scared. I know having that thing inside your head wasn’t pretty, but you’re safe now. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Dan told her. “So how about you shake it off, and we all go home.”

Ollie’s breathing slowed. Something more familiar flickered across her face. “H-home?”

“Well, I mean… for now. I’m not saying it’s permanent, and you probably shouldn’t go getting too comfortable, but…”

Artur bit Dan’s finger hard enough that he felt it.

“Fine. Yes. Home,” Dan said.

Ollie sagged a little, then straightened. She shook her head, then shook it again more violently. She clenched and unclenched her fists, then regarded her fingers as if seeing them for the very first time. There had been an energy aura buzzing around her, which Dan only now noticed because of its absence.

With a few blinks and a couple of gasps, Ollie’s features shifted imperceptibly. The hard edges that had carved themselves into her expression relaxed and smoothed over, turning her face back into the one that Dan knew and…

He frowned, pushing the rest of the thought away.

Knew. The one that Dan knew.

“Home,” Ollie whispered. “Let’s go home.”

“You got it, kid,” said Dan. He had a damn good go at a reassuring smile as a tank skipped past the window like a pebble across a lake. “There’s just one tiny thing we need to do first.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Aranok swarm was evolving. For the past few minutes it had been forming increasingly more complex shapes as the demon inside it got to grips with all the individual elements of its collective shared consciousness.

At first, forming even a simple sphere had seemed impossible, but once the Inhabitant had mastered that, everything else quickly slotted into place. It wasn’t about trying to control all the different nanobots at once, it was about guiding them into place like one would a limb. Granted, these limbs were all smaller than the eye could comprehend, flying around the place, and numbering in their trillions, but the principle was more or less the same.

What surprised Aranok most of all was that he could inhabit the cloud in the first place. His ability to possess a living host had always depended on… well, having an available living host. As far as he could tell, the nanobots themselves were not alive, but somehow their hive mind was. Or alive enough for him to inject himself into, at least.

He twisted his myriad components into their most complex form yet. It was a form that would only be recognizable to a select few individuals, all of whom had died horrible, agonizing deaths soon after seeing it. It was the physical form of Aranok himself, only several thousand times larger.

The general shape was mostly humanoid, with the addition of two tatty-looking wings on his back, both of which had seen better days.

His head was an ugly knot of features, as if several different heads had all been melted together into a tangle of eyes and mouths and ears and noses. A single curved horn jutted up from the back of his head, bent at such an angle that it couldn’t possibly serve any useful purpose whatsoever, besides possibly hanging a coat on.

Aranok’s arms were thin and elongated, and ended in grasping fingers that looked to be little more than bone. His legs were unpleasantly frog-like, with thick thighs that tapered to painfully thin ankles, before giving way to large, flipper-like feet.

The demon threw back his head and opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. His features shifted jerkily, like bad stop-motion animation, then he tried the roar again. This time, several trillion nanobots all screeched at once, the sound stretching off across the city in all directions at once.

“Hey!”

An explosive round detonated against the side of the demon-bot’s head. Aranok jerked around to find Dan sitting astride a mag-bike, gun raised. Ollie sat behind him, holding onto the bike’s passenger handles.

“You mind keeping the noise down?” Dan shouted up to the thing. “Some of us have work in the morning.”

He squeezed the trigger again. Aranok’s arm rose to deflect the shot, but he couldn’t move quickly enough. The bolt exploded on his chest, leaving a deep crater in the center. It quickly healed over, and the demon’s grotesque face strobed into a different expression.

“Ooh, I think ye made him angry,” said Artur from inside the breast pocket of Dan’s shirt. “Sure, look at the face on that. Have ye ever seen anything like it? Other than when ye look in the mirror, I mean.”

“I want him angry,” Dan said. He pulled the trigger again, but Mindy let out a depressed-sounding bleep. “Damn. Out of charge,” he muttered, shoving the gun back in its holster. He raised his voice until it boomed out over the ruined street. “You want me, you piece of shizz? Come get me.”

Dan twisted the throttle of the mag-bike. It was one of those moments that would have really benefited from the throaty roar of an engine, but the bike just hummed softly as Dan spun the back end towards the giant nanobot-demon and powered off between the mounds of debris, burning vehicles and dismembered Tribunal troops.

“These things fairly suck the drama out of a good getaway, don’t they?” Artur said, struggling to hear the bike’s whisper-quiet drone. “Sure, it’s practically silent. Where’s the fun in that, I ask ye? Where’s the excitement?”

Dan lurched the bike sideways as an enormous fist smashed down, obliterating the tarmac.

“Oh, there it is now,” Artur said. He ducked down in Dan’s pocket. “Whatever yer plan is, I suggest ye hurry the feck up and put it into action, Deadman, because that big bastard does not look happy.”

“Ollie, hold on,” Dan said. When he got no response, he raised his voice and spat out her name. “Ollie!”

Ollie shifted in the seat behind him. “Huh? Oh. What?”

“Hold on.”

Ollie looked down at her hands. “I am.”

“Right,” said Dan.

“Otherwise I’d have fallen off.”

“Right. Yes,” said Dan. “But hold on tighter.”

“Why?”

The bike shot forwards, narrowly pulling away before a froggy foot slapped down with enough force to jolt an upside-down Tribunal tank several feet into the air. It landed directly ahead of the mag-bike, forcing Dan to swerve around it.

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Artur asked.

“It can, but I don’t want it to,” Dan said. “I need to keep this son of a bedge following us.”

“It’s following us,” Ollie confirmed. “It’s definitely following us.”

A snake like appendage sprouted from Aranok’s arms and stabbed down at them. Dan swung the bike left, debris spraying up around the bike.

“And now it’s attacking us,” Ollie pointed out.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Dan grunted. He leaned lower on the bike. “Ah, fonk it. Let’s just hope it can keep up.”

He gunned the engine. The tone of its humming shifted up a third of an octave, but once again failed to let out the throaty growl he’d been hoping for.

“Fonking mag-levs,” he muttered, then he squinted into the oncoming headwind as the bike streaked along the street with Aranok thundering along behind it.

The bike similarly failed to emit a satisfying screech of rubber on asphalt as Dan skidded it onto the adjoining road. Several cars had been abandoned here, their occupants huddled in knots of nosiness at various vantage points, all trying to get a view of whatever the fonk was going on the next block over.

They scattered as Dan raced towards them, then dived for cover when the nanobot giant stomped around the corner behind him, its flat feet pancaking the vehicles in its path. The screams of the people below caught Aranok’s attention. His head lowered, the movement much smoother than it had been just a few moments ago.

“Shizz. Ollie, get his attention,” Dan barked, slowing the bike as the nanobot-demon lurched to a stop.

“Hey!” said Ollie. “Over here!”

“Not like that,” Dan said, turning in the seat. “Zap him.”

Panic flared in Ollie’s eyes. “What? No. No, I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“Yeah, ye do,” Artur said. “I mean, ye nearly fried both our heads off back at the pub. And as for what ye did to all that alcohol… I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forgive you. I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

Ollie looked at her hands, then gripped the bike’s handles again. “I can’t. I can’t do it,” she insisted, tucking her chin to her chest and avoiding all eye contact.

“Damn it,” Dan spat, so suddenly it made Ollie jump. He shoved a hand into his coat and pulled out his gun. “Mindy. Kill shot.”

The cylinder spun, but no lights illuminated. Dan cursed, then tried again. “Stun shot.”

There was a series of clicks as the cylinder rotated again. As before, the lights failed to illuminate.

“Shizz. What else? What else?” He wracked his brains, then let out a little grunt of hope. “Oh. Mindy. Flare.”

Once again, the gun’s cylinder spun. When it locked in place this time, a single red light blinked on and off. It wasn’t much – it was barely anything, in fact – but it would have to do.

Taking aim, Dan fired the gun. A ball of burning red arced through the air towards Aranok, then exploded harmlessly across his chest. It did no damage whatsoever, but it served its purpose. The Inhabitant raised his vast head, the people scurrying around beneath him now forgotten. He made a dive towards the bike, his twisted body becoming a hurricane storm of flying nanobots as he abandoned his physical form in favor of something more efficient. It spiraled along the street like a sideways tornado, hurtling towards Dan and the others.

Artur swallowed. “I think now ye can safely go faster,” he said. “Ye’ve got its attention this time, alright.”

The bike droned calmly as Dan opened the throttle all the way. Ollie’s grip slipped on the handles, but she caught hold of Dan’s coat in time to stop herself falling. “I told you to hold on,” he called back over his shoulder, but Ollie’s reply was lost among the blaring of horns and screaming of pedestrians as they skidded onto another street with the nanobot cloud closing quickly.

“Trucks!” Artur cried. He needn’t have bothered. The only way Dan could have failed to notice the two hovering juggernauts hurtling towards them would be if he was dead. More dead.

There was no way of switching lanes in time. The trucks were side by side, probably twinned together and auto-piloting their way through the city. Their hefty metal grilles bore down on the bike, their headlights blindingly hot.

“Keep your arms in,” Dan warned, leaning right and aiming the bike straight between the trucks. In his front pocket, Artur pulled his limbs in tight. “Wasn’t really talking to you,” Dan grunted.

“Better safe than sorry,” Artur replied, the last syllable becoming a long, drawn-out and somewhat hysterical laugh as the bike shot between the juggernauts, sparks flying whenever any of its components skimmed too closely to the much larger vehicles.

With a sudden burst of speed, the mag-bike emerged from the Valley of the Trucks and shot straight across a busy junction. There was a lot of noise from around them. Shouts. Screams. The growl of metal meeting other metal. That sort of thing.

Behind them, meanwhile, the nanobot cloud tore through the trucks, Swiss-cheesing thousands of varyingly-sized holes in them. As the bulk of the bots forced their way through the widening gap, both enormous vehicles were forced outwards. They toppled in opposite directions, crashing down on much smaller cars in the lanes on either side.

“So, is yer plan just to drive around until this fecker has destroyed the whole city?” Artur called from Dan’s front pocket. “Because that’s kind of the impression I’m getting.”

Dan shook his head. “No. That’s Plan B.”

He mounted the sidewalk when he saw the road ahead was blocked with traffic. Luckily, most of the people who had been walking here had run like fonk when they’d seen the giant silver cloud knock the trucks over, and the final few stragglers all had enough sense to dive for cover when the mag-bike came zooming towards them.

“Then what the feck is Plan A?” Artur asked.

“Assuming I haven’t lost my sense of direction…” Dan began. He spun out the back end of the bike, powered along an alleyway, and felt that pang of disappointment again when the engine whispered politely beneath him.

They emerged onto a much quieter stretch of road lined on one side with tall metal fences topped with laser wire. A few hundred feet ahead, a faded sign read: Scrap ‘n’ Shizz.

“This is.”

“It’s coming!” Ollie urged. She knew this because huge chunks of masonry were raining into the alley behind them as the cloud forced its way between the buildings. “Hurry!”

Dan hummed along the street towards the junk yard entrance, the nanobots tumbling and spiraling out of the gap behind them.

“Wait, this is where we chased those other two bastards,” Artur realized. “Sure, what are ye coming here for?”

He clicked his fingers and straightened up inside Dan’s pocket. “Oh! The big magnet! Ye’re going to catch that fecker with the big magnet. Genius plan, Deadman! Fecking genius! That is the plan, right?”

“No.”

“Oh, thank God for that,” said Artur, visibly relaxing. “Because I broke the big magnet getting the car down, and didn’t know how I was going to break it to ye.”

The wire mesh gates had been chained together. In an ideal world, Dan would have been able to blast the lock off with his gun, but Mindy was now deader than he was. Instead, he barked an order for everyone to hold on, then braced himself for the impact as the bike slammed into the barricade.

The chain held, but the hinges didn’t. Both gates crashed inwards, in what was one of Dan’s few lucky breaks of the evening. The mag-bike droned softly into the yard. Dan pointed it towards the far end of the long central corridor that ran between the stacks of rusting metal, then hit the cruise control.

Grabbing Ollie, he rolled off, then kicked and dragged them both into the mouth of one of the much smaller passageways that ran off at right angles to the main artery.

“Hey, watch what—” Artur began, but Dan slapped a hand over his breast pocket to silence him, then pulled Ollie in tight against the wall of scrap. The Aranok-controlled cloud swarmed in above the fence. It tumbled end over end as it chased the speeding bike. Dan clamped his other hand over Ollie’s mouth as the heaving mass passed by just a few feet away, only releasing his grip when he was sure the coast was clear.

“I hope there’s more to it than this,” Artur whispered. “Sure, it’s not going to chase that bike forever. What the feck did ye bring us here for, Deadman?”

Dan ignored the question, and turned to Ollie. “How you holding up?”

Ollie frowned. “How am I holding what up?”

“Good enough,” Dan said. “I need you to do something.”

Ollie shifted anxiously. “Oh. What?”

“I need you to destroy those fonking nanobots.”

She snorted out a laugh. “Ha!”

Dan’s face remained stoically blank.

“Wait, what?” Ollie said.

“You can do this. We’ve seen you,” Dan told her. “You can flash-fry the shizz out of those little bamstons.”

“No. No, I can’t,” Ollie insisted, shaking her head. “I don’t know how.”

Dan put his hands on her shoulders. He smiled with a sort of fatherly compassion. “You’ll figure it out,” he said, then he shoved her out of the passageway and sent her stumbling into the main path. Shoving his fingers in his mouth, he let out a shrill whistle, then heaved on a rusted pipe and partially collapsed the alley mouth before Ollie could get back through.

“Wait! No, don’t!” she pleaded. “I can’t!”

Dan saw her through a gap in the scrap. Her irises were surrounded by acres of white in all directions. Tears were already pooling, and her purple-ping skin had turned several shades paler. Her head snapped around to the left, then jerked frantically back again.

“Let me in. Help me. It’s coming!”

“I’m sorry, kid,” Dan said, sounding like he actually meant it. “This is the only way.”

Ollie opened her mouth to reply, but the nano-cloud slammed into her before she could utter a sound. One second she was there, the next she was gone, replaced by a hurtling mass of liquid silver.

“Oh great. Ye’ve killed her,” Artur said. He drew in a breath. “Well, back to the drawing board, Deadman. Any other bright ideas?”

“Wait,” Dan whispered, shrinking further back into the passageway as the flying worm of demon-bots continued to wriggle past the entrance. He lowered his voice further still. “Come on. Come on.”

A red flash reflected off the metal around them and briefly turned the ever-present blue glow a shade of purple. Ollie made a sound that was part way between a scream and a roar, and a jarring ripple passed through the nano-cloud as if it had just met some immovable object.

“See? Didn’t kill her,” Dan said, although he failed to hide the note of surprise in his voice. Several short flashes of blue strobed across the junkyard, each one changing the pressure in Dan’s eardrums. He crept closer to the partially collapsed alley mouth and peeked out through a gap.

He could see the undulating silver mass of nanobots, but no Ollie. The multi-colored flashes of fire gave Dan a pretty good idea of where she was, though.

“Ye think she can do it?” Artur asked. “Ye think she can take out all them tiny robots?”

“No,” Dan admitted. “But I don’t need her to. I just need Aranok to believe she can.”

Artur waited for more of an explanation, but it soon became clear one wasn’t coming. “Ye’re a cryptic bastard, Deadman,” he grumbled. “Well, sure, I hope ye know what ye’re doing.”

“Me too,” Dan said, then he turned and hurried into the junkyard stacks, leaving the raging battle far behind.

* * *

Ollie stood in the center of a swirling vortex of silver, tiny bolts of lightning crackling across her body and flowing from her fingertips.

To say she was scared didn’t really do it justice. The rational part of her brain was still there somewhere, but it was merely observing as some more primitive and primal part took control of her body and unleashed a rainbow of Hells on the demon-cloud.

From its vantage point, her rational brain noted that the cloud was really very big indeed, and was currently surrounding her in all directions. On the other hand, it also noted that Ollie’s physical form was radiating an incredible amount of heat that seemed to be preventing the bots getting too close to her. The wall of the tornado’s eye was glowing white hot as millions of the tiny robots burned up.

The swirling tunnel folded upwards, briefly becoming an impossible shape that twisted around and folded in on itself, before several tentacle-like strands emerged from it and stabbed down in Ollie’s direction.

The primal part of her brain stepped up again and thrust her hands above her head. The aura of heat became a concentrated beam of white that carved through the tendrils, punched a hole in the impossible shape, then continued all the way into the upper atmosphere.

Unfortunately, somewhere between Ollie and the upper atmosphere of the planet Parloo was one of several million floating cities, so the beam passed through that, too. Around half of the blue glowing area on the city’s underside stopped being either of those things, which appeared to put a real dampener on its ability to stay aloft.

Slowly – reeeeeeally slowly – the city began to tilt, and then proceeded to start falling.

It was still Up There for now, but it was a little less Up There than it had been, and was getting further Down Here by the second.

The rational part of Ollie’s brain picked up on all this, but it had been relegated to such a small area now that it couldn’t really do anything about it. Even if it had been in charge, it doubted it could have done anything, anyway. Run away crying, perhaps, but nothing else was immediately springing to mind.

It decided to keep an eye on the falling metropolis for the moment, in the hope that it all somehow worked itself out. They probably had a spare engine somewhere. It would seem remiss for them not to.

Back Down Here, meanwhile, Aranok the Inhabitant was having his own internal strategy meeting, and it went something like this:

Ooh shizz.

Ooh shizzy, shizzy, shizz-fonk.

This was quickly seconded by all the other parts of his collective consciousness, and it was agreed that a new approach was required.

The swarm reformed, bunched together, then once again took the form of Aranok himself. It was potentially less effective than an ever-changing mass of gelatinous liquid metal, but he had more experience with this shape, and experience might just be what made the difference.

What Aranok didn’t know, though – what he couldn’t possibly have known – was that Ollie had a deep-rooted, practically pathological hatred for anything large and demon-like, and the sight of a fifty-feet tall one looming ahead of her did nothing to calm her rage.

Because he wasn’t aware of this, Aranok was feeling pretty pleased with his decision to adopt this form. He remained pleased with the decision right up until the point his legs were cleaved off by a scything energy blast, whereupon he concluded that it might have been a mistake.

The frog-like limbs collapsed beneath him, but as they fell they twisted and reformed, the severed thighs becoming the feet even as the feet fattened and reattached themselves to the demon’s hips.

Throwing out both spindly arms, Aranok toppled two towers of compacted metal cubes towards Ollie. She screamed – a raw, primal sound that had precisely nothing to do with fear – and the blocks changed direction. They slammed into the demon-bot, staggering him and getting wedged in his bulky frame.

Ollie’s hands came up on their own again as one of the cubes was launched back towards her. The already crumpled metal collapsed further, becoming smaller and more densely compacted. She redirected it with a wave and it hit a junk stack like a wrecking ball, bringing the whole thing crashing to the ground.

The rational part of her brain hated to admit it, but it was starting to rather enjoy this. Sure, the Up There city was still tilting, still falling, and would likely kill them all in a colossal fireball, but that was a worry for later. Not much later, admittedly, but a few minutes down the line, at least.

For now, though, Ollie’s brain just stood back and watched admiringly as her most primal instincts clapped her hands in front of her and the stacks of compressed metal closed like the walls of a battle-station trash-compactor, crushing the demon-bot between them.

Aranok became liquid metal and flooded out through the gaps in the junk. He took to the air again, fluttering like a sheet on the wind as he searched for some other viable form with which to turn this pitiful sack of bone and guts into a greasy spot on the ground.

He was part of the way through changing from a generic swarming blob to a whirling sphere of spiky death when a wide blast of fiery energy obliterated a few hundred thousand more nanobots. Relatively speaking, it wasn’t a lot – barely zero-point-one per cent of his total number, but it was enough to tell him that the nanobot phase of his life was probably over, and the time had come to move on. It had been fun while it lasted, but the girl was just too powerful to fight.

He’d just have to take back control of her, and use that power for himself.

The nanobots collapsed as one, becoming an inert silver hillock amidst all the debris. The now non-corporeal Aranok set his sights on Ollie and poured through the air towards her. She raised her hands and blasted him with a fizzing beam of blue energy. It passed through harmlessly through him, and the Inhabitant writhed in glee as he launched himself at Ollie’s head.

A hand caught him by the throat. This took the demon by surprise, as he hadn’t had a throat just a moment before. Now, though, a gloved hand was most definitely holding him by it, and quite tightly, too.

“Well now,” Dan said, the words emerging as an angry, yet also quite satisfied-sounding growl. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“The gloves!” cried Artur from Dan’s front pocket. “That’s why ye came back, for the old monster-grabbers. Ye crafty big bastard, ye!”

“Yup,” said Dan, holding Aranok firmly around the windpipe as he crunched a jab into the bridge of one of the demon’s many noses. “That’s why I came back.”

Coughing and wheezing, Aranok raised both frog legs and drove them towards Dan’s stomach. Deadman caught one of the feet around the ankle and twisted sharply until something in the demon’s knee made a popping sound that would likely haunt it for the rest of its life. However many minutes that might turn out to be.

Aranok let out a burbling wail. Several of his eyes bored into his captor, and Dan felt those icy fingers go digging around in his brain again, frantically searching for a handhold. He saw glimpses of a hole in his chest and a hole in the ground. He saw Vanshie, panic writ large on her face.

“Ain’t gonna work,” he said, tightening his grip and forcing his fears back down into the dark where they belonged.

With his free hand, Dan fished Artur from his pocket. “Ollie. Catch,” he said. Artur yelped as he was tossed through the air, went sailing over Ollie’s shoulder and thudded to the ground.

“Oh, nice catch, peaches,” Artur complained, spitting out dust as he got back to his feet. He took one look up at Ollie and decided it best not to push the matter any further. She stood rooted to the spot, her whole body trembling, her breath snarling in and out of her in vast red vapor-clouds.

“Uh, ye alright there? Sure, ye’re looking a little… on edge.”

“Calm her down,” Dan urged, marching away from them, partly carrying and partly shoving the struggling Aranok on ahead. “Be right back.”

The Inhabitant’s bony fingers dug into Dan’s wrist, but a few crunching jabs to the thing’s guts took some of the fight out of it.

The fingers in his brain became ice picks, but everything precious or delicate was buried beyond their reach now. Aranok squealed in despair and threw out his leathery wings, as if just the sight of him in all his glory would be enough to make Dan back down and let him go.

It wasn’t.

While held by the gloves, the demon was fully corporeal. Dan took full advantage of this and smashed the monster’s head into the rusted chassis of an old pick-up. Aranok hissed, then rained a flurry of blows on Dan’s head and upper body.

“Knock it off,” Dan warned, cracking a backhand slap across the Inhabitant’s distended jaw. He dragged him into another of the narrower passageways, out of Ollie and Artur’s sight. The demon’s squirming intensified as he anticipated what was coming next.

“Don’t kill me,” he croaked, all hints of the big bad Malwhere monster crumbling away like a decaying façade. “I’ll go. I’ll leave. I promise.”

Dan flicked his dry tongue across the front of his teeth. Despite the lack of air in his lungs, he sighed. “A few weeks ago… Hell, a few days ago, you’d be dead already. I’d have killed you without a first thought, let alone a second one.”

He looked back over his shoulder in the direction they’d come from. “But… I don’t know. Things change, I guess. Everything changes.” He pulled Aranok in closer until they were nose to noses. “So, between you and me, I’m trying to change, too. It won’t be easy, but I’m trying.”

Even with the hand on his throat, Aranok managed a grateful nod. “Th-thank you,” he sniveled. “Thank you. You won’t regret it.”

“I said I’m trying to change,” Dan grunted. He brought his other hand up quickly. There was a crack as the demon’s neck snapped. Releasing his grip, Dan watched the Inhabitant’s lifeless form slump to the ground. “Didn’t say I was there yet.”

As Dan stood over it, the body seemed to go into a high-speed decay. The flesh dried out, darkening until it became charcoal, then dust, then smoke. Whatever was left of Aranok swirled upwards on the breeze, then dissipated in the air.

Dan nodded in satisfaction, then staggered and fell against the closest junk stack as his legs decided enough was enough and exhaustion dragged down on him. He knew the Tribunal would be on the way, but the sirens sounded distant, and he reckoned he could spare a minute or two to rest up.

“Deaaaaadmaaaaan!”

Artur’s voice was a panicky roar that rolled across the junk yard and poked into every corner.

Dan groaned and pushed himself back into a standing position. He shambled, even more zombie-like than usual, out of the alleyway. “What is it now?” he muttered, then he blinked in the glaring intensity of the blue glow that was now painted across the ground and over the stacks.

Tilting his head back, Dan looked up. An entire city was falling towards them. That was… unexpected. It was maybe a third of a mile up, but getting steadily closer despite the best efforts of its one working engine.

“Oh,” Dan spat. “Fonk.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Artur said. “Any ideas? Because I am clean out.”

“Ollie?” Dan barked, hurrying to her side. The aura of power had gone again, and Ollie’s rational brain had been sucked back into action, quite against its will.

“Huh? What?” she spluttered.

“Falling city,” Dan said, keeping it brief. “Can you stop it?”

“No!” Ollie said, her voice a barely-audible whisper. “No, I can’t.”

“Maybe ye could push her into the path of it,” Artur said, making no attempt to hide the accusing edge to his voice. “See if maybe that spurs her into action, eh? Oh, wait, we’re already in the path of it.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Dan grunted.

“Well, previously we had some tiny robots giving us shoite, and now a feckin’ city’s about to fall on us from out of the sky, so I’m not entirely convinced that it worked at all, no.”

They stood together, looking up and looking lost. There was nothing to be done, Dan realized. Nothing but the waiting.

He felt something squeeze his hand through the glove, and looked down to find Ollie holding it. How long had she been doing that for, he wondered? And why?

He watched her for a moment, her head back, her eyes locked on the tumbling city, fear etching the lines of her face. Could she stop it? Maybe. He had no idea. He just knew he couldn’t ask her to try. The kid had been through enough today. Hell, she’d been through enough every day.

There was nothing to be done.

Nothing but the waiting.

“Still, if there’s one silver lining to this, it’s that we’ll take out a few million of those stuck-up bastards with us,” Artur said, gesturing up at the falling piece of Up There. It was so close they could hear snatches of screaming on the wind, and the blaring of some kind of klaxon alarm.

“Technically, they’ll be taking us out,” Dan said.

Artur tutted loudly. “Well, way to spoil a perfectly nice moment,” he said. “Sure, ye couldn’t have just left me with one fecking happy thought to keep the chill from me bones in the afterlife? Oh no, ye had to go and…”

The silver mound shifted beneath him, stopping him short. “Hey. Here now. Did ye feel that?”

He grabbed frantically at everything within reach as the ground swallowed him like quicksand. Dan bent and made a grab into the pile of inert nanobots and…

And…

Wait. No. They weren’t inert. Not anymore.

They billowed up around them, tentatively at first, but quickly finding their confidence. Uncovered once more, Artur spun, fists raised. “What the feck was that about?” he demanded.

As the nanobots spiraled upwards, Ollie shrank back behind Dan, but he kept hold of her hand and stopped her. “Hold on. It’s OK,” he said. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. It was not something he did often, and it didn’t really suit him, but this was one of those rare occasions that warranted it. “It’s all going to be OK.”

The nanobots formed a vast halo that grew spokes until it resembled a giant wheel lying horizontally in the sky. Dan and the others watched as it positioned itself beneath the city and matched its speed, so now both the platform and the nanobot wheel were falling.

The platform groaned as the nanobots slowed their descent and it came to rest atop them. The blue light of the engine was blinding now, turning night into day. The heat it gave off wasn’t yet enough to cause any damage, but the air rolling over Down Here was warm, and would soon become uncomfortably so.

And then, with a final creak, the city stopped falling. The nanobot wheel inched higher, levelling the platform out. Dan heard Ollie laugh with relief as the whole thing began to climb again, and had to resist joining in.

Instead, he raised his wrist-comm to his mouth and spoke into it. “Nice work, Tressingham.”

There was silence for a while, only broken by the soft whispers of static. Finally, a voice broke in.

“Thank you,” Tressingham said, then the comm-unit bleeped once more, as Tressingham hung up.

“Well now, there was a night and a half, eh?” Artur said. He raised his eyebrows as if an idea had just occurred to him. Dan didn’t need any detective skills to see through the act. “Oh! Hold on a moment! Ye know what we should do now?”

“Pretty sure I can guess,” Dan said.

“Pub!” Artur exclaimed, then he frowned. “Why are you two holding hands, by the way? Is there somethin’ ye’re not telling me?”

Ollie and Dan both looked down at their hands, then yanked their hands apart. “He looked scared,” Ollie said.

“I looked scared?” said Dan. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t scared.”

“A city was going to fall on our head,” Ollie pointed out.

“Was I concerned? Yes,” said Dan. “But that’s not the same as…”

A blaster round punched a hole in his stomach, ejecting a dribble of intestines out through his back. He looked down at the wound, his shoulders heaving in dismay.

“Oh, great,” he muttered, as dozens of Tribunal Enforcers and marksmen swarmed the junk yard. “There goes another shirt.”

“On the ground. Face down. Hands where we can see them!” barked a voice on a loudspeaker.

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Dan shouted back.

“We just saved the whole city, ye fecking eejits!” Artur hollered. Ollie started to point out that it was the nanobots who had technically done that, but he waved the objection away. “They don’t know that, do they?” he said. “Besides, we saved it from the nanobots in the first place. And from yerself before that, when ye were going all crazy and trashing the place, like.”

“We will open fire.”

“You already opened fire, you dumb piece of shizz,” Dan said, pointing to the almost perfectly circular hole in his stomach. “So how about you give us a break.” He jabbed a thumb in Ollie’s direction. “Or she will start blowing stuff up again.”

“What?” Ollie said, but Dan stepped in front of her.

“I mean it. Back off, or she cuts loose.”

There was silence from the Tribunal ranks. Tucked behind a full-height photon shield, Dan could see an officer talking anxiously into a wrist-comm.

“Very well,” the man said, once his conversation was over.

“Huh,” Dan muttered. “Didn’t think that would work.”

“Open fire in five, four…”

“Yeah. I don’t think it did,” Artur said.

Dan spun, turning his back to the assembled guns and putting himself between them and Ollie and Artur. “If you can run, run,” he commanded, then he clenched his jaw, tucked his chin in to his chest and braced himself for utter annihilation.

But the guns didn’t fire. Instead, Dan heard the rich clunk of a ludicrously expensive car door closing, then the thud, thud, thud of heavy footsteps drawing closer.

“Leave us,” said a voice. If Dan’s own voice was the sound of two bricks rubbing together, this one was the shifting of tectonic plates somewhere deep underground. Dan groaned. In a lot of ways, he’d have preferred death by blaster fire.

“Everyone shut up,” he whispered. “Leave the talking to me.”

When he turned, the Tribunal was packing up its gear and leaving as quickly as it possibly could. Where the Enforcers and marksmen had been was now a mismatched line of people who seemed to have been specifically built for the purposes of violence. There were only eight or nine of them, but each one looked capable of inflicting the damage of twenty men.

The casual observer might be forgiven for thinking the appearance of these brutes was what had sent the Tribunal rushing off in quite such a hurry, but Dan knew better. What had really been behind the Tribunal’s retreat was now thumping towards him, with a crisply-dressed assistant gliding effortlessly along behind.

The shape approaching was female. Dan only knew this because of the smear of glossy red across its stony lips, and the reinforced metal heels strapped onto its feet. Without those distinguishing features, the walking boulder would be pretty much as genderless as the non-walking variety, although Dan would know that face anywhere.

The assistant hurried ahead, reaching Dan and the others just before her employer did. She nodded curtly, then spoke in a soft but authoritative tone.

“Presenting the revered and much-loved Shornack, High Murderess of the Eleven Seals, dominatrix of Qqqtzl, and destructor of the following planetary systems…”

She launched into what seemed to be quite an exhaustive list of planetary systems, most of which Dan had never heard of, and probably for very good reason.

Throughout the introduction, Shornack held Dan’s gaze, her lipstick-stained mouth pursed in a dry smile, her eyes cold and calculating.

Once the assistant had reached the end of her list, Dan nodded in greeting. “Shornack.”

“Deadman,” said Shornack, and Dan felt his bones rattling inside him. She raised a finger and wagged it reproachfully. “You have been a very naughty boy!”

“About your guys, I can explain,” Dan began.

“My ‘guys’? What ‘guys’?” Shornack asked. The assistant leaned closer and whispered in her ear. Or where her ear presumably was, at least, it was hard to tell. “Oh, yes. Those guys. No real loss.”

Dan glanced around at Ollie, then down at Artur, hoping neither of them were about to try anything stupid. “So, this is about your money, then?” Dan asked.

“Everything is always about my money, Deadman,” Shornack said. “Always.”

“I’ll get it to you,” Dan said. “Soon.”

“How soon? Now soon?”

“Not all of it,” Dan said. “But I can pay you some.”

Shornack held his gaze for a few long worrying moments, then her stony lips parted to reveal teeth made of diamonds and gold.

“Relax, Deadman. Today, you have earned yourself a reprieve.” She raised that accusing finger again. “Today. Just today.”

“Uh… OK,” said Dan. He felt the obvious question niggling around in his head like a hole in a tooth that he really shouldn’t go poking his tongue in. He poked anyway. “Why?”

She gestured around them. “Isn’t it obvious? This place. Those men you took care of. They were working for a…” She smacked her lips together a few times, spitting sparks. “…competitor of mine. A newcomer, someone who doesn’t know any better. Yet. You struck a blow against him, and I felt I should show my gratitude.”

Dan nodded slowly, then shrugged. “OK, then.”

“And this is me showing my gratitude, Deadman.” She clicked her fingers. The line of built-for-violence henchmen all turned and faced the other way. “But be warned, I do not remain grateful for long.”

She glowered meaningfully at him, shot Ollie a cursory glance that somehow seemed to take in each and every one of her molecules, then turned away. She had barely made it two thunderous steps when her assistant leaned in and whispered again.

“Oh yes,” she said. She turned her head a fraction, but otherwise didn’t turn. “And I left you a little surprise at your office. A gift, in case my appreciation of your efforts wasn’t clear enough.”

“What is it?” Dan asked.

“You’re an educated man,” Shornack said, lumbering onwards and leaving Dan and the others behind. “I thought you’d have a better grasp of the meaning of the word ‘surprise’.”

Dan, Ollie and Artur all stood in silence, watching the gangster leave. If as Artur who eventually spoke.

“It’s a bomb, isn’t it? She’s stuck a big fecking bomb in the filing cabinet, or something,” he said. “Mark my words.”

“It won’t be a bomb,” Dan said, pulling off the gauntlets. He was about to toss them on the ground, but then decided they might come in useful someday, so shoved them down into his pockets instead.

“Ye sure about that?” Artur asked, trotting along behind Dan as he set off towards the exit.

“It probably won’t be a bomb.”

“Ye want to money on it?” Artur asked.

Ollie hung back. She looked down at her hands, then at the wreckage of the junk yard, before finally casting her gaze up to the floating city which was now being slotted back into place way, way overhead.

She had done all that. Somehow. She had done all that. And it scared her.

“Ye coming or what, peaches?” Artur asked. “Sure, we don’t want to get blown to tiny pieces without you now, do we? Where’d be the fun in that?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It wasn’t a bomb. In many ways, Dan would have preferred it if it had been. At least a bomb would’ve been just one terrible moment, rather than an endless succession of the fonking things all culminating in an enormous garage bill.

A dark purple Jonta Exodus slouched in Dan’s parking space. It was the exact same make, model and year as his old car. The only real difference was, this one hadn’t been completely destroyed.

Partly destroyed, maybe, but then that was just par for the course when it came to these pieces of shizz. Three of the four tires looked to be completely bald. One of the twin exhausts was tied on to stop it falling off, while the other was currently nowhere to be seen. Where it should have been was a short length of rope, suggesting the similar repair on the one remaining exhaust probably shouldn’t be considered a permanent measure.

The paintwork was flecked with dark chips and freckled with rust. There was a patch of lighter-colored paint on the rear wing where someone had amateurishly patched up a hole, and at least sixty per cent of the driver’s side was taken up by a single long scratch running from the front wheel arch all the way to the back.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Dan muttered.

“Is that… Is that your car?” Ollie asked.

“No, but it’s annoyingly similar,” Dan said.

“Maybe it’s better inside,” said Artur. He scampered up onto the back windshield, wiped away some of the grime covering the glass, then peered inside. “Ah no. No, it’s worse. Sorry if I got yer hopes up there.”

Dan opened the driver’s door. It squeaked as it sagged out of the doorframe and plunged towards the ground. He hooked a foot beneath it and held it more or less level with where it should have been as he bent and peered inside.

The smell was so bad it even bothered him. The seats were moldy. The floor was inch-deep with crumbs, empty candy wrappers and what looked like some kind of pet hair. There was a stain of unknown origin on the fabric of the roof lining, but it was almost certainly something body-fluidy.

His instinct was to have it destroyed in a controlled explosion, or just tossed into the ocean. But Shornack had given him the car, and that made it all much more complicated. He couldn’t risk offending her, so he didn’t have a lot of choice. He was once more the owner of a Jonta Exodus, the car widely regarded to be the one that single-handedly brought about the downfall of the multi-billion credit Jonta corporation, and the mass suicide of its board of directors.

Owning one of these things was bad. Owning two? That was either careless, or some cruel and unusual form of punishment.

Sliding in behind the wheel, Dan powered up the engine. It gurgled for a moment, coughed for several seconds, then let out a deep, throaty growl that reverberated up through Dan’s seat and into his bones.

He gave the gas pedal a nudge and the car barked and snarled in a way no mag-lev ever would.

Huh. Maybe it wasn’t all bad.

The passenger door opened, and Ollie slid in beside him. Artur hopped out of her hands and up onto the dash. “Oh, it’s ripe in here, alright!” he said.

“We can clean it up,” Dan said, running his hands along the faded leather of the wheel. He turned a handle on the door beside him. “Maybe open a…”

The glass in the door fell outwards and smashed on the ground.

“…window.”

“Oh yeah, that helps, right enough,” said Artur. He clapped his hands, then rubbed them together. “So… pub?”

“Soon,” said Dan, jerking the Exodus into reverse and lurching out onto the street. “I just have one little thing to do first.”

* * *

Commissioner Usakt Polani stepped from his private elevator, drained the last of his coffee from a plastic cup, then tossed the container roughly in the direction of where he thought a trash can would probably be. The cup paffed onto the floor, but Polani either didn’t notice, or assumed someone else would pick it up. He caught his reflection in the darkened glass of his office door as he shambled along the corridor, and saw how the night had taken its toll.

His eyes were ringed with red, his pudgy, overfed cheeks more bloated than usual. He’d been wearing the same clothes for twenty-six hours now, and he looked it. He dreaded to think what he smelled like.

Hardly surprising, though. He hadn’t remembered a night like this since that bounty hunter had swung into town a decade ago and taken out half of Down Here’s politicians. The Tribunal had dealt with plenty since then, of course – rampaging off-worlders, gang battles and the willfully unemployed, to name but a few – but nothing had come close to that night.

Until tonight.

He had all available units searching for the woman who had single-handedly taken out one of the longest streets Down Here, plus a few of his more qualified detectives looking into the flying metal cloud angle. They knew he was expecting results, and would be unlikely to disappoint him.

Usually, he wouldn’t get involved. He’d be holed up with one of his mistresses somewhere, or taking care of his own business. What he wouldn’t be doing was returning from one of the Watchtower’s canteens, having just forced down a cold pastry filled with an unidentifiable gray mush, with a cup of cheap and barely lukewarm coffee as a chaser.

Polani took a moment trying to fix his hair in his reflection, then accepted he was wasting his time. He stepped inside into darkness. “Lights,” he said, but the bulbs failed to illuminate.

Behind him, the door closed with a faint but definite click.

Polani turned, moving surprisingly quickly for a man of his age and size. He swung with a forearm strike at the shape barely visible in the gloom. The blow was knocked aside, and Polani cried out as he was shoved backwards, hit his desk, and rolled clumsily all the way over it.

Whether through accident or design, he landed butt-first in his chair. The momentum rolled it a few feet to the wall, where it bumped to a stop against a city map marked with thousands of colorful pins.

“You’re making a big mistake,” the commissioner spat. If he was scared, he wasn’t showing it. “You think this place isn’t being watched? You think two dozen Enforcers aren’t on their way up here right now to blow your fonking brains out? You dumb shizznod. You’re a dead man walking. You hear me? You’re a dead man walking.”

“Funny you should say that.”

Dan stepped from the shadows and into the sliver of blue light that seeped in through the closed blinds of the window.

The change in Polani’s expression was slight, but it was there. He had built a career on being surprised by nothing, taking everything in his stride. Dan could tell he was rattled now, though, or making a damn good job of pretending to be.

“Holy… Ripley?” the commissioner whispered. “What… I mean…” He plastered a big old goofy grin on his face and started to stand. “Great to see you, man. We all thought you were—”

Dan’s knuckles introduced themselves to the bridge of the commissioner’s nose. “Sit down,” Dan instructed, although from the way Polani flopped back into his chair, it probably wasn’t necessary.

“I know you did it,” Dan said. “Or ordered it, anyway. Me.” He gritted his teeth, wrestling with the next word. “Vanshie. I know you did it.”

“Ripley…”

“Don’t,” Dan warned. “That guy’s dead.”

Despite the blood oozing from his nose, Polani tried his best to turn on the charm. “Well, I mean, you’re looking great for it! Look at you.” His smile became something more sincere. “But, listen, everything aside, it was nothing personal, OK? To tell you the truth, I’ve regretted it ever since. Sure, we had our differences, but think of everything we did together before that. Everything we achieved. Right?”

He used his heels to pull the chair a little closer to the desk. “You were good, Slam. Hell, you were the best. And you throw it all away for what? An attack of conscience?”

Ripley spat a phlegmy wad of blood and spittle onto the desk. “Fonk conscience. We don’t need it. You don’t need it.”

He leaned forwards so one arm was draped over the edge of the desk. “I’m sure you’ve heard, but I recently lost an important member of my organization. Your old partner, in fact. You know what that means, right?”

“One less piece of shizz out there on the streets?” Dan guessed.

“Well, not where I was going with it,” Polani admitted. “It means, I have an opening. It’d be a perfect fit for someone with your skills and experience. You’d be an asset to the team, Ripley, like the old days.”

He gestured vaguely at Dan’s ravaged face. “Maybe we could even do something about… you know. We have access to some pretty good surgeons. Money wouldn’t be an issue. We could get you fixed up good as new. What do you say?”

“I’ll pass.”

“Huh,” said Polani. “Shame.”

He tore open the top drawer of his desk and shoved a hand inside. His face fell when he found it empty.

“I know where you keep your gun, commissioner,” Dan said. He brought the weapon up into the light. It was an old plasma pistol, modified to give it some extra oomph. They had been ruled illegal a decade or more ago, mostly due to the time it took those shot with one to die, and the journey they had to go on to get there.

Dan peered down the gun’s narrow sights at Polani. “I know where you keep a lot of things. Your wife. Your girlfriends. Your children.”

He let that last one hang in the air for a moment, then lowered the gun.

“Are you blackmailing me, Ripley?” Polani asked. “Seriously? Is that what this is?”

“Not blackmailing. Not threatening. Just… offering you some advice,” Dan said. He approached the desk and leaned over it, bringing his face closer to the commissioner’s. Up close, Dan was pleased to see the subtle signs of panic on Polani’s pudgy face. His pupils were dilated, and his open pores were glossy with sweat. “The girl. The woman who caused some problems down town tonight. I assume you’re looking for her?”

Polani nodded, just once.

“I know where she is,” Dan said. “Her name is Oledol Lodelo. Ollie for short. She’s registered. You can find her in the system.”

He gestured with the gun to the glassy surface of the commissioner’s desk. “But you’re not going to,” Dan continued. “You’re going to forget all about her. You’re going to call off any squads you have looking for her, and you’re going to pretend you never even knew she existed.”

Polani snorted. “I don’t think so. She caused millions in property damage alone. We’re bringing her in, and we’re putting her down.”

Dan sighed and straightened up. “See, I’m not worried about what you might do to her. Not really. And I’m sure as shizz not worried about what she might do to you. But I am worried about what might happen if you come after her.”

He pointed with the gun to the window and the world out there beyond it. “She almost destroyed the city tonight. Two cities, in fact. You know how?”

The commissioner said nothing, but gave the briefest shake of his head.

“She didn’t have some great plan. Didn’t have weapons. Didn’t have an army,” Dan said. He placed the barrel of the gun on the desk and leaned on the handle, lowering his face to the commissioner’s again. “She waved her hands.”

He gave that a moment to sink in.

“That was it. She waved her hands, and almost killed billions of people.” He leaned down even further until he could smell the sweat stink rising from the commissioner. From the way Polani’s nostrils flared, he was getting a good whiff of Dan’s scent, too. “Imagine what she’ll do when she’s cornered. Your wife. Your girlfriends. Your children. Gone, along with everyone else. And all she has to do is wave her hands.”

Polani said nothing. He didn’t have to. Dan could read the man’s face. He’d do as he was told. What choice did he have?

There was a click as Dan released the battery pack from the bottom of Polani’s gun. He tossed both parts into different corners of the room.

“It was good to see you, Usakt,” Dan said. “But so we’re clear, if I see you again, I’ll kill you.”

The commissioner’s anxious expression became a smirk, then a grin, then a staccato laugh ejected from his throat. “Oh, Ripley, you idiot.”

He nodded towards the office door. Dan turned and saw twenty or more red dots hovering over his chest as a platoon of Enforcers took aim with their weapons.

“You’re not getting out that door in one piece.”

“Who said anything about the door?” Dan asked, then he turned towards the window, lowered his head, and ran.

* * *

Ollie sat in the passenger seat of the Exodus, rocking impatiently from side to side. The cool air swirling in through the missing window was helping with the smell, but she had been sitting in the car for a while now, and it had long-since lost its already limited appeal.

“Think he’s going to be long?” she asked.

Up on the dash, Artur sighed. “Again, I don’t know, peaches. Like all those other times ye asked. I have exactly as much information on the situation as you do. He might be four hours, or he might turn up any moment—”

There was an ear-splitting bang as Dan landed heavily on the car’s hood, crumpling the metal and shattering a spider-web pattern into the windshield.

“Talk of the devil,” Artur said. He chapped on the windshield. “Ye alright there, Deadman?”

“Ugnf,” Dan groaned.

Artur pointed ahead to the cushioned rectangle on the ground in front of the car. “I thought ye were going to aim for the mattress? Wasn’t that the idea?”

Dan grunted again, then he rolled off the hood and clattered onto the ground. Grunting and grimacing, he crawled around to the driver’s door, heaved it open, and slumped into his seat.

“Are ye hurt, or something?” asked Artur. “Sure, ye’re gasping like yer on yer dying breath.”

Dan hacked up something black and bloody, and spat it out through the gap where the window should be. Despite the not inconsiderable amount of damage that had just been inflicted on it, the Exodus’s engine strained and struggled into life. It’s bald back tires spun, throwing up two clouds of white smoke as Dan powered the car over the pedestrianized plaza and away from the Tribunal Watchtower.

“Did you see him? The man you wanted to see?” Ollie asked.

Dan grunted as he forced a dislocated shoulder into position. “I did.”

“And is everything OK?”

Dan turned his head, ignoring the pain it brought. He met her eye. “It will be, kid. It will be.”

“Great!” cheered Artur. “So how about we finally go and celebrate? Pub.”

Dan made a non-committal sort of noise. “We should probably call Tressingham’s wife. Let her know he isn’t cheating on her.”

“Aah, now, Deadman. Deaaaadman. Come on now, ye bollock-faced sack of shoite,” Artur said in the most soothing voice he could muster. “Sure, that can keep for tonight, can’t it?”

Dan shrugged. It made three of his ribs pop out of position. “I guess it can wait.”

“Good man!” Artur said. He drummed his hands on the dash, then pointed both index fingers at Dan. “So… pub?”

Dan rolled his eyes. “Pub.”

Artur’s grin almost split his head in two. He turned to Ollie and pointed at her this time, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

Ollie frowned and darted her eyes from Artur to Dan and back again. “Well, I mean, I’m not really sure what a pub is, so…”

“Then it’s our duty as yer friends to introduce ye to its many wonders and delights,” Artur said. He turned and placed a foot on a raised vent, then pointed dramatically ahead like a captain on the deck of a ship. “Full speed ahead, Deadman. There’s drinking to be done!”

Dan crunched through the gears of the Exodus. He checked the rear-view mirrors. No-one was following. No-one was chasing. Not yet, anyway. Not right now.

“Whatever you say, Artur,” Dan answered, and the Exodus roared as it swept onwards between the towers and spires of the city. His city. “Whatever you say.”

Hey, don’t go yet!

Want to find out what happens with Dan, Ollie and Artur between this book and the first book, Dial D for Deadman, and where Dan got his replacement arm from? Find out in Dead Men Don’t Get Paid, an exclusive short story only available in the short story collection SPACE TEAM: A LOT OF WEIRD SHIZZ, available to order now.

Also, if you want to keep up with all things Dan Deadman, or the Space Team series, where Dan made his first appearance, you can get all the updates (plus some free stories) by clicking here. You could also come join me and some fellow Space Team Universe fans over on Facebook, if you’re so inclined.

Finally, thank you for reading this book. I had a blast writing it, and hope you enjoyed reading it. If you did, and you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, please consider leaving a review when prompted at the end of the book. I appreciate all the reviews and feedback I get, and they are a great way for helping other readers discover books you’ve enjoyed, so please do spread the word!

Bye for now, ye great big gobshoite!

Barry

ALSO BY BARRY J. HUTCHISON

Looking for something else to read? This is a full list of the currently available books in the Space Team Universe. They’re all excellent, even if I do say so myself…

SPACE TEAM SERIES

Space Team
Space Team: The Wrath of Vajazzle
Space Team: The Search for Splurt

Space Team: Song of the Space Siren
Space Team: The Guns of Nana Joan
Space Team: Return of the Dead Guy
Space Team: Planet of the Japes

Space Team: A Lot of Weird Shizz - A Space Team Universe Short Story Collection

Space Team: The Collected Adventures – Volume 1

Space Team: The Collected Adventures – Volume 2

DAN DEADMAN SPACE DETECTIVE SERIES

Dial D for Deadman
Dead Inside

EVERYTHING ELSE

The Bug – Complete Season 1