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Neena shook her head stubbornly.

“You can go,” Ed told her.

“It’s him we want,” agreed Evie Cray. “You go on, dear.”

Tig Vesicle took Neena’s hand. She let him draw her away a pace or two but she kept her body and her eyes turned to Ed. He gave her his best smile.
Go on,
he mouthed silently. Then out loud he said:

“Thanks for everything.”

Neena smiled uncertainly back.

“By the way,” Evie Cray said, “we want your fucking husband too.”

She reached into her purse, but Ed already had the Hi-Lite Autoloader out, which he held close enough to her face so that the muzzle just touched her under the left eye, indenting the flesh there. “Keep your hand in the bag, Evie,” he advised. “And don’t do anything.” He looked her up and down. “Unless this is a cultivar you’re running.”

“You’ll never know, dipshit,” she said.

She said: “Kill him, Bella.”

Ed found himself looking across the top of her head into the muzzle of Bella Cray’s big Chambers pistol. He shrugged.

“Kill me, Bella,” he said.

Tig Vesicle observed this standoff for a moment, backing away quietly. He still had hold of Neena’s hand. “Goodbye, Ed,” he said. He turned away and ran off down the street. At first he had to pull Neena along, but soon she seemed to wake up, and began to run in earnest. They were like some kind of tall, awkward bird. The snow whirled round them, half-obscuring their poorly articulated limbs and curious running style. Ed Chianese felt a kind of relief, because he owed them both so much. He hoped they would work it out between themselves, and come back for their kids, and be happy.

“Hey,” he said absentmindedly. “Go deep, you guys.”

“Dipshit,” said Evie Cray.

There was a loud bang as the gun in her purse went off. The purse exploded and a Chambers bolt hummed off down the street. Ed jumped in surprise and shot Evie in the side of the face. She went rigid and backed into her sister’s hand, so that Bella shot her too, in the back of the head. Ed let Evie fall, stepped away and got the Hi-Lite under Bella’s chin.

“I hope it was a cultivar, Bella,” he said. Then he warned her: “Drop the pistol unless you’re running one too.”

Bella looked down at her sister’s body, then at Ed.

“You fucking cunt,” she said. She let the pistol fall. “You won’t be safe anywhere now. You won’t be safe anywhere ever again.”

“Not a cultivar, then,” said Ed. He shrugged. “Sorry.”

He waited until he was sure that Tig and Neena Vesicle had escaped. Then he collected up all the weapons and ran off down Straint in the opposite direction to the one they had taken. He had no idea where he was going, and the snow was already turning to rain. Behind him he could hear Bella Cray screaming for the gunpunks. When he looked back she was trying to get her sister to sit up. The remains of Evie’s head flopped backwards like a bit of wet rag in the streetlight. Point-blank, he thought. Shot right in the eyes.

The day he got
back to London, Michael Kearney closed the Chiswick house and moved into Anna’s flat.

There wasn’t much to move, which was lucky because Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts. The place was a warren to start with: linear in plan, but each room sized differently or acting as a passage between two others. You never knew where you were. There wasn’t much natural light. She had reduced it further by doing the walls a kind of Tuscan yellow then rag-rolling on top of that in pale terracotta. The kitchen and lavatory were tiny, and the latter had been painted with blue-gold fishes. There were masks everywhere, streamers, Chinese lampshades, bits of dusty curtain, chipped glass candelabra, and large dried fruits from countries to which she had never been. Her books spilled off their bowed softwood shelves to drift across the molasses-coloured floor.

Kearney had planned to use the futon in the back room, but as soon as he lay on it his heart raced and he was racked with inexplicable anxieties. After a night or two he began sleeping in Anna’s bed. This was perhaps a mistake.

“It’s as if we’re married again,” Anna said, waking up one morning and giving him a painfully bright smile.

When Kearney got out of the bathroom, she had made poached eggs and stale toast, also stale croissants. It was 9 a.m. and the table was carefully set with place mats and lighted candles. Generally, though, she seemed better. She signed up for yoga classes at Waterman’s Arts Centre. She stopped writing notes to herself, though she left the old ones pinned up on the back of the bedroom door where they confronted Kearney with forgotten emotional responsibilities.
Someone loves you.
He spent much of each night staring at the wash of streetlight on the ceiling of the room, listening to the traffic murmur to and fro across Chiswick Bridge. As soon as he felt settled, he went to Fitzrovia to see Tate.

It was a raw Monday afternoon. Rain had emptied the streets east of Tottenham Court Road.

The research suite—an annexe of Imperial College orphaned recently into the care of free market economics—was entered through a bleak, clean basement area with a satin-finish nameplate and newly blacked iron railings. A few streets further east it would have housed a literary agency. The ventilators were open and noisy, and through the frosted glass windows Kearney could see someone moving about. The faint sound of a radio filtered out. Kearney went down the steps and punched his access code into the keypad by the door. When it didn’t work, he pressed the intercom button and waited for Tate to buzz him in. The intercom crackled, but no one spoke at the other end, and no one buzzed.

After a moment he called, “Brian?”

He pressed the buzzer again, then held it down with his thumb. No answer. He went back to street level and peered through the railings. This time he couldn’t see anyone moving, and all he could hear was the sound of the ventilators.

“Brian?”

After a moment, he assumed he had been mistaken. The lab was empty. Kearney turned up the collar of his leather jacket and walked off in the direction of Centre Point. He hadn’t got to the end of the street when he thought of phoning Tate at home. Tate’s wife picked up. “Absolutely not here,” she said. “I’m glad to say. He was out before we woke up.” She thought for a moment, then added dryly: “If he came home at all last night. When you see him tell him I’m taking the kids back to Baltimore. I mean that.” Kearney stared at the phone, trying to remember what she was called or what she looked like. “Well,” she said, “in fact I don’t mean it. But I will soon.” When he didn’t answer she said sharply, “Michael?”

Kearney thought her name was Elizabeth, but people called her Beth. “Sorry,” he said. “Beth.”

“You see?” said Tate’s wife. “You’re all the same. Why don’t you just bang on the fucking door until he wakes up?” Then she said: “Do you think he’s got a woman in there? I’d be relieved. It would be such human behaviour.”

Kearney said, “Look, hang on, I—”

He had turned round just in time to see Tate come up the steps from the suite, pause for a moment to look both ways, then cross the street and walk off at a rapid pace towards Gower Street. “Brian!” called Kearney. The phone picked up the tone of his voice and began squawking urgently at him. He broke the connection and ran after Tate, shouting, “Brian! It’s me!” and, “Brian, what the fuck’s going on?”

Tate showed no sign of hearing. He stuck his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. By now it was raining heavily. “Tate!” shouted Kearney. Tate looked over his shoulder, startled, then began to run. By the time they reached Bloomsbury Square, which was where Kearney caught up with him, they were both breathing heavily. Kearney grasped Tate by the shoulders of his grey snowboarder jacket and swung him round. Tate made a kind of sobbing gasp.

“Leave me alone,” he said, and stood there suddenly defeated with water pouring down his face.

Kearney let him go.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

Tate panted for a bit, then managed to say: “I’m sick of you.”

“What?”

“I’m sick of you. We were supposed to be in this together. But you’re never here, you never answer your phone, and now bloody Gordon wants to sell forty-nine percent of us to a merchant bank. I can’t deal with the financial side. I’m not supposed to have to. Where have you been for the last two weeks?”

Kearney gripped him by the forearms.

“Look at me,” he said. “It’s
all right
.” He made himself laugh. “Jesus, Brian,” he said. “You can be hard work.” Tate watched him angrily for a moment, then he laughed too.

“Look,” said Kearney, “let’s go to the Lymph Club and have a drink.”

But Tate wouldn’t let himself be won over that easily. He hated the Lymph Club, he said. Anyway he had work to do. “I suppose you could come back with me,” he suggested.

Kearney, permitting himself a smile, agreed that this would be the best thing.

The suite smelled of cats, stale food, Giraffe beer. “Most nights I’m sleeping on the floor,” Tate apologised. “I don’t get time to go home.” The cats were burrowing about in a litter of burger cartons at the base of his desk. Their heads went up when Kearney walked in. The male hurried up to him and fawned about at his feet, but the female only sat where she was, the light making a transparent corona out of her white fur, and waited for him to come to her. Kearney passed his hand over her sharp little head and laughed.

“What a house of prima donnas,” he told her.

Tate looked puzzled. “They’ve missed you,” he said. “But look here.”

He had prolonged the typical useful life of a q-bit by factors of eight and ten. They cleared the rubbish from around the credenza at the back of the room and sat down in front of one of the big flatscreen displays. The female cat prowled about with her tail in the air, or sat on Kearney’s shoulder purring into his ear. Test results evolved one after the other like puffs of synaptic activity in decoherence-free space. “It’s not a quantum computer,” Tate said, after Kearney had congratulated him, “but I think we’re ahead of Kielpinski’s team, as of now. Do you see why I need you here? I don’t want Gordon selling us down the river just when we can ask anybody for anything.” He reached out to tap the keyboard. Kearney stopped him.

“What about the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“The glitch in the model, whatever it was.”

“Ah,” said Tate, “that. Well, I did what I could with it.” He tapped a couple of keys. A new programme launched. There was a flash of arctic-blue light; the female oriental stiffened on Kearney’s shoulder; then the earlier test result bloomed in front of them as the Beowulf system began faking space. This time the illusion was much slower and clearer. Something gathered itself up behind the code somewhere and shot out across the screen. A million coloured lights, boiling and sweeping about like a shoal of startled fish. The white cat was off Kearney’s shoulder in a second, hurling herself at the display so hard it rocked. For fully half a minute the fractals poured and jerked across the screen. Then everything stopped. The cat, her coat reflecting ice-blue in the wash of the display, danced about for half a minute more, then lost interest and began to wash herself affectedly.

“What do you make of it?” said Tate. “Kearney?”

Kearney sat full of a kind of remote horror, stroking the cat. Just before the burst of fractals, just as the model collapsed, he had seen something else. How was he going to save himself? How was he going to put all this together? Eventually he managed to say:

“It’s probably an artefact, then.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Tate. “There’s no point going any further with it.” He laughed. “Except maybe to amuse the cat.” When Kearney didn’t rise to this, he went off and started setting up another test. After about five minutes he said, as if continuing an earlier conversation:

“Oh, and some maniac was here to see you. He came more than once. His name was Strake.”

“Sprake,” said Kearney.

“That’s what I said.”

Kearney felt as if he had woken in the night, out of luck. He put the white cat down carefully and stared around the suite, wondering how Sprake had found his way here.

“Did he take anything?” He indicated the monitor. “He didn’t see this?”

Tate laughed.

“You’re joking. I wouldn’t let him in. He walked up and down in the area, swinging his arms and haranguing me in a language I didn’t recognise.”

“His bark’s worse than his bite,” Kearney said.

“After the second time, I changed the door code.”

“So I noticed.”

“It was just in case,” said Tate defensively.

Kearney had met Sprake perhaps five years after he stole the dice. The meeting occurred on a crowded commuter train passing through Kilburn on its way to Euston. The walls of the Kilburn cutting were covered with graffiti, explosions of red and purple and green done with deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes bulging like damp tropical fruit, effects of glistening surfaces.
Eddie, Daggo, Mince
—less names than pictures of names. After you had seen them everything else became oppressive and dull.

The platform at Kilburn was empty but the train stopped there for a long time, as if it was waiting for someone, and eventually a man pushed his way on. He had red hair, pale hard eyes, and an old yellow bruise across the whole of his left cheek. He wore a belted military surplus coat with no jacket or shirt underneath it. Though the doors closed, the train remained still. As soon as he got in, he rolled a cigarette and began smoking it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other passengers. The men stared at their polished shoes. The women studied the mass of sandy hairs between his pectoral muscles; they exchanged angry glances. Though the doors had closed, the train remained where it was. After a minute or two, he pulled back his cuff to consult his watch, a gesture which revealed the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. He grinned, and indicated the graffiti outside.

“They call it ‘ bombing,’ ” he said to one of the women. “We ought to live our lives like that.” Instantly she became involved with her
Daily Telegraph
.