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  The Bureau was law. But the Brethren were justice.

  A perfect display of it. With carefully selected robes that had been specially chosen to mimic the shape of scales, made of paper.

  There he sat. In his enormous paper robe, rustling noisily in the anteroom to Frome’s office. The main man. The Cardinal. Named Big Brother by the Temple, whose library lacked major works from the twentieth century. Those belonged to a different timeline. He was waiting for an appointment. Like an enormous paper beetle. He had come to discuss the budget for the following year.

  How much were the Brethren worth, thought Frome, totting it up. How much was she willing to pay for services rendered to the City and its people.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell who had the upper hand in the relationship between the Brethren and the Bureau. They were symbiotic. And the seas of double-entry book-keeping made it hard to say who was on whose payroll.

  The answer, thought Frome, was that the Brethren were worth a lot. They owned most of the land the Tranquelle Belt was nested on. Without the support of the Brethren, the City could not really exist.

  Frome smoothed her trouser suit down and entered.

  They shared a glass of Bureau Bourbon. They discussed everything and nothing. They poured over the accounts for the Temple. Frome did not believe in micromanaging. She presented the Bureau account papers.

  ‘It seems we have had fewer Bad Memories than in previous years.’

  ‘Is this a cause for concern?’

  ‘Well, on the face of it, it is an improvement. However, we have our sources that have indicated that the issue may be a case of under-reporting.’

  ‘Lethene? I thought it was just an urban legend?’

  ‘Yes. Well, if it isn’t Lethene we don’t know what it is. Somehow, they’re avoiding iRemember and setting fire to more and more servers. Scientifically Proven God only knows how, given that they live like animals out in that desert. And the situation is...heating up. We are still in control. But only just. It seems that some Bad Memories are simply being...forgotten.’

  This conversation was for the record. Big Brother, like Frome, knew that Lethene was very much more than an urban legend. They knew exactly what it could do.

  ‘Shall we continue this discussion over refreshments?’

  ‘It is traditional.’

  And the meeting concluded in the way it always did – in the ostentatious blue and gold draperies of the State Dining Room at the Glitz, with a slap-up meal. Frome’s Personal Assistant, Louis, called ahead and drove them there in Frome’s armoured black transit pod. The State Dining Room would have to be cleared of guests. Frome ate alone. Big Brother excluded.

  In a state where real agriculture was limited to a few small greenhouse complexes in far-off reaches of the empire, the City chefs and their lab assisstants had become very creative with protein mash and artificial colours and flavours. Meats. Vegetables. Anchovies. They all looked and tasted just like the real thing. No one needed the real thing. But for those who wanted it, and could pay, there was always the Glitz. Only at the Glitz could you still get real olives, and real chicken. Real caviar. The greenhouses produced just enough for the delectation of the ruling elite. To normal Citizens the mere existence of these greenhouses was a legend more doubtful than Lethene even, nothing more than whispers on the wind from Desert Ring 2.

  Real wine flowed. Meat flowed. So did certain cherry-picked press delegates who would report the dinner over the wireless, and the national press. Sanctified by the Brethren, each newspaper printed with a serial number, and in limited quantity.

  Frome watched Big Brother carefully. There was meaning in every movement of the little finger, in every olive pit expectorated, in every cutlet lifted.

  She was careful to hide her own meanings. She moved very little at the dining table. Only her eyes shifted, following the motions of her opponent’s body. For he was an opponent. Like all Frome’s opponents, she thought, he would lose.

  A group of orbiting waiters brought assorted dishes and dark red liquor. Until Big Brother was under the table.

  Frome nodded to Louis to take her back to the Bureau. She had done her job admirably. Now she could go back to her office. Back to her comfortable Chesterfield.

  She could put on the visor.

  The movement of anticipation, a junkie shake, a barely perceptible tremble, ran through Frome’s forearms. Louis pretended not to notice, which is exactly what Frome was paying him for.

  She could already feel the soft suction around the temples. The hormone-fizz of another mind.

  She quickened her pace. There would be a brief moment of pleasure before the monthly medical check-up. Which she was not looking forward to one bit.

  ***

  As he tried to shift dirt, dust and sand as quietly as possible, Lucian felt his muscles ache and spasm. He was getting much too old for all of this. He felt as if he would melt into the sand. Icara Swansong would find him, he imagined, a puddle of perspiration, an almost imperceptible smear at the bottom of the crater.

  The Lethene barrels twanged as he pushed them over onto their sides and rolled them towards the pit he had dug. He winced, feeling sure that the Inspector would hear the racket and come running.

  No. She was probably well-sedated and sleeping sweetly.

  It was, he thought, a great shame for all of this lovely stuff to go to waste. He reckoned there must be at least 300,000 Frome dollars’ worth of the stuff. Per barrel. Though he and Gurk had never charged. They had given it away for free, to those who could prove they were pure of heart. Whatever that meant. Lucian had just brewed the Lethene. Gurk had conducted the background checks.

  He tried not to think about the ache in his arms as he shifted dirt and fluid-filled barrels. If he was really going to leave, in the dead of night, what would he need? Water? Food? There probably wasn’t time to take much. How much would he need, and how long would he be able to survive once it ran out? He looked out into the night. There was sustenance in Desert Ring 2, in any desert. But it was not an easy life. Not an easy survival. He remembered the little expeditions he and Gurk had taken. As preparation for some utopian future, when the City was dead and gone. A future that hadn’t come in time for Gurk. Gurk had wanted to make sure Lucian could survive if it came in time for him. He’d taught Lucian ways to use the desert. Find water. Eat lizards. And crucially, if there were neither lizards nor water, how to find the hidden entrances to Off-Gridder tunnels using nothing but the constellations and a bit of old plastic. Any of the hundreds of subterranean tunnels that the Off-Gridders had built out here would do. A knot of tunnels, like hundreds of balls of yarn. Voids scratched under the soil. Tunnels you could be safe in if you could find them.

  I don’t need the dome world. I don’t need Lot 458. I only think I need the bottled water and the reconstituted protein mash. But I don’t.

  Still it was daunting. Survival techniques are easier to forget than old friends like Gurk. He hadn’t been on an expedition for years. Besides, even if he could remember how to survive – he tried not to think it, it hurt to think it, but it was the truth – he was getting really old.

  Well…if he died, so what? It was coming for all of them eventually. He’d just be dust returning to dust. No good crying over it.

  He patted down the earth.

  Now to remove the Tranquelle plants.

  There weren’t very many. But the veiny purple stalks were springy and tough.

  Maybe the best thing to do would be to set fire to them?

  Lucian thought of the heat this would produce. The ash and smoke. And he imagined the heat of the desert sun on his back. A small, angry feeling bristled in the pit of his stomach as he thought better of the fire option and started to hack at the stalks.

  He imagined he was decapitating Helena Frome. The hydra of iRemember. The City and the system tha
t had taken everything from him. She had plucked his future from before his very nose. While she sat in her office sucking on the cocktail straw of power and alcohol. Maybe if the state had reasoned with him when he had been young, he could have worked for the Bureau instead of against it. But no one had bothered to reason. Instead they had slashed and burned. And now here she was again. Helena Frome. Dressed up as Icara Swansong. Taking what was left of his middle age. Sending her avenging angel Icara Swansong whose landing would mean an uncertain desert death.

  Wherever she is right now, thought Lucian, I hope she is in terrific pain.

  ***

  Frome was at that very moment being rolled, on a top-secret gurney, in a top-secret location, to an operating theatre full of mirrors.

  A reflector flooded the theatre with painful, probing light.

  The doctors and nurses had never met each other before and were required to wear masks for the occasion. Each one had been through an extraordinarily long vetting process. And might be ‘neutralised’ when they left. This was maximum security. Frome had not kept the top job so long by standing idly by and welcoming in the assassination attempts.

  At that moment, she was high as a Government Issue kite, swirling somewhere above the Tranquelle Belt. They had given her sedatives, yes. Which she had not failed to top up with her own special brand of booze – the brand the Bureaucrats had nicknamed Bureau Bourbon.

  On another gurney in the room full of mirrors was the body of a young woman with a shock of ginger hair. Her eyes rolled in the back of her head. Her skin had the blue sheen of death over it, like a layer of spilled gasoline, only colder.

  The theatre did not feel like a butcher’s shop; it had the air of a high-class tailor’s. Only here they measured your kidneys for size. And it was more chaotic than a tailor’s. With all the mirrors it was difficult for the MDs to know what they were cutting or where. A reflected orgy of scalpels.

  Frome got two new ones. Kidneys. And a liver. Larger than you’d expect in a woman of her size.

  She would wake up feeling refreshed. But achy.

  The young woman would not wake up.

  This wasn’t the kind of underhanded trade-off you might think. The young woman was another Frome. Grown in a greenhouse in the Belt for this exact purpose. A kit bag full of spare kit. She would have wanted this. She would have wanted herself to succeed. Rule. Conquer. Anything for the success and longevity of the State. In fact she would have pulled her own liver out from her torso and given it to herself. Had she been aware of what was taking place. Which she was not, as she had been unconscious and on ice for the past hour. The doctors hoped she wouldn’t wake up.

  It was easy really. A basic exchange. Moving the contents of one bag out and into another.

  When Helena Frome awoke, she would already be back at her desk, signing papers. And attending trials arranged by the Brethren.

  Oxygen mixed with Tranquelle vapour inflated the Head of State’s cheeks and deflated them again.

  There was a sucking sound and the gurgle of internal organs.

  ‘Scalpel, please.’

  ***

  Feeling unwell, and not knowing why, Icara shifted in her meadow of Tranquelle-induced red flowers.

  She could hear a faint thumping from somewhere and it had woken her up. She swallowed and found her throat was dry.

  Everything was dry.

  The thumping was the window that she had left open. The beginnings of a wind-storm were licking at the walls. A film of sand scoured them, tearing off another molecular layer.

  How long before the whole place is sandblasted into non-existence?

  She shut the window tight, and wiped the dust off the sill with a Disinfect wipe.

  This place was asphyxiating her. The sooner she could get back to the City, the better.

  A glance at the screen confirmed that the documents she was expecting from the Bureau were still pending.

  She tried to go back to sleep by mentally redecorating the inside of Frome’s office. That awful monstrosity of a walnut desk would be the first to go. As would the carpet. Though the thing had probably grown claws and would not leave of its own free will. There was a faint unpleasant smell whenever you walked in asking to speak to Frome. The smell was animal. It came from the carpet with its discoloured label proclaiming it to be the property of the Beige Carpet and Upholstery Co. The fibres had a whiff of old tomcat about them. Maybe they even had a feline mind.

  Just before she fell asleep, Icara wondered how many years Frome had left. Realistically? The woman had been ruling for sixty years, sat behind that same desk, knocking back the hard liquor, playing whack-a-mole with entrenched alcoholism, assassins, and insurgents.

  In all honesty, even if the rumours about the regular organ transplants were real, no one could survive that long in a hostile climate.

  It was time for a change.

  ***

  In the hollow darkness of Hangar 3, where the air felt like lung, something moved.

  The shiny wall of a server stood like a stern, oblong elder.

  In a crawlspace behind it, something moved again.

  This was the crawlspace Lucian Ffogg used for monthly repairs. Lucian took a laissez-faire attitude to server maintenance, so the space had been empty for years. Desert creatures had found the space in search of refuge from the sun, and been petrified by the arctic air-conditioning winds that rolled through the barren wastes of the crawlspace.

  As if it wanted to be found, something muttered curse words under its breath, as it dropped an explosive device. Luckily for something, the device had not been armed. Something picked up the little silver disk and ever so gently tacked it to the grating on the back of the server.

  Something was sweating heavily in its black T-shirt; letters twinkled, announcing the lewd name of a heavy metal band made out of heavy metal rivets.

  Something had done this exact same thing in Hangars 1 and 2. There were now only a few more Hangars to go.

  A quiet beep announced that the explosive was armed.

  Something moved with effort along the concrete oesophagus and away from the device, grunting and swearing.

  ***

  Oblivious to the crawling stranger in Hangar 3, Lucian went on hacking at Tranquelle stalks, venting frustration and making desperate plans. Where will he go? Hack. What will he do? Hack. Perhaps he could settle somewhere in the Belt? Hack.

  And then something happened that seemed to prove to Lucian that he and his plans did not matter to Scientifically Proven God one bit.

  An enormous explosion tore through the Tranquelle patch and roared out into the desert night. There was an audible whoosh of hot air. And the unmistakable crackle of plastic burning.

  Hangar 3’s roof landed, slicing through the dust. It sent a shock wave that jittered down into the crater, started a small landslide and sent the CMO sprawling.

  It felt like the end of the world. The final judgement. Lucian scrambled to his feet. Between the stinging of raw wounds on his hands and knees, the tinnitus and sudden rush of yellow and orange jumping lights, it took him a few seconds to figure out which way was up.

  The pain of the fall made him realise that the world continued around him. Thick black smoke pouring from a gap among the hangars told him what had happened.

  He clambered to the lip of the crater and hauled himself up.

  ‘Off-Gridders,’ he whispered.

  Hangar 3 was smoking like a pizza oven. The plastic of the air-conditioning systems melting like Gorgonzola at the Glitz.

  Like a moth to a large, roaring flame, Lucian Ffogg ran towards his hallowed spaces. His only thought was to return stillness to the dormitories. The hiss and pop of pouring Bioware and exploding server tubes sounded like screams. It was a living noise you might not associate at first with Arc-Hives. The past going up in smoke.

&n
bsp; Half-way to the hangars he met Icara Swansong.

  ‘What’s happening Mr Ffogg!? What did you do!?’ she screamed.

  ‘Do!? Why would I set fire to my own servers!?’ he shouted back.

  ‘To get rid of evidence?’

  ‘Evidence of what? I knew you weren’t here to inspect the guttering. Get out of my way. The longer I stand here talking to you, the more of the place will burn. Neither of us wants that.’

  ‘Stand back, Mr Ffogg!’

  ‘Out of my way!’

  Icara watched the little grey man walking towards the inferno. Surely this was his perfect outcome? Everything disintegrated. Everything gone. What was he looking so miserable about? As if this was hurting him?

  Lucian kept moving, closer and closer to the flames.

  ‘Mr Ffogg! Don’t go any closer. Either you will be vaporised or I will be forced to sedate you!’

  Lucian continued to walk towards the smouldering Hangar doors.

  There were three more explosions. Hangars 5 and 6 burst into flames.

  Icara didn’t have any sedatives with her. And she didn’t particularly like Lucian Ffogg. But she wasn’t about to watch a man risk his life in front of her.

  She planted a kick right behind the knees. Lucian was floored. He clutched his kneecaps, which had forgotten how to kneecap.

  There was nothing left to do but let the sprinkler systems fight the blaze alone.

  He stared at Icara in disbelief.

  ‘Don’t you care about the Arc-Hives? Isn’t that what you Bureaucrats are all about? Preserving? Your precious stores of thoughts in aspic are bubbling away into nothing! You do know what happens to Bioware when it reaches 20 degrees, let alone 280, don’t you!’

  The fact that the suspected insurgent wanted to walk bodily into an inferno to salvage memory sticks, to save iRemember, was a surprise to Icara. But the biggest shock was the pillar of flame itself. She had never seen an open fire before. The Brethren had lobbied against burning of any kind, to protect their sacred paper stores. Frome’s Civic Law Code forbade flames and combustion. Even if a Citizen were to ignore the Code, the City was kept misted every day by humidity generators. Moistened daily like an enormous houseplant, the dome and everything inside it were thus protected from the cracking heat of Desert Ring 1 and the poisonous air of the Tranquelle Belt.