Skin it. NOW.

Yet another device bearing the Renotel emblem. Only recently installed, too.

Tautening the outer defences.

Strip that plastic off. Now.

Only recently installed.

This isn't only way through. You can always go the long way, around the docks to the west.

Fuck 'around'. Go through!

A system compromised at the sub-atomic level.

We're going to need tools for this one.

Cut the chain.

In another life it would've been a serpent.

Cut the chain. (Use the chain-cutters.)

Only ghosts can pass freely between such crevices.

In the time that it would take for you to get the gate open, your tail will have caught up.

Unless you're planning to hop off the end of the pier and swim for it, you're stuck.

Your human situation.

Far left. A frame built for violence. Bulbous glistening skull shaved bare every morning.

They didn't really talk, but she gravitated toward his presence like an animal to an abandoned building.

Now they remind you of her.

You still have them, in fact. On your feet. Right now.

Leather jacket, moustache and military cut. A face that could fluctuate wildly between innocence and depravity depending on the setting.

Older than anyone else there by at least ten years. Small eyes in a smaller frame, looking out from her corner with cold intelligence.

Your double. Together you assembled the crew from the ground up, but he never crossed professional boundaries the way you did.

And yet so many do -- the eternal and the doomed.

But he isn't just a cop. He's a carabinero -- one of the investigative branch's best.

You still have them, in fact.

Then why does everything hurt?

And per the standards of stagecraft, should never have occurred in the first instance.

It wasn't actually your birthday, you just said it was.

Right. The young watcher.

Something you missed.

You can feel the tension going out of her shoulders, her diaphragm slackening as she straightens in her chair.

Tk-tk-tk. The sound of a pen marking three boxes in short succession.

At the Greater Quisach Gymnasium, the bell rings three times: Recreation Period is over. The children file back into the building covered in peeling plaster. The grey play-yard is empty.

Ice crystals fractal in your veins.

What she means is the real account will be buried in a centre-held file for 30 years. You will never so much as glimpse the outside of its folder.

There's nothing to consider. We're locked in to Dissociation Nation. Nothing can possibly hurt us now.

There is a correct answer, but neither of you know what it is.

It's like she's handing you a trophy cup with the corpse of a small animal in it.

But not like this. These feelings aren't mixed. They're on entirely different planes from one another.

One more relationship smothered with a pillow and buried in the courtyard.

Into the dustbin it goes.

BURNED OUT IN THE HAZE OF IT ALL LONG DISTANCE CALLS

The digital birdsong of a signal jammer. When you want your target to know they're being disrupted.

The Illuminated Empire awakens.

Like a rabbit. Scenting danger.

The receiver buzzes warmly in your hand. In the wiry nerves of the city you just left, ideologies crash against one another like waves. Across the Developed World and beyond, telephones begin to ring...

Increasing chance of precipitation as a front of high pressure moves across the Noscorrentes Sea. The temperature is 16 and falling.

The flight path from Luz's costal airfields to Portofiro is approximately 60 kilometres, or 3 minutes at supersonic speed.

Under your feet, the buoy and the boat jostling in the sea swell. You keep your balance, just barely.

Checks