It is insanely hot on the sidewalk outside the court, hot and crowded and dusty, and even with his biohazard burka's photovoltaics pumping away heat as fast as they can, Huw is sweating. His skin itches everywhere, but especially on the shoulder where he can feel his skin crawling every time he thinks about the glowing trefoil tattoo.

The court is located in a district full of bleached white shells, buildings thrown up by massively overengineered molluscs—unable to breathe without oxygen supplies—that, having erected a habitable structure, then die in order to provide a delicious moving-in feast for the residents. It's cheap refugee-camp architecture, but durable and far better than the tent cities of a previous century; snail cities have power, recycling services, bandwidth, and a weird kind of hobbitish charm. Some of the bigger shells have been turned into storefronts by various cottage professionals, and Huw is drawn towards one of them by the mouth-watering smell of roasting goat. Not that it makes Huw's mouth water—the idea of eating a real dead goat makes him feel queasy—but it might be synthetic, and if nothing else he'll be able to get a feta salad or something.

There are elaborate cast-iron tables outside the shell-front, and cast-iron chairs, and—luxury of luxuries—a parasol over each. There are people inside the shell, but the outside tables are deserted. Huw wilts into the nearest space and puts his teapot down on the table. "You," he grunts. "Universal translator for anyone who comes my way. I expect service with a smile. Capisce?"

"Your wish is my command, effendi," pipes his djinn.

A teenaged girl in a black salwar kameez, white face paint, and far too much eye shadow and silver spider-jewelry saunters over, for all the world like a refugee from a Goth night club in Bradford. "Yeah? Whatcher want, granny?"

"It's mister," Huw replies, nettled. "You the waitress?"

"Yeah," She answers in English, staring at him idly. Her earrings stare, too—synthetic eyeballs dangling from desiccated optic nerves. "You a tranny?"

"No, I'm a biohazard. What's on the lunch menu?"

"We've got a choice of any cloned meat shoarma you fancy: goat, mutton, ox-tongue, or Rumsfeld. With salad, olives, cheese, falafel, coffee or Coke. Pretty much anything. Say, are you really a biohazard?"

"Listen," Huw says, irritably, "I'm not wearing this fucking sack because I enjoy it. Your Ministry of Barbarian Affairs insisted—"

"Why don't you take it off then?" she asks. "If they call you on it, just pay."

"Pay—"

"What's wrong with you? You one of those dumb westerners who doesn't understand baksheesh? Anonymous digital m-cash transactions? Zero-knowledge laundry systems? Wow." She's looking pretty impressed (for a Goth, anyway, which is to say, slightly less gripped by paralyzing boredom and gloom)—and for all the wrong reasons.

Huw sighs. "Look. Just get me the shoarma and falafel. If they're cloned, I'll take the goat. And, uh, a Diet Coke."

"Okay." She turns and beams his order to the kitchen, then wanders over to the bar and begins to pour a tall drink.

Huw takes a deep breath. Then he pinches the seal node on his burka and gives it a hard yank. As gestures of defiance go, it's small but profound; he suddenly feels immensely claustrophobic, and can't stop until he's tugged the whole thing off, up and over his head, and yanked down the overalls that make up its bottom half, and stomped them all into the grey dust under his boots.

The air is dry, and smells real. Huw finally begins to relax. The waitress strolls over bearing a large glass, loaded with Coke and ice cubes. As she gets close her nose wrinkles. "You need a bath, mister biohazard-man."

"Yeah. Well. You tell the Ministry." Huw takes the drink, relishes a long swallow, unencumbered by multiple layers of smart antiviral polymer defenses. He can feel the air on his face, the sunlight on his skin. He puts the glass down. Wonder how long I'll take to work up a suntan? He thinks, and glances at his wrist. He freezes.

There's a biohazard trefoil on the back of his hand.

Huw stands up, feeling dizzy. "There a toilet here?" he asks.

"Sure." The waitress points him round the back. "Take your time."

The bathroom is a small nautiloid annex, and inside it's as chilly and modern as Sandra Lal's. Huw locks the door and yanks his tee and sweat pants off. He turns anxiously to check his back in the mirror over the sink—but the trefoil on his shoulder has gone.

It's on the back of his hand. And it itches.

"Shit," he says, quietly and with feeling.

Back at the table, Huw bolts his food down then rises, leaving an uncharacteristic tip. He picks up the bundle of dusty black biohazard fabric and strolls past the shops. One of them is bound to be a black-market nanohacker. He finds his hands are shaking. He isn't sure which prospect is worse, finding he's got a big medical bill ahead, or trying to live in ignorance.

"Teapot," he says quietly.

"Yes, effendi?"

"Where's the nearest body shop? Doesn't have to be fully legal under WIPO-compliant treaty terms, just legal enough."

"Bzzt. It is regrettably not possible for this humble unit to guide you in the commission of felonies, oh noble sirrah—"

Shake. "There is legal and there is legal," Huw hisses. "I don't give a shit about complying with all the brain-dead treaties the Moral Majority rammed through WIPO in the wake of Microsoftgate. I just want somewhere that the local police won't arrest me for frequenting. Can you do that? Or would you like to tell me where the nearest heavy metal reclamation plant is?"

"Eeek! Turn left, effendi! Left, I say! Yes, ahead of you! Please, do me no injury, sirrah!"

Huw walks up to a featureless Roc's egg and taps on it. "Anyone at home?" he asks.

A door dilates in the shell, emitting a purple-tinged light. "Enter," says a distinctly robotic voice.

Inside the shell, Huw finds himself in a room dominated by something that looks like a dentist's chair as reinvented on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition by H. R. Giger. Standing beside it—

"Does your sister work at the diner along the road?" he asks.

"No, she's my daughter." The woman—who looks young enough to be the waitress's twin, but wears medical white and doesn't have any body piercings that blink at him—looks distinctly unimpressed. "And she's got an attitude problem. Did you come here because of her? What's your problem? She's a Goth, you know. Thinks it's so progressive." She sniffs.

Huw holds up his arm. "I'm here because of this," he says, dodging the question.

"Aha." She peers at his trefoil. "Do you know what it is?"

"No, that's why I'm here."

"Very well. If you take a seat and give me your debit token, I'll try to find out for you."

"Will there be any trouble?" Huw asks, lying back on the couch and trying not to focus on the mandibles descending towards him.

"I don't know—yet." She fusses and putters and mumbles to herself. "All right, then," she says, at length. "It's in beta, whatever it is."

"Oh yes?" Huw says, in a way that he hopes sounds intelligent.

"Certainly. That's the watermark—it's compliant with the INEE's RFC 4253.11 on debug-mode self-replicating organisms. Whatever host medium it finds itself in, it advertises its presence by means of the trefoil."

"And …?" Huw says.

She shakes her head at him. "And that means that either the person who made it is conscientious, or is working with an RFC-compliant SDK."

"I see," Huw says. He supposes that this is probably interesting to people in the biz, but he slept through most of the microcode lessons in school. He prefers concrete stuff he can get his hands on. None of these suspicious self-modifying abstractions that suddenly make you sprout antlers.

The hacker mutters to herself some more. "Well," she says, and "Hmmm," and "Oh," until Huw feels like he will burst. "Right then."

Huw waits. And waits. His whole fucking life seems to consist of conversations like this. He's read some hilariously naive accounts of life in the so-distant "Information Age" about "Future Shock," all those dim ancestors trying to make sense of their info-glut and their rapidly changing world. They fretted about the "Singularity:" the point at which human history goes nonlinear and unpredictable and the world ceases to have any rhyme or reason. Future Shock indeed—try living in the fucking Singularity, and having your world inverted six times before breakfast.

"Well, that's it. I can do it in vitro or in situ, up to you."

"Do it?"

"Accelerate it. What, you think I'm going to decompile this thing? That code is so obfuscated it may as well be cuneiform for all the sense I can make of it. No, there's only one way to find out what it does: accelerate its life-cycle and see what happens. I can do it in your body—that's best, it's already halfway there—or I can do it in glass. Your choice."

"Glass!" Huw blurts, his heart racing at the thought of an accelerated unknown and unlicensed nano-colony hastening to maturity in his precious skin.

The hacker sighs a put-upon exhalation. "Fine," she says. Let's get you cloned, then." Before he can jerk free, the instrument bush hovering over him has scraped a layer of skin from his forearm and drawn a few CCs of blood from the back of his hand, leaving behind an anaesthetized patch of numb skin that spreads over his knuckles and down to his fingertips. Across the room, a tabletop diamond-walled chamber fogs and hums. The mandibles recede and Huw sits up. A ventilation system kicks in, clearing the fog from the chamber and there Huw sees his cloned hand taking shape, starting as a foetal fin, sundering into fingers, bones lengthening, proto-fingernails forming. "That'll take a couple hours to ripen," the hacker says. "Then I'll implant it and we'll see what happens. Come back this time tomorrow, I'll show you what turns up." She rubs her thumbs against her forefingers.

Huw sticks his hand out to touch hers and interface their PANs so he can transfer a payment to her, but she shies back. "I don't think so," she says. "You're infectious, remember?"

"Well, how shall I pay you, then?" he says.

"Over there," she says, gesturing at a meatpuppet in the corner, a wrinkled naked neuter body with no head, just a welter of ramified tubules joined to a bare medulla that flops out of the neck-stump like an alien nosegay. Huw shakes the puppet's clammy hand and interfaces with its PAN, transfers a wad of currency to it and steps back, wiping his hand on the seat of his track-pants afterward.

"This time tomorrow, right?" the hacker says.

"See you then," Huw says.

As he steps into the gloomy courtroom, he thinks for a moment that he's the first one back from lunch, but after a moment he detects movement and slurping sounds from the shadows behind one of the benches. A familiar head with a blue forelock rears back, face a rictus of agonized enjoyment. Huw makes out a female head suctioned to the joe's chest, teeth fastened to his nipple. Christ, Huw thinks, he and Sandra are having a snog in the fucking courtroom. The Vulture's going to string them up by their pubes and skull-fuck them with her gavel.

Then the head turns, worrying at the nipple in a way that looks painful (though it appears to be doing wonders for the joe) and Huw sees that it isn't Sandra Lal masticating that tit, it's Doc Björk. He feels a sear of jealousy jetting from his asshole to his shoulderblades, though who he is jealous of he cannot exactly say. He clears his throat.

The lovebirds spring apart and stand. Doc Björk's shirt is hiked up around her armpits and before she gets it pulled back down, Huw is treated to a stunning display of her chestular appendages, which are rather spectacular in a showy, fantastically perfect way. The joe is more casual, stretches and yawns and pulls his own sweaty leather shirt down. Then he does a double-take as he recognizes Huw.

"You!" he says. "The hell are you doing here?"

"You know him?" Björk asks. She's blushing a rather lovely and fierce Viking red.

Huw partially unrolls his burka from his arm and dangles it in front of his face. "So do you, Doc," he says.

"The transvestite?" she says.

"I'm not a tranny," Huw says. He rewraps the burka around his arm, which is throbbing with itch and needles of alternating ice and fire. "Just got a nasty little itch and took a while to figure out who to bribe." He glares at the guy with the blue forelock, Bonnie the party animal. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about it would you?"

"Who, me?" Bonnie frowns right back at him. "What did you think you were doing barging in here, anyway?"

Huw crosses his arms defensively. "In case you hadn't noticed, this is a courtroom and the Vulture's going to be back in about—"

The door banged open behind him and he turns round. "Where is everybody?" croaks the black-clad judge. "Dammit, I expect punctuality in my courtroom!"

Judge Giulliani crosses to her box and stands behind it, tapping her toe on the floor and glowering furiously at the doorway as, one by one, the delinquent jurors filter in. Her stare is lost on Sandra, who sees Huw as she opens the door and nearly jumps out of her skin. Huw smiles at her sweetly and she edges around the far side of the room and sits down as far away from him as possible. So while the Vulture is busy tearing a strip off the Neanderthal, he gets up, walks over, and sits down next to her.

"Hello, Sandra," he says, warmly. "How's it going?"

Sandra leans away from him, looking afraid. "Where did you get that?" she asks, eyeing his biohazard-wrapped wrist.

"I thought you and me, we could talk about it." Huw smiles. "I picked it up at your party?"

"Listen, I have no idea what this is about, but I don't like it! I don't hang out with people who do that sort of thing, least not without warning. Are you sure you weren't jarked by a stranger on your way over? Or something?"

"Silence in court!" shrieks Giulliani, waving her gavel at Sandra, who cowers, trying to get as far away as possible from both the judge and Huw. Huw crosses his arms, annoyed. Is she telling the truth?

"You pukes had better listen up right now! We are about to begin the most dangerous part of the proceedings! Are those of you who believe in physical resurrection all backed up to off-site storage? And are those of you who don't all up to date on your life insurance policies? Because if not, you're too fucking late, haa haa! It is time to open the box!"

"Oh shit." Huw hastily begins to untangle his burka, in the hope that its advanced biocontainment layers will help if the monster that hatched from the scatotrophic klein-bottle from outer space turns out to be unfriendly. His wrist itches hotly in sympathy, then mercifully stops.

Giulliani twirls her hammer round and presses a button; it turns into something like a cross between a pocket chainsaw and a whittling knife. "Now, I am about to open the containment," she says, standing over the ominous black cube with a raised knife. "With any luck, it's just sleeping. If it isn't, well, all I can say is it damn well better behave itself in my courtroom."

She leans forward and slaps one hand on a side of the box. Something heavy goes CLUNK inside it. A hand goes up from the far side of the jury box. "What is it now?" demands the Vulture.

"Please, judge, can I go to the bathroom?" Bonnie is waving an anxious hand in the air.

"Oh fuck off, then," snarls the judge. "Five minutes! Or you'll be sorry!"

She yanks at the lid of the biohazard containment and Bonnie takes off, scampering behind the benches as if his arse is on fire—or maybe he's just afraid that it will be, in a few seconds.

The box deconstructs itself into a pile of bubbling pink slime, to reveal the space monster the brothers Bey downloaded. It squats, curled up, in a nest of shredded teddy bears; two of its six legs are wrapped over what ought to be its snout, and it is making a faint whistling noise that it takes Huw almost a minute to recognize as snoring.

"Behold, the stinking pile of godvomit!" says the Vulture. She stands over it, arms akimbo, Swiss Army chainsaw at the ready, looking almost pleased with herself. "Exhibit A: asleep. It's been this way for the past eighteen days, ever since the Bey twins created it. Any questions?"

A susurrus of conversation sweeps the jury benches. "That's funny," says Huw, "my arm doesn't itch any more."

"Shut up about your arm already!" hisses Sandra. "Look!" She points at the box, just as the space monster emits a deep grunting sigh and rolls over on its side, snuffling sleepily.

"Six limbs, bilateral symmetry, exoskeleton. Has anyone tried deconstructing its proteome yet?" asks Doc Björk, looking rather more cheerful than Huw feels.

"From inside the containment? No." The Vulture looks thoughtful. "But from traces of carapace scraped off the walls of the Bey residence nursery, we have obtained a partial genotype. Tell your guidebooks or familiars or whatever to download Exhibit B for you. As you can see, the genome of the said item is chimeric and shows signs of crude tampering, but it's largely derived from drosophila, mus musculus, and a twentieth-century situationist artist or politician or something called Dan Quayle. Large chunks of its genome appear to be wholly artificial though, written entirely in Arabic, and there's an aqueous phase Turing machine partially derived from octopus ribosomes to interpret them. It looks as if something has been trying to use the shari'a code as a platform for implementing a legal virtual machine. We're not sure why, unless it's an obscure joke."

"Does the metasphere have a sense of humor?" Huw hears himself asking. He clears his throat—the dust must be getting to him because it feels as if he's developing a ticklish cough.

"If it didn't, my life would be a lot simpler," the Vulture says. A door at the back of the courtroom bangs, Bonnie coming back from the toilet. Huw notes with a spike of erotic shock that Bonnie is female again, a forelocked vision of heroin-chic skin and bones. "As it is, it makes it hard to tell a piece of sculpture from a practical joke, a new type of washing machine, or an alien superweapon."

"Urk." Huw subsides into a fit of coughing; it doesn't help his throat.

"Can we wake it up?" Doc Björk asks brightly. "If I play it some music, perhaps it can the dream awaken from?"

Oh shit, musical dream therapy, Huw realizes with a sinking feeling. So that's why she's on this panel.

"That sounds like an possible idea," the Vulture concedes. She prods the sleeping space monster with a steel toe-capped boot but it just snores more loudly and burrows deeper into its nest of disemboweled toys. "I lean towards electroshock, myself."

"Shit." Sandra says. Huw glances sideways at her, and cowers away from him. "Shit!"

"What is it?" he asks.

"Your—" she stops, and rummages in her fanny pack. Pulling out a mirror she passes it to him. "Throat."

At the other end of the bench, Doc Björk is explaining the healing properties of ambient post-industrial music to an interested judge and a couple of less skeptical jurors. Huw holds up the hand mirror and points it at his throat.

Huw stares at the mirror nearly cross-eyed and focuses on his stubbly Adam's apple. It has been completely covered with a familiar biohazard trefoil, surrounded by ranked miniature trefoils, each of them fractally ringed with smaller duplicates, and so on, into hairy infinitude that no doubt extends down to mitochondrial detail.

Huw clutches his hands to his throat and feels it buzzing, vibrating, just as Björk lets fly with an eerie ululation. She sings the quasi-melody rather well, noodling around from a ghostly, bluesy I-IV-V progression to something pentatonic that sounds like the wind whistling over the blasted steppes of some distant Eastern land and then into something Celtic and complicated.

The buzzing under his sweating fingertips heightens. The godvomit is vibrating, too, beginning a bobbing sinuous cobra-dance, and it begins to sing, too, a low droning ommmmmm that resonates in Huw's bones, in Huw's throat, in Huw's mind.

His tongue stirs in his mouth and he feels a great, pre-verbal welling from his larynx. He feels a burst of Tourettic obscenities tickling at his lips like a sneeze, and he moves his hands from his throat and claps them over his mouth, but it's too late, he's singing, too.

If you can call it singing. He's giving voice to two wordless melodies simultaneously, in artful discord to each other and the joint song of the Kleinmonster and Björk. One voice is basso profundo, the other a Tiny Tim falsetto, and the Kleinmonster is turning its attention on him—he can hear it thinking joyful thoughts to itself. His skin crawls with creeping horror as his voicebox secedes from his autonomic nervous system and he flees the courtroom, chased by the mystified stares of his co-jurors and the doleful glare of the Vulture.

He stumbles for the loo, struggling to keep the alien song inside his chest, lips clamped tightly shut. He has an enormous, painful, rock-hard erection and he thinks wildly of auto-erotic asphyxiators who blow their loads in ecstatic writhing as their oxygen-starved brains stage endorphin-fuelled fireworks displays on the backs of their eyelids. He is certain he is dying. He falls to his knees on the rubber tiles of the lav's floor and begins to retch and weep.

He feels a tentative hand caressing his shoulder and he turns his head. Through a haze of tears, he recognizes Bonnie, her eyes smoldering with barely controlled lust. "You're so fucking transhuman," s/he says, and clamps her mouth to his, ramming her tongue in almost to his gag reflex. She pins him to the yielding tiles and straddles him, grinding her/his crotch against his.

It's enough to shock him out of despair and into anger. He pushes hard against her bony xylophone chest and spits. "You are sick," he says, rolling away. The song is dying now, just a buzz of harmonics that pick at his pulse. "God!"

Bonnie smirks at him and does a cat-stretch on the tile before climbing to her feet. She shakes herself and tosses her fringe and gives him another smirk. "Pity," she says and leaves him alone.

Huw pulls himself to his feet and staggers for the door, his throat no longer itching, but wriggling. He pushes weakly against the door and steps out into the corridor, where he confronts the entire court, which has apparently adjourned to follow him. The Vulture's fists are fiercely planted on her hips.

"You're infected," the Vulture says. "Unfortunate. We've got a nanocontainment box for you until we sort it out. We'll pull an alternate juror from the pool." She sounds almost tender, not to say yielding. Sandra, Bonnie, Björk, the caveman and the centenarian are all staring at him like a sideshow curiosity. "Come along then, the Guardsmen will take you to the box." The Guardsmen are a pair of hulking golems, stony-faced and brutal-looking. They advance on him with a thunderous tread, brandishing manacles like B-movie inquisitors.

Huw's mind goes blank—blank with fear and rage. Bastards! he tries to scream, and what comes out is an eerie howl that makes the jurors wince and probably terrifies every dog for a kilometer around. He feints towards them, then spins on his heel and dashes for the front doors. Curare darts spang off the rubber walls and rebound around him, but none hit him. He leaps off the courtroom steps and runs headlong into the humanswarm, elbowing his way along.

He runs without any particular direction, but his feet take him back to the hacker's Roc's egg of their own accord. He turns his head and scans the crowd for jurors or officers of the court. Seeing none, he thumps the egg until the door irises open, then dives through it.

The hacker is laid out on her table, encased in the instrument bush. Her fingers and toes work its tendrils in response to unknowable feedback from its goggles and earphones. Huw coughs in three-part harmony, and she gives her fingers a decisive waggle that causes the bush to contract into a fist near the ceiling.

She looks at him, takes in Huw's watermarked throat and two-part snoring drone and shakes her head. "Right," she says. "Looks like you're about done, then." The teapot at his belt translates efficiently, giving her a thick brummie accent for no reason Huw understands.

"What the fuck is this shit?" Huw says, over his drone.

"No need for that sort of language," she says primly. She gets up off her table and gestures towards it. "Up you go," she says.

Reluctantly, Huw climbs up, then watches the bush descend on him and encase him in a quintillion smart gossamer fingers.

"I uploaded your opportunistic code to a mailing-list," the hacker said. "It was a big hit with the Euros—lucky for you it's their waking hours, or it could have been another twelve hours before we heard back. You've solved quite a little mystery, you know.

"The betaware you're infected with has been floating around the North Sea for about a month now, but it has so far failed to land a single successful somatic infection. Lots of carriers but no afflicted. Best guess at its origin is a cometary mass extruded from the Cloud that burned away protecting its payload.

"So it was quite the mystery until I pasted your genome into a followup. Then it was obvious—it's looking for specific T-helper lymphocytes. Welsh ones. Which begs another question: why Welsh?

"And here we have the answer." The bush's tendrils stroked Huw's growling voicebox. "All those grotty Welsh vowel-sounds and glottals. It needed a trained larynx to manifest."

"Aaaagh," Huw gargles, tensing angrily and trying to argue. The bush takes the opportunity to shove what feels like a wad of cotton wool into his mouth and extrude exploring wisps to brush samples from his epiglottis.

A histogram scrolls across the egg's wall in time with Huw's groan, spiking ferociously. "Oh, very nice," she says. "You're modulating about a gigabit a second over a short-range audio link. Pushing the limits of info-sci, you are!"

Huw stutters another groan, then vomits a flood of obscenities: "Segfault fuck piss cunting shit Bee Ess Oh Dee." They're chased and enveloped with his di-vocal drone, and the histogram spikes in sympathy.

The hacker shakes her head. "No easy way to know what you're spewing, of course. Lots of activity in your language and vision centers, though." The bush firmly grips the sides of his head. "Do that again, will you? I'm going to run a PET scan."

"I don't think I can—" he begins, then, "Whore tripe shiznit kay-rap eatme!"

"Right," she says. "Right. Here's my guess, then. You're x-mitting your sensoria—visual, auditory, olfactory, even tactile. Somewhere out there there's a complimentary bit of receiving equipment that can demodulate the signal. You're a remote sensing apparatus."

"Fuck," Huw says. The histogram is still. He is voluntarily cursing.

"It's kinky, yes?" she says. "Too kinky for you. One second." Tentacles slither down his throat briskly, curl around inside his stomach, then come back out. It feels like he's vomiting, except his guts are limp, and a big bolus of something or other is trying to stick in his throat on the way out. For a panicky moment he feels as if he's choking—then the lump tears away with a bright stabbing pain, but he can breathe through his nose again.

"Ah, that's better," he hears distantly. "A beautiful little whistle! Easy to fence to some out-of-body perv, I think. Oh dear, did I say that aloud?" A fuzzy mat of bush tendrils peel away from his face to reveal an unsympathetic face peering down at him. "You did hear that, didn't you? Hmm, what a pity. Well, your left kidney is in good shape—"

There's a loud crash from outside the operating theatre, followed by a wail from his belt. "In here!" screams his teapot. "Help, please come quickly!"

More crashing. The hacker straightens up, cursing under her breath. Casting around, her gaze falls on Huw's biohazard burka. She grabs it and dives for the back door, sending a gleaming operating cart skidding across the floor. She's out the back as a tremendous thudding noise batters at the entrance and the door bulges inwards. Huw struggles to sit up, pushing back the suddenly quiescent instrument bush—it feels like wrestling with a half ton of candyfloss. What now? he thinks wildly.

"In here!" shrieks the djinn, standing in holographic miniature on top of the teapot and waving its arms like a stranded sailor.

"You shut up," Huw grunts hoarsely. He manages to get his legs off the side of the chair and stumbles against the trolley. Another crash from the front door, and he sees something on the floor—something silvery and cylindrical, about ten centimeters long and one in diameter, for all the world like a pocket recorder covered in slime. That's it? he puzzles, and thoughtlessly picks it up and pockets it just as the door gives up the uneven struggle and slams open to admit the two court golems, followed by an extremely irritated hanging judge.

"Arretez-vous!" yells his djinn. "He's over here! Don't let him get away this time!" With a sense of horror Huw realizes that the little snitch is jumping up and down and pointing at him.

"No chance," grates Judge Giulliani. "Get him!" She tells the golems, and they lurch towards him. "Your palanquin is outside, waiting to take you to the Emperor Ghadaffi Memorial Teaching Hospital. It's quite secure," she adds, with an ugly grin. "Asshole. Do you want to spread it around? Have you any idea how much trouble you're in already, breaking biocontainment?"

"The—the bastards, set me fucking shitting up—" The Tourette's is still there, as is a residual urge to break out in song even as the huge golems clamp inhumanly gentle six-fingered hands the size of ditch-diggers around his arms—"party in fucking cunt Monmouth, fucking bitch Bonnie slipped me the shit-shit-shitting godvomit raining on Northern fucking Europe, set me up that wasn't the fucking Libyan consulate at all, was it? And, and—"

One of the golems slaps a hand over his face. The hand has some kind of flexible membrane on it, with built-in antisound. Huw can hear himself chattering and cursing inside his own head, but nothing's getting out. The golem slowly shrinkwraps his legs together from hip to ankle, and the other golem picks him up under one arm and carries him through the broken front door. The hands of the first golem part easily at the wrist and go with him, a temporary gag.

"We'll discuss the charges later, in my chambers," Giulliani murmurs in his ear, confidingly. Then she whisks off in a flapping of black-winged robes as the golem lowers Huw into something that looks like a cross between a pedal-powered taxi and an upright coffin.

Bastard fucking bastard must stop fucking swearing, Huw thinks desperately, as he confronts a baby-blue padded cell lined with ominous-looking straps. Bonnie set me up for this, bastard neophiliac, but why did the fucking tin whistle want to talk to the shit-monster? Why was the thing happy to hear me—he stops as the lid closes behind him, momentarily shocked. Because that was the oddest thing about it; the way the godvomit responded to his unwanted flight of song—

As the golems start leaning on the pedals, something squirms in his pocket, like an inquisitive worm. It's the whistle the hacker yanked out of his throat, he realizes, half-horrified that he's locked in with it. Which is worse, he asks himself, a traitorous djinn or a musical instrument that wants to nest in my larynx? He gets his answer a moment later as the whistle squirms again, then digs in tiny claws and begins to inch its way up his shirt. Locked in a tiny box, on his way to the cells beneath the courthouse, Huw confronts his most primal fear, gives in, and screams himself hoarse behind his antisound gag.

Eventually, his screams taper off and he notices a heretofore subliminal buzzing against his hip, and he screams afresh as he envisions spidery trefoils crawling over his pelvic girdle towards his crotch. The reason takes over and he realizes that it's his goddamned phone. Squirming around in the cramped box, he pulls it out and shakes it to life, holding it before his mute face. The picture on the other end resolves. Adrian and his bicycle, in some swarming souk. "Wotcher!" Adrian says, cheerfully. Huw waggles his eyebrows frantically at the pinhole cam. The whistle is stuck on his hollow chest, crawling in circles as it tries to locate a suitable aperture to return to its nest by.

"Saucy," Adrian says. "Hadn't figured you for bent in that direction. Met a lucky lady, then?"

Huw shakes his head frantically, rolling his eyes. Slowly, he pans the phone around the tiny box, then brings it back to eye-level.

"Oh ho! Not voluntary, then."

Huw nods so fiercely his head smacks into the padded wall behind him.

Adrian shakes his head. "Right then. See you in two ticks." The picture on the phone swings crazily as Adrian clips it to one of the thousands of clever grabbers on the front of his wash-n-wears and pedals off on the bike. Periodically, his face looms in the screen as he looks down at the positional data that Huw's phone is relaying.

Then Huw is looking at a jittery high-def image of the Judge's caravan, at the slowly moving lockbox he's encased in. Adrian holds his phone up again and Huw sees that his eyes are, if anything, redder than they'd been that morning, nearly fluorescent with stoned glee. "You're in there, yeah?" he says, and swings the phone toward the strongbox. Huw nods.

"Hrm." Adrian says. "Tricky." He clips his phone back to his shirt and turns around, and Huw sees two young women swathed in paramilitary black bodysuits bulging with cargo pockets and clever sewn-in bandoliers. They exchange rapid hand-signals then the phone's POV wheels sickeningly as Adrian does a tire-attriting doughnut and zips off to the head of the caravan. Now Huw's looking at the two impassive golems pumping the pedals of the palanquin. Adrian rolls the bike directly into their path, then makes terrified tourist squeaks as he rolls clear of the frame at the same moment as the golems plough through it, then grind to a halt as their wheels disintegrate on Huw's bike's frame, which has gone into self-defensive hedgehog mode. Huw hears the Vulture croaking enraged threats at Adrian, whom Huw is certain is shrugging with gormless English apologies.

Then his cage rocks violently and he's thrown to one side, losing his phone in the process. A moment later, light scythes into Huw's cell and he's staring up into the eye-slit of a ceramic-reinforced veil. Strong, long-fingered hands lift him free and he's unceremoniously slung over a hard female shoulder. Dangling upside-down, Huw catches a glimpse of the smoking ceiling of the palanquin, dissolving into blue goo, and the Vulture, her black robe spread out like tattered wings as she waves her arms in their direction. The golems are lumbering toward them, but in a moment they're gone into the crowd, lost in the swarm.