Butcher’s phone buzzed with an SMS coming through from Cook. It was just a postcode. Butcher stabbed it into the Insignia’s satnav and looked at the map. Emmy leaned in, curious, and Butcher shied away from her.

‘What, cowboy?’ she laughed. ‘You think I’m going to nut you?’

It had occurred to him, yes.

‘I just classed,’ said Butcher. ‘New skills. Big stat boost. And you just got the same. I thought you were dangerous when we went toe to toe a minute ago, but you’re now officially serious bad news. And I do not need you kicking off right now. Looking at what I can do now, I’d probably walk away but I think we’d total the car and I do not feel like walking to bloody Yorkshire.’

‘Is that where he is?’

‘Can you break out of the cuffs now?’

She flexed, then stopped.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘No problems. Strength nine, mate.’

‘But you didn’t,’ he observed, reminding himself that she could be STR 9, but she could also be lying.

‘Didn’t want to worry you,’ she admitted. ‘Look, I can get out, but it’ll take me a few seconds. So you’ll at least have a warning if I leave them on for now.’

‘That’s not uncomfortable?’ he asked.

‘Con seven, man,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll be fine. So, we’re going to Yorkshire?’

‘What the fuck is this “we” shit?’ he asked, putting his shoes on and setting the fans to clear the windscreen. ‘I’m kicking you out the moment I’m ready to leave. You can take your car and do what you like, but you need to go home and stay the fuck away from me, from Cuttler and from everything BRS is doing. I don’t know what Cuttler used to persuade you to come after me, but this is not your fight. And there’s no way you’re going to keep up with me in a Leaf.’

‘Hey, I don’t need your protection,’ she complained.

‘No, you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘You don’t. You need the pleasant and agreeable protection of anonymity. Now shut up. I still have a pistol and you’re not bulletproof yet. Probably. At least, you don’t want to find out you’re not at an inconvenient moment.’

It would be at least five hours to get there and he could relax again when he wasn’t babysitting a belligerent paladin.

Then Emmy’s phone rang. Butcher thumbed it to speaker mode.

‘Hello, Ron.’

The phone was silent for a moment and Butcher could imagine him trying to decide whether to hang up.

‘Where’s Emmy?’ he asked eventually. Butcher held up a hand to Emmy.

‘Would you be sad to hear that I shot her and her corpse is now lying in a Hampshire wood?’

‘You motherfucker!’ screamed Cuttler. ‘I will fucking kill you next time! I will burn you! You will die!’

‘Well the good news is that I didn’t do that,’ said Butcher and he gestured at Emmy.

‘Hi, Ron,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘I didn’t beat him, but I classed anyway. He’s tied me up a bit, but I can break out any time I like.’

There was silence on the line again.

‘Good,’ he said eventually, his voice a little unsteady. ‘Parsons, you’re still a motherfucker, but I’m sorry I asked you to do what I did, Emmy. I shouldn’t have done that. I’m glad you didn’t do him in. I’m glad you’re OK. I’m really glad you classed.’

‘Look, Ron,’ said Butcher, calmly. ‘We got off on the wrong foot. I did what I had to do to track you down. That’s my job. But this is getting out of hand. Someone nearly died today and, more importantly, it was nearly me. I’m going to send Emmy home, and then I’m going to come to see you. Let’s talk. Let’s find a way to make everyone at least a little bit happy. I can be in Yorkshire in five hours. We could have this all over by tomorrow evening.’

‘Yes, OK.’ sighed Cuttler. ‘You’re right. I’m tired. I’m making bad decisions. I don’t trust you, but we can… Hang on. How do you know I’m in Yorkshire?’

‘I got your number from Emmy’s phone and had BRS run a trace.’

‘Shit.’

As Cuttler swore and immediately hung up, Butcher realized his mistake. By giving BRS Cuttler’s exact location he had made himself superfluous. They could just go and get him. And if they grabbed Cuttler without Butcher, what did they need him for any more?

By sheer chance and happy incompetence, he’d managed to tip off Cuttler, who would now be well gone. The phone would burn. His current location would burn. He’d be back in the wind and Butcher would have no more clues to his location. But, on the other hand, Butcher would still be relevant to BRS. They had been talking on Emmy’s phone. They had no way of knowing it was Butcher who had tipped off Cuttler. He had inadvertently saved himself, even at the same time as making his life much, much harder.

‘Ah, crap,’ he muttered.

‘What just happened?’ asked Emmy. Butcher explained, then went on:

‘Go home, Emmy. Keep your head down. Stay off BRS’s radar. I want you to promise me. Please?’

His experience with classing had given him some clues about how the nanoids worked, responding to certain patterns in the brain and the nervous system in order to decide how to prioritise their work. A holy warrior like a paladin was going to be bound by some kind of honour system. He was guessing that if she gave a promise then if she knowingly broke it, she would lose some of whatever boosts she was getting from the class.

‘I’m promising nothing, Butcher,’ she complained. ‘Let me go or take me with you. Your call.’

Butcher shrugged, wondering whether her refusal to make the promise was confirmation of his guess or not. But he got out of the car and went around to her side to open the door for her.

‘You want me to cut you free, or do you fancy going for the flex?’ he asked.

She grinned, then closed her eyes and strained at the restraints. Beneath her wet tracksuit, Butcher could see muscles bulge that he could’ve sworn hadn’t been there three days ago. And that, too, was interesting - the nanoids could obviously add rapid muscle mass as well as making the muscle tissue more dense and efficient. That kind of thing had to make you hungry.

For a moment, there was nothing and then, with a sound of gaffer tape ripping, Emmy pulled her wrists apart with a victorious laugh, raising her hands in victory.

Butcher took a cautious step back from her, even as he nodded in reluctant admiration. He had to wonder whether he could do the same, now. STR 7 probably wasn’t enough, but his Feat of Strength skill had one level. From what he remembered of Cuttler’s avatar’s explanation, that should mean he counted as STR 8 when performing an act of raw strength, like lifting a weight or tearing apart plastic ties and gaffer tape - as long as it was part of his Duty, of course. Otherwise he wouldn’t get the bonus from being a SOLDIER.

‘Not going to try to kill me again?’ he asked her, carefully, hands raised in front of himself.

‘Nah,’ she replied, flexing her right bicep and giving it a tentative squeeze. ‘Not making that mistake twice. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Right, then,’ he told her. ‘I’m off. Please don’t take it personally, but I hope I never see you again.’

‘Likewise,’ she agreed, still entranced by her own increase in size. Then she paused and looked at him. ‘Listen, Ron’s a good guy. He’s a stupid arse, but he’s a good guy. He’s trying to be a criminal mastermind but he’s just not got it in him. If you kill him, and I find out, I will hunt you down.’

‘Fair enough,’ Butcher agreed, lowering his hands and heading back to the driver’s side door, where he looked back at her. ‘You look out for yourself, Emmy. If anyone’s going to hunt me down, I’d rather it was you.’

She nodded, then suddenly remembered something:

‘Hey! What about my phone, you cunt!’

But he had already climbed into the Insignia. The engine growled into life and, with a wave, he pulled away.

*

Ron Cutler, MANCER Level 6, watched his most recent bolt-hole burn from a vantage point on the hill. It had just been a cheap holiday cottage. He’d rented it on the owner’s farm doorstep, cash in hand and no questions asked, for a month. For the farmer, off-season, it was easy money that didn’t need to trouble the tax man. Unfortunately, the farmer in question wouldn’t be making much money off his run-down little shed conversion this summer. It would probably take that long for the insurance to pay out on the burnt-out wreck it was now being turned into.

Ron hadn’t burned it. He’d cleaned it out as best he could. But the team of black-clad security men from BRS who had turned up an hour ago had tossed a white phosphor grenade through the door before they’d left. On the plus side, the insurers would see it was an arson job, Ron supposed. Otherwise, he wasn’t sure why Ball’s rent-a-thugs had bothered. He supposed they were sending a signal but, if Ron had done the sensible thing and just cleared out, he would never have seen it. As it was, he had only hung around to see if he could put eyes on this man, “Parsons”.

The hunter BRS had put on him hadn’t been among them, though. Using both Farsight and Starsight, he had been able to clearly see that, masked as they were, none of the men who had smashed down his door carried a procedural status. Frankly, Ron was relieved. He was, in fact, relieved about a lot of things, despite being homeless yet again. This man, Parsons, that BRS had put on his trail was tenacious and ruthless and, frankly, Ron wasn’t sure if he really had the levels of bastardness he needed to get the man dead. But he was also fallible. And just from the exchanges they’d had, Ron thought Parsons probably didn’t actually work for BRS directly. His Bluff skill aside, the man didn’t feel like the kind of person who would tolerate James Ball’s level of macho posturing and ego-driven obsessiveness.

It left him feeling relieved, because he’d already felt bad enough about sending Emmy to kill him on the promise of classing up. He was relieved that she’d failed: for her - a friend who had been there when he needed a true friend - and relieved for Parsons, for all that he was a hunter working for BRS. Ron was beginning to think that Parsons might not be the total bastard he had first imagined the man must be.

He felt less relieved for himself, though. He had still told a friend to murder another human being. Even if the end justified the means, that wasn’t who he wanted to be. The blood on his hands might have been purely theoretical, but it felt no less dirty for that.

Ron cast Distort Appearance on himself, shrugged his backpack into a more comfortable position, and set off along the moors with no clear direction of travel.

*

A chirpy ringtone made Butcher jump at the wheel, but he kept the car from crossing the lines as he negotiated the eighth circle of Hell that was the M25 Northbound. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was Emmy’s again. It was a new number - a mobile - so, as the car was only moving at a snail’s pace anyway, he jabbed it onto speaker mode.

‘Yes?’ he asked.

‘Parsons?’ came Cuttler’s voice. ‘Where’s Emmy?’

‘I left her by her car, safe and sound and buff as fuck,’ he replied. ‘Did BRS miss you, then? Sorry about that.’

‘You sound devastated.’

‘I’m not. What do you want?’

‘Well, I want to know Emmy’s OK, for a start,’ replied Cuttler. ‘Hard to do that if you’ve got her phone.’

‘She ought to be on her way home. Give it a couple of hours and try her flat if you don’t believe me.’ Butcher told him. ‘Otherwise, there’s not much I can do to show you that I’m not a murderer - attempted or otherwise.’

‘What’re you doing now?’ asked Cuttler, after a pause.

‘You want to ask me what colour underwear I’m wearing?’ laughed Butcher, finally getting onto the M40. He would need to stop for fuel soon.

‘I hope you’re not coming to Yorkshire?’

‘You are still there, then?’ asked Butcher, and paused to let Cuttler’s mistake sink in. ‘But, no. It’s a big place. I’ve no idea where you are and no practical way to find out without giving BRS another excuse to fuck me over.’

‘So where?’

‘This may surprise you, Mister Cuttler,’ said Butcher. ‘But I am, in fact, not a total bastard, however hard Her Majesty’s Government may have tried to make me into one. I am, in fact, on my way to Liverpool to see if I can’t track down what happened to your sister.’

‘Cally? Why?’

‘You shoot fire out of your fingers, Ron,’ said Butcher, simply. ‘I’m not an idiot. I know when a target is too dangerous to try to take out one on one. I might beat you with better training. But it’s about as likely that I end up with a hole in my face that no amount of nanoids is going to fix. So I figure you might respond better to honey than vinegar.

‘If I can find Cally, I think you’ll talk about coming in.’

‘She’s dead.’

‘You know that for a fact, or it’s just what helps you sleep at night?’

There was silence on the line for a few moments.

‘If you find her…’

‘I’ll call you first,’ said Butcher. ‘If you switch phones, text your new number to Emmy’s phone. Or call in if you want an update. But not too often.’

‘I don’t want you tracing me,’ Cuttler agreed.

‘No, and I don’t want you pissing me off,’ Butcher corrected him.

‘If you can’t find her, though…’

‘Back to doing it the hard way, Ron,’ said Butcher. ‘I’d rather not.’

‘Me too,’ said Cuttler. ‘Alright. Good luck. I don’t know what you’ve already got, but the lead on the case was a Detective Constable called Saad Malik. To be fair, he did a reasonable job as far as I could tell. The case is still open, but…’

‘Good,’ said Butcher. ‘I’ll speak to you again when I’ve got anything to say. Oh, and Ron?’

‘What?’

‘Call your mother.’

He hung up.

*

Ron looked down at the phone. He was waiting at a rural bus stop, wrapped up against the cold but still with the nanoids running a gentle program to keep his skin temperature a little higher. Eventually he would burn through his surplus fat reserves and this kind of luxury would need more fuel but for now it was a good way to shed weight and change his appearance in one go.

So Parsons was looking for Cally. Whatever else he was, he was obviously good at finding people. For all that Ron had gone looking for him, it was because Parsons had been shaking all the right trees. And if Cally was still alive…

Ron would just have to deal with the fact that he’d given up on his little sister too quickly. She could hate him and blame him if she wanted, but if she was still alive it would be worth it. Even to have her controlled by Parsons and, by extension, by BRS would be a small enough price to pay to have her back.

Would he go in, though? Would it be enough to make it worth giving up to BRS?

A bus pulled up - finally - and Ron got on board. Birmingham was a long way by public transport but it was funny that he and Parsons were heading more or less in the same direction for now...

*

‘An external USB drive for three-and-a-half inch floppy disks,’ said Butcher, patiently. ‘... Well I really don’t think that’s any of your business. Do you have one or not? ... Well, thank you for your time.’

He hung up, mouthed “twat” to himself and moved on to the next one on the list. He knew the devices existed. He could find a billion of them for sale online if he didn’t mind waiting two weeks for them to arrive from China but he wasn’t in the mood to wait. He dialled another number - the seventh on the list.

‘Hi,’ he said when the phone was eventually answered. ‘I’m trying to find out if you have an external drive in stock for three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks… Yes, I know, but I need it today. Do you have one? … You do? Excellent. I also need a USB device for reading an internal hard drive from an old PC. Yes, that you can plug it into. Do you have one? … Which one’s most expensive? ... Yeah, my employer is paying the bills. Awesome. Can I collect today? … Oh, good point. It’s going to be late by the time I’m in your area, now. Tomorrow morning? What time do you open?’

He finally hung up with plans made to collect the equipment he’d need to dig through Cally Cuttler’s digital past. Whether it would be fruitful, he had no idea, but the drive and the disk were the only advantages he had over the police who’d already been looking for her. Well, that and a really solid motivation to track the missing girl down, one way or another.

He was no stranger to observation operations in the UK. He’d worked with the Met and with Five more than once when they were short on manpower, and although the Det officially supplied only observation and reconnaissance services, he had been an eye witness to the investigation side of the work. London, Leeds and Birmingham had all been locations for ops he’d had a hand in, one way or another. Liverpool was new territory to him, though. Good thing, too, if he was going to walk into a police station.

He sighed and reached for the phone again. He thought he deserved a decent night’s sleep in a good hotel - the sort with a business centre, room service and an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast… Unfortunately, he had an unpleasant task to see to, first.

‘You’re checking in?’ Cook asked. ‘I’m astonished.’

‘I wanted to find out if you got Cuttler,’ he said, leaning on the bonnet of the car. He could just hear the roar of the M6 traffic beyond the trees as he watched a middle-aged man picking up after an elderly terrier on the pathetic “green space” at the services.

‘If we -?’

‘You had his location,’ said Butcher, suddenly wishing he’d never given up smoking. This felt like a cigarette sort of a conversation. ‘I was six hours away in a Vauxhall Insignia. I know Ball will have sent a snatch-squad of his stormtroopers. Did you get him?’

‘... No.’

‘OK, so I’m still in-play?’ he asked. Yeah, that would be exactly the point at which he’d put the cigarette to his lips and take a long pull, and let it roll around before drawing it into his lungs and puffing it out into the sky. He had considered taking up that vaping thing that had been bloody everywhere six years ago. But he hadn’t wanted to look like a knob. And not smoking felt far too good to go back now. He wondered whether the nanoids could fix the damage if he started again.

‘You’re still our lead on this, yes,’ she agreed.

‘And I assume if you got anything to give me a pointer from his place in Yorkshire, you’d let me know what you had?’

‘We would,’ she agreed again. ‘And yes, that means we got sod all from the cottage where we traced the number you gave us. He was definitely there. DNA match on hair samples. But no tickets, no letters, no digital history on the local WiFi… nothing.’

‘OK,’ he nodded. ‘Well, I’m proceeding with Plan A, then. I’m heading to Liverpool to look into his sister. If I can find her, I think I can draw him out.’

‘It feels like a long shot,’ she complained.

‘Well, if you’d mentioned the super-powers, I might have been able to take him by now!’

‘Christ, Butcher, you’re a broken bloody record,’ she growled at him. ‘Yes, fine. It sounds like the best option we’ve got. The police are doing their best, but given that he’s not actually been charged with anything worse than corporate espionage we’ve not been able to persuade them to send out a public campaign. But his photo has been circulated to local forces.

‘In fact, that’s a good point,’ she interrupted herself. ‘You’ve seen him, face-to-face! What did he look like? Had he changed his appearance?’

‘He still had the same hair and beard when I saw him,’ said Butcher, leaving out the fact of Cuttler’s changed physique.

‘Good.’

‘Speaking of our friends in blue,’ Butcher went on. ‘I’m going to need to visit them when I get to Liverpool. I thought I’d better check that your Mister Ball had done what he said he was going to viz my photo on the police records and fingerprints and suchlike. I don’t need to be arrested the moment I walk in.’

‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘You should be fine. We’ve also done some deep background work on the Greg Parsons identity. You’ve got a credit history, five years of addresses and utility bills in the name of Greg Parsons.’

‘That’s nice. So where do I live?’

‘You’ve got a flat in Southend, rented from a property holding company that’s an arm’s length subsidiary of BRS,’ she replied. ‘We’ll have it furnished by the end of the weekend. And Mister Ball has asked me to tell you that, if you pull this off, we’ll give you the keys and six months rent-free.’

‘Got tired of wielding the stick at last, has he?’

‘Do your job, Butcher,’ she told him. ‘You’ll be a happier, wealthier man for it than you would ever have been playing soldiers.’

She hung up on him, this time, and Butcher decided that it was only fair.