I heard hoarse weeping. My own breathing had locked up automatically on the blast, relic of decades in one military context or another. I turned to the woman and found her propping herself up against the bar.

Her face looked bruised.

I risked breath to shout across the general uproar.

“Can you stand?”

A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.

“Out. Try not to breathe.”

Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando.

Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.

“A light,” he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.”

He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.

“The angel.”

I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”

“The an—” And then something must have got through the hallucinogens.

His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.

I slashed his face open and left.

Deep enough.

Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.