McCowan had moved further away from the door leading back into the bar area. Kendrick lurched past him and gripped the handle, began turning it.

The familiar sound of the bar beyond increased slightly. He paused with the door fractionally open.

"You're not here," he murmured, turning to see if the dead man was still there. McCowan still gazed back at him with calm eyes.

"It was a long time ago."

"I'm sorry."

McCowan cocked his head. "What for?"

"For letting you die."

The other shook his head. "They were never going to let both of us out of there – you know that for a fact. We both knew your family might still be alive out there somewhere. But there was no one who needed me, so I looked like the obvious choice."

This was too much. Over the years he'd imagined what it would be like, to be able to talk to Peter one last time, to find a way to understand what had happened between them. Now it appeared that he had the opportunity, and suddenly he didn't want it. He wasn't ready for it.

It came to Kendrick that he must be caught up in some particularly vivid form of hallucination generated by his augmentations: fantasies that imposed themselves on the real world. How much longer did he have left, then, before he could no longer distinguish the imagined from the real? Was this what it was like for other Labrats when they got close to the end, when their augs consumed first their nervous systems and then their bodies, from the inside out? Did they imagine their pasts literally coming back to haunt them?

If that was the case, then perhaps he would be better off dead.

"I'm here to tell you something. I need to go soon, so are you listening to me?"

Kendrick stared down at the door handle. Sanity lay on the other side of it. "All right, I'm listening."

"Don't trust Hardenbrooke. He's a dangerous bastard. Do you hear me? He's dangerous."