With the combat, the mesh had kicked in for real. It flushed him now, warm as the sun, and the pain in his side dropped to memory and a detached knowledge that he was bleeding. His field of vision sharpened on the woman running from him, peripherals smearing out with the brightness in the air. When she broke left, out of line-of-sight, he’d closed the gap by about a third. He reached the turn and hooked around, into another back alley, this one barely the width of his shoulders. Unpainted prefab walls with small, high-set windows, stacked sheets of construction plastic and alloy frames leaning at narrow angles, discarded drink cans on the dirt floor. His feet tangled momentarily in a loose wrap of polythene from one of the frames. Up ahead, Gaby had already ducked right. He didn’t think she’d looked back.

He reached the new corner and stopped dead, fighting down the urge to poke his head out. The right turn Gaby had taken was a main thoroughfare, paved in evercrete and loosely thronged with people. He squatted, dug out his Cebe lenses, and peeked around the corner at knee height. With the relief of not having to squint in the harsh light, he picked out Gaby’s fleeing form amid the crowd almost at once. She was glancing back over her shoulder, but it was clear she hadn’t seen him. There was no panic-stricken bolt, only a deep-drawn breath, and then she started to jog rapidly along the street. Carl watched her go for a few seconds, let the gap open up to a good fifty meters or more, then slid out into the street and followed, bent-kneed to keep his head low. It earned him a few strange looks, but no one spoke to him and more importantly, no one made any comment out loud.

He had, he reckoned with meshed clarity, about ten minutes. That was how long it would take news of the fight in the bar to reach someone in authority, and that someone to put a chopper into the air above the rectilinear streets of Garrod Horkan 9. If he hadn’t found Gray by then—game over.