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Fiorinda. I sleep there. In that bedroom.’
    Sage blinked at her: pulled out his current rag, found a relatively unused patch, filled it and carefully looked around for a binbag. Nope. All been cleared away.
    ‘Oooh, tha’s ingenious of him, if true… Is Hu pissed, is it a competition?’
    ‘You don’t get it, Ao-hahaha, Sage. He has photos of her when she was twelve, photos Rufus must have taken. Everyone knows Rufus took pictures, no one’s ever found a trace. Wang has them on the bathroom wall, where he can see them from the shower; know what I mean ? ’
    Sage cast another leisurely glance around for somewhere to dump the rag; sighed and returned it to his pocket. ‘Is that the terrible news? Dian, aside from I’m not sure I believe you, this is Fiorinda you’re talking about. Grow up, mediababe. Using a rockstar as wank-aid: not a crime. Not unless it leads to the fantasies getting invasively acted out. It’s a hazard of our employment, I’m sure Cliff Richard did not escape. Fiorinda is anybody’s. Ax too. An’ even me, eh? You think?’
    Maybe she blushed: difficult to tell in the dim light, with permanent make-up.
    ‘It d-doesn’t concern you that he took great pains to find the shrine of the evil magician, and he’s desecrating the image of our lady there? Doesn’t that scare you? The Chinese claim they don’t believe in magic. So why would he do that?’
    Sage seemed at a loss for an opinion. ‘What did Wang say? Have you told him where you think he’s living?’
    ‘It’s not like that… I saw the pictures in the bathroom. Then he told me .’ Dian shivered. ‘He says he’s making me live there to re-educate me; he’s living there to re-educate us. To teach us that the story of Rufus’s magic is nonsense.’
    The Minister for Gigs thought it over.
    ‘Well… It’s a piss-off if he’s making a big thing of a place we’d rather forget, but he’s got the right idea. Dian, take my advice and ditch the evil magician, lord and lady shite. Paganism’s the religion of the Counterculture. No matter how close you are with the General, you can’t afford to talk like that.’
    The mediababe looked very sick for a moment, and he wondered exactly why. ‘I could be useful,’ she blurted out. ‘That’s what I really came to say.’
    ‘What—?’
    ‘Look, I don’t want to do this, I want to survive. But I’m more afraid of what, what might return , than I am of s-starving. I’m sleeping with the enemy, that’s my business, but he’s off his guard with me. Wang uses me as a source of information, but he talks. He talks about immix, about the Zen Self experiment, using those words. These are forbidden topics, supposed to be treated like they never existed, but he doesn’t care with me. I could tell you things, find out things.’
    Fer fuck’s sake, he thought. You could go back an’ tell your General we’re not quite as dumb as we look. But he felt her desperation. He believed she was sincere, in her own eyes, at this moment; and he pitied her, dangerous as she might be.
    ‘They’d kill you,’ he said, bluntly but not unkindly. ‘Don’t you understand that? And they’d take their time, know what I mean ?’
    She held her ground, chewing the glossy lip again.
    ‘He keeps asking me about Dilip. Why would Wang need to know about Dilip? He’s a m-minor figure, believed to be dead. You know that no bodies have been recovered from the State Apartments?’
    Sage had not been in London since before the invasion, but he’d seen the news coverage of the breaking of the siege, and he’d had eye-witness accounts. The Chinese were refusing access to a heap of sodden spoil, on some atavistic theory that this would humble the English. In some atavistic way they were right. But there would be no bodies . When the human remains search teams were allowed in, they’d be sifting the ash for teeth. Dian stared at him, insistent: he refused to be drawn.
    ‘There never will be. What are you