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Many of the people who lived in the Void and didn’t go out a lot were paler than they were supposed to be, but Scope was the only one who looked like she was born to a life underground. It was as if someone had taken an African baby and raised her in a cave.
    She only felt that way sometimes, but they were tough times. As a self-confessed nerd, she was a social outcast in the world of crime. As an albino, her appearance cemented her inability to fit in. Her finger pointed at him like a weapon.
    “I just wanted to tell you that—” he began.
    She cocked her thumb like the hammer on a gun and pointed again. He sighed and pulled his head back behind the curtains.
    “All I ask is that you don’t contaminate my space,” she called over to him. “And you, my friend, are crawling with contaminants. Why do you always have to push it?”
    “Because I like winding you up,” Tanker said from behind the curtain. “And when my own business isslow, I like pokin’ me nose into other people’s. Boss has got all paranoid again, and shut down my web connection. He wants you, by the way. That’s what I came to tell you. He’s askin’ for his ‘Little Brain.’”
    Scope sighed again, placed the piece of gelatin carefully in a sealed container, and pulled off her latex gloves as she walked through the curtains. She got out of her own overalls, picked up her toolbox and followed Tanker out of the lab. He was Move-Easy’s best hacker, but when it came to chemistry, biology—or anything to do with forensics—Scope was called in. Before joining Move-Easy’s ‘staff,’ she would never have guessed how much chemistry and biology were involved in running a criminal empire. The applications for forensics were a little more obvious.
    She spent most of her time here, in Move-Easy’s Void. A Void was a speakeasy, any place hidden away from the prying eyes of London’s WatchWorld system. It was a place free of surveillance—or at least, surveillance by the Safe-Guards and the police. This one was the largest in London, situated beneath Ratched Hospital, right in the city center. Voids were typically run by criminal organizations, though there were a few hippy communes and artists’ refuges around too, like the one where Scope had grown up. None of them were as secure as this one. But then, they didn’t run major counterfeit operations either. The rooms she walked past contained people working on producing fake IDs, or hacking firewalls, or running identity theft scams, or online gambling or black market operations. One room was being used to plan a bank robbery. In another part of the complex, men and women with intense eyes gambled their money away in an illegal casino.
    As Scope and Tanker walked down the concrete-walled hallway, the boy handed her a ‘backscatter’ x-ray image printed on an A4 sheet of paper.
    “He wants to know what that is,” Tanker said, pointing at part of the image.
    Scope frowned, puzzled by what she was seeing but not in the least bit surprised. She’d seen all sorts of bizarre things since she’d started working here. The main object was caterpillar-shaped, filled with rectangular shapes. There was a harder, clearer box visible near the mouth end. This was what Tanker was pointing at. The image was still holding her attention as she followed Tanker through a doorway.
    “Ah, there’s my Little Brain!” an East End accent bellowed. “Come ’ere, my pet, and grace us wivyor luminescence!”
    Move-Easy was orange. If you valued your life, you didn’t mention it in his presence. It was a result of spending time on a sun-bed nearly every day. Since establishing himself as one of the most powerful gangsters in London, he had become increasingly paranoid about surveillance, and had sought permanent refuge underground. He had been living underground, without emerging into daylight, for seven years. After the first year, he became concerned about how this lack of sunlight might affect his health, and