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that he had practised thousands of times. The wall brightened with blocky patches of vivid colour. The colours resolved into a mosaic of faces, several dozen of them, arranged in a compositional scheme with the larger images clustered near the middle. The faces were all the same woman, but taken at different stages in her life, so that they almost looked like images of different people. Sometimes the woman was looking into the camera; sometimes she was looking askance, or had been snapped candidly. She had high cheekbones, a slight overbite and eyes of a startling bronze, flecked with chips of fiery gold. She had black hair that she usually wore in tight curls. She was smiling in many of the images, even the ones where she hadn’t been aware that she was being photographed. She’d smiled a lot.
    Dreyfus stared at the pictures as if they were a puzzle he had to solve.
    Something was missing. In his mind’s eye he could see the woman in the pictures turning to him with flowers in her hand, kneeling in newly tilled soil. The image was vivid, but when he tried to focus on any particular part of it the details squirmed from his attention. He knew that memory had to come from somewhere, but he couldn’t relate it to any of the images already on the wall.
    He’d been trying to place it for nearly eleven years.
    The tea was cool enough to drink at last. He sipped it slowly, concentrating on the mosaic of faces. Suddenly the composition struck him as jarringly unbalanced in the top-right corner, even though he’d been satisfied with it for many months. He raised a hand and adjusted the placement of the images, the wall obeying his gestures with flawless obedience. It looked better now, but he knew it would come to displease him in time. Until he found that missing piece, the mosaic would always be disharmonious.
    He thought back to what had happened, flinching from the memory even as he embraced it.
    Six missing hours.
    â€˜You were okay,’ he told the woman on the wall. ‘You were safe. It didn’t get to you before we did.’
    He made himself believe it, as if nothing else in the universe mattered quite as much.
    Dreyfus made the images disappear, leaving the rice-paper wall as blank as when he’d entered the room. He finished the tea in a gulp, barely tasting it as it sluiced down his throat. On the same portion of the wall he called up an operational summary of the day’s business, wondering if the forensics squad had managed to get anything on the sculpture Sparver and he had seen in Ruskin-Sartorious. But when the summary sprang onto the wall, neither the images nor the words were legible. He could make out shapes in the images, individual letters in the words, but somewhere between the wall and his brain there was a scrambling filter in place.
    Belatedly, Dreyfus realised that he’d neglected to take his scheduled Pangolin shot. Security dyslexia was kicking in as his last clearance boost faded.
    He stood from the table and moved to the part of the wall where the booster was dispensed. As he reached towards the pearly-grey surface, the booster appeared in an alcove. It was a pale-grey tube marked with the Panoply gauntlet and a security barcode matching the one on his uniform. Text on the side of the booster read: Pangolin clearance. To be self-administered by Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in permanent irreversible death.
    Dreyfus rolled up his sleeve and pressed the tube against the skin of his forearm. He felt a cold tingle as the booster rammed its contents into his body, but there was no discomfort.
    He retired to his bedroom. He slept fitfully, but without dreams. When he woke three or four hours later, the summary on the wall was crystal clear.
    He studied it for a while, then decided he’d given the Ultras long enough.

CHAPTER 4
    An alert chimed on the cutter’s console. Dreyfus pushed the coffee bulb back into the wall and studied