★★Ramona? You busy?★★

★★Powdering my nose. What’s up?★★

I stare at the car ahead of me, trying to visualize it well enough to shove it at her as a concrete image. ★★I’ve got company. The unwelcome kind.★★

★★Surprise!★★ I can feel her chuckle. ★★What did you do to annoy them?★★

★★Oh, this ’n’ that.★★ I’m not about to go into my snooping activities just yet. ★★Billington’s yacht is anchored off North Point, and some of the locals aren’t too happy about it.★★

★★Surprise indeed. So what’s with the car?★★

★★They’ve been tailing me!★★ I sound a bit peevish to myself—petulant, even. ★★And Billington’s got the marina under surveillance. He’s using seagulls as watchers. That makes me nervous.★★ I couldn’t care less about the flying sea-rats, but I’m not terribly happy about the fact that someone aboard that yacht has got the nous to run the Invocation of Al-Harijoun on them, not to mention having enough spare eyeballs to monitor the surveillance take from several hundred zombie seagulls.

★★So why don’t you lose them?★★

I take a deep breath. ★★That would entail breaking the traffic regulations, you know? I’m not supposed to do that. It’s called drawing undue attention to yourself. Besides, there’s a whole stack of documents to file, starting with a form A-19/B, or they’ll throw the book at me. I could lose my license!★★

★★What, your license to kill?★★

★★No, my license to drive!★★ I thump the steering wheel in frustration. ★★This isn’t some kind of spy farce: I’m just a civil servant. I don’t have a license to kill, or authorization to poke my nose into random corners of the world and meet interesting people and hurt them. Capisce?★★

For a moment I feel dizzy. I pinch the bridge of my nose and take a deep breath: my vision fades out for a scary moment, then comes back with this weird sense that I’m looking through two sets of eyes at once. ★★What the fuck?★★

★★It’s me, Bob. I can’t keep this up for long . . . Look, you see that SUV parked ahead?★★

★★Yeah?★★ I’m looking at it but it doesn’t register.

★★The guy who just got out of it and is walking towards you is carrying a gun. And he doesn’t look particularly friendly. Now I know you’re hung-up on the speed limit and stuff, but can I suggest you—★★

There is one good thing about driving a Smart car: it has a turning circle tighter than Ramona’s hips. I hit the gas and yank the wheel and make the tires squeal, rocking from side to side so badly that for a moment I’m afraid the tiny car is about to topple over. The bad guy raises his pistol slowly but I’ve floored the accelerator and it’s not that slow in a straight line. My wards are prickling and tickling like a sandstorm and there’s a faint blue aura crawling over the dash. Something smacks into the tailgate—a stray pebble, I tell myself as I swerve back up the coast road towards Orléans.

★★I knew you could do it!★★ Ramona enthuses like she’s channeling a cheerleader. ★★What did you do to get them riled up like that?★★

★★I asked about Marc.★★ I glance in the mirror and flinch; my tail is back in the SUV and has gotten it turned around. It’s kicking up a plume of dust as it follows me. I swerve wildly to overtake a Taurus full of pensioners who’re drifting along the crest of the road with their left turn signal flashing continuously, then I overcompensate to avoid rolling the Smart.

★★That wasn’t very fucking clever of you, was it?★★ she asks sharply. ★★Why did you do it?★★ Irrelevant distractions nag at the edges of my perception: a twin-engine pond-hopper buzzes overhead on final approach into Grand Case Airport.

★★I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct.★★ And if I was dreaming or not.

There’s a van ahead, moving slowly, so I pull out to look past it and there’s an oncoming truck so I pull back in. And behind me, closing the gap again, is the SUV.

★★I am going to have to lose these guys before they phone ahead and get some muscle ahead of me on the road to Philipsburg. Any ideas?★★

★★Yes. I’ll be on my way in about five minutes. Just stay ahead of them for now.★★

★★Be fast, okay? If you can’t be safe.★★ I pull out recklessly and floor the accelerator again, passing the van as the driver waves angrily at me. There’s a kink in the road ahead and I take it as fast as I dare. The Smart is bouncy and rolls frighteningly but it can’t be any worse at road-holding than the SUV tailing me, can it? ★★Just what are they doing with the women?★★

★★What women?★★

★★The women Marc was kidnapping and selling to the boat crew. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that?★★

The Suzuki has pulled past the van and is coming up behind me and I’m fresh out of side streets. From here, it’s a three-kilometer straight stretch around the foothills of Paradise Peak before we get to Orient Beach and the fork down to the sea. After that, it’s another five kilometers to the next turnoff. I’m doing eighty and that’s already too damn fast for this road. Besides, I feel like I’m driving two cars at once, one of them a sawed-off subcompact and the other a topless muscle-machine that dodges in and out of the tourist traffic like a steeplechaser weaving through a queue of pensioners. It’s deeply confusing and it makes me want to throw up.

★★What do you know about—★★ pause ★★—the abductions? ★★

★★Women. Young. Blonde. His wife owns a cosmetics company and he looks too young. What conclusion would you draw?★★

★★He has a good plastic surgeon. Hang on.★★ The muscle car surges effortlessly around another bus. Meanwhile the SUV has pulled even with me, and the driver is waving his gun at me to pull over. I glance sideways once more and see his eyes. They look dead and worse than dead, like he’s been in the water for a week and nothing’s tried eating him. I recognize that look: they’re using tele-operator-controlled zombies. Shit. My steering wheel is crawling with sparks as the occult countermeasures cut in, deflecting their brain-eating mojo.

I tense and hit the brakes, then push the cigarette lighter home in its socket during the second it takes him to match my speed. We come to a halt side by side on the crest of a low hill. The SUV’s door opens and the dead guy with the gun gets out and walks over. I sniff: there’s a nasty fragrant smoke coming out of the lighter socket.

He marches stiffly round to my side door, keeping the gun in view. I keep my hands on the steering wheel as he opens the door and gets in.

“Who are you?” I ask tensely. “What’s going on?”

“You ask too many questions,” says the dead man. His voice slurs drunkenly, as if he’s not used to this larynx, and his breath stinks like rotting meat. “Turn around. Drive back to Anse Marcel.” He points the gun at my stomach.

“If you say so.” I slowly move one hand to the gearshift, then turn the car around. The SUV sits abandoned and forlorn behind us as I accelerate away. I drive slowly, trying to drag things out. The stink of decaying meat mingles with a weird aroma of burning herbs. The steering wheel has sprouted a halo of fine blue fire and my skin crawls—I glance sideways but there are no green sparks in his eyes, just the filmed-over lusterless glaze of a day-old corpse. It’s funny how death changes people: I startle when I recognize him.

“Drive faster.” The gun pokes me in the ribs.

“How long have you had Marc?” I ask.

“Shut up.”

I need Ramona. The smell of burning herbs is almost overpowering. I reach out to her: ★★Phone me.★★

★★What’s the problem? I’m driving as fast as—★★

★★Just phone me, damn it! Dial my mobile now!★★ Fifteen or twenty endless seconds pass, then my Treo begins to ring.

“I need to answer my phone,” I tell my passenger. “I have to check in regularly.”

“Answer it. Say that everything is normal. If you tell them different I’ll shoot you.”

I reach out and punch the call-accept button, angling the screen away from him. Then in quick succession I punch the program menu button, and the pretty icon that triggers all the car’s countermeasures simultaneously.

I don’t know quite what I was expecting. Explosions of sparks, spinning heads, a startling spewage of ectoplasm? I get none of it. But Marc the doorman, who managed to die of one of the effects of terminal cocaine abuse just before Ramona’s succubus could suck him dry, sighs and slumps like a dropped puppet. Unfortunately he’s not belted in so he falls across my lap, which is deeply inconvenient because we’re doing fifty kilometers an hour and he’s blocking the steering wheel. Life gets very exciting for a few seconds until I bring the car to rest by the roadside, next to a stand of palm trees.

I wind down the window and stick my head out, taking in deep gasping breaths of blessedly wormwood- and fetorfree ocean air. The fear is just beginning to register: I did it again, I realize, I nearly got myself killed. Sticking my nose into something that isn’t strictly any of my business. I shove Marc out of my lap, then stop. What am I going to do with him?

It is generally not a good idea when visiting foreign countries to be found by the cops keeping company with a corpse and a gun. An autopsy will show he had a cardiac arrest about a day ago, but he’s in my car and that’s the sort of thing that gives them exactly the wrong idea—talk about circumstantial evidence! “Shit,” I mutter, looking around. Ramona’s on her way but she’s driving a two-seater. Double-shit. My eyes fasten on the stand of trees. Hmm.

I restart the engine and reverse up to the trees. I park, then get out and start wrestling with Marc’s body. He’s surprisingly heavy and inflexible, and the seats are inconveniently form-fitting, but I manage to drag him across to the driver’s side with a modicum of sweating and swearing. He leans against the door as if he’s sleeping off a bender. I retrieve the Treo, blip the door shut, then start doodling schematics in a small application I carry for designing field-expedient incantations. There’s no need to draw a grid round the car—the Smart’s already wired—so as soon as I’m sure I’ve got it right I hit the upload button and look away. When I look back I know there’s something there, but it makes the back of my scalp itch and my vision blur. If I hadn’t parked the car there myself I could drive right past without seeing it.

I shamble back to the roadside and look both ways—there’s no pavement—then start walking along the hard shoulder towards Orient Beach.

De-animating Marc has brought back the sense of guilt from Darmstadt: the conviction that if I’d just been slightly faster off the ball I could have saved Franz and Sophie and the others. It’s also confirmed that my dreams of Ramona are the real thing: so much for keeping a fig leaf of deniability. She was right: I’m an idiot. Finally there’s Billington, and the activities of his minions. Seeing that long, hungry hull in the distance, recognizing the watcher on the quay, has given me an ugly, small feeling. It’s as if I’m an ant chewing away at a scab on an elephant’s foot—a foot that can be raised and brought down on my head with crushing force should the pachyderm ever notice my existence.

After I’ve been walking for about half an hour, a bright red convertible rumbles out of the heat haze and pulls up beside me. I think it’s a Ferrari, though I’m not much good at car spotting; anyway, Ramona waves at me from the driver’s seat. She’s wearing aviator mirrorshades, a bikini, and a see-through silk sarong. If my libido wasn’t on the ropes from the events of the past twelve hours my eyes would be halfway out of my head: as it is, the best I can manage is a tired wave.

“Hi, stranger. Looking for a lift?” She grins ironically at me.

“Let’s get out of here.” I flop into the glove-leather passenger seat and stare at the trees glumly.

She pulls off slowly and we drive in silence for about five minutes. “You could have gotten yourself killed back there,” she says quietly. “What got into you?”

I count the passing palm trees. After I reach fifty I let myself open my mouth. “I wanted to check out a hunch.”

Without taking her eyes off the road she reaches over with her right hand and squeezes my left leg. “I don’t want you getting yourself killed,” she says, her voice toneless and over-controlled.

I pay attention to her in a way I can’t describe, feeling for whatever it is that connects us. It’s deep and wide as a river, invisible and fluid and powerful enough to drown in. What I sense through it is more than I bargained for. Her attention’s fixed on the road ahead but her emotions are in turmoil. Grief, anger at me for being a damn fool, anxiety, jealousy. Jealousy?

“I didn’t know you cared,” I say aloud. And I’m not sure I want you to care, I think to myself.

“Oh, it’s not about you. If you get yourself killed what happens to me?”

She wants it to sound like cynical self-interest but there’s a taste of worry and confusion in her mind that undermines every word that comes out of her mouth.

“Something big is going down on this island,” I say, tacitly changing the subject before we end up in uncharted waters. “Billington’s crew has got watchers out. Seagull monitors controlled from, um, somewhere else. And then I ran into Marc. Judging by the state of my wards every goddamn corpse on the island must be moving—why the hell haven’t they chained up the graveyards? And what’s this thing they’ve got about single female tourists?”

“That might not be part of Billington’s core program.” Ramona sounds noncommittal but I can tell she knows more than she’s admitting. “It might be his crew carrying on behind his back. Or something less obvious.”

“Come on! If his sailors are kidnapping single females, you think he’s not going to know about it?”

Ramona turns her head to look me in the eye: “I think you underestimate just how big this scheme is.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?” I complain.

“Because I’m—” She bites her tongue. “Listen. It’s a nice day. Let’s go for a walk, huh?”

“A walk—why?” I get the most peculiar sense that she’s trying to tell me something without putting it into words.

“Let’s just say I wanna see your boxers, okay?”

She grins. Her good humor’s more fragile than it looks, but just for a moment I like what I can see. “Okay.” I yawn, the aftereffects of the chase catching up with me. “Where do you want to go?”

“There’s a spot near Orient Bay.”

She drives past tourists and local traffic in silence. I keep my mouth shut. I’m not good at handling emotional stuff and Ramona confuses the hell out of me. It’s almost enough to make me wish Mo was around; life would be a lot simpler.

We hit a side road and drive along it until we pass a bunch of the usual beachside shops and restaurants and a car park. Ramona noses the Ferrari between a Land Rover and a rack of brightly painted boneshaker bicycles and kills the engine. “C’mon,” she says, jumping out and popping open the trunk. “I bought you a towel, trunks, and sandals.”

“Huh?”

She prods me in the ribs. “Strip off!” I look at her dubiously but her expression is mulish. There’s a concrete convenience nearby so I wander over to it and go inside. I pull my polo shirt off, then lose the shoes, socks, and trousers before pulling on the swimming trunks. I have my limits: the smartphone I keep. I go back outside. Ramona is just about hopping up and down with impatience. “What are you doing with that phone?” she asks. “Come on, it’ll be safe in the glove compartment.”

“Nope. Not doing.” I cross my arms defensively. The Treo doesn’t fit nicely in the baggy boxer-style trunks’ pocket, but I’m not handing it over. “You want my wallet, you can have it, but not my Treo! It’s already saved my life once today.”

“I see.” She stares at me, chewing her lip thoughtfully. “Listen, will you turn it off?”

“What? But it’s in sleep mode—”

“No, I want you to switch it right off. No electronics is best, but if you insist on carrying—”

I raise an eyebrow and she shakes her head in warning. I look her in the eye. “Are you sure this is necessary?”

“Yes.”

My stomach flip-flops. No electronics? That’s heavy. In fact it’s more than heavy: to compute is to be, and all that. I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies. How far do I trust her? I wonder, then I remember last night, a moment of vulnerability on a balcony overlooking the sea.

“Okay.” I press and hold the power button until the phone chimes and the signal LED winks out. No electronics. “What now?”

“Follow me.” She picks up the towels, shuts the car trunk, and heads towards the beach. While I wasn’t looking she’s shed the sarong: I can’t keep my eyes from tracking the hypnotic sway of her buttocks.

The sand is fine and white and the vegetation rapidly gives way to open beach. There’s a rocky promontory ahead, and various sunbathers have set up their little patches; offshore, the sailboards are catching the breeze. The sea is a huge, warm presence, sighing as waves break across the reef offshore and subside before they reach us. Ramona stops and bends forwards, rolls her briefs down her legs, and shrugs out of her bikini top. Then she looks at me: “Aren’t you going to strip off?”

“Hey, this is public—”

There’s an impish gleam in her eyes. “Are you?” She straightens up and deliberately turns to face me. “You’re cute when you blush!”

I glance at the nearest tourists. Middle-aged spread and a clear lack of concealing fabric drives the message home. “Oh, so it’s a nudist beach.”

“Naturist, please. C’mon, Bob. People will stare if you don’t.”

Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off. I fumble my way out of my trunks and concentrate very hard on not concentrating on her very visible assets. Luckily, she’s Ramona. She’s strikingly beautiful—with or without the glamour, it doesn’t matter—but I also find her intimidating. After a minute or so I figure out I’m not about to sprout a semaphore pole in public, so I begin to relax. When in Rome, et cetera.

Ramona picks her way past the clots of slowly basting sun-seekers—I notice with displeasure a scattering of heads turning to track us—and detours around a battered hut selling ice cream and cold drinks. The beach is narrower at this end, and proportionately less populated as she veers towards the waterline. “Okay, this’ll do. Mark the spot, Bob.” She unrolls her towel and plants it on the sand. Then she holds out a waterproof baggie. “For your phone—sling it around your neck, we’re going swimming.”

“We’re going swimming?” ★★Naked?★★

She looks at me and sighs. “Yes Bob, we’re going swimming in the sea, bare-ass naked. Sometimes I despair of you . . .”

Oh boy. My head’s spinning. I bag up my phone, make sure it’s sealed, and walk into the sea until I’m up to my ankles, looking down at the surf swirling grains of sand between and over my toes. I can’t remember when I last went swimming. It’s cool but not cold. Ramona wades into the waves until she’s hip-deep then turns round and beckons to me. “What are you waiting for?”

I grit my teeth and plod forwards until the water’s over my knees. There’s an island in the distance, just a nub of trees waving slowly above a thin rind of sand. “Are you planning on wading all the way out there?”

“No, just a little farther.” She winks at me, then turns and wades out deeper. Soon those remarkable buttocks are just a pale gleam beneath the rippling waves.

I follow her in. She pitches forwards and starts swimming. Swimming isn’t something I’ve done much of lately, but it’s like riding a bicycle—you’ll remember how to do it and your muscles will make sure you don’t forget the next morning. I splash around after her, trying to relearn my breast stroke by beating the waves into submission. Damn, but this is different from the old Moseley Road Swimming Baths.

★★This way,★★ she tells me, using our speech-free intercom. ★★Not too far. Can you manage ten minutes without a rest?★★

★★I hope so.★★ The waves aren’t strong inside the barrier formed by the reef, and in any event they’re driving us back onshore, but I hope she’s not planning on going outside the protective boundary.

★★Okay, follow me.★★

She strikes out away from the sunbathers and towards the outer reef, at an angle. Pretty soon I’m gasping for breath as I flail the water, trailing after her. Ramona is a very strong swimmer and I’m out of practice, and my arms and thigh muscles are screaming for mercy within minutes. But we’re approaching the reef, the waves are breaking over it—and to my surprise, when she stands up the water barely reaches her breasts.

“What the hell?” I flap towards her, then switch to treading water, feeling for the surface beneath my feet. I’m half-expecting to kick razor-sharp coral, but what I find myself standing on is smooth, slippery-slick concrete.

“No electronics, because someone might have tapped into it. No clothing because you might be bugged. Seawater because it’s conductive; if they’d tattooed a capacitive chart on your scalp while you were asleep it’d be shorted out by now. No bugs because we’ve got a high-volume white noise source all around us.” She frowns at me, deadly serious. “You’re clean, monkey-boy, except for whatever compulsion filters they’ve dropped on you, and any supernatural monitors.”

“Shit.” Enlightenment dawns: Ramona has dragged me out here because she thinks I’m bugged. “What’s down below us . . . ?”

“It’s a defensive emplacement. The French got serious about that in the early ’60s, before the treaty arrangements got nailed down. You’re standing on a discordance node, one of a belt of sixteen big ones designed to protect the east coast of Saint Martin against necromantic incursions. If you swim through it, any thaumaturgic bugs they’ve planted on you will be wiped—it’s a huge occult degaussing rig. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here.”

“But if it’s a defensive emplacement, how come the zombies up at—” I bite my tongue.

“Exactly.” She looks grave. “That’s part of what’s wrong here, which is the other thing I want to check out. About four months ago one of our routine geomantic surveillance flights noticed that the defensive belt was—not broken, exactly, but showed signs of tampering. One of Billington’s subsidiaries, a construction company, landed the contract to maintain the concrete ballast units. Do I need to draw you a diagram?”

Here we are surrounded by ocean, and my mouth is dry as a bone. “No. You think somebody’s running a little import /export business, right?”

“Yes.”

I take a deep breath. “Anything else?”

“I wanted to get you alone, with no bugs.”

“Hey, you only had to ask!” I grin, my heart pounding inappropriately.

“Don’t take this the wrong way.” She smiles ruefully. “You know what would happen if—”

“Only kidding,” I say, abruptly nervous. The conversation is veering dangerously close to territory I’m uncomfortable with. I look at her—correction: I force my eyes to track about thirty degrees up, until I’m looking at her face. She’s watching me right back, and I find I can’t help wondering what it would be like to . . . well. Sure she’s attached to a level three glamour so tight you’d need a scalpel to peel it off her, but I can probably cope with whatever’s underneath it, I think. Her daemon is something else again, but there are things we could do, without intercourse . . . but what about Mo? My conscience finally catches up with my freewheeling speculation. Well, what indeed? But the thought drags me back down to Earth, after a fashion. I manage to get my worst instincts under control then ask: “Okay, so why did you really bring me out here?”

“First, I need to know: Why the fuck did you go rushing off to Anse Marcel?”

The question hits me like a bucket of cold water in the face. “I, I, I wanted to check something out,” I stutter. It sounds lame. “Last night, I was inside Marc’s head. He was going to—” I trail off.

“You were inside his head?”

“Yes, and it wasn’t a nice place to be,” I snap.

“You were inside—” She blinks rapidly. “Tell me what you picked up?”

“But I thought you knew—”

“No,” she says tightly. “I didn’t know it went that far. This is as new to me as it is to you. What did you learn?”

I lick my lips. “Marc had an arrangement. Every couple of weeks he’d pick up a single female who wouldn’t be missed and he’d—let’s not go into that. Afterwards he’d drop a geas on her, a control ring he’d learned from the customer, and he’d drive her up to Anse Marcel where a couple of guys would come in on a boat to pick the victim up. They paid in coke, plus extras.”

“Ri-ight.” Ramona pauses. “That makes sense.” I can feel it snapping into place in her mind, another part of a lethal booby-trapped jigsaw puzzle she’s trying to solve. I realize in the silence between heartbeats that we’ve stopped pretending. It feels as if some huge external force is pushing us together, squeezing us towards intimacy. She gave me an opening to pretend that I wasn’t involved, and I didn’t take it. But why? I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing; maybe the tropical clime’s addled me.

“What part of the picture does it fit?” I meet her gaze. I have the most peculiar feeling that I’m watching myself watching her through two pairs of eyes.

“Billington’s diversified into a variety of fields. You shouldn’t think of him as simply a computer industry mogul. He’s got his tentacles into a lot more pies than Silicon Valley.”

“But kidnapping? That’s ridiculous! It can’t possibly be cost-effective, even if he’s selling them off for spare parts.” I swallow and shut up: she’s broadcasting a horrible sense of claustrophobic dread, fear rising off her like a heat haze. I shuffle, grounding my feet against the concrete defense platform, and for a moment her skin acquires a silvery sheen. “What is it? Is he—”

“You know better than to say it aloud, Bob.”

“I was afraid that was what you were trying to tell me.” I look away, towards the breakers foaming across the reef and the open seas beyond. And it’s not just her sense of dread anymore.

Some types of invocation need blood, and some require entire bodies. Whatever lives in the back of Ramona’s head is a trivial, weak example; the creature I ran across in Santa Cruz and Amsterdam three years ago was a much more powerful one. Ramona is afraid that we’re dealing with a life-eating horror that lives off the entropy burst that comes from draining a human soul: I’m pretty sure she’s right. Which means the next question to ask is, who on Earth would summon such a thing, and why? And as I’m pretty sure we know the answer to who . . .

“What’s Billington trying to do? What is he summoning up?”

“We don’t know.”

“Any guesses?” I ask sarcastically. “The Deep Ones, maybe?”

Ramona shakes her head angrily. “Not them! Never them.” The sense of dread is choking, oppressive: she feels it personally, I realize.

I stare at her. That flash of silver again, the water lapping around her chest, drawing my eyes back towards those amazingly perfect breasts—I fight to filter out the distraction. This isn’t me, is it? It’s hard work, fighting the glamour. I want to see her as she really is. Taking a deep breath I force myself back to the matter in hand: “What makes you so sure the Deep Ones aren’t behind him? You’re holding out on me. Why?”

“Because they don’t think that way. And yes, I am fucking holding out on you.” She glares at me, and I can feel her wounded pride and defensive anger fighting against something else: Concern? Worry? “This is all going wrong. I brought you out here so I could tell you why you’re being kept in the dark, not to pick a fight—”

“And here I was thinking you wanted me for my body.” I hold my hands up before she has time to swear at me: “I’m sorry, but have you got any idea just how bloody distracting that glamour is?” It’s amazing and frightening and beautiful, and it makes it a real bitch to try to concentrate on a conversation about subterfuge and lies without wondering what horrors she’s concealing from me.

Ramona stares at me, until I can feel her inside my head, watching herself through my glamour-ensnared eyes. “Okay, monkey-boy: you want it, you got it.” Her voice is flat and hard. “Just remember, you asked for it.”

She lets go of the anchor of the glamour she’s been clinging on to. The constant repulsive force emanating from the concrete countermeasure emplacement we’re standing on blows it away, like a hat in a hurricane—and I see Ramona as she truly is. Which gives me two very big surprises.

I gasp. I can’t help myself. “You’re one of them!” I meet her clear emerald gaze. And, quietly: “Wow.”

Ramona says nothing, but one perfect nostril flares minutely. Her skin has a faint silvery iridescent sheen to it, like the scales of a fish; her hair is long and green as glass, framing a face with higher cheekbones and a wider mouth, rising from an inhumanly perfect long neck, the skin broken by two rows of slits above her clavicle. Her breasts are smaller, not much larger than her nipples, and two tinier ones adorn her rib cage beneath them. She raises her right hand and spreads her fingers, revealing the delicate tracery of webbing. “So what do you think of me now, monkey-boy?”

I swallow. She’s like a sculpture in quicksilver, created by inhuman sea-dwelling aliens who have taken the essence of human female beauty and customized it to meet their need for an artificial go-between who can walk among the lumpen savages of the arid continental surfaces. “I’ve met half—sorry, the sea-born—before. At Dunwich. But not like, uh, you. Uh. You’re different.” I goggle at her, my mouth open like a fish. Different is an understatement and a half. The glamour she customarily wears doesn’t make her look unnaturally beautiful to human eyes; rather, it conceals the more exotic aspects of her physiognomy. Strip it away and she’s devastating, as unlike the weak-chinned followers of St. Monkfish as it’s possible to imagine.

“So you’ve met the country cousins.” Her cheek twitches. “Yes, I can understand your surprise.” She stares at me, and I’m not sure whether she’s disappointed or surprised. “So do you still think I’m a monster?”

“I think you’re a—” I grind to a stop, before I can push my foot any further down my throat. “Um.” An inkling comes to me. “Let me guess. Your people. Go-betweens, like the colony at Dunwich. And you were given to the BC and they dropped the, your daemon on you to control you. Am I right?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny anything to do with my employers,” she says with the flat-voiced emptiness of a necromancer’s answering machine, before snapping back into focus: “My folks lived off Baja California. That’s where I grew up.” For a moment her eyes overflow with a sense of loss. “The Deep Ones did . . . well, they did what they did at Dunwich. My folks have been go-betweens for generations, able to pass as human and visit the depths. But we’re not really at home among either species. We’re constructs, Bob. And now you know why I use the glamour!” she adds harshly. “There’s no need for flattery. I know damn well what I look like to you people.”

You people: Ouch! “You’re not a monster. Exotic, yes.” I can’t look away from her. I try to pull my eyes away from those perfect breasts and I keep looking down and there’s another pair—“It just takes a little getting used to. But I don’t mind, not really. I’ve already gotten over it.” Down in the Laundry compound at Dunwich they’ve got a technical term for human employees who start spending too much time skinny-dipping with a snorkel: fish-fuckers. I’ve never really seen the attraction before, but with Ramona it’s blindingly obvious. “You’re as attractive without the glamour as with it. Maybe more so.”

“You’re just saying that to fuck with my head.” I can taste her bitter amusement. “Admit it!”

“Nope.” I take a deep breath and duck under the water, then kick off towards her. I can open my eyes here: everything is tinged pale green but I can see. Ramona dodges sideways then grabs me by the waist and we tumble beneath the reflective ceiling, grappling and pushing and shoving. I get my head above water for long enough to pull in a lungful of air, then she drags me under and starts tickling me. I convulse, but somehow whenever I really need air she’s pushing me up above water rather than trying to pull me down. Weirdly, I seem to need much less air than I ought to. I can feel the gills working powerfully in her pleural cavity; it’s as if there’s some kind of leakage between us, as if she’s helping oxygenate both our bloodstreams. When she kisses me she tastes of roses and oysters. Finally, after a few minutes of rubbing and fondling we settle to the bottom and lie, arms and legs entangled, in the middle of the circuit-board tracery of gold that caps the concrete table.

★★Fish-fucker!★★ She mocks me.

★★It takes two to tango, squid-girl. Anyway, we haven’t. I wouldn’t dare.★★

★★Coward!★★ She laughs ruefully, taking the sting out of the word. Silver bubbles trickle and bob towards the surface from her mouth. ★★Y’know, it’s hard work breathing for both of us. If you want to help, go up to the surface ... ★★

★★Okay.★★ I let go and allow myself to stand up. As I pull away from her I feel a tightness in my chest that rapidly grows: we may be destiny-entangled, but the metabolic leakage is strictly short-range. I break surface and shake my head, gasping for air, then look towards the beach. There’s a loud ringing in my ears, a deep bass rattle that resonates with my jaw, and a shadow dims the flashing sunlight on the reef. Huh? I find myself looking straight up at the underside of a helicopter.

“Get down!” Ramona hisses through the deafening roar. She wraps a hand around my ankle and yanks, pulling me under the surface. I hold my breath and let her drag me down beside her—my chest eases—then I realize she’s pointing at a rectangular duct cover at one side of the concrete platform. ★★Come on, we’ve got to get under cover! If they see us we’re screwed!★★

★★If who see us?★★

★★Billington’s thugs! That’s his chopper up there. Whatever you did must have really gotten them pissed. We’ve got to get under cover before—★★

★★Before what?★★ She’s wrestling with the iron duct cover, which is dark red with rust and thinly coated with polyps and other growths. I try to ignore the tightness in my chest and brace myself to help.

★★That.★★ Something drops into the water nearby. I think it’s rubbish at first, but then I see a spreading red stain in the water. ★★Dye marker. For the divers.★★

★★Whoops.★★ I grab hold of the handles and brace myself, then put my back into it. ★★How long—★★ the grate begins to move ★★—do we have?★★

★★Fresh outa time, monkey-boy.★★ Shadows flicker in the turbid waters on the other side of the coral barrier: barracuda or small sharks circling. My chest aches with the effort of holding my breath and I think I’ve ripped open the skin on my hands, but the grate is moving now, swinging up and out on a hinged arm. ★★C’mon in.★★ The opening is about eighty by sixty, a tight squeeze for two: Ramona drops into it feet first then grabs my hand and pulls me after.

★★What is this?★★ I ask. I get an edgy, panicky feeling: we’re dropping into a concrete-walled tube with hand-holds on one side, and it’s black as night inside.

★★Quick! Pull the cover shut!★★

I yank at the hatch and it drops towards me heavily. I flinch as it lands on top of the tunnel, and then I can’t see anything but a vague phosphorescent glow. I blink and look down. It’s Ramona. She’s breathing—if that’s what you call it—like she’s running a marathon, and she looks a bit peaked, and she’s glowing, very dimly. Bioluminescence. ★★It’s shut.★★

★★Okay. Now follow me.★★ She begins to descend the tunnel, hand over hand. My chest tightens.

★★Where are we going?★★ I ask nervously.

★★I don’t know—this isn’t in the blueprints. Probably an emergency maintenance tunnel or something. So how about we find out, huh?★★

I grab a rung and shove myself down towards her, trying to ignore the panicky feeling of breathlessness and the weird sensations around my collarbone. ★★Okay, so why not let’s climb down a secret maintenance shaft in an undersea occult defense platform while divers with spear guns who work for a mad billionaire wait for us up top, hmm? What could possibly go wrong?★★

★★Oh, you’d be surprised.★★ She sounds as if she does this sort of thing every other week. Then, a second later, I sense rather than feel her feet hit bottom: ★★Oh. Well that’s a surprise,★★ she adds conversationally.

And suddenly I realize I can’t breathe underwater.