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Tighe sucked in a breath. ‘Is my pahe here?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘In this ice room? Is my pahe here?’

The Wizard turned to look at Tighe. ‘But we’re talking about your implants!’ he said. ‘Why would you be interested in your pahe?’ Then he registered what Tighe was holding in his hands. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

Tighe swallowed quickly. ‘I found it,’ he said, holding it between both gloved hands. It was a moment of intense focus in his head. To avenge his pahe. To make things right for pashe. He pressed his hands together, feeling the trigger resist, resist, and then click in.

The gun exploded, bounding out of Tighe’s hands, and a bullet sped through the icy air towards the Wizard.

For a moment time seemed as frozen as the location. The Wizard was standing there. The gun had thrown itself out of Tighe’s hands and landed amongst the frozen corpses.

The Wizard reached down with one hand and his long leather fingers fumbled at his stomach. He pulled out a black pellet and held it up to his face. His skin had not been broken.

‘Sorry,’ said Tighe.

‘You ought to be careful with that,’ said the Wizard. He sounded mildly irritated. ‘You could harm yourself. That
would
be a waste of your potential.’

‘It must be the cold,’ said Tighe. ‘It just, sort of, went off.’

‘I can see it went off. Still!’ He beamed. ‘It shows off how excellent my new skin is. The microfilament mesh I told you about is very strong and very clever. It distributes the force of the bullet’s impact over its whole structure almost at once, so I barely even feel the blow. Isn’t that clever?’

‘Very clever,’ said Tighe. His head was swimming in and out of focus. Even in the bitter cold of the ice chamber he was sweating. ‘How clever you are, Wizard.’

‘Yes. Anyway, where was I?’

He turned back to the box, and started rummaging through again.

‘My implants,’ said Tighe breathily. He looked about frantically and located the gun. ‘You were telling me.’

‘Yes. Well, yours are basically the same model as I tried out on several other people. Some of them now sitting frozen around you; some still living on the worldwall.’

Tighe grabbed the gun and stuffed it into the pocket in front of his clothing. ‘Really?’ he said.

‘Your pashe’s implants were very similar.’

‘You put things in her head too,’ said Tighe, looking around for some other weapon. There was the dandelion-puff device, but that was in one of his own pockets, underneath the clothing the Wizard had made him put on. He couldn’t think how to undo this outer clothing and reach the little
device without drawing attention to himself. He wasn’t even sure how to operate the little thing. And he wasn’t sure – he realised with a sensation of doom in his heart – wasn’t even sure it would penetrate the tough skin of the Wizard.

‘Yes,’ the Wizard was saying, ‘I inserted her implants when she was a child. It may have been too late, actually, because she suffered from all manner of emotional instabilities. Still, you haven’t inherited them. Either I reached you in time or else your metabolism was simply more suited to the implants. Ah!’ He lifted something from the box, and turned to face Tighe.

Tighe looked up. He smiled weakly.

‘Back to the craft, I think,’ he said. ‘Enough time in here.’ He hoisted up a sack that rattled with the things that he had gathered, and made his way back to the door.

Tighe, slowly and cautiously, got to his feet. He felt the strange tugs and weird angles, as if he were fevered and the world were warping around him.

He staggered over to the Wizard’s side and held on to his arm as he made the door appear again. They stepped out on to the little platform and then the Wizard was away over the sheer face of the ice. Tighe, braced by the mess of icy snowflakes that fluttered against his exposed face, reached out. A filament snaked out and he pulled himself along.

In minutes he had joined the Wizard on top of his craft.

Inside the upper, green room, the Wizard poured the contents of his sack on his bed-couch with the excitement of a child with its presents. ‘Let’s go down below,’ he said. ‘First, go downstairs and check to see what my Lover is up to. He’s a wily one, my Lover. We’d better keep him in view, that’s all.’

He ushered Tighe down the ladder, still wearing his oversuit. He expected to feel too hot, wrapped up as he was. But in fact he felt pleasantly cool. He stepped off the bottom of the stairs and made his awkward way through the twist in space to settle beside his pashe.

‘Pashe,’ he whispered, as the Wizard made his way down the ladder. ‘I tried killing him, but his skin is magic. Strong.’ He pulled off one glove and pressed the ends of his fingers against his mother’s lips. The Wizard was standing now, making his way gingerly over towards his cradle.

Tighe watched him. His pashe, staring straight ahead, started sucking, absently, on Tighe’s fingers’ ends.

‘So,’ said the Wizard, examining his screens. ‘He is close. Close! We may need to leave at a moment’s notice. Still, the flurries and blizzards do a good job in masking where we are.’

He stood up. Tighe pulled his fingers from his pashe’s mouth.

‘So!’ he said. ‘I think we can spare an hour or two before we have to go.
What can I say? My jaunt on the ice has tired me out. If you’ll excuse me I’ll have a little lie down.’

He wandered back to the ladder and climbed up to the top room, pulling the hatch closed behind him.

For a while Tighe did nothing but sit still, with his arm around his pashe. His mind circled round and round, just as he had spun round and round in the Wizard’s strange ice cavern. Most of what the Wizard had told him made no sense at all. The world was not the way he had thought the world was; no. But he had no clear idea of the version that the Wizard seemed so wedded to. This strange part of the wall was unlike any place he had been to before, that was true; but as Ati had once said, the wall is cluttered with wonders. Perhaps the Wizard possessed powers beyond his machines; or machines that Tighe had not yet seen. The more he thought about it, the more likely it became that it had been some magic of the Wizard’s that had spun him through the air in the ice cave. Some tantalising magical trick of the Wizard’s that had shown him the top of the wall and then baffled his attempts to climb up to it.

‘He is a powerful creature, pashe,’ Tighe whispered into the ear of his unresponding mother. ‘But perhaps he can nevertheless be defeated.’

For some unfathomable reason, this leather-skinned man had been present in his family life, a hidden thing, a secret. Tighe stroked his pashe’s hair. She seemed to be shivering.

‘Don’t fret, pashe,’ hushed Tighe, trying to calm her down. ‘I have a thing in my pocket – it is a device of the Wizard’s own. He won’t expect it. I believe it will harm him. I believe that!’

Pashe was trembling hard now. From sitting placidly, she was suddenly in the grip of something; it was as if she was having a fit of some kind. Her lips were working. ‘Pashe!’ said Tighe, feeling a lump of fearful anticipation in his throat. ‘What is it?’

She started rocking backwards and forwards, and a thin sound forced itself between her lips.

Tighe clutched her more closely. ‘He did something to you, I think,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘He killed pahe and put him in that cave of ice, I think. He did something to your head. To mine.’

For a while pashe struggled against his embrace, moaning faintly, a most pathetic sound. Then suddenly she stopped. She turned her head and
looked directly into Tighe’s eyes. It was the first time she had looked at Tighe since his arrival on the Wizard’s craft. Her eyes locked with his. He saw the little sparks of lighter brown freckling the darker brown of her pupils, like flaws in a jewel. Her brows were pressed together in pain, or puzzlement.

Tighe felt tears clog the corners of his eyes. ‘Pashe,’ he said.

‘I remember you,’ said his pashe. She lifted a wobbly hand and touched the side of Tighe’s face. ‘When you were a baby. You were a smooth baby. Sweet-smelling. A nice baby.’

‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, the tears tickling down his cheeks. He felt his adam’s apple as a tightness in his throat, a knot of emotion.

‘He came,’ she said and Tighe knew at once that she was talking about the Wizard. ‘He came and he fiddled with your head. He made me sit and watch it; he made me happy to see it. He can do that, he can twist the inside of your head from a distance, make you happy or sad, give you pleasure or pain. He can manipulate his machines from a distance. He made a doorway in the back of your head and put in his machinery. But after he went I had a temper and I pulled as many wires as I could out of the back of your head before the wound healed over.’

She dropped her hand, and turned her face away, looking again at the wall across the floor from her.

‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, softly, meaning to ask a question. But she cut back in.

‘Your pahe didn’t like it. He said best leave alone, that you’d die. But I was in a state, I wouldn’t be told. I pulled the wires out of the back of your head where he had bandaged it. You bled and bled. You didn’t even cry. I don’t think I got them all, but I got much.’ She was starting to tremble again, to shiver from side to side. ‘It was all like stalks of grass, very fine, very fine. A thin wire. I threw it off the world, never told
him
. You didn’t even cry. Bled and bled. Bled and bled and bled.’

‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, wiping his tears with his gloveless hands. ‘Pashe, stop now.’

‘Your pahe tried to stop me and I hit him, hit him hard. Then I pulled it all out, all that badness, out of your head.’

‘Pashe – stop. You’re hurting yourself.’

And it was obvious that she was. Every word was an effort. There was something wrong. Her eyes were thrumming up and down, and a tendril of blood dribbled down from one nostril. Her words became indistinct. ‘Pashe!’ cried Tighe, coming round and trying to embrace her fully. ‘Pashe!’

She jerked back hard and cracked her head against the wall behind. Then she was fitting fully, her tongue out and her eyeballs white. The violence of her seizure knocked Tighe away and he scrambled over the nightmare landscape of the warped-but-flat floor back to her body. Blood was
squeezing from the corners of her mouth where she had bitten her tongue, mixing with her saliva into a pink froth. She was grunting in rhythm, her arms straight at her side. Then she went quiet.

Tighe laid her out on the floor on her back, and pressed his face to her chest. He couldn’t sense any breathing.

Panic was swelling inside his chest. He couldn’t believe this was happening. ‘Wizard!’ he cried, lurching over the treacherously shaped floor to the ladder, and climbing it awkwardly. ‘Wizard! Wake up! Wizard!’ He hooked one arm round the top rung and hammered on the bottom of the hatch with the other. ‘Wizard!’

There was a grumble through the floor from above. ‘What?’

‘Come down here, Wizard!’

‘Leave me sleeping, boy.’

‘Come down here Wizard! It’s pashe. She’s had a seizure.’

‘Leave me be. I
need
my sleep.’ The Wizard sounded impossibly querulous and distant.

‘Please come down! Please come and help me!’

‘Oh very
well
, tiresome and troublesome.’ Tighe heard a rustle, and some footsteps from above. ‘You can have five minutes, then I’m going back to sleep.’ The hatch started opening.

Tighe dropped quickly down the seemingly curved ladder to give the Wizard space to come down. He made his way back to where his pashe was lying.

‘What is it?’ said the Wizard, coming up behind him. ‘Fallen over, has she? Coma, is it? I can’t say I’m surprised. You can’t muck around with somebody’s cortexes the way I was compelled to do and expect everything to work properly afterwards.’ He leant over, putting his leathery hand on Tighe’s shoulder for support. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes. I thought this might happen.’

‘What will you do?’ Tighe asked. ‘To bring her round? What will you do?’

‘Bring her round? Dear me. Dear me. You seem
much
more agitated by this than I should expect. I’ll turn up the dials, if you see what I mean. I’ll adjust my fine-tuning of your mind, so that you don’t feel so upset by this.’

‘It’s my pashe!’

‘Yes, I know it is. Obviously there
will
be a part of your mind that knows that. I couldn’t eradicate the fact from your consciousness without losing important aspects of who you are. So, I suppose, in an
intellectual
sense you might feel a little disturbed by her death.’

‘She’s dead?’

‘But I can
tweak
other sensitivities, so that it shouldn’t
feel
too bad. I’m surprised,’ said the Wizard, getting to his feet and making his way over to
his cradle. ‘I’m surprised that you feel as bad as you seem to do, to be honest. The adjustments I’ve already made should have dampened down a lot of that.’

He settled into his cradle and fiddled with one switch, prodding it with a single leathern finger whilst watching the corner of a screen. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Better?’

‘Dead,’ said Tighe, looking down at the body of his pashe.

‘Yes – yes. You sound more neutral about it already. I don’t mind boasting that I’ve gotten myself
quite
skilled at the fine-tuning. There … there. How’s that?’

Things went calm inside Tighe’s head, like a snowstorm clearing to leave a patch of blue sky. It was clear to him what he had to do. He reached over to pick up his spare glove, holding it in his left hand. His right hand was empty. He stood up.

‘You see, how much better that is?’ the Wizard was saying. ‘I like to think of it as a kind of emotional analgesic. A painkiller for the soul, if you see what I mean. It’s one of the many things we can do, you and I.’

Tighe concentrated on the Wizard in his cradle, fixed his eye on that destination so as not to be distracted by the strange topography, and started walking towards him. The floor seemed curiously curved. He reached into his front pocket with his ungloved hand and drew out the gun. It felt chilly against his skin.

‘Eh, my boy?’ said the Wizard, looking round. He saw the gun. ‘I see you still have that,’ he said. ‘A souvenir? You can pick up more if you like, since we’d better shift your mother’s body to the cavern. Back inside the cavern. Lots of goodies there.’