Forehead pressed against the glass, she looks down, towards the streets, not seeing them. The rain falls, falls away from her and she imagines it stood still, and that it is she who is moving upwards, backwards, away from it all. Back in time, to where she could make a difference.

They'd met in Bright Angle, a 24-hour corner bar in Uptown. It used to be residential, but DarkNight had snuck a suitcase bomb into the building and blown the edge of four floors out. People moved away, finding themselves apartments with less abrupt air-conditioning, and it lay empty for a while.

Some enterprising individual came along and turned it into Progress: bought the corner flats up, reinforced the walls a little, shipped in a few thousand credits of Karma plants and made it into a tall, thin, forested bar. Lynn liked it because the food was good -- Ebon delicacies that came in small but fierce packages -- and also because people didn't tend to get too drunk here; it was too risky. Too much to bump into. Too much to fall off of.

Around the edge of the jagged hole, the "open air" section of the joint, you could sit and eat and look out across the city, rain beading on the vat-grown leaves around you. But it was in the confusion of branches and suspended platforms nearer the back, amongst tables and foliage and connecting catwalks, like a treehouse by Escher, that Tristan's glass dropped past.

She'd plucked it out of the air, and none was spilt; she had always been quick. Reflexes, a steady hand, a good eye, they'd seen her through Meny, as a Bright Young Media Thing. She'd looked up for the source, and met his pastel eyes, smiling apologetically down.

He'd reached down with a deathsuit-covered arm, offered her a hand, helped her up onto the platform, and they'd sat, dangling their legs over the edge, talking, until the pale light of day crept through the branches around them.

He was a Company boy of course, Tristan. A Medic, a researcher. New drugs, new techniques. He disdained the methodical approach. "I feel around the edges of a problem," he said as, somewhere below, morning people started to filter in for their espressos. "It's like the answer is already there, a shadowy thing glimpsed through veils."

The pain hits again, soft at first, warm and familiar, like a memory of an old friend. And then a sharp tang cuts through, a pure white communion of pain that vivisects her brain and for a moment, she thinks she knows what it is like to die. The street beyond the glass swims away in a haze of tears and the strange coloured shapes her optic nerve conjures up, and she slumps down, curling and shivering against the radiator until the last perfect droplets of torture trickle away.

The disappearances had been going on for some time in this sector. Not that this was anything particularly novel; gang wars, the skin trade, serial killers, they all took their toll. But it was Ebons this time, a Valuable Resource Of The Company and so here she was with the rest of the crew, skulking outside a warehouse in the small hours of the morning, final details being worked out before kicking the doors down. Gardner liked it that way, and it was his squad. "Lynn," he'd said to her, when she signed up as their recording angel, "The secret of a successful raid is simple: Groundwork, planning, and detail. That, and two bloody great Chagrin."

Lynn heard his voice now over comms, talking to the pair of 714's: "Alright, twinkletoes. Give me some of that special Stormer charm.". She leant out, tracking them through her viewfinder as the door imploded under the impact of three hundred kilos of biogenetic whup-ass.

K'f'tch was right behind them, sword humming quietly, and Lynn moved in for better footage. Gardner, and Ysabel too, glowing now with a faint flux-charged nimbus, they'd all piled into the building.

Awkwardly, she unfolds and, one hand on the radiator to steady herself, stands slowly upright. Padding through the silence of her apartment towards the bathroom, she remembers the vibrant, brittle moment when everything changed.

Everything had been going according to Gardner's plan, as they'd neutralised the ground floor. There'd been several props on guard, but two or three were too close to the door as the Stormers had gone through and the rest were swiftly dealt with.

But upstairs... upstairs, she'd seen it, and frozen:

The deathsuit.

His.

Tristan's.

The lines and curves of it were burned into her mind. Torn and bloody it had lain on a workbench and, staring at it, she hadn't noticed the thug in the side-alcove; taking the initiative, he'd grabbed the closest thing to hand, a syringe from a nearby workbench, and leapt at her, trying to put an eye out on his way to the door and freedom.

He'd never made it; a hastily-thrown chair came from the direction of a Chagrin and smashed into his head, but the man was close already: Unconcious, he'd fallen, but still, he'd knocked her to the ground, and under his weight, the needle had stuck into her torso.

Ysabel had tended to the minor wound; Lynn heard the sounds of flesh tearing as the 714 finished what it had started.

The operation was shut down successfully, but they never found Tristan's body, or any of the other Ebons that had been taken. Nor did they find a reason; when the BPN came through, they'd assumed it was some sort of suit-harvesting operation, but the Ebons' suits had been found, cut and ruined like Tristan's, in disposal sacks in a back room.

It had been slow, at first, the shakes. Psychosomatic. That's what they'd told her at the clinic. The shock of her lover's death. It would pass.

But it got worse. Her camera's anti-jog could keep up, but it fell clean out of her hands one chilly grey morning, tumbling down the steps outside the Crib with a bright plastic clatter. The others had turned at the sound, and Gardner took her aside, suggested she take some time off. He looked concerned. She wondered, numbly, about the rest of the squad, the non-humans, how they felt about her now.

She went home, threw her bag, her camera, her phone and her FEN into the corner, and curled up on the bed, silently shaking.

He had known, or suspected, for weeks before. He'd tried to hide it from her, but sometimes, late at night as he slept fitfully beside her, fragments of his fear had leaked out, shadowy flickers of apprehension that Lynn could never quite see, but could feel massing like stormclouds, oppressive in the darkness.

When pressed, Tristan had only made evasive noises about trouble at work; internal politics, that kind of thing. Not the usual rivalries -- his colleages believed in his work. Some kind of pressure from above. Nothing serious, he'd said. She'd let it slide.

When, one afternoon, she found her legs no longer supported her, she went back to see the doctors. She'd sat up all night drinking by herself, and slept late. Woken by the ringing of the telephone, she'd had to drag herself across the floor to where it lay, discarded. She told a worried Gardner, checking up on her, to take her to the hospital.

She had to bully them into looking past their earlier diagnosis, using her SCL and the silent bulk of the Chagrins to change their minds. She was glad they'd turned up, now, though she didn't like to admit it. Feeling tinier than ever between them in a Company wheelchair, she waited for the results to come back.

A motor-neurone disorder. Mutagen damage. Shatter. The tests matched its subtype with the syringe the thug had been carrying. Incurable. Except...

Except that it wasn't.

"It's new, and, frankly, pretty radical," the consultant said, sipping coffee in his office. Lynn couldn't risk picking up hot drinks any more. "A serum, containing small quantities of an exotic form of matter, discovered recently at SLA Industries. Ordinarily, it wouldn't be available to you. It's very difficult and expensive to get hold of, and until we've sorted out the supply problem, we're not announcing its development to the general public. But... certain of our staff...", he shrugged offhandedly.

Lynn looked at him, willing herself not to ask. Out-waiting him seemed obscurely important.

"He was popular. Your Tristan. They feel you ought to receive the benefit of his work. He developed it, you see. The serum."

She stared for a moment, then nodded. The consultant leant forward, setting his cup down on the desk, and smiled automatically, "If you'd just like to run your finance card through the slot..."

He'd not often talked about his work, and she'd never asked. But once, sitting out a storm under a concrete overhang somewhere in suburbia, he'd said, "Rememberance..."

Water fell past them in smeary, greasy sheets.

"What?"

He'd looked at her, then, head tilted, "Our memory cells are different to yours..."

They said they'd obtained some limited supplies.

It was relatively simple: a local anaesthetic, a coldness in her spine, a series of injections. Rinse. Repeat. A few days later, she checked out, walking again with the aid of a stick, and still feeling the tingling, somewhere near the back of her neck.

That night, she fancied she could sense the ghosts of stormclouds in the corners of the room. But they never came back. The next day, she picked up her camera again. And her FEN.

"Something to do with the Ebb. The stuff they like to call Science Friction," he said, and tugged idly at a sleeve of his Deathsuit, splashed droplets of rainwater catching the light. "You know we make it with pure concentration; can, with practice and time and energy, make things, real things from it, from nothing but our minds eye and rememberence..."

The pain has passed now, and Lynn persuades herself to make some food, idly stirring water into some instant noodles. The bleating of the microwave seems inappropriately loud in the empty flat.

She doesn't feel hungry. The pain has never been this bad before, had started mild. Two weeks after the treatment, returning from a BPN, she'd buckled with a sudden, surprised choking sound as she was getting out of the cab. Flittering visions of sodium lights and dark waters danced through her, masking the grey of the Uptown noon for a moment, a feeling like deja vu, and then it passed...

Always, the images, with the pain. It had come again two days later, and again the next day, and now it comes and goes unpredictably throughout her waking hours.

She wonders if she dreams pain in her sleep.

"We make it, and it makes us, too, in a way. Our memories. Tiny, tiny amounts of it, interwoven with the microtubules of our brain cells... we make it with our minds, in our minds... I think... it encodes our memories..."

Pulling the bowl from the microwave, the pain hits again, and the noodles slip from her hands. The glassware drops towards the floor.

And he watches the glass fall, watches as the young woman catches it almost without thinking about it. Impressed, he smiles apologetically, and offers her a hand up. And...

The pain passes, and she realises what she has seen. What she has been seeing all along, what images the pain brings her.

And she knows.

She knows what's in the serum. She knows from where they'd found their "limited supplies". She knows why Tristan was killed.

And, when she concentrates hard. When she pushes through the pain...

She knows who by.