If I can get to a phone, I can do miracles. That’s what I have to remember. Megalos has caught me while I’m still partly human, but if I can even touch civilisation, the network of relationships defined by convention and money, there is nothing I cannot do. The Fifteen Hundred are superheroes. Every single one of them is Batman, and their superpower is an evolutionary amount of money. I know a man—call him Bill from Madrid—who once awoke in a hotel room in New York with an absurd quantity of high-grade cocaine and a dead model. He was relaxing after a long flight and had purchased his coke in bulk because it was cheaper, and this woman had obviously got up in the night for another toot and had had a heart attack. It happens. Cocaine is an unpredictable drug. Some people like to have a paramedic team on standby when they party, and I know a major corporation that keeps a pair of helicopters flight-ready during the Ibiza season so they don’t lose any key personnel to poorly applied recreational pharmacology. Waking with the dead isn’t quite the same deal as murder, but in terms of the getaway it might as well be.