Mielikki Neith slumps back on to her bed, and never mind that slumping wakes the crushed capillary memory of Lönnrot’s Cuban heels. Touching Hunter’s mind with her own is like laying fingers on the flank of a python on a branch, familiar vitality in an alien life. It is exhausting, as if this recorded consciousness is deeper and more real than her own. In training, Neith experienced the minds of murderers and suicides, surgeons and thieves. None of them possessed this measure of density. Astronauts, perhaps, come close. She remembers it as one of the great treats of the graduation year: sitting with her friends at a long table in the Hoxton academy, jointly recalling the same borrowed identities, the exotic competence of ESA spacewalkers. She remembers remembering a welding operation, broken rigging white hot against a field of stars, her feet hanging over an infinite abyss. Except that she didn’t see it as an abyss until she was back in her own head. To the principal, it was the distance she had flown.