The coroner arrives. Neith realises she has at some point toggled off the Witness’s personal telemetry, so the woman’s name is not being displayed. No matter, she knows it. Lisa? Lucy? Lara? Trisa. Trisa, from St. Albans, paternal grandmother born in Okinawa, mother once sang solo at the Albert Hall. Likes dancing but not alone, doesn’t drink, plays piano. Trisa Hinde. Hinde wears a badge with a rainbow on it. A few decades ago this would have meant something about her sexual orientation, but now it’s a polite signal to Neith and anyone else Hinde interacts with that she is not neurotypical. Her brain touches a particular peak of the modern medical taxonomy that includes some autisms and various perceptual and processing functions such as synaesthesia, and structural (rather than acquired) hypervigilance. It is not actually a spectrum in the linear sense, more a graph on several axes. In Hinde’s case it means that she has a superb set of tools for the consideration, recall and analysis of her sense data—making her an excellent medical examiner—but she has no mind’s eye in which to conjure counterfactuals or even remembered scenes, and dislikes having to reach for what is implicit in the way others cringe at emery boards or biting into a block of ice. That disparity of experience is one reason she likes dancing: her understanding of social and sexual cues inherent in physical activity is aligned with everyone else’s and infinitely less annoying than having to make everyone else explain their subtext.