She glimpsed a pair of shadowy figures, one holding something that might have been a rifle. She angled her head out a little and risked a quick look down and to the left, to where the two men were, standing on a gantry cantilevered out from the side of the fly tower’s north wall. In the gloom, a moment before she had spread herself against the enormous backdrop, she had been able to make out that it was just painted canvas with great sweeps of dark and light paint, but she had been too close to it to see what it actually portrayed. She was standing, flattened, against a flat scenery. Wonderful though they might be, they had yet to deliver her into Veppers’ exquisitely manicured hands. Jasken tended to wear them all the time, which she had always thought was just showing off, or betrayed some deep insecurity. They turned night to day, made heat visible and could see radio waves, allegedly. anything with those?” He must be talking about Jasken’s Enhancing Oculenses a fabulously expensive piece of hardware like heavyduty sunglasses. they’re all trouble.” He sounded out of breath. It felt as though something curdled inside her when she heard his deep, perfectly modulated voice, right now attenuated to something just above a whisper. The man who’d spoken was Jasken Veppers’ principal bodyguard and chief of security. And they were worried too the hunters experienced their own fears during the chase. Yes, she thought, she would be trouble, she already was trouble. Even over her fear, the sheer naked terror of being hunted, she felt a shiver of excitement, of something like triumph, when she realised they were talking about her.

She heard one of them say this, only ten or so metres away in the darkness.

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