The entrance whooshed open. I couldn’t turn my head but was alert to every signal – from the zip-swish of the door to that tang of sour, fetid air.

A cloak brushed past me; a figure that, with speeding heart, I recognised.

Despite the rumours, Ravene still lived.

She was attended by a blurg – blubbery rings, oozing tentacles, gluey gait, the sickly-sweet scent of rotting prawns. The detritus from its rings was being neatly collected by a small pundling.

Meanwhile Ravene, in silks so glorious that every silkworm had probably been knighted, swivelled before me. Stroking her lower lip, frowning, she looked every inch the ranking princess. I recalled that constellation of tiny freckles above her elbow and closed my eyes to drown out the recollection, the warm glory of flesh on flesh. Had it really been a decade?

‘Aiden. It has been many years.’ Her voice was the same – if anything, a still creamier contralto.

‘How could I forget?’

‘I wondered if I’d changed.’

‘No, you look terrific. But could you possibly lose the sidekick? Surely I’m bound enough for safety here!’

‘Why should I?’

‘Perhaps because I retain some residual sense of smell?’

She laughed and dismissed the blurg, which oiled away. ‘Happier now?’ she asked and then, very casually, ‘I still have my zuge with me. You look tired, Aiden.’

‘I was fucking pinned, didn’t they tell you?’

‘No. But what were you doing teaching pundlings, anyway?’

‘I like pundlings. Anyway, I have to work somewhere. I was expelled from the Academy after they found out about us.’

She could still blush. If she had been enhanced, at least she’d chosen to retain some human traits. How human was she, these days? I wondered. To subdue my boyish reaction, I said roughly, ‘There were rumours you were dead.’

‘Did you believe them?’

‘A little.’

‘Enough to be sorry?’

Was she flirting? – It was tough to tell, because flirting had always been Ravene’s default mode. But there was far more at stake here than an old flame. I was no longer the kid I’d been at the Academy. Instead, I was thirty, an operative of the rebellion, and sworn to fight her father, her regime, her entire race… And, given the secrets I had to protect, the sooner I roused her into finishing me off, the better.

With that airiness I so well remembered, she pressed, ‘So, were you sorry?’

I had been sorry, as I recalled, but fired back, ‘Why the hell should I have been sorry?’

And braced myself for the zuge, those long lines of pulsing eyes, that single fang.

Instead, she leaned against the wall – she’d been a famous leaner in our college days – and polished a nail with diamonds embedded in it. (They’d found a new mine on some wrecked planet, massive fuss in the news.)

‘I just wondered. You’re one of the rebels, I know. That’s why Father ordered your arrest.’

‘Your father still lives?’

‘He’s late in his third incarnation, but yes, he still lives.’

The King hadn’t been much in evidence lately, so this counted as bad news. I said, ‘The old buzzard always had it in for me. Ever since the

Academy.’

Ravene flashed the smile that used to intoxicate me. I suspected that her human half was recollecting old times, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up. It was the thought of torture that set the skin on the back of my neck crawling, which was why I needed to goad her into releasing her zuge. Fat chance I’d have of betraying anybody if every white blood cell I’d got was bursting through my skin… And Ravene had always had a shortish fuse.

‘We had some good times, didn’t we, Ravene?’

‘We were innocents then.’

‘Shame you betrayed me.’

‘You were betrayed by a colleague, not a princess! We both were.’ Despite the circumstances, I still felt a dart of shock. That bastard Judd? Or Harrison? I was desperate to know. But the smarter part of me latched onto the ‘princess’.

‘You seem to have talked your way out of trouble with Daddy pretty brilliantly.’

My provocation was rewarded by that stunning smile. I recalled the satiny texture of her skin, the electric warmth of those lips. But I’d made my choice – and every decision since had led me straight to this metallic chair.

‘Would you rather that I had betrayed you?’ she asked.

‘Well, it might have made more sense. You were always easily bored.’

She paced. ‘I was not bored with you, Aiden – not at all! But one of your friends – also in the history department—’

‘Which one?’

‘I can’t remember names.’

‘Try. Male or female?’

‘Male.’

‘Dark or fair?’

‘Dark brown hair. And very boring.’

That bastard Harrison! I’d always wondered.

Ravene, of course, had already lost interest. Instead, she strode around restlessly. ‘Because we were together – though it was a few years ago – perhaps the King remembers? Perhaps that’s why he sent me to kill you.’

There was just a moment when I almost admired the old bastard. There was an elegance – an irony – in his choice of Ravene. I took a deep breath and remembered that I belonged to myself no longer. If I ever did – if we ever do.

‘Then get it over with,’ I told her roughly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do what you were ordered to do!’

‘Fiery as ever!’ she murmured, drawing back her long sleeve.

I waited, recalling the only other zuge I’d ever seen, 3034’s fat anxious face, the stricken silence in my classroom. I closed my eyes, superstitious as a child, that I might not see the fang.

When I opened them, Ravene was far closer than I had realised.

She said, strangely, ‘Wait!’ A soft swathe of turquoise hair was falling across my face. It was a wonderful kiss, almost animalistic.

Instead of a last meal, a last kiss. Fine by me.

Ravene felt starved of human contact – but for several seconds I forgot to notice, I was so fired, so surging, so lost. And when she pulled away, I was captured by those irises: the left side blue, the right green, divided down the middle as precariously as by a surgeon.

I shut my eyes again, waiting for that crushing fang.

Instead I heard the door whoosh closed and, when I opened my eyes again, I was alone.