LIGHT

Kearney, expecting discovery at any moment, lived from newscast to newscast: but there was no mention of Meadows. The upper half of a body recovered from the Thames near Hungerford Bridge proved to be decomposed, and a woman's. A second Nigerian boy was found dead in Peckham. Apart from these incidents, nothing. Kearney regarded the screen with growing disbelief. He couldn't understand how he had got away with it. No one likes a venture capitalist, he found himself thinking one night, but this is ridiculous.

'And now,' said the anchorwoman brightly, 'sport.'

He was less afraid of discovery, he found, than of the Shrander itself. Would Meadows be enough to keep it at bay? One minute he was confident; the next he had no hope. A noise in the street outside was enough to send his heart rate up. He ignored the phone, which was often ringing two or three times in a morning. Messages were backing up at his answer service, but he didn't dare call in and get them. Instead, he cast the dice obsessively, watching them bounce across the floor away from him like bits of human bone. He couldn't eat, and the slightest rise in temperature made him sweat. He couldn't sleep, and when he did, dreamed it was himself he had killed. When he woke from this dream-filled with a mixture of depression and anxiety that felt for all the world like grief-it was to find A

'It's all right. Oh please. It's all right.'

Awkward and unpractised, she had wrapped her arms and legs tightly round him, as if to stifle his cries. It was so unlike A

'I don't understand you,' she complained the next morning. 'You were so nice until a few days ago.'

Kearney peered cautiously at himself in the bathroom mirror, in case he saw some other thing. His face, he noted, looked pouchy and lined. Behind him through the steam he could see A

'Ignore it,' A

Later, Kearney made himself listen to his messages.

Most of them were from Brian Tate. Tate had been calling two or three times a day, sometimes leaving only the number of the research suite, as if he thought Kearney might have forgotten it, sometimes talking until the answer service cut him off. To begin with his tone was hurt, patient, accusatory; soon it became more urgent. 'Michael, for God's sake,' he said: 'Where have you been? I'm going mad here.' The call was timed at eight in the evening, and bursts of laughter in the background suggested he was phoning from a pub. He put the phone down suddenly, but the next message came in less than five minutes later, from a mobile:

'This is such a shitty signal,' it began, followed by something indistinguishable, then: 'The data's useless. And the cats-'

After two or three days things seemed to come to a head for him. 'If you won't come over,' he threatened, 'I'm giving up. I'm sick of dealing with it all.' There was a pause, then: 'Michael? I'm sorry. I know you wanted this to be-'

There were no further calls after that, until the most recent one. And all that said was:

'Kearney?'

There was a background noise like rain falling. Kearney tried to return the call, but Tate's phone seemed to be switched off. When he replayed the original message, he heard behind the rain another noise, like a signal feeding back then swallowing itself abruptly.

'Kearney?' Tate said. Rain and feedback. 'Kearney?' It was hard to describe how tentative he sounded.

Kearney shook his head and put on his coat.

'I knew you'd go out again,' said A

As soon as Kearney let himself in, the black cat, the male, ran up to him, fawning and mewling for attention. But he extended his hand too suddenly, and, lowering its haunches as if he had hit it, it ran off.

'Shh,' said Kearney absently. 'Shh.'

He listened. The temperature and humidity of the suite were supposed to be tightly controlled, but he couldn't hear the fans or the dehumidifiers. He touched a switch and the fluorescents came on, buzzing in the silence. He blinked. Everything but the furniture had been crated up carefully and moved somewhere else. There was plastic packing material scattered over the carpet, along with discarded strips of heat-seal tape. Two damaged cardboard boxes, bearing the logo of a firm called Blaney Research Logistics, lay discarded in a corner. The benches and desks were empty but for the dust which had built up over the months of their occupation, to make circuit-like patterns between the installations.

'Puss?' said Kearney. He drew with his finger in the dust.

On Tate's credenza he found a single yellow Post-it note. There was a phone number, an email address.

'Sorry, Michael,' Tate had scribbled underneath.

Kearney stared around. Everything Gordon Meadows had said about Tate came back to him. It made him shake his head. 'Brian,' he murmured, 'you co

Tate had taken his ideas to Sony, with or without the help of MVC-Kaplan. He had clearly been pla

'Shh,' he said.

He reached down more carefully, and this time it rubbed against his hand. Its sides were trembling and emaciated, its head as sharp as an axe, its eyes bulging with opposites-distrust and relief, fear and gratitude. Kearney picked it up and held it close to his chest.

He fondled its ears, called the female cat's name, looked around hopefully. There was no response.

'I know you're here,' he said.

Kearney turned the lights out and sat down on Tate's credenza. He thought that if the female got used to him being there she would eventually come out from wherever she was hiding. Meanwhile, her brother ceased to tremble and began instead to purr, a clattering rumble, disjointed, hoarse as machinery. 'That's a bizarre noise,' Kearney told him, 'for an animal your size.' Then he said: 'I'd imagine he called you Shrodinger in the end. Is that what he called you? Is he that dull?' The cat purred a moment more then stopped and stiffened suddenly. It peered down into the pile of wrecked equipment and burger cartons.

Kearney looked down too.

'Hello?' he whispered.

He was expecting to see the female, and indeed, there was a whitish flicker down near his feet; but it wasn't a cat. It was a quiet spill of light, emerging like fluid from one of the ruptured displays and licking out across the floor towards Kearney's feet. 'Jesus!' he shouted. He jumped up. The male cat made a panicky hissing noise and squirmed out of his arms. He heard it hit the floor and run off into the dark. Light continued to pour out of the broken screen, a million points of light which shoaled round his feet in a cold fractal dance, scaling into the shape he most feared. Each point, he knew-and every point which comprised it, and every point which comprised the point before that-would also make the same shape. 'There is always more,' Kearney whispered. 'There is always more after that.' He threw up suddenly: staggered away, bumping into things in the dark, until he found the outside door.