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pitching, into dark. The street on which lamps shone and that was glared by shopwindow fluorescence was the shallowest and lightest place: the sky was the abyss, pointed by stars like bioluminescence. In the bus’s upper deck they were at the edges of deep, the fringe of the dysphotic zone, where empty offices murked up out of sight. Billy looked up as if down into a deep-sea trench. The man behind him was looking up, too.
    At the next stop, which was not his, Billy waited until the doors had closed before bolting from his seat and down the stairs, shouting, “Wait, wait, sorry!”
    The bus left him and headed into the dark like a submersible. Through the dirty window at the rear of the top, he saw the man look straight at him.
    “Shit,” Billy said. “Shit.”
    He jerked his hand defensively out. The glass flexed and the man jerked backward as the bus receded. Billy’s own glasses shivered on his face. He saw no one moving behind the window, past a crack in the glass that had suddenly bisected it. The man he had seen was Dane Parnell.

Chapter Four
    B ILLY SAT UP LATE THAT WEIRD DEEP NIGHT . H E CLOSED THE curtains of his living room, imagining the unsavoury squirrel watching him as he poked around on his laptop. Why would Dane have followed him? How? He tried to think like a detective. He was bad at it.
    He could call the police. He’d seen Dane commit no crime, but still. He should. He could call Baron, as he had requested. But despite his discomfort—call it fear—Billy did not want to do that.
    There had been such a strange gaming edge to all his interactions with Baron, Vardy and the woman. It had been so clear that he was being played, that information was being held from him, that they had no consideration for him at all except insofar as he pushed forward whatever their opaque agenda was. He did not want to be involved. Or, and or, he wanted to understand this himself.
    He slept a very little at last. In the morning, he discovered that it was not as hard to regain entry to the Darwin Centre as he had imagined. The two police at the entrance were not terribly interested, and examined his pass peremptorily. They interrupted his carefully constructed story of why he had to go back in to sort out some stuff on his desk that wouldn’t wait but that he’d be careful and quick and blah blah. They just waved him past.
    “Can’t go to the tank room,” one of them said. Alright , Billy thought. Whatever .
    He was looking for something, but he had no idea what. He hesitated by retorts and sinks, by plastic containers of diaphanised fish, their flesh made invisible by enzymes, their bones made blue. A common room was full of stacks of posters for the Beagle Project, a retracing of those crucial early days of Darwin’s journeys, a rerun in a floating laboratory kitschly made to look like the Beagle .
    “Hey, Billy,” said Sara, another curator who’d been granted entry, for whatever reason. “Did you hear?” She looked around and lowered her voice, passed on some rumour so evanescent and vapid it left his head as soon as she said it. Folklore was self-generating. Billy nodded as if he agreed, shook his head as if it were a shocking possibility, whatever it was she was talking about.
    “Did you hear?” she said as well. “Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”
    Well that he heard. It gave Billy another cold sensation, as he had had the previous night when he had seen Dane all those yards away, through the bus’s glass, and as if Billy had touched him back.
    “I was talking to one of the police,” Sara said, “doing stuff in the tank room, and he was saying that they’ve heard things since, you know, it went. Something clattering.”
    “Whooo,” said Billy, like a ghost. She smiled. But Those are my hallucinations , he thought. It was like theft. Those were his imaginings that the police were hearing.
    He logged in at a workstation and searched, trying endless different spellings of the names Vardy had said,