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your inner wrist like a pink lizard with a hard head, a twisting tail and two tiny dots for feet on each side where the stitches had been. Eventually, it faded to a silver thread, as though all but the ridge of its spine had sunk beneath the skin.
     
    ‘Alive,’ a voice through some kind of speaker, ‘I’ve got him. He’s in here. Give me a hand here.’ Heavy breaths and a pull on the straps of your pack. ‘He’s hurt but he’s alive.’
    You yell.
    ‘Sorry pal. Hang in there, I’ve got you. Just checking you over.’
    Consciousness flickering on and off. Wumph wumph of rotors idling, flashlights dancing on masks, bodysuits, American accent, Medipac ticking busily. You know the manual – ‘read out tells field operative…’ smell of charring, patches of burning light on water, fizzing, someone cutting your sleeve. There’s urgency in their voices. You dribbling, sweating, gushing mud. Eyes stinging, closing is no better.
    Your body is trembling and your lungs are trying to twitch out of your chest. Shining in your eyes ‘Open up, pal, open up just a second.’ No way.
    Stings when you open. Chopper silhouette, new model Squall Fifty-five. Another. Solomon stream you have to work to control. Nothing but pieces, burning small pieces littered everywhere.
    ‘Tyler, have you got Tyler?’
    ‘Yup. He says you’re a no good candy-ass dickhead mother – or some such.’
    ‘Good. Schultz is hurt he’s waiting at the…’
    ‘Okay, pal, you’re going to be fine.’
    Rotors overhead now, accelerating, bones shaking. Masks up close, working. Let them. Lifting, turning, banking, thank God, flying away.

 
    Three
     
    There were thirty-six of them in the room on the first day. When he first signed up it had been a unique opportunity, a shortcut, and with everything else fucked up, a lifeline. Out of the chaos had come a connection, a chance. They told them the usual odds for success were awful, maybe five percent, but because of what they’d signed they were all guaranteed a place somewhere, a career. Even if you failed to make Solomon, you still won.
    Against the immediacy of that, the no-brainer of having no other options, the operation itself had seemed a distant probability, an insurance risk. By stages it became a reality. As it approached he got more scared and more intrigued. It mesmerised him. People take performance drugs all the time, make sacrifices to get on, spend years training, years abroad in some hellhole sending money home. Augmentation seemed at the outset a small price for a ticket to the world. More than that, in ways they didn’t yet understand, Solomon would give them new powers. When the American General, Dooley, came to talk to them he said they were a new elite. Later, Brodzky would keep saying that too. There was a buzz about it, a sense of pride, of terror, an adventure. It had seemed remote. Now it was staring at him up close.
    They had to be young because it mattered that their brains were still developing. A lot of the other crap was waived but they still got to do Selection. It’s not all hype either; they said you need to want to succeed a lot more than you want to stay physically whole. Most people got some experience first but Rees hit it straight from school. If he hadn’t been a runner and used to maps and blisters he’d have tanked. When running about carrying stupidly heavy loads over cold wet hills didn’t kill him, they started throwing him out of aeroplanes for parachute training. He found out a lot about himself, mainly about knees and ankles but also that he wanted to succeed above all else. The final twist was the programme going over to the Americans. No one was clear what it meant but they said commitments made would be honoured. Delays in negotiations turned days into weeks and then months. They really wanted the technology, not the people. There were Yankee rangers in their exercises and rumours of cherry-picking and cutting numbers. The little team was