They sold you. Now you are hunting them.

Rain on the neon makes the street unreadable. You have been standing in the doorway opposite for forty minutes, and the man who sold your name to Quantum Innovations is sitting three metres behind the fogged glass, eating noodles.

His name is Tomas. Seven weeks ago he found you a bed when you had nowhere, and four days later he pushed your ID to a number that existed for twelve minutes. Whatever he got for it is enough to eat at the same counter every night.

The noodle bar is narrow. Six seats, one door. The cook knows him and refills without being asked. Tomas's jacket hangs over the back of his stool, and something about the size of a card presses against the lining of the inside pocket.

Outside, half up on the pavement, sits his van: grey, unmarked, nothing he could have afforded seven weeks ago. The engine has been running for ten minutes and nobody has got out.

In the corner of your vision the borrowed ID counts down. Two hours, fourteen minutes. After that, to every reader in this district, you are a dead woman walking again.

He does not know you are alive. Right now that is all you have.

You cross the street without running, and take the free seat on his right.

The cook puts a bowl in front of you without asking, and slides the chopsticks after it. It is that kind of place: nobody asks.

Tomas glances sideways, the way you glance sideways when somebody sits down next to you. Then he looks back at his bowl. Then his hand stops halfway.

He does not run. That is the first thing that is wrong.

"They told me you were dead," he says, very quietly, into the noodles.

They told him. Afterwards. Somebody took the trouble to inform him.

"They said it was a relocation," he says. "New ID, different district, no handover. That's what they called it."

He no longer believes it himself while he is saying it. You can hear that.

Then he pushes something across the counter under a flat hand, and leaves it there. A card, matte, unprinted, worn at one corner. The thing from his jacket pocket.

"The van outside isn't mine," he says.

And while he says it, the grey van's engine cuts out.

After that the street is very quiet, and the rain is the loudest thing you can hear.

"Who?"

Tomas lays the chopsticks across the bowl, very neatly, like someone who has decided he is not going to eat any more of it.

"Not a who. A where." He nods at the terminal at the end of the counter, an old box with a yellowed fascia. "The message came in there. On that. The cook read it out to me, because I couldn't read it myself. I wasn't registered."

You look at the terminal. Then you look at the stove.

The cook is not there. The flame under the big pot is still going, the ladle is resting on the rim, and the kitchen door is swinging slowly to a stop, as though somebody had just gone through it.

"Tonight is the third night," Tomas says. "I've eaten here three nights running."

"Why?"

"Because you'd come." He looks at you properly for the first time. "I wanted to be found. I just didn't want it out on the street."

In the corner of your vision the number jumps.

It does not carry on counting down. It holds still for a moment, and then it reads 4:00:00.

Somebody has extended your borrowed ID. From outside. Which means somebody knows exactly which ID you are wearing, and how much of it you had left.

Tomas can see in your face that something has happened.

"They know you're here," he says.

You take the card, you take his elbow, and you have him off the stool before he can decide whether he wants that.

"I'm slow," he says.

"I know."

Outside, the rain is warmer than the air was inside. You stand among puddles with the neon running in them, and the first thing you see is the van.

Both front doors are open. Nobody is in it. The engine is off, the dash dark, and when you put a hand on the driver's seat in passing, it is warm.

Tomas stops. Not from exhaustion — he has seen something.

Across the street, in the doorway where you stood for forty minutes, somebody is standing. Not hidden. Exactly where you stood, in the same posture, shoulder against the same frame, face in the shadow of the canopy.

The figure does not move.

In the corner of your vision the ID is counting down normally again. 3:59:12. 3:59:11.

As though somebody had decided you have enough time for tonight.

"Don't run," Tomas says beside you. "Please. Don't run."