The administration officer sat behind her glass security booth, tapping the data log touch screen with such intensity, it was a wonder it didn't crack. She spoke to him without looking up.

"State your name." Her voice was as monotone as the sound of her iron fingers smacking the screen.

"Declan Hancock."

"Age."

"Twenty"

"Occupation."

Dec shrugged. He didn't know what to call his shitty job. Floor worker, stock person, idiot who boxes up produce to be shipped offshore to the Northern Isles. He settled with, "Produce packer."

"Company."

"Overland Trading Co."

"Residential address."

Dec leaned forward in an attempt to look at the screen. "You already have my address."

This made the woman look up. Her face was as white and pinched as his own. "Can you confirm that your current residential address is the ground floor of fourteen Carrington Street?"

"Yes."

Iron fingers went back to typing. "Okay. Look at the camera. No teeth."

Dec glared at the tiny dot of an ID photo camera hanging from the glass protection booth and waited.

Click.

The flash left white imprints in his eyes.

"Empty your pockets and remove your palm pod." Iron fingers shoved a tray containing a large zip lock bag under the grill of the glass booth. Dec, only then remembering the woollen gloves and face stocking in his back pocket, hesitated.

Iron fingers pushed the tray further towards him. "Empty your pockets and remove your palm pod," she repeated dully.

Dec hid his shaking hands beneath the counter and removed his palm pod first, as slow as he dared, to buy time to devise a plausible explanation for the gloves and stocking. Could the gloves have been borrowed? Perhaps he was returning them to a friend. Could the stocking have been a rag he used to clean his bike? He dropped the bag with the palm pod, gloves and stocking into the tray and slid it back under the glass grill, stomach sinking. He was so screwed.

Iron fingers barely glanced at the tray before she waved him through. "Body scan, then first room on the right."

He bit back a sigh. He was safe for now. Dec removed his shoes and stepped inside the giant egg of a machine in the corridor. The 'virtual butt probe' as Tommy called it, was a human scanner that used a non invasive form of MRI technology to check for foreign objects stashed inside the body.

All clear. The machine flashed green and he was ejected from the other side by a rush of air. His socks made gentle padding noises as he made his way down the narrow corridor and into the interview room.

Officer Montague or 'The Crabman' as Dec had come to refer to him, leant over the lonely island of a table at the centre of the room, proffering an engorged right arm. The first time Montague had interviewed him, Dec had thought his arm was a natural deformity next to his other normal, almost underdeveloped arm, until Montague made a point of telling Dec how he built himself up that way so he could be best shot in the force. "One for strength, the other for dexterity," he'd said. "Light on the trigger, steady on the hold."

Dec winced as Montague took his hand now. His grip was just as it had been the first time—like getting your hand caught in a clamp.

"Declan Hancock. Didn't expect you to be back so soon." Montague's voice was all sand and shell grit. "I see our recommendation to keep out of trouble didn't quite sink in." He motioned for Dec to sit.

Dec shuffled to his seat, suddenly aware of the fact that his socks didn't match—one was grey, the other, black. He was also swelteringly aware of the fact that he was still wearing jeans a long black skivvy—suspicious choices on such a warm summer night.

Montague's beady eyes travelled over Dec's attire, settling on his neck. He seemed to think so too. "As you're probably already aware, we've brought you here to ask you a few questions. Where were you at approximately six thirty last night?"

Dec frowned. He thought this was going to be about his stunt with the cameras. Now, he wasn't so sure. "I'd just visited my mum at the hospital on the Terrace. I was walking to my bus stop." He gulped. Of course. This was about that Northerner he'd left in the cemetery.

"Did you notice anything ... suspicious at that time."

Dec shook his head. Innocent until proven guilty, he told himself.

"Then how do you explain this?" Montague tapped his palm pod and on the far wall, a projection appeared, featuring Dec leaving the hospital and waiting to cross the Terrace at the lights. The footage was taken from a birdseye view—a view that could've only been achieved by a bot. It was timestamped 6.29 pm. Wednesday night. Just before changeover. Dec's heart palpitated.

"You've been following me?" His words came out bitten down through his clenched jaw.

"Looking out for you," Montague corrected.

Dec stifled the urge to snort and turned back to the screen where, much to his horror, projection Dec crossed the Terrace and drew closer to the cemetery. In just under a minute, he would encounter the Northerner. In less than a minute, his life as he knew it, might as well be over.

The bot arced a wide 360 to get a side angle of Dec when suddenly, the image spun and jolted, went fuzzy before going black. Dec blinked. Had Montague purposefully stalled the footage before the incriminating climax? He felt sick.

Montague tapped his palm pod and the projection disappeared, leaving them staring at the blank white wall. His beady eyes settled on Dec's neck once more. "Care to explain?"

Dec moved his lips, but no sound came out. He was having trouble concentrating through the tingling in his dung beetle senses—which were telling him the obvious. He was in trouble.

Montague lifted a mug-sized cardboard box from the floor at his feet and slammed it down on the table. "Tell me, Dec, how our million dollar, premium quality tracking device somehow ended up—" He lifted the lid of the box and pulled out a spangled carbon fibre casing. "An unrecognisable lump of hard rubbish?"

"You think I did that?" Dec somehow managed to choke out. "I didn't even know you were following me."

Officer Montague leaned forward, his bushy brows forming one long caterpillar along his forehead. "Mr Hancock, you do realise what the repercussions will be if we find out you're lying."

Dec stared right back, did his best to crease his forehead into an equally flat line. His buzzing dung beetle senses were in overdrive like they'd never been before, so that he was having trouble focussing on Montague's question. "Yes," he said carefully.

"And do you care not a sol for what that could mean?" Montague was saying. " Do you think that jail would be tolerable for someone like you?"

But Dec had stopped listening. The buzzing was getting stronger still, until it was impossible to ignore, like interference of a badly tuned radio. And then, out of the fuzz, he thought he heard something. Words. Or whispering, he couldn't tell. Something that starting with 's', or 'f', or 'sh'.

And then it was gone.

Dec shook his head And tried to focus on Montague once more. But dread was rising from the pit of his stomach and causing him to lean on the desk at the thought. Could it be the beginning stages of the Desert Sickness?

He shook his head and told himself it must be the stress. Or the lack of sleep.

That's all.

Montague stood, bumping the table as he did so. "That's better, Hancock," he said. "Nice to finally see some remorse on that skinny face of yours."

Just then, a skeletal policewoman with grey hair pulled into a swimming cap tight bun poked her head around the door. "Officer Montague. I've just been informed that Declan is to be released on bail without further questioning."

Montague frowned. "My ass."

"His lawyer's in the foyer if you want to ask him any questions."

Montague tensed, then quickly masked his surprise with a shoulder roll. Dec, who was just as surprised to discover he had a lawyer, didn't bother to hide his open mouthed stare.

"May I ask who said lawyer is?" Montague said.

"Dirk Regulski."

Montague slammed the lid of the box containing the bot shut and turned towards the wall. His face shuttered and for the first time, Dec couldn't read any trace of emotion in his expression. Skeletor waited for an answer, checked her palm pod, and waited some more.

Dec looked from one officer to the other, expecting some kind of formal dismissal. When none came, he decided to take his own leave and stood. Officer Montague reached across the table and grabbed his arm, so firmly, Dec winced.

"You're as slippery as a fish, Hancock," he said. "But mark my words, you won't be so lucky next time."

A stone-cut man in a crisp grey suit waited for Dec in the foyer. He spoke into his palm pod, barely moving his lips. Between the thin line of his mouth, Dec saw pearly whites, clean as his diamond cufflinks. Dec looked like a dishevelled teenager next to him, one who'd just come out of the principal's office having been caught doing something foolish like smoking fags behind the toilets—shoes untied, rubbing his arm where Montague had grabbed him, sweat slick hair like a smudge of grease over his forehead. He swallowed a yawn. Somewhere between the interview room and the foyer, nervous adrenaline had left him for exhaustion.

The stone man disconnected his call and held out a large palmed hand, smooth and white, veined in a bluish grey like a chunk of Cararra marble. Dec imagined Dirk and Montague taking each other on in an arm wrestle and got a vision of a crab wrestling with a clam shell.

"Dirk Regulski. Lawyer," he said.

Dirk's grip was cold. Firm but not bruising. As soon as the shake was over, Dec retracted his long-fingers and slipped them inside his jean pocket. His hand seemed embarrassingly slender inside Dirk's chunky palm.

"Who hired you?" he said, the words coming out unintentionally flat and ungrateful. He owed this man much more than a handshake and yet his situation begged the obvious question: Why would a man like Dirk stoop to help someone like him?

Dirk's chest rose with his intake of breath. "I'm not at liberty to provide you with that information, though my employer asked me to warn you that this is the last time he's going to get you out of trouble."

"The last time?" Dec frowned at the insinuation that there'd been a time before.

Dirk didn't answer, just retrieved a folded piece of paper from his suit pocket. "My employer also asked me to give you this." He placed it securely between Dec's hands under the guise of another handshake, leaning forward as he did so. "Read it in private. Burn it in private." He straightened. "And before I forget." He tossed Dec the snap lock evidence bag containing the face mask and gloves.

Dec jerked his hand up and caught it just before it hit him square between the eyes.

"Interesting fashion choice for such a balmy night." Dirk gave him a cold, marble look before striding out the door, shiny black shoes squeaking on the tiled floor.

Dec watched him into the lamplit carpark and disappear behind the largest four-wheel drive he'd ever seen—a gargantuan excess of jacked up wheels, bull bar and floodlights threatening to devour the white lines that attempted to box it in. It rumbled to life with the growl of a diesel tractor that rattled the waiting room windows in their frames. Rather than reversing out of the park, Dirk swung the monster machine over the curb, through the ornamental rosemary hedged garden and straight onto the main road, causing a passing car to burn rubber as they swerved to avoid him.

Dec unfolded the slip of paper in his hands, ignoring Dirk's instruction to open the note in private. Inside, small, block letters, carefully penned, read:

ONLY ONE THING SEPARATES A HERO FROM A FOOL.

A HERO THINKS WITH HIS HEAD.

A FOOL THINKS WITH HIS HEART.

SMARTEN UP, SON.