Free So Vile a Sin by Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman

change the shape of her face. The slip dress was a nightmare.
    60
    Mei Feng didn’t recognize her right away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said,
    ‘we’ve got enough Skag ladies here right now – good grief! Hey,
    ‘Jude.’
    ‘Hey, boss. Can you use an extra gun?’ said Roz.
    ‘Always,’ said Mei Feng. She wore a pants suit, businesslike after last night’s gown. Her black hair was tied in an elaborate bun. ‘You start immediately. Mother of Nobody will show you the cleaning work. It’s pretty basic. Your real job is to keep an eye on things.’
    ‘Any things in particular?’
    ‘Anything. Everything. We average four serious injuries a week and one fatality a month, and that’s just the staff. Brawls, mostly, but also a lot of petty theft accompanied by exaggerated violence.’
    ‘After all those years in the undertown,’ said Roz, ‘this should be a piece of cake.’
    ‘Tell me that again after you’ve been cleaning floors for twelve hours,’ said Mei Feng. ‘Your timing’s good: one of my Skag ladies just left for her homeworld, so there’s a bed available.’
    ‘I’ve got somewhere,’ said Roz. ‘Thanks though.’
    ‘Mother of Nobody’s out the back, shelling Arcuturan prawns.
    You won’t miss her. Go on. And take off that ring – anyone can tell it’s genuine.’
    ‘Thanks,’ said Roz. She walked through the door marked STAFF ONLY.
    Walking through the brightly lit, dingy hallway, she wondered why Mei Feng needed more security. It wasn’t as though her staff would be expensive to replace. And there was a steady supply of customers who wouldn’t know or care if the place had a reputation for fights (or would know, and made a beeline for the place with their fists itching). Maybe too many glasses and chairs got broken.
    She came to a big kitchen. A breeze was blowing in from an open door, smelling like the sea. She put her head around the door, looking out into the alley behind the Oasis.
    An Ogron woman sat on the plasticrete steps out back, twisting the heads off three-foot-long prawns. She sang a soft, rumbling 61
    song as she worked, in time with the twist-crack-pull. There was a huge pile of shells next to her.
    She looked up at Roz. ‘You the new girl?’ she said.
    Roz got back to her hotel room at four a.m. According to Mother of Nobody, she was now fully trained in the complexities of cleaning bar, not making mess and keeping nose clean.
    She pulled off the wig and fell on to the bed, pushing her face into the soft coverlet and groaning. The bar staff were all on stims, of course; she’d taken just the one so as not to arouse suspicion, and it felt like her eyelids had been sewn open. How did they get to sleep at night? Bash their heads on the wall until they fell unconscious?
    At least the customers couldn’t tell she wasn’t a Skag. Like the Qinks, they just figured she’d had some of the usual cosmetic surgery. After a few hours in the Oasis, some of them probably couldn’t tell she wasn’t a wall.
    Roz waited half an hour, snapped on the bedside light, lifted the mattress, and took out her file on Mei Feng. The envelope contained a few diskettes and a single hard copy. The scan she’d done of Mei Feng’s head when they’d first met, rummaging in her handbag for the miniature medical scanner the Doctor had given her.
    There was the N-gram, showing up as a thick black line in the tissue of the woman’s brain. Like a tiny mouth, waiting to open.
    Waiting to let something in.
    Presumably the N-gram had been created when Mei Feng was on Iphigenia. Something she ate, or something she snorted, or some kind of weird dimensional effect. Only half a dozen members of the expedition had survived. Roz bet that Mei Feng had been allowed to live.
    Roz wondered for a moment if she should tell the woman she was carrying a multidimensional time bomb in her head. But that would only alert the waiting N-form. So long as Mei Feng didn’t know who she was, Roz was safe and Mei Feng’s