By noon, forty thousand strangers had voted Lucia Moretti down to one point two stars, and below one, the city would put her out at dawn.Her brother was driving the family who had paid for every vote, and he was the one man alive who could take them back.Enzo Moretti stood at the foot of the Star Bureau steps with one hand on the door of the Commissioner's car, watching his sister's name on the Starboard. The great screen covered the whole front of the Bureau and listed everyone in Asterholm who was close to the line. Most of the names belonged to people the city had already stopped seeing. Lucia's sat near the bottom in amber, and the number beside it slipped a little further every few minutes.In Asterholm, anyone could rate anyone from one star to five. A shopkeeper could mark you down for counting your coins too slowly, and a stranger could do it for the way you looked at him on a tram. Your rating decided your school, your hospital and the street you were allowed to live on. Fa

For the first time in four years of marriage, Ottoline asked her husband for something.She found him in the garage at nine the next evening, still in his driver's jacket, and stopped in the doorway wearing a plain dark coat he had never seen before. A hood hung loose at her shoulders. She held a small camera the way other women held a purse."I need you to drive me to the old fish market under Lowbridge," she said. "My brother is holding a fight night there tonight."Enzo looked at her. He had driven her to studios, galas and her father's dinners for four years, and she had never once asked. She simply appeared at the car and gave an address."Does your network know?""My network won't touch the Kemble story. I've been building it on my own since the night he died." She lifted her chin slightly. "I'm not asking you to come in.""I'm coming in," he said, and opened the door for her.The old fish market sat under the arches of Lowbridge, closed for twenty years and still smelling of sa

The script was already on the prompter when Ottoline sat down at the anchor desk, waiting above the lens in neat glowing lines.Her father had sent one of his own aides to stand at the back of the gallery and watch. Under the desk, resting on her knee, was Raff's recorder, with a cable running from it to the port where guests plugged in their laptops. Nobody had asked what it was. Nobody ever questioned the most trusted face in the city.The floor manager counted her in with his fingers. Three, two, one."Good evening," Ottoline said. "Tonight, the Star Report can reveal that the video at the centre of the Kemble case was forged by the Moretti family."The second line rolled up the prompter. She looked at it for a moment. It said her husband had deceived the Chief Justice. It said his family should be investigated, his mother too, and the sister who had stood in the witness box in a crooked blazer. Behind the gallery glass, her father's aide folded his arms. Then she reached under the

They waited for dark.Pier Six stood at the far end of the docks where the cranes gave out, a long tin warehouse with its windows painted black. Enzo had walked past it every morning for five years on his way to the ships, and he had never once seen its loading door open. Tonight it stood ajar by the width of a hand, and through the gap came a faint blue glow, like moonlight on water.Ottoline crouched beside him behind a stack of pallets with her hood pulled up. "That's it?""That's it."They crept to the door. Inside, the warehouse was a maze of steel shelves running back into the dark, and on every shelf, cheap phones sat charging in rows by the hundred. Their screens lit and dimmed in slow waves, thousands of small blue faces waking and sleeping. Each one was a citizen who didn't exist, and each one had a vote.At the far end, behind the window of a plywood office, a boy sat hunched over a laptop. He couldn't have been more than twenty, thin and unwashed, swallowed by a hooded jac

By noon, Thrale had come for Enzo too.He found him on the pier, standing in front of what was left of the warehouse. The fire had burned itself out before dawn, leaving a black skeleton of girders and a smell of melted plastic that hung over the whole dock. Enzo had come back to see if anything had survived. Nothing had.Thrale walked up the planks with two officers behind him and a sheet of paper in his hand. "The lease on this building," he said, holding it up. "Signed and paid for in the name of E. Moretti."Enzo looked at the signature. It was nothing like his own."And a witness," Thrale went on. "Rafferty Abernethy tells us he saw the Fairness husband carrying petrol onto this pier last night." He nodded to his officers. "Turn around."Enzo turned. The cuffs closed around his wrists, and as the officers walked him back down the planks, he understood what the lease meant. Someone had built this frame days ago, before the fire, before Ozzie, perhaps before the Star Report. The Cr