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By Root 1050 0

hesitated there and caused small knots of confused congestion. It struck Leela that it was not a sensible way to arrange things. She felt a nudge in the back and tensed for an attack. She was surprised at how quickly she found herself primed and ready to fight. It was not how she had originally been trained. It was not warrior-like at all. It was as if she was looking for any excuse to fight. It must have been the latest training she had been doing with the other duellists. When she had trained as a warrior with other warriors it had not been like this. And yet the new training had not been so different. Perhaps it was the way she had been watched and cheered on by uninvolved people. Perhaps it was something to do with the way that made her feel.

Nenron nudged her in the back again. ‘Come on,’ he muttered.

‘Cleansing staff are not supposed to stand around gawping.

You’re supposed to look as though you’re here to work. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’

‘You lead the way,’ Leela said.

‘The OTS concourse first?’ he asked.

She nodded and they stepped out into the drifting crowd.

Probably because Nenron had been apprehensive about it, Leela found she was immediately uncomfortable getting so close to large numbers of people. Whenever she caught someone’s eye she expected them to call out her name; she even half expected one of them might want to fight her.

Ahead of her Nenron was hurrying towards one of the moving pathways. He was walking far too fast, she thought, dodging and swerving through the crowd, and if she kept up with him it was bound to make her conspicuous. Someone would look closely at her. Someone would recognise her. Someone would call her name. There would be crowds and chaos and terror.

She slowed her pace to what she felt would look determined rather than frantic and panicky, determined and inconspicuous. She was confident that she could keep Nenron in sight without any problems. But as her warrior trainer had frequently told her there is a dangerous difference between being confident and being sure, and by the time she reached the moving pathway she thought he had taken, Nenron was nowhere to be seen.

Leela knew that confused hesitation is as conspicuous as headlong rush and so she stepped calmly onto the moving pathway and let it carry her down towards what she assumed must be the Orbital Transfer Station concourse. She had seen that most people stood still on the moving pathways and she was doing the same, when she was unsettled to find that a man had walked down and was standing beside her. For a moment she thought it might be Nenron but when she glanced at him she realised it was a stranger and that the glance had been a mistake.

He glanced back at her and then he stared more pointedly.

Trying to make it look casual, as if she was getting herself ready to start work when she reached the end of the pathway, Leela pulled the hood of her coveralls up onto her head and settled the breathing mask and filters into place over her mouth and nose. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that the man continued to look at her and too late she noticed that the breathing filters in the mask were giving off a faint and peculiar smell. She reached up to try and pull the mask away from her face but nothing happened. It was as though her hand was feeble and weak and the mask was stuck to her. And then she realised that her arm had not moved from her side. She had not reached for the mask at all. She reached again using her other arm and found that it too had not moved. Furious with herself she tried with both hands to pull the mask away from her face only to realise that both arms had remained unmoving at her sides.

‘There’s no point in fighting it,’ the man beside her said. He moved in closer and gripped her upper arm.

‘Let go of me,’ Leela snarled. ‘Get away from me or I will break both your arms and then both your legs.’

‘I know you can see and you can hear me,’ the man said,

‘but that’s all you can do. Anything else is just an illusion.

Trust me I know about these things. I’m a professional.