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‘They’re my only spares,’ he said, after he’d shown her how the cheek controls worked. ‘Watch them carefully.’

He put the helmet under his arm.

‘Set the glades to shade,’ he said. ‘We’ll look like tourists.’

‘Heavily armed tourists.’

‘That’s the only kind around here.’

Jumping down and walking across the tarmac to the cafeteria, Janis kept looking around her. These things didn’t just polarize light, they integrated it: the bright lights were stepped down, the dim enhanced.

‘They’re brilliant!’

‘Turn them down a bit then.’

‘Ha, ha. How do they work, anyway?’

‘I don’t know, but I suspect they’re not strictly speaking transparent – the front is a lot of micro-cameras, the back is screens, and in between there’s a nanoprocessor diamond film.’

She paused outside the toilets and stared at the pink Cadillac.

‘Huh,’ she said. ‘They’re eating doughnuts and drinking coffee from a flask. So much for your theory.’

‘That’s what they want you to think,’ Kohn said darkly.

Janis looked again. One black man, one white.

‘I’m sure they’re the ones who came to my lab,’ she said. ‘Goddess, to think I came all this way to get away from them.’

‘You have got away from them,’ Kohn said. He nudged her away from looking at the car. ‘Don’t you worry about that.’

The queues at the meal-machines were short.

‘Ten marks,’ Kohn said indignantly. ‘Each!’

‘Don’t be stingy.’

‘I spilled blood for that money.’

They chose a table by the plate-glass window where they could see the car and the truck. The glades disposed of the reflections, too. Janis found it disorienting to glance from the strip-lit interior – with its truck-drivers eating fast, families eating slowly, youths wandering around sizing up who might or might not be a user – out to the parked or crawling vehicles, and see it all as one scene. What effect, she wondered, would years of seeing like this – no shadows, no reflections, almost no darkness, no comforting distinctions between in here and out there – have on the mind? It matched, it fell into place with one aspect at least of Kohn’s, well, outlook.

She smiled at the thought, and saw Moh smile back.

Bleibtreu-Fèvre brushed sugar from the tips of his fingers, licked them, and replaced the plastic cup on top of the thermos flask. Always a damn dribble of dark liquid. He sighed and looked at his colleague, Aghostino-Clarke. The other man was dressed identically to himself, in a black jacket and trousers, white shirt and a tie the exact colour of coffee-stains. His suit was getting shiny in the same wrong places. His skin was very black and his eyes were brown.

It was lucky they had been prepared; but then, Bleibtreu-Fèvre thought smugly, preparation creates its own luck. When Donovan’s call came through, indicating that Cat had revealed her location and Moh’s, they’d been cruising around the perimeter of Norlonto. They’d been ready to do what they did – send the car into a screaming dash along one of the fast-access roads, the ones that normally only the rich and the emergency services could afford. He’d been right not to put much trust in Donovan’s ability to field a large enough force in a short enough time to deal with the problem, right to have the green partisans on stand-by alert.

That the Women’s Peace Community was near the border had been luck, however: pure luck.

They were going to need some more.

Aghostino-Clarke smiled. ‘Scared?’ he said. His voice was deep: the upward inflection of the question raised it to bass.

‘Nervous.’ Bleibtreu-Fèvre coughed and, as if reminded, lit a ciagarette.

‘It’s what we’ve been trained for.’

‘That’s why I’m nervous.’ He laughed briefly and stared again at the distant shapes of the man and the woman. ‘He behaves so normally, it’s as if he hasn’t a care in the world. One might almost think he’s not afraid of us.’

‘He? Or it?’

Bleibtreu-Fèvre looked at Aghostino-Clarke and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘We can make no assumptions about what we may face.’

A literal drug fiend,