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‘That’s really good.’

She turned quickly to see Valery standing in the doorway. The jacket slipped from her shoulders.

‘Yes, I’m quite pleased with it, even if using this machine was a bit of a cheat.’ She half-knelt to pick it up. Her skirt settled in slow billows, like a parachute.

‘Nonsense, Cat, it’s the design and the carrying of it through that matters. The method is just technical.’

‘Like, the end justifies the means?’ Cat straightened, smoothed the skirt, and looked at Valery with a demure smile.

‘Hah!’ Valery swivelled the console’s chair and sat down. ‘We never claimed to be pacifists, you know.’

Cat shook her head, as if to rattle her synapses back to their old pattern, and stood up.

‘What a scam. You had me worried there. I thought I was going soft myself when all the time I was being – softened up! To work for the ANR, of all the macho elitist gangs!’ She caught the sides of her skirt and swirled it around her in a joyous flurry.

‘That’s not how I see it,’ Valery said, a half-embarrassed smile on her lips. ‘As it happens…we have a job for you to do. A job for the ANR.’ Her smile broadened. ‘Usual rates.’

Cat considered this. ‘And the alternative is staying here, right?’

Valery nodded. ‘We can’t risk letting you go back to Donovan’s gang. All right, all right, you can say you won’t, but unless you have a contract with us there’ll be nothing to stop you changing your mind as soon as you’re out the door. So either you do this job – nothing too risky, by the way – or you sit out the insurrection behind a sewing-machine, making parachutes.’

Cat knew that Valery was putting it to her gently. The ANR had a short temper and a long memory.

‘I’ll do the job,’ Cat said hastily, fighting off a panicky, smothered feeling. ‘What is it?’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Valery. ‘Good girl.’

Jordan looked at the message in the work-space, restraining an impulse to bat the reply tag yet again.

Moh says search over, do your own thing.

It wasn’t just the gnomic brevity of the message that frustrated him. The sender, the Women’s Peace Community, had vanished from the nets as if it had never existed. Jordan had sent a dozen responses, all of which had bounced. His suspicion that the femininist community was connected to the ANR intensified.

Moh, wherever he was, wasn’t taking calls either. Jordan had little doubt that the message came from him; it echoed what Moh had said when he’d first asked Jordan to help him. And now, apparently, he expected Jordan to drop the investigation. Some chance, comrade. Jordan had spent the afternoon since contacting Moh and Janis in a succession of net trawls. He’d detected the effect of Moh’s settlement of the dispute with Donovan, and the clearing of Cat’s status. In the narrow, fiercely contested fringe where Norlonto’s private defence agencies and political-military groupuscules fought indistinguishably in the dark, Catherin Duvalier was a respected minor player. Every so often, through the afternoon, the thought would come back to Jordan of Cat returning to that.

Mary Abid had gone back to work on the other side of the world, oblivious. The comms room was still airless, and hot. Jordan pulled in the original message, the videophone call, and froze it at the exact moment when Cat looked up, brushing her hair from her face. He trimmed away the rest of the image, enlarged and enhanced the picture of Cat and printed it on A4. It came off as a good-quality colour photograph. Jordan powered down the machines he’d been working on, left the room quietly and went upstairs to Moh’s room, where he stuck the picture beside the photograph of Cat on the wall. He stood back and looked at them.

There was no question that they were of the same girl, making the same gesture and the same caught half-smile. Only the clothes she wore were different: the dirt-stiff overalls, too big, the sleeve rolled back, a streak of oil smeared on her forehead by the passage of her wrist; the starch-stiff frill of the pinafore over the precisely fitted