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He smote his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Agh!’ he said. Of course. ‘You saw Moh today!’

Catherin smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’

‘That place you were at, is it—?’

She tilted her head, shook it slowly. Not no, but you don’t ask.

‘I got something to tell you,’ she said.

The level of sound in the place would have made it impossible to overhear their conversation from a metre away. Catherin glanced around, then brought her mouth up to his ear. He felt her warm breath and forced himself to attend to the words she breathed.

‘What you did – don’t do it again.’

She straightened up and looked at him, her expression as awkward and embarrassed as was (he felt sure) his own. What he had done…when he found her…surely nobody, not her, not whoever had sent her, could object to his hacking into a system in BC? His mind went back over the trail, the SILK.ROOT program, and he suddenly realized exactly what he’d been doing when he’d traced the silk consignment to the Women’s Peace Community.

He had been hacking the Black Plan.

Possibly blundering around in something pretty sensitive, if the offensive were as imminent as she’d said.

‘Ah.’ His lips felt dry. ‘I get it.’

Catherin smiled up from under her eyebrows. ‘Well. OK. That’s that done.’ Head back, hair pushed back with her wrist, she laughed with a sound of relief. ‘Hey, Jordan. There’s things I can’t tell you. If you’ve been mixed up with Moh, there must be things you can’t tell me, yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’ He had been thinking about that.

‘Get used to it. You’re in the revolution now.’

‘Oh, I am, am I?’

She knocked back her drink. ‘You better believe it.’

She stood up and put on her jacket, patted an inside pocket. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

Stone and Dafyd gave him grins full of knowing surprise and complete misunderstanding as he passed.

‘See you back at the house,’ Cat called to them over her shoulder as he held the door for her. ‘Don’t be long.’

After the pub’s interior the evening sky was bright.

‘Look at those clouds.’ Catherin tilted her head back. Jordan looked at the clouds, lit by the sunset, a rippled formation like wave-marks on sand.

‘Like ruched peach satin…’ Cat said, then laughed at herself. ‘Listen to me!’

‘The femininists were getting to you, were they?’

‘Yeah. They were.’

She barely glanced at him as she spoke, threading her way through the crowd with a constant alertness that made his own progress feel clumsy. The street appeared to Jordan even busier, and with even more business going on in it, than usual: more people walking, hurrying, talking; more openly carried weapons.

Streetfighters out on the streets…

Cat had already had herself re-entered in the house’s security system, and he followed her through the door with a strange feeling that he was the stranger, the guest. They found Mary Abid busy with the Cable-editing console, Tai studying maps spread on the table, Alasdair doing something with a soldering iron to a piece of kit Jordan didn’t recognize. The children were counting bullets and loading them into magazines, sticky-taping together the curving AK clips. Nobody gave Cat more than a glance as she breezed through the haze of flux, coffee aroma and cigarette smoke. Evidently she’d roped everybody at the house into whatever she was up to before going to the pub to find him. She’d left a couple of carpet-bags and a strappy bundle of belts and holsters and pistols in a corner, more or less out of the way.

The comms room was fully occupied. Cat turned to him.

‘You got personals?’

‘Sure.’ He tapped the case of the computer and glades on his belt.

‘You’re staying in Moh’s room?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, there’s a port there.’

In the room she tossed her jacket on to the bed and looked around, as if checking a returned-to, familiar place. Her gaze stopped at the two pictures of herself on the wall. She gave Jordan a quirky smile and turned to the stacks of pamphlets in which he’d found the book by Wilde.

‘Aha,’ she said. ‘You’ve started.’ She sat down in the clutter, bringing her hem