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Colours came up.

Van looked away to the other screens, where interesting items were appearing on local channels, usually in traffic reports.

‘Jesus wept,’ Cat muttered as she and Jordan struggled along the crowded pavement of the Broadway. ‘Half the bloody country seems to have gone on strike.’ Traffic was gridlocked, a knock-back effect of distant junctions blocked by buses whose drivers had simultaneously decided to exercise their right to a mid-morning break. Several office buildings were picketed by workers in white shirts and ties. Even with all the honking of horns and chanting of slogans, Norlonto seemed quieter than usual.

Jordan glanced sidelong at the good communist and loyal daughter of the revolution beside him and smirked. In the Modesty dress which she’d magically produced like a coloured scarf from an egg she could pass for a well brought-up young Beulah City lady, except…

‘Language,’ he chided. ‘Apart from that you’re doing fine. I’m amazed at how you’ve mastered the effortless glide.’

‘Effortless, hell,’ Cat choked. ‘You have to kick the goddam petticoats out of the way with every step you take, and if I’m not careful I’ll blow my foot off.’

She had jeans on underneath, two side-arms in boot holsters, and ammo strapped to her thighs.

Jordan took her elbow and ostentatiously steered her past a trodie who’d collapsed in the doorway of a Help the Waged charity shop.

‘The correct expression, my dear,’ he said, ‘is: “My feet are killing me.”’

Cat laughed. ‘You’re a sight yourself.’

‘Update me on it,’ Jordan said, running a finger around the inside of his collar and leaving it even more sticky and uncomfortable. A frantic search of Moh’s wardrobe had turned up a frightful ’thirties outfit, three-piece with cravat, which he’d apparently worn to the interview for the last respectable job he’d ever attempted to get, in some edited-out deviation from what he nowadays presented as a steady career progression from bricklayer to union organizer to mercenary. Jordan had insisted on taking Cat’s jacket and his jeans in a carpet-bag: whatever it took to get into BC, he’d no intention of being seen like this attempting street oratory – for which, he gathered, street-credibility was a crucial requirement. Even by Beulah City’s time-lapsed standards he looked a complete neuf. Cat, by exasperating contrast, didn’t look out of place in Norlonto.

Overhead, air traffic was being diverted away from Alexandra Port and the sky was gradually filling up: airships at the lowest level; then re-entry gliders cracking past and drifting into the city’s thermals, rising in great lazy spirals; above them the blue of the sky crosshatched with the contrails of airliners stacked above Heathrow or giving up and making a break for the Landmass.

Cat and Jordan found themselves part of a flow of people going down the hill. Looking back, Jordan saw that more and more people were pressing on from behind them. Almost every other vehicle in the road had been abandoned, and more occupants were joining the pedestrians by the minute. He’d worried about looking worried, but by the faces around him he could see it had been a misplaced concern.

‘I’ve just realized,’ Cat said. ‘We’re in the middle of a bunch of refugees. They’re keeping very calm about it, for now, but I’ll bet there’s a flood building up of Norlonto’s middle classes getting out of the way of the godless communists and under the wing of the godly capitalists.’

‘Nobody outside BC believes the ANR is communist,’ Jordan murmured.

‘Oh yes they do,’ Cat said. ‘You should hear them talking about “the cadres”.’

‘Mind who hears us talking about them.’

‘Just listen. Everybody else is.’

And they were. Complete strangers earnestly passed on scraps of information that they’d heard from the third person back from the one who’d just passed a car with the radio left on: Glasgow had fallen to the ANR, bombs had gone off in Victoria Street, the Dail had declared war on England…The crowds thinned a little as part of the stream turned left to