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‘You can put the boy into the slum,’ Wills said, ‘but you can’t put the slum into the boy.’

They all laughed, except Janis. They rested in the ruins of a gutted gas-station, smoking. There was no danger; there was no petrol.

‘We’ve done it,’ Janis grated. ‘We fucking did it ourselves.’ She saw the fetch nodding vigorously, in a patch of sunlight. ‘We pushed the barb into the cities. It’s in the blood now. In the bone. Like radioactivity. “Barb”, ha, ha. Can’t get them out.’ She felt dizzy and weak and reckless. She looked around at faces that faded like fetches in the sunlight.

Dark now, even the sunlight. Everything tipped sideways.

When she came round she was in a camp-bed. Wills came in and told her she was at least five weeks overdue for leave.

‘You should have told me, Taine.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she said surprised at herself. ‘I thought we just had to keep going.’

‘Yeah, we do,’ Wills said. ‘But not all the time.’ He grinned. ‘Enjoy your leave, soldier.’

She made her way back to Uxbridge, astonished at how normality itself had shifted, at how much everything cost. Transport took tattered wads of her star-stamped sterling dollars: the Republic’s currency, stellars. Good for astronomical prices, the joke went. She arrived at the flat early in the morning, reached in her pocket for a key, then laughed at herself and rang the bell. Sonya came to the door, blinking, and stared at Janis before bursting into smiles and tears and giving her an awkward, leaning-over hug; she was four months pregnant. Jerome joined them a moment later, and made breakfast.

She tried to eat slowly, like a civilian, half-listening to Sonya’s resumé of all that had happened to all their acquaintances, half-answering her questions, while scanning the cable channels with a sharper hunger. She paused at a suddenly familiar name…

‘…would you advise, Mr Wilde?’

Wilde. Moh had talked about him…she’d come across articles here and there that Jordan had written, arguing or agreeing with him…

Cut to a face like an Amerind tribal elder, looking directly at the camera, not at the interviewer: ‘There may come a day for a last stand. But this is not it. I appeal to all who may be considering it: don’t. Don’t destroy our town to save it. Remember how the West saw off the Stalinists and the Islamists. The fun-loving, freedom-loving decadent West undermined and subverted its enemies by making them be like itself, not by becoming grim and hard and serious like them. Those who had the most laughs had the last laugh. So when the soldiers come in, let them be welcome, and life may surprise us.’

‘Thank you, Mr Wilde. Of course we’ll be following this situation very closely, but right now we have to take a break—’

Breakfast-food commercial.

‘Any idea what that was about?’

Sonya frowned. ‘Politics?’ she suggested.

Janis found her room as she’d left it, still a mess. She checked her mail: most of it had been forwarded from the university. Offprints were still coming from Da Nang Phytochemicals. And the grant cheque, in B-marks: a fortune. She figured she was owed it – the project had been a success. She would cash it hurriedly to gold, body-belt the Slovorands.

She found an invitation to a wedding. She looked at it, took in the date. She looked at the time, looked at herself in the mirror, then went to look for Sonya.

Some things didn’t change.

20

The Queen of the Maybe

She pushed open the heavy door of the Lord Carrington, flashed her invitation at the door heavy, and walked into a haze of smoke and a tolerable volume of music. The Precentors were on the stage, their images faint in the filtering sunlight of a February afternoon.

She smiled to herself, remembering, and looked over the crowd as she absently passed her coat – and a bag containing the dismantled parts of the gun – to a small woman sitting between two overloaded racks of coats and weapons. She slung the small leather bag containing the gun’s CPU over one shoulder. Glancing