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Ax jabs out the cigarette and lights another. He’s still shaking.

‘People assume things,’ he says. ‘They assume things will go on just as they are. They know what they can get away with. They know what they can get people to agree to. Like, I agreed to let other people use my body, because I needed the money. And they knew I did. But because I agreed, they think that makes it all right. Some of them even knew I hated it. But I agreed to it.’

Dee suddenly needs a cigarette herself. She lights one, and her hands, now, are trembling.

‘Did Reid ever let other people use your body?’

‘Oh no,’ Dee says quickly. ‘He’s very possessive.’

‘But he used you,’ Ax persists. ‘Whether you wanted to or not.’

‘I always wanted to,’ Dee says, but her Sex–y smile hides a new and gnawing doubt as to how much that consent was worth, now, looking back. Ax watches her, and she sees him see the doubt grow.

He opens a drawer in the table and reaches in, and brings out a knife. It isn’t a kitchen-knife. It has a black wooden handle, a brass guard, and thirty centimetres of blade. Almost casually, Ax bangs the sharp point of the knife into the table and lets go of the handle, so it springs back a bit and it vibrates.

‘Now you know who you are,’ Ax says quietly. Dee isn’t sure he’s talking to her. All the shaking has gone out of his body, out of his voice, and into that quivering blade. ‘You’re a person. You’re free. Have you ever thought – what you would like to do to people who’ve treated you like meat?’

Out here, in the damp-desert flats between two arms of the city, it’s quiet even for a Sic’day morning. The only sounds are the thrum of the dinghy’s motor, the occasional hiss of a jet transport overhead, and the cries of the adapted birdlife: the lost-satellite bleep of rustshanks, the quacking of mucks, and the caw-cawing of sandgulls. Sic’day is for most folk a day when some work is done, but not much.

(Tamara has heard the opinion that the day is called that because of the number of people working – or not working – with hangovers, but this is a myth. More than a Neo-Martian century ago, Reid expressed the opinion that continuing to name the days after the gods of the Solar system would be inappropriate. Nobody could agree on other names, so the week goes: Wunday, Twoday, Thirday, Fourday, Fi’day, Sic’day, Se’nday. There are twenty-five hours and ten minutes in a day; for convenience there are twenty-five hours in the first six days and twenty-six on Se’nday. There are a hundred and ten weeks in a year. More or less. All serious chronology is done in SI multiples of seconds, reckoning from the moment the Ship’s clock came out of the Malley Mile, around 6.4 gigaseconds ago.)

Tamara’s boat bumps against the canal-bank as she drifts along under minimal power. She’s on a capillary of the Ring Canal. The shallow artificial rivulet is carrying her away from the centre of the city, towards the fields. The human quarter is on her right, the Fifth Quarter on her left. Between them is this expanse of waste, not quite mud-flat, but no longer desert, and not yet fields. In it, venturing out from the machine domain of the Fifth Quarter, can be found biomechanisms, Tamara’s habitual prey.

A sandgull descends, screaming, about a hundred and fifty metres ahead and thirty from the left bank. Tamara ups the revs and lowers her profile as other gulls dive to join it. They squawk and squabble around a black thing. The boat cuts diagonally across the canal. Tamara zooms her right eye. The black thing has a flailing appendage. A stubborn gull clings to it, taking some of the momentum out of the shaking in moments of hopping near-flight.

‘Stay,’ Tamara tells the boat’s ’bot, and it obediently idles the engine and hooks the bank as Tamara steps out, clutching a long grapple. She draws her pistol as she sprints forward. The bang of a blank scatters the gulls into wheeling indignation overhead. As Tamara’s feet thud over the damp sand and skip over tussocks of grass, the black object – a warty, rubbery ball about a third of a metre across, with at