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‘You are a machine too,’ it said. ‘You will know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dee, her voice sounding even stranger as she tried not to laugh. ‘But my human friend here is more familiar with the wild machines.’

‘Avoid them,’ the robot told her. ‘They are not like us.’

The humans walked along the tunnel towards the arch of distant light. When they reached it and turned for a backward glance, their own vision had adapted, and the paired pinhole glints of the robots’ eyes had vanished in the dark.

Tamara sneezed. It made a mess inside her headpiece, and she surreptitiously lifted it off to wipe away the snot and spittle.

‘Great,’ said Ax, from behind her. ‘That’ll look real convincing, a robot pulling its own head off.’

‘Not to mention sneezing,’ said Dee. ‘What’s the matter, anyway? That’s your…seventeenth sneeze in thirty-five minutes.’

‘Fallout.’ Tamara sniffed aggressively. ‘It fucking gets up my nose, OK?’

They were walking in single file along a back street at the northern edge of the Fifth Quarter, the side opposite to the one that faced the human quarter. Their objective, Dee had told them, was to continue along that course, past the tip of the Quarter where it tapered into the sand, and on until they intersected the Stone Canal. The only activity they’d encountered was that of small biomechs, hopping or crawling across their path, heading into the wind that was bringing the radioactive dust in off the desert. Eventually, Tamara had explained, whole flocks of them would congregate at the blast-site, to feast on the rich unstable isotopes.

‘Kind of ecological,’ she’d added. ‘Keeps it out of the carbon-life food-chain, see?’

They walked on. The sun got higher in the sky, and the suits became increasingly uncomfortable. Dee, with more conscious control of her pain-tolerance than the others, allowed her impatience to goad them on.

‘The sooner we get there,’ she said, ‘the sooner we can get this clutter off.’

‘Those of us who get there,’ Ax protested. ‘Bury me in something else, that’s all I ask.’

‘Try a bin-liner,’ Wilde called back callously.

Dee urged them all to be quiet. Badinage wasn’t a feature of the humanoid robots. The shadow of a swooping aircraft emphasised her point, and, fortunately, none of them looked up.

Eventually the Fifth Quarter petered out, the street running into the sand. The canal gleamed in the distance. They approached it across desert and, later, fields. Tamara guided them carefully around those fields whose owners were unlikely to tolerate robots clumping across their crops. In some of the fields the crops were difficult to distinguish from the irrigation-systems. There was a kind of modified cane that could be harvested as jointed plastic pipes, and these fields they walked through, parting the tall synthetic stalks.

They reached the bank of the Stone Canal. The pathway along which Wilde and Jay-Dub had entered the city, four days earlier, was on the opposite bank. The canal itself had no traffic in sight.

Dee had led them to the exact spot where the boat, in which Jay-Dub had rescued her and Ax, waited for them. Jay-Dub had recalled it from its mooring, many kilometres farther up the canal, by a coded transmission shortly before entering the tunnel. Spy and Soldier between them had had no problem in identifying the co-ordinates, accurate to the nearest metre, which had been among the last pieces of information Jay-Dub had passed to Dee’s mind.

Beside the boat, another robot waited – a patroller. It was smaller and squatter than Jay-Dub had been, but of a similar shape. On first glimpsing it Tamara had given an excited cry, then she fell silent as the robot extended its legs and peered at them.

‘This boat matches the identification of one used to impede an investigation,’ it informed them as they walked up. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ The question was repeated on several microwave channels and in several codes, but only Dee was aware of that. The initial aural query had