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Moh laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘You’ve cheered me up, you really have. It’s not like some kinda global catastrophe started in 1939, huh?’

They got off at a station which the Underground shared with the Elevated monorail. Both Underground and Elevated ran at ground-level here: Hein-leingrad, well inside the Greenbelt, where all the old placenames had been scraped away. The gutted Underground part of the station was scrawled with colourful graffiti and wilfully obscure slogans:

NEITHER DEATH NOR TAXES

QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR SPACE FIRST! NO COMPROMISE IN DEFENCE OF EARTH’S CHILDREN!

She nudged Moh. ‘One of yours?’

‘Nah. Just a bunch of extremists.’

The Elevated station had been built around a 1930s bus terminus decorated in the style of a futuristic past. They sat in the station’s glass-fronted cafeteria, their backs against a grooved aluminium pillar, and had coffee and doughnuts. Janis watched the people come and go through what looked like a small set from Things To Come, apart from the outfits. Not a short tunic or a short-back-and-sides to be seen. Moh spent a few seconds flipping through maps on a computer.

‘Big drawback of the arrangements here,’ he remarked as he slipped the machine into his shirt pocket, ‘is that there’s no King’s highway. Everything is private. Property and access can be a bit of a minefield.’

‘I hope you don’t mean that literally.’

‘Not exactly, but if we do have to trespass I’ll rely on my friend’ – he patted his bag – ‘rather than legal precedents.’

‘That’s where you’ve got the gun?’

‘Not so loud. Yeah. Comes apart.’

‘And I thought we were alone together at last.’

‘Better two and a bit than none, my dear.’

He was watching the crowd almost all the time. The few moments when he looked directly at her he would half-smile and she only had time to half-smile back before his glance darted away again. She wondered if to him it was a long, searching look…She couldn’t complain: it was her drugs that had done things to his sense of time and his memory, and her money that was paying him to keep watch.

And she had fallen for him, hard. As in: a hard man is good to find. One part of her mind – the sceptical, analytical, scientific part – was looking on sardonically, with a knowing smirk, seeing her sudden swept-off-her-feet attachment to Moh as, ultimately, the springing of a genetically loaded trigger, a survival strategy: her best bet was someone strong and kind, dangerous to others and safe, safe, safe to her. The rest of her mind just felt weak whenever he looked at her. What her body felt was different, and weak did not come into it.

Moh was tapping at his phone. He slid it to where both of them could see it and nobody else could: the picture was set to flat, not holo.

Mary Abid’s face appeared on the screen.

‘Oh, hi,’ Mary said. ‘Jordan’s back, if that’s what you want to know. Threw him in at the deep end, didn’t you?’

‘Can I speak to him?’ Moh said impatiently.

‘Sure…passing you over.’

Jordan looked up at them, evidently via a camera mounted on the top of a screen he was working at. He had a black eye and a few scratches.

‘You all right, Jordan?’

‘Yes,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘We got into a bit of a scuffle, but that was all. You should have seen the police, Moh. They ran like rabbits.’

‘Yeah, well, I told you the Neos—’

Jordan smiled. ‘It wasn’t your commie headbangers that chased them off – it was the market ladies!’

‘Good for them. And they’re not my commie headbangers, as I keep telling you. Did Sol Bernstein get away OK?’

‘Yes. Never saw anyone so old move so fast. He had his books packed up by the time I reached him, and we chugged off on his electric tractor right through where a fight was going on. That was when I got a few knocks, but it was nothing really.’

He obviously felt it was a bit more than that and was quite pleased with himself. Janis hoped Moh wouldn’t burst Jordan’s little bubble of satisfaction at getting through his first rumble.

‘Sounds like you did all right,’