"Yeah." He grinned and took another drag before handing it back. "You got to me. But then you were never going to run off and join the officer college with me, were you?"

She shook her head as if she'd been admonished and pouted. "No."

"Can I stay here the rest of the night?"

Joona nodded.

"With you?" he asked softly.

She opened the quilt. She was naked underneath.

When Lawrence woke up in the morning his earlier confusion was replaced by something close to embarrassment Classic case of now what?

He was lying along the edge of the bed, the quilt covering him, with his back pressed up against the wall. The mattress really wasn't wide enough for two. Joona was curled up beside him, looking a whole lot more fragile than she had last night. She was thin, skinny enough for her shoulder blades and collarbones to be prominent, and a lot shorter than he recalled. She must have been wearing heels before. Funny he'd never noticed that.

When he tried to pull the quilt up gently around her shoulders she stirred and woke. Pale blue eyes, he saw, a contrast to her darkish skin.

"Well," she said.

"Morning."

"Yes, it is."

She snuggled up closer, closing her eyes.

Again: now what?

"So, er, what time do you have to get up?"

Joona's eyes stayed shut "You're always in a rush to go nowhere, aren't you?"

"That's me."

"I was going to take a break from college. It's getting heavy there for me right now. I hadn't got a plan for getting up."

"You're at college?"

She sighed and sat up. "Yes, the Prodi. It's a complete shit-hole. They don't even have enough funds to stop the building from falling apart, and the lecturers are all fifth-raters who couldn't get an appointment cleaning the toilets at a decent university." She got up out of bed with a sudden energetic motion and padded over to the window, pulling the curtains back with a quick tug.

Lawrence didn't point out she was nude; he would have sounded like his mother. But the window was smeared with dribbles of condensation, only a few vague gray shapes of buildings were visible. Joona shivered and rubbed her arms. The air in the room was cold enough to make her breath show as thin vapor.

"Are you leaving me?" she asked.

"Like you, I don't have any plans."

"Actually, I was thinking I'd go to Scotland."

He couldn't figure out if that was an invitation. She certainly wasn't his usual type, not with all this twitchy energy and commitment to her stupid cause. He couldn't imagine her ever walking down the Strip at Cairns, hunting a good time as the sun went down. Come to that, he couldn't even imagine her laughing heartily. He'd never seen her do more than smile wryly every now and then. But then again, she definitely knew her own mind. Just like Roselyn. Unlike Roselyn, she wasn't happy with life. There was a lot of anger bottled up inside that small frame—a stupid form of anger, though he would never tell her that to her face. She was far too wrapped up in her issues to welcome contrary observations. He guessed that might make her kind of lonely.

The room had a singular imprint that was all her own. It wasn't just the air that was cold. Most people, he thought, would instinctively keep their distance.

So why didn't I?

Two lonely people. Maybe that was why they'd kept dancing around each other in the bar. They weren't opposites attracting after all.

"I've never been to Scotland," he said.

Joona was bending over the heatstore block that sat in the ancient fireplace, turning up its output. The black surface began to glow a deep orange, as if there were still embers in the grate. She gave him a fast, nervous smile. "You want to come with me?" There was surprise and hope in her voice.

"Sure. If you want me to come with you."

"I don't mind. It would be nice."

For a moment he thought she was going to jump back into bed with him. Instead she grabbed a big red-and-green-check nightshirt from the back of a chair and struggled into it.

"I'll put some coffee in the microwave," she said. "Then I have to do my yoga: it helps me center myself. We can go after that."

"Okay," he said, trying to keep pace with events. "I can pick up my stuff from the hotel on the way to the station."

"Will you book the train tickets? I hate using the datapool. I can pay you."

"Sure." He hunted around for his clothes, wondering what he'd gone and said yes to.

Lawrence and Joona took an express train straight out of Amsterdam direct to Edinburgh, traveling in a big U, down south to Paris, across to London, then up north again to the end of the 1-pulse line at Waverley. To start with, Lawrence was impressed by Holland. The old canals were still draining the land. Windmills stood guard along the straight-edged waterways, although little wind now reached their sails, thanks to the extensive forests that had grown up in the last two centuries across the old farmland. There was a huge variety of trees, but with the canals slicing through them they formed such a regular grid it made them look like nothing more than fields. In a sense they were, not that they were cultivated, but the land management teams maintained them carefully. Even now, the drainage system couldn't be allowed to fall into disrepair, and the roots were a big potential hazard. It gave him an impression of an artificial environment barely one step ahead of Amethi. He thought that in a way Holland must be the first example of large-scale terraforming; human engineering and ingenuity wresting a livable nation out of an alien environment.

Lawrence soon tired of the fenlands, especially as their speed blurred details. "So why Scotland?" he asked.

Joona put her feet up on the table, ignoring the disapproving looks of the other passengers in the carriage. "My grandmother is Scottish. We're going to stay with her."

"Where, exactly?"

"Fort William."

He put his interface glasses on and accessed the datapool to find where that was.

"You spend a lot of time trawling, don't you?" Joona said.

"My education had a lot of holes. You must do a fair bit of accessing yourself."

"As little as possible. I prefer books."

"There's a time and a place for hard copy. My dad had a thing for books, too. I guess that's why I never use them." He grinned at the face she pulled. "What's your subject at Prodi?"