They sat on half-inflated bedrolls, their backs against the sides of the flier. “He’s never told you about all that Severity School stuff?” Fassin asked.

Taince shook her head. “Nope.” She took out her little grey military communicator again, checking in vain for reception. She and Fassin had already walked out to the hull gap half an hour earlier, looking for a signal either on this device or their phones. They’d stood there in the bright, flickering glow of a heavy aurora display, Nasqueron a vast inverted dome above, dark but sheened with its own rippling auroras and specked with a random craquelure of lightning bursts. A series of small ground-quakes had vibrated through their boots, but for all this natural turmoil — and perhaps partially because of the magnetic activity in the case of the phones — they had heard nothing through their machines.

They’d tramped back, Fassin grumbling about Beyonders for attacking a planet best known for its peaceful Dwellers Studies faculties in the first place, and the Guard, Navarchy Military, Ambient Squadrons and Summed Fleet for not protecting them better. Taince tried to explain about the logistics of moving sufficient numbers of needle ships and other bits of materiel through “holes to where they’d be needed, and the equations which governed how many assets you would need fully to protect the many scattered systems of the Mercatoria. Even with the near-instantaneousness of portal-to-portal Arteria travel, it was an unfeasible, economically unsupportable number. The many enemy groupings might be collectively puny, but they were widely distributed and often working on an awkwardly extended timescale. The main thing was that ’glantine and Ulubis system as a whole were safe. Its own Squadrons were a match for any feasible Beyonder grouping, and behind them, just a few portal jumps away, lay the matchless superiority of the Summed Fleet.

None of this prevented Fassin from continuing to moan about the Beyonders’ nuisance attacks, so Taince had shifted the conversation to their classmates’ foibles, proclivities and eccentricities and before very long they’d got to Saluus.

“Well,” Taince said, “he’s mentioned going to Severity School but he’s never volunteered anything much about it and I’m not his interrogator.”

“Oh,” Fassin said. He wondered if maybe Saluus and Taince weren’t lovers after all. School, early life… that was the stuff of pillow talk, wasn’t it? He stole a glance at Taince. Though “lovers’ somehow didn’t seem like the right word anyway, not for Sal and Tain, assuming they were involved. They each seemed different from everybody else in their year, less obviously caught up in the whole dating, young love and experimental sex scene, as though they’d gone through all that already or were just, through natural predisposition or sheer determination, immune to it somehow.

Taince intimidated most boys her own age and a lot who were significantly older, but she didn’t care. Fassin had seen her turn down a couple of very nice, decent lads with a bruising degree of brusqueness, and then take off for what were pretty obviously one- or few-nighters with burly but boring guys. He had also known at least three girls in their school year who were hopelessly in love with Taince, but she hadn’t cared about that either.

Saluus had been in an even stronger position from the start; not just good-looking — anybody could be that — but easy with it, and assured, charming and funny as well. All that and money! A fortune to inherit, another beckoning world of even more finely graded superiority that existed alongside the monumental, bamboozling, hierarchic system that had surrounded them all since birth, presenting an alternative infrastructure of reward which was both younger and older than the Mercatoria’s colossal edifice, if ultimately entirely subordinate to it. Like the rest of the boys in his year — like most in the entire college — Fassin had long since come to terms with the fact that as long as Sal was around, you were always second-best.

And yet neither Taince nor Sal — especially Sal — took advantage of their chances. Except maybe with each other.

It was like they were adults before their time, with their own steely, determined agendas, and sex was no more than an itch that had to be scratched, an irritating unter-hunger which sporadically necessitated being dealt with as quickly and efficiently as possible with the minimum of distractive fuss, so that the real, serious business of life could be attended to.

Weird.

“Why?” Taince asked. “Did you go to Sev School too, Fass?”

“Me?” Fassin said, astonished. “Shit, no!”

“Right,” Taince said. She was sitting with one leg stretched out, one folded, hand resting on her knee. “So,” she flapped her hand. “Tough, is it?”

“They hunt them!” Fassin told her.

Taince shrugged. “So I’ve heard. At least they don’t eat them.”

“Ha! They still die sometimes. I’m serious. These are just little kids. They fall off cliffs or out of trees or into crevasses or they kill themselves, they’re so stressed. Some get lost in the outwoods and get hunted and killed and eaten by real predators.”

“Mm-hmm. High drop-out rate, then.”

“Taince, doesn’t any of that bother you?” Taince grinned at him. “What, you mean arouse my maternal instincts, Fass?” He didn’t answer. She shook her head. “Well, it doesn’t. You want to ask me do I feel sorry for these junior members of the Acquisitariat? Yes, for the ones that don’t make it out. Or the ones that leave hating their parents. For the others, it does what it’s supposed to do, I guess; produces another generation of the truly selfish. Well, not my department. Don’t even think about them. If I did maybe I’d despise them, but I don’t so I don’t. Maybe I’d admire them. Sounds worse than basic training.”

“You have a choice with basic training. These little—”

“Not if you’re drafted.”

“Drafted?”

“Laws are still on the statute books.” She shrugged. “But your point is taken. It’s tough on those kids. But it’s legal and, well, the rich are another breed.” She sounded unconcerned. “Sal’s really never said anything?”

Something in his tone made Taince look at Fassin. “You mean, like,” she waggled her dark eyebrows, “‘afterwards’, Fassin?” He looked away. “As you will.”

Taince looked at him again. “Fass, is this really all about whether Sal and I fuck?”

“No!”

“Well, we do. Now and again, thank you for asking. That settled any bets? Made you any money?”

“Oh, please,” he said. Damn, he thought, I’m not sure I really wanted to know that, now that I do. Fassin quite enjoyed thinking about some of the potential or actual couples and other groupings of his class and year having sex — grief, he’d watched\been part of the real thing a few times — but the thought of Sal and Taince bumping bits was slightly grisly.

Taince hoisted one eyebrow. “Ask nicely and maybe sometime we’ll let you watch. That’s what you like, isn’t it?”

Fassin felt himself colouring despite his best efforts. “Why, I live for nothing else,” he said, attempting sarcasm.

“And no, he hasn’t mentioned Severity School,” Taince told him. “Not before, during or after. Unless I was a lot more distracted than I thought I was.”

“But it sounds horrific! Cold showers, hot-bunking, corporal punishment, deprivation, intimidation, denigration, and, for a holiday, you get to run for what might be your life!”

Taince snorted. “You end up paying good money for the sort of treatment your ancestors spent their short, brutal lives trying to avoid. That’s progress.”

“I think the guy’s been damaged by it,” Fassin said. “I’m serious.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are,” Taince drawled, sounding bored. “Sal seems to be okay with it, all the same. Says it made him.”