There came a reaction that he wasn’t expecting. It was relief.

The elevator doors trundled shut, and he glanced around. “If you work upstairs, you might want to take the rest of the day off. I’ll get someone unconnected with you all to clean things up.”

He waited for one of them to say something, but no one volunteered this time, not even to ask him what had happened to Miss Sonja.

“Right, then. I’ll be going. You know where to reach me.” He set a routine running that would unlock their phones and computers, and as the crowd parted to let him through, all he could hear was the chiming and snatches of song as backed-up messages were delivered.

He was through the foyer and onto the street. The air was cold and clear, and he trembled as he breathed it in.

“Michael? We’ve got a problem. Amongst all the other problems.”

[One that requires me to finish my conversation with the cardinals?]

“Yeah, I reckon it does. For now, anyway. Just before Sonja shot herself, she told me she’d been following CIA orders all year: either she make me her pet, or they’d kill me.”

[That is a premise based on the supposition that CIA agents could realistically assassinate you. Did Sonja believe such an action was likely to succeed?]

“It doesn’t matter if she thought it likely or not. She was too scared to take the risk. So she bought into the whole package.”

[And she is now dead. Which means it is entirely possible the CIA cell is mobilizing to carry out their threat.]

“Or we’ve got incoming missiles, like before.” He turned the corner, starting up Cleveland Street toward Regent’s Park. “But unless they’re going to nuke the whole of the Freezone, they can’t guarantee they’ll hit me. I don’t think they’ll do that.”

[I will start searching for them at once.]

“That won’t work. They operate differently now you’ve appeared: no electronic comms until the very last minute, and they’ve been living off the grid—what grid we have here, anyway.”

[You are suggesting a different course?]

“Sonja pointed out how rubbish we were at finding the last lot of agents, even with you, even when there should have been plenty of traffic for us to find. We’ll just waste time and get it wrong. So what is it that we want?”

[To be left in peace. To explore, to build, to dream.]

“Huy, yes. So how are we going to persuade the Americans to do that? What is it that we can do that will make them believe it’s in their own best interests to leave us alone?”

Petrovitch was halfway up Cleveland Street, and almost level with the barricade he’d demolished. The fire had died out, but the wreckage remained, smoldering and hot. The guards had deserted their post, but he was gratified to see the red flags had stayed at the far end of the road.

[Any proactive sanctions we take against the United States of America will have unpredictable consequences.]

“You think?” He was being sarcastic, but Michael wasn’t.

[Yes. You have been neglecting your news feeds,] said Michael, and a rectangle opened up at the side of his vision.

There was a station ident in the corner of the virtual screen—CNN—and a tag in another proclaiming it was a live feed. A man with a dark-blue nylon jacket and a forehead so bulbous that studio lights would glare off it like a mirror was clutching his mic and virtually swallowing it to make himself heard. In the background, and somewhere between him and the camera, were thousands of protestors, chanting, shouting, blowing whistles and waving placards.

There was clearly more to it than just a noisy rally—because a public demonstration of the sort Petrovitch was watching hadn’t happened in any part of the USA for two decades.

The screen jumped. No longer viewed from ground level, with images of a distant white stone facade in the neo-classical style, but from the air. What had looked like thousands now became tens of thousands, enveloping a whole city block and beyond, packed into the park in front of the largest building and spilling out into the surrounding streets.

The early morning sun hung low over the distant towers of an office district: that meant some, if not most, of the protestors had been there all night. And still the reporter was trying to get his message across.

The news ticker refreshed itself, and scrolled “California Supreme Court siege.”

“You have got to be yebani kidding me.” Petrovitch realized he’d stopped short of the junction, and his hastily organized militia were wondering why. “Dalton.”

[It appears that one Paul Dalton, attorney-at-law in New York state, has… ]

“I know what he’s done. I know. We talked about it. He was going to…”

[Present a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Doctor Epiphany Ekanobi to the California Supreme Court. It appears such an action is unpopular with the local citizenry.]

“Where the huy are the police? The Yanks don’t allow this sort of thing to happen. Not now.” Petrovitch watched the aerial images as they zoomed and panned across the crowd, which went right up to the steps of the court itself. Fists raised, painted cardboard banners waved, bottles and sticks rattled off the first-floor windows. He was incredulous. “Hooy na ny!”

“Sam? Sam!” Madeleine ran toward him, closing the distance with her long-legged strides.

He looked through the pictures from half a world away to Madeleine, standing right in front of him. “Hey.”

“What happened? Where’s Sonja. Why are you just standing there?”

He blinked CNN away. “We need to call a press conference.”

“A what?” She grabbed his shoulders and inspected him for wounds. “What are you on about?”

“A press conference. Ten minutes. At Container Zero.” He grabbed a list of accredited journalists in the Freezone and flashed them the message. “If they’re going to kill me, they’re going to have to do it in public.”

She spun him around and checked his back and his skull. “You’re not hurt—anymore than you were before. So please make some sense.”

“Okay, okay. I will explain, but if you thought it was pizdets before, it’s worse now. We don’t have time to hang around.” He faced her and put his hand behind her neck. When their foreheads were touching, he told her. “The CIA told Sonja they’d take me down if she didn’t do something about me first. Now she’s killed herself. And they’re rioting in America.”

“I don’t understand. She… she did what?”

“This, everything that’s happened: Sonja was trying to save me. And now she’s dead, I guess the CIA really are coming for me. And Dalton went to California to try and get Pif out: a crowd of around twenty thousand Reconstructionists are attacking the courthouse.” His fingers lightly gripped the rope of her hair and his hand ran the length of it from tip to tail. “We’re not going to lose.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because in a moment, I’ll tell the world what Sonja told me. Better still, I’ll show them. What’s the point of having eyes that work like cameras if I don’t record the important events?”

“Oh God. You’ve got it all saved. Even, even that.”

“Yeah. Even that.” He let go of her. “Come on. We need to get ready.”

“But what about all these armed people we’ve just turned out onto the street?”

He thought furiously for a moment. “I’ll appoint one in ten to collect the guns back in and return them to the trucks. They can guard them, and any other ones the Oshicora security teams turn in. I’ll give everyone the headlines and, chyort: running a city would be so much easier if foreign agents weren’t trying to kill me.”

Petrovitch composed a short message and pushed it out first to the Freezone, then to the newswires. Already, there were steadicams and portable satellite dishes wending their way into Regent’s Park. Red flags flapped overhead, and there seemed to be people everywhere, moving in front and behind and all around, happy they’d not have to fight.