He sat on the mattress, and for all his bulk and strength he couldn’t hold back the exhaustion any more. ‘Where are you?’ he asked the bare walls.

Coulan wouldn’t abandon him, especially not in this dark desperate hour when he needed him more than ever. They loved each other. They were one. All he could think of was that Slvasta had sent an assassin for Coulan; that one by one he was wiping out anybody who opposed him.

‘You idiot,’ he told himself, and rested his eyes for a moment.

*

‘Wake up.’

Javier opened his eyes. Bethaneve was staring down at him. There were dark fatigue circles round her eyes, and her cheeks were blotchy from crying. Hair hung lankly round her face.

‘You look terrible,’ he said, smiling to ease the slur. He could only have been asleep minutes, for he was still absurdly tired. But somehow the sun was now low in the sky.

‘It’s Slvasta,’ she said in a fragile voice.

‘I know. I’m sorry. We were both stupid. Uracus, I hadn’t slept for days – I still haven’t. I was so tense, so angry. There were fights, terrible fights against the sheriffs and Marines, and . . . The streets were bad places to be for a while. But I had to be out there, had to lead our comrades. I’d like to talk to him.’

Bethaneve shook her head, struggling against fresh tears. ‘He’s got worse. He’s . . . He doesn’t trust anyone any more. He thinks there are conspiracies everywhere.’

‘You as well?’

She nodded miserably.

‘Giu! What did you do?’

‘He thinks I’m scheming with Nigel.’

‘Nigel? Nigel that supplied us with all the weapons?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s the only one of us who knows Nigel.’ He studied Bethaneve’s dead expression, sensed the seething emotions so thinly obscured by her shell. ‘All right. We have to put a stop to this. I need to find Coulan. He’ll know what to do.’

‘I know where he is.’

‘Where?’ It came out a lot more urgently than he intended.

‘The National Council building. Javier, he’s meeting with senior comrades, making deals, organizing them. I think he might be putting his own faction together.’

He thought it was the cold that made his muscles so difficult to move, but in the end he had to admit it was shock. ‘No. No, you’re wrong.’

‘I hope so. I do, really. But my informants aren’t close enough to be included in the deals. I don’t know what he’s actually arranging.’

‘Coulan would never betray us. We planned this with him for years; I know exactly what he thinks on any subject. He wants social justice just like we do.’

‘I know.’ She gave her feet a sheepish glance. ‘I remember, too. He saved me. He was going to save everyone.’

‘Then we must believe in him. We can’t allow Slvasta’s paranoia to contaminate us. That’s one of the principles we were going to install, remember? Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.’

‘He came up with that.’

‘Yeah. Then, until we find out what’s going on, we follow that principle.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We’ll do that.’

Javier lumbered to his feet. It was an effort, and for a moment he felt dizzy. ‘I should have been helping our comrades with the railway nationalization this afternoon.’

‘Do you even know how to nationalize a railway company?’

‘Sort of like taking it into new management, like I did with Coughlin’s stall at the Wellfield market.’

‘You need to scale up your thinking.’ She paused, allowing her troubled thoughts to show through her shell. ‘I meant what I said about not knowing what to do next. Do you think that’s strange?’

‘Listen, we’re both tired like nothing we’ve experienced before. Of course we’re going to make mistakes and forget things. Go easy on yourself. Look at the screw-up I’ve made of today.’

‘No. It’s more than that. We could always think of something before. How to organize the cells, political objectives, how to achieve our goals, strategies to manipulate public opinion. We sat down together and these ideas just kept coming. Fabulous ideas. Ideas that worked. Now we’ve won, and there’s nothing. We can’t figure out how to capitalize on what we’ve got. The city’s falling apart; there’s precious little food, the markets are closed, the water’s still not running in half the boroughs, people are fleeing. We broke it, cleverly and carefully. Why don’t we know how to put it all back together? We wanted this to be a decent fair society, so how come we had nothing ready to implement? Why no strategy to rebuild the rail bridges? Why not issue guarantees about life and liberty to reassure the professional classes that do the actual work?’

‘The People’s Interim Congress—’

‘Is a farce.’

‘That’s a bit harsh.’ He squirmed under her gaze. ‘Okay, they’re a bunch of idiots. But some of them are useful idiots. They mean well.’

‘That’s a magnificent epitaph. If we’re not careful, we’ll be singing it all the way to Giu.’

‘What do you want, Bethaneve?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just saying it’s strange. Strange that it didn’t bother me before, either. It’s as if we’ve suddenly used up every idea. Why?’

‘All right. This is how it’s going to go. You and I are going to find Coulan. Then the three of us are going to sit down like we did in the good old days of an entire week and a half ago, and think how to calm Slvasta down and get everything back on track. When we’ve done that, the four of us will brainstorm how to make the city work again; there may even be beer and sitting around in a pub involved. How’s that sound?’

‘Sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all day.’

There was a cab waiting for them outside Tarleton Gardens. Javier smiled as he helped Bethaneve inside. ‘See? You do know how to keep some things working.’

She was deadly serious when she looked back and said: ‘But this was something we knew we’d need before.’

Javier gave up.

The cab set off, moving quickly through the semi-deserted streets.

‘He’s moving,’ Bethaneve announced after ten minutes. ‘Leaving the National Congress building. There’s a cab – not one on our list.’

‘I’m going to ’path him,’ Javier announced. He focused his mind, reaching over the rooftops towards First Night Square. ‘Coulan. Coulan, my love, talk to me, please. I know you’re there. I need you so much.’

‘Uracus,’ Bethaneve grunted. ‘What did you say?’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘He just fuzzed that cab good and hard. My agent’s ex-sight can’t perceive it at all.’

‘Why is he doing this?’ Javier couldn’t keep the hurt distress from his voice. ‘What have I done?’

‘Hang on,’ Bethaneve settled back into the cab’s leather bench seat. ‘I’m going to activate all the cells around First Night Square. The comrades are still loyal, at least for now; they’ll watch out for him. Fuzz can defeat ex-sight, but he can’t hide the cab from good old-fashioned eyeball contact.’

A minute later someone saw the cab turn into Fletton Road. Then Coulan got out and hurried into the Tonsly shopping arcade. ‘Uracus, there are twenty entrances to that place,’ Bethaneve said. ‘I wish we had Andricea’s mod-bird.’

‘She’s one of Slvasta’s loyalists.’

A single eye opened to give him a disapproving stare. ‘That’s wrong-thinking.’

‘Sorry.’ He followed the gifting Bethaneve sent him. Marvelling at the way she coordinated ’paths from dozens of cell members seemingly simultaneously. Images of streets and arcade halls flashed before him at bewildering speed.

‘There!’

Fleeting glimpse of his beloved’s pale skin and sandy hair disappearing fast down Makins Alley. Short sharp instructions flicked out to cell members. They changed direction, sped up, slowed down, hovered at road junctions.

Coulan called a cab on Lichester Road. Fuzzed it. A cab from the list turned onto the road behind him, three cell members hopped on.

There were three more changes of cab. A confusing run on foot through the maze of crooked alleys and tiny dark lanes of Saxby.