So Slvasta concentrated his ex-sight on the door’s hinges and used his teekay to turn the screws. They were old and practically welded into the wood, but he persisted. It took ten minutes and eventually they all came free, methodically winding up from the hinges, and Javier lifted the door aside.

They crept into the stable complex, keeping up their fuzz. There were oil lamps on the corners of all the buildings. Slvasta reached out with his teekay to snuff the flames on some of them so they could slink past unseen. Then they were at the barns. That was where they split up. Slvasta crept into one of the low buildings, wrinkling his nose up against the smell of neuts and their manure. The creatures were all huddled together, sleeping on their feet. He sent his ex-sight into the body of the first, and followed with his teekay.

Slaughtering every mod they encountered would be easy. A quick spike of teekay into the brain or heart would kill the defenceless animal instantly. But that would be noticed, and the authorities put on the alert, so they were going for a more indirect approach. A small pinch of teekay in the right place in a female neut’s ovaries and the creature was barren for life. After a few weeks, the city’s supply of new mods would dry up, and all those jobs they were intended for would have to be done by humans instead.

Of course, new neuts could be bought and brought in from other towns and cities, but that would take time. By then, Slvasta was hoping the movement would have built enough momentum to cause a lot of problems for the adaptor stables everywhere.

It took twenty minutes for Slvasta to sterilize all the female neuts in the barn. He and Javier crept out of the stable unseen, and fixed the door back into place behind them.

*

The Great North-Western train company had built Plessey station in Varlan’s Narewith district, the terminus to a main line that ran almost three thousand miles north, crossing the equator to reach to New Angeles at the tip of the Aflar peninsula. Its goods yard sat behind the grandiose passenger terminal, with row after row of sheds whose steep roofs stood on iron pillars covering the slender loading bay platforms. Every day, hundreds of goods trains brought raw materials into the capital and dispatched manufactured goods out across the north-west. The money which flowed through the station on a daily basis formed a goodly portion of the city’s overall economy. Many people relied on it for their jobs.

Slvasta and Javier drove their carts into the goods yard at just after half past four, merging into the usual procession of carts belonging to various stallholders. They already knew something was wrong before they passed the tall stone gateposts. The aether was bubbling with disgruntled ’path comments suffused with emotion.

There were a lot of carts pulled up in the loading bays which ran along one side of platform 8D, which handled the meat trains. Big yalseed oil lamps hung from the rafters, shining a meagre yellow light down on the men milling along the narrow platform, but Slvasta couldn’t see the trains. Just about every platform was empty.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Javier.

The big man just shrugged. There were no station officials anywhere, though Slvasta could sense the engineering crews in their shops, radiating disgruntled and in some cases nervous thoughts. He scanned a little deeper, trying to identify individuals whose resentment burnt hotter than the others. By now he recognized most of the night-shift station workers.

‘Check it out, I think we might have three,’ he told Javier, his thoughts indicating the specific people hunkered down in the engineering shops. They avoided recruiting anyone from the Wellfield these days. Bethaneve said a concentration of activists in the same place would be suspicious if the Captain’s police ever stumbled onto those cells.

Wherever they went now they were on the lookout for the resentful and sullen among the city’s residents. When a possible emerged, a day later that chosen one would receive a quick private ’path from someone they didn’t know, asking them if they’d like to actually do something about the focus of their ire. Responses were graded against a chart Bethaneve had drawn up. ‘To see if we’ve got a talker or a doer,’ she said as she supervised their growing network of activist cells. Some of their best assets were cells of one – a person broadly known as a political activist (criminal record preferred) who would happily take an order to cause a little physical havoc.

Testing Bethaneve’s pyramid of cells had so far resulted in water being temporarily cut off to certain streets (in one case for two days), allowing them to gauge the efficiency and preparedness of the repair teams. That information, along with their growing map of the city’s main water pipe network, would allow them to cut off water to nine individual districts through just seven small acts of sabotage, throwing the proverbial spanner in the ageing, rickety pump mechanisms of substations.

‘Good. Tag them for Bethaneve,’ Javier replied. His own ex-sight and intuition wasn’t as developed as Slvasta’s. He gestured around at the throng of unhappy stallholders waiting for the overnight meat train. ‘This doesn’t look good.’ He ’pathed Vladja, another Wellfield stallholder, waiting in a bay further down platform 8D.

‘There’s been no goods train come in since midnight,’ Vladja told them.

‘What about passenger trains?’ Javier asked.

‘Some, but only from the local stations.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nobody knows, but it’s got to be some kind of major accident somewhere up the line.’

Finally, a station official had appeared at the end of platform 8D; a young man in an assistant platform manager’s uniform, surrounded by a big scrum of stallholders. He looked terrified and his superiors had clearly sent him out with the purpose of saying one thing: we don’t know when the trains are coming.

‘Come on,’ Javier said. ‘This is pointless.’ He jumped back into the cart and picked up the reins. Slvasta followed him out of the goods yard. As they passed through the gates, his ex-sight showed him two more stallholder carts leaving.

*

Wellfield market had been on its current site, barely a mile from Plessey station, for over two thousand years. It had been completely rebuilt seven times, the last being two hundred and eleven years ago, though there had been many refurbishments since. This latest version covered six acres under a series of long curving glass-and-slate roofs that could easily be mistaken for one of the capital’s railway stations. Heavy iron girders supported the roof; every five years they had their rust scraped off so they could be given a fresh coat of red and green paint to protect against the humidity; some claimed it was just the paint layers holding it all together these days. Most of the sides were open, allowing a breeze to carry through, cleaning out the damp clingy smell of butchered meat. Over a hundred wholesale merchants had Guild permits to operate in Wellfield, supplying meat to the trade across the capital city.

After a month working there, Slvasta was completely immune to the smell and sight of raw meat in the form of freshly slaughtered carcasses. They left the carts in the stables with Pabel. Javier started scanning round with his ex-sight. ‘We need to buy stock, quickly,’ he said. ‘Most stalls have some in reserve. Once they all hear there’s no train, they’ll cling to it like gold.’

He started to hail people, using a confident, slightly amused tone to wheedle a carcass out of them. Never more than one per stall, for fear of arousing suspicion. Slvasta, Pabel and Ervin hurried around the market with barrows, collecting the meat. Their good fortune came to a halt about thirty minutes later. Slvasta was hanging up a salted pig carcass in the cool brick-lined store when Javier came in sighing.