‘Are we ready?’ Slvasta ’pathed at half past nine.

Bethaneve sipped her hot chocolate and picked up a gazette, the perfect image of an innocent bystander. ‘We’re ready.’

‘Then let’s do this.’

The train pulled in to the goods yard at eleven minutes past ten. It was greeted by stable owners from across the city. All of them had caged wagons to transport the female neuts, most of them hurriedly altered with planks of wood affixed to the bars, offering a flimsy level of protection and anonymity to the animals they were intended to transport. Waiting alongside the wagons were guards, tough men whose loyalty was to the shiniest coin.

Bethaneve sent out some instructions, sensing them dissipate across the cells. Several mod-birds fell from the sky, striking rooftops with nasty thuds – dead long before they landed. The remaining mod-birds started to flap hurriedly away from the area, withdrawn by their owners.

*

Excitement and animosity began to build in the crowd waiting outside the barricades – a psychic wave that washed across the station and began to unnerve the placid neuts. As they were led out of the cattle trucks and into the boarded-up wagons, they began to buck about, anxious to escape this new and frightening environment. Handlers were hard pressed to cope with them.

‘Is that a truck of mod-apes?’ Bethaneve asked in surprise.

Cell members (level twenty-eight) were close to the train, sharing their perception. Sure enough, two of the trucks seemed to be full of mod-apes.

‘Those stables are greedy,’ Slvasta murmured.

‘More like desperate,’ Coulan said.

Jeers rippled across the protesters jamming the streets outside the station as they picked up on the shared ex-sight. The new surge of antipathy made several neuts rear up and run frantically. Stable Guild workers ran after them, trying to calm the terrified animals.

An insidious teekay began to open the locks on the cattle wagons. The neuts crammed inside, already frantic and oversensitive to the psychic storm boiling from the hostile crowd, burst out and stampeded across the station’s marshalling yard. Amid the chaos, more truck locks were opened. The mod-apes broke free. The humans in the marshalling yard yelled wildly as the tide of alien animals raced about chaotically, hooves kicking at anybody in the way. Guild workers tried to halt the mod-apes that were rampaging amid the neuts, but their ’path orders had no effect.

‘Oh crud,’ Slvasta gulped. ‘Did we do that? Did we set them free?’

‘We didn’t plan it,’ Bethaneve said. ‘But it looked organized to me.’

‘One of the cells innovating, maybe?’ Javier said.

‘Maybe.’

‘Irrelevant right now,’ Slvasta said. He was standing a little way up Cranwich Road, surrounded by the crowd. The atmosphere had begun to change from confident aggression to unease. A hundred metres away, the sheriffs on the barricade across Knole Street, which ran along the side of the station, were turning round nervously. Behind them, one of the tall cast-iron gates leading to the marshalling yard began to shake as neuts hurled themselves at it. Individually, a neut was a modest animal without a great deal of power, but now there were hundreds of them hurtling along, goaded by their own fear. Herd instinct, enhanced by a shared crude psychic distress, made the flight imperative utterly dominant. The impact as they flung themselves heedlessly at the gate was like a battering ram. Then a couple of hulking mod-apes hit the gate.

Slvasta was perceiving it with his own ex-sight, so there was no mistaking the force and coherence of the telepathic orders which frantic Stable Guild members were thrusting into the minds of the mod-apes to stop. Yet they made no difference.

The gates burst open. Hundreds of panicked frenzied neuts burst out into Knole Street and began to run for freedom.

‘That’s wrong,’ Slvasta whispered. ‘Why can’t the wranglers get control of them . . . ?’ Bad memories began to percolate into his conscious thoughts.

Anxiety started to flare through the crowd around Slvasta. Over by the barriers, the sheriffs were trying to combine their teekay before the onrush of hundreds of crazed neuts bearing down on them. The neuts at the front of the rampaging pack were felled as the sheriffs lost discipline and sent spikes of teekay into the animals’ brains, shredding the neural cells. But it took time, and the corpses were immediately swarmed by the rest of the inflamed herd. Several sheriffs broke and sprinted for the relative safety of the buildings on either side of the road.

‘Slvasta, you need to move,’ Javier said.

The crowd around him seemed to be sharing that opinion. People were turning, pressing towards the buildings lining the streets that had been locked up against trouble since first thing that morning. Teekay and boots thumped into locks on sturdy wooden doors. The equally frantic residents and storekeepers inside used their strength and teekay to keep them out.

Slvasta turned and let the alarmed crowd push him along. Once he felt the flow of bodies surging round him, he started to push in the same direction as those heading back along Cranwich Road. The road opened into some sort of square ahead, he remembered; the pressure would ease off and the crowd could disperse down half a dozen alleys and lanes that led away from it.

Behind him, the neuts and mod-apes reached the abandoned barricades. Their weight and speed sent the metal and wood rails crashing to the ground, and hooves sped over them. Slvasta was concentrating on running with the crowd – he could sense the street opening into the small square ahead while flashes of shared ex-sight showed him the torrent of neuts and mod-apes pouring along Knole Street. People were clinging to windowsills to get above them; some had even scaled iron lamp posts, hanging on for dear life as the animals thundered past underneath. He perceived one man drop, to be pummelled under the hooves.

‘Oh, that’s all we need,’ Bethaneve declared.

‘What’s happened?’ Coulan asked.

‘The bastard Meor regiment. They’re coming out of the government buildings. Must have been waiting since last night. Our people missed that.’

‘What in Uracus do they think they’re going to do?’ Javier asked.

‘If the officers are smart, they’ll take out the neuts and mod-apes,’ Coulan said.

‘Those bastards are more likely to kill people for running away,’ Javier said.

‘It doesn’t look as if they’re well organized,’ Bethaneve said. ‘And there are more coming out of the station.’

‘Too late!’

The front of the stampede reached the junction of Cranwich Road. ‘Oh, crudding Uracus!’ Slvasta exclaimed. Over half of the neuts and seemingly most of the mod-apes peeled away to charge along Cranwich Road. The screaming began all around him – high-pitched shrieks and bass roars combining into a wall of sound that hammered against his brain, amplifying the primeval fear that was rising all along the road. The last dregs of civility shattered in that single moment. The crowd became a mob, with everyone looking out for themselves, no matter what the cost.

Slvasta came hurtling out of Cranwich Road into Eynsham Square, a pleasant cobbled area with tall blue-leafed arctan trees lining the small central garden. Stalls with striped canvas canopies defending food and clothes from the sun were clustered together along one side, the vendors fleeing away down side lanes along with the mob.

Then Slvasta saw them, pressed up against the railings round the garden not twenty metres ahead. ‘No,’ he yelled, his mind emitting a burst of horror. Instantly, Bethaneve, Javier and Coulan were querying him, anxious for his personal safety. The image that blasted into his eyes flashed out, shared openly by his distraught mind, imbued with a terrible flood of urgency and fright.

*