'It's for the safety of the fucking city,' the man in the doorway said.

Al Wilson made flapping motions. 'Let's go, people. We have a lot of work to do.'

He locked the door on their backs and shed Ken Shintaro. He carefully searched the room in case someone had planted a bug. He checked the net, found the announcement about martial law, found another that said that Marisa Bassi would be addressing the city at eight a.m., a third stating that the Permanent Peace Debate had been closed down. This was not war, then. It was a local problem, a heightening of the city's fever. And Zi Lei was caught up in it somehow.

She didn't answer when he called her. All right, he would check all the places in the city that she had shown him, starting with the Permanent Peace Debate. He would find her and help her. He righted everything in the room and took a shower, first hot then cold. As he was dressing, Keiko Sasaki called. She asked him if he had seen Zi Lei and he told her that people had come to his apartment, looking for her.

'They think she's part of the peace movement,' Keiko Sasaki said.

'Well, she is,' he said, thinking of Zi Lei standing on the stage of the theatre and making her humming noise, the audience ranged above her humming too. He was impatient to end this call because he wanted to get out and about and see what was happening, but he didn't know how to do it without arousing suspicion.

'I'm petitioning to have the warrant for her arrest waived,' Keiko Sasaki said. 'It will take some time, though, because almost everyone who's been arrested has someone petitioning on their behalf. If you happen to see her, Ken, if she comes to you asking for help, will you try to keep her out of trouble? Keep her in your room, or somewhere safe, and tell me at once. Tell me if you see her. Will you do that?'

'Yes,' he said, because it seemed simplest to agree. 'I have to go now,' he said, and cut the connection.

He went past the amphitheatre that hosted the Permanent Peace Debate. Peace officers and wardens wearing red armbands were guarding every entrance. At the cafe where he and Zi Lei often ate breakfast together, the man who gave him his cinnamon oatmeal and beaker of coffee told him that he should be careful, they were arresting people all over the city.

'About time,' another customer said.

'We're a democracy,' someone else said. 'We shouldn't arrest someone because we disagree with them.'

Which started one of the noisy debates that the citizens of Paris loved - everyone with contradictory opinions, everyone trying to talk over everyone else. He ate his breakfast, sitting quietly in the middle of the noise. The cafe's customers were still arguing when he left.

He drifted slantwise through the city, checking the places where he had been with Zi Lei. Neighbourhood green markets were besieged by people desperate to buy fresh produce. Many small businesses were closed. Cafes and bars that had stayed open were doing roaring business. Freed from its ordinary routines, the city had a raffish carnival air. Kids chased each other through the vines and broad branches of a huge banyan tree in one of the parks, screaming as they leaped and tumbled, making noises like guns and explosions, dying dramatically in slow motion before scrambling up, reborn, ready to resume the fight. People stood outside doorways talking, passing flasks back and forth. People watched as a man spray-painted traitor in ragged black letters across the door of an apartment on a set-back terrace. Small groups of wardens wearing red armbands stood at the intersections and at the entrances to public buildings, scrutinising every passer-by.

He kept his gaze averted as he passed through checkpoints, trying to look humble and harmless, hiding the hot flame of excitement that burned in his breast. Soon he would be able to shed Ken Shintaro completely and show his true self to these people.

At last his seemingly random wanderings brought him to the compound where the gene wizard Avernus was staying. There was a mutinous crowd in front and peace officers stood in a line across the gate. He asked a woman at the fringe of the crowd what was happening and she told him that Avernus and her gang of peace-lovers had been arrested.

'They won't let us in,' she said, and raised her voice, shouting at the peace officers. 'Show us what those traitors were doing!'

He asked where the traitors had been taken.

'I heard the correctional facility,' a man said.

'That's what they want us to think,' another man said. 'I reckon they stashed them someplace secret. So if it comes down to it they can use them as bargaining chips with the enemy.'

'We'll never make any kind of bargain with the enemy,' the woman said, bristling.

'It's definitely somewhere outside the city,' a third man said. 'I have a cousin who works in the warehouses. He saw them being loaded into a couple of rolligons.'

The woman said, 'We should paint a big target out on the plain and put her and all the other peace-lovers in the bullseye and see how they like it.'

Ken Shintaro edged away from the small crowd and was walking back through the city when at exactly eight o'clock his spex rang. A civic alarm. Everyone around him had stopped and was putting on spex. When he fitted his own pair over his eyes, he found that Marisa Bassi was making the same speech on every channel. The mayor talked about the vote that had united the city in defiance against the invaders. He talked about the necessity of rounding up troublemakers for the sake of the city's safety and the inevitable loss of certain individual rights during this period of tension. He asked everyone to stay calm and do their duty by carrying on with their lives and their work.

'I know many of you want me to take the fight to our enemy. I say, let them leave now, and we will not follow them or attempt to exact any retribution. But if they do not leave at once, they should prepare to face the consequences. They should prepare to face a people united in their determination to fight to the death in the name of freedom.'

A group of wardens started clapping at the end of this. He wondered if he should clap too, but everyone else, on the street and in the cafe under a big sweet-chestnut tree, were resuming their conversations or walking on to wherever it was they had been going. So he walked on too, and soon realised that he was being followed by the man who had stood in the doorway of his room while it had been searched.

The man made no attempt to conceal what he was doing, walking about twenty metres behind him, stopping when he stopped, moving on when he moved on. His spex identified the man as Ward Zuniga, thirty-one, a construction worker, no partner, a very small cloud of friends.

He sat in a park and passed some time reviewing his plans, finding nothing out of order. Ward Zuniga sat nearby, got up when he got up, followed him to a cafe and sat nearby while he ate noodles, followed him back to the apartment building, up the walkway to the door of his room.

'I'm on to you,' Ward Zuniga said. 'I know what you're doing.'

'What am I doing?'

'Why are you smiling? What's so funny?'

'I suppose I am excited by what happened today. Like everyone else.'

'You? You're not like everyone else.'

'I'm not?'

He could kill the man and drag his body into his room, but what then?

He would have to go into hiding, and it would be very difficult to move around the city because people would be looking for him.

'You're an outsider. A collaborator,' Ward Zuniga said.

He realised that the man was talking about Ken Shintaro, from Rainbow Bridge. He felt almost sorry for him - his reek of testosterone, his unfocused aggression, the pathetic scrap of beard dabbed on his chin.

'I understand,' he said. 'You must be wary of strangers at a time like this.'

'Are you shitting me? Because if you are, it'll come right back at you.'

They stared at each other. It was one of those moments when things can go down either of two different roads. Then Ward Zuniga pointed with his forefinger, right in Ken Shintaro's face, and said, 'I'll be seeing you.'

Ken Shintaro blinked and stepped back, hands raised to his chest in a defensive gesture.

Ward Zuniga smiled. 'Yes sir. I have plenty of time for you,' he said, and turned on his heel and floated off along the walkway.

Later, after midnight, he woke to a faint scratching at his door. It was Zi Lei. She fell into his arms and while he held her he looked over her shoulder, checking the walkway and the courtyard below. No one was about.

'You don't have any clothes on,' she said, after he had pulled her inside and shut the door.

'I was asleep.'

'Oh, I don't mind. I'm above such things,' she said.

'You're shaking,' he said, and snapped the tab on a beaker of green tea and gave it to Zi Lei, then pulled on his trousers and sat with her on the floor.

She held the beaker in both hands, taking small quick sips, and told him that she had known at soon as the vote was called that there would be trouble, that her mission had marked her out, that she must hide. She'd spent all day in a storage room beneath the building, waiting until everyone was asleep before sneaking out to find him. She was a spy now, a real spy, she said. The Edda were in direct contact with her; they had implanted themselves in her head. She had shed her birth identity. She was in the process of becoming something else. She had changed, and the city was changing too. Soon everything would change, she said, then yawned unselfconsciously and said that she had much to do but first she had to rest, she was so very tired.

'I know,' he said, and took the beaker of tea from her and set it down.

Zi Lei yawned again and began to tell him about the new solar order, a sleepy but steady and unpunctuated flow of words circling around and around until he leaned forward and seized her and did the one thing that he knew would shut her up: kissed her full on the lips.

She gave a squeak of surprise, then yielded. They leaned against each other, his face on her shoulder, her face on his. Her exquisite trembling slowly relaxed and he felt something wet his bare chest -tears. She had a rank but not unpleasant odour like old sweat, the comforting smell of the room where he had practised day after day with his brothers.

'I've been so afraid,' she said.

'You don't have to be afraid now.'

'The truth - it's such a burden.'

'I know.'

He felt a tender swelling in his chest, a mix of pity and helpless love. He knew that he had to use her to help complete his mission, but told himself that what he was about to do was for her own good. Besides, he couldn't keep her here. If Ward Zuniga found out, he'd have to kill the man, and then there would be real trouble.

He looked into her face. The hypnotic he'd stirred into the green tea had done its work. She was half-asleep, her pupils huge black pools.

'You're strange,' she said. 'A strange man. Not like the others.'

'We aren't like the others.'

'No . . .'

He told her that she must do something for him, and she sleepily agreed, opening her mouth like an obedient child, letting him place the capsule on her tongue, swallowing it. He massaged her throat to ease it down, told her that he had to go out for a moment, she could sleep now.

'Hold me first,' she said.

He gathered her up in his arms and laid her in the sleeping niche, then went out and woke AI Wilson. Betraying her would earn him trust and kudos, and besides, it was for her own good. She would be safe in prison, and with a little luck she would be held in the same place as Avernus and all the others from the Permanent Peace Debate.

7.

When the guards unlocked the door of her cell, an hour before breakfast, Macy was already awake and working through her second set of sit-ups. She didn't ask the two women, who waited just outside the door while she stepped into her coveralls and slippers, where they were taking her. By now, after six weeks of incarceration, she was used to being roused at odd hours of the day or night, being taken to the bare little office for yet another round of questioning. Long sessions with different pairs of interrogators. Wearing a tight MRI cap so that they could tell if she ever deviated from the truth while they forked through their interminable lists of questions.

Macy always tried her very best to stick to the truth. There was no point in lying because she had nothing to hide. She'd spoken at length with Avernus about her life on Earth and how she had ended up in exile in the Outer System, and during the interrogation sessions she was led through that story over and over again. She talked about her childhood, how she'd run away from the Church of the Divine Regression and ended up in Pittsburgh, how she'd joined the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. She talked about how she'd been selected for the construction crew, her training, her work on the biome at Rainbow Bridge. The whole sorry saga of Ursula Freye's murder. Her defection, her life in East of Eden until she'd escaped, her life with the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan . . .

The only time she refused to answer her interrogators' questions was when they touched on Newton Jones and the other people in what had become her extended surrogate family. She refused to speculate or comment on their beliefs, whether they supported the peace movement or whether they supported Marisa Bassi and every other true and righteous Outer who wanted to drive the ships from Earth out of the systems of Saturn and Jupiter. If they wanted to know anything at all about anyone in the clan, she told her interrogators, they should damn well go talk to them.

They asked her about Loc Ifrahim, too, just as they no doubt asked him about her. Macy told them what she knew as dispassionately as possible. Trying to stick to the facts, trying not to colour or distort them with her deep dislike for the man. Going over everything again and again, until she began to doubt that any of it was real; until it seemed as remote as a story she'd once experienced in a virtuality. She was never threatened with physical violence, the food wasn't bad, she exercised as best she could in her cell, read books on the little slate they'd given her, and tried to stay alert. But it was getting harder and harder to keep the numb languor of jail at bay.

When she'd been arrested, she'd thought that she would be subjected to a show trial, but that didn't seem likely now. And Although she supposed that Newt and others in the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan must be petitioning for her to be charged or released, she doubted that they would be successful. Her guards let slip that Marisa Bassi and Paris's council were busy with preparations for war and the problems created by sabotage to the city's farms and its net. It seemed that she and Loc Ifrahim were being kept in limbo, bargaining chips whose value was dubious and might never be tested.

The last couple of sessions had been a little different, in a spooky, creepy kind of way. Her two interrogators, a man and a woman this time, had been as polite as ever, but instead of going over the old ground yet again they'd asked her if she had any knowledge of a long list of sabotage techniques and had showed her pictures of two or three hundred people, a few she knew, most she didn't, asking her the same questions about each and every one before dismissing her. Now, as she was escorted into the brightly lit office, she felt a small shock of recognition when she saw who was waiting for her. Sada, lounging in one of the sling chairs, smiling up at her, flapping a hand towards another chair, telling her to sit.

Macy sat. A small bone-white ceramic knife lay unsheathed on the table between her and Sada, haft and blade all one piece. Perhaps it was there to tempt Macy into trying to do something foolish. Or to remind her of what might happen to her if she refused to cooperate. She did her best to ignore it.

Sada studied her and said, 'You look a lot better than I thought you would.'

'How did you think I would look?'

'You look fit and well. Rested, even. That's good.'

'And you look like a hundred klicks of rough road. Maybe we should swap places. You look like you could do with some downtime and you can get plenty of that here.'

Sada stretched in her chair, as unselfconscious as a cat. 'I could do with some rest. I've just come back from a long, hard trip.'

'You'd like it here. I've been in jails a lot worse. I wouldn't even call this a jail, really. It's more like a hotel where they don't let you have the keys to your room.'

'A long, hard trip,' Sada said again. 'Working on something that will make sure that everything comes out the way it's supposed to. Working for the future, you might say.'

She was dressed in a white vest laced to the tops of her small breasts, white leggings. Her hair cropped short. Small iron rings sewn along the arc of her left eyebrow. A tattoo of the constellation Hydrus sprawled across her cheek. She really did look exhausted, her skin chalky, her eyes darkly pouched and red-rimmed, and she looked absurdly young, too. A child in fancy dress, smiling expectantly at Macy, no doubt hoping to be asked where she'd been, what she'd been doing. Macy let the silence stretch. She wasn't going to play that game.

'I can't really tell you about it, but you'll see soon enough,' Sada said.

'Everyone will. I don't feel guilty about how things ended up, you know. Because this is how things are meant to be. We're part of something bigger than our little stories, Macy. Something huge and strange and wonderful.'

'If you came here to justify what you did to me, tell me that you had to do it for the greater good, I'd as soon skip the coffee and go back to my cell,' Macy said. She said it with some force, but without anger. She didn't feel any anger towards Sada, only sorrow. Sorrow that the girl had lost her way. That she had been caught up in someone else's deeply dark and dangerous fantasy.

Sada picked up the knife, turned it back and forth. Its blade was hooked like a velociraptor's claw. Skinny rainbows slid along its cutting edge, which was no doubt sharpened to the width of an atom.

'Why I'm here,' the girl said, 'Marisa Bassi has a favour to ask of you.'

'You're working for Marisa Bassi now?'

'We have always worked with Marisa Bassi. He is a potent instrument.'

'I've been asked to cooperate by all kinds of people, Sada. Now they've sent you. I'll tell you what I've been telling everyone else. I had nothing to do with the deaths of your friend or Colonel Garcia, and you have no evidence to the contrary. So charge me and let me stand trial, or let me go.'

'It isn't only about poor Janejean now. They say you're a spy. You're suspected of espionage. Working against the city.'

'They can say anything they like about me, but that doesn't make it true.'

Macy did her best not to flinch as Sada leaned forward. The girl rested the point of the knife on the tabletop and turned it back and forth.

'You're accused of espionage. And because habeas corpus has been suspended they don't ever have to let you go if they don't want to. They can keep you here for ever without having to charge you. But I can help you, if you'll let me.'

'Marisa Bassi asked for my help once before,' Macy said. 'He asked me to tell the truth about life in Greater Brazil. And I did. Maybe it wasn't what he wanted to hear, because it wasn't full of stories of exploitation and slavery and horror. It wasn't useful propaganda. But it was the truth.'

'You said that you've been in worse places than here,' Sada said.

'Once or twice.'

'Talk about those places, Macy. Talk about life on Earth and this time tell the whole truth,' Sada said, lightly stabbing the tabletop at the end of each sentence. 'Explain what it's really like, living under the thumb of a self-selecting elite. Tell the truth about the repression and cruelty. How ordinary people are treated like slaves. How free speech and free thought are ruthlessly suppressed.'

'I've already told the truth,' Macy said. 'If they haven't taken it down, you can look it up on the net.'