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cannot be the only survivors of the city’s final days.”
    Sol turned away with clicks of barely suppressed anger and frustration.
    The moment was broken by a streak of light across the northern sky, stabbing down at the skystation, like a needle-straight bolt of lightning. Another arrival from the stars, reminding me again of the vastness of what was beyond. There was not just a whole world I had barely seen, but space, the stars, the cosmos. I was not even a speck of dust in the vastness of it all.
    Sol took a swig of the spirits they had been drinking, and visibly calmed.
    “We need to prepare,” she said. “!¡ authority | resolve ¡! We need to be ready, without stirring up panic in the Ipp. Maybe Dodge can help, after all...”
    I studied Sol closely. I had always looked up to her, but now she seemed right on the edge, unpredictable, volatile. I realised then that she was scared, and that did little to help settle my own nerves.
    “!¡ cautious ¡! I heard some of what you were saying,” I said. “Angiere. How can we prepare for that if they turn on Laverne?”
    Sol looked down. “!¡ defeat | frustration ¡! I don’t know,” she said softly.
    “We don’t even know it’s coming here,” said the other woman, Pleasance. She was much quieter than the others, with a hesitant, nervy manner. “We don’t know why they hit Angiere, we don’t know what provoked it. We just don’t know.”
    Her mate, Lucias, hugged her, squeezing her shoulders with his big hands.
    I looked again to the north, the skystation, and remembered my earlier line of thinking. We were – all of us together – not even a dust speck on the face of the cosmos. Tiny. Insignificant. Things happened, on scales we couldn’t even imagine. At best, we were no more than rats, cockroaches, cowering in our little niches, feeding on the scraps of the greater races. We didn’t understand why suddenly someone was trying to stamp on us, or rather, why they had suddenly stamped on Angiere, and why should we? How could we?
    “We don’t know that it’s not coming here, either,” I said. “We might not know why, we might not know when or even whether, but” – I nodded towards Sol, my nest-mother – “it’s what she said: all we can do is prepare, be ready to protect ourselves, or flee, or whatever it is that we’ll end up doing. We might not be in control of events, but we can try to ride them, turn tragedy into opportunity. It’s what we do. It’s what we do well .”
    Callo was nodding. “You see?” she said to Sol. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t let him fall?”
     
     
    L ATER, THERE WERE just four of us, and then Marek and Sol retreated into the villa and I was left alone on the terrace with Callo.
    We stood leaning on the enclosing wall, watching the city lights, the silence between us comfortable. It felt like we already had a bond, forged at the transit station in that brief exchange of pids.
    “There.” She pointed as another bolt of light split the sky, another arrival or departure at the skystation. In daylight you could see the ’station’s towers and gantries, reaching for the stars, but the nightly light-show was always more dramatic.
    We had talked for a long time, so that now it would not be long before the eastern sky was afire with dawn. Slowly, I had built up a picture of what had happened at Angiere – the world beyond the city of Laverne was largely unknown to me, and this evening was one of the first times it had started to take form, like random tiles suddenly falling into place in a mosaic.
    The most deadly strikes on Angiere had come from the sky, beam weapons burning entire blocks to glass, something I did not even know was possible. Squads of grunts had gone in too, snatching community leaders who may or may not have had some involvement in the opposition. The squads were a mix of orphids, craniates and chantras, overseen by watchers and chlicks.
    When Marek had said this earlier, I’d interrupted.