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lips pressed against mine, firm and cool, over in an instant. I flinched, surprised, and clicked, “!¡ fear | excitement ¡!”
    I reached for her but she had turned, stepped away, and almost before I could react she was pausing at the entrance to the villa, dipping her head to me in parting, and then she was gone.
    I could taste her on my lips still. I could close my eyes and feel the pressure of her mouth on mine.
    I went down through the caverns and found my way to a sleeping chamber; for what little remained of the night, I slept on my rock shelf and dreamed of the woman from Angiere.
     
     
    I WAS WOKEN by Immy, one of the pups I sometimes looked after at Villa Mart Three. Small hands on my shoulders, like pincers or birds’ claws, shaking me vigorously. I woke, shards of dream slipping away, and saw Immy’s sharp little face looming too close to mine.
    “!¡ urgency | importance ¡! Mama Sol wants you,” she shrilled.
    “Huh? !¡ alarm ¡! What... what is it?” Visions flooded in of swarming black flies destroying everything in their wake, of beams from the sky that turned all below to molten glass.
    “!¡ dismissive ¡! Has a job for you. Lazy Dodge, silly Dodge.”
    I found Sol in the main chamber, sharing a mug of tea with a man I vaguely knew as a street trader from the Pennysway Ipp.
    Sol broke off from her conversation when I arrived, and said, “Got a job for you, boy.” She produced a fold of paper, sealed with wax. “Run this over to the Loop. It’s for Boss Frankhay. Only for his eyes, eh?”
    A message. Running errands. I looked at it, took it, tucked it into the front pocket of my breeches. Was this punishment for my foolishness the night before? Was it some kind of test, to see how I would react? Was it the first step in preparing for the worst?
    There was no way of telling. All I could do was run the message, do what I was told, trust that Sol was doing things right and not just trying to remind me of my place.
     
     
    T HE L OOP WAS to the west of our Ipp, just past the centre of the city. It was a hazardous journey at the best of times, a cut through territory that was truly alien, where you could never be sure of what you would encounter, what rules to follow, what risks there might be. But on this day, it was even worse: the tensions in the city had reached levels I had never before encountered.
    I took a circuitous route out of the nest, hoping to bump into the visitors from Angiere, but I did not see them. Ruth and Divine were in the foreyard, drinking tea and making doe eyes at each other. I ignored their almost subliminal click exchanges. I didn’t need to know.
    Divine waved me over to join them, but I shook my head. “!¡ self-important ¡! Business to be taken care of.”
    They smirked into each other’s faces, and for an instant I wondered how others saw me: heir apparent or messenger boy, figure of fun. My head was all over the place, I realised: up one moment, down the next. I wasn’t usually so erratic.
    I passed out of the Ipp with no trouble, through the checkpoint and into Cheapside E, the site of my first night run, when I had so nearly been caught and betrayed the whole nest with my sloppiness.
    Soon, I was crossing the line into Central, a boundary marked by a humped bridge over a wide canal. The duty grunt scanned my wrist and peered into my face: my pids said I was me today, and cleared for all central zones outside the hours of curfew.
    The grunt paused for far too long, and I realised it was communicating with someone or something that was not there: its superiors, or their security systems.
    I kept my smarts, stayed calm. I didn’t look around for escape routes, because I’d already done that as a matter of course, on approaching the checkpoint.
    Eventually, the grunt clicked me through, with a big sigh of caustic gases that made my eyes sting.
    Just off the bridge, I had to stop. My senses were being assaulted. I was dizzy and dazzled and my head was spinning.