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began to waddle back toward the house. Lunae looked ahead once more. She could see the crackle of the weir-wards along the wall, a black-and-silver sparkle. They were intended to keep out intruders, linked as they were to the mansion's blacklight matrix, but they were also designed to keep the occupants inside. An adult would not have been able to crawl under the blacklight sparks, but Lunae was not yet fully grown. She crawled to the very end of the branch and ducked be-neath. The wall was wide enough for her to lie balanced across it. She could hear the snap and sizzle of the weir-wards above her head. She swung her legs around, grasped the edges of the wall, and dropped down.
    It was a much longer drop than she had anticipated and it knocked the breath out of her. She sat down on the curb, momentarily winded. But she was out of the house, and the realization hit her almost as hard as the fall. She had not really meant to escape. She looked back up at the wall. It was smooth and vitrified, with no handholds. If she were to get back into the mansion, she would have to go round to the front gate. The Grandmothers would be furious. Dreams-of-War would grow even colder and icier.

    Lunae thrust these images from her mind and concen-trated on the present. If she went straight back to the house, she would still be punished. She might as well make the most of the experience.
    She scrambled up from the gutter, rearranged her robe, and hurried down the street. Here, she was sur-rounded by the other great houses that she had glimpsed from the tower: sprawling, decaying mansions topped with moldering cupolas, half-gilded, roofs askew, porches slipping into the mass of undergrowth, starred with flow-ers that grew in profusion over what had once been formal gardens. The air was filled with the scent of blooms and rot. Lunae, fascinated, longed to explore, but something held her back. The interiors of the mansions were dark, save for a few. Even though it was still afternoon, lamps burned in some of the upper windows, casting a sickly light out into the foliage.
    At the end of the street, Lunae looked back. She could see the tower room rising above the oaks.
    Ahead, a long street sloped down to become lost in the teeming maze of the lower Peak. The spy-eyes would surely be watching, but perhaps she might see a little, at least, before she was spotted. Lunae hesitated for a moment, but the prospect of investigating the streets that she had only experienced from the interior of a litter was too alluring. She thrust thoughts of the spy-eyes from her mind and ran down the road, heading for the maze.
    Little by little, the mansions gave way to narrower, more crowded streets. The great houses wer&replaced by tenements, rising in tottering columns up from the road-way, covered with rickety balconies filled with vegetation. The tenements looked like great vertical gardens. Birds sang from cages, captive crickets whirred. Crowds of women in the traditional black, red, or jade jackets thronged the streets, wheeling ancient bicycles, leading cats on leashes, carrying mesh shopping bags that bulged with vegetables. No one took any notice of Lunae, who felt happily invisible. That this was clearly just an ordinary af-ternoon for these people made the day even more special. There was a heady, complex smell of spice and shit, smoke and dust. Lunae made her way slowly along the road, pok-ing into baskets filled with seeds, dried snakes, cat food, laundry powder. Then, at a little junction, someone stepped out into her path.
    This person was a small woman, clearly of Sheng ori-gins, with a moon-face and blank black stare.
    Her mouth was slack, releasing a string of spittle. At first, Lunae thought that she was having difficulty in focusing, because the woman seemed blurred and out of phase. But then she realized that everything else in the street was clear.
    "You are different! Who are you?" the woman said, and there was a strange overlay of sound, a