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cities. Carefully chosen people, of course. Smiling, photogenic people in designer clothes, with meek children and cuddly pets.
    Confined to the apartment by her mother, who seemed oddly scared by the whole operation, Jude had spent the morning perched in the window seat, watching the chaos.
    About a quarter of their block were leaving. She watched them lining up two by two, their bags on the ground between their feet for protection, as the wind raced screwed-up newspaper along the SideRide track and kids hung out of windows to spit ineffectually at them or call them traitors.
    Considering all the stuff she’d seen on TV – gardens and rooftop pools and big soft beds with satin pillows – they didn’t look that eager to leave. They were young couples, mostly, without children, so she didn’t know them. Maybe her mother did, but she didn’t seem interested in saying goodbye. Just clattered pans in the kitchen area and scowled at the TV reports as if they were some sort of personal threat to her.
    Nobody in the Bankside had a car, of course. The permit alone cost a decade’s wages. So the Government sent buses, big green or yellow buses driven by smiling fatherly men with neatly trimmed beards. And while the stupidly grinning couples were loading their patched and polished suitcases, and the cameras played across the crumbling concrete they were leaving behind, the riot started.
    A lot of the Bankside residents had just never applied. They liked living somewhere where the police rarely ventured and all the shops still accepted easy-to-steal cash.
    But some had filled in the forms and got back cheery letters saying there was no room for them just yet, or they were a little too far down the waiting list, and maybe they’d like to try again next year?
    Looking back, she could see why. The Cowleys, whose kids wore police monitoring tags as a proud badge of criminality; the Syals, who ran illegal technology out of the disused Tube station, hawking anti-surveillance and top class encryption to anyone rich and paranoid enough to need it. Their next-door neighbour, Maya Keeley, supporting a tribe of loosely related children by cooking up a new variant on PCP in the shower cubicle. Not at all the kind of citizens the wage-slaves wanted in their brave new world.
    It started with squabbles in the bus doorways, raised fists and shouted threats. Her mother had told her to close the curtains, but only in the quiet, automatic way she gave any order she was too tired to enforce. Jude, who knew the rules back to front by that stage, yelled back some garbled assent, and kept watching.
    The bus drivers didn’t want them on board, not without the right paperwork. The knives came out. The drivers started waving their anti-riot aerosols and pretending they had some idea what to do with them. Then the families and friends and whichever gang they’d been buying protection from barged in, and from there it was downhill all the way.
    It wasn’t a bad riot, for its time. Twelve dead, couple of hundred injuries. Couple of shiny new buses used for barbecues. The remaining children had wrung a summer’s worth of fun playing among the charred bodywork. Too old for spaceship and pirate ships, Jude and her friends had colonised the smallest bus, gossiping and swapping pills stolen from their parents’ medicine cabinets.
    But on that day, three stories up, nose pressed to the glass, Jude had come to the conclusion that crowds were a bad thing, and it was probably just as well that, with the Migration and all, there weren’t going to be any more of them.
    Until now.
    There were broad paths between the stalls, marked out with painstaking rows of white stones; but they were solid already, people dodging and squirming and sliding round each other. Clumsy, not used to it, and falling against each other by accident and design, trailing arms and legs and clutching hands. It was like Club Andro on the worst night