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with me, and I’ll stake you to the first week’s rent.”
    â€œWhy would you do something like that for me?” Rebel asked suspiciously. “Just who are you, anyway?”
    â€œI’m … an old acquaintance. A fellow-worker.” He tapped behind one ear, and Rebel saw a small red abrasion circle there. “We persona bums have to stick together, right?”
    â€œI …” Rebel retreated into the folds of her cloak. “Look. I’m sorry. It’s just that people have been taking a lot of interest in my case lately. I didn’t ask for any of it. I don’t want any of it.”
    â€œOkay, then.” He shrugged and turned away.
    Something desperate came tearing up from deep within Rebel then; and she cried, “Wait!” The man turned back. That cautious face. She colored, because she had no idea why she had cried out. To cover, she said, “Maybe I was a little hasty.”
    Another instantaneous shift of expression, and the man laughed heartily. “You crack me up, Sunshine.”
    â€œDon’t call me that!”
    â€œAll right. Eucrasia, then.”
    Her face felt cold and hard. “The name is Rebel,” she said. “Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark.”
    â€œWyeth.” A lopsided grin and a shrug said that that was all the name he had.
    They took a jitney to the tank towns, crammed hip and knee with twenty others, almost too tight to breathe. It carried them to the shadow of the Londongrad cannister, where a cluster of fifty-year-old air tanks floated. They were enormous things, each large enough to hold an entire cannister city’s atmosphere under pressure, and retrofitted with crude airlock and docking facilities. Faint traces of rust edged the locks, where the long whisper of oxygen leakage ghosted over metal.
    â€œJeez, it’s hot in here,” Rebel grumbled. “I should’ve just gone solo in my suit.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” Wyeth asked. Then, when she repeated herself, “Tank towns don’t have magnetic cushions. We’re talking heavy-duty slums here.”
    The jitney pilot slammed into a dock and bawled, “Tank Fourteen!” and they squeezed out.
    The light was dim at the locks and murky beyond. They swam up a crowded corridor, through ramshackle hutches that were no more than pipework frames with corrugated tin sheets for walls. The air was fetid with rotting garbage, stale wine, and human sweat, with a sweet undersmell of honeysuckle. Children shrieked at play, and there was a constant yabber-yab-ber-yabber of voices. Bees hummed as they moved mazily among the flowery vines that overgrew everything. A green rope led up the corridor, and they followed this handway, occasionally grabbing it to twist clear of an oncomer, until it was crossed by an orange rope. They took this deep into the tank.
    A raver came down the rope, and people shrank away from her. Wyeth grabbed Rebel and pulled her out of the way. They slammed noisily against a tin wall, and then the woman was gone and they proceeded up the rope.
    Now and then light spilled from a doorway, or a string of lanterns lined a cluster of informal shops and bars, places where people offered alcohol or other goods from their own homes. Everywhere the vines were thick and lush, with frequent bio-fluorescent blooms. There were sections where the flowers provided the only illumination. “This is awful,” Rebel said.
    Wyeth peered about; as if trying to detect what flaw she saw in his world. “How so?”
    â€œIt’s like a parody of my home. I mean, if you know the biological arts, there’s no excuse for this kind of squalor. Back home, the cities are …”
    â€œAre what?” Wyeth asked.
    But the hard, undeniable truth was that she could not remember. Not a thing. She tried to recall the name of her city, the faces of her friends, her childhood, the kind of life she’d led, and none of it would come. Her