STANDING ON THE GRANITE steps of the Governor’s Residence, John tugged at the white cuffs of his new suit. It was past six by his watch, and the Magulf sky was already starting to darken, draining the color of the stone between the shining yellow windows. He took a step forward when the doors of the residence swung in, expecting the figure who blocked his way to be some Borderer domestic. Then he recognized the governor’s face.

“Father John—come in! I won’t shake hands…” The governor was wearing an apron. His large hands were floured. “I’m in the middle of cooking dinner. One of my hobbies. Straight through to the patio. Help yourself to the drinks. You’ll have to excuse me—I’ve got onions frying.” Wagging a finger, he left.

John walked across the hallway and a wide, sparsely furnished room. The far end, framed by curtains that lifted and fell in the wind, gave onto a patio, a circle of wicker seats, and a drinks trolley. As yet, no one else had arrived. He took the steps down into the garden, where a pathway led through clouds of rhododendron towards a fan of light and the pock of tennis balls. The man playing was bald, tall, and thin, clumsy yet quick in his movements. At the other side of the net a machine hissed and tumbled as it lobbed, returned.

“Thirty love, four games to three, final set,” it intoned, trundling back to the line. The man briefly raised his racket to John in acknowledgment, then hunkered down to await the next serve, his bare skull gleaming under the court’s floodlights, his cheeks forming deep hollows. His eyes were brown.

John sat on a bench outside the ball buffer and watched the game unfold. There had been evenings like this at the playing fields across the road from home in Hemhill, when he’d sat and watched Hal serve, run, volley, win…But there was something odd, he realized, about the Borderer’s hands.

He waited for the match to finish; it was won by the machine against serve. Laughing, the man leaped over the net and, gravely ironic, shook the machine by the claw. John heard the clink of metal on metal.

“That’s six-three. I must be losing my touch.”

The man sat down at the other end of John’s bench, still breathless. Inside the court, the machine proceeded to collect the balls from the troughs.

“You’re here for the dinner tonight?” John asked, wondering why no one had ever thought to make the lydrin implant show itself the way the iris-bleaching pigment did for Europeans. “I’m John Alston—a priest. I work on Gran Vía.”

“Call me Ryat.” His fingers clicked. At the place where the metal of his hands met his arms just above the wrists, the flesh had scarred and melted. “I was involved in supplying one of the main contracts for the kelpbeds at Medersa. I imagine that’s why Owen Price has me here tonight. The token—is that the word?—the token Borderer. Although I gather that a girl who works on the net is coming too.” The hands slid together with a sound like knives. He stood up. “I must change.”

The garden was fully dark now. Away from the shelter of the windbreaks, the rhododendrons bowed and swayed. The two men passed the rim of a swimming pool rippling red as blood and entered the large changing hut beyond.

“Where do you live?” John asked as Ryat undressed.

“Mokifa. You know it?” Ryat balled up his clothes and tossed them into the disposer. His body was brown and well muscled but, like Nuru’s, the healthy flesh was stretched over knobbed joints and a thin, angular frame. John studied Ryat’s left arm for an implant scar, but there was no obvious sign.

“I’ve never been inside,” John said. “I assumed that I wouldn’t be welcome.”

“And you have better things to do with your time than worry about bereket—a few rich Borderers?”

“If you put it like that.” John shrugged. Ryat turned on a cubical shower. Even after six months in the clinic with the doctor examining Borderers, it was odd to see the clean, un-puckered line of a spine.

“And you know about Kushiel?” Ryat asked over the clatter of the water. The bar of soap, guided by metal fingers, slid, foaming, over his belly and thighs.

“I entered it once by accident.”

Ryat turned off the shower and stepped out, shaking the water from his pointed fingers. Throwing damp towels into the disposer after drying himself, he reached into his locker, withdrew a small syringe, raised a pinch of flesh, and inserted the invisibly thin needle into his arm. Lydrin. So that was how. “On some nights before the rain,” he said, “when the humidity is high, I stand at my window and watch Kushiel send great upward lights into the sky.” He began to dress. “I’m sure one day it will have to be dismantled…”

“Even when it was built,” John said, “it must have been too ambitious. A waste of money and land.”

Ryat inspected himself in the mirror. Glancing over his shoulder, his face crinkled around a grin. “But there’s a pattern, isn’t there?” He straightened his tie. “The way things proceed here in the Endless City. It’s not the ungoverned chaos that some people imagine…”

They walked back around the pool towards the lights of the house. From the patio, carried on the wind, came the tinkle of glasses, the hum of voices.

Laurie approached, wearing a long blue dress. She nodded at Ryat and drew John away.

“You know who that is?”

“Ryat. We met at the tennis courts.”

Her eyes were their natural green tonight, but they still seemed closed off, covered by a layer. A gritty wind was picking up. The guests retired inside. They sat for dinner at a long table in a high room where the windows looked out across the Dustbowl towards the Northern Mountains, jagged and distant against a crimson sky. There was Jacques Montrel, a visitor from mainland Halcycon S.A. There was the deputy manager of the Bab Mensor shuttleport; John recalled the face. And Tim Purdoe, looking oddly lumpy in a suit instead of his usual tweed jacket, as if he had the thing on underneath. And Cal Edmead, Price’s deputy, who had introduced Mister Mero at Trinity Gardens what now seemed a long time ago.

“As soon as I saw the skies here, I thought—late Turner!” the governor said when the main course was finished and dessert came. He swooped around the table to pass out the dishes with his own big hands. “Swirling reds, oranges, golds. Laurie, would you see to the light over there?”

Laurie folded her napkin and stood up. She touched the room controls, and a big canvas loomed out from a paneled wall, showing a ship on a blood-red sea awash with bodies. The cream jug was passed.

Jacques Montrel, who sat opposite the governor, was obviously very senior in the Halcycon hierarchy—and made politely sure that everyone knew it—but he was also gray-haired, thin-faced, tired, and stooped as the bones hardened around his implants, a gaunt presence near the end of his time. “Tell me, Father John,” he said in a near-whisper. “How do you manage with the Sacrament?”

“The packs are presealed, so I never actually touch the wafers.”

“And there’s no risk? Your parishioners don’t object?”

“No.”

A brief silence followed. Mozart played faintly in the background.

“The days,” Tim Purdoe said, “when people had to go around wearing hoods and special suits are long gone.”

“I suppose,” Montrel said, “that that is progress. But don’t you think we should aim to provide recombinant viral implants for all Borderers as well?” Slowly, he raised his trembling glass and sipped. His eyes were red-rimmed, and moisture had made trails down the furrows of his cheeks. He glanced up the table. “Mister Ryat, you must have a different understanding of this. I mean, living in the Endless City…”

Ryat smiled. “What you are really asking me is whether I’d like to become a European.”

“Would you? No”—Montrel smiled and corrected himself, the wattles of his neck sucking in—“of course not. That isn’t what I mean, even if it really were possible. And you, Miss Kalmar?”

Laurie shook her head. “The reasons implant technology came about,” she said, “had more to do with keeping out the great migrations than combating the spread of new disease.”

Montrel gave a gray nod. His breath whistled. “And now?”

“Nothing’s changed really, has it?” she said. “The only surprise is that we Borderers have survived and adapted, that the weather and the new diseases haven’t killed us all.”

The governor leaned forward briskly in his chair. “Of course Laurie’s right,” he said. He smiled, gazing upon his Turner. “There was a time when people feared that humanity would be taken over by machines. What they didn’t expect was that machines would grow and expand inside us…”

The guests left the table. The music shifted to Chopin, rumbling from the keys of a piano, and doors opened, leading to a castellated terrace. White awnings flapped overhead. From here you could see north across most of the Zone, the lights of an orderly checkerboard. A few veetols were hovering at the shuttlebase: for a moment, they looked like twinkling stars. Beyond the Endless City was a well of darkness.

Montrel had been helped into a silver frame—a sleeker version of Felipe’s leghelpers, but with support for the arms and back as well. He was talking to a few listeners about a trip across the globe to FarEast and Australasia where, as in Europe, the climate still held. Strange customs, strange people—his voice amplified now by the machine he was in—and, beyond in the dusty fringes, even stranger versions of the Endless City.

As John walked past Montrel to where Tim was leaning on the parapet, he caught the same stale papery smell of death that had filled the backrooms he’d once visited in Yorkshire.

“I know, John.” Tim waved a hand. “You’re going to ask me about all those tests.”

John nodded, looking out, resting his elbows on the stone, breathing in the rich, living air of the Magulf.

“I’ve done the lot,” Tim said.

John turned to him. “You have?”

“You could look a little less surprised.”

“And?”

“You were right about the koiyl. Two of the five leaves you gave me contain significant levels of strontium 90, and traces of cesium 137 and plutonium 239. I found the isotopes in some of those tissue samples you sent me, too—although you didn’t really give me the right kind, or tell me enough about the donors. But I imagine they’re the ones who have the koiyl-chewing habit, or who absorbed the isotopes from their mothers. There was one case with a high concentration in the gut. Not a sample—I think it was on a pink card.”

“That wasn’t from the clinic,” John said. “It was from the incinerator at El Teuf…” Looking out across the lights of the Zone, he was thinking of Daudi, comatose. And of the woman he’d tried to treat with cytotoxic drugs, her lush, jet-black skin paling under the bloom of a parasitic growth. And of Martínez, and the way Kailu had looked at him in that hallway off the Cruz de Marcenado.

The other guests were going back inside now to escape the rising wind.

“Of course,” Tim added, squinting against a billow of dust, “this isn’t proof. And there are bound to be other factors involved—a genetic predisposition to the disease, perhaps a chemical or viral trigger.” He shrugged. “We could simply be witnessing some kind of random cluster…”

“There’s nothing damaging about the leaf itself?”

“It does have a clever mix of neuropeptides, so I suppose you could make a nerve poison from it if you wanted. But that’s not what’s happening. The problem is definitely the strontium 90.”

“What do we do? Put in more work to prove what we already know? Publish something on the net?”

Tim laughed and shook his head. “John, I remember asking you what you were going to do with the truth when you had it. Well, now you do. And you know what they’ll say back in Europe: Why don’t you just tell the Gogs to stop chewing that beastly koiyl?”

“It’s not that easy. The whole point about the leaf is that it’s simple and safe. The alternatives are alcohol, opiates, expensive tubes, even encephaline, and there have been cases of mass poisoning—”

“I know, John. I analyzed it. Your average Gog wouldn’t believe there’s a danger anyway. It’s not like those two here…” Tim nodded over to where Laurie and Ryat still stood outside, talking. John could tell from the quick way they shrugged and gestured that they were speaking Borderer. “But what do the rest of them out there know about myeloid leukemia, John? The ones who work the phosphate plants and pour our drinks and hand-paint our Christmas baubles?”

“They have this generalized word. Bludrut—but that covers anemia, hepatitis D.”

“It would be just another Zone-based campaign. More un-watched satellite time, the bloody Outers telling them what to do again. You try explaining how the remnants of some forgotten war could affect the Magulf now.”

“Is that what you think the source is? A bomb? A weapon?”

“Here.” Tim reached into the breastpocket of his lumpy suit. “I brought the main card you gave me from your doctor. I’ve updated it as best I can. You can read it yourself.”

John stared at it. One little wedge of plastic.

Tim flicked the card with his thumb. Waiting.

John took it. “Okay,” he sighed. “I’ll speak to Price. And I’ll play down how helpful you’ve been, Tim. That’s what’s worrying you, isn’t it?”

“You never know what turn these things’ll take. I’m not supposed to use my facilities for private research.”

“Tim, you’re the Chief Medical Officer.”

“Yeah, and I’m CMO because I’ve learned how to keep my nose clean.” He managed a smile. “And I’ll still be here after you’ve gone. But fuck it, John. You go for it…” He gestured through the open doors at the room where the guests mingled, the lights glowed, a piano played. “I mean, what are we doing here otherwise? What’s it about, eh?”

“That’s right, Tim.”

John turned and went inside. Conveniently, the governor was standing alone. John walked over to him.

“Mister Price.”

“Call me Owen.”

“I’d like to speak to you.”

The governor steered John to a sofa in an alcove, and they sat down. The man leaned forward, broad shoulders hunched, elbows on knees, nodding, listening, swirling a big balloon glass of brandy and asking brief clarifying questions as John explained about the leukemia, the koiyl, the tests that indicated radioactive isotopes. And, yes, Owen Price did know about the koiyl leaf, its popularity…

“It’s not often,” he said finally when John had finished, “that there’s a simple answer to a problem in the Magulf.”

John studied him. Every day, he supposed, he was presented with problems, solutions, conflicts of priority, disasters posing as triumphs. If you rose high enough in Halcycon S.A. to get to be governor of a zone, you probably learned to forget that there were simple answers to anything.

“I’ll tell you what it’s like, Father,” the governor continued, with the air of confiding a great secret. “People come here, and they look around at what happens in the Zone and what goes on outside it, and they generally reach some conclusion. We all think that we’re getting it wrong in one way or another. A lot say we should pull out of the Magulf entirely. Just trade with the Borderers for what we need and leave them to get on with it. It’s mostly phosphates, ores—raw materials that we could find new ways to recycle or create if the pressure in Europe got tight enough…”

He downed the last of his brandy and leaned back. Around them, music played, voices rose and fell.

“That’s supposed to be the whole basis of our society, isn’t it?” he said. “Don’t exploit, don’t mine, don’t hack, don’t fell. Grow, nurture, reuse, make the best of what’s left of the world…And then we trickle money and aid and investment into the Endless City. Just enough to unbalance things, never enough to really bring about a change. If we left. Left them to get on with their lives…” He shook his head. “But we’re afraid to do that, too. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? We’re afraid of the Borderers. And we envy them. Like Jacques over there. Such a waste.”

John nodded, and said nothing.

“How sure are you of this blood-cancer link, Father?” he asked. “Where’s the koiyl grown? Do you know where the radiation is coming from?”

“I understand it’s harvested in sheltered valleys up in the Northern Mountains. I would expect—”

The governor raised a hand. “Let’s not speculate, Father. So you’re saying we could save lives by stopping the trade of koiyl—or at least by stopping the supply from the contaminated area?”

“Exactly.”

“Still, you’ve admitted that big gaps remain in what you know…” He gazed sadly at his empty brandy glass. “And I can tell you from bitter personal experience that common sense and reasonable evidence are never enough.” He sighed and raised his handsome, wide-set silver eyes to John.

“You’re telling me I should give this up?”

The governor shook his head. “I simply want you to be aware of what you’re up against, Father. You really do need to find out more about the trade routes, the local supply—above all, what exactly the source of this contamination is. If you can point to that, I think we may be starting to get somewhere…” He levered himself up from the sofa. “You can of course continue to use my people to pursue your researches. But please be discreet. You must understand that a lot of Borderer goodwill can be lost if we meddle thoughtlessly in these areas. And do keep me informed. It would be counterproductive for any of this to get out in the wrong way. Have a quiet word with Cal Edmead over there when you feel the need…”

The governor turned, raised his hand, and headed off.

The voices were louder now. The air felt tired, talked-out. John stopped a drinks trolley as it tinkled by and grabbed a brandy. He had to admire the way that the governor had dealt with him. Even living in the Endless City, John realized that he still kept looking towards the Zone, hypnotized by its aura of power.

He got up and wandered around the room, looking to speak to Laurie Kalmar. But she’d already left.

It was too late to go back to the presbytery that night. Lying on the bed in the guestroom that he was given, he breathed the intrusively clean air and waited, even here, for the pleading white figures to emerge, the trailing hands and faces. But tonight, for the first time in many weeks, they didn’t come.

He awoke just as the windows were letting in the first light of morning. He lay for a while watching the sky redden. The carpets were soundlessly thick as he went out along the empty corridors, and he startled a Borderer maid who was leading a linen-stacked trolley. Rubbing nervously at her implant, she directed him around a corner, through a doorway, and down a narrow flight of stairs.

He opened cupboards in the kitchen below, peered under the lids of tureens and jars, and wandered amid the hanging meats and cheeses in the coldroom until he found soft wheaten bread on the marble shelves, a knife, a plate, a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice, salted and unsalted butter, numberless varieties of marmalade and jam. He ate breakfast at the scrubbed wooden table, then set about finding Laurie Kalmar’s address on the kitchen screen.

One of the middle-rankers, she lived on a street half a kilometer from the governor’s house. There was no birdsong as he walked down the sloping drive through the gardens of the Governor’s Residence, which seemed odd amid the scent of damp earth and the flowers. He looked up at the sky, which was a bright early-morning Magulf pink, but circling caroni birds were absent, somehow discouraged from the Zone.

Blackberry Avenue. Hazel Oak Road. Whoever had christened these tight little grids of interchangeable bungalows, alien and gray-white under the seething Magulf sky, must have been exercising a dry humor. And All Saints Drive, with the spire of the similarly named Zone church showing at the end. Number 28—but for Laurie’s battered van sticking out among the parked lines of clean and barely driven Elysians—was like all the rest, with a narrow facade fronted by the same square of tough low-maintenance grass.

The door clicked open when he spoke his name. He stepped into a hall that was the size of a cupboard. The air smelled of tubes and dust and breadcrumbs. Faintly, too, of Borderer.

“I’ll be there in a minute…” A refrigerator door banged, and Laurie stood barefoot in a faded red dressing gown. “You stayed on? I saw you talking to the governor. You got what you wanted last night?”

“Not at all, really.” He followed her into the kitchen. It was also tiny, and had obviously been designed by someone with a tidy mind. He unstuck a half-drunk mug from a stool to sit down. “But Tim’s done all the tests for me on the leaves now. I’m a great deal wiser.”

Laurie sneezed, rummaged in the pocket of her dressing gown, and blew her nose. She sneezed again. “I’m sorry.” She sniffed and waved her handkerchief. “I get like this if I’ve been near someone who’s just come over from Europe, like…” She thought about sneezing again, changed her mind. “Like Montrel. Didn’t he seem pathetic?”

John shrugged. “Isn’t lydrin supposed to stop any reaction?”

“I wish it did.” She pocketed her handkerchief. “Do you want some coffee?” She turned on the grinder. Dirty plates jingled and rattled. She gave him a cup, and he touched the handle and watched as the brownish fluid began to heat and swirl.

“So…” She cleared a space and sat down across the cluttered counter from him. “Tell me what happened.”

She watched and listened as he talked, and blew grayish tubesmoke through her slightly red-tipped nose.

“I don’t think I’ll get much more out of Tim for a while,” John said finally. “And the governor seems to regard the leaf as just some extra problem—another way of rocking the boat. He said I should obtain more information about where the contaminated leaf is grown. And exactly what the source of radioactivity is. Which makes sense. I mean, how much do you know about this, Laurie?”

She waved her hands. “Koiyl wasn’t commonly used where I came from. If you were old, in pain, you might…But my mother said it was a bad, disgusting habit.”

“You’ve never tried it?”

“Is that why you came here? Because you thought—”

“Laurie.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think anything. I knew you were interested. I just wanted to talk.”

She gazed at him for a moment over the empty mugs, her chin cupped in her hand. “I suppose I could help you look in the net. Do you have the card Tim gave you?”

While she went to change, he cleared a space on the sofa in the lounge and sat down. Amid all the mess, the only thing in the room that seemed actively used was the screen by the window, which had several of what looked like gauzy stars drifting inside it. He could sometimes admire the chaos that other people created around them—all that life—but the scattered tube stubs and empty glasses and mugs gleaming dully in the reddish light here were too impersonal. It looked and smelled a little like the morning after someone else’s party. He stood up and went over to the window. Across next door’s wire fence, the stained sun-awning that some hopeful expat had erected over the patio flapped uselessly in the breeze.

Laurie reemerged. She seemed to have an infinite supply of unironed skirts of faded navy, with cream and white blouses to go with them. Outside, the Zone was at last showing signs of wakefulness. Vans and cars and cyclists swished past. Yawning, morning-robotic people ambled along the pavements. Laurie and John joined them. She walked quickly, chewing at her lip, not noticing anyone she passed. She worked at one of the big annexes bridge-linked to the main admin block where John attended his dreary subcommittees, a large white cube with sunken black windows like the pips on a die. Inside, through the tickling barrier that kept out the Magulf air, silver-eyed people yawned at desks, scratched, gazed absently, or chatted into screens. Laurie headed between the desks and down some steps, along a windowless corridor. No one said hello.

He asked, “Do many other Borderers work here?”

“A few,” she said, opening a door into an office, “if you count the maintenance staff.”

The office was as neat inside as her bungalow was messy, although just as tiny. Hardly an office at all, more a box with one wall occupied by the shimmering neutral standby gray of a very large screen. Otherwise, there was only a desk and two chairs; no notepads or calendars or cabinets or scraps of paper. Unlike the rest of the world, people who worked the net really had got used to doing everything on computer.

Laurie fed the card he’d given her, the one with Tim’s analysis of the leaf, into the port in the desk. Humming to herself, she began to issue one-fingered instructions. The big screen blackened. Bars of glittering white light shot across the room, each bar filled with tiny specks that fizzed and danced like hyperactive dust motes.

“These strings are up at the main entry level,” she said, still humming. “Look…” She said something else, and the bars across the room all froze. Each was entwined with an endless procession of the initials of the quaternary code of adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine nucleotides—A, G, T, C—the same code that, though in different ways, John and Laurie’s bodies still shared.

She began to hum again. It was an odd sound, modulated into phrases, neither quite rhythmic nor musical. As the strings began to flow again, ATCGATGATGCCCTAGATC spreading and opening around them like a silver net, he understood that humming was her way of issuing commands.

“Can you actually read all of this?”

“You get used to it. Everything looks the same for a while, but…” She popped her lips and smiled, looking up at the lines that revolved through the ceiling above them, pulling down the lines, tunneling deeper. Spears of light threaded around Laurie and John. “You learn to find your way.”

“And you sing to it?”

She chuckled. “Is that what it sounds like?”

More intersecting lines. Level after level. Slashing, blurring, dropping. Then a complex knot of intersections, a ball of jagged shining wool turning before them. The ball rolled at them, then Laurie clicked her tongue, and the lines snapped back. They were suddenly looking down over the Magulf from a stratospheric height. And falling. The view reminded John of the one he’d seen from the shuttle window as he approached Bab Mensor from Europe. First, the gray Breathless Ocean, with Spain reaching down towards the mottled land that had once been North Africa—mountain peaks and red gashes of desert dissolving into cloud. But everything was impossibly far, impossibly clear.

“See those lights over there?”

He nodded as the Northern Mountains, still vague with distance, tilted up. Specks of red flickered like cannonfire amid the lower slopes.

“The red indicates the main areas where the net thinks the koiyl leaf is grown.” She muttered something. “But the data can get pretty thin. The net really isn’t that interested in what happens in the Magulf, apart from the impact the Magulf has on sustaining the European climate.” The horizon tilted back, and the Northern Mountains receded. Laurie nodded and began to hum again. The image shrunk, dissolved. They were back within the silver web.

As she sang a scatter of mid-pitch notes, the two of them veered up, down, left, and right through the matrix, hovering over gaps where the lines receded to a glimmering mesh, then diving in again, level through level, down towards a brittle rose, right into the tightly bound heart that widened back out into a space of darkness. She was obviously on the track of something and too involved to say what. John just sat beside her, wishing and waiting for the ride to stop.

Laurie glanced over at him. Light flaring across her face. Briefly, she stopped humming. “Are you all right? You look…”

“I’m fine.”

They came to a massive cube, slowly revolving.

“This is the Zone’s main scientific database.”

“Why is it so isolated?”

She shrugged. “We’ve come at it a funny way.” She made a soft whistling sound, and they lunged down to the cube where the silver bars loomed thicker and larger than those at any of the other levels. He looked at her. She was smiling as they hovered in the twirling pit, her green eyes twinkling with flecks of reflected silver. The detail of the network all around them here was incredible, like woven silk.

Laurie was clicking her tongue, humming in a tuneless, rambling way. Freezing, sometimes, the trembling strings, scrolling up and down silver lines dripping with ATGCGTATAGGAC like dew-laden wires. Then on and in, until she found the right sector, a tiny bundle of strings that grew and grew as she pulled.

“There is it. A couple of days old, but see that extra string up there, where it enters the subnetwork? It’s been reentered. That must have been when Tim took the copy for your card. But…”

“What?”

“The code’s wrong. It’s been reentered since, and it wasn’t Tim.”

“Who, then?”

“I’m not sure. The code’s odd. Old. From somewhere…Maybe it’s just me.”

They gazed at the intricate silver tapestry of AGTC letters. She popped her lips. “Here’s the analysis of the leaves that Tim made. See that bigger cluster off to the right? That will be the tissue samples. Anyway, you gave him five leaves to analyze, and it turned out that only two were contaminated. Now, it also turns out that those two have the same blip in a no-read area of their DNA.”

He nodded.

“In other words,” she said, “the two contaminated leaves are from plants that are close relatives, probably from the same valley. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And, see…” She pointed at another tangle of silver. “The balance of trace elements in those two leaves is very similar, too. As is the growth pattern, if you run it back. Again, a shared location. So we can ask the net to try to filter out those factors until it finds the climate in a koiyl-growing northern valley with the closest match. It’ll still be guesswork, of course…”

She smiled over at John as the lines swirled around her. She looked pleased with herself.

“The net might get it wrong?”

“It wouldn’t be truly intelligent,” she said, “if it always got everything right, now would it? Anyway.” She whistled, and the silver strings snapped away, the big screen grayed, and the tiny office fell back into shape around them. “Let’s eat.”

They went to a bar on Main Avenue, where the tables on one side had already been pushed together for a semidrunken leaving party. Laurie took a corner booth and picked over their shared order of salad and paella.

“Seafood…” she said. “Why did we order seafood?” She pushed away her plate and took out a tube. “I’m not hungry anyway. Never am when I’m working. You look pale—would you like wine?”

He shook his head.

She drew at her tube and exhaled. She looked a little shaky, and exalted. “When I started my job,” she said, “I just used to take food tabs and coffee in my office from the machine that went past. It was less trouble. But I kept getting these sore throats.” She inhaled. The leaving party opposite erupted into laughter. “Then someone told me that people were spitting in the coffee before it got to me. Trying to make me ill…”

He shook his head. “You deserve better than this.”

“I got the biggest break a Gog could imagine. No, really.” She looked at him, then down at her uneaten plate. “I like a lot of it. The work. The net. The Zone. Last night…”

They fell into silence. At the row of tables, the people were trying to decide if there was anything about the Zone they would miss. The money, it was unanimously decided. They would miss the money. And each other, someone else said. Sure, they said, their voices more muted now as they shared glances and agreed. Each other…

“And what will you do, Father John?” she said. “What will you do if the net tells you where the bad koiyl is coming from? Will you try to ban the whole trade? Put up posters? Send in the veetols to destroy some village up in the hills?”

He shook his head. “The governor was right about one thing—I don’t know enough yet. I’ll have to go up to the Northern Mountains to confirm this.”

“You, personally?”

“Why? Is that a problem?”

Coffee was brought to them. It was unusual for the Zone, but in this bar they were served by a long-armed chromium machine that hissed around the room on magnetized tracks. Makes a change from all these fucking Gogs, someone muttered on the other side. John glanced over, but he couldn’t see who it was, couldn’t tell for sure if they’d even noticed Laurie.

“How,” she asked, blowing the steam from her cup, watching the machine depart, “are you planning to get there?”

“I’ll manage. I see people at the clinic who’ve walked from the mountains barefoot.”

“But you’ll go?”

“I can’t give up.”

“Okay,” she said, putting down her cup, grinding out her tube.

“Okay what?”

She looked at him. “I’ll come with you.”

He took a breath.

“Or perhaps you would rather be alone…”

“No,” he said, finding that he was smiling. “I don’t want to be alone.”