She recognised him from the holovids and nuscan bites as soon as she was ushered into his office. Tall and handsome, electric blue eyes, a great eccentric mane of white-blond hair and a smile that seemed just a little too bright and wide in real life. William Reichler was fleshier than in the vids, but the visual slimdown might not be vanity. Cam crews always shaved off podge, claiming it was aesthetically unappealing and therefore bad for ratings. When he rose and held out his hand to her, she noted his pupils were dilated. She told herself hers were probably dilated, too, after the stimutabs and coffee, and so what if he had slipped a couple of uppers? Everyone used them in corporate cities. Her parents disapproved of using drugs to pep up or calm down, yet current thinking said it was savvy to make your mind and body serve your will and needs. Her parents were old-fashioned in their attitude to chems, but she suspected she had absorbed their bias, because she always found herself making excuses to rationalise why she would not take a pill or a hotshot.

You can take the girl out of a Tipodan freetown, but you could not take the freetown out of the girl, she thought wryly. That was what her friend and co worker, Eva, had warned on the way to the airport.

Eva had also told her she was a fool to give up her apartment, sell off her furniture and books and shift halfway round the world to Uropa to take part in research so new it was on the crackpot edge of science, all on the say-so of someone she had never met. But William Reichler had not been a stranger. Discovering his book had changed her life. Before reading it, she had thought of herself as a lone freak. For all their liberal inclinations, her parents’ minds had been full of blind spots and guilt because she had been a very late child conceived by in vitro fertilisation. They never openly acknowledged what she was, and for a long time she had tried desperately to change herself, to be normal. Then a day came when she had accepted she could not stop being what she was. So she had made an art of hiding it.

Then William Reichler’s book made her see she might not be an aberration, but the next tentative step in human evolution. Her first e-send to him had been a girlish outpouring of admiration and excite ment, and she had received a polite note from his personal assistant acknowledging it. Soon after, she stumbled onto an article whose author observed that humans co-evolved with their technology, and this had given her the focus for her own work. Years later when she had sent articles about her work, published in Tipoda Tomorrow, to William Reichler, he responded personally with interest and encouragement. After that they had corresponded intermittently until his offer of an internship at the Reichler Clinic.

His letter did not say there would be a job at the end of the unpaid internship, but it was implied. And Hannah was good at what she did. Better than good, according to her workmates and supervisors, though their opinions mattered less to her than her own feelings. You had to have a realistic idea of what you were worth or else you would be forever at the mercy of other people’s opinions, which most often would depend on their level of liking for you. You had to know yourself and, above all, you had to be honest with yourself.

‘Ms Seraphim, it is a real pleasure to meet you in person, at last,’ William Reichler said, his big pink manicured hand encompassing hers in a warm, slightly clammy grip. ‘Your last paper on the way some humans adapt to the speed of technological development was very fresh. Young woman, you have a brilliant mind, though I must say it is a shock to see how very young you are.’ He gave an avuncu lar chuckle.

‘My age ...’Hannah stammered, overwhelmed by the way he had leaned towards her, still holding her hand.

‘Is no problem,’ he concluded firmly. He sat on a soft fat sofa, drawing her down with him, and shifted smoothly to talking about the work of the Reichler Clinic with an easy familiarity that made him sound glib. It was a natural consequence of him having to say the same thing over and over, she supposed, and she told herself it would be no surprise if his brain just wandered off in another direction completely, leaving his mouth to run on auto-pilot.

It was a mistake to think about his thoughts, she realised a split second too late as her mind peeled open.

. . . like them young ... good hands and legs and great hair .. . probably reach her waist if she let it down ... like a woman with a good head of hair ... pity about the neck to knee retro-frump freetown threads . . . transpo gel tube would make the most of her breasts ... too small, but bump them a size or two and she’d be specky ... give her a year or two and she’d get over her outmoded freetown attitude to augmentation ...

For one shocked and disorientated second, Hannah thought she must be picking up the mental thread of the only other man in the room, an older, white-coated scientist who had yet to be introduced, except her mind was too well disciplined to open itself to more than one thread at a time and risk being mentally bludgeoned. No, the stream of crude speculation was flowing from William Reichler’s mind. The physical contact and the eager razzle dazzle of his personality, combined with the dual hype of nerves and stimutabs, had broken through her carefully constructed mind-shield.

Ordinarily her ethics would have made her with draw immediately, but William Reichler’s thoughts made it all too painfully clear that Eva had been right. Hannah had not known him. The revelation of his arrogant disrespect for her dispelled any guilt she might have felt as she delved through what tran spired to be a superficial, atavistic sensuality crusted over a vast and rapacious, self-centred hunger for glory and the social power that came with it. Her heart sank into her new gel boots, for not only was William Reichler a lecher, he was a liar. One look into his deeper mind made it clear he did not have the ability or knowledge to have undertaken the research upon which his book and articles were based. He had cribbed the science from raw data, spinning it into brightly accessible rhetoric.

It did not comfort Hannah to find he had every intention of offering her an employment contract at the end of the internship. The only reason he had not done so already was because he believed an unpaid internship would establish an advantageous power structure between them, ensuring she was locked into a subordinate and subservient role. He had no fear she would go elsewhere because of her blatant hero worship of him.

How it rankled to remember she had gazed into those brilliant blue eyes in vids, reading in them sincerity, intelligence and sensitivity. She felt ashamed because she ought to have known better than to expect truth from vid and nuscan spinners, or even to take the things that William Reichler had written in e-notes to her, as any indication of his character or ethics. How many times in life had her abilities revealed that a bland or smiling face could hide anything from deep neurosis and fear to loathing or boredom? It was the bitterest kind of joke that these abilities, which had brought her halfway round the world to this meeting, now revealed the brilliant, charismatic William Reichler as a charlatan.

Her disappointment and despair did not show in her expression or manner any more than her shock and outrage had done. She had learned the hard way not to react obviously and openly to the things she learned from people’s minds, and in this case, she was very glad because a man with an interest in paranormal abilities might very well jump to the right conclusion. Instead, she managed to nod and smile as the interview progressed, and even to talk enthusiastically about working at the Reichler Clinic; though the second she left the building she was determined to return to the hotel, pack and leave, after dispatching a bland little e-note expressing contrition and regret at her decision to refuse the internship because she was homesick for Tipoda.

Then William Reichler introduced the other man in the room.

‘This is my cousin, Axel Reichler,’ he said. ‘He is the head of the laboratory here at the Clinic and he will conduct you on a tour of the facility so that you can see what you will be getting into.’

The white-coated man rose and bowed slightly from his waist. He was older than his cousin by a good decade and as strikingly ugly as William Reichler was handsome. That he should remain so in a world where no one had to be ugly intrigued Hannah, despite herself, as he ushered her, with William trailing behind, from the reception room. She did not hesitate to access his thoughts. She almost gasped in relief to discover that this was the mind behind the research, though she had never heard Axel Reichler’s name anywhere in the public ity about the Clinic, or seen it on the articles or books it had produced. Delving deeper as she followed him from laboratory to laboratory and through rooms full of the latest technological tools for brain and mind research, she was looking for the hold that William Reichler had over him, that had allowed the theft of his work. Instead, she was astonished to learn that Axel Reichler had no objection to William absorbing the limelight by putting his name and face on the books and articles that had resulted from his work. He knew his cousin craved power and visible success and appreciated the social skills that were honed and sharpened by that hunger because they served his own ends. He did not care at all that his name was unknown. He cared nothing for fame or power, or for money, save that it would buy him the equipment and materials he needed to continue his research.

Hannah might have admired his single mindedness, except that he had no more notion of what it would be like to be a person with the abilities they were so hungrily researching than his cousin. To Axel it was all theory and to William it was an angle to be played out like bait on one of those ancient fishing poles that people used to dangle in water. William didn’t even believe paranormal abilities existed. It was all smoke and mirrors to him. What he did understand was that people wanted to believe their minds held a potential that might be woken. There were dozens of sponsors paying good creds to the Clinic, in the belief that when the breakthrough came, they would be first in line to receive the serum or pill that would unleash that potential.

Both men wanted Hannah to join the Reichler Clinic, though neither guessed her groundbreaking work was the direct result of her possessing the very abilities of mind they were trying to document. Axel believed the direction of her research would lead him to a breakthrough in finding a means of creat ing a machine capable of isolating and identifying people with fledgling paranormal abilities. Hannah shifted to William Reichler’s mind, wanting to learn if his motivations were the same, but he was think ing about a meeting that morning with a couple of government men interested in the possible uses of paranormal abilities in conflict. The govogeeks had indicated they were prepared to pay well if the work at the Reichler Clinic could be shaped to serve their ends.

Hannah slipped back into Axel’s mind. He might be cold, but he was brilliant and in his own way, honest. He believed in paranormal abilities, though her probing showed his certainty they would only manifest after chemical or genetic intervention upon people whose minds were receptive. He actually conceived the possibility of breeding them, like to like, to improve the paranormal strain. He had not once, she saw, considered how a paranormal might feel about being used in this way. To him they were merely hypothetical experimental subjects.

It hurt Hannah that she had believed in their research, had set so much store by it.

The tour through the Clinic ended and as they made their way back to his office, William began to speak of a future in which mobile testing units would allow people to self-test to discover if they possessed any paranormal tendencies. This would offer a far greater sampling than they had been so far able to assay, he pointed out enthusiastically. Hannah read Axel’s surprise in his mind. He and William had discussed the need for the development and creation of equipment to provide proof of their theories, she learned, but they had never spoken of mobile testing units. Axel was no fool and was already wondering what angle his cousin was playing, and why. He did not know William had met with the govogeeks or that he was calculating how much he could dun them for the money to set up mobile test units that would enable the compilation of a list of suitable candidates.

Candidates for what? Hannah wondered uneasily, but Axel was asking what sort of research she might be interested in pursuing. His mind told her he was genuinely interested, but he was distracted wonder ing what his cousin was up to. He needed to find out and to be sure it would help, rather than hinder, his work. Hannah withdrew from his mind as she began to talk. She was very careful because she was aware that the truth about her abilities was woven into her research. She would have spotted it. Maybe, she thought bleakly, on{y someone like her would have spotted it: a lone freak of nature; the exception to the rule of normality.

When she stopped talking, both men were smiling. William produced a contract and pressed it into her hands, suggesting she take it away and return later in the week to discuss it. He spoke as if her employment was a fait accompli, the contract a mere formality and not, as she ascertained from a swift dip into his mind, a binding intern contract connected seam lessly to an agreement to be employed at whatever wage was offered her, for a period not exceeding five years. He must think her a fool or perhaps he counted on her being overawed. Hannah cared too little to discover which. Indeed, her first impulse was to throw the wretched contract into a passing trash unit as she left the building. But she stuffed it into her document case and slung it over her shoulder before setting off for the glide stop where she had been set down two hours earlier with such high hopes.

Half an hour later, Hannah gazed out the window of the glide, her eyes slipping over the enigmatic surfaces of the gleaming splinter towers with their mirror-coated glass that reflected everything and revealed nothing of what lay within. Everything offered you back to yourself in the corporate city of Londo-Arko, which was sprawled along both sides of the river that bisected it. You would never know it was an ancient city, looking down at it from above. You had to get on the ground to see beneath its shiny skin and, even then, in many places, genuine age had been replaced by faux age dens catering to the growing New Luddite movement spawned by those for whom technological advancements had not answered. It was a potent minority giving rise to a multitude of offshoots from radical fundamental ists to conservative ecolniks like her parents. Still, ultimately, it was a minority because in corporate cities, the culture tended to be middle-of-the-road conservative. But even in a freetown in Tipoda, people were content with technology and happy with where it was leading them. Happiness was the accepted proper goal of life, though that had never seemed enough to satisfY her own restless intensity of yearning. It was odd how her refusal to worship at the altar of happiness angered and irritated people. When she was six a teacher had become infuriated because instead of painting something that had made her happy at home, as instructed, she had painted a city as a bleak and smoking ruin over which loomed a dark, bruised-looking sky, the only visible thing a great green smiling neon face at the apex, one eye gone dark and dead.

She had listened, head hung, as the teacher ranted at her for egoising, too ashamed to explain she had been unable to think of something happy at home so she painted what she dreamed the night before instead. She had already learned never to talk about what she saw in her dreams.

The endless mirroring of other buildings, the sky and clouds was oddly hypnotic and she let their motion soothe her jangling nerves. The coiling flow of the segmented public glide and the quick darting movement of the small private glides reminded her of fish and sea snakes weaving through the waving fronds of a submarine forest of seaweed floating and undulating upward.

Diving was one of the things she had left behind in the remote freetown on the northern part of the west coast where she had grown up, and where there were still places you could dive and actually catch sight of fish. Not that you killed them as divers had once done. That was illegal in all countries now. Not just the killing of the big sentient cetaceans, but all remaining wild sea life. The five big governments and the powerful corporations running all but a few of the biggest cities had agreed it was a bad idea to kill off all life in the sea and a pact was made to leave it alone for a millennia or so. All the fish people ate was now either flavoured soy substitute or tank grown if you could afford it. The sea was totally out of bounds save for harmless recreational activities in closely monitored areas.

She could dive in Londo-Arko. Not in the deadly matte-black Thames or even in the sea, because that would require a contamination suit and there would be no marine life to see in any case. But Eva had told her of a public aqua park where you could do bare skin dives, when Hannah revealed her intention of using the remainder of her scholarship grant to travel to Uropa rather than trading up to a govern ment research facility fellowship or a grant with one of the big corporate entities. Knowing Eva, Hannah had taken a look, only to discover the so-called dive haven was really just a big fish tank sunk into the ocean to produce the illusion that you were swim ming in the open sea. It was so crowded it might as well have been called people soup.

Glumly, Hannah accepted she had been naive on all fronts. Certain the Reichler Clinic internship would result in a proper work contract, she had been cheerfully prepared to live carefully on the remain der of her grant and to take any work she could get to eke it out, no matter how menial, until she had proven her worth. She even accepted she might need a part-time job to supplement the startup wage, because she would be working with someone she admired on research in an area that mattered to her.

She had said that to Eva.

What she had not said was that somewhere in Uropa was a place she had been dreaming about her whole life - not an ideal, but a real place with a name, that had somehow become the shape of her deepest unnamed desires. She didn’t know why it was so important to find it, except that when she dreamed of it, a great sense of calm purpose unfurled in her. Somehow she knew that when she found it, she would have found herself She would be home. For that reason, she had always known that sooner or later, she would travel to Uropa. She had already looked for her place using the worldweb, but so far, to no avail. But it was here, somewhere, and she was determined to find it. In the meantime, she would have her work.

Or so she had thought.

She sighed, feeling as if years had passed since she had woken too early that morning, still jet-lagged from the long flight from Tipoda two days before, but wired with anticipation. She had slept a lot since landing, but the time change had not got through to her on a cellular level and she had been forced to indulge in a face-brightening session in a Spruce kiosk to get rid of the bags under her eyes, knowing how much face mattered to people in corporate terri tories. She could have flown a rocket plane and done the trip in four hours, hence avoiding the dehydra tion and body stress that were the main components of classic jet lag, but the price would have taken a hefty bite out of her grant. Once she dealt with her external appearance, it had taken two stimutabs for her to feel halfway alive mentally, and a big cup of black coffee to complete the process. The trouble was that all that false adrenalin and hype took its toll when the caps and caffeine wore off.

She debated nibbling another stimutab to head off the downer. They were a herb-based chem and basically harmless in the short term, but too many would give her the jitters and she didn’t like that feel ing. Even less did she like the way chems messed with her mind. Besides, she was so thirsty she didn’t think she would be able to swallow anything. She was sorry she had not stopped at the Javabooth by the glide stop for a tube of aqua, but she had just been too devastated by what had taken place in the meeting to do more than stumble aboard the first glide to set down.

Hannah shifted on the gel seat, which moulded warmly and somewhat obscenely to her buttocks, wondering what it was about this whole city that seemed too grabby, too intimate, too personal, for all its coldness and superficial glam and glitz.

‘What now?’ she muttered. ‘Do I go back to Tipoda with my tail between my legs or go on, and if I go on, what do I go on to?’

‘Hah?’ muttered an old woman seated next to her. Realising the woman was unsmoothed, Hannah had to suppress the urge to reach out and squeeze her hand companionably. The trouble with the smoothing process was that while the people who had it done sure looked smooth, at some point they stopped looking real and started looking like those lifelike clone-bots some of the android companies were trying out. But maybe she was just more sen sitive to it, having been raised in a freetown com munity, by people who would not have thought of smoothing their faces even if they had the money for the procedure. She had not seen too many young smoothies here yet, but according to the holos the trend was all the rage in face-conscious Mericanda where all cities were corporate-owned, and what happened in Mericanda, so the saying went, ended up everywhere. Though her father always said this was a saying begun by Mericandans, who had a ten dency to believe their own spin.

She had smiled involuntarily at the old woman, whose eyes now narrowed suspiciously. Hannah heard her wonder if she was one of those pet snatch ers who stole your beloved and sold it to the illegal fur traders. To her surprise what Hannah had taken for a faux-fur purse clutched in the woman’s gnarled hands on her lap suddenly lifted its head and looked at her. It was a lap fox, bred to be small enough to fit into a handbag. Amused, Hannah projected warmth and non-aggression at it. She felt its curiosity spike, and when it craned its neck, she obligingly held her hand out for it to be sniffed.

The old woman looked starded and drew the litde beast protectively closer to her. ‘Could give you a nasty nip,’ she said hopefully. She was wishing she had not forgotten the mugger spray her son had given her. The litde creature merely wagged its bushy tail and projected firmly that it was hungry and wanted to get down to pee. It had figured out in the way animals always seemed able to do, that Hannah could understand it better than other humans. She debated passing the message onto the old woman but thought better of it.

Turning again to gaze out at the city, she told herself that there would be no shame in returning home. It would be downright foolish to remain in Londo-Arko simply to avoid the so-called humilia tion of admitting she had made a mistake. Her flat back home would be gone, of course, but since she had refused the facilities that might have taken her on, she would have to wait for the midyear intake to get a place anyway. In the meantime, she could go home and have a holiday, do some diving. She rejected this thought as soon as it formed, for while she did not doubt that her parents cared for her, she was the cuckoo child they had brought up gently and with real affection, but whom they had never been able to regard as their own. Their thoughts had told her too brutally that neither could believe such an abnormal child had come solely from their genes. Something had gone wrong and though they would never stint on her, neither could they truly love her. No, she could not return to their gentle bafflement and determined kindness, which had cut her so deeply that, at some level, she was still bleeding.

To go back to her parents would be to return to the drowning loneliness of her childhood. Indeed, she might truly have drowned had she not happened on William Reichler’s book, which had made her wonder if there might be others like her, alone and isolated inside their caution and secrecy. She had resolved to find them and no matter what she now thought of William Reichler, she had to acknowl edge that his words had given her direction. She had ceased trying merely to exist, unnoticed, and had begun actively to pursue studies and subjects that would let her examine research into the mind and evolution. She had taken her first degree in anthropology and her second in nano-biology. She was now on the final year of her third degree, hence the grant. She had made an agreement with the educational facility to produce her final thesis based pardy on the work she had expected to do with the Reichler Clinic and there was no doubt the grant body would take a dim view of her refusing the of fer she had courted. At the least, she would have to find something to do that would be equally worthy and relevant to her studies. Her parents would pitch in financially if she was fined, but they were older and their earnings had never been great. The small biofarm where she had grown up was self-sustaining, but there had been nothing extra to stash away in a bank, even if her parents hadn’t regarded bankers and stockbrokers and all money manipulators as the ultimate pornographers. Of course they had chosen to live where they had because of her. Funny how you could think of your life as so normal, and then look back and see how strange and eccentric it had been, only finally coming to understand that even while you were the result of all that strangeness, you might also have been the reason for it.

She sighed, and closed her eyes.

When she woke, she had missed her stop. She didn’t recognise the part of the city she was in, but she got off at the next stop. It was not until the glide had taken off that it occurred to her she didn’t know the location of the return stop. Feeling better for her sleep, she decided it would not hurt her to walk a little. She knew her hotel was north and she could call up a cab if she got tired before she found another public glide stop. The truth was she needed to walk off her weariness and her disappointment.

She had gone some way before it struck her she had entered one of the old districts. In general they were densely populated, but she seemed to be alone. That made her uneasy until she woke to the fact there were other people around, lurking in shad ows or doorways, staying out of sight, and unease racheted up into anxiety. As she continued, buildings and pathways became more and more dilapidated, and then she noticed with a little flip of fear that someone was following her. Maybe they were just curious, but worrying, given she was definitely not in one of the trendy retro-age precincts. This was a genuinely run-down area and her sneers at the shiny faux newness of the city came back to haunt her as she yearned for a brightly lit mall zone full of shop ping smoothies. She thought of the holo on trashers she had seen on the plane - people who lived in the so-called ‘rim’; poor people, angry people, radical dissidents, without the disposable creds to interest corporate bosses in providing resources.

She lifted her wrist to summon a cab but the reception was full of static. She must be too close to a junction in the power grid. She would have to keep on walking. She tried to walk confidently in the hope that whoever was following would assume she had a weapon,until it occurred to her that her stalker might also have a weapon. The next time she caught a glimpse of her shadow, she sent her mind arrow ing out, and was chilled to learn that although the man had no weapon, he was a detoxing chemhead hungering for the wrist unit he had spotted when she got down from the glide. He figured on bartering it for a hotshot. She considered knocking on one of the doors, but when she glanced up at the windows, she saw most of them were blank and dark, the glass in them long since smashed and fallen away. The inhabitants, if there were any, were as likely to attack her as the man following.

Hannah licked her lips and tried to calm down, but her heart was galloping because now the chemhead was trying to work up the courage to attack. Only paranoia had held him back so far, the possibility she might have been set down as a police lure. It was actually a rational speculation, she thought shakily, because what sort of idiot would come wandering alone and unarmed into a rim area? Tourists were warned of the danger of areas not patrolled by the corporate police, and indeed she had been cautioned in the pre-landing holo, but she had been too preoc cupied worrying about her meeting at the Clinic.

She dared not stop and figured if she could put a little distance between her and her stalker, she would try her wrist unit again. She wanted to be out of sight of the chemhead to do it because he was watching for a sign that she might be summoning back-up. He was panicky and desperate and would not hesitate to kill her. He had killed before with his bare hands, she saw, because he was thinking about the kill. She wondered what he would do if she took the unit off and left it on the cracked sidewalk. It was a gradua tion present from her parents, but she thought they would prefer a live daughter without a wrist unit to a dead daughter with the proper urban accessories.

She came round a corner and her heart leapt at the sight of a corporate road beyond two tumble down buildings. The ground level stream was close enough to take in her plight but most vehicles would be delivery and service glides, and even if they had human drivers, it was unlikely they would open and take her in in this area. On the other hand, she was clean and unarmed and young enough that they would surely ping the pollys and make a report. She didn’t run, but she walked faster - aware her stalker had developed an entourage and they were all speed mgup.

She was within a few steps of the road and on the verge of breaking into a run, when a man dropped down from the building to the left to block her way. He was wearing what she recognised as the latest in urban combat, complete with the little antigrav pac that had let him make his dramatic entrance with out straining an ankle. He had plast body armour moulded into an exaggerated pectoral frieze and she stared at him in confusion, not knowing if this was a rescue or a new threat. She tried to penetrate his mind to find out, but the helmet he was wearing had some sort of tronics that blocked her.

‘Hile woman,’ the man said, his voice distorted by the tronics.

‘Uh, can you help me?’ she gasped. ‘I got off the glide at the wrong stop and I’m lost.’

‘You sure are, Doll, but N’zo found you and now you gone be saved.’

‘Oh, that’s great. Thank you,’ Hannah said stiffiy.

She couldn’t see the man’s face or read his mind, but there was a gloating cadence in his voice and her erstwhile stalker was withdrawing, his mind reveal ing that he had recognised her rescuer as a nunazi ganger whose favourite recreational activity was to laser-graffiti his gang sigil between the eyes of trash ers. She was no trasher, but her every instinct told her to run. Hannah’s eyes darted past the man to the road as she calculated how much time it would take between breaching the seal on the road and the arrival of a police pod.

‘Actually, I just need you to point me to the nearest glide stop, or wait while I call a cab,’ she said, adding absurdly, ‘I’m late for a meeting.’

‘Don’ worry, Doll, N’zo gone take you to a meet ing that will change your life,’ the man said and this time he gave a creepy skittering giggle.

Hannah saw the man’s intention to lunge in the shift in his stance and she leapt left, as he lunged right. The result was that he was wrong-footed, but he spun on his heel with swift grace and lunged again. Fortunately Hannah was quick and she had got past and set her gel boot triumphantly down on the smooth blue-sheened tarmac. Her attacker froze and glanced up and around, as she did, looking for a polly pod, but there was only one sleek private glide in the highest stream and no siren to announce that help was on the way. Hannah’s heart sank.

‘Pollys doin’ their thing elsewhere, Baby Doll,’ crooned the man. ‘Lucky fo you, N’Zo here to take care of ever’ little thing.’

But even as he stepped towards her, Hannah heard the sound of a glide in descent and she looked up in time to see the silver highfiier doing a swift vertical drop.

‘Don’ fight me, Baby Doll,’ the man snarled as he closed his arms around her in a bear hug. Before he could tighten his grip, she dropped to her hands and knees and rolled sideways, snapping out a kick at the unarmoured side of his knee. He gave a grunt, but he had thrown out a hand and, catching her by the hair, he hauled her up. The pain was excruciating as he lifted her off the ground. She clawed desperately at his hand. Too late she remembered his free hand and he punched her in the side of the head, turning out the lights.

She woke to someone touching her cheek and mur muring her name. ‘Hannah? Hannah?’ At first she thought it was Eva’s brother, but then a face swam into focus and she realised it was a stranger with a kind face, in whose lap she seemed to be lying.

‘Who ... who are you?’ she asked. ‘How do you know my name?’

‘I’m Jake and your name is coded into your wrist link.’

‘It’s encrypted,’ Hannah said, noting that her voice slurred. She was having trouble remembering what had happened, but it seemed to her she could see out of one eye a good deal better than the other.

‘Yes,’ he said with a mild smile. ‘I apologise for hacking you, but I needed to know if you had any medical conditions before I let Wu administer a revival shot.’

‘Someone was chasing me, then a moron in com bat gear leapt down from the building and knocked me out,’ she answered indignantly, as things began to float back. She felt her temple and winced at the size of the swelling.

‘So we saw,’ the man said. ‘You have an impressive black eye, but your assailant was limping badly when the pollys led him off.’

‘Good,’ she muttered wrathfully. ‘Who was he?’

‘A ganger,’ he answered. ‘The nunazi are anti technology, with a chaser of archaic notions about purity of race taken from an ancient cult. Somewhat difficult to put eugenics into practice in this day and age so the nunazi base their credo on appearance. You have pale skin, therefore you qualify as a poten tial recruit. As would I. Whereas my driver, Isah, or my assistant, Wu, would be considered sacrifices, as they term their victims.’

‘They practise sacrifice?’ she asked, aghast.

‘I daresay they dream of it, for their rhetoric and literature is very violent, but as far as I know, the sac rifices are merely shaven and tattooed with a symbol used by the antique Nazi cult from which the nunazi take some of their less charming practices. The so called sacrifices are ritually humiliated before being turned loose, naked. As a recruit, you would have been required to do the shaving and engage in the ritual humiliation before being tattooed yourself, on the arm.’

‘He said he was going to save me and take me to a meeting,’ Hannah murmured. Then she looked at her rescuer. ‘You seem to know a lot about them.’

‘Whereas you appear to know remarkably little and yet I understand the cult is gaining popularity in Antipoda,’ he said gently.

‘I didn’t live in a city in Tipoda,’ she said, stress ing the preferred freetown term. She was beginning to take in her immediate surroundings. She was lying along the back seat of a large glide with the sort of luxurious appointments ordinary human beings did not warrant. She noted the man wore a beautifully-fitted grey suit and his hair and hands were perfectly groomed. In the background his assistant, Wu, a ravishing Asiatic-looking woman with dark skin, was tapping into her wrist unit.

‘Where are you taking me? Hannah asked, strug gling to sit up.

‘To your hotel, which is where I assume you were headed when you decided to take a stroll through one of the worst districts in Londo-Arko. The name of your hotel was in the link, too,’ he said apologetically.

‘How come there were so few people in the area where you found me?’ she asked. ‘I thought rim districts were packed.’

‘They are,’ he said. ‘Except when they have been evacuated for redevelopment. That one is situated right between two rim slums whose residents fear their areas will be next, and who are determined to frighten off investors. The clearances are scandalous and brutal and verging on illegal even in a corporate city, but there is no profit in defending rim dwell ers so no one does anything. Your ganger belongs to a group inhabiting one of these, with ties to a new Luddite fundamentalist group called the Shepherd Faction.’

‘Them I’ve heard of,’ she said grimly. ‘Strange bedfellows.’

‘Indeed,’ Jake said, giving her a thoughtful look.

‘In any case, there are rather more pleasant places to walk than rim sectors, even in a corporate city.’

‘I fell asleep on the public glide and when I got off to backtrack, I couldn’t find a stop. Thought I’d walk until I came to one. Dumb, I guess,’ she said, depressed because now she was remembering what had preceded the glide journey. ‘You don’t need to take me all the way to my hotel. Just drop me at a glide stop.’

‘It will be no trouble,’ he said smoothly.

‘You have an accent,’ Hannah said. ‘I noticed it when I first woke, before I was properly awake.’

‘Everyone talks like that in New Scotia and we are resistant to the nuspeek of the corporate cities, as you will have noticed,’ he said wryly. ‘I have lived away some time now, but the accent gets stronger when I am agitated. As I was at seeing a young woman attacked by a much larger man. You were brave to fight back.’

‘Brave on top of stupid might just equal stupid.’

‘Courage is worthy of honour wherever you find it, no matter the circumstances,’ the man said, sounding for a moment like her father, who had also eschewed nuspeek, saying he preferred his language straight up. But then again he had been a teacher. She remembered all at once that she had not thanked her rescuer. She remedied this and he smiled. It was the kind of smile some people have that starts out in their eyes and flows out to light up their whole face. It turned her rescuer’s nice ordinary face into something special. Then he had his assistant prepare a pain blocker. Her head was throbbing badly enough that she gave in, after being told the coffee and stimutabs she had consumed would not affect it. As his assistant administered the shot, Hannah watched her rescuer covertly, resisting the temptation to violate her own code and probe him. He was a good seven years older than she, but still young, and yet he had the gravitas and polish of an older man. Power and money, she diagnosed, and that took her thoughts the full circle back to William Reichler.

‘What is it?’ Jake asked.

Hannah shrugged. ‘I came to Londo-Arko for a research internship and the interview was this morm0ng. ‘

‘It didn’t go well?’ He actually sounded as if he cared, but maybe that was just the lack of nuspeek, which always sounded too cool and slangy to be smcere.

‘They offered me the position only ... only the company was not what I had thought it was. They want different things than I want.’

‘It is often the case when an individual wishes to join a group,’ he said. ‘The individual has to choose whether they can work within the group agenda or if they would be better to go their own way. What you must ask yourself is if there is any advantage to doing your work with these people.’

His words forced Hannah to think about her own agenda. Before the meeting, it had been her desire to come to Uropa and work on research that might help her better understand her abilities, and which might bring her into contact with others like her. Of course she could go back to Tipoda and eventually continue her own research, but she could not deny the Reichlers had shown her the way in the first place, or that their facilities were beyond impressive. Despite knowing what they were really like now, she could pursue her agenda far better working for them than in returning to Tipoda, so long as she kept her secrets. And if she didn’t work with them, Axel would go ahead with his research anyway. He was certainly brilliant enough to succeed in finding a way to iden tify people with paranormal tendencies. If Hannah took part in the research, she would be able to guide and protect them, and perhaps teach them what she had learned.

‘Hannah, we are about to set down on the pad atop your hotel,’ Jake said. ‘And I apologise for silencing you with a lecture. I am afraid the tendency to pontificate is part of being an ethno-sociologist.’

‘I wasn’t silenced, just thinking,’ Hannah assured him. ‘In fact I think you have just helped me to make up my mind to take the position. I don’t like the company, but I can work with them. At least for the time being.’

His brows lifted, and there was approval in his eyes. ‘Then you will be staying in Londo-Arko rather than returning to Tipoda?’ Hannah nodded, pleased at his careful use of the freetown term. Jake glanced at Wu, who passed him a holocard. He gave this to Hannah two-handed, bowing a little over it. ‘Perhaps you will allow me to show you a more pleasant route to walk, one afternoon next month. I have to go off planet for some time, but I will be in Londo-Arko upon my return.’

‘You don’t live here?’ Hannah asked.

He shrugged. ‘I’m afraid the corporate cities are not for me. Nor even a corporate town where there is somewhat more autonomy. But I travel here regularly as part of a liaison committee between the corporate committee and the Uropan government.’

‘Is that why you are going to the moon?’ Hannah asked, fascinated, for while there was some explora tion and tentative settlement on Mars, it was primi tive and not open for general settlement. The Moon base, on the other hand, was a small government city, though there was talk the corporations were slavering to get a foothold.

‘I am travelling to the moon, but on another mat ter,’Jake said. ‘My construction company is involved in some work for the World Council.’

‘How does an ethno-sociologist come to have a construction company?’ Hannah asked then flushed at her rudeness. ‘I’m sorry. That is none of my business.’

He smiled that warm smile. ‘It is a family business that I inherited by default. As to where I live, I have an apartment in Newrome.’

‘Newrome is the free city under the ground,’ Hannah said in wonderment, remembering with a little start that one could not travel there without the endorsement of a resident patron.

Jake’s smile broadened. ‘Strictly speaking it is a city built within a series of vast linked subterranean caverns. It is a free city though the corporations have their feelers out and would move in at once if those of us who have the power and the money to stop them falter in our vigilance.’ The door to the glide slid open and he stepped out and handed Hannah down. He was very tall, she noted as she thanked him again. ‘My name and address in Newrome are on the card, as well as my contact details. Ping me if you would like to take that walk. Or if you plan on visiting Newrome.’

Hannah glanced down at the card and suddenly she had trouble breathing. She gaped at the vivid little holo of the mountain valley pictured on the card, the shape of the peaks as familiar to her as her own eyes.

‘Obernewtyn,’ she breathed.

‘Yes,’ the man said. And only then did she take in the name in raised type above the image of the val ley: Jacob Obernewtyn. She looked up into his face and saw his smile fade, a little ridge of puzzlement forming between his brows. ‘Is something the mat ter?’ he asked, and Hannah heard his clear thought that her green eyes were the saddest, deepest eyes he had ever seen. Eyes that would see things other eyes did not. The thought was so close to the surface that she was not sure he had not spoken it aloud.

‘You . .. I . .. I was just -’ she stammered. Then she stopped, took a breath and asked more calmly,

‘What is the place in the holo? Where is it?’

He smiled and there was pride in his expression.

‘It is a property I own in the mountains outside Newrome. At the moment I am simply calling it Obernewtyn, but I will give it a proper name once I have built there.’

‘You ... you’re going to build there?’

‘I had always thought to build a refuge there. A place to escape to when I need it,’ he said.

She swallowed hard, and looking back down at the place of her dreams, said softly, ‘I am sure you will build something special in this place. And Obernewtyn would make a perfect name for a refuge.’

‘You think so?’ He looked half amused, half pleased.

‘I know so,’ Hannah said.