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gaps, handholds, foot-spaces.
    I climbed, as I had climbed here so often as a boy.
    Villa Mart Three was four storeys high, culminating in a rooftop terrace far wider than that at Villa Virtue, with views out across much of the western part of the city. This villa was the clan’s secondary nest, used largely for raising and schooling our children. It would be a good place for visitors to lie low for a while.
    As I had anticipated, the five were on the terrace already. I heard them before I reached that level. I knew Sol would bring them out here for the spectacle of the night-time view over the rooftops of the Ipp and beyond to the alien zones, with their blazing skyscrapers and needle spires and gravity-defying mushroom towers. And beyond that, in the northern district of Constellation, the occasional flashes and lightning jags of the skystation.
    I settled into a niche in the rock, just below the terrace’s outer wall.
    Sol’s voice was the first I heard: “...pids will be good. The boy’s good. !¡ reassurance | calming ¡! You’ll be safe with us.”
    “!¡ agitation ¡! As safe as we were in Angiere?” said one of the men. That brought the conversation to a long pause. Angiere was a city to the west of Laverne, on the coast of the Great Sea. I had heard of it, but had never met anyone who had been there.
    “!¡ sadness | loss ¡! No one is safe in war.” That was my woman, the one I had saved and whose restored identity was Callo Hart 76.
    War...
     
     
    T HE M ONUMENT TO the Martyrs was tucked away in a side alley to the south of Precept Square.
    By its nature, it was not a large or showy monument. If you did not know it was there, you would walk right by without noticing anything unusual.
    Nightcut Alley was so narrow you could touch the buildings on either side, with your arms not even at full stretch. Usually, it was lined with trash cans and mounded rubbish from the taverns and pap-houses of Night Street, always waiting to be cleared but never, seemingly, clear. The buildings backed onto a straight-sided channel, filled with fast-flowing black water, and the Alley cut across the channel on a rickety wood-plank bridge, and the Monument to the Martyrs was tucked away below that bridge.
    Here, on the far side, the channel cut into natural rock, and below the wooden span names had been carved, going back way beyond living memory. Names carved on names, carved on names.
    Names of the Disappeared, names of the executed, names of those who had died in other ways at the hands of aliens.
    Were they martyrs, though?
    I never thought so. Maybe some of them.
    Those of us who grew up in the Ipps, none of us were really rebels. We got by, we survived. Some of us took more risks than others. There were laws, of course, although the watchers had different laws to the chlicks, who had different laws to the starsingers and all the others. We had our own clan codes too, but they were quite apart from the rules of the aliens. Some of those laws we knew, but how could you ever understand the laws or moral protocols of sentient swarm-beings like the dragonflies of Clyd?
    You couldn’t, in short, and our only real law, underlying all the rest, was the law of survival. We did what we needed to get by.
    We were not rebels, and our martyrs had no cause.
    We commemorated them for the loss, and for the knowledge that the next name on the Monument could be your own and, in a world like this, you might never even understand why.
    We were not freedom fighters. There was no enemy. There was no war.
    At least, not as far as I knew.

 
     
    Chapter Four
     
     
    “!¡ SADNESS | LOSS ¡! N O one is safe in war,” said Callo Hart.
    Silent, I clung to my niche on the crag below the rooftop terrace.
    There was another long pause, and I realised that the break in her voice had been because she had been holding back tears. I could picture the scene: she was crying now, quiet, restrained, just a line of tears from each eye picked out by the