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nightlights. Lucias and Pleasance were probably standing nearby, maybe her hand on his arm; Marek might be hesitating, unsure whether to go to her or not; and Sol would be staring out at the night skyline, ignoring the show of emotion, waiting for the conversation to move on. I wanted to look over the terrace wall, see the tableau, but I did not.
    “!¡ curiosity | probing | fellow-feeling | sympathy ¡! Angiere?” prompted Sol eventually, her tones much softer than usual. I had got her wrong tonight: I had not expected her to show such sensitivity to the strangers.
    “Gone,” said Callo, simply.
    One of the men took over, Marek I thought: “!¡ matter-of-fact ¡! The purges started about a year ago. At its onset, they sent swarms of tiny black flies, each the size of a pin-head...”
    Into the pause, Sol said, “How do–” but was cut off as Marek regained his composure and continued.
    “The destruction was instantaneous. One moment, a clan might be gathered to eat, the children still playing and yet to come to the table; the next, a black cloud would descend and the place would be stripped clean. The flies would devour cloth, wood, flesh, waste... Within seconds, all that remained would be bones and building stone, and then, as if the building suddenly realised it had no frame, the whole thing would collapse.”
    “!¡ probing ¡! And you’re sure this wasn’t a natural phenomenon, eh?”
    “!¡ cold ¡! The purges were targeted,” said Callo. “They were carefully engineered. !¡ stifled-emotion ¡! I don’t know how these swarms were controlled, but they were. They would target one building and leave those all around it untouched. At first, the clans most active in the resistance were targeted, but later the attacks were more indiscriminate: any indigenous enclave could be hit. Even the trogs were targeted.”
    The trogs, the dead people. Human on the surface, but look into their eyes and you looked into an empty space. Like nearly-men, only less.
    “The swarms were only the start,” said one of the men. “Clan elders were seized. !¡ sadness ¡! Sometimes they would return after interrogation, but increasingly, when they did, they had been tortured...”
    “What...?”
    “Sometimes it was obvious from the physical injuries, but other times it was their minds that were wrecked. We don’t know what happens in the torture chambers, but we do know that the watchers and their grunts understand how to tear a human mind apart.”
    “!¡ loss ¡! Often they didn’t return at all,” said Callo softly. “My blood-father... He was taken. He never had anything to do with the resistance, or even with the black market. He was a good man. But now he is gone. Disappeared.”
    Another pause. I looked out across the city. The northern horizon was lit up with mushroom towers and needle spires. Occasional pulses of light sprang from one tower to another for no apparent reason. It was another world over there. Another world, right on our doorstep.
    “!¡ defensive ¡! We tried everything,” said one of the men. “We had contacts in the emissaries, but they would not even acknowledge that Callo’s father had ever existed, let alone that he had disappeared and that some of their goon squads might be responsible. We had grunts we’d turned by supplying drugs and satisfying their strange fetishes !¡ repulsion ¡! but when we asked, none of them would even admit to knowing anything.
    “So that was when the resistance became real.”
    I shifted slightly in my niche. I thought of the Monument to the Martyrs. I knew kids who had gone up against the grunts, but it was more a rite of passage thing than an act of rebellion. Stones and taunts and running like mad. What was there to rebel against? This was how things were. Far better just to survive and make good. I never had been an idealist.
    “!¡ strong | assertive ¡! We weren’t rebelling against their presence,” said Callo. “We were defending ourselves.