Caitlin gestured for him to sit on a small log and he lowered himself gratefully and carefully to the ground. The day was passing and she noted a change in the clamour and tenor of bird and animals noises around them. The world was quieter now, as those creatures that hunted and fed during the day repaired to their burrows and nests to take refuge from the night stalkers. The long, pencil-thin shafts of light that penetrated the canopy had shifted from bright white to a softer, golden hue.

After close to three hours of rigorous trekking through the forest, Lupérico was exhausted and close to emotional collapse. She could tell that the idea he might actually escape the nightmare of the Federation’s wretched sinkhole was finally becoming real to him. He might live. He might escape, get far away from here, and survive to such an age that the terrors of the last few years, and especially the last six months, receded into the dark numbness of the long ago.

As long as he could give this woman what she wanted.

She could read all of this in his face because she had seen that stupid, futile hope in the face of so many other men that she had lost count.

He silently watched her interrogate the data pad strapped to her forearm. She busied herself with that for a minute, fixing their location, while he sipped again from the canteen. His limbs were shaking, whether from extreme fatigue or shock she could not say and didn’t much care. But he tried not to let his weakness seem so obvious. His eyes told her he was already turning his thoughts to what she might ask of him next.

What possible interest could she have had in him?

Caitlin was content to let him stew.

She knew the years of la colapso had not been kind to Ramón Lupérico. He had lost his position in Guadeloupe in October 2003, a few months after the civil war in France. ‘The intifada’, they called it, but he probably knew better. Even living in virtual exile thousands of miles from metropolitan France, taking care of the Republic’s dirty laundry in the quiet, grim, but well-maintained little detention centre that had been his fiefdom, Lupérico would still have had enough contacts among the more significant bureaux back in Paris to have understood that the street fighting and urban warfare was not merely a more violent reprise of 1968. No, the state had been at war with itself.

She knew Lupérico was not a stupid man. He would have understood that in such times, it was the tiny little cogs in the wheels of politics that were most likely to be stripped and crushed. As the collapse accelerated, according to her briefing set, Lupérico had very wisely looked to his own interests.

*