“Yes yes.”

“So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?”

A sudden fury swept through Ann. “You drove them to this,” she shouted in Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up and took a step toward Nadia and yanked her pants up, shouting still: “You and your smug stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a hint of compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no hope!”

“Maybe so,” Nadia said mulishly. Clearly she didn’t care about that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her point: “But will you try?”

Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost youthful with fear, utterly focused and alive.

“I’ll do what I can,” Ann said grimly. “But from what you say, it’s already too late.”

• • •

It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was deserted, and when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers. So she left Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the east Pavonis warehouse complex, and drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red leaders based there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of the locals knew where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations and café windows, but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not even on Mangalavid. A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood; she wanted to do something but did not know how. She tried her wrist-pad again, and to her surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the little image looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her confusion Ann didn’t at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John to the life!

“. . . had to do it,” he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had asked him about that. “If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart. They’ll garden it right to the tops of the big four.”

This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again, but she collected herself and said, “We’ve got to work within the framework of the discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.”

“We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about minorities.”

“I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be Martians killing Martians.”

“They’re not Martian.” There was a glint in his eye, his expression was Hiroko-like in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, speaking a new language.