I couldn’t imagine what had happened to the so-called militia – maybe they’d all been slaughtered already, in some brave idiotic stand back in the city. I scanned the local nets; there were bleak reports of dozens of attacks like the one I’d witnessed, but little else. I didn’t expect the anarchists to broadcast all their military secrets on the nets – but I found the absence of blustering propaganda, of morale-boosting claims of imminent victory, strangely chilling. Maybe the silence meant something, but if it did, I couldn’t decipher it.

It was growing cold. I was reluctant to ask for shelter in a stranger’s tent – I wasn’t afraid of being turned away, but I still felt too much like an outsider, despite all my feeble gestures of solidarity. These people were under siege, and they had no reason to trust me.

So I sat in the restaurant, drinking hot thin soup. The other customers talked among themselves, keeping their voices low – glancing at me more with measured caution than open hostility, but excluding me nonetheless.

I’d destroyed my career – for Mosala, for technolibération – but I’d achieved nothing. Mosala was in a coma. Stateless was on the verge of a long and bloody decline.

I felt numb, and paranoid, and useless.

Then a message arrived from Akili. Ve’d escaped the city unharmed, and was in another camp, less than a kilometer away.

Chapter 28

“Sit down. Anywhere that looks comfortable.”

The tent contained nothing but a backpack and an unrolled sleeping bag; the transparent floor looked dry, despite the hint of dew outside, but almost thin enough for the grit beneath it to be felt through the plastic. A black patch on the wall radiated gentle heat, powered by the solar energy stored in the charge-displacement polymers which were woven into every strand of the tent’s fabric.

I sat on one end of the sleeping bag. Akili sat cross-legged beside me. I looked around appreciatively; however humble, it was a vast improvement on bare rock. “Where did you find this? I don’t know if they shoot looters on Stateless … but I’d say it was worth the risk.”

Akili snorted. “I didn’t have to steal it . Where do you think I’ve been living for the past two weeks? We can’t all afford the Ritz.”

We exchanged updates. Akili had heard most of my news already, from other sources: Buzzo’s death; Mosala’s evacuation, and uncertain condition. But not her joke on the ACs: the automatic dissemination of her TOE around the world.