I couldn’t think of anything to say, so instead told her where to go and what to do with herself when she got there – a futile comment and she and I both knew it – then walked outside the station and stood in the gently falling snow, clenching and unclenching my fists as I tried to make sense of what had just happened. I wanted to find something to kick, but there was little around that wouldn’t have been hard and unyielding and ultimately painful, so I just stood there, seething quietly, the snow gathering silently on the shoulders of my greatcoat, like great big crystallised tears.

I stood in a marinade of my own self-pity for ten minutes or so until the chill made me shiver, and more practical matters took precedence: survival. I moved to the top of the station footbridge to get a better sense of the local geography. The town was not located specifically around the town square as I had first supposed, but strung out in a line that began at HiberTech on the hill behind me, then stretched along a main road that headed off to the north-west, where forty or so Dormitoria rose in ranks on the opposite slope of the shallow valley, two or three miles distant. The only lights showing were the lanterns over the porters’ lodges, and the gas lamps that illuminated the connecting roadway. There was almost no sound, and it already felt like midwinter, even though it was still officially Autumn for another twenty-nine hours.

‘Worthing?’ came a voice below me. ‘What the hell are you still doing here?’

Below me was Aurora. She was alone, and buttoned up against the cold. It was, I confess, a relief to see her.

‘They let the train go early,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I’ll come down.’

I walked down from the footbridge to where she was waiting for me.

‘I’d upset the stationmaster when I delayed the train in Cardiff,’ I explained. ‘Sort of payback.’

‘That’s annoying,’ she said, ‘but not unexpected. What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I was going to go back to the Consulate and see if they could get me out.’

‘Probably not the wisest of moves, especially as you’ll have to justify your actions to Toccata at some point. I know it was me that pulled the trigger, but you got into this situation because you insisted on retrieving Bouzouki Girl. While a brave act, it could be seen as reckless, and, well, you did disobey orders and a Chief Consul ended up dead.’

It didn’t sound good when she said it like that.

‘One who was involved in illegal activity.’

‘I wish things were that simple,’ she said, ‘but when Toccata’s involved, logic becomes somewhat  . . . mutable.’

She stared at me for a moment.