The parlour filled up with her rank smell again. Outside, the sun warmed each shabby frontage, picking out the unlit bar sign across the street – a black and white cat dancing on its hind legs – while two monas in pencil skirts and seamed nylon stockings gossiped at the intersection  of Straint and dos Santos; inside, it was matt black walls, dust. There was a smell of stale lipids in the air around the proteome tanks, with their rows of LEDs and torn posters for year-old fights, long-dead fighters. The tailor, rigid with disquiet, looked away from her as hard as he could. His anxiety flipped suddenly into depression. ‘You got Preter Coeur written all through you,’ he said, ‘but no one signed the work. This isn’t something they would do for a sport fighter. There’s military stuff in there too.’

‘So do you want to get a drink sometime, George?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Yes you do,’ the assistant said.

Later, as puzzled by her own motives as anyone else’s, she left him in the bar listening to Edith  Bonaventure  play the sentimental accordion solo from Ya Skaju Tebe – 2450’s favourite song – and drove herself up Straint Street, through  acre after acre of industrial dereliction and out on to the Lots, where she slipped her ’52 Cadillac quietly into the row of cars already parked there, on the cracked expanse of weed-grown cement in a long curve facing the Event site.

The cloudbase was down since lunch, Saudade City afternoon rain coming on. Fifty yards into the gloom, she saw rubble and sagging razor wire. Beyond that the landscape crawled constantly, as if uncomfortable with itself, or as if you were viewing it through water flowing on glass. Further  away, you could make out unfamiliar objects being tossed up into the air by a silent but convulsive force. This force, though it had been given many names, was as impossible to understand  as the objects themselves, which, scaled in incongruous ways – giant crockery, huge shoes, ornaments and jewellery, bluebirds and rainbows, tiny bridges, tiny ships and tiny public buildings  – were so unconstrained  by context  that  they seemed less objects than images, collaged on to a further  image of bad weather and ruined landscape. They rose, floated, toppled, thrown up as if by the hands of a gigantic, bad-tempered, invisible child. The assistant shook her head over all this. Cars came and went around her; something big broke the cloud cover and settled near her briefly. (It brought an extra pressure to the air, along with heat, feelings of invasion, the stink of metamaterials  and intelligent nanoresins. Then it was gone.) Finally, she started up the car and drove off at walking pace across the cement.