There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so he left.

Outside in the corridor, he leaned his head against the cool white wall and took a steadying breath. If he’d been in his own domik, he wouldn’t have been alone. There would have been corridor dwellers or shift workers or whores or dealers or muggers. In a student accommodation block with paycops on the doors downstairs, his were the only footsteps he heard as he skipped down the stairwell.

Living like Pif did, insulated from the outside, in a place which didn’t stink of rust and mold, where your neighbors weren’t plotting to kill you and take your space—it was different.

And for Petrovitch, who’d always clung by his fingernails to the edge of existence, it came as a revelation. He’d deliberately chosen the domiks over this bright, clean, warm life. The corner of his mouth twitched with the realization that perhaps he’d made a mistake.

The paycop on the door let him out with a grunt. The screen on his desk was a storm of static.

Suddenly, it was cold. The damp dawn air goosebumped the flesh on his bare arms, and he regretted the loss of his jacket. Thought followed thought; he’d lost a lot more than just a piece of clothing. He hunched his back against the weather, and set off across the campus.

There was one more airlock of comfortable warmth to enter. He passed through the foyer, showed his singed student card to those on duty, and hesitated at the main doors.

Something was wrong, and it took him a moment to see what it was. The street outside was all but deserted, and he’d never seen it like that before. He turned to the guards, who seemed to have caught the same sense of disquiet as he had. They huddled close together at the reception desk, talking quietly amongst themselves and casting the occasional glance through the windows.

A car, two cars, went by with their headlights blue-white bright, but then nothing. The pavements, the same ones that he was used to grinding his way along everyday, were wet with moisture that reflected the street lights. There were people, just not enough of them for him to feel comfortable. He’d stick out, exposed in plain sight.

The clock on the wall clicked to eleven minutes past six. He was going to be late. He felt the cold press of the gun at the base of his spine, the weight on his right ankle.

He tapped the door mechanism. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he said to himself as he waited, and waited, for the door to open. After a while, he shoved at it instead, and eventually it wheezed aside enough for him to slip out.

The cold returned, and he assumed his usual head-down posture for the road.