It seemed a strange request to Dura. She looked around, but this deep inside Parz City there were, of course, no light-ducts, no access to the open Air. "But then it would be dark," she said slowly.

"Yes... We sleep in the dark."

Dura had never been in the dark in her life. "Why?"

Toba looked puzzled. "I don't know... I've never thought about it." He drew back his hand from the lamp, and smiled at them. "Sleep well." He Waved briskly away, sealing shut the room behind him.

Wriggling inside her cocoon, Dura uncoiled her length of rope from her waist, and wrapped it loosely around one of the cocoon's ties. She knotted the rope around her knife, close enough that she could reach the knife if she needed to. Then she squirmed deeper into the cocoon, at last drawing her arms inside it. It was an odd experience to be completely enclosed like this, though oddly comforting.

She glanced across at Farr. He was already asleep, his head tucked down against his chest. She felt a burst of protective affection for her brother — and yet, she realized ruefully, he seemed less in need of protection than she did herself. Farr seemed to be absorbing the wonders and mysteries of this complex place with much more resilience and openness than Dura could find.

Dura sighed, clinging to the fragments of her dissipating feeling of protectiveness. Looking after her brother, at least nominally, made her able to forget her own sense of isolation and threat. Perhaps in an odd way, she thought drowsily, she needed Farr more than he needed her. In the quiet of the room, she became aware of noises from beyond the walls around her. There were murmured words from Toba, the uneven voice of the boy, Cris; and then it was as if her sphere of awareness expanded out beyond this single house, so that she could hear the soft insect-murmurings of thousands of humans all around her in this immense hive of people. The wooden walls creaked softly, expanding and contracting; she felt as if the whole City were breathing around her.

The cocoon soon grew hot, confining; impatiently she shoved her arms out into the marginally cooler Air. It took her a long time to find sleep.

—

The next day Ito seemed a little friendlier. After feeding them again she told them, "I've a day off work today..."

"Where do you work?" Dura asked.

"In a workshop just behind Pall Mall." She smiled, looking tired at the thought of her job. "I build car interiors. And I'm glad of a bit of free time. Sometimes, at the end of my shift, I can't seem to get the smell of wood out of my fingers..."

Dura listened to all this carefully. The conversation of these City folk was like an elaborate puzzle, and she wondered where to start the process of unraveling. "What's a Pall Mall?"