Ori’s landlady let them in. "I don’t know if he’ll be coming back," Cutter said, and she looked away and thinned her green lips, nodded. "I’ll clean up later," she said. "He’s a good boy. I like him. Your friends are here."

Curdin and Madeleina were in Ori’s room. Madeleina wore tears. She sat by the bed and did not make a sound. Curdin lay soaking blood into the mattress. He sweated.

"Are we saved?" he said when Judah and Cutter came in. He did not wait. "Got pretty harsh out there." They sat with him. Judah put his head in his hands. "We had some hostages, some priests, some members of Parliament, Fat Sunners, the old Mayor’s party. And the crowd was… It got ugly." He shook his head.

"He’s dead, or dying," Curdin said. He tapped his rear legs. "This one. The man inside me. That was the worst of it." He backheeled his own ruined hindleg.

"Sometimes it seemed to want to go somewhere. There’s a knot in my belly. I wonder whether this was a dead man, or whether they left him alive in there. Whether his brain’s in there, in the dark. He’d be mad, wouldn’t he? I was either half-corpse, or half-madman. I might have been a prison. "

He coughed-there was blood. No one spoke a long time.

"I wish, you know I really wish you’d been here in the early days." He looked at the ceiling. "We didn’t know what we were doing. People on the streets were moving much faster than the Caucus. Even some militia were coming over to us. We had to run to catch up.

"We put on lectures and hundreds came. The cactacae voted to show people inside the Glasshouse. I won’t tell you everything was all right because it weren’t. But we was trying."

Silence again. Madeleina kept her eyes on his face.

"Chaos. Concessionists wanted to meet the Mayor, Suitors wanted peace whatever cost. The Victorians screaming that we had to crush Tesh: they thought the city’d gone pusillanimous. A core of Caucus. And provocateurs." He smiled. "We had plans. We made mistakes. When we took over the banks, the Caucus didn’t argue hard enough, or we argued wrong, because we ended up borrowing little bits with by your leave. Never mind it should have been ours to start with."

He was quiet so long Cutter thought he had died.

"Once, it was something else," he said. "I wish you’d seen it. Where’s Rahul gone? I wanted to tell him.