He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered, How am I going to do this?

He went to Dog Fenn, where he knew the militia would be harder to find but where he could hide. It took two attempts, a lot of planning and several shekels in bribes. By night in the darkness of Barley Bridge’s girdered underside. A two-man patrol lured by a breathless street-boy telling them someone had been thrown in, while a gang of his fellows shouted. A young streetwalker wailed in the black water while trains wheezed overhead. She thrashed with genuine fear (she could not swim but was kept afloat by two vodyanoi children below her who swilled water in their submerged equivalent of giggles).

The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

"I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you," Old Shoulder said. "Where you been before now? Who you been with?"

"Double-R," said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

"Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad." He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. "Things go very different with our friend." He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. "I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With Double-R it’s just more and more notions.

"I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university." They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. "What I care about’s what you do, mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?"