She let him guide her into the centre of Bretton, pleased he was with her. The place looked rough. She would never have gone into it by herself.

The main street was roofed over by an erratic collage of plastic sheeting, solar cells, corrugated iron, even thatch; all supported by an equally bizarre collection of trusses like telegraph poles and rusting chunks of electricity pylons. It was a twilight world where relief from the sun's heat was tempered by the clouds of arid dust any motion kicked up. The stalls snaking along the pavements lacked the cramped clutter of Oakham's disarray, here the shops were coming back into use. There was a greater emphasis on material goods. Food was appearing in packages again. But no tins yet, she noticed.

They grazed the stalls for stuff Greg said Royan would want. Junk, Eleanor thought. He picked out circuit boards, electric motors, inexplicable mechanical gizmos that were parts of bigger machines, antique watches, the wind-up sort. Three plastic carrier-bags full, which came to thirty pounds. There was no logic behind it. He seemed delighted when he found a Sanyo VCR. It was lying among Mickey Mouse phones and kettles on a stall which was half lobster-tanks, half broken gear. He haggled the owner down to a tenner and departed well pleased.

She began to wonder about Royan again. Strange gifts.

They walked out of Bretton and into the Mucklands Wood estate; and Eleanor decided that Bretton wasn't so bad after all, not compared to this. The fifteen high-rise blocks which had risen out of the dead forest were council-run low-cost housing. They represented the least successful aspect of the city's expansion programme. A throwback to the worst of the nineteen-sixties style of instant slums.

They were twenty storeys high, identical in every way right down to the cheap low-efficiency slate-grey solar-cells clinging to every square centimetre of surface. Heat shimmer twisted the blocks' harsh geometry, blurring edges; it was as though nature was trying to distort the inhuman ugliness which their desolate lines delineated. The ground between them wasteland. Less than half of the estate's intended employment workshops had been built, and those that the council had completed were abandoned, either burnt out or gutted. The Trinities gang symbol was scrawled everywhere, brash and sharp, a closed fist gripping a thorn cross, blood dripping; She'd heard of the Trinities, even in the kibbutz. Anti-PSP in a big way.

Mucklands Wood could've been deserted. Nothing moved; worse, there was no sound: there should've been something coming from those hundreds of grimed windows, music or shouting. Their footsteps crunched loudly on the badly nicked limestone path.

She stuck close to Greg's side, eyes darting about nervously. "Is this part of your past?" she asked.

"Briefly. I taught some of the people who live here."

"I never knew you were a teacher."

"Tell you, not your sort of teaching, school and such. I trained them in streetcraft."

"Streetcraft?"