“Your grandmother? And you live on Kallisti? In the original city? In the future?”

“In the original city, yes.” The Relocation was too complicated to go into.

Kebes was staring at me so delightedly that it made me uncomfortable. “And you’re a Gold?”

My hand went to touch my pin, and I glanced automatically at his shoulder as he said this, and saw to my surprise that he wasn’t wearing any pin at all, though I knew he was a Gold. “I’m a Gold,” I confirmed. He was so different from the way I had expected.

“Let’s sit down and have a drink,” he said. I looked at Hermes.

“We only really want to take the message from Athene and go,” he said.

“We need to talk about that. And I want to talk to my granddaughter,” Kebes said.

“Then by all means let’s have a drink,” Hermes said. The little breeze was stirring up ankle-high swirls of dust in the empty agora. We walked across it to the tables outside the cafe. I wondered whether to tell Kebes I wasn’t his granddaughter. It seemed a cruel deception, but equally cruel to undeceive him now he had deceived himself this way.

We sat down, and Kebes banged on the table, startling both me and the debating couple, who looked up at us for a moment before they turned back to their work. A woman came scurrying out from inside. She wore a bronze pin, and she looked tired and hot. “Wine, with water as cold as you can make it,” Kebes demanded. “And quickly!” I didn’t like the way he spoke to her, and I was made even more uncomfortable by the cringing way she smiled, as if she agreed with him that he was more important than she was. I watched her as she went back inside. Between this time and my own, things had definitely improved in Lucia in terms of how the classes interacted.

Kebes turned to me and smiled. “Do you have family?” he asked.

It seemed like such a normal question, the kind anyone might ask, and which I wasn’t expecting from a monster. “Yes. Parents, a sister and a daughter,” I said. I was used to saying this, but even so I couldn’t look at Hermes and I could feel my cheeks heating with embarrassment.

“A daughter?” he asked. “How old is she?”

“Seven,” I said.

“She’d say seven and a half,” Hermes said. He was leaning back in his chair, completely relaxed.

“Could you bring her here?” Kebes asked him.

“Alkippe? Why?” I was horrified. I was taking these risks to keep her safe!

“I thought you’d want her with you. You can have a lovely house, next to mine, with plenty of servants. We have public baths and—”