‘There’s a battle at a Conurbation a couple of days from here. There are great opportunities out there, kid.’

Rala felt sick; the world briefly swam. They had never discussed the child growing inside her, but Pash knew it existed, of course. It was a mistake; it hadn’t even occurred to her that the contraceptive chemistry which had circulated with the Conurbation’s water supply might have failed.

She hated herself for begging. ‘Don’t leave.’

He kissed her forehead. ‘I’ll come back.’

Of course he never did.

The brief factional war was won by a group of Green Guards called the Million Heroes. They wore a different kind of armband, had a different ranking system, and so forth. But day to day, under their third set of bosses since the Qax, little changed for the drones of Conurbation 2473; one set of rulers, it was turning out, was much the same as another.

By now most of the Conurbation’s systems had ceased functioning, and its inner core was dark and uninhabitable. Everybody worked in the fields, and some were even putting up crude shelters closer to where they worked, scavenging rock from the Conurbation’s walls.

Still Rala went hungry, and she increasingly worried about the child, and how she would cope with the work later in her pregnancy.

She remembered how Pash had said, or hinted, that the nano dust was like a plant. So she dug it up again and planted it away from the shade of the wall, in the sunlight.

Still, for days, nothing happened. But then she started to noticed pale yellow specks, embedded in the dirt. If you washed a handful of soil you could pick out particles of food. They tasted just as if they had come from a food hole. She improvised a sieve from a bit of cloth, to make the extraction more efficient.

That was when Ingre, for whose life Rala had prostituted herself, turned her in to the new authority.

Ingre, standing with one of the Million Heroes over the nano patch, seemed on the point of tears. ‘I had to do it,’ she said.

‘It’s all right,’ said Rala tiredly.

‘At least I can put an end to this irregularity.’ The Hero raised his weapon at the nano patch. He was perhaps seventeen years old.

Rala forced herself to stand before the weapon’s ugly snout. ‘Don’t destroy it.’

‘It’s anti-doctrinal.’

‘We can’t eat doctrine.’

‘That’s not the point,’ snapped the Hero.

Rala spread her hands. ‘Look around you. The Qax did a good job of making our world uninhabitable. They even levelled mountains. But this bit of Qax technology is reversing the process. Look at it this way. Perhaps we can use their own weapons against the Qax. Or is that against your doctrine?’