‘You crimed,’ he breathed, and he stared at her with eyes that were bright white against the dirt.

He was right. She should have let the deathing go ahead, and then taken out the We-ku. Then there would have been two deaths, instead of one. She had been un-Doctrine.

She glanced around. Nobody was close. Nobody had seen how the We-ku died.

Nobody but this man, this intended victim.

‘Ca-si,’ he said. ‘Cadre Fourteen.’ That was on the other side of the sky.

‘La-ba. Cadre Six. Will you report?’ If he did she could be summarily executed, deathed before the day was out.

Still he stared at her. The moment stretched.

He said, ‘We should process the We-ku.’

‘Yes.’

Breathing hard, they hauled the We-ku’s bulky corpse towards a hopper. The work brought them close. She could feel the warmth of his body.

They dumped the We-ku into the hopper. It was already half-full, of tangled limbs, purple guts, bits of people. La-ba kept back one ugly We-ku ear as a trophy.

La-ba and Ca-si sexed, there and then, in the slippery dirt.

Later, at the end of the shift, they got clean, and sexed again.

Later still they joined in a dance, a vast abandoned whirl of a hundred citizens, more. Then they sexed again.

He never did report her crime. By failing to do so, of course, he was criming himself. Maybe that bonded them.

They kept sexing, whatever the reason.

Hama stood beside his mentor, Arles Thrun, as the citizens of the Observation Post filed before them. The marching drones stared at Hama’s silvered skin, and they reached respectfully to stroke the gleaming egg-shaped Memory that Arles held in his hand: the treasure, brought from Earth itself, that the Commissaries were here to present to the drones of this Post.

One in three of the drones who passed was assigned, by Arles’s ancient, wordless gesture, to the Cull. Perhaps half of those assigned would survive. Each drone so touched shrank away from Arles’s gleaming finger.

When Hama looked to the up-curving horizon he saw that the line of patiently queuing drones stretched a quarter of the way around the Post’s internal equator.

This Observation Post was a sphere, so small Hama could have walked around its interior in a day. The folded-over sky was crowded with Cadre Squares, dormitory blocks and training and indoctrination centres, and the great sprawls of the Post’s more biological functions, the Cesspits and the Cyclers and the Gardens, green and brown and glistening blue. The great Birthing Vat itself hung directly over his head at the geometric centre of the sphere, pink and fecund, an obscene sun. Drones walked all over the inner surface of the sphere, stuck there by inertial generators, manipulated gravity. The air was thick with the stink of growing things, of dirt and sweat. To Hama, it was like being trapped within the belly of some vast living thing.