We've had this conversation before, a few times: revisited the situation for an update. No, the world we work in isn't a suitable one to inflict on a child you love.

"Besides, you're not the one who'd have to go through a first pregnancy in your late thirties."

"Certainly not just to please them."

We walk back to the station in morose silence, a thirty-something couple out for a Sunday afternoon stroll; nobody watching us needs to know that we're pissed off, armed, and on the lookout for trouble.

It's probably a very good thing indeed for the local muggers that they're still sleeping off their Saturday night hangovers.

MONDAY DAWNS BRIGHT AND HOT AND EARLY, AND I FIND MY SELF waking to the happy knowledge that I can go back to work, and nobody will order me home. I roll over, feel the cooling depression across the mattress—continue my roll and sit up, relieved, on the wrong side of the bed.

Mo's clearly been up for a while: when I catch up with her in the kitchen she's listlessly spooning up a bowl of yogurt and gerbil food. I attend to the cafetiere. She's wearing what I think of as her job-interview suit. "What's up?" I ask.

"Need to look the part for an off-site." She frowns. "Do you think this looks businesslike?"

"Very." She looks like she's about to foreclose on my mortgage. I spill coffee grounds all over the worktop, finish spooning the brown stuff into the jug, and add boiling water. "What kind of meeting?"

"Got to see a man about a violin. Conservation."

"Conservation . . . ?"

"They don't grow on trees, you know." The frown relaxes: "It's not something common like a Stradivarius. We've got three on inventory, but only twelve were ever made and they're all unavailable for one reason or another. A couple got bombed during the war, three are unaccounted for—presumed lost during extra-dimensional excursions—and the rest belong to other agencies or collectors we can't touch. Operational Assets are looking for a supplier who can make more of them, but it's turning out to be really difficult. Nobody is quite sure of the order in which Zahn applied his bindings; and as for what it's made of, just owning the necessary supplies probably puts you in breach of the Human Tissues Act of 2004, not to mention a raft of other legislation."

"Ow." I look at the battered violin case, propped up in the corner next to the recyclables bin. That's the trouble with a defense policy based on occult weapons: the sort of folks who make magic swords can rarely be bothered with the BS 5750 quality certification required by government procurement committees. "So what are you doing?"