“Seen it where?” asked the muscled man, his masked face implacable but the suspicion clear in his voice.
“The broadcasts,” she said. “We've all seen it.”
“There are a lot more of us than there are of them,” said the man.
His ridiculous bravado was going to get him killed. “If you fight them on the streets, you'll die, don't you see? It isn't about numbers, it's about weaponry and technology. And you don't have nearly enough of either.”
“You seem to know a lot about what Concordance plans to do,” he said.
“It's obvious what they plan to do. They'll allow you to dance around wearing masks and have a few noisy parades, but open revolt is something else. They won't allow it. You know that's true.”
The woman pulled Selene away from the others, holding up a hand to her two comrades to tell them to leave it. She spoke in hushed tones. “Whoever you are, it's best you go. You may be right about the dangers of rebelling, but that's what we're going to do. At least we'll have tried.”
Selene replied in a similar whisper so the others wouldn't overhear. “I get it, trust me, I do. But getting yourselves killed isn't going to help anyone. There are other ways to fight.”
Through the eye-holes of her mask, the woman appeared to be studying Selene intently. “What ways? Who are you really? I didn't say anything to the others, but that accent of yours isn't right. I spent five years at university in A'cha. It sounds as though you've learned how to speak like a native and you didn't finish the course.”
Which was true. Her brain knew the accent and the idiom perfectly, but it took time for muscles to adapt to the subtleties of pronunciations. Time she hadn't had.
Selene decided to take a risk. “Look, you're right. I'm not from A'cha, and it's best you don't know where I am from. But I'm on your side, truly. I have very good reason to hate Concordance.”
The woman nodded. “You fight them in whatever way you can, but this is all we can do. We have no other choices left to us.”
“If there's trouble, innocent people will die. You've seen how busy the city is. What right do you have to do that?”
“No right,” said the woman, “but what's the alternative? Let them win, let them kill us slowly, let them enslave our children as they've enslaved us?”
More than anything, Selene wanted to explain who she was, what she was doing on the planet. Of course, she couldn't. As well as everything else, she didn't want others – people on Migdala and elsewhere – to see her and Ondo as beacons of hope, when the truth was they might be killed at any moment.
“I should go,” said Selene. “The guards have gone.”
The woman nodded. She placed a hand on Selene's arm. “Whoever you are, wherever you're really from, look after yourself.”
“I will,” said Selene. “You do the same. And, thank you.”
Selene peeped out of the doorway, then stepped into the passageway. The hunt had moved away, following a false trail or distracted by other flashpoints. She wondered how many were going to die in Senefore before the carnival season was over. She concealed her blaster and set off.
She spent the next two hours losing herself in the crowd, savouring the atmosphere of celebration and expectation that consumed the gathered people. More and more spiced intoxicants were consumed from dazzling arrays of liquor bottles with their enticing colours: vermillion and turquoise and blood-red. Each food stall she pushed past engulfed her briefly in a fresh miasma of enticing scents: the smell of fresh bread that instantly transported her to her own world, fifty thousand light-years away; meats and fishes cooked in a seemingly endless variety of spices; heady clouds of steamy smoke that promised a variety of colourful intoxications and miraculous visions.
The carnival itself finally wound into view, heralded by bone-rattling drum beats and blasts from blaring brass horns. Dancers and marchers moved through the crowd in a slow procession, each mask and costume more outlandish than the last. One person had been transmogrified into a gaudily-plumed bird, another a shining being of mirror-metal. Quite a few costumes glittered and sparkled with their own strings of lights, and one person processed in an outfit that burned with licking orange flames. The others kept well away from her. The mood was of delight and celebration, of wonder at each new outlandish mask and costume.
But always, glimpsed through brief gaps in the jubilant crowds, she saw the stony faces of the watching City Guard officers. Overhead, always, the observation platforms drifted in slow circles, ignored by the crowds.
Selene's threat-monitoring systems remained constantly at peak concentration, and it was they that spotted a subtle sign of action passing through the crowd. The blank-masks, in twos and threes, were suddenly all drifting in the same direction towards a tall, ornate building whose towers she'd glimpsed repeatedly through the trees. The blank-masks appeared to be following some signal, some pre-ordained plan.
Again, she followed them at a distance, doing her best to look like she was meandering aimlessly through the throng. The front of the carnival procession was jangling its way across a wide square in roughly the same direction. She consulted the local maps she'd pulled into her brain. The building with the spires was the Revelation Temple itself, the home of the religion upon Migdala: alien-looking architecture in this town of low, square buildings. The route of the carnival passed right around it in a loop, an act of clear provocation to a church that so strongly disapproved of the practice of wearing masks and the anarchy and licentiousness that went with it.
Selene hurried, pushing past people
