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buildings clung to the hills of the northern districts.
    I had never been far above of the Swayne, had only once even been as far north as the skystation we normally only saw as occasional jet-streaks in the night sky. My world then was a small place consisting of Cragside Ipp, the neighbouring mixed zones and Ipps, and some of the commercial districts where stolen pids allowed us to move outside curfew.
    Again, I felt like that fox prowling his territory, marking the boundaries.
    Cragside was Sol’s domain for now, and I hoped it would be for a long time. But maybe one day, when Sol stepped down... maybe when that came to pass, the Ipp would be mine. Maybe.
    I came to a green area, where trees had been allowed to grow. Silvery lianas were draped across the branches, home to a million tiny silk nests alive with finger-thick dragonflies.
    I thought of the girl.
    Maybe I’d been thinking of her all along, just fooling myself that I was not. I don’t think I yet understood how deeply she had insinuated herself.
    She had no pids.
    I’d never come across anyone without an identity before, and it was my business to deal in identities. We stole them, we faked them, we traded them. Each of us had unique pids added to our bloodstream at birth; if that didn’t happen, for any reason, we had them added later. Every time we passed through a checkpoint we were scanned, and anyone without pids would be found out. The oldest child I had known without pids was caught out before her fifth birthday, and she had only lasted that long because her mother was simple and rarely ventured out beyond her clan nest.
    I wondered where she could be from, this girl of about my age with the bluest of blue eyes.
    I was intrigued. If she could get by this long without being caught, there must be some lessons to learn from her. It was a professional interest. A technical thing.
    No more than that.
     
     
    O NCE YOU HAVE pids in your blood you can change their identifying codes – with the help of some dodgy black-market kit – but you can never be free of them. So the first thing I did when I got back to the nest that evening was reimpose my originals, make myself Dodge again and not Reed Trader 12, whoever he might be. Elsewhere around the Ipp, all those with borrowed identities would be doing the same.
    Somewhere in their systems, the chlicks would be evaluating what had happened in Precept Square that day, and it was a safe assumption that soon they would be rounding up some of those involved. I didn’t want to be Reed Trader any longer than necessary.
    The clan’s main nest was known as Villa Virtue. It was a concrete block grafted on to the cliffs deep in the city’s South-East 6 Indigenous People’s Preserve, a district otherwise known as Cragside. Behind the walls, caverns were burrowed deep into the cliff, excavated generations ago.
    I had spent all my life here.
    As the sun sank in a bloody sky to the west and the bells tolled seventh and curfew, I sat on a parapet with my back against a moss-covered rock, my feet dangling over a sheer drop to the street below.
    Down there, old Sully hauled his hand-cart over the cobbles, cursing and muttering at the sentinel hanging in the air above him, logging his late return. A dog snapped and played at his heels, waiting for a titbit to fall. Three nearly-men, heads cauled with glowing alien webbing, rushed in the other direction, momentarily snagging the attention of the sentinel.
    I heard a commotion out on the terrace, then. Sol’s voice, a mutter of clicks and spoken comments from the others. She had brought the refugees back from the meeting place.
    I stood, balanced on the parapet, and threaded my way back round to the terrace. Time to purge their pids, time to switch identities and rewrite the stories told in their blood.
    Sol greeted me with a wave of one hand. I thought she was going to make proper introductions, but instead she said, “Here he is. !¡ matter-of-fact ¡! The pids boy I was