“A Magenta feed-pipe leakage, he told me.”

“I heard that, too. But we’re not on the grid. He’s been invited to conduct the Ishihara, but that’s not for three days. I want to know what he’s really doing here.”

“ You want me to spy on a National Color operative? Someone Colorful? ”

“Wow,” she said, “you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.”

“I can’t spy on my fourth cousin!”

“Of course you can. And you will.”

“You seem very confident about this.”

She leaned forward. “You’ll do this for me, Red, because despite Constance, you’re in love with me.”

And there it was. She’d said it. If I’d wanted to deny it, there was a half-second window in which to do so. But I paused too long, and all hope of believabilitywasgone forever. “Oh, sure,” I said inan unconvincing manner, “I’m on a half promise to an Oxblood, and I let myself fall for a Grey girl who not only despises me but is up for Reboot in under a week. Does that sound remotely sensible to you?”

“Love isn’t sensible, Red. I think that’s the point.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and thought hard for a moment. “You want to know what the Colorman is doing here?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see what I can find out. But you have to stop threatening to kill me and punching me in the eye and stuff.”

“This is the new me,” she said, and gave me another smile. I was being used, but then I didn’t mind—and I didn’t actually have to do as she asked. In under a week she’d be pacing the yard at Reboot.

We turned the corner into the main square and came across a small crowd outside the town hall. It looked like an allocation ceremony, so we wandered over to dutifully offer our best wishes.

I had been nine at the time of my own allocating, and up until then I’d carried a nondescript BS3 code from the open pool that was held by the prefects. With the increased importance of family and inheritance, a loophole had been drafted to allow residents to transfer a relative’s postcode to a junior member of the same family. The RG6 7GD code that was now scarred into my chest had been my grandfather’s. I’d have liked any child of mine to have had my mother’s old code, but that had been reallocated to someone named Holland Claret, and I’d never liked him because of it. The Oxbloods had elderly relatives in abundance, so any children of Constance would almost certainly carry an SW3—Oxblood through and through.

We were standing at the back of the crowd of perhaps fifty or so people. DeMauve was conducting the ceremony, and it seemed that young Penelope Gamboge was having her allocation on the last day possible—her twelfth birthday, which lent a double sense of occasion to the proceedings. Old Man Magenta back in Jade-under-Lime treated allocation as the formfillery it was, but at least deMauve was making an effort. The whole Gamboge clan, which numbered eight as far as I could see, were beaming happily and even shedding a tear or two, which I never thought Yellows could do.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” whispered Jane. “A new life to an old postcode. A connection to our past, and to the future.”

“You can be quite sarcastic sometimes, can’t you?”

“It’s more than sometimes.”

“How did you get to Rusty Hill this morning?”

It was a daring question, but she had promised not to thump me. As it turned out, her answer was as matter-of-fact as it was impenetrable.

“The highway obeys my every wish.”

“What?”

She ignored me, and the ceremony came to an end.

“Aren’t you going to give a donation?”

I wasn’t planning to, but said I would so as not to appear cheap. I placed the smallest coin I had in the jar marked PENELOPE DAFFODIL GAMBOGE, TO3 4RF, which I noted was already half full of low-denomination coins, and quite a few buttons.

“There,” I said, “happy?” But I was talking to myself. Jane had slipped away in the crowd, her job completed. I looked at the poem again. It was the best I’d seen, and I wished she had written it to me, and not for me.

I stopped off at the telegraph office to send Jane’s poem to Constance. Mrs. Blood was impressed and congratulated me on the quality of my words. “You’re smarter than you look, young man. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say your Constance is a lucky woman, she might conceivably do worse.”

“You’re very kind,” I replied. “I just needed to get into my groove.”

And then, despite what Jane had told me, I wrote after the poem: I take my Ishihara this Sunday. All my very best, Edward.

“There,” I said, handing over the completed telegram form and counting out the money. “That will sort out Roger Maroon once and for all.”

I went next door to the Co-op to buy some pudding rice and found Tommo behind the counter, bagging some lentils for Carlos Fandango.

“Hello, Edward,” said the janitor, placing a custard powder tin on the counter to be refilled. “What did you think of Imogen’s information pack?”

“It was most impressive,” I said, “especially the unicycling.”

“Then you’ll be contacting your friend?”

“It’s at the top of my list.”

“Excellent.”

He turned to Tommo. “Put this on my account, would you, Spoonpacker?”

Tommo said he would, and as soon as Carlos had gone, Tommo opened the accounts ledger and took a pencil from behind his ear.

“One tin of custard powder . . . one hundred twenty pounds of lard . . . a haunch of lamb . . . two licorice sticks.”

He snapped the book shut, handed me a licorice stick and took one for himself.

“That should sort him out. Did he offer you a one percent finder’s fee?”

“Two percent.”

“He must have liked the look of you. If Dorian was still Lilac and had six grand kicking about, there might be a happy ending. He’s Grey and has only thirty, so there won’t be. Tears all around. Did you have a particular Purple in mind for her?”

“There’s only Bertie Magenta back home.”

“The elephant trick guy?”

“The same. But I’m not going to help out. Fandango intimated that a prospective purchaser could have her in the wool store on appro.”

“What a fantastic sales gimmick,” he said in admiration. “When I hear stuff like that it makes me proud to be in retailing.”

“I say it’s vile odiousness. Would you do that to your daughter?”

“Technically speaking, it’s not his daughter. If I’d brought up another man’s girl for twenty years, I think I’d be due some sauce for my investment.”

I could see I was wasting my time arguing with Tommo over this one.

“Even so, it’s just not right.”

“There is no right or wrong,” said Tommo. “Only the Rulebook makes it so. Do you want a banana?”

“Not really.”

“Reserve judgment until you see it.”

He reached behind the counter and produced an ordinary-looking banana—but in a beautiful dark yellow shade that was delightfully nonstandard. It was one of the new Chromatically Independent bananas I had seen advertised in Vermillion’s Paint Shop.

“Wow. Where did that come from?”

“The regional fruit and veg allocations manager owed me a favor. I was going to keep this one for myself but instead thought I’d sell it to some shallow dope who’s impressed by this sort of thing.”

“Like me?”

“Like you.”

I stared at the fruit from several angles and wondered if I could send it to Constance as some sort of love token, then dismissed the idea as quickly—sending bananas to young ladies really only meant one thing, and you could expect a face slap for it. Or in Constance’s case, six.

“How much?”

“To you, thirty.”

“Come on! An uncolorized one is only five cents.”

“That was a special price because I like you—everyone else paid forty.”

“Fifteen, then.”