Someone with disturbingly strong teekay wrenched the glass oil reservoir from a lamp post, sending it arching towards the office. It ignited at the top of its trajectory and smashed against the stone wall just above the front door. Flames cascaded down. Arnice ducked, flinging his teekay around himself for protection.

The mob yelled its approval. More reservoirs were snatched from lamp posts.

‘Aim high,’ Arnice instructed. ‘Fire!’

*

Her name was Haranne. She was twelve years old, and jumping up and down amid the crowd in Cantural Street, enthusiastically chanting the new and wonderfully rude song about rich boys loving an egg up their bottom. She was there with her father and older brother, Lonnie, caught up in the excitement and drama of an extraordinary day. She stopped singing as the first flaming oil bottles went flying overhead. Pointing and going: ‘Look, look, Dad.’

The bottles from the lamp posts smashed against the front of the big office building, and bright flame went ripping across the stone wall. That drained the smile and joy away from her face. The sheet of flame was scary, with long streamers pouring down close to the regiment soldiers standing along the base of the wall. She was worried one of them might get burnt.

But they were all raising their guns in one hand. A volley of terrifically loud shots crashed out. Haranne ducked instinctively, hardening her shell around her at the same time as her dad snatched her and held her tight as he crouched down.

‘Go home!’ a strong ’path voice commanded.

She recognized the regiment captain again; he’d been telling them to leave as soon as he emerged. People in the crowd around her groaned and shouted in antagonism. An astonishing sensation of anger washed against her mind. There were more shots.

‘This way,’ Dad ordered. They started to run, hunched down.

‘Together now,’ a calm ’path voice commanded. And she could sense teekay slithering through the air, many strands combining into a tight bundle like some invisible giant’s arm. It lashed out at the regiment captain, knocking him sideways. Blood poured out of his broken nose and torn cheeks. Then one of the glass yalseed oil bottles smashed on the ground beside him; flame burst out.

Haranne cowered away from the brutality, retracting her ex-sense. ‘Daddieee!’

More shots rang out. They seemed closer, different somehow. Then the soldiers were shooting again, and they weren’t aiming up into the air any more. Her father pulled her along frantically. ‘Bastards, bastards!’ he shouted. ‘Out of the way, I’ve got childr—’

An incredible force smashed into Haranne’s side, actually lifting her off the ground for a moment before she crumpled onto the granite cobbles of the road. ‘Dad?’ She was completely numb, staring up into the warm sapphire sky, somehow removed from all the frantic activity churning around her. The angry voices and ’path shouts were becoming muffled. ‘Dad?’

His face slid across the sky. And the way he looked down at her was frightening.

*

Shock and dread hit Tasjorka as he stared down at his daughter’s wound. Blood was running from the appalling hole the bullet had torn in the side of her ribs, and her gorgeous eyes were dazed with confusion and trust as she tried to grab him.

‘Haranne!’ Adrenalin and terror gave his voice and ’path shout a power far beyond normal. Everyone within two hundred metres winced as the image of Haranne burst into their consciousness. A pretty girl with dark hair and rich olive skin, lying awkwardly on the cobbles, her dirty old green dress soaked with blood. More blood starting to glisten on the cobbles beneath her, spreading out. Eyes filled with uncomprehending tears. Breath coming in jerks as shock set in.

‘Help me!’ he commanded. ‘Help!’

The conflict along Cantural Street faltered.

‘Stop the bleeding.’

‘Put pressure on the wound.’

‘I’m a nurse, let me through.’

‘Help her breathe.’

‘You have to stop that bleeding – here—’ Tumbling memory images of how to apply teekay to human flesh.

Too many people crowding round. A hundred different haunting images of the shot girl rippled out across the city, the gifting passed from shocked mind to shocked mind.

‘A girl. They shot a little girl!’

‘I’m a doctor, damn you!’

Tasjorka, along with two others, was trying to staunch the flow of blood with their teekay. He was crying, his mind too frenzied to direct teekay accurately.

‘Let me through!’

‘Please.’

A circle of tough angry men had formed a guard around tragic Haranne. They parted with snarls as a young regiment officer pushed through. He was carrying a fat satchel with a red cross on the side. He fell to his knees beside the girl.

‘Stop doing that,’ he said. His teekay reached out, and flowed over the wound. Pinching and squeezing in clever little pulses. His ’path voice spoke quietly and calmly to Haranne. She managed a brave smile. He opened the satchel and dressings rose out of it like a slow-motion explosion, hovering in the air. He began applying them to the wound. The nurse arrived and helped tie them properly. A phial of amanarnik was broken under Haranne’s nose, and she sighed as the narcotic hit. Her eyes closed.

*

Along with most of the city, Slvasta watched through other eyes as Haranne’s travails were gifted openly. How the mob parted for her, using combined teekay as a protective umbrella from the stones and firebombs arching overhead. How the Meor regiment blocking Walton Boulevard opened their ranks so she could be carried through to the Captain’s Free Hospital on Wallace Road. How the hospital staff clustered round and transferred her onto an iron gurney. He clenched his teeth, his thoughts riding in tandem with Tasjorka’s anguish as the surgical team elbowed everyone away from his precious daughter, now desperately pale, her breaths coming in short gasps. A father’s fright as needles were slipped into arteries, and foreign fluids started to seep along veins.

Then the hospital’s senior doctor hurried in, snapping instructions, and the entire building fuzzed, giving Haranne her rightful privacy.

Every Varlan resident not involved with the riot waited anxiously for news on Haranne’s progress. They endured three fraught hours while the battle of Walton Boulevard raged with escalating violence. There were dozens of further injuries and even two deaths, but it was little Haranne’s plight that had captured everyone’s heart.

Finally, Tasjorka emerged through the fuzz around the Captain’s Free Hospital, and announced in a shaky ’path that Haranne was out of the operating theatre, and the doctors were confident she would recover. He thanked everyone for their help and support. ‘And please, no more violence. No one should suffer as she has.’ With that, he turned round and walked back into the hospital.

The clashes reduced after that, flaring sporadically throughout the afternoon before people finally drifted away as the sun sank below the horizon.

*

Slvasta stayed on at the office that night, helping to clean up and secure the building. The deployment bunker was now serving as a triage post for regiment troopers who’d been injured, which was most of them.

Oil lamps hanging from the bunker’s brick arch ceiling cast a pale yellow light and filled the air with fumes. Slvasta ignored the groaning as he walked along the line of cots, trying not to flinch at the troopers with bloody bandages. Arnice was lying motionless on the cot at the end, his head swaddled, leaving only narrow slits for his eyes and mouth. The white linen was stained crimson in several places. Slvasta’s ex-sight probed below the bandages, revealing the disturbing extent of burnt, ruined skin, the missing part of his lips. A drip bottle hung above the cot, a rubber tube snaking down to his arm, where an intravenous needle had been taped in.