‘All right.’ His hands helped her rise. ‘Come on. You need to get out of here.’

He half-carried her from the xeno area to the lifts, held her as they descended, then let her lean on his arm as they walked out through reception. Outside, in the hot sauna-damp air, he led her to a European-style coffee shop. Inside, coolness shivered across her skin, and she felt better as he sat her down in a corner booth.

‘I’ll get you something calming to drink,’ he said.

‘H-how did you know?’

That this was doing her good, she meant. That she needed to calm down.

‘I’ve seen hypertension before. Besides, my wife’ – his voice softened – ‘gets migraines from time to time.’

Did Simon’s voice change that way when he talked about her, Rekka?

Does he talk about me at all?

It was not a question she would have asked herself six weeks earlier.

‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the tea that Randolf brought back. ‘Thank you so much.’

She sipped, and it helped a little more. Jasmine, camomile, with a maybe a touch of something synthetic underlying the added honey.

‘And I got this.’ Randolf held out a small, soft silver ovoid. ‘It’s the brand my wife uses.’

She took it from him and ran it across her forehead.

‘Better. Yes.’

Closing her eyes, she leaned back against the upholstered booth.

Breathe the way you know how.

Years of yoga and she was behaving like this. It was embarrassing, but even the thought of that embarrassment was causing her breathing to quicken, her temples to pulse—

Let it go.

After a while, she opened her eyes.

‘I could call for a medic,’ said Randolf. ‘But you’re looking much more relaxed.’

‘I am, thank you.’

‘Then why don’t we take an extended break? The almond cookies here are wonderful, if you want something light. And some more honeyed tea.’

His kindness made her want to cry.

‘Yes, please,’ she said.

They talked about Singapore and a little about Randolf’s upbringing in Germany. They drank tea and ate croissants as well as cookies. It was an hour before he said: ‘Bittersweet will be worrying about you, you know. She has a caring personality.’

Rekka blinked.

‘I thought no one else had noticed.’

‘Because you’ve been working so hard.’

‘Oh.’

‘So how are you getting on,’ he said, ‘with finding a place?’

Her hotel was upmarket. On first arrival, as soon as she had walked through the entrance, she had received a cool drink from a pretty young staff member, while the inbuilt system registered her automatically and a porter came to take her bags. But that had been six weeks ago, and she had two more left before UNSA would stop paying the bill.

‘I’ve not really been … looking.’

Because she had planned on viewing properties with Simon, at least with him on the other end of a real time link. Because in trying to forget that, she had immersed herself in work to the extent of making herself ill.

‘Come to dinner tonight. My wife will be able to offer advice.’

‘Oh.’ The invitation surprised her. ‘I … would love to come. Thank you.’

‘So.’ Randolf held up his infostrand and tapped it, causing her strand to chime. ‘You have my details, and everything is organized.’

‘Alles in Ordnung?’ It was one of the few phrases Rekka knew. ‘Did I get that right?’

‘Exactly correct.’ He smiled. ‘Time to get back to our inscrutable friends.’

‘Not so inscrutable,’ said Rekka.

Rekka rode up in one of twelve lifts that followed helical paths through the braided tower, where apartments were stacked like corn-on-the-cob given a twist. She wondered whether she could live here, if there were vacancies, and how much it would cost.

Imagined herself living alone.

No. It’s just the pressure, making him act weird.

If she could suffer from shaking hypertension, why would Simon be immune?

According to the text-and-map Randolf had sent, his wife’s name was Angela. Rekka had assumed, with her basic knowledge of German, that the name would have a hard g, pronounced An-gay-la. But the woman who opened the door was oriental, and when she introduced herself as Angela it was in the English fashion.

Over dinner, Rekka learned that Angela was native Singaporean, that she had met Randolf in an art gallery during his first week here – he had been a researcher at the University of Singapore before getting a post at UNSA – and that Randolf laughed a lot in Angela’s presence.

‘Come sightseeing on Saturday,’ said Angela. ‘Randolf will be hanging out with his old colleagues on campus.’

He seemed to belong here, with connections that extended beyond the closed world of UNSA.

‘Definitely,’ said Rekka.

On Saturday, they sat in a pavilion in Stanley Park; explored the resurrected Raffles Hotel with its airy white corridors and ceiling fans and Sikh doormen; saw the harbour and the sea-lion statues and, in another park, a group practising in the designated ‘tai-chi area’; and watched shoppers buying smartfabric and biotech off the stalls in Chinatown. There, Angela frowned as a young oriental couple walked off with a new configurator, smiling, while the proprietor was blank-faced.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Rekka.

‘If you want anything here, let me buy it, and give me the money afterwards.’

‘Because …?’

‘There’s such a thing as preferential pricing. I’d pay less. You’d pay more, but not as much as those two.’

She meant the young couple.

‘Why would they be charged more?’

Angela shrugged.

‘They’re Japanese.’

Afterwards they took the mag-lev to Changi station, transferred to a bus, and travelled along white-paved streets through an upmarket residential area: gardens an explosion of tropical colour, scarlet blossoms bigger than Rekka’s head, the ubiquitous palm trees surrounding beautiful homes. When they got off at the stop, it was just the two of them. As they walked, to their right rose a tall fortified wall with razor wire rotating non-stop, coated with neurotoxin nanovectors according to Angela. The establishment was Changi Prison, and its security was the best that modern tech could provide.

‘Let’s carry on,’ said Angela.

There was a white one-storey building outside the prison wall.

‘During World War II, that building would have been inside’ – Angela pointed – ‘because it’s one of the original prison buildings. The Japanese treatment of prisoners was notorious, that’s European prisoners as well us.’

Rekka noted the pronoun – us – and wondered why events of two centuries earlier should be so manifest in the present.

They went inside, to see the exhibits and to experience the dark claustrophobia of a cell – Rekka thought that perhaps ultrasonics magnified the effect – and return to the display cases. Angela pointed to a diary whose entries, in twentieth-century handwriting, were hard to make out.

‘“We thought the Europeans to be superior,”’ she read aloud, ‘“yet they seemed as lost and bewildered as we were.” That’s a world-view being shattered, right there.’

No history buff, Rekka was intrigued.

‘At school we learned that white people used to think themselves superior.’ She looked down at her dark hands, then up at Angela. ‘I hadn’t realized that the rest of us agreed with them.’

‘Disquieting, isn’t it?’

As they left, Rekka wondered what negative beliefs she might subconsciously hold, constraining her life now as people two centuries ago had limited theirs.

Simon. Why don’t you call?

Waiting for the return bus, Angela asked: ‘What about your family, Rekka? Were you born in India?’

‘Born, yes.’ She tried to tell it objectively. ‘My father fell victim to the Changeling Plague when I was a baby. Maybe even while my mother was pregnant with me. And with so many people starving in those days … She took me to a Suttee Pavilion – you know about those? – for a last wonderful meal and music and all the rest, intending to kill me along with herself.’