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components vanished into hidden compartments that Macnamara had built into the furniture, and everyone changed into clothing more suitable to a night on the town. At the door to the apartment, they separated like the flying fragments of one of their own explosive devices.
    They had been in the same small room far too long.
    Sula went toward the entertainment district along the old canals below the High City. She visited a series of clubs and cafés, sitting at the bar where she could encounter people, or at a table where she could overhear others. A number of men wanted to buy her drinks. She sipped mineral water, let them talk, and tried to steer the conversation toward the Naxids.
    All showed prudent caution about the topic—one never knew who might be listening—but alcohol eventually loosened their tongues. Several had new Naxid supervisors, but said it was too early to know how that would change things. One man had been demoted, his place in the Transportation Ministry taken by a Naxid: he was on his sixth or seventh drink and in the midst of a deep melancholy. Most were eventually willing to admit they were furious that the Naxids had taken hostages.
    â€œBut what can we do?” one said. “We’ve got to cooperate. The whole planet is hostage now.”
    None seemed to have encountered the first issue of Resistance, let alone absorbed the wisdom Sula had so hopefully packed into it. By now she herself was depressed, and her steps brought her to a derivoo club, where she could be comforted by the existence of folk with worse problems than hers.
    The derivoo singer, face and hands whitened, stood straight beneath her spotlight and sang songs of sorrow. Betrayal, shattered hearts, death, violence, accident, suicide, horror—the derivoo’s palate was cast entirely in dark colors. The point was not so much that these griefs existed as that the derivoo was still able to sing about them. Oppressed by every imaginable catastrophe, weighted down by every fearful memory, the derivoo still stood straight and broadcast a message of defiance to the universe. I am beaten, I am bloody, but still I stand…
    Watching the performance was like observing an unforgiving war between passion and control. Too much passion, and the work would tip into melodrama and become absurd. Too much control, and the songs became soulless. The singer tonight was able to walk perfectly the knife-edge between fire and ice, and Sula felt her blood surge in response. She had seen the Home Fleet burn at Magaria, torn to ions by Naxid antimatter. She had brought her team out of the wreckage of the Axtattle ambush as Naxid bullets chewed the building to bits around them. She had watched her comrades die by torture.
    Sula had inflicted tragedy as well as endured it. She had killed five Naxid ships at Magaria along with all their crews. “It was Sula who did this!” she had called to the Naxids at Magaria. “Remember my name!”
    She had claimed the Sula name then, made it her own, even though Sula had not always been her name. Once, when she was very young—when her name had been Gredel—she’d pressed a pillow to the face of Caroline, Lady Sula, and afterward claimed the dead girl’s name, her title, and her small fortune.
    It was not clear in Sula’s mind whether that was a tragedy or not. Probably it was for Caro Sula, though it wasn’t likely Caro would have survived much longer anyway. She had already overdosed once, and would have again.
    Whether any of this was a tragedy for her was as yet unclear to Sula. She was inclined to think not. If there were tragedy involved, she intended that it would be a tragedy for the Naxids.
    She left the club feeling as if she had gained possession of some primal fact of the universe, something both despairing and joyous, and the elation carried her all the way home. Not to the apartment where she met with her team to plan assassinations and to plunder