Sasha sprinted through a vacant lot behind the tenement building where the two fallen police bots lay. Her heart was leaping up and down, fairly bursting with the joy of escaping from Klar and Lois and the hope of finding Nug. She peeled off her yellow cord jacket, dumped it in a trash can, and galloped after Dean and Chloe. The three fugitives dashed across a narrow street to a pub with an almost-full parking lot and a neon sign above the door. Dean paused with his hand on the doorknob, looked quickly inside, then nodded to the others. 

"It's okay, I know the guy behind the bar. Tyrone's a revo like us."

"What's a revo?" she asked. Chloe leaned closer to whisper in her ear.  "Someone who fights for the revolution."

Dean pushed open the door and led her and Chloe to the bar, where he spoke in a muted voice to a bartender with red hair and a red beard. The barman began pouring three vodkas and flicked a glance at Dean as he poured the drinks. "How do you want these, Prof?" 

"Doubles, with a splash of Schloop." 

The barman disappeared into a back room. She stood beside Dean and Chloe and gazed around the crowded barroom. Groups of unemployed men were hunched together in VR booths, spending their meager BNI on hologames, beer, and pork scratchings. A couple men at a cribbage screen eyed her yellow clothes. She figured chromers were a rare sight in places like this and Dean's green hair would also be a rarity. She kept her head lowered and inspected her yellow boots.

"How long are we gonna be here?" Chloe whispered to Dean.

"Soon as Tyrone comes back, we're taking off," Dean said. Her heart jumped faster.

The redheaded bartender emerged and called out to Dean. "Doubles at the double."

Dean motioned to her and Chloe. "Okay. Now."

They hurried out the front door. In the parking lot a shiny, sapphire-blue Mercedes waited, its motor switched on and Beethoven's Eroica blasting at high volume. Dean climbed into the seat nearest the autocontrol and pulled out a steering console, with which he replaced the autodrive. She settled next to Chloe who turned and winked at her. "Dean's a revo. He don't want the car to drive us. He wants to be the driver."

Dean turned down the music and fingered the newly-installed steering wheel. He drove off and they headed east, maintaining a correct distance from the autodriven vehicles buzzing along the crowded roads. At the next stoplight they halted and prepared to turn. She felt a trickle of relief. She was clear of danger and speeding away from the Klar and Lois madhouse. Her thoughts swung to her bodily needs. She was longing for a snuggle. After the uncertainty and tension of the last few days, the idea of comfort sex was overwhelmingly tempting. Her heart experienced something like elation for the first time since Nug's accident. The lights changed and they swung onto a side road. 

The car slowed and stopped before a modest gray terraced house in a grungy street somewhere in East Stratford. She had no clue where they were. She climbed out behind Chloe. "This is a safe house," Chloe whispered. She stumbled to the front door where Dean was jiggling a key in the lock.

He led them through a dark hall. In the living room four people, crammed onto a frayed couch, sat transfixed by a holographic battle erupting around them. "Sorry about these guys and their taste in flicks," Dean said. "I guess some people are addicted to violence."

She found herself in the middle of a virtual war. Roaring, iron-clad soldiers brandished their weapons and surged toward her, blasting her with loud, blood-curdling battle cries. That the swords, spears, and hammers flying close to her face were merely pixels didn't prevent her from feeling thoroughly alarmed. 

"Can you tell them to turn the volume down?" she yelled at Dean. He gestured to one of the seated occupants of the room as arrows and spears flew around him.

The mayhem and slaughter continued, Sasha, Dean, and Chloe standing amid the strife. Finally, a stout man with straggly gray hair, jammed between a large, tattooed woman and a man with short wiry limbs, touched a button on his remote. Immediately the tangle of warriors disappeared.  

In the silence, she gazed around the room. The walls were a riot of images of warlike spacecraft and mythical figures, some of whom she recognized from the Galactic Overlords series of holomovies. On the wall facing her was a poster of Steamgrinder, the Chief Galactic Warlord. He was armed with what looked like a hi-tech harpoon and stood with one index finger pointed directly at her. She felt she was in a twelve-year-old's bedroom.

"Hi Dean. Hi Chloe," the man with the remote said. "Who's your new friend?"

"She's no friend--she interrupted the Battle of Bokkorech!" the man next to him rumbled in a voice like thunder. 

"God, you really take it seriously, don't you?" Dean fired back. "It's only a damn holomovie."

The man, who wore a dressing over his nose, looked sheepish and shifted in his seat. "Right-o, Dean. She's a friend."

She smiled at him. "What happened to your nose?" 

"I got mashed by a police bot in a demo last week," he mumbled. "They said I had severe concussion at the hospital. Anyway, I woke up with a broken nose."

"Maybe your nose won't look too bad after they take the dressin' off." 

The man snickered. "It'll be my first battle wound."

"Where can we sit?" Dean asked. Apart from the fully-occupied couch, the seating arrangements consisted of three lumpy cushions in a rough semi-circle.

"Plonk your arses on a bag," the heavily-tattooed woman, who had fuzzy hair, said.

They each found a cushion to sit on. The room smelled musty, and she wrinkled her nose. 

"Sorry about the clutter," the other woman, bespectacled and bright-eyed, said to her. "A revo who's unhygienic was sleeping here for three solid weeks. Thank God he left this morning."

She noticed an unmade bed in one corner of the room. In the other corner, a dressing-table was heaped high with what looked and smelled like dirty laundry. The room had blacked-out windows and was lit by a single overhead bulb. Through an air vent she could hear traffic swishing by.

The bespectacled woman cleared her throat. "My name's Stella, by the way. And your name is..?"

"Sasha. I'm looking for my boyfriend. He's on the run from the cops. His name's Nug."

The woman's face twitched. "Can't say I know him. If I hear anything, Darling, I'll let you know."

The fuzzy-haired woman spoke up. "So what brings you guys here?"

Chloe's battered features scowled. "I nearly got killed by a fuckin' purple. Two of 'em came stormin' into me room, demandin' to know where you were hidin'. Dean came down from his room and offed 'em. We legged it to Tyrone's pub and got us a car."

The man with the injured nose looked puzzled. "Why were they lookin' for us?"

Dean leveled his gaze at the four people on the couch. "You want to overturn the government and liberate the people. Surely that's reason enough."

They all laughed coarsely. The man with the straggly gray hair put down his remote and smiled at her.

"Well, you're welcome to stay here with us. My name's Chas, and the joker next to me is called Slim."

The man with the broken nose elbowed him. "If I'm a joker, you must be Charlie the Clown."

The fuzzy-haired woman folded her tattooed forearms and gave a snort of derision. "You're all clowns as far as I'm concerned. Dean's the only smart one."

Dean gave her a weary smile. "You're too kind, Pen." He turned to Sasha and Chloe. "Looks like we'll be holed up here for a while. When the cops find out two of their bots have been mangled, all hell's gonna break loose."

Slim's bandaged face cracked a smile. "In that case, you better stay for dinner."

Dinner at the kitchen table was bland and spartan. Penny, the woman with the tattooed forearms, presented a casserole of cabbage, green beans, and carrots, with thin slices of rhubarb tart for dessert.

"Sorry about the short rations. We've been going to demos all week and haven't had time to food shop."

She dribbled custard from a jug over her rhubarb tart, and thought about Nug. He's not with these people. Maybe he drifted back to his druggy friends.

"Why are the cops after your boyfriend?" Stella asked, between mouthfuls of casserole. "Is he an activist?"

She began coughing over her food, until Dean poured her a glass of water.

"No, he's a drug addict." Her face turned red as she sipped. "The cops are after him because of me."

"You're a mysterious girl, Sasha," Dean said, spearing a chunk of cabbage with his fork. "I still can't work out what you were doing in our rooming house with those two bots."

She coughed louder and had to drink more water. "I was waitin' outside with two people from Catalysis," she finally managed to say, "and they let me go into the building to look for Nug."

"Catalysis?" Dean paused, the laden fork hovering over his plate. "They're a mysterious bunch, too."

"What do they do?" Chas asked.

"They're licensed by the government to do secret work." Dean gobbled the morsel of cabbage, then dug his fork into the casserole. "They also work with the AI companies that control the government. Their job is to give droids brains like ours."

"You mean implants?" Chas said.

"Not exactly. More like mind mapping from human subjects."

Her face took on a crimson hue and she looked across at Dean. He met her gaze and smiled.

"So you actually live in that building where you took out the two bots," she said.

"I used to," he replied, "but now I'm stuck here with the rest of you."

Sweating, she awoke with a start and sat bolt upright in bed. She had seen Nug in a dream, hauled away unconscious after a savage beating by the purples. She closed her eyes to recapture something of the dream, but it was too far away. It left only a sense of extreme disquiet and foreboding. She heard the box spring creak. A dark figure was bending over the bed.

"Who is it?" 

Dean's face appeared in the darkness. "You were moaning," he said in a muffled voice. "I thought I'd come over to see what was wrong."

At that moment Dean's ajna, resting on his forehead, began to warble. "I'm getting a message," he muttered. A woman's voice vibrated from the ajna a few centimeters from her ear. The conversation went back and forth.

"Who was it?" she said, when the voice fell silent.

"A friend. She's having problems at work." He tuned out the ajna. "But what about you... Are you all right?"

"Yeah, it was just a bad dream. I'm sensitive like that." She noticed his eyes were drooping. 

"That's good," he said. "I'll go back to my doss bag." Wearing only his boxers, he slumped against the bed and his eyes flickered and closed. "If you need anything, I'll..."  His voice trailed off, his left arm hanging down.

"Why don't you sleep here?" she said lightly. "Come on." She helped him onto the bed, where he landed heavily. He lay motionless, staring at the ceiling. "It's funny how things turn out," he said, his voice drowsy. "I'm laying on the bed in my room, a nerdy science guy trying to figure out some ULV sound theory, when I hear a kerfuffle downstairs. I get up, go downstairs, and there's this redhead chick about to take on a dirty great purple bot. Thank God I had my stun gun handy."

"I was stunned an' all," she said. "I ain't never seen nothin' like it."

"You sound like a cockney sparrow." He chuckled, and his voice trailed off again. "A damsel in distress who's a chirpy cockney sparrow..."

Dean began to doze and she covered him with the blanket. For the next four hours, the longest she had ever known, she sat on the bonehard bed while he slept. She wanted to stroke his long green hair, but was afraid to disturb him. Her thoughts about him, as well as Nug and her own situation, kept her awake and upright. She kept turning his words over and over in her mind. Just before dawn her eyes grew heavy and she settled down in the sheets. Snuggling under the blanket, she fell asleep beside him.