Why is the stranger limping?That was a question Sulanever wanted her neighbors to ask each other, not when the news broadcasts were full of the Naxid triumph in a pitched battle on the Axtattle Parkway, and even an ordinary person might think of flying bullets and wounds.

 She knew that it was perhaps irrational to take these precautions, but she had survived the Naxid occupation so far by taking precautions that others had thought irrational.

 “How’s the leg?” Sula asked Spence.

 “Better, my la—Lucy.” She made a turn about the room and gave a wistful look at the street beyond the window. “Pity I can’t leave, on a lovely day like this.”

 “Work on your walking and your stretching, and you will,” Sula said.

 Human warmth is not my specialty,she thought.

 “Didn’t you like your squid?”

 Sula looked in surprise at her supper, bits of squid grilled on a skewer, which had sat untouched by her elbow for the last hour.

 “I forgot to eat,” she said.

 “Let me warm it,” Spence said, and took the skewer—and the other skewer with mushrooms and vegetables—to the kitchen.

 Sula heard the hum of the convection oven as Spence returned to take another turn around the floor.

 “You must be working hard on something,” Spence said.

 “I’d be a lot happier if Icould work on it,” Sula said. She looked down at the displays on the glossy surface of her desk and touched the pad to disconnect her desk from the Records Office computer. “I was trying to think of a way to communicate with people in the city, let them know it’s not all over. ReplaceThe Loyalist somehow.”