The Matah rose. 'You must excuse me. Thanks to you I have urgent business to attend to.'

Tiaan quaffed her wine. The fumes went up her nose, her head spun, she had a vague memory of the Matah laying her on a pallet and drawing a cover over her, and that was all.

When she woke, the sun was streaming in through a glassed porthole high on the western wall. It was mid-afternoon. Tiaan stretched aching limbs and rose. Food had been set out on a stone table and a set of clothes laid over the end of the bed. Nearby was a bathing room. Pressing down the levers for water, she tore off her stained rags – clothes selected so she would look her best for Minis. Tiaan looked back on that morning, only two days ago but a lifetime away, contemptuous of the naive trembling girl she had been. She had been a girl, though it had been her twenty-first birthday. That person, that life was over.

With a shudder of disgust, Tiaan hurled her rags into a refuse basket. Taking off the plaited leather bracelet Haani had made for her birthday, she laid it carefully on the bed. It was her most precious possession now. She stood under the warm water, brooding. She despised Minis for his fickleness, his treachery, but most of all because she had loved him with all her passionate heart and he had been too weak to stand up for her. Love was for fools! She would never love again.

On the way back, she caught sight of herself in a metal mirror mounted on the wall. Tiaan stopped to stare. Mirrors were rare in her part of the world and she had never seen a full-length one.

Neither tall nor short, Tiaan had a slender yet womanly figure which the matron of the breeding factory had rated well enough. Her skin was her best feature – it was silky smooth and the colour of honey dripping from a comb.