21
THE NATIONS OF EARTH security guard wasn’t happy about me walking off, oh no; that was written all over his face. But I suspected that the presence of an unpredictable crowd—or at least a crowd not unequivocally friendly towards the guards and police—stopped him and his colleagues from using any form of physical threat on me. They might well have been ordered to use any means to keep me under control, but also not to display, let alone threaten me with, weapons.
We pushed through into the crowd, and they stayed behind, talking to each other and into their communication devices.
I stopped at the fountain with the inked hands and called the others around me. “What do we need to know? I want to get out of here as soon as possible without falling under their influence again, without arme
