Jane didn't know that Loach had decided to kill her. She had stamped out of the boarding house out of sheer fury and now stalked the dark, evening streets of the city as she waited for her simmering temper to die down. She hadn't thought about the danger she was putting herself in until a figure holding a knife emerged from the shadows in her path. "Don't try ter run," he said grinning as he walked towards her. "Jest do as I sez and..."

Jane was tired, angry and totally fed up and acted without thinking. Her fist flew towards his face and his nose crumpled under it in a spray of blood. He staggered back in shocked surprise, dropped the knife and fled back into the darkness.

Jane stared in shock as she realised what she'd just done, and as she stood there a sense of triumphant jubilation came over her. She'd been threatened in the street and she'd fought him off! A man who had probably been going to rape her, and possibly cut her throat afterwards, had fled from her. God had saved her, she thought in glorious joy and wonder. The true God had come to her and given her victory over her attacker.

Of course He had, she realised as she considered it further, still standing in the same spot. She was, quite probably, the only Christian left in the world. God had no choice but to work through her, had no choice but to protect her. God would not let her come to harm, she should have realised that days ago. She wore the armour of God, and He would not let any harm come to her.

Her first impulse was to run back to Randall and Loach and tell them what had happened, show them that she wasn't the helpless child they thought she was, and if she had, if she had stumbled across Loach in the empty streets of the city, she would have died on his knife before she'd had a chance to say a word. Fortunately, pride came to her rescue. They'd thought she'd go screaming for help at the first sign of danger. Well, she'd showed them, but she wanted to show them more. She wanted to show them that she was quite capable of doing her part in the overthrow of VIX. She would go back to them when she'd accomplished something, she decided. When she'd searched through the city's records and found Randall's secret underground facility. Until then, she would go her own way. Find her own place to live, get a job in the records office, or whatever they called it. She had no fear now. God would protect her.

She bent down to pick up the knife her attempted rapist had dropped and tucked it in her sleeve. Then she started walking, back to one of the other boarding houses they'd found during their search of the city earlier. It was getting late and she was tired. She would get a good night's sleep and be about her business first thing in the morning.

☆☆☆

The place she wanted, Jane thought the next morning as she left the tavern again, would probably be in the centre of the city, assuming there were business premises there and it wasn't just the homes of the rich and powerful. The only way to find out was to go there, and so she set of with a purposeful stride, the knife still tucked safely against her wrist in the sleeve of her tunic.

There was another wall circling the centre of the city, with guards on duty at the gates. They stopped her, demanding to know her business, but let her go when she gave them a gold coin each. It was the only gold she had left, but it was worth it if it gained her passage and smoothed her way to the inevitable triumph of God.

She paused for a moment, though, and turned back to the guards. "Do you know where the records of land surveys are kept?" she asked.

"The whet?" said one of the guards, staring at her blankly.

"When they send people out to see what's under the ground." They continued to stare. "Look," said Jane with growing frustration. "Coal amd iron are dug out of the ground, right?"

"Reet," said the guard hesitantly.

"Well, when the coal and the iron runs out in one place, they have to dig somewhere else, right?"

"I seppose," The guard looked at his fellow in total bewilderment.

"So they need to know where to dig, right? So every now and then they to dig holes in the ground to see if there's iron or coal down there, right?" Jane actually had no idea if that was how it was done, but it had to be something like that, she thought. Right?

"It's called a survey," Jane explained. "Have you heard the word?" There was a faint glimmer of recognition on the guards face that gave her hope. "Is there a surveyor's office? Something like that? A place where they know what's under the ground."

"Not ender the ground," the other guard replied. "Not that I ever heard of, anyway. Do ye mean the Land registry office?"

"Possibly," said Jane, brightening with hope as she switched her attention to him. "What's that?"

"Where they know who's farming whet, so they know how much ter tax 'em."

Jane sagged with disappointment for a moment, but then brightened again as a thought came to her. Randall had said that the doors to the underground hanger might be covered by a depth of soil too shallow to farm. A place where crops couldn't be grown might show up on a land registry. "Yes!" she said therefore. "Where's that?"

"Threadneedle Street," said the guard. "Between the Bank of Lendaron and the library." He pointed ahead. "Second street on the left."

"Thank you!" said Jane, and she strode off in that direction, leaving the two guards staring after her in amusement and bewilderment.

☆☆☆

Walking through the centre of Elmton, Jane could almost imagine that she was back in the twenty first century, in one of the historic cities like York where care had been taken to preserve the historic architecture. The buildings were tall and half timbered with shuttered windows and iron railings that defined a narrow strip of private ground at the side of the street, just large enough for a few straggly pot plants or lichen covered stone statues to stand.

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The streets were wide and made of sharp gravel packed to form a hard, flat surface that felt like solid rock under Jane's feet. Passing the first turning on the left, she saw a stretch of road being dug up by a team of muscular, sweaty workmen, to repair the ruts and potholes left in it by carts and wagons, she presumed. They were digging up the gravel with pickaxes and raking it flat before a heavy roller pulled by carthorses was driven back and forth over it to crush it back into compaction.

The people walking the streets were dressed expensively in brightly coloured silk and velvet finery, making Jane feel a little self conscious in the cheap, rather plain clothes they'd bought in one of the towns they'd passed through a few days before, but she consoled herself by remembering that she'd been wearing potato sacks just a few days before that. She dressed herself in her dignity, therefore, and walked with her head held high as if daring any of them to notice. Fortunately there were tradesmen in dirty, working clothes walking the streets too, some of them with young children. Their sons perhaps, learning the trade with their fathers. Carpenters, plastermen, stoneworkers and others pushing barrows or carrying bags of tools as they went to begin a new days work on the houses of their current employers. None of them were women, but they still made Jane feel a little better as she made her way past shops and small businesses whose owners were laying out their wares for the inspection of passers by.

Jane found the land registry office right where the guard had said it would be, a nondescript brick building with grimy, cobwebbed windows and a sign from which most of the paint had flaked away. Going in, she found a reception desk with no-one behind it. She paused there for a few moments as her eyes adapted to the gloom, then went through another door to find a large room in which half a dozen men in smart black uniforms were sitting at desks and staring at ledgers with wide, myopic eyes. They stared up at her as she entered and glanced at each other curiously but said nothing.

"I'm looking for the man in charge," said Jane, fixing her eyes on the nearest, a short man with curly red hair.

He stared back at her, then glanced sideways at the man sitting at the next desk beside him. He just shrugged his shoulders back at him. The man turned his eyes back to Jane, staring at her as if she were a unicorn that had suddenly appeared in a puff of smoke. "Mister Trabe's in his office," he said, turning to point to another door at the back of the room.

"Thank you," said Jane, walking between the desks towards it.

"But you can't go it..."

"He'll see me," said Jane condidently, paying the men no further attention. God will smooth my path, she told herself. He will raise me up with wings of eagles.

The room on the other side of the door was even darker and was lit by a single candle sitting on the desk. Most of the rest of the room was filled with filing cabinets, some of which were half open to reveal stacks of crumpled papers. There were more papers piled on top of the cabinets and a couple of sheets were lying on the floor, dirty and crumpled where they'd been pushed up against the wall.

Behind the desk was a man who looked like a human mole, with a very short beard that covered almost his entire face except for the area around his small, staring eyes. He jumped to his feet in alarm as Jane entered and backed away as if she were threatening him with a gun. "Who a yez?" he demanded. "Whet de ya want?"

"I'm looking for a job," replied Jane. "I want to work for you."

"There's nay work here! Gez away before I call the police!"

"I can be useful to you. I have a very good memory. I can memorise everything on every bit of paper in this room."

"Yez mad! Gez out! Gez out a once!"

"Please," said Jane, taking a step back to appear less threatening, although she had trouble thinking of someone being threatened by her. The radiance of God surrounds me, she thought. That must be what it is. "I can be valuable to you. I can prove it."

"Jacob!" cried the small man. "Albert! Cem here, please!"

"Look, I didn't come here to attack you..."

The door opened and two of the clerks from the other room looked curiously in. "What is it, Mister Trabe?"

"Get this woman out of here please!"

The clerks looked at Jane, who backed away from them with her hands raised. A demonstration of peaceful intentions. "Please, let me prove what I can do," she said. "One little demonstration, and if you're not impressed I'll go away and I won't bother you again. I promise."

The clerks stared at Trabe, waiting for his reply. Trabe stared at Jane suspiciously for a few moments, then carefully returned to his chair. "Whet kend o' demonstration?" he asked.

Jane reached up to one of the folders sitting on top of the nearest filing cabinet. "I can memorise everything in this file in just a couple of moments."

"Empossible!"

"Watch." Jane opened the file, looked at the first sheet of paper and told her head phone to take a photo of it. She turned the sheet over, photographed the other side, then put it aside and picked up the second sheet. When she'd photographed every sheet she handed the file to Trabe. "Test me," she said. "Ask me anything about what's in this file."

Trabe smiled with condescending amusement. "Very well," he said. "Let's see. Page seven, nineteenth line down."

Jane told her head phone to display the contents on that page and lines of crabby, handwritten text appeared across her visual field. She selected an app from her head phone to scan the page and convert the almost illegible handwriting into neat printed letters. Then she accessed the library of translated words and phrases that Randall had shared with her and Loach a couple of days before. A moment later the page appeared to her as neatly typed English words and lettering. She read it aloud. "...has neglected to rotate the crops in this field for several years..."

Trabe stared in astonishment. "Page nine, fourteenth line down," he said.

Jane selected that page and repeated the translation. "...seems likely, therefore, that revenue from this farm will continue to..."

Trabe stared suspiciously. "And whet farm is this referring to?" he asked.

"Give me a moment." Jane scanned through page after page, translating each one in turn. "The Tilford Farm," she said. Another page had a crude, hand drawn map. "Half way along Kingfisher Lane, beside Blackwater Creek."

Trabe's look of suspicion intensified. "Ye cen go back ter work now," he said to the two clerks.

"Ae ye sure, Mister Trabe?" asked Jacob, giving Jane a wary look.

"Yes, thenk you." The two clerks gave Jane a warning look, then left, closing the door behind them.

Trabe reached across to the filing cabinet beside him, opened one of the drawers and pulled out another file. He leaned forward to hand it to Jane, his eyes never leaving hers. Jane opened the file and leafed through it, photographing every page in turn. Then she handed it back. Trabe tested her again, and again Jane answered correctly every time.

"If you have an enquiry about a particular farm," she said, "how long would it take you to find the right file? Would you even know which cabinet it's in? I can answer any questions instantly. I can be the best, most efficient secretary you ever had." She thought about offering her services as a clerk as well, replacing all six of the clerks in the next room. They seemed to be doing nothing but adding up rows of numbers in ledgers. Jane's head phone could do the same thing in moments. She dismissed the idea almost instantly. The six clerks would be laid off and would resentfully tell all their friends about the woman with the unbelievable mental skills who'd made them redundant. If word reached a priest, he would know that there was a woman with a head phone in the city, and that wouldn't do at all.

Trabe was still staring at her. "Ye cen memorise ell the files in this room?" he said. "En the maps in the next room anall?"

Jane felt her heart racing with excitement. The maps! The information she was looking for might be right there, waiting for her. "I can," she said.

"Ell give yez a week," said Trabe, leaning back in his chair to look at her. "If ye really cen do what ye sez ye cen, ell see about a permanent position fer yez."

"Thank you," said Jane with a relieved, satisfied smile.