Lara's biggest frustration was that she could only speak one language – her native tongue of Dog. She would have loved to learn to speak Human but this was beyond the spy-training programme.

Someone put together a clean-lined, benignly elegant chair's chair — shaped somewhat like a midcentury desk chair, only slumpier.

The mining boomtown she remembered, was now a ghost town.

And not at all about how a state picks which group of electors to send, which is the whole basis of the NaPoVoInterCo plan, and will yield plenty more Supreme Court popcorn if it ever gets enacted.