Lise Adams drove toward the little rural airstrip on the afternoon of the 34th of August feeling lost, feeling free. It was a feeling she couldn't explain even to herself. Maybe the weather, she thought. Late August along the coast of Equatoria was inevitably warm, often unbearable, but today the breeze from the sea was gentle and the sky was that indigo blue she had come to associate with the New World, deeper and truer than the smudgy pastel skies of Earth. But the weather had been fine for weeks, nice but not all that remarkable. Free, she thought, yes, absolutely: a marriage behind her, the decree nisi freshly-issued, an unwise thing undone… and, ahead of her, the man who had been a factor in that undoing. But so much more than that. A future severed from her past, a painful question hovering on the brink of an answer.

And lost, almost literally: she had only come out this way a couple of times before. South of Port Magellan, where she had rented an apartment, the coast flattened into an alluvial plain that had been given over to farms and light industry. Much of it was still wild, a sort of rolling prairie grown over with feathery grasses, meadows that broke like waves against the peaks of the coastal range. Before long she began to see small aircraft coming and going from Arundji's Airfield, which was her destination. These were little prop planes, bush planes: the runways at Arundji's weren't long enough for anything big. The planes that alighted there were either rich men's hobbies or poor men's businesses. If you wanted to rent a hangar, join a tourist excursion into the glacial passes, or get to Bone Creek or Kubelick's Grave in a hurry, you came to Arundji's. And if you were smart you talked to Turk Findley, who flew discount charters for a living, before you did any of those things.

Lise had flown with Turk once before. But she wasn't here to hire a pilot. Turk's name had come up in connection with the photograph Lise carried in a brown envelope, currently tucked into the glove compartment of her car.

She parked in the gravel lot at Arundji's, climbed out of the car, and stood listening to the sound of insects buzzing in the afternoon heat. Then she walked through the door at the back of the cavernous tin-roofed shed—it looked like a converted cow barn—that served as Arundji's passenger terminal.

Turk's charter business operated out of a corner of this building with the consent of Mike Arundji, the airfield's owner, who took a share of Turk's profits in return. Turk had told her this, back when they had had time to talk.

There was no security barrier to pass through. Turk Findley worked out of a three-sided cubicle tucked into the north end of the building, and she simply walked into it and cleared her throat in lieu of knocking.