‘He wasn’t best pleased. Told me that nothing good ever comes from catching Mother’s attention. Said that if I succeeded Special Operations would take the credit, and if I failed it would most likely be the end of my career.’

‘He could be right.’

‘I think he’s worried it might damage his career, too.’

‘What about you?’

‘I want to help Goodwill Saltmire as best I can, and not just because Mother asked me to. And I really am sorry that I involved you,’ Ysbel said. ‘I should have been able to figure out the location of that city on my own.’

‘First she gets me entangled with Special Operations. Then she runs down my expertise,’ Ilan said, with dry good humour.

He was an archaeologist working for Retrieval and Reconstruction, a gangling, long-boned man with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and tapered torso. Ysbel had first met him because he and Landers Landersson surfed off the same beach north of the city, where the big breakers rolled in after crossing thousands of kilometres of open ocean. Ysbel couldn’t imagine commingling her life with Ilan’s, but he was kind and thoughtful and fun to be with, and he loved his work and was good at it. Ysbel had once watched him as, with laser-focused attention, he assembled glass fragments into a small gourd-shaped bottle. It was a task that one of Mother’s little helpers could have accomplished in a few seconds by sorting virtual scans of the fragments, but Ilan had explained that the point of the exercise was to experience at first hand the object’s physicality. Every artefact excavated from sediments beneath the Burn Line had once possessed specific meaning and significance that could only be guessed at now, but reconstructing them by eye and hand, he said, gave him a deeper connection than study of virtual replicas ever could.

They had a good time buying food at several different stalls. Grilled sprats in a sour sauce. Pickled squid tentacles. Agave and custard apple. A native asked politely if he could take their picture, and they leaned against the thigh-high railing at the edge of the boardwalk while the photographer fiddled with knobs and levers of his brand-new box camera, and struck a self-conscious pose when he asked them to stay as still as they could while the photosensitive dye of the camera’s film was exposed. Ysbel was reminded that this time tomorrow she would be in the capital, a stranger in a teeming city of alien creatures, chasing phantoms at the behest of a machine older than any civilisation that had ever prospered on Earth, and felt a piercing moment of estrangement.