‘The city lawkeepers had been keeping watch on me, and I did not see it. They thought we were going to steal something from the Library, and warned its gatekeepers. Who waited until after we had entered the closed stacks because they wanted to catch us in the act. They were very amused,’ Goodwill said, ‘when I told them that the thing we wanted to find was missing.’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Ysbel said, thinking that in spite of Zaquil’s overwatch she might easily have been the one who had been tracked, by the embassy, Damage Limitation or some other player. She’d been a fool, had failed to take the station chief’s warning seriously and blundered into a trap.

Goodwill was saying that the gatekeepers had also arrested Clarity Forrester. ‘And they brought Swift in for questioning.’

‘What did you tell these gatekeepers?’

‘The truth, of course,’ Goodwill said, with simple, sincere dignity.

‘What we were looking for, and why? The whole story?’

‘I did not tell them about the project in bear country. Hopefully, neither did Swift. For if he did, the gatekeepers and your people may be waiting for us there.’

‘They’ll certainly be waiting for us when we return. So let’s hope we find something useful,’ Ysbel said.

‘Yes, let’s. Especially as I have set my honour against it.’

Presently, a point of light flared at the edge of the planet’s dark curve, spreading out and defining the atmosphere’s thin shell, and then the sun rose, illuminating chains of snowcapped mountains. Goodwill was leaning as far forward as his webbing would allow, eyes shining, mouth agape. Ysbel told him that they were watching a sunset in reverse because the hopper was travelling so fast it was overtaking night’s boundary. Mountains and forest and more mountains poured beneath them, and then the rim of the ocean appeared to the west and the hopper’s motor roared and deceleration pressed her into her seat.

‘I believe that I have found what we are looking for,’ Zaquil announced, and the hopper’s motor roared again and the world spun through a hundred and eighty degrees and rose to meet them. Goodwill shouted out, Ysbel glimpsed the crooked slash of a river cutting through endless forest and then they were down.

14.

The hopper had set down on a broad sweep of gravel in a bend of a swift shallow river. Pine forest crowded along both banks; far off to the east, mountain peaks floated in the sky. In a corner of the window displaying this view Zaquil put up an image of the place that he had spotted. A large square cut into dense forest, a row of burrows and footprints where rectangular structures had once stood, paths wandering between overgrown fields and rough pasture, the black gleam of a solar panel array.