They used wood broken from the bleached carcasses of trees deposited by floods in winters past to build a fire at the downstream point of the gravel bank. The vast slow sunset was fading above tree-clad ridges on the far side of the river; frogs creaked and chirped each to each; squadrons of mosquitoes flitted through the still air. The mosquitoes didn’t seem to bother Goodwill and Raia, but Ysbel made liberal use of a spray bottle of repellent Zaquil supplied, along with ration boxes from the hopper’s store. Raia contributed salmon jerky and sour wild cherries, and devoured a container of tofu and fried rice, saying that it made a welcome change from jerky and line-caught trout.

She had been doing field research on bear behaviour and culture every summer for four years, in an area around a sea inlet more than three hundred kilometres to the north. Part of a small, discreet project to gain some understanding of the bears, and the ethical and political problems raised by their existence. Most people thought they were fierce, solitary predators that only met their peers to mate or fight, Raia told Ysbel and Goodwill, but they decorated themselves with pigments and shell ornaments, made dot-and-line carvings on rocks and tree trunks and passed down rituals and customs from generation to generation: evidence that they possessed the kind of complex symbolic cognition that made humans human, and people people. The local bears mostly avoided the boundary of her camp site, which she protected with electric wires, noisemakers and pepper-spray mines, and she took care to keep her distance too, observing them with bots and fixed cameras. In all the time she had spent in bear country she’d never had to use her rifle. There had been a few close encounters with juveniles who hadn’t established their own patch, but as long as you respected them and took care not to trespass on their territories, she said, most bears would return the favour and leave you alone.

She had been keeping watch on the camp, as she called it, for more than six weeks now. She told Ysbel and Goodwill that she hoped that some of its former inmates might still be in the area, but wouldn’t explain who had been living there, or what its purpose had been.

‘I need to know that I can trust you before I tell you anything else,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you can tell me how you discovered it.’

‘I stumbled across it when I was looking for something else,’ Goodwill said.

‘The map your partner wanted to buy,’ Ysbel said.

Raia’s gaze sharpened. ‘How did you find out about that?’

‘I was sent to investigate Trina’s involvement in the deaths of two fisherfolk,’ Ysbel said. ‘Goodwill was the local bailiff.’

‘That stupid race,’ Raia said. ‘Trina told me all about it after she was sent back to the Gathering Place.’