‘When I talked to her, she told me that the map might be relevant to a project she was involved in,’ Ysbel said. ‘I’m wondering now if it might have something to do with your work.’

‘Behavioural Science keeps track of the market in antiques. Things that shed light on bear history and their lost civilisation,’ Raia said. ‘That’s how we found out about the map a dealer had put up for sale.’

‘That would be Solomon Firststar,’ Ysbel said.

‘He’s made a small fortune playing us against wealthy collectors,’ Raia said. ‘Trina wanted to get a close look at the map, to do some simple tests to find out whether or not it was genuine. So she got in touch with him, made her interest known. Luckily, he didn’t bother to check her out. If he had, he would have found out that she wasn’t on official business, and didn’t have the funds to make a bid. He invited her to that party because he thought that he could use her interest to inflate the asking price, but although she got a good close look at the map, he wouldn’t let her scan it, or take a sample.’

‘Which is why she goaded Joyous Hightower, the person who bought the map, into racing her,’ Ysbel said.

‘If I had known what she’d planned to do I would have done my best to talk her out of it,’ Raia said. ‘Though I don’t know if I would have been successful. Trina always likes to take things right to the edge.’

‘She turned herself in to Survey and Surveillance after I interviewed her,’ Ysbel said. ‘As far as I was concerned that was the end of it. But while Goodwill was making sure that Joyous Hightower made proper amends for the deaths of the two fisherfolk, he discovered that the map had once been belonged to his tribe.’

Goodwill told Raia that his uncle had written a monograph about a similar map he had found and lost, and Solomon Firststar had confirmed that a sketch in that monograph resembled the map he had sold to Joyous Hightower.

‘The map was stolen from Pilgrim after he found it in the abandoned library of my tribe’s former Hearth, and after I discovered that it had been the prize in that fatal race I set out to reclaim it,’ Goodwill said. ‘I believed that it would help to redeem my uncle’s work, and give him the place he deserved in my tribe’s history, and the larger history of our people. And now it seems that it is part of a very different story.’

‘Goodwill wanted to bring a legal case against Joyous Hightower. A claim of prior ownership. He wrote to me, thinking that I could help, and his letter caught Mother’s attention,’ Ysbel said, and told Zaquil that it was time to show himself.