Ysbel promised that it wouldn’t, and told Zaquil to promise too, but after Raia had left, walking upriver to the place where she had stashed her canoe, the helper said that it would be a good idea to follow her anyway. ‘The possibility that she is in league with the people who built the camp is slight, but definitely non-zero.’

‘Raia has bots too,’ Ysbel said. ‘She made a point of mentioning them. If they spot an attempt to track her, it will undo the trust we’ve established.’

‘May I at least continue to monitor radio frequencies?’

‘I don’t remember asking you to do that,’ Ysbel said, with a stab of exasperation.

‘I thought it a sensible precaution,’ Zaquil said. ‘In case the woman, out of malice or fear, or some calculus of self-interest, is planning to betray us. So far she has sent no signal that I could detect, but she may think it safer to do so when she has put some distance from us.’

Ysbel thought about it, couldn’t see what harm passive eavesdropping would do. ‘All right. Keep listening. Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’

‘I want only to help, Ysbel,’ Zaquil said blandly.

‘Fine. But don’t do anything else without consulting me.’

After Ysbel and Goodwill had eaten breakfast beside the warm ashes of the fire, the bailiff collected long dry stems of grass and began to plait them into fish traps – you tied a scrap of bait at the closed end, he explained to Ysbel, and when fish of the right size swam in they couldn’t turn around or back out. She couldn’t tell if he was worried about putting their trust in Raia, or if he felt that it was a necessary risk. It was a common belief that natives were by nature impassive and stoical, but in Ysbel’s experience their apparent stoicism was more often a disciplined pretence of indifference to the bumptious giants who, claiming to mean well, carelessly scattered gifts that changed the world in ways that were hard to understand or predict and cheerfully blundered through the intricate protocols and customs which maintained native society’s harmonious balance.

As for herself, she was too restless to sit around while waiting for Raia to return, and walked up through the trees to take another look at the camp. Kicking around the footings where buildings had once stood, searching for traces of the former inhabitants and failing to find anything, and walking the four sides of the camp’s fence, pausing now and then to study the shadows under the trees beyond the perimeter.

About halfway around, Zaquil spoke via her bot, telling her that he could see no sign of natives or humans out there.

‘I’m not really looking for anything in particular,’ Ysbel told him. ‘Just passing the time.’