‘Good,’ Raia said. ‘I don’t like to use the canoe’s motor. Its noise can attract bears. And we’ll get there faster with three of us pushing against the current.’

The canoe, with a matt-black composite hull and three seats woven from mycelial-leather straps, sat lightly in the water. Goodwill claimed the seat in the bow, Ysbel took the one in the middle, Raia jumped into the stern and they were off, paddling as close to the shore as possible, where the current was slowest, steering around or through shoals of water-smoothed boulders. Shards of sunlight flashed and shimmered off the water; the shade under the trees on either side was deep and dark and still. No sound but intermittent birdsong and the wind moving through the tops of the pine trees and small splashes of unseen animals going about their business. The three of them might have been pioneers in the long ago before the Burn Line, travelling through untrodden territory.

Paddling was hot, thirsty work. Goodwill kept pace with the two women, even though the shaft of his leaf-bladed paddle overtopped him. When they stopped for a water break he stripped off his jacket and embroidered vest, revealing a tattoo of a hummingbird, what the natives called a flowersipper, between the two pairs of dark nipples on the leathery skin of his chest.

Ysbel’s arms and shoulders were already aching. She drank deep from her water bottle and refilled it from the river and splashed cold water on her head and neck and they went on, travelling for more than an hour until at last Raia turned the canoe aslant the current and beached it on a bench of loose pebbles. They hauled it out of the water and set off on foot across a marsh where widely spaced trees, many dead or dying, stood in sloughs of black water. Despite liberal application of repellent, Ysbel plodded along in a swirl of mosquitoes and black flies, trailing after Goodwill and Raia as they picked a winding way across ridges and archipelagos of drier ground. Goodwill had put on his vest and jacket but left them unbuttoned; Raia walked at a steady, confident pace, her rifle and pack slung over her shoulders, the bag of supplies hung from one of the pack’s straps. Every so often, Ysbel glanced up at the scraps of sky caught between the treetops. She didn’t trust Zaquil, couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t acted on his own initiative again, and although there wasn’t any sign of the security bot, that didn’t mean the damn thing wasn’t up there somewhere, and she felt a little stab of apprehension whenever Raia looked around, worried that the helper’s overconfidence might sabotage this meeting before it could begin.