They’d agreed to meet in one of the small native places Ilan had a talent for sniffing out, a tiny shack on a busy road junction in the industrial quarter, a place Ysbel had never before visited in a part of town she didn’t know. The only human amongst the cheerful hum and clatter of native customers, mostly manufactory labourers, who crowded tables under a canvas awning that boomed and fluttered in the hot wind, she was perched on a button cushion at a corner table so low she had to sit sideways, trying and failing to concentrate on reviewing the latest findings put up by her accountancy tools while gusts of road dust and wood smoke blew over her, a heavy traffic of steam carts and wagons hauled by draft maras rolled by only a couple of metres away, and one of the striplings who waited on the tables kept anxiously topping up her bowl of water and asking her if she wanted to order yet. So she wasn’t especially pleased to see Ilan when at last he strolled in, spending a couple of minutes greeting the owner of the place, who clearly knew him well, before at last sitting across from Ysbel, pushing back his hair with both hands and smiling with unjustified good cheer as he asked her how she had been.

The food was good, though – boiled crabs served whole – and for a few minutes, while Ilan showed Ysbel how to use hammers and pinchers to crack the shells and get at the meat, and fold it into flatbreads and dip the flatbreads in tiny bowls of pureed vegetables, it was like old times. He didn’t ask her about her work, they mostly talked about his and exchanged low-level gossip about mutual friends, but her secrecy and obsession hung between them all the same. It had consumed her life, she had shut him out of it, and while they parted on tactfully guarded terms, it was clear that their relationship was over.

Ysbel felt sorry and guilty, and threw herself back into her work in an attempt to absolve herself. She hadn’t quite given up trawling through records, but it seemed that the people who’d set up the camp had been better at covering their tracks than she’d assumed, and she thought it was time to attack the problem from another angle. A few days after the ill-starred meeting with Ilan, she went into town and had lunch with Bethane Marisdaughter, an acquaintance who worked for Management and Supply. After Ysbel had given her a highly edited version of her escapades in Concord, Bethane said that she had news of her own: she was quitting her job and the mainland, and returning to her commune on the Garden Isle. She and her partner planned to have a bunch of kids and grow vegetables and – she knew Ysbel would like this – work on developing new strains of coffee.