Special Operations had put the godown under seal, but Bethane had copies of its keys and Ysbel called up a flitter and flew north to take a look. Pleasant Bay was a port town on the southern edge of a sheltered bay where, tens of thousands of years ago, a tsunami triggered by a big undersea earthquake had scoured away the fossil remains of a large ogre city and reshaped the land. The port was busy, exporting timber, wool, and fruit and vegetables to the rest of the New Territories, but the town itself was small and rural, clusters of low wooden buildings much like those of Ogres Grave scattered amongst stands of old-growth forest and common parkland where maras, black-tailed deer, grey foxes and wild shoats – pig-like omnivores descended from genetically engineered rats – roamed freely.

The docks were in the native style, built along a beach where small fishing boats ran straight onto shore and sold their catches, and ragboats and skiffs discharged their cargoes and were hand-loaded with goods they took out to ocean-going ships at anchor in the deep-water channel in the middle of the bay. Ysbel parked the flitter on a patch of sandy ground and walked along the road above the beach’s long curve to the godown, a low yellow brick building with a curved turf roof. She broke the security seal on the door and used two different keys, one a sliver of plastic that kicked back electrical deadbolts, the other a toothed strip of wood that worked a chunky wooden lock. Inside, the place was as empty as a blown egg. Beams of sunlight dropped from skylights set in the roof, throwing shadows of the neatly carpentered roof trusses across limewashed walls and a floor of pounded earth coated in thick honey-coloured resin. If the young people who claimed they would turn dreams of the past into wonders of the present had left anything behind, Special Operations must have taken it. Ysbel sat in a patch of sunlight on the floor, but couldn’t get a reading of the place – what it had been used for, the nature of the people who had worked there.

There was a small shipyard next to the godown, where labourers were scraping and hammering at the hull of a two-masted coastal trader hove down on a shingle bank. Its foreman, a pot-bellied old native with a suspicious squint and a wad of chewleaf bulging in one cheek, told Ysbel that the people who had rented the place had kept themselves to themselves. ‘Foreigners,’ he said, meaning natives from the United Territories. ‘Foreigners, and once in a rare while one or two of yours.’