At dawn, after a few hours of restless sleep in the flitter’s cramped cabin, Ysbel scraped a hole in the dirt inside a tangle of brush and discreetly relieved herself, and walked down to the beach and splashed saltwater on her face and bought some kind of flatfish from one of the fishing boats drawn up on the sand. She filleted the fish with her knife and grilled the meat on a hot stone at one of the communal fires, the natives around it drifting away one by one until she was on her own, watched by small groups gathered here and there on the beach and the road. Some of the watchers followed at a respectful distance as she ambled as casually as she could manage back to the flitter, and she took it up under manual control, turning it in a circle for the benefit of her audience on the ground before dipping its nose and flying it out across the bay, heading due north.

21.

The railhead was a fan of sidings in a broad flat clearing in a seemingly endless ocean of trees. A dead-straight railway track ran south while a road snaked northward through the forest. Ysbel glimpsed the river that marked the border with bear country, tried and failed to spot the camp. It was just fifty kilometres away. Around three hundred stades, by the natives’ reckoning. And somewhere beyond it, assuming they hadn’t yet been caught, were Raia and Seven.

Scattering bots into the air for a quick and dirty survey, Ysbel saw rows of chain-link cages strung along loading banks and a chequerboard of pits with fringes of sharp stakes pointing downward, to stop prisoners climbing out. The cages and pits were empty; the tracks were overgrown. Wagons rotted amongst weeds and volunteer saplings and several wood-burning locomotives stood nose-to-tail, one with steam tubes sprung like questing tentacles from its burst boiler. But the place was not completely abandoned: there were heat signatures in and around a scattering of shacks, and clustered by the bright star of a fire behind one of the station’s sheds.