She recalled the bots, landed the flitter at a discreet distance and followed a muddy, potholed path that wound past shacks and vegetable plots. An old female native in a pinafore dress and headscarf was hoeing rows of sweetroot plants, but when Ysbel called out, asked where she could find the station chief, the native gave her a brief blank stare before turning her back and resuming her work. Further on, up on one of the loading banks, two raggedy striplings were using long canes to prod a bear, starveling thin and afflicted with some kind of mange that had left bare ulcerated patches in its pelt, hunkered down in one corner of a chain-link cage. It was stoically ignoring its tormentors, but turned its head towards Ysbel as she approached. When she asked the striplings where she could find the person in charge of this place one of them pointed to the sheds on the far side of the sidings and told her that the arbiter was most likely around there.

‘What about the station chief?’

‘Isn’t one no more,’ the stripling said.

‘And who is this arbiter?’

‘She has the ear and voice of the Mother,’ the stripling said.

It was a formulaic way of saying that someone had absolute authority.

The other stripling, bored with the exchange, had begun to poke at the bear again. When Ysbel said that they shouldn’t mistreat a captive, the older stripling said, ‘He’s ours, not yours.’

‘Why haven’t you sent him across the border, like all the others?’

‘Because he’s ours.’

‘Does he have a name?’ Ysbel said.

‘Stink,’ the second stripling said.

‘Because he stinks,’ the first one said.

‘I meant the name he uses,’ Ysbel said, looking straight at the bear. ‘Is it by any chance a number?’

The bear seemed to pay attention for a moment, raising his head and looking directly at her, then yawned hugely, showing broken teeth and a cankerous tongue, and looked past her into some far distance only it knew or cared about.

‘No use talking to bears,’ the first stripling said scornfully. ‘They aren’t like us.’

‘She isn’t like us either,’ his friend said.

The first stripling ignored him, told Ysbel the arbiter might answer her questions. ‘She knows more about bears than anyone else in the whole world.’