‘Of course,’ Ysbel said, because it wasn’t as if she had a choice. She felt that she was being ground between two implacable and opposing forces. She’d dumped her bots before Special Operations arrived, and reckoned that if she switched off her link after she met with Goodwill neither Zaquil’s beady-eyed sliver nor Special Operations would be able to spy on her directly. She hoped she could feed both sides a careful edit of everything she discovered without compromising her friend, and knew that she’d have to tell him that Special Operations was keeping watch on them. He’d probably guess that anyway, but it helped her to think that, on balance, she would be helping rather than betraying him, and she wanted to believe – even though she quailed at the enormity of it, the finality – that she still had the option of escaping both Mother and Iryn Moonsdaughter and going over to the other side. What would they call her, for favouring another species instead of her own?

‘We’ll keep you under surveillance as best we can,’ Iryn told her. ‘And we reserve the right to extract you at any time we see fit. If Goodwill Saltmire gives up what we need to know at this meeting, we could do that straight away.’

‘This isn’t just about what he knows now,’ Ysbel said. ‘It’s also about what else he may be able to find out with my help.’

‘Focus on what we need to know,’ Iryn said. ‘Who built the camp. Who designed the cure. What happened to the articulate bears. All right?’

‘All right. But I think it will be more complicated than that.’

‘Of course it’s more complicated. But that’s all you have to worry about. And I should warn you,’ Iryn said, with a hard, serious look, ‘that if you somehow manage to get into trouble with the natives again, we won’t be able to help you.’

‘I guessed that was pretty much a given,’ Ysbel said.

Iryn studied her. ‘Get some sleep. My people will go over the technical details of the operation tomorrow. And remember: what you find out will determine what happens to you when this is over.’