‘The person who will take you to him is waiting for you in the Library,’ Clarity said, and couldn’t or wouldn’t explain how or where Goodwill had found the articulate bears. ‘He will tell you everything, I’m sure. We must hurry. Your friends will be looking everywhere, and sooner or later they will think to look here.’

‘They can’t look for me in the Library. Not without violating the treaty.’

‘Some of my people are helping your people. The sooner we get you on your way the better.’

They splashed a long way through the tunnel and clambered up another shaft and emerged onto a stone wharf stretched alongside a sleeve of black water. Clarity led her at a brisk pace towards the far end, where a tramway slanted through a tunnel under the houses and grassways of Highwater Reach to the sidings and platforms of the Library’s depot, deserted at this late hour apart from a cart painted in the Library’s grey and red livery, a shaggy mara standing patiently between its shafts, its driver waiting beside it.

Ysbel sprawled flat on the cart’s load bed under a heavy tarpaulin sheet as the cart rumbled out of the depot. Special Operations agents and native lawkeepers would be searching for her, bots were patrolling the night sky and she had no idea of where she was being taken or who Goodwill’s allies were. It was likely that she was tangled up in some gnarly native politics, but on which side? Pragmatists who supported the treaty, or separatists who wanted to kick every last human out of the Union and the New Territories? What kind of bargain had Goodwill made, and how did she figure in it?

The exhilaration of her mad escape was fast fading; the load bed, slung between leather straps, swayed like a cradle. Ysbel dozed off, and when she woke the sky was paling. She lifted a corner of the tarpaulin, saw dense forest dropping away to the brown waters of the great river and asked the driver if it was safe to come out.

‘Best not,’ he said. ‘Not until we get where we’re going.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Not far now,’ he said, but more than an hour passed before the cart turned off the road, following a track that cut through the forest to a clearing where a trim white hopper reared up beyond the tumbledown sheds and overgrown burrows of an old lumber camp.

As Ysbel clambered down from the wagon, a group of natives came forward. Three young males – one a giant almost as tall as her, the other two with percussion pistols tucked in the broad belts that girdled their long grey shirts – and Goodwill Saltmire, dressed in his usual fustian and arm in arm with a stout, elderly female.

24.