Iryn Moonsdaughter had told them that their exile was a temporary measure until the area was cleaned up and her superiors decided what to do with them, and Juniper was confident that she and her people would not be captive for long. Imprisoning any native was a serious violation of the treaty; the delegate she served knew where she had gone; hard questions would be asked if she did not soon return. Ysbel wasn’t so certain. Although they hadn’t broken any law, human or native, they knew too much. It was possible that they’d be imprisoned here or in some other remote spot for the duration. Special Operations could claim that their hopper had disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, or that they had been killed and eaten by sharks or saltwater crocodiles before they could be rescued.

‘My people might believe lies like that, because they trust your people to tell the truth,’ Goodwill said, after Ysbel had shared her thoughts with him. ‘But what about yours?’

‘They might believe them too,’ Ysbel said. ‘If only because the truth is stranger. Not only that bears can be cured, but that there might be another mother, and a history very different to the history we were taught. No wonder Mother – the mother we know – wants to keep it secret. However things shake out, we could be stuck here for some time.’

Juniper and her aides claimed the half of the island embraced by a broad crescent of white sand, digging scrape burrows at the edge of the forest and roofing them with palm leaves. Ysbel, instructed to keep to the other side, built a shelter from palm leaves and whittled branches and chunks of dead coral, and kept a small fire burning at its entrance to drive off flies and mosquitoes. Low tide revealed an irregular pavement of corals cut by channels and pools floored with bone-white sand; when the tide came in, Ysbel could swim across this patchwork reef to the deep blue abyss beyond the abrupt drop-off, where she twice saw the dim shapes of sharks languidly pass. The boulders and banks and stag-horns of coral were sheathed in gardens of polyps in every shade of brown and yellow and purple, yearning like flowers towards the sun; shrimp and crabs and eels peeked from crevices; schools of small fish painted in vivid primary colours darted and drifted; parrotfish pecked at meadows of red algae. Ysbel wondered if this teeming abundance of life had regenerated naturally in the tens of thousands of years beyond the Burn Line, or if, like the corals of the Gathering Place and the rest of the islands, their genomes had been tweaked with edits and augmentations which had helped them survive the gauntlet of climate change and mass-extinction events.