Now and then she thought that Ilan would love this place. The sea warm as bathwater, the coral gardens, endless days of doing nothing … She missed human company. She still thought of Goodwill as a friend, but after their spat she couldn’t completely relax in his company. Had to put on a mask of politeness, and police everything she said. As did he. It was a respectful peace, but a fragile one. As perhaps it had always been, would always be, between humans and natives.

According to Goodwill, Juniper had taken to standing on the beach and hectoring any bots that came close, hoping to start a conversation with their operators. One day, he reported that she’d ordered her aides to chop down trees and construct a raft.

‘It didn’t go well,’ he said, ‘The bots set fire to it in the night, somehow, and there was no food drop today. It seems that we’ll be here until Iryn Moonsdaughter or your Mother decide otherwise.’

‘Let’s not count out the Other Mother,’ Ysbel said. ‘She invited us here. She had a plan.’

‘Maybe so. But neither she nor her plan appear to have survived contact with your Mother and Special Operations,’ Goodwill said.

One night, Ysbel was woken by a distant roll of thunder. Flashes of purple light rippled in the distance, in the direction of the river mouth. Almost certainly some kind of lightning – the web of the bots’ laser light was blinking overhead, undisturbed – but she couldn’t help hoping that it was something else.

‘We saw it too,’ Goodwill said, when he delivered her water and rations the next morning, ‘and wondered if it might have been something to do with your two mothers.’

‘Or it might have been some kind of weird weather, or Special Operations destroying infrastructure,’ Ysbel said. ‘The balloon works and so on. Whatever it was, the bots are still here. Nothing’s changed.’

‘But perhaps it has given us a little hope that things might change,’ Goodwill said.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, but after darkness fell the light show fired up again. Up in the palm tree that gave her the best view of the coast, Ysbel watched slow, horizontal flares of purple light extend from some unseen point. Fading back, regrowing. Flashes stuttered along the tree line, and suddenly tall columns of white light stood up, raking the sky like searchlights, and Ysbel thought that she saw things moving around them, flying very fast and leaving faint erratic trails. She had read about war – the world-spanning wars of her ancestors and the territorial battles between bear cities – but this was the real thing. Huge forces beyond her control or understanding deployed against each other. Eerie and fearsome, yet undeniably exciting, quickening something primal deep inside her.