There was a sudden flare of light so bright she had to squeeze her eyes shut and look away. As she blinked back green afterimages she saw that the columns of light had vanished, and someone was walking across the water towards her, silhouetted against a kind of pearlescent afterglow. It was Zaquil, his image growing ever taller as he advanced. When he halted, he overtopped Ysbel’s perch, looking down at her with furious outrage, a crown of little lights, bots, jostling above him. Ysbel’s link woke up for the first time since she’d been taken prisoner and his voice thundered inside her head.

‘What have you done!’

‘You need to explain what’s happened,’ Ysbel said, as calmly as she could.

Although he was only a projection got up by the bots, she had the stupid idea that he might reach out and crush her, and she flinched when he bent closer. She could hear the whir of the bots’ rotors, and her link’s cache suddenly opened and something was moving through it, opening and closing files with enormous speed. She glimpsed images and videos from her childhood, saw Joyous Hightower’s damaged speedboat hung in the boathouse, heard a snatch of one of Seven’s songs, the voice of the arbiter.

And then everything shut down and Zaquil’s face was level with hers, his expression stern and cold.

‘We purged and destroyed the Other Mother, but a fragment or a cloned copy breached our defences and counterattacked. Did she tell you anything about her plans? Do you know where her assets are hidden?’

‘You tried to use me and she used me too. Me and Goodwill. She lured us here, but didn’t tell us why.’

That didn’t appease Zaquil. His voice filled her head.

‘Think about everything she told you, Ysbel Moonsdaughter. Think hard. You may have forgotten something. It doesn’t matter what it was. How small. How seemingly insignificant. It may help me to find her and destroy her. And when that is done I will return and I—’

Zaquil’s giant figure was gone and things were dropping from the air, clattering through into the palm trees, splashing into the water. A deep note boomed across the dark water; a brilliant flare of pure white light expanded into the sky above the forest shore and very slowly faded away. A low wave washed over the submerged reef and burst against boulders along the narrow edge of the shore and extinguished Ysbel’s little campfire, and the night was as dark and still as it had ever been.

27.

Goodwill came out to meet Ysbel as she walked along the beach in the first light of day. She was carrying one of the fallen bots. Its feather-light body, woven from threads of translucent plastic, was scorched and split; its gossamer vanes hung limply.