As her flitter descended towards the gravel bank at the bend of the river, Ysbel spotted a slant of canvas near the tree line and a small boat at the water’s edge. Trina Mersdaughter had been camping there for two days, it turned out, after sailing singlehanded from the Gathering Place to the north-west coast of the mainland and anchoring her yacht in a sheltered bay and motoring upriver in its dinghy to the abandoned camp in bear country. Trina claimed to have arrived ahead of schedule thanks to calm seas and kind winds, but Ysbel suspected that she had finessed her ETA because she hoped to contact her partner on her own, and was glad she had stuck around, had not reneged on their agreement to meet up after the long-range bot she had sent to scout the rendezvous point – the place she and Raia had thought looked like a piece of heaven fallen to Earth – had failed to spot any sign of activity.

Trina hadn’t been able to find any traces left by Raia or Seven in the camp or the forest around it, either, and there’d been no response to her radio broadcasts or the flares she’d sent up, but at least her bots had tagged and tracked most of the local bears, she told Ysbel, and she had been able to plot a path between their territories towards the mountains.

‘They’re still pretty active,’ she said. ‘Looking for food and fattening up before the snow comes. But things should be quieter when we get above the treeline.’

Her hair was clipped short and bleached by sun and saltwater, and she was dressed in shorts and stout boots and a windproof jacket that was currently trying to imitate the stony beach where they stood, surveying the river and the forest.

‘How many days’ walking are we looking at?’ Ysbel said.

When they’d been planning this expedition, Trina, out of an understandable excess of caution, hadn’t disclosed the exact location of the rendezvous point. It was somewhere in the mountains, she’d told Ysbel then, and didn’t give away much more now, saying that it was a two-or three-day hike, assuming they didn’t run into any trouble.

‘The long-range bot is still loitering there, in case Raia and Seven turn up,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll start at the place where you last saw them, and try to pick up their trail as we head up into the mountains. Look for waymarks, caches. Any sign of where they’ve been and where they were going.’