They descended between steep talus cones and picked their way through trees and mossy boulders along the lake shore to a shelf of rock at the mouth of the valley. There was a vertical drop to a wide, meandering glacial trough, and a view of mountains rising on the far side, peaks beyond peaks fading into a misty soft blue vastness under the seamless sky. Trina called out Raia’s name again, and again there was no response, but in a small stand of fir trees beside a stony chute that channelled overflow from the lake to a waterfall, they found the remains of a fire in a circle of water-smoothed cobbles, and something rustled in the treetops and a small bot whirred down and cast a cone of light in the green shade.

Life-sized, translucent, Raia sat crosslegged with the bear, Seven, standing behind her in his patchwork cloak, asking if her machine was recording now.

‘Yes, it is. See the little blue light?’

‘So then: greetings to whoever is watching these pictures of us,’ Seven said, and solemnly raised a hand, leathery palm outwards.

‘I hope it’s you, Trina,’ Raia said. She looked ragged but resolute. Dark smudges under her eyes, hair bushed up above a torn length of cloth tied around her forehead. ‘But if it’s someone else, I’m Raia Karysdaughter of the Behavioural Science section of Survey and Surveillance, and this is my friend Seven, who as you can tell is an articulate bear.’

Trina was very still and intent, her hands folded together under her chin.

In the cone of projected light, Seven inclined his sleek head and said, ‘We have come here to look for others like me. Articulate bears who escaped their keepers and made a life in the treacherous wilderness. And we have at last found some, although our encounter did not quite go as we expected or hoped.’

Raia explained that she and Seven had set up camp beside the lake and searched the area north and east of it, discovering the remains of a large fire and gnawed bones and a half-finished flaked stone point, and a few kilometres north of this camp site the skull of a bear daubed with red pigment and white pebbles set in its eye sockets, lodged in the crotch of a dead tree.

‘A warning we failed to take seriously,’ Seven said.

‘I put up my bots, and after a long search we finally spotted them,’ Raia said. ‘Two males and a female and a young cub, using nets and spears to catch spawning salmon in a series of river pools at the edge of the forest.’

‘I did not recognise them, although they were about my age,’ Seven said. ‘They were not, I think, from the camp where I was raised.’

‘We think there may be other camps,’ Raia said.

‘There are,’ Ysbel told Trina. ‘Or there were, according to the Other Mother.’