‘We will find them and make peace with them,’ Seven said, ‘and learn who they are and where they came from, and if there are any others like them living out here.’

Raia gave the universal coordinates of the bears’ last location, and the time and date of the recording: it had been made forty-seven days ago.

‘If you’re watching this, Trina, that’s the best place to start looking for us,’ she said. ‘If we have to follow the bears any further, we’ll leave waymarks. Look out for stones set in arrow shapes, and carvings in tree trunks. You know the kind of thing. And please be careful.’

‘I look forward to meeting you,’ Seven said.

‘And if someone else has found this, please link it to my partner, Trina Mersdaughter,’ Raia said, and the cone of projected light blinked off.

Trina had the bot play the recording again, and afterwards walked down through the trees to the rock shelf and stood in the windy sunlight, looking out at the mountains and sky. Ysbel got a fire going with fir cones and dry branches and boiled water for tea, and after a little while Trina came back and said that she had to look for them.

‘I know you do,’ Ysbel said.

‘They’ve been gone a long time. Anything could have happened,’ Trina said.

‘Raia might be talking to those bears right now. Or be on her way back.’

‘It’s nice to think so, isn’t it? But I still need to go look for her.’

‘And I’ll come with you. But we only have a few days’ rations left. If we’re going to be out here for much longer, we need to resupply.’

They boiled up more tea and hashed out a plan. They’d link to the flitter via the long-range bot and fly it by wire to the lake. Ysbel would head to Pleasant Bay and bring back more supplies, a round trip that would take two days at the most. Meanwhile, Trina would hike out to the bears’ last location, and use her bots to make an aerial survey of the surrounding territory.

‘I looked at the maps,’ Ysbel said. ‘There’s a lot of country within forty-seven days’ walking, and it’s pretty rugged, too. We could call in more people – a couple of my former colleagues are still winding up affairs at Ogres Grave, to begin with.’

‘We have a plan, and I don’t want to wait for a search party,’ Trina said. ‘Raia said she’d leave waymarks, and she could be laid up hurt somewhere. It’s not just those bears they found. There are feral bears, too. Spotted cats. Or she might have fallen, broken a leg …’

‘She knows bear country,’ Ysbel said. ‘And she has Seven.’

Neither of them wanted to talk about the worst outcomes, that forty-seven days was an awfully long time to be out of contact in the wilderness.