It was growing dark. They built up the fire and opened ration packs, and after they’d eaten Trina walked down to the lookout point again and shot off a flare that burst in a flower of white fire which swayed down through the dusky air, sending shadows skittering under the fir trees, and guttered out.

‘They’re probably too far away to see it,’ Trina told Ysbel, when she returned to the campfire. ‘But maybe they aren’t.’

Ysbel thought that it was more likely to attract feral bears, but kept her reservations to herself. Trina’s resolve was a brittle, frail thing. She needed the small hope that she’d done something useful. That however unlikely it was, her partner might see it and know what it meant.

A cold wind got up in the night, whipping sparks from the campfire and raising spectral whitecaps on the dark lake beyond the stand of fir trees. Ysbel was dozing in her foil sleeping bag when Trina woke her and said that one of the bots had spotted something or someone moving along the shore, under the trees.

The wind had died down. The fire had gone out. The black peaks of the trees were etched against rigid patterns of stars, and by the faint cold starlight Ysbel saw that Trina was holding her tranquilliser rifle across her chest.

‘Is it a bear?’ she said, shucking her sleeping bag and groping for her own rifle.

‘Hard to tell what it is,’ Trina said. ‘If it’s one of the bears Raia found, it’s on its own.’

She threw a link to Ysbel. A spectral view looking down on treetops pale as a crowd of ghosts, a bulky white shape moving beneath them, only intermittently visible.

‘It could be Seven,’ Ysbel said.

‘Or Raia, wearing Seven’s cloak,’ Trina said.

They were both whispering, and both startled when stone rattled against stone somewhere in the vast unknowable night.

‘I should send up a flare,’ Trina said. ‘If it’s a feral bear, it might scare it off. If it’s Raia …’

‘Whoever it is, they know we’re here,’ Ysbel said. ‘They’re coming straight towards us.’

The two women stood silent and still in the shadows under the fir trees, staring out at the black mirror of the lake and its shadowy fringe of forest, hearts beating lightly and quickly as they waited for their visitor to make contact.

By Paul McAuley:

400 Billion Stars

Secret Harmonies

Eternal Light

Red Dust

Pasquale’s Angel

Fairyland

Confluence

The Secret of Life

Cowboy Angels

The Quiet War

Gardens of the Sun

In the Mouth of the Whale

Evening’s Empires

Something Coming Through

Into Everywhere

Austral

War of the Maps