She drew the shape of the encircling wall in the sand. Then she zoomed in closer to the camp, putting a stone aside for each figure as she spotted them. She assumed the smallest were females, but sometimes it was hard to be sure. One figure appeared to be digging close to one of the buildings, while another watched. She counted all the larger figures as males. Some of the guards stood looking out; others sat on the wall, their legs dangling over. All the guards carried something in their hands – guns, she guessed, or other types of weapon. She made a pile of twigs for weapons. The guards were not evenly spaced on the wall and she wondered why.

She drew the evenly laid out patches of crops in the sand. Several plastic water tanks were scattered throughout the camp and she marked them with stones. Small figures moved around the garden patches and she counted all of those as females. She strained to see if any one of them could be Bibi, but they were too tiny. The images on the PlAK froze and she sat back on her heels and waited.

She followed the walls that surrounded the camp and saw the lower section that Arc had talked about – only two guards on that side – and a faint trace of the gully they would use to approach. She began to add shapes for the buildings to her map. Some were rectangular – probably where people slept. There were ordinary looking old-time houses, a few much bigger than others. Something that looked like a church. One blocky building with a flat roof, close to the part of the wall where most of the guards were clustered. I bet that’s where they keep the weapons and ammunition, she thought. She wished she could see better. There was another flatroofed building, square and low, half sunk in the ground. She drew the paths she could see on the map.

The image froze and failed resolve. The battery was almost dead – it would soon fail completely. She plugged the PlAK into the charger and stared at the map she’d made in the sand. It was an insubstantial thing to use for life and death decisions. They needed something more.

She went to find Rapt.

He sat alone under one the lean-tos and for the first time, she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He was a teenager, like her, and perhaps if he had been a Squaddie, had never heard a caring word. “I want to ask you something,” she said and sat beside him.

“You want to ask me something?”

“Yes. About war. About fighting. Were you violence-trained?”

“What d’you think?” She thought she saw tears in his undamaged eye.

“That must really hurt,” she said, pointing to his injury.

He shrugged. “Yes, I was in the camps. I was five when they took me.”

“You had to study battle techniques, right?”

“So what?”