I was certain my former masters would still demand some form of retribution for my failure. Despite my request to join the House of Reclamation, I wouldn’t officially be a member until my application was approved and I’d completed my training and orientation. Until then, the Conglomeration could still legitimately claim me as a fugitive. If we were cornered here and I wanted to buy myself time, I’d need something to trade. Perhaps, if I completed my missing persons case and recovered Ona Sudak, that one success might go some way towards ameliorating matters? I had no idea what made the poet so valuable, but if the Intelligence Service was keen to get its hands on her then perhaps I could use her as a bargaining chip. I’d never work for the Conglomeration again, but at least I might be spared jail, and allowed to pursue my self-imposed exile in peace.

“I should have stayed a cop,” I grumbled aloud. “It was crap, but it was better than this.”

Neither of the others turned around at the sound of my voice, but I saw Preston’s shoulders twitch and guessed he might be having similar thoughts of his own, trying to fathom how he’d ended up here. The poor kid. He didn’t look much older than nineteen or twenty, and here he was laying his life on the line for a bunch of strangers in the most sterile and unforgiving landscape I’d ever had the misfortune to encounter.

* * *

We had been walking for an hour when Clay stopped us with a raised hand. “Movement,” she whispered.

I peered ahead, seeing only the straight lines and razor-sharp shadows of the canyon. “Where?”

“On the left wall, about two hundred yards.” She stepped into the shadows at the base of the same wall, and Preston and I followed her.

“Is it them?” the kid asked.

Clay shook her head. “I don’t think so. Doesn’t look like people.”

I still couldn’t see anything more than a deep shadow, with a deeper blackness at its centre. “Drones?”

“No.” Her brow furrowed. “I only caught it from the corner of my eye, but it looked like a hole opened in the wall.”

I placed my palm against the smooth, cold stone. It towered two thousand metres above me, a solid vertical slab of quartz.

“How could a hole open in stone?”

“I don’t know, but it did.” She sounded cross. “Like an eye, or a mouth.”

We edged forward, staying pressed into the shadows. Clay held her pistol at the ready. Detail resolved with each step, and it soon became easier to see that the darker patch of shadow was in fact an aperture of some kind.

When we were closer, Clay made us wait while she reconnoitred the situation. Preston and I crouched in the angle between cliff and floor, and watched her.