Lamoureaux gave him a strange look, and Corso realized just how cold-hearted he’d sounded. ‘If we save some people at Ascension instead of heading straight out to those coordinates, we might lose something that could save us all from the Emissaries,’ he explained. ‘If the Legislate doesn’t want to think ahead, then I’m going to have to do it for them. Get hold of Martinez for me, and set up a secure, one-on-one tach-net link to Akiyama at the Office of Representatives while you’re at it, and route it to my quarters. Flag it urgent and top-priority.’

‘Senator, with the very greatest of respect, do you really think we can pull this off?’

Corso glanced back at Lamoureaux, as he headed for the door. ‘You’d better hope we can, Ted. Because if we can’t, we’re screwed.’

Chapter Nine

The sun was low on the horizon. Cool wind teased her dark hair, while saltwater foamed and splashed over her bare toes where she sat at the water’s edge, her baggy cotton trousers rolled up above her ankles. She knew, without looking, that further up the beach behind her stood a single-storey cabin on stilts, with tatami mats scattered welcomingly on its floor and a futon rolled up in one corner.

None of it was real, of course, but she didn’t know who she was, so it hardly mattered. She knew something had been threatening her because, when she tried to remember where she’d been before the beach, all that came to her was a sense of unease and foreboding.

In the meantime, she knew she could happily wait here on the beach for ever.

Sometimes she glanced down at her arms and legs and didn’t recognize them. The knowledge that something was missing – that some essential part of her had been lost for ever – slowly formed in the back of her mind, but somehow she didn’t seem to feel anything about it: no anger, remorse or bitterness. Only the awareness that something that should have been there, now wasn’t.

After a long while she remembered a star, angry and red, reaching out to swallow her. She remembered there had been machines like dark metal locusts filling the universe like a plague.

A little while later, she remembered dying.

What might have been hours or days or years later, her name came back to her: Dakota. She formed the sound with her lips, working her jaws around it in ways that felt unfamiliar, as if trying the vowels out for size.

She turned, seeing that a bamboo table laden with fresh fruit stood near the cabin, and in that instant it was as if a switch was thrown inside her. Sudden hunger overwhelmed her, and she stood and walked over. Once she’d eaten her fill, she crawled inside the cabin, unrolled the futon and went to sleep.