That night she dreamed of her old friend Ed Chianese, incontrovertibly the great rocket jockey of his day. In the dream, it was the morning after Liv’s big dive. Ed lay next to her. They were at the Hotel Venice, home to rocket sport bums of every description, but especially hyperdip jockeys between attempts on the photosphere of France Chance IV. Thick sprays of photons, most of them originating in that same photosphere, poured into the room, over-egging the yellow walls and prompting Liv to wonder out loud what the weather was like in the Bénard cells today. She was so happy. Ed was thinking about breakfast. At the same time the dream had him falling – the way Liv herself had fallen, with only the paper-thin hull of the Saucy Sal between her and it – into France Chance IV. ‘Ed!’ she called, in case he didn’t know. ‘Ed, you’re falling!’ Hot gas raged all about him, putting stark shadows under his handsome cheekbones. Caught in descending plasma at four and half thousand Kelvin, his hyperdip had lost confidence in itself and was breaking up. Those things were a neurosis with an engine.

Ed turned his head slowly and smiled at her. ‘I’ll never stop,’ he said. ‘I’ll always fall.’

Liv woke up wet.

They spent some days waiting for Antoyne’s contact.

Abandoned fifteen years earlier, after inexplicable climate shifts and abrupt changes in range and distribution of native species, World X’s single continent was now a commercial limbo, its pastel spintronics factories and EMC-funded radio frequency observatories mothballed, its lower management dormitories and holiday resorts closed down. Da Luz Field continued to operate, but at reduced traffic volumes. The Port Authority maintained an oversight staff. The single small bar and pâtisserie, L’Ange du Foyer, was little more than a handful of stamped aluminium tables set out in the blazing sun, at one or another of which Irene the mona could be found every morning after breakfast, wearing huge black sunglasses and drinking chilled marzipan-flavour latte. Toni Reno’s paperwork, weighted down by an empty cup, fluttered in the warm wind. By the third day it was grubby from being handled, covered with brown rings; by the fourth it seemed like an obsolete connection to another world.