In reply, he took a green cardboard box off a shelf and emptied it in front of her. Hundreds of dice – some alien, some human, some single, some in pairs – rattled  and bounced  across the counter. All colours and materials, from bone to ruby plastic, they glittered with buried  lights and embedded  physics. He passed his hands above them and suddenly it was nothing  but win. They were all the same way up. ‘What we lose is ourselves,’ he said, sweeping the dice back in the box then spilling them out again. ‘I seen luggage and pictures. A parcel of rusty knives. Once a thing that looks like a shoe but I find it’s alive. I took delivery of lost kiddies, lost coats, lost antiques including, as you see, these dice of all kinds.’ He shrugged. ‘A rocket ship’s too big for this office.’

The assistant put her hands over his and held them still.

‘Don’t be afraid of me,’ she urged. ‘Black Heart rum is the drink I like, and I take my time over its burnt sugar flavours. That ship I’m after’s called the Nova Swing?’

The old man looked at her.

‘Wait here,’ he said.

‘Lost dice,’ she called after him: ‘Unlucky for the finder!’

She waited ten minutes then twenty.

Behind the counter  he kept it neat: just the box on the shelf, the  yellowed waybills on  the  wall. Everything  was very clean. There was a locked back room; there was a back door, opening on to fresh views of the Kunene Economic Zone. When he didn’t return  in half an hour, the assistant went out and walked around calling, ‘Hello?’ Intense afternoon light threw shadows across the empty avenues between the buildings. At the end of one silent perspective the rare  earth  hills revealed themselves; at the end of another, the cracked cement of the landing field. She was in a maze: silent and static, self-similar in all directions, with the air of temporary habitation made permanent by the forces of commerce and psychic decline. ‘Hello?’ Confused by the sameness of things, her tailoring began to hallucinate objects bigger than the spaces they occupied: she switched it to standby. A few minutes later the old man crossed an intersection fifty or sixty yards in front of her. He was pushing some long, heavy, tubular object, leaning into its weight as if into a strong wind. She could hear him groaning with the effort.

When he caught sight of her, he gave a little skip of fear.

‘I am not Renoko!’ he called.