‘Because I can’t figure out how any saboteur could possibly have been able to pull off so many things all at once. They’d have to simultaneously shut down our communications, screw with the surveillance drones and lead the bee-brains towards us. Can you imagine someone arranging all that on their own? Because I can’t.’

‘So why does Rozalia think that?’ asked Chloe.

I spread my hands. ‘I guess she’s grief stricken. It’d hardly be surprising.’

She eyed me sadly. ‘Do you want my advice?’ She shifted on the edge of her seat, her expression intent. ‘Drop all of this. Forget about it. You met Greenbrooke, didn’t you? I’m prepared to think he’s not even the worst of the Authority. Don’t make the same mistake your predecessor did. Don’t draw their attention.’

She stood up then, and I could sense she wanted me to go. I had thought of asking her about the kiss, but I knew now that it had not been intended for me. It had been for him – my predecessor, the man in whose shadow I now walked.

I stopped at the open front door, hit by a sudden thought. ‘After he died,’ I asked, ‘what did they do with him?’

‘He’s buried just outside of town,’ she said, ‘in a graveyard just past the runway—’

I ran out and into the unkempt garden. Rozalia’s half-cooked eggs came surging up the back of my throat and onto the unmown grass.

‘Oh God,’ I heard Chloe say from somewhere behind me. ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry. I should have thought, before I said anything. I just . . .’

I heard her rush back indoors, then come back out seconds later, shoving a wad of tissues into my hand. I wiped my mouth before pulling myself upright.

Somewhere within walking distance was a grave with my name on it. In that moment, I hated the Authority nearly as much as I had the people who’d wiped out everything I had ever known and loved on my own alternate. Bramnik and his ilk had brought me to this place without a moment’s consideration either to the people I would be living among, or to how I might cope once I learned the truth, as I inevitably would.

‘A favour,’ I said. I tried to swallow some of the bad taste away. ‘I’d like to borrow one of his diaries. The last one he kept, in particular.’

She glanced back inside the house. ‘I . . . guess that’s not a problem.’

It had occurred to me that if there might really be something suspicious about the first Jerry’s death, and if he had continued writing in his diary after his retrieval, there might then be some clue in his diary entries – some hint of the truth, at least, if not an outright accusation.