I turned to look at her. She had stood back up from her stool after sitting quietly all this time, a wild look in her eyes. ‘You haven’t even told them the really important thing,’ she spat, then pushed in front of me until she was facing the others. ‘There is no retirement,’ she yelled. ‘Wallace hacked into the Authority’s computers and found out the truth. There’s no going home, or some place better. They were lying to us all these years, and now Casey’s going to take his revenge on the Authority for that lie by doing his damnedest to kill their whole damn world.’

Randall’s mouth opened and closed a number of times before he finally sat back down, looking shell-shocked. The rest stared at Chloe with open mouths. I noted with interest that Winifred Quaker, by contrast, was as poker-faced and calm as ever.

‘So, fine,’ said Selwyn, looking harried. ‘So Casey wants to screw the Authority for screwing with us. Why not just let him?’

‘You mean apart from the fact it’d be genocide?’ I said. ‘We depend on the Authority for everything. Medical supplies, food, drink . . . all of that, in case you hadn’t noticed, comes from that commissary around the corner. And that only gets restocked from the Authority’s own home alternate. So, unless you fancy trying to farm this damn island, or subsisting entirely on Yuichi’s home-brew, I’d suggest we’re pretty seriously fucking reliant on them for just about everything. Especially now we know there’s no such thing as retirement.’

‘Chloe,’ said Yuichi, ‘you said Casey wanted “revenge”. How’s he going to go about getting it, exactly?’

‘We think he’s searching for something he can carry over to the Authority that’ll wipe them out,’ I said. ‘Some super-weapon from one of the explored alternates, maybe.’

‘Wait a second,’ said Selwyn. ‘Why would the Authority lie to us in the first place? They built the transfer stages. If they can find the alternates where all of us come from, why not ones we can retire to? What’s stopping them, exactly?’

‘Because they didn’t build them,’ I explained. ‘They didn’t even invent them. They just found them.’

‘No,’ said Randall, shaking his head. ‘No, no, no.’

Wallace had told me all of it in his halting, careful words before the guard had interrupted us. ‘They just stumbled across an abandoned stage in a jungle on their own alternate. They don’t even really understand how the damn things work, which is why they can’t program them with their own destinations. As a matter of fact, every coordinate they have, including the ones they used to find and retrieve us, they found right here, on this island, when that first stage led them here.’