Howes regarded the bundle of pages wearily. ‘Maybe later. In the meantime, we have a job to do, and that’s stopping your friend carrying out this threat of his to commit genocide, assuming it’s real. Miss Ludke was very clear about the consequences if we fail.’

‘And then what?’ said Selwyn, coming to stand directly before the Major. ‘Everything goes back to the way it was, with us running around like rats in a cage until we drop dead? Because I just got told there’s no retirement plan for any of us, and never has been.’

‘And who told you that?’ asked Howes, with surprising equanimity.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ asked Rozalia. Chloe pulled her to one side and quickly told her what we had learned from Wallace.

‘So you admit it’s true,’ said Randall, coming to stand by Selwyn’s side and glaring at the Major.

Howes looked around us all and sighed. ‘I guess I do.’

‘Then there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense to me,’ Randall continued, nodding over at me. ‘How could you retrieve Jerry more than once, if you only ever had the one set of coordinates for his alternate? How come you can find more than one alternate with a version of Jerry on it, but you can’t find somewhere that’s safe for us to retire?’

Howes shook his head. ‘Alternates with minute variations in their histories are bundled together in “braids”. The first time you program a coordinate into a rig, it grabs one particular strand – an alternate – out of that braid of highly similar universes. The Mr Beche standing over there we found by picking a different strand from the same braid that the first Mr Beche came from.’ He looked around us. ‘Each one of you comes from a braid containing a multitude of alternates just like your own, with only very minor variations. To find one where your world didn’t end, so the theory goes, would require us to find an entirely separate braid, and that’s what the scientists can’t work out how to do. Now, we can’t waste any more—’

‘One moment,’ said Oskar. ‘I get the how. It doesn’t tell us why you’d lie about retirement.’

I could see Howes’ patience was wearing thin, but he clearly understood that we needed answers. ‘They were sure they were on the verge of figuring out how to program the stages right at the start,’ said Howes. ‘I guess they thought wrong, because they’re still trying. I’m sorry you were lied to, but I swear it had nothing to do with me.’

‘Enough of this,’ I said. ‘He’s right. We need to act now.’

‘We’ve got maybe one gun between all of us,’ said Yuichi, pointing at Howes’ pistol. ‘That’s hardly enough to do anything.’