I glanced at Mayer, and suddenly decided I didn’t want him to know about the second secret transfer stage. ‘There was a glitch, that’s all,’ I told Selwyn, extemporizing quickly.

Selwyn peered into my eyes, looking for something. ‘And Rozalia? Oskar?’

I met his gaze as steadily as I could. ‘They didn’t make it.’

Selwyn took a step back and nodded grimly. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

I walked over to Mayer, who sat staring off into space. I saw he had my predecessor’s last testament gripped in one hand, as if he’d just been reading it.

‘You people shouldn’t have lied to us about retirement,’ I said, nodding at the crumpled pages. ‘None of this would have happened otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, that makes you people nearly as much to blame as Casey.’

He gazed at me hopelessly, then looked away again. The moonlight revealed bruises on his face, and I wondered if he’d received them during his brief incarceration at the hands of the Patriots.

‘There isn’t time for this, Jerry,’ said Winifred, coming towards me. ‘We need to get going.’

I turned to look at her. ‘Where to?’

‘The Authority,’ she replied. ‘Remember what Howes said back at the Mauna Loa? We have to take the evidence back through to the Authority ourselves, along with Kip.’

I nodded as it came back to me. ‘What happened at the base?’ I asked her. ‘It all went okay?’

She nodded. ‘Pretty much the way Howes said it would. They took him prisoner, and that gave us the opportunity to get Kip out while their backs were turned. We can’t hang around. They might have seen our headlights.’

Selwyn stepped towards Mayer. ‘Mr Mayer? If you’d care to program the stage with the appropriate coordinates, we’d be delighted.’

Mayer nodded. ‘You’ll need to leave your weapons,’ he said.

We all looked at each other. ‘If you go through armed,’ said Mayer, ‘the people on the other side will shoot first, trust me. Just leave them somewhere out of sight here.’

We did as he said, not without some trepidation, then waited as he programmed the stage for the Authority. He and Yuichi were the first to climb onto the tiny stage, followed some minutes later by Winifred and Randall, then Selwyn on his own and, lastly, myself and Chloe, gripping each other’s hands as the light swarmed around us.

Men in dark suits were waiting for us when we arrived at our destination, all of them conspicuously armed. I felt a brief moment of terror, thinking perhaps we had misjudged Mayer and inadvertently walked straight into a trap. But when I saw the other surviving Pathfinders standing unguarded nearby I decided we were safe.