I looked at the people passing us on the street, imagined them dying, or partying their last days away as the moon slid out of the sky before crashing down on their heads.

‘Come on,’ I said to Chloe, taking a tighter grasp on her hand and turning back the way we had come. ‘Let’s go home.’

All you can do is find some place to call home, and hope for the best.

A few days later, I found myself facing Bramnik from across his desk. Outside, rain thumped against the window of his office in Government House. A tropical storm had hit the island, it being that time of year. He looked older, more tired, despite his full reinstatement as head of the Pathfinder project.

‘And that’s all you can tell me?’ he said. ‘That they’re gone?’

‘We searched for them,’ I said. ‘Haden, Selwyn and Randall. They’re nowhere on the island.’

‘But where could they . . . ?’

I stared towards the window, trying my damnedest to look grief stricken. I’d practised that morning, in my mirror, and thought I’d been pretty good at it. Maybe in another life I’d have been an actor.

‘We searched for them everywhere,’ I said. ‘But then I remembered something I heard Selwyn and Randall saying, when it looked as if the Patriots were going to take over.’ I sighed heavily. ‘They said they’d rather take their chances with a null sequence.’

Bramnik regarded me with horror. I began to think he might really believe me.

‘I’ll admit,’ I said, ‘we used the transfer stage Casey had mounted in the trawler to travel to a bunch of known alternates, but there was no sign any of them had travelled to those places.’ I raised my hands in my lap and let them fall again. ‘Out of all of us, they were the ones most dissatisfied with the way things were. Randall talked more than anyone, I think, about how desperate he was to retire.’

‘You think they killed themselves? Because they found out they couldn’t retire?’

I gave a heavy shrug. ‘It crossed my mind. Who knows? But I’m not so sure it was suicide. I think they decided it was worth the risk, to see where each of them might end up. After all, nobody really knows where you go when you program a null sequence. All we know is that nobody ever comes back – and with nobody to report back, there’s no way of knowing what’s on the other side.’

Bramnik shook his head. ‘It just seems incredible that they would do such a thing.’

I shrugged helplessly. ‘I can’t ever be certain what they did, or why. All I’m saying is I can’t think of anything else that makes any kind of sense. Either way, they’re gone – all three of them.’