After Selwyn and Randall departed forever, Winifred and I had decided to make one final trip to the bee-brain alternate. The decision to do so, to say the least, had not been made lightly. We had transferred across to the basement from where Casey had vanished into an unknowable void, and collected the field-pillars. We carried them outside, carefully avoiding the tripwires, and loaded them into Casey’s jeep, once we figured out where he had abandoned it.

Then came the question of what to do about Rozalia’s body, still lying prone in the basement. I had promised Yuichi I would bring her body back, but Winifred argued against this, pointing out that if we did, we would almost certainly have to bury her in secret – otherwise, the Authority would know we had come back to get her. And if they knew that, they might well get to wondering what else we might have brought back. There was greater dignity, she said, in leaving Rozalia where she was – in the same place that Nadia and also Oskar had met their ends.

I couldn’t argue with that. At least this way Nadia and Rozalia were still together, after a fashion. So we took Rozalia’s body from where it still lay sprawled across the concrete and arranged it so it at least had a little more dignity. Winifred said a few words, but I’m damned if I can remember a single one of them. Then Winifred took previously collected samples of the spoor the night patrols used to indicate which areas of the city the bee-brains should next tear apart, and she smeared it all over the basement and most of the rest of the building. That way, if the Authority ever came looking for the stage Casey had hidden there, they’d find the building razed to the ground and assume the stage had been destroyed along with it.

We drove the jeep with its cargo of field-pillars back across the city to the reservoir stage. There, we unloaded the field-pillars from the jeep and abandoned the vehicle, as it was too large to return through the stage hidden in the trawler back on the island.

We used the control rig taken from the basement as a replacement for the one smashed by Casey’s drone, since the reservoir stage was otherwise unharmed. That way, when we arrived back at the trawler, it was with nearly everything we needed to have our own, secret transfer stage – without, we hoped, Bramnik or anyone else from the Authority ever figuring out the truth. Finally, we reopened the link back to the bee-brain alternate from the island, so we could fetch the functioning control rig to operate our own, secret stage.

Bramnik closed his eyes for a moment, and rubbed at one temple with his hand. ‘I guess it’s plausible enough,’ he said, ‘that I can put it in a report.’