“Don’t you knock?” asked the king, cementing this impression. He rose, forcing Clarence to leap awkwardly to the floor.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” said Saori. “I just wanted to tell you we’ve found Ward.”

“Yes!” said the king, punching the air.

“Excellent!” said Clarence, grinning.

“But there’s something else,” Saori added. “He’s not dead.”

The king and Clarence looked at each other. The king laughed, because surely this must be a joke. Clarence didn’t laugh.

“His body wasn’t stolen,” said Saori. “He’s alive and someone helped him escape.”

* * *

As afternoon gave way to evening, Iona helped Victor to probe the artificial brains of the citizens. She even felt like she was starting to understand how they worked. She and Victor had isolated the ones with no known job, reactivated them, and asked them questions. The question of what they actually did elicited a blank response, as if they simply didn’t comprehend it. They reacted as though there was no reason to think they would do anything.

Iona wondered if this was a side effect of them having died, but a test with some of the others revealed they all remembered their lives in the city well enough. The ones who apparently did nothing were either genuinely doing nothing or they were doing something they weren’t talking about.

Victor had managed to work out some of the citizens’ programming language, which was input via the numbered switches in the cavity; it was he who had come up with the sequence that was written on the instructions Iona had found. He entered commands and each citizen would speak reams of code that Iona wrote down as quickly as she could. Victor analyzed this code and tried to locate the citizens’ security protocols. There were several failures along the way—in resetting one citizen they wiped its entire memory. But eventually they established there was a code-phrase—“starlit sky”—that released the information they were looking for.

Now the citizens told a different story. They explained how they got together in pairs—different pairs each day, so they heard different points of view. Together they analyzed the composition of the dome walls and discussed available implements to break through it. They talked about the environmental controls for the dome and how they might possibly be accessed from the inside. They pondered the exact location of the door, what the mechanics of it might be, what lock it might use and how it might be picked. They theorized, based on their limited observations, on the nature of their captors, how their language worked, and how they might be induced to open the door. Every citizen was aware of the many attempts that had been made in the past and this ensured they did not replicate work that had previously been done. The best idea they had come up with so far was that the interior of the dome could not continue to expand indefinitely, and if they continued to build a larger and larger humanesque settlement, eventually it would stretch to breaking point and an opportunity to escape might present itself. But this was just a theory so far.