Iona walked outside and found Victor sitting on the ground, leaning against the outer wall of the dome. After her conversation with the figure up on the plain she’d spoken to the other humans and explained the situation. Their reactions had varied. Steve in particular had reacted with anger: like Iona he’d demanded to speak to the deciders, but when told he couldn’t he raged at the figures for dumbly following orders. Saori had convinced him to calm down, rightly arguing their position with the figures was still precarious. But Victor had been quiet.

As Iona sat down next to him he started with surprise, and she realized he’d been lost in thought. She asked if he was alright.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was just thinking about them guys.” He jerked his thumb in no particular direction but it was clear he meant the figures. “Going on doing the job, following their little protocols, sending back the loot, keeping the supply chain going. But there’s nobody out there, is there?”

“We don’t know that,” said Iona. “Maybe there is and they just don’t care. Maybe they just can’t be bothered to come out here and deal with it.”

“Well exactly. It’s not the people who sent them that I’m sad for. I’m sad for them. Poor bloody simple creatures.”

“They seem engineered for the purpose.”

“Oh obviously, yeah. Engineered not to be too curious and just carry out instructions. Just going on and on until someone tells them to stop.”

“Maybe they’re happy doing that.”

“Nah,” said Victor, gesturing at a figure as it crossed the space between the domes. “You see how interested they are in us? They’ve been watching everything we do all this time.”

“Yes, because they were told to research the native life—”

“They’ve had us in there centuries, they know all they need to know by now. They kept watching us because they got something out of it. Something they don’t get in their normal lives.”

Iona hadn’t thought of it like that. If Victor was right, that made it a great deal more likely that the figures would put them back in.

13

THE HUMANS CONTINUED TO live in the medical facility, sleeping in their vertical beds at night. But only the figures’ innate caution had stopped them from dealing with the issue of what to do with them sooner, or at least this was what Iona believed. She told her colleagues as much one day during a long conversation after lunch. Iona was reluctant even to say all this out loud, because she felt sure the figures were listening to them and she didn’t want to give them any ideas, but she needed to work out how to tackle this before it all came to a head.

“Look, we are smarter than them,” said Saori. She leaned back in her chair and rested her feet on the aluminum table they’d been given to use at mealtimes. Her shoes made a dull ringing sound as they made contact with the surface. After centuries of only using wooden furniture they all found the noise jarring—except Saori, who seemed to revel in such noises and made them quite deliberately. “I refuse to accept we can’t argue our way past them.”