He looked down. On both feet, his little toes were pushing through the worn-out mesh, showing the grey fabric of his socks. ‘I’m making these last.’

‘Last until what?’ Teena made a face as she drove. ‘Just buy new sneakers, will you?’

The day was getting on; soon it would be dusk, and the temperature was dropping. On reaching a shallow crater rimmed by rocky cliffs, they entered through a narrow pass between eroding tiers of stone. There was an isolated hut, a basic can-shaped structure with a stand-alone latrine. Campers weren’t supposed to use it – it was for work crews – but Dino had coaxed the keypad code out of someone he knew. He made it his base for his sketching excursions, making forays to the cliffs and fossicking in the caves. The hut was an open secret among their group of friends; Sebastian and Teena used it to get away. They both felt lighter in the desert, and Teena especially craved the relief of low gravity when her leg gave her trouble.

On arriving, they threw their gear into the hut, shut the door as the air processor cranked up, and pulled off their headgear to down a couple of cold beers. They looked out the window at the cliffs, which were popular with rock climbers. ‘That reminds me,’ Teena said. ‘I’ve got to ring Zoe. She’s been wanting to go climbing.’

Zoe was a friend from her time in special forces. She had sought to remake herself as an adventure tour operator, but it seemed to Sebastian that she had a lot of time to burn. ‘Well, another time,’ said Teena. ‘The cliffs aren’t going anywhere.’

‘No, they are not.’ Sebastian went to take a leak. He was glad to have his mask – the latrine had not been cleaned. He would have thought that the work crews would be used to urinating in a low-gravity environment, but the stained wall showed where they had overshot.

Escaping the cubicle, he found the magnesium sticks and kero and got a campfire going, just for the hell of it, coaxing the flame until it took and burned cheerfully. He squatted before it and looked across the shallow valley to the cliffs that were just then catching the last of the sun. People rhapsodised about the quality of light that was distinctive to New Province – the streakiness of the sky, the delicate colours, a golden haze that was in fact the sign of noxious gases. It was almost a religion, and sometimes he thought there was something more at play in these protestations, something almost competitive, a need to definitively prove an attachment to the place. Still, there was something to it. He wasn’t unaffected. He watched with a quiet awe as the sun sank, then disappeared, its dying rays turning the sky an electric blue.