“Anna, I can get out of this. Will you help me?” She opened her mouth to speak, but he touched her lips with his fingers. “Will you just go home and keep this thing safe and wait for me? Please? I’ll be back in the morning, I promise.”

She glanced up at him, her eyes hard and bright, then away again. She reached out and touched the pocket drive, then put it quickly inside her coat. She shook her head, as if she had tried everything and was now consigning him to the world. “All right,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”

Kearney felt an enormous relief.

He left the bar and took a cab to Heathrow, where he booked himself on the first available flight to New York.

The airport was stunned into calmness by the late hour. Kearney sat in an empty row of seats in the departure lounge, yawning, peering out through the plate glass at the huge fins of the manoeuvring aircraft and throwing the Shrander’s dice compulsively as he waited for night to turn into dawn. He had his bag on the seat beside him. He was going to America not because he wanted to, but because that was what the dice had suggested. He had no idea what he would do when he arrived. He saw himself driving through the heartlands trying to read a Triple A map in the dark; or staring out of a train window like someone in a Richard Ford story, someone whose life has long ago pivoted onto its bad side and is being held down by its own weight. All his strategies were bankrupt. They had been hollowed out years ago by a kind of persistent internal panic. Whatever was happening to him now, though, was new. It had a culminatory feeling. He was going to run again, and probably be caught this time, and perhaps find out what his life had been about. Anything else he had told Anna was a lie. She must have expected that, because just before 5 a.m. he felt her lean over him from behind and kiss him and close her thin hands over his so that he couldn’t throw the dice again.

“I knew you’d come here,” she whispered.

23
Star-crossed

The commander of Touching the Void tried to contact Seria Mau by fetch.

Something was wrong with his signal. It had lost part of itself, or got mixed up with something else, some of the baroque matter of the universe, before it reached her. The fetch squatted in front of her tank for a full minute, fading in and out of view, then vanished. It was much smaller than she remembered from their previous dealings—a bundle of yellowish limbs barely bigger than a human head, crouching in what looked like a puddle of sticky liquid. Its skin had the shine of roasted poultry. She wondered if that meant there was something wrong, not just with the signal but with the commander himself. She asked mathematics what it thought.