He holds out his hand and I take what he offers me. It’s a tin box the size of a lho-stick pack. I open the lid to see something inside made of silver and brass. Of spares. The little clockwork soldier’s limbs are fused and frozen, and the paint is all but gone, but when I press on the lasgun I see the flashpin flicker.

On.

Off.

‘She knew how to make things work,’ he says. ‘Even when they shouldn’t.’

I hold out the box. Zoric takes it back and looks at it once more before closing the lid and putting it back in his jacket pocket. His hand lingers in that place a while. Just over his heart.

‘If you could bring them back, would you?’ I ask him.

‘Of course I would,’ he says. ‘But you can’t go back. Can’t change what’s done.’

‘What if you could?’

He drops his hand into his lap. ‘You believe you can do that for Sofika, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘That it’ll be part of the deal when we find the Conduit.’

I nod. ‘My dreams told me so.’

Zoric sits forward in his chair. ‘Then you have to make it happen,’ he says. ‘Take the chance.’ He shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t keep my promise, but I want to help you keep yours. I want to prove that I can be more than what they made me. That I can be good, or something like it.’

I think about the things I have done in the name of my dreams. The blood on my hands.

‘Perhaps both of us can,’ I say.

Zoric nods, then he gets up out of the chair and offers me his hand.

‘I can show you to where she is sleeping,’ he says.

I hesitate a moment before I reach out. Before I accept his help.

‘I can’t stop,’ I tell him. ‘I won’t. Not until it’s done.’

‘I know,’ he says.

Then I take hold of his hand and let him pull me to my feet.

Sofika’s new chambers are a long way sternward, right at the far end of the hospitaller’s ward. It’s so far that even with a cane to support me, Zoric has to help me walk there. The room is sealed behind a voice-printed bulkhead door, with a heavy spinning lock. When Zoric opens it I see that the chamber is clean and quiet, even if it is small enough to be dominated by Sofika’s machine. The lighting has failed here as it has across the rest of the ship, but there are lit candles in the wall-sconces and in shallow dishes all around the foot of the machine. Tiny lights, to watch over her while she sleeps. The lambent glow lights my dream-taker in warm tones, turning her pale hair to gold and putting colour back in her cheeks.