Saleh could see apology in Elias’s eyes.

“You can’t run away,” Elias said, as gently as he could. “Even in space, you’d still just be yourself. And lonelier than you could ever imagine.”

“Maybe,” Saleh said. “But I have to get out.”

“I’m sorry,” Elias said. He shook his head. “It’s rare,” he said. “It’s valuable. There’s no question about it. But it’s just an empty bomb husk. Even with provenance. You’d have to find the right collector, and even then. . . . It won’t get you to Mars. It would barely get you a one-way ticket on the ’stalk. We would buy it off you, of course. But we are wholesalers, not collectors. I can’t offer you what you want and, even if you could somehow sell it at full price somewhere else it won’t be as much as you’d want.”

Inside Saleh, hope died.

“My father, my uncle, my cousins, everyone . . .” he said.

“Yes,” Elias said.

“All for nothing,” Saleh said.

“Not nothing,” Elias said.

Saleh barely heard him. He stared at that awful, empty husk. So many lives. And so many still caught in that explosion, the final installation of a mad artist who took delight in destruction and death.

He could go back, he thought. Go find the rest of the Abu-Ala, follow the coast to Sharm.

He didn’t want to, he realised. Even before it all happened, he did not want to live his life this way. Scavenging old tech in the crumbling, rotting, endless maze of kitsch architecture on the Ghost Coast. Marrying, and having a family, so one day he’d have a son, so one day his name would pass on along with the tribe’s.

He wanted to see Al Imtidad, he realised. He wanted to see the glitterball underwater cities of the Drift, or the view of Earth as seen from the observation decks of Gateway high in orbit. He wanted the moon. He wanted Mars.

Instead he was here.

He couldn’t, wouldn’t, go back, he thought. He shook his head. He blinked back tears.

“Thank you,” he said, formally. He took back the find. The bomb. “I will find a buyer. I will go—”

“How will you go?” Elias said.

Saleh felt trapped. “I will go,” he said. “I will find a way.”

“You could come with us.”

Saleh looked at Elias. The other boy was smiling.

“You could be useful,” Elias said. “And we can always use a steady set of hands.” He tapped his goggles, which must have connected him with the rest of the caravaners, Saleh realised. “It is already decided by quorum. If you would like to, that is.”

“Where do you go?” Saleh said.

Elias shrugged. “Along the coast, still, for a while. Then back through the desert before the summer comes. Perhaps to Bahrain.”