“The crew all died, of course,” Elias said. “But it was lifetimes ago. For a long time no one knew the location of the crash site, but then a Webster showed up in a Cairo coffeehouse one day, wild-eyed, and told a story of a ship full of treasure out in the Sinai. Before long you had all kinds of scavengers out here, but when they got to the ship it was empty. People still look for the treasure it was supposed to be carrying. But no one ever found it.”

“What treasure was it?” Saleh said. He couldn’t help but feel a tinge of excitement at the word. Treasure. It made him think of caves, and jewels spilling out of jars. . . .

Elias shrugged. “No one knows. Gold mined on Psyche 16, some said. Others, that it was carrying hagiratech weapons, forbidden on Earth. All the scavengers found when they got here was the green glass, the empty ship, and the crawlies. They were part of the ship’s eco-system, cleaner robots that were the only thing to survive. Everyone thought they would die out but they adapted to the desert quite well.”

“So what happened to the treasure?” Saleh said.

“No one knows. Maybe there wasn’t any. Most of the ship was destroyed, but you can see what’s left, it isn’t far from here. Want to see it?”

“Sure!” Saleh said. This sounded like fun, and fun was not a thing he’d had any abundance of recently.

So they packed some supplies, and plenty of water, and set off across the glassy sand.

A heron flew against the sky. Flatworm robots slithered away from the two boys’ path, sensing the vibrations of their footsteps in the ground. The desert stretched out, with only a few shrubs and a single date tree in the distance, and the boys’ prints were the only marks in the sand. They left a trail behind them. Their faces were both covered in keffiyehs. The heat was strong. They moved slowly, even sluggishly. No one else came with them.

It wasn’t long before Saleh could see the impact crater.

It wasn’t the most impressive of sights, though it might have been once. The desert had crawled back over the gap. Sand reclaimed the wound. There was still a depression in the earth, and out of the centre of it there rose something big and metallic, half buried in the ground, and which must have been the Compassionate Heaven. Saleh filled his lungs with air. He thought he could smell something metallic, something cold, like how he imagined space might smell. This was the closest he’d come to his dream.

He wanted to hold the moment, and he stood there for a while all alone before he followed Elias down into the crater.