“Is it safe?” he said—a little late to ask, he realised, for in moments they were both standing by the ship, and it was larger than he’d thought, even half buried as it was, and the structure rose high over them both and cast a long shadow over the sand. It was nice and cool there, and quiet too.

“Pretty safe,” Elias said. “I love coming here. It’s peaceful. Do you want to go inside?”

“Inside?” Saleh said. “Really?”

“Sure. There’s a massive hole in the side.”

“Are there . . . bodies and things?”

“No,” Elias said. “There’s nothing much. Even the little robots don’t go there.”

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

Elias shrugged. “The desert took them, or the scavengers. Maybe they got a proper burial somewhere. I don’t know.”

“And the cargo? The treasure?”

“All gone.”

“Maybe it got jettisoned elsewhere?” Saleh said.

“It’s possible,” Elias said, and he smiled in pleasure. “You’re not the first to think of it, you know. People have been searching for a long time. A Webster once told me she’d found it. She was an old weather-hacker who lived near St. Catherine’s. I was only small then, and I went with Mathias to visit her in her hermitage to trade. He was the speaker, before a roc took him one year. This Webster lived high up in the mountains, and her cave was obscured with clouds, and she made rain fall. ‘I found the treasure,’ she told us, ‘the treasure of the Compassionate Heaven, but it is nothing anyone should ever have to see.’

“‘What is it?’ I asked her, all bright eyes, as you can imagine.