“Thank you,” the robot said. And then it turned and just as quietly as it had come it left the market.

The robot passed through the neat streets of Neom. It admired its wide tree-lined avenues, its prosperous shops and its clean and orderly cafés. It watched a man grind coffee beans and a crawler robot suck up dirt along a road and it watched two women hand in hand push a pram along the pavement and it watched young people practice Tai Chi in a small neat urban park, and it walked on. What it thought of the city remained known only to the robot.

It walked until the city ended. It passed out of the green fence system that filtered sand and condensed water out of the air and it walked into the desert. The desert stretched far out, as far as the horizon, and the desert was as old as the city was young. The robot walked until the sun fell and the air grew cold and it kept walking through the night under the stars.

On the third day of its pilgrimage the robot came to a valley between two hills where the sand was fused into a strange green glass. It had seen no one as it passed through the desert except once when it thought it saw a line of camels and their riders silhouetted against the sky, but they were soon gone and the robot did not see them again.

It walked on, more slowly now, and came to a place and it stopped.

The ground here was covered in sand and small pebbles and rocks, and a few shrubs clung onto the ground and grew out of broken glass. The robot knelt down and it cleared away the rocks and the sand until it found something that was buried. It was a sort of cenotaph, perhaps. Not much remained of it anyway. Not enough to tell. The robot cleared as much of the rubble away from it as it could. The air shimmered in the heat. The sun beat down and the place was silent with that special silence that means the absence of people.

The robot took out the rose Mariam gave it. The rose had withered on the journey but the robot didn’t seem to notice. It placed the rose on the ground.

It stood there for a long time, and was startled by a small movement in the sand. The robot turned its head and saw a scorpion dart between the rocks.

The robot regarded the scorpion and then it brought its foot up and stepped on the scorpion and twisted until the animal was dead.

Then the robot turned away and went back into the desert.

6. The Hole

“What is it doing?” Nasir said.

Habib said, “Digging.”

“Digging for what?”

“Maybe it lost something,” Habib said.