What he did find was a human skeleton. The bones were old and there was no flesh left. The brain was long gone, but the nodal stem had been left, and Anubis could pick just a spark of life in the quantum processors. He clamped his jaws on the spine and the old bones snapped easily, and he removed the ghost of the human, but when he pulled it out the last flecks of life faded away from it, and Anubis thought he could sense tired relief from the ghost before it was gone. Anubis let the disc drop to the floor and then he sniffed around some more.

He wondered who the two drinkers had been, and where they had gone. It was possible one was the skeleton, he supposed, though that made very little sense. But the whole place was weird and made very little sense. Something kept bothering him, as though eyes were staring at him in the dark, but he could smell no one there. Finally he came to a small wooden chest and opened it, again with his teeth, and for a moment he thought it was empty.

Then he saw that at the bottom, its grey colour camouflaging it against the dark of the box, was a small rough-hewn chunk of rock. He tried to reach it, though the digital smell repulsed him. When he finally managed to close his teeth on it he almost retched. This, too, was alive in some way, but it wasn’t human. When he tuned in directly to the Conversation, the rock manifested as a block of solid code, impenetrable and foreign. Whatever it was, it wasn’t currently active, but it was conscious: Anubis could smell that.

A part of him wanted to throw this revenant away. Another part was curious, and curiosity got the better of him. He didn’t have hands but he did have a special pouch tied to his body and he put the rock in there.

He went back to the caravan though he didn’t stay too close. He still didn’t like the elephants.

Then he smelled the sea again, one day, and he saw the two boys slink out into the old town and he followed them.

Anubis had never been to El Quesir before, had never, in truth, left the desert proper, and so he was delighted with the strange alleyways and the enchanting smells of laundry overhead and falafel and manure, spice from the many shops, the sea and coal smoke and the smell of people. He happily chewed on a dead bird he’d found by some bins. City life suited him so far, he thought.