“Ma’a salama, Nehemiah,” Mariam said. She watched the UXO hop away. A little child ran up to it then.

“Hey, mister,” she started to say.

“Buzz off,” Nehemiah told it. The little child started to cry and her mother ran to pick her up. She berated the UXO angrily.

And that, more or less, was that.

27. The Wave

“I guess this is goodbye, then,” Mariam said.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Saleh said. He looked nice in his new clothes, Mariam thought. She’d taken him shopping earlier, for the flight.

“And from me,” Anubis said. The jackal, too, looked dapper, and his new aug pulsed gently behind his ear. He’d had everything upgraded, with money of his own—he’d sold Mukhtar a strange sort of grey metal object that came from a space wreck and confused all the scanners. Mukhtar already had offers for the enigmatic artefact flooding in.

And, well, at least it wasn’t a miniature black hole this time. Though Mariam still harboured doubts about what the grey object actually was, or what it did.

But it wasn’t her concern.

She embraced the boy and shook the jackal’s paw. She watched them as they wandered off to the runway, where the shuttle plane to Tel Aviv’s Central Station waited. From the spaceport, she knew, they would go up to orbit. From there on, she didn’t know. Mars, or the Belt, or beyond. . . . She wondered what it would be like for them.

Just before getting on, the boy turned. He gave her a shy little wave. Then he vanished inside and the jackal followed, and where they went next and what they did, Mariam didn’t know.

She was late for work, she was due to clean downtown. It was a hot day and when she got to the apartment she felt tired from walking. She put the air condition on while she cleaned. She thought about the robots, and where they may have gone. She hoped they would be happy there, and then she wondered if robots felt emotions like happiness, and then she thought about lunch. She hadn’t had any.

It was dusk when she left. She walked slowly, enjoying the cooling day. When she passed the Banque Nationale de Djibouti a shurta car drove by, Laila at the wheel. She waved but didn’t stop, and Mariam walked home.

It was dark by then. When she reached the block she saw a figure standing by the doorway. When she came closer she saw it was Nasir.

He was holding a rose.

“I got it at the flower market,” he said, “just before closing time. . . .”

He gave it to her sheepishly.

“I saw Laila earlier,” Mariam said.

“She’s doing the patrol in the desert tonight on her own,” Nasir said. “It’s so much quieter now, without the . . . you know.”

“Yeah.”

There was a question in his eyes.