“My God, you have working electronics?”

“Yep.”

“Then you are a spy.”

“Crap, but you’re paranoid.” He waved his hand at the surrounding darkness. “Mind, I suppose you have that right. Dumped here, wherever here is. Incidentally, my mInet can’t lock on to any satnav signals. So that makes this place extremely remote. I’m guessing the Antarctic’s Ellsworth Mountains. Quite high up them, too, with air this thin.”

Her grin made him uneasy; it betrayed the fact she thought she still had some advantage. “Wrong. Who are you?”

“I told you: Callum.”

Donbul groaned. His head came up, and his gaze fixed on Callum.

“Untie me,” he demanded.

“So you can start stabbing me?” Callum said archly. “I don’t think so.”

“You are going to hurt so bad.”

“Real tough guy, huh? You need to dial it down there, pal.”

“You think you can outrun us?”

“Do I look like I’m trying to run somewhere?”

That brought a puzzled frown. “What the fuck is this? Who are you?”

Callum sighed. “Callum. I’m a team chief in Connexion’s Emergency Detoxification division.”

“All I see is a dead man walking.”

“You need to be nicer to me,” Callum said. “Really.”

“Go fuck yourself, dead man.”

“Why? You know someone else who’s going to get you out of here?”

That made them both gawp. Callum grinned. “Oh, do I have your attention now?”

“Nobody can get us out of here,” Foluwakemi said.

“We’ll see.”

“Why are you here?”

“I’ve come to find my wife. I think Connexion renditioned her.”

“Why would they do that?”

“She was caught up in the protest against the Australian desert being seeded with ice. Did those people get sent here?”

“Yes.” Foluwakemi nodded. “Over a hundred of them.”

“Christ almighty! How many people are here?”

“There are thousands of us.”

“Thousands?”

“Yes.”

“But…Is this a camp?”

“No, there’s nobody here but us. Connexion dumped us here to fend for ourselves.”

Callum gave an involuntary shiver. “Pretty tough, huh?”

“Worse than you think. The crop seeds they provided aren’t much good. The biologists among us think there’s too much iron in the soil.”

“Crops? In Antarctica? There’s no such thing.”

Foluwakemi gave him a pitying smile. “Look up, detoxification man.”

Callum did as he was told. He hadn’t noticed dawn arriving above the glare of the torch. That was reasonable enough, as it hadn’t come to the horizon. Instead, directly overhead, a wide strip of the sky was tinged with an insipid gray light. He frowned at the anomaly, scanning around in a full circle. As the light grew, he realized he was in the bottom of a canyon, but the poor light was making it difficult to judge the scale of the rock walls on either side. That and his mind was refusing to accept what he saw. He was constantly trying to adjust the perspective.