Silas’s teeth clench around the pipe stem as he hammers at the controls. The ship lurches again, with a sickening drop. ‘Boosters aren’t firing.’ He swears and spins around, wrenching open a panel to reveal a mess of wires. ‘Goddam it.’

Pegeen staggers onto the flight deck, followed by Falco as the ship bucks and sinks.

‘What the hell?’ Falco shouts.

‘Yeah, what the hell,’ Silas shoots back. ‘This is what happens when a crazy woman with a shotgun uses all the water that we needed to stop the system overheating.’

‘If this was a real ship, it wouldn’t overheat.’ She leans on his chair. ‘What can you do about it?’

Silas flips some switches, shaking his head. ‘Nothing. We gotta land, let her cool down.’

I scramble to peer out of the windshield. The view is not comforting; we’re flying above a long, desolate canyon between plateaus. Bad terrain, unless you were planning an ambush.

‘Where the hell are we?’ I look at the nav screen, scrolling it rapidly, hoping that I’m wrong. ‘Shit.’

‘What?’ Falco asks.

‘I think we’re in the U Zone.’

She swears, with greater energy than me. I know why. The Unincorporated Zone is part of the Barrens even she avoids, unless absolutely necessary. Sometimes, in my lowest moments, I have thought about the U Zone, about driving the mule past the signs that tell me I’m leaving Factus’s official territory and that I will have no recourse to the regulations of the Accord, or of any land. But every time, I remembered the stories – cults, loners, communities who hated outsiders, hostile to the point of madness, too much space between them and no one coming, no water or medical or food drops, no Air Line Road for hundreds of miles – and turned back.

‘You got a map?’ Falco demands.

The tattered and stained thing that Silas produces is less than promising.

‘This is out of date,’ she accuses, peering. ‘Look, it has White Cat listed. That place burned down two years ago.’

‘What’s happening?’ The General stumbles onto the flight deck.

‘We have to land,’ I tell her.

‘Why?’

‘System’s overheating.’ Silas lets out a noise of frustration as the ship drops, a horrible whining noise filling the flight deck. ‘This sounds bad. Might mean repairs.’

‘Have you tried opening the secondary air-cooling ducts?’ the General asks.

‘Of course I have!’

Falco jabs at the map. ‘Here, I think we’re at the end of this canyon.’

I look over the host of Xs hatched across the desolation, marking dead towns and no-go settlements and ghost ranches.

‘Think we could reach Tidhar’s Dozen?’

‘How far?’

‘Eighty klicks.’

‘Too far!’ Silas hangs on as the ship sways.

‘There.’ Pegeen is at Falco’s elbow. ‘What about Bliss?’

‘I heard the headman went crazy, killed everyone but himself.’

‘There’s a ranch here— ah forget it, it was the Mbelas’s place. They upped sticks six months ago.’

‘What about Gally Town?’

‘Gallowtown? We’d be dead and this ship stripped in minutes.’