‘It means you have been marked.’

Sweat is cold on my torso. ‘Marked.’

‘By them.’

‘The Ifs?’

A flare of the cigarette. ‘Is that what you call them? Yes. Perhaps by them, indirectly. Human hands cut your flesh. Though many would not call them human any longer.’

‘The Seekers did this?’ Her head dips, and in the scant light I see one of her eyes, bright and black as opal. ‘Why?’

‘Because they know you belong to them.’

‘Do you… feel them too?’

When she speaks, her voice is like the scraping of sand across the roof. ‘You remember what Mala said, about my being one of the first to arrive on Factus?’ The bench creaks as she leans back. ‘The moment I set foot in the dust, I felt them. We all did – soldiers, engineers, convicts – no matter what people say now, we all felt them, and we knew instantly that we were not alone on this moon.’

I shiver as she voices the thoughts that I have always been too afraid to acknowledge.

‘I can’t describe how it felt,’ she continues, ‘to come face to face with another life force, to finally have proof that we are not all there is in the universe, and to be summarily dismissed. The wardens didn’t believe us, neither did the Settlement Bureau; no one did. They put it down to mental strain, fatigue, low oxygen levels, mass hysteria, bad food. But they were far away, on their bright stations, or on Prosper. They were not here.’

She shakes her head, her eyes fixed on me. ‘While we stayed on Earth, they were spread thin, ranging so far to reach us. But here.’ She points towards the Void. ‘Here is where they are born, where they are strongest. And in those early days we were like sheep that had wandered to the mouth of a wolf den. They could not help themselves. They flocked to us, they lapped and gnashed and clawed at our lives and everything that could have gone wrong in those first years did. Many people died, many more fled Factus, driven mad by fear.’ She pauses, her jaw working. ‘It was how we began.’

‘We?’ I’m held in place, desperate to hear.

She nods. ‘A group of us – all convicts, all deemed expendable – were assigned to Search and Rescue. It was our task to scour the reaches of this moon and bring the lost workers home. Only, their tracks went into the Edge. We followed them in.’

Cold runs through me, deep as the marrow, as I remember the endless dunes of the Edge, the pitiless darkness; the horrible fear that I had not emerged the same.

‘I was in the Suplicio,’ I whisper.