Bebe strokes his hair with a grazed hand. ‘It protects us from Seekers, Fran, not from people.’ When she looks up, I see that she knows more than she’s saying. ‘Did it protect you?’

My hand creeps to the scabbing cuts. ‘Yes.’

Falco only frowns. I nod at her wearily as Silas cleans the wound and re-dresses it. There is more to say, but first comes rest.

When I wake, hours later, I find the others kneeling outside Esterházy’s place. From beneath the burned rubble in the yard, Bebe has dug up a strongbox. In it are credit notes: hundreds of them.

‘Enough to start again,’ she says, tears streaking the grime on her cheeks. ‘As if Pec knew.’

I turn away, uneasy. What had Esterházy seen in the presence of the Ifs, the moment before she told me to run? What had she seen all those years ago, during her first encounter with them as they raged from the Edge?

We bury the dead – Thrip and Horse and four Peacekeepers – in the rough plot at the edge of the settlement, where a handful of rusted metal grave markers cluster.

HERE LIES WRETCH BARKER, one reads, A GOOD FRIEND WHO DIED IN JUNE.

One grave in particular is better tended than the others, a faded plastic bouquet fastened to it by a ring. MARIOLA DUROY, AND CHILD.

Sand blows in sheets at those who dig the graves. Bebe says it doesn’t matter much if they’re deep; the dirt blows away too quickly for anyone to stay buried for long. The weather will eventually do the work the earth cannot.

There is to be no grave for Esterházy. Instead, a wind burial, which Bebe says the old woman would have wanted. Together, outside the limits of Angel Share, we construct a makeshift shelter through which the wind can howl. Here she will lie until the wind has dried her flesh to thinness and it comes loose and is borne away across Factus, across the Edge and out into the unexplored vastness of the Void.

Will the Seekers come to her? I wonder, as I watch as the first mutterings of the night breeze stir her grey hair. Was that the reason for burying her out in the open, far from the town? In death, would she rejoin them, at last?

I look to the horizon, imagining this moon as it must have been when it was newly terraformed, imagining Esterházy leaving behind the oppression of the prison hulks, to fly into the unknown.

‘She’s here,’ I murmur to Silas. ‘In another reality, she’s here.’

Carefully, he puts his arm around me, taking care not to bump my bandaged shoulder.