‘The Peacekeepers won’t kill her, not while there is bounty to be had. And to execute her, the Accord will probably need to give an executive order.’ I wince, picking up one of the guns abandoned by the window. A Peacekeeper pistol, it looks like. ‘If they’re travelling by mule, they’ll be moving slowly. It means we have a chance.’

A hand grasps my arm.

‘Ten,’ Silas pleads. ‘Look at you, you’re half-dead. You need to rest. And if the Accord catch you…’

I squeeze his hand, before letting go and shouldering my pack with difficulty. ‘Meet me in Drax?’ I ask them all. ‘You have to pass it to get back to Landfall, in any case.’

‘And where the hell are you going?’ Falco demands.

I stop. I’m tired, more tired than I dare admit, and yet I can’t rest. My hand goes to the scalpel hidden in the jacket.

‘To send a message.’

* * *

The ashes of the fire spiral into the air around me, before falling soft, like the snow I once saw in an old wire-and-picture show filmed on Earth.

Night has fallen as I sit on the sand. I add another piece of debris to the fire, making sparks leap high into the air. I know it will be visible for miles across the Barrens – a spark, a red pointed star. A beacon.

To my right, a vague shape beneath the shelter, lies Esterházy’s body.

‘Will they come?’ I ask, over the crackling of broken furniture.

There’s no reply.

I turn the scalpel in my hands, tracing the tarnished handle, worn to smoothness. How many lives has this blade taken? How many arteries severed, how many hearts cut free? Or am I seeing it all wrong? The blade reflects a narrow strip of my face; just an eye socket, swollen from the beating, and an eye within it, dark as a bird’s. How many lives have they saved, in their bloody trade? Can such things be measured and weighed and balanced in any meaningful way, whether one or a thousand?

I feel the lives that make up the tally rising around me, as they did in the Suplicio. Is this why the Ifs follow me? Do I carry the balance of all those unrealised realities? Or is it a debt that can never be paid?

In another world, Ten Low does not exist. In another world, a young army medic refuses to forget her name and wear another face to spy on the enemy. In another world she never goes to Prosper. She never accepts a mission from a contact on the corner of a lonely street. The virus research never leaves the medical laboratory. And Tamane is never a target, just another moon, home to thousands of young Accord trainees – fighters of the future. And the Free Limits still fight, gathering their scattered allies, forgetting why the fight ever began, and the war goes on.