‘I joined up for a time. Before they lost their way.’

Beyond the ranch house the wind rushes down the slope of the foothills like water. Exhausted, I lean upon the railing, feeling every bruise and laceration, wondering how my body is still holding itself together.

‘It is quiet here,’ I say.

‘A good spot,’ the surgeon agrees, taking a pipe from his pocket, and a tin. He nods to the small, metal-sided vegetable plots. ‘The shade of the hill keeps the earth from drying out too much.’

‘You get no trouble?’

‘The gangs know we treat whoever arrives at the door, no questions asked.’

‘And the Seekers?’ I stare at his face, at the deep lines of his cheeks as he lights the pipe.

He doesn’t answer straight away, instead takes a long drag. ‘They know I follow The Way. I think they respect that, see it as something similar to their own beliefs about the universe.’

He meets my eyes and smiles, an expression as worn and thin as an old scalpel.

‘Is this peace?’ I ask.

‘No.’ He looks into the night. ‘It’s life.’

* * *

The morning after our escape, Pegeen and Rat and Bui, all of them patched and bandaged, come riding back up to the ranch on borrowed mules and mares, dragging the damaged Charis on a makeshift truck behind them. When she sees the ship’s hold, Falco lets out a shout of laughter. It is stuffed full of plunder: panels and components and chips and power cells, the inner workings from the Iron Slug and the downed Accord fighters.

We sit on the porch with the surgeon and his husband Marti, sipping on cups of precious, watered-down tea, watching the G’hals calculate their profits.

‘If we can shift even half of this off-world, we’ll make a fortune,’ Peg says.

‘We’ll need a good smuggler.’ Falco’s eye narrows, bright with morphine. ‘How about it, flyboy?’

Silas starts to laugh, then winces in pain, holding his torso. ‘Only if you stop calling me that,’ he wheezes.

‘The thing I don’t get,’ Rat says, picking at her teeth. ‘Is why the Seekers left any of this behind. They usually strip ships and bodies to the marrow, right?’

‘They helped themselves to some, definitely to the bodies,’ Bui points out. ‘Maybe it was too much for them to carry?’

‘No,’ Peg says, frowning. ‘Some of this stuff was piled up, portioned almost, like it had been left deliberate.’

I meet Falco’s gaze.

‘Whatever the reason,’ she says. ‘We earned it.’

We stay at the surgeon’s for two days, while the General lies silent, hooked to the medical man’s cobbled together machines, and Falco curses us out and laughs at us in equal measure, and Silas groggily asks me to keep him company on the pallet bed.