As he turned, he felt the weight of something like grief: the burden he’d shirked all his life but never quite renounced was utterly lost to him now.

He caught up with Tarquinia, Agata and Azelio beside the airlock. They’d rehearsed the exit half a dozen times, and as they donned their corsets, cooling bags and jetpacks, Ramiro cushioned himself with the familiarity of it all.

Agata said, ‘Think of Yalda parting from Eusebio, knowing that she’d never return. This is nothing.’

‘Yalda’s an invention,’ Ramiro told her, straight-faced. ‘She’s no more real than anyone from the sagas.’

Agata stared at him, appalled by this heresy, but before she could summon a reply he put on his helmet. When she finally launched into an improvised defence of the historical Yalda he just frowned apologetically and feigned incomprehension.

Verano had had to build a whole new airlock to get the Surveyor out into the void, but the shiny clearstone chamber in front of them covered a small portal that had been here since Marzio’s time. Ramiro was the last to squeeze into the chamber; he slid the door closed and watched blue resin oozing out of the frame, taking on a green tint as it expanded and solidified to make a hermetic seal.

Tarquinia’s voice came through the link in his helmet. ‘Evacuating airlock.’ Ramiro felt the fabric puff out around his limbs as the pressure in the chamber dropped.

Tarquinia squatted down and broke the seal on the portal, then cranked the circular aperture open. She was the first to descend, seizing hold of the short stone ladder that protruded above the opening as she placed her feet on the rungs of rope below.

Azelio followed, then Agata. Ramiro felt a twinge of annoyance; he’d made a bet with Tarquinia that Agata would pull out at the last moment – and Tarquinia had made it clear that once they were on board she’d be accepting no resignations. At the edge of the portal he hesitated; he could see the assembled guests gawking from behind the cordon. Backing out now would almost be worth it, just for the joy of telling these idiots that he wouldn’t be cleaning up their mess after all.

Almost, but not quite. He grabbed the top of the ladder and began the descent.

Ramiro emerged facing the black hemisphere of empty sky. The light spilling through from above lit the way well enough, and as it tapered off his eyes adjusted to the starlight. He glanced down to see the dark disc of the Surveyor, enmeshed in support ropes, still standing on its rim but inverted compared with its orientation in the workshop.