When he opened the outer door he saw Agata and Azelio leaping around, buzzing like excited children for no reason he could discern, unless it was sheer joy at the stillness after the storm. A couple of coherers mounted on the hull illuminated the red soil starkly – showing up an extraordinary maze of tracks that testified to his comrades’ exuberance. With the foreground so bright his eyes stood no chance of adapting to the starlight so, even with the dust haze settled, everything in the distance was lost in utter blackness.

‘What are you idiots doing?’ he called out.

‘Trying to see which footprints are ours,’ Agata replied gleefully. She jumped forward with her rear gaze fixed intently on the place where she’d been standing.

Ramiro was bemused, but then he observed her more closely as she took her next few leaps. Twice, as she jumped out of some indentation in the sand, it vanished. She and Azelio hadn’t actually made all the tracks that he’d attributed to them. Or not yet, they hadn’t.

‘Come and join us,’ Azelio said. ‘Some of these must be yours.’

Ramiro stayed on the top rung of the ladder, watching. Each time Azelio lifted his feet, scattered sand unscattered itself, grains sliding in around the places where he’d stepped to settle more evenly – though not always smoothing the ground completely. After all, Ramiro reasoned, it was possible to walk in someone else’s footprints, or to step several times in your own. It would only be the last footfall on any given spot – prior to the next occasion on which the wind levelled everything – that would unmake the imprint completely.

The crew had talked over possibilities like this, dozens of times. Ramiro knew he had no right to be surprised. But having sought a world where the dissenters could escape the tyranny of foreknowledge, what had he been given? A world where every step he was yet to take would be laid out before his eyes.

‘What happens if I try to walk on pristine ground?’ he asked.

‘Try it and see!’ Agata taunted him.

Ramiro descended to the bottom of the ladder, intending to move quickly and get the ordeal over with, but then his resolve deserted him. When he willed his foot to land on unblemished sand, what exactly would intervene to stop him? A cramp in the muscle, diverting his leg to its proper, predestined target? A puppet-like manipulation of his body by some unseen force too strong to resist, or a trance-like suspension of his whole sense of self? He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the answer. And perhaps that was the simplest resolution: he would lack the courage to walk out across the surface of Esilio for the rest of the mission. He would cower in his room, leaving the work to the others, while he waited to return to the Peerless in disgrace.