Agata was watching him. ‘Ramiro, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ She was amused, but there was no malice in her voice. ‘Just step off the ladder without thinking about it. I promise you, the world won’t end.’

Ramiro did as she’d asked. Then he looked down. He’d scrutinised the ground beforehand, and he was sure there’d been no footprints at all where his feet now stood.

He lifted one foot and inspected the sand below. He had created an indentation that had not been there before. That was every bit as strange to Esilio as the erasures he’d witnessed were strange to him.

‘How?’ he demanded, more confused than relieved.

‘You really don’t listen to me, do you?’ Agata chided him. ‘Did I ever tell you that the local arrow was inviolable?’

‘No.’ What she’d stressed most of all was a loss of predictability – but the sight of her and Azelio unmaking their footprints had crowded everything else out of his mind. Those disappearing marks in the sand might be unsettling, but if he could ignore them and walk wherever he pleased then they were not the shackles he’d taken them to be.

Still . . .

‘What happens if there are footprints that no one gets around to before the next dust storm?’ he asked Agata. ‘Ones that were there straight after the last storm?’

She said, ‘There can’t be a footprint untouched by any foot. I don’t understand the dynamics of wind and sand well enough to swear to you that there won’t be hollows in the ground that come and go of their own accord – but if you’re talking about a clear imprint, if we could keep our feet away from it, it simply wouldn’t be there.’

Ramiro pondered this, but it seemed much less dismaying than the kind of all-encompassing trail he’d originally feared. Esilio was a world where a certain amount of noisy, partial – and predominantly trivial – information about the future would be strewn across the landscape. There had always been plenty of trivial things that could be predicted with near-certainty back on the Peerless, and perhaps as many of them would be lost, here, as these eerie new portents would be gained.

Emboldened, he strode out across the illuminated ground, pausing every few steps to kick at the sand. Sometimes he simply pushed the dust aside; sometimes the dust applied pressure of its own, as it moved in to occupy the space his foot vacated. But that pressure never came out of nowhere: his feet moved as and when he’d willed them to move, followed by the dust but never forced to retreat. Nor were they thrust without warning into the air by a time-reversed version of the dissipation of motion into heat that took place when they landed.