Azelio reached over and took it. Ramiro forced himself to look elsewhere as he tried to decide whether or not to intervene. He might get away with a joking confiscation – protesting that he’d carried more of the plants back than Azelio – but that could only end with him eating the loaf himself. Two crew members falling ill hadn’t been the plan, but did it matter? Ramiro stole a glance at Azelio’s plate and saw that he no longer had a choice.

He pretended to be annoyed by the vote on the orbits and stayed out of the conversation, finishing his meal while Tarquinia was still eating. ‘I might start bringing in the tents,’ he said. He needed a chance to come and go from the storeroom without anyone beside him, in order to get the tools for the inscription outside.

‘Relax,’ Tarquinia said. ‘There’s no rush. We can do that later.’

‘I want to get a start while it’s calm,’ he insisted. ‘If a storm comes in it could take twice as long.’

In the storeroom he found the lever for extracting the tent stakes, but he couldn’t see where the chisel had gone. With the constant gravity, people had grown careless about slotting every tool into place. He left quickly, not wanting Tarquinia to wonder what could be taking him so long.

Outside, he took the stakes and poles out of the first tent, then folded the fabric down into a square. There was no particular reason for taking the tents back with them; it almost came down to mere tidiness, a virtue that made more sense in the confined spaces of the mountain. But if leaving six of the wheat plants growing backwards in time felt apt, requiring Esilio to manufacture four tents out of dust seemed more of an affront. One day a successor to Agata might find an equation that spelt out exactly how much inexplicable junk a time-reversed world could be expected to cough up, just to cater to the whims of visitors with a different arrow. If there was a limit, that might even be the ultimate reason why there would never be settlers here: a whole city might have pushed the mathematics of consistency past its choking point. Ramiro found the idea encouraging; nothing helped a plan run more smoothly than having a law of physics on its side.

In the front cabin, the rest of the crew were still sitting and talking, digesting their meals. Ramiro carried the disassembled tent past them into the storeroom and searched again for the chisel, with no luck. It had to be somewhere, but he couldn’t ask the others if they’d seen it.

As he walked back into the cabin he saw Agata beginning to sway on her couch. ‘That’s not right,’ she muttered, pressing a fist to her chest. ‘It’s like a rock in my gut.’