Agata couldn’t understand why her tone was so bleak. She’d endured three frustrating years, but the dark times would soon be over. ‘So the Council plans to act unilaterally?’

‘There is no vote, there is no plan, there is no explanation,’ Lila replied. ‘All we know is that we’ve received no messages from any time later than a dozen stints from now. And in the run-up, there’s nothing telling us why.’

‘The data just cuts out?’ Agata glanced up from the console; the expression on Tarquinia’s face was as grim as Lila’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘So there’s a glitch of some kind,’ Agata concluded. She couldn’t take all this ominous brooding seriously; she’d seen the proof with her own eyes that the Peerless would survive all the way to the reunion.

‘No,’ Lila said flatly. ‘We ended up building more channels. They operate independently, so there could hardly be a glitch in all of them.’

Agata struggled to unpick the logic of that. ‘You had to build a second channel, even though the first one already told you that it wouldn’t help . . . because if you hadn’t built it you couldn’t have known that it wouldn’t help. But why build a third?’

‘We built a dozen.’ Lila buzzed, darkly amused. ‘You’re forgetting the Council’s paranoia. They weren’t convinced that they were being honest with each other about this event, so the process couldn’t stop until they each had a messaging channel of their own – built and run by people they’d vetted themselves.’

Agata was distracted for a moment by the sight of Ramiro, rocking back and forth with one hand against his tympanum, trying to contain his mirth.

‘So what came of all that?’ she asked. ‘Putting aside our own paranoia and assuming that at least one Councillor who found the truth would let us know.’

Lila said, ‘With every channel, the story’s been the same: the messages cut out at exactly the same time, and nothing that’s sent back while the system is still working tells us why.’

25

‘I just found a picture of you in the archives,’ Greta said. ‘There’s a banner behind you saying WELCOME HOME, but all in all it’s still quite sad. You look so old and worn down that you might be that woman’s uncle, not her brother. And her children don’t seem happy to see you at all.’

‘You sound like an actor who’s over-rehearsed her lines,’ Ramiro replied. ‘I suppose you’ve studied the recording of this conversation a dozen times?’

Greta buzzed derisively. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

‘No? Your first interaction with the Surveyor, in the middle of a political crisis? You didn’t send that back to the earliest moment that the bandwidth of the oldest channel allowed?’