Azelio hesitated. ‘So why would they even try to stop us? They know the disruption is going to happen – so unless all this clandestine activity is irrelevant and a meteor is going to be responsible, this is a battle they know they can’t win.’

‘They’re not going to give up, any more than we are,’ Agata replied. ‘Do you see any sign in what we’ve heard from the mountain that the Council have resigned themselves to a state of fatalistic powerlessness?’

‘No,’ Azelio conceded.

‘Think of it as a kind of equilibrium,’ Tarquinia suggested. ‘I’m sure there are limits to how far the Council would go to try to stop the inevitable, but there must be limits, too, on how supine they’ll become: they’re not going to shut down the system themselves, or release all the anti-messagers and let them go on a rampage with mallets. They’ve taken a stance and they’re going to pursue it as far as they can. When this is over they’ll be looking for a political advantage in the details of the fight, as much as in the outcome.’

Azelio was looking disoriented. ‘I want this to work,’ he said haltingly. ‘But every time I stop and think about it, it feels as if all we’re doing is playing some kind of game. Shouldn’t we be trying to build better meteor detectors? If we really are the only people left with any hope of innovating, why not design a device that could actually save the mountain – instead of one for faking its death?’

Agata said, ‘If we saved the mountain from a meteor, don’t you think we’d know about it?’

‘I have no idea.’ Azelio rose from his seat. ‘But what we’re doing now is pointless.’ He walked out of the cabin.

In the silence, Ramiro felt his own confidence faltering. ‘I don’t know how to reason about this any more,’ he said. ‘If it’s a meteor that could actually kill us, isn’t that where our efforts should go? Forget what the messages say or don’t say about it: if we do our best to build something useful, how can that fail to make a difference?’