Ramiro wasn’t so confident, but if the Council was intent on declining the role he was happy to match their stubbornness. It was his nature to oppose the messaging system, and history had finally offered him a route to its destruction just a few stints long. Until a meteor fell from the sky to show him up as an irrelevant trespasser, all he could do was keep following that path, and hope that the footprints in the dust ahead really were his own.

30

‘I knew you’d want your old job back,’ Celia declared.

Agata wasn’t sure if she should take this claim literally. She was surprised that Celia remembered her at all, though they had been on duty together when the bomb went off. In the four years since she’d been here the ramshackle office hadn’t changed, but the new construction along the axis had made it much harder to reach.

‘I mean, now that you can’t do cosmology,’ Celia clarified, holding out the patch for Agata to sign.

‘Exactly,’ Agata agreed, forming her mark and accepting the tool belt from her supervisor. ‘I thought I’d better make myself useful somehow.’

‘Do you think it’s a meteor coming?’ Celia asked phlegmatically.

‘No one can rule that out,’ Agata replied. ‘But I’m still hoping that it’s just a glitch in the system.’

Celia looked sceptical, but she didn’t press Agata for a detailed hypothesis. ‘Don’t take offence,’ she said, ‘but some of the older workers find it helpful to rehearse their resorptions and extrusions before going in.’

‘I’ll try that,’ Agata promised.

She made her way towards the entrance to the cooling system, trying to appear mildly dejected for the surveillance cameras: the woman who’d travelled across the cosmos to confirm Lila’s great theory, reduced to menial labour – and this time with no zealous strike-breaker’s pride. In truth, she was ecstatic that she’d been allowed to take the job. The automated employment system, bless it, had had no idea how far from ‘current’ her experience really was, and more to the point she had clearly not been flagged as any kind of security risk.

Agata dutifully shortened and stretched her legs half a dozen times before fitting her access key to the hatch. As she descended into the cool air of the tunnel she felt a twinge of claustrophobia and her memories of the blast came rushing back. She would never stop mourning Medoro, but she let the grief move through her mind like a familiar presence, with no need for elaborate rituals or acknowledgements.