‘Why couldn’t they have spoken more clearly?’ Agata asked, bewildered. ‘I thought they were giving me the courage I needed to go down that shaft . . .’ She began shivering again. ‘How can I fail them, when they know my whole future? How is that possible?’

Ramiro said, ‘There was no message from the ancestors.’ The stupid hoax had gone on far too long, and it had almost killed her. ‘Tarquinia carved those words into the rock, before we left Esilio. You and Azelio were sick, bedridden in your cabins, so it was easy for her to slip away to the blast site while she was packing up the tents.’

Agata was stunned. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘To make the messaging system look redundant, so no one would have to scratch out a living on Esilio.’

Agata drew away from him. ‘So the two of you lied to me for six years?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Because you wanted me to sell it on the mountain? You thought people might believe my testimony, so long as I didn’t know the truth.’

‘That was the plan,’ Ramiro admitted. There was no point going into the whole convoluted history of the thing, explaining his failed attempt to make the inscription his own.

‘We don’t know anything now.’ Agata seemed more wounded by this revelation than by the personal betrayal. ‘If the mountain’s wiped out, the Councillors might not make it to Esilio. We don’t even have that comfort any more – we don’t know that there’ll be any survivors at all, that the home world won’t burn.’

Ramiro said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He’d only meant to spare her the burden of imagining herself chosen by history, pinned to this impossible task by the ancestors’ gaze. But there was no way to do that without stripping away the whole lie.

Agata rose from the couch and dragged herself towards the door. She said, ‘When Tarquinia gets back, tell her I’m dead to both of you. I don’t care any more. Let the cosmos work it out.’

Six bells after she’d left for the observatory, Tarquinia had still not returned.

Ramiro knew that if she’d been arrested she wouldn’t tell her captors anything – but the mere fact of her transgression would mean that the two of them would have been under observation from the moment they’d left the Surveyor. If the authorities had found the link on her, they would have been searching for its signal all along, so they could have picked up the transmissions to the occulters. Even without decoding any of the content, they would have been able to deduce the machines’ locations from the direction of the beam.