‘Can you understand my speech?’ Clara asked. She spoke with a heavy accent that Valeria couldn’t place.

Eusebio said, ‘Yes.’

‘I hope I’ve got the grammar and vocabulary correct. We have written sources, but no sound recordings.’

‘Sound recordings?’ Eusebio buzzed appreciatively. ‘That’s an inventive embellishment, I’ll give you that.’

Clara said, ‘I gave the city police the location of my rocket. If they’d sent someone to look at it, that would have saved us all this confusion.’

Eusebio replied bluntly, ‘The Peerless isn’t due to return for three years. And when it does, I think we’ll manage to spot the engines in the sky.’

Clara tipped her head, amused. ‘Some people did argue for a light show to help set the scene . . . but then, I was in the other camp who thought that putting out the sun really ought to be more than enough to establish our credentials.’

Valeria watched Eusebio. He said, ‘Conjurors have made an art out of convincing people that they’ve foretold the future. The jailers here must have made a good audience.’

‘The Peerless did travel three full years into your future.’ Clara sketched a portion of the mountain’s proposed trajectory on her chest, but every educated person in Zeugma was aware of that. ‘At the turnaround our plan was to follow a straight line back home and then decelerate for a year. But eventually we realised that it would be perfectly safe to arrive earlier. So we executed a big loop, going a few years into the future then curving around and travelling a few years into the past.’ She added these unlikely adornments to her diagram. ‘All of that happened before I was born, though. For most of my life, the Peerless was travelling homewards through the void at a time, by your reckoning, when it was yet to leave the ground. And I saw the old mountain through a telescope when we passed it! It was still accelerating, burning sunstone. We weren’t so visible: our engines work very differently – they don’t consume fuel at all.’

Valeria said, ‘Why did you ask for me?’

Clara turned to her with an expression of terrifying joy. ‘When I was a girl, I read Yalda’s biography, and there was a story she’d told one of her friends about you. You gave her a gift before she left Zeugma: a diagram showing Nereo’s force for spherical shells.’

‘There were a lot of people at that party,’ Valeria pointed out, trying not to be rattled. Eusebio’s point about conjurors was an apt one. ‘A lot of people could know that.’

Clara tried to gesture with her arms; she’d forgotten that they were melded behind her back. ‘Is this really going to be so hard? If there’s nothing I can say that could convince you, can’t we ride out to the place where I arrived?’