‘But now they can, and everything’s perfect.’ Agata hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but the words kept emerging that way.

‘So you’ve given up on making Pio an uncle?’ Medoro asked.

‘There’s nothing we agree on,’ Agata said. ‘It would feel like I was doing it for selfish reasons, and then the children would be stuck with all his crazy ideas.’

‘And you don’t want to try a Cira? Raise them yourself?’

‘No. I’d probably mess them up even more than Pio would.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Medoro replied. ‘But if you don’t want a child, don’t have one. Pio will survive. Cira will get over it. And despite your rude remarks about Serena, if you ever feel like babysitting you’re welcome to join the roster.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re just worried that I’ll get more letters from the future than you,’ Medoro joked. ‘All that lavish praise for your theories of cosmology won’t cut it; you’ll be looking for mindless gossip from the descendants, just like the rest of us.’

They were approaching the food hall now. There was a news screen at the entrance; from a distance the two counts looked perfectly matched, though that impression was unlikely to survive closer scrutiny.

Agata said, ‘And if we don’t win today—’

Medoro reached over to thump her arm. ‘If we don’t win, it’s not going to kill you. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘Ha.’ Agata felt a pang of shame, but not enough to shift her perspective. ‘If we win, I’ll stop being jealous of your sister’s perfect life,’ she said. ‘How’s that for a promise?’

Medoro said, ‘I’m waiting to hear the second part.’

‘If we lose . . . I don’t know.’ If she had never imagined any of the miracles the messaging system offered, she would have lived happily enough without them. But it was too late for that now.

‘If we lose, you can leave behind a message for Eusebio,’ Medoro suggested. ‘Tell him how much you enjoyed flying in his rocket. We can carve it in an axial staircase, then no one will mess with it before it’s been sanctified by age. That’s contact with the ancestors, isn’t it?’

Agata said, ‘No, that’s graffiti. It’s only contact if he sends me a reply.’

11

‘It was so close!’ Rosita said consolingly. ‘You should be proud that you made it so close.’

Ramiro forced himself not to snap at her. She’d come to his apartment unbidden, to stand beside him through the final two bells of the vote. No one else in his family had even acknowledged his efforts.

‘Close isn’t good enough,’ he said. He wanted to switch off the console so he didn’t have to keep staring at the skewed bar graph that had already burnt itself into his brain – but he knew that as soon as he did he’d feel compelled to switch the machine on again, just in case there’d been an error found, a correction issued. ‘This isn’t over,’ he swore.