‘Someone told me you were down here,’ Tarquinia explained, ‘so I thought I’d try to catch you. I asked at the prison but they wouldn’t let me visit there. And I wanted to take a look at the Surveyor anyway, before I make it official.’ She staggered slightly; Ramiro stepped forward so she could rest a hand on his shoulder. ‘That walk from the entrance was the hardest part,’ she said. ‘I forgot how high the gravity is down here.’

‘I’m surprised your legs haven’t snapped off.’ Ramiro glanced back towards the Surveyor. ‘Make what official?’

‘My application for the pilot’s position.’

Ramiro wasn’t sure how to take that. ‘Are you serious?’

Tarquinia gestured at her skeletal hips. ‘I didn’t clear myself of familial obligations for the sake of a joke.’

‘Familial obligations?’ Ramiro had never heard her talk so bluntly before.

‘What – you think I’m being cold?’ Tarquinia didn’t sound offended, just curious as to how he viewed her actions.

‘It’s your brother who’ll be raising them,’ Ramiro conceded. ‘Still, four years is a long time at that age.’

‘Did the ancestors miss their mothers?’ Tarquinia asked. ‘Or mothers their children?’

‘Why wouldn’t they? The only people more perfect than the dead are the yet-to-be-born. But my mother had nothing to do with me or my sister, and that didn’t bother us.’

‘Mine was the same.’ Tarquinia straightened her body. ‘So are you going to show me this thing?’

Ramiro led her over to the hull and introduced her to Verano. Greta caught his eye; she looked smug for some reason. But it was Ramiro who’d gained an ally, not her.

‘How are we meant to navigate?’ Tarquinia asked Verano. ‘We’re not going to have time to set up a grid of beacons far enough apart to be useful, and there’s only so much positional information we’ll be able to extract from home-cluster star trails.’

Verano glanced at Greta. Greta said, ‘Once you’ve made an application and agreed to the confidentiality conditions, we can discuss whatever details you like.’

Tarquinia was taken aback for a moment, but she accepted the reply without complaint.

Verano took Tarquinia closer to the hull and the two of them began chatting with some of the masons. Greta turned to Ramiro. ‘Still thinking of doing a Eusebio?’ she asked. ‘Letting your comrade fly alone?’

‘I wasn’t serious,’ he protested.

‘Of course not.’ Greta reached down and picked up the end of his chain.

Ramiro groped for an insult, but his mental scrabbling yielded an entirely different weapon. ‘You’ve got a working version of the camera,’ he realised. ‘What is it – some prototype that survived the bombing?’ How else would they navigate to the edge of the orthogonal cluster, if not by imaging the time-reversed stars?

Greta said, ‘You don’t get to ask questions like that.’