“Of course.”

“Yeah, well, none of them were Pathfinders.” Vidhan laughs. It’s a good-natured laugh—easy, unburdened. “It’s the ones ya least expect,” he adds, looking hard at me. “Ya know. The nobodies. Like you and me.”

I feel a buzz in my skin. “And Mother? Tell me about her.”

Vidhan stops in his tracks. Before I realise what’s happening, he’s snatched The Book of Seven from my back pocket and he’s flipping through the pages. He bunches the book open in his fist and shoves it into my hand. “Read this,” he says.

I take it from him and I stand in the middle of a mirror world and read the paragraph he’s pointing at.

She sits right at the beating heart of the Collective of Pathfinder clans. Her name is one word. MOTHER. A pseudonym. A code name. She has been called—over the course of her long, remarkable life—many things. The Mantis. The Rider. The Dark Horse. None have stuck and none have a thing to do with her born identity; her real name, left far behind in her first world, Lūna. She is the archetypal Pathfinder. Elusive. Hard to find, hard to know. A ghost. A prophet. And, if required, an assassin.

“An assassin!” I say aloud, looking up.

Vidhan nods. “She’s not just an elder master, she’s a bloody legend. For a long time, she was a spy, working behind enemy lines inside the Order. She knows their secrets, front to back.”

A sharp whistle cuts through the air. Malik. He’s shooting us a look, beckoning me to hurry. I shut the book, shove it in my pocket, and we fall silent and follow. Into the darkness—an alley.

The bright sheen of the glass-fronted buildings drops away behind us. Windowless brick walls enclose us now, either side. Our footsteps crunch over a stony ground littered with debris and shards of glass. So, there’s pollution in Lūna after all. In the shadows, eyes gleam. Furtive movements, figures shifting packages through their hands. Further in, we encounter tin-roof lean-tos and traders selling bootlegged wares. Meat-sellers, stringing up bloody carcasses jewelled with flies. The stink is godawful.

“Wait here,” Malik says. He steps up to a meat-seller and begins to barter. I look at Vidhan. He stops, without turning his head to see. Akuji, on the other side of the street, also halts. She watches me.

Malik returns. “Let’s go,” he says, without explaining.

We turn down a deserted alley. Metal bins line a sordid corridor of rubbish and rot. A dustbin clatters and I flinch. With a yowl, a black cat darts across our path, scrambles down an iron staircase and disappears. Malik pulls out his gun. My heart thunders. I shadow him, my steps in sync with his.

Behind us, Akuji follows, silent and pale as the moon.

Vidhan stops ahead. He cocks his head, as if listening.