“Not ours. It’s its own. Of another world. Older. Oldest world, maybe. Anyway, you are guests, now. So come to the…” He looked at the nearest handful of huts. “Research station? Yes. Come, I’ll find someone to look after you. You’re hungry, probably. Tired.”

“I could do with a break, it’s true.” Matchell was sitting on the ground, heedless of the damp. “Spiker, let’s make a move.”

He didn’t move, perhaps still absorbing the latest developments, but then he took a deep breath. He looked at Stig, and for once the other man didn’t look away.

“Not fools, are you?” he said, just loud enough for Lee to catch. “You know a lot of good people—our people—died so you could end up with Kay.”

“And ours,” Stig said simply. “To save your people, and my people, and other people who don’t even know we exist, and wouldn’t understand. Everything is at stake, Julian Sabreur. I’m sorry about your people, but it’s everything.”

“God, I hope Kier got out.” Sabreur shook his head, finally resigned. “Lead on, then. Take us to your leader.”

Stig shambled off, signalling for Lee to join him at the head of the column. “Nice place, you said,” he said awkwardly. “Wasn’t always like this, you see? Does that help you?”

“Help me?”

“You compare this to your city. We have rebuilt this. Three hundred summers before and this was all poisoned. Our great engines were here, drawing power from the tree.”

She was about to frown, uncomprehending. But the answer came before she could get the question out. “The tree…that the worlds all branch from?”

“Good, yes, good. Cheap, clean energy, except the harvesting is never so clean. The building and the making which that energy powers, less clean still. We have been making and building longer than you, a thousand years longer. We poisoned so much. This land was black and dead. Nothing grew, just mud down to the dead river, you see with me?”

“I see,” she agreed. “But now it’s…”

“We healed, we…” He was short of the word, but then he pronounced carefully, “detoxified. We learned and did better. But this is still made landscape. We can never return it to what it was. The land is never still, and what we’ve made here cannot change and grow like a land should. It is a garden, but a garden is better than a wasteland.”

“Are you telling me we could do this too?”