Absolution Gap

THIRTY-FIVE

The dean had called Rashmika to his garret. When she arrived, she was relieved to find him alone in the room, with no sign of the surgeon-general. She had no great affection for the dean’s company, but even less for the skulking attentions of his personal physician. She imagined him lurking somewhere else in the Lady Morwenna, busy with his Bloodwork or one of the unspeakable practices he was rumoured to favour.

“Settling in nicely?” the dean asked her as she took her appointed seat in the middle of the forest of mirrors. “I do hope so. I’ve been very impressed with your acumen, Miss Els. It was an inspired suggestion of Grelier’s to have you brought here.”

“I’m glad to have been of service,” Rashmika said. She prepared herself a small measure of tea, her hands shaking as she held the china. She had no appetite—the mere thought of being in the same room as the iron suit was enough to unsettle her nerves—but it was necessary to maintain the illusion of calm.

“Yes, a bold stroke of luck,” Quaiche said. He was nearly immobile, only his lips moving. The air in the garret was colder than usual, and with each word she saw a jet of exhalation issue from his mouth. “Almost too lucky, one might say.”

“I beg your pardon, Dean?”

“Look at the table,” he said. “The malachite box next to the tea service.”

Rashmika had not noticed the box until men, but she was certain it had not been there during any of her earlier visits to the garret. It sat on little feet, like the paws of a dog. She picked it up, finding it lighter than she had expected, and fiddled with the gold-coloured metal clasps until the lid popped open. Inside was a great quantity of paper: sheets and envelopes of all colours and bonds, neatly gathered together with an elastic band.

“Open them,” the dean said. “Have a gander.”

She took out the bundle, slipped the elastic band free. The paperwork spilled on to the table. At random, she selected a sheet and unfolded it. The lilac paper was so thin, so translucent that only one side had been written on. The neatly inked letters, seen in reverse, were already familiar to her before she turned it over. The dark-scarlet script was hers: childish but immediately recognisable.

“This is my correspondence,” she said. “My letters to the church-sponsored archaeological study group.”

“Does it surprise you to see them gathered here?”

“It surprises me that they were collected and brought to your attention,” Rashmika said, “but I’m not surprised that it could have happened. They were addressed to a body within the ministry of the Adventist church, after all.”

“Are you angered?”

“That would depend.” She was, but it was only one emotion amongst several. “Were the letters ever seen by anyone in the study group?”

“The first few,” Quaiche replied, “but almost all the others were intercepted before they reached any of the researchers. Don’t take it personally: it’s just that they receive enough crank literature as it is; if they had to answer it all they’d never get anything else done.”

“I’m not a crank,” Rashmika said.

“No, but—judging by the content of these letters—you are coming from a slightly unorthodox position on the matter of the scuttlers, wouldn’t you agree?”

“If you consider the truth to be an unorthodox position,” Rashmika countered.

“You aren’t the only one. The study teams receive a lot of letters from well-meaning amateurs. The majority are really quite worthless. Everyone has their own cherished little theory on the scuttlers. Unfortunately, none of them has the slightest grasp of scientific method.”

“That’s more or less what I’d have said about the study teams,” Rashmika said.

He laughed at her temerity. “Not greatly troubled by self-doubt, are you, Miss Els?”

She gathered the papers into an untidy bundle, stuffed them back in the box. “I’ve broken no rules with this,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about my correspondence because I wasn’t asked to tell you about it.”

“I never said you had broken any rules. It just intrigued me, that’s all. I’ve read the letters, seen your arguments mature with time. Frankly, I think some of the points you raise are worthy of further consideration.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it,” Rashmika said.

“Don’t sound so snide. I’m sincere.”

“You don’t care, Dean. No one in the church cares. Why should they? The doctrine disallows any other explanation except the one we read about in the brochures.”

He asked, playfully, “Which is?”

“That the scuttlers are an incidental detail, their extinction unrelated to the vanishings. If they serve any theological function it’s only as a reminder against hubris, and to emphasise the urgent need for salvation.”

“An extinct alien culture isn’t much of a mystery these days, is it?”

“Something different happened here,” Rashmika said. “What happened to the scuttlers wasn’t what happened to the Amarantin or any of the other dead cultures.”

“That’s the gist of your objection, is it?”

“I think it might help if we knew what happened,” she said. She tapped her fingernails against the lid of the box. “They were wiped out, but it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the Inhibitors. Whoever did this left too much behind.”

“Perhaps the Inhibitors were in a hurry. Perhaps it was enough that they’d wiped out the scuttlers, without worrying about their cultural artefacts.”

“That’s not how they work. I know what they did to the Amarantin. Nothing survived on Resurgam unless it was under metres of bedrock, deliberately entombed. I know what it was like, Dean: I was there.”

The light flared off his eye-opener as he turned towards her. “You were there?”

“I meant,” she said hastily, “that I’ve read so much about it, spent so much time thinking about it, it’s as if I was there.” She shivered: it was easy to gloss over the statement in retrospect, but when she had said it she had felt a burning conviction that it was completely true.

“The problem is,” Quaiche said, “that if you remove the Inhibitors as possible agents in the destruction of Hela, you have to invoke another agency. From a philosophical standpoint, that’s not the way we like to do things.”

“It may not be elegant,” she said, “but if the truth demands another agency—or indeed a third—we should have the courage to accept the evidence.”

“And you have some idea of what this other agency might have been, I take it?”

She could not help but glance towards the welded-up space suit. It was an involuntary shift in her attention, unlikely to have been noticed by the dean, but it still annoyed her. If only she could control her own reactions as well as she read those of others.

“I don’t,” she said. “But I do have some suspicions.”

The dean’s couch shifted, sending a wave of accommodating movement through the mirrors. “The first time Grelier told me about you—when it seemed likely that you might prove of use to me—he said that you were on something of a personal crusade.”

“Did he?”

“In Grelier’s view, it had something to do with your brother. Is that true?”

“My brother came to the cathedrals,” she said.

“And you feared for him, anxious because you had heard nothing from him for a while, and decided to come after him. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

There was something about the way he said “story” that she did not care for. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

“Because I wonder how much you really care about your brother. Was he really the reason you came all this way, Rashmika, or did he just legitimise your quest by making it seem less intellectually vain?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you gave up on your brother years ago,” the dean said. “I think you knew, in your heart, that he was gone. What you really cared about was the scuttlers, and your ideas about them.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“That bundle of letters says otherwise. It speaks of a deep-rooted obsession, quite unseemly in a child.”

“I came here for Harbin.”

He spoke with the calm insistence of a Latin tutor emphasising some subtlety of tense and grammar. “You came here for me, Rashmika. You came to the Way with the intention of climbing to the top of the cathedral administration, convinced that only I had the answers you wanted, the answers you craved, like an addict.”

“I didn’t invite myself here,” she said, with something of the same insistence. “You brought me here, from the Catherine of Iron.”

“You’d have found your way here sooner or later, like a mole burrowing its way to the surface. You’d have made yourself useful in one of the study groups, and from there you’d have found a connection to me. It might have taken months; it might have taken years. But Grelier—bless his sordid little heart—expedited something that was already running its course.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, her hands trembling. “I didn’t want to see you. I didn’t want to come here. Why would that have meant so much to me?”

“Because you’ve got it into your head that I know things,” the dean said. “Things that might make a difference.”

Her hands fumbled for the box. “I’ll take this,” she said. “It’s mine, after all.”

“The letters are yours. But you may keep the box.”

“Is it over, now?”

He seemed surprised. “Over, Miss Els?”

“The agreement. My period of employment.”

“I don’t see why it should be,” he said. “As you pointed out, you were never obliged to mention your interest in the scuttlers. No crimes have been committed; no trust betrayed.”

Her hands left sweaty imprints on the box. She had not expected him to let her keep it. All that lost correspondence: sad, earnest little messages from her past self to her present. “I thought you’d be displeased,” she said.

“You still have your uses. I’m expecting more Ultras very shortly, as a matter of fact. I’ll want your opinions on them, your peculiar insights and observations, Miss Els. You can still do that for me, can’t you?”

She stood up, clutching the box. From the tone of his voice it was clear that her audience with the dean was at an end. “Might I ask one thing?” she enquired, nearly stammering over her words.

“I’ve asked you enough questions. I don’t see why not.”

She hesitated. Even as she made her request, she had meant to ask him about Harbin. The dean must have known what had happened to him: it wouldn’t have cost him anything to uncover the truth from cathedral records, even if he’d never set eyes on her brother. But now that the moment was here, now that it had arrived and the dean had granted her permission to ask her question, she knew that she did not have the strength of mind to go through with it. It was not simply that she was frightened of hearing the truth. She already suspected the truth. What frightened her was finding out how she would react when that truth was revealed. What if she turned out not to care about Harbin as much as she claimed? What if everything the dean had said was true, about Harbin just being the excuse she gave for her quest?

Could she take that?

Rashmika swallowed. She felt very young, very alone. “I wanted to ask if you had ever heard of the shadows,” she said.

But the dean said nothing. He had never, she realised, promised her an answer.

Three days later, the Inhibitor aggregate had moved within range of the weapon. The technicians still felt they had more calibration to do, more parameter space to explore. Every now and then the weapon did something weird and frightening, taking a nibble out of something local when it was supposed to be tuned for a target several AU distant. Sometimes, most frighteningly of all, its effects seemed only loosely coupled to any input. It was weakly acausal, after all: a weapon that undercut both time and space, and did so according to rules of Byzantine and shifting complexity. It was no wonder that the wolves had nothing analogous to it in their own arsenal. Perhaps they had decided that, all told, it was more trouble than it was worth. The same logic probably applied to Skade’s faster-than-light drive. A great many things were possible in the universe, far more than appeared so at first glance. But many of them were unhealthy, on both the individual and the species/galactic culture level.

But the lights kept dimming, and the weapon kept operating, and Scorpio’s private sense of self continued, unperturbed. The weapon might be doing grotesque things to the very foundations of reality, but all he cared about was what it did to the wolves. Slowly, it was taking chunks out of the pursuing swarm.

He wasn’t winning. He was surviving. That was good enough, for now.

Aura was wrapped in her customary quilted silver blanket, supported on her mother’s lap. Scorpio still found her frighten-ingly small, like a doll designed to sit inside a cabinet rather than be subjected to the damaging rough-and-tumble of the outside world. But there was something else, too: a quiet sense of invulnerability that made the back of his neck tingle. He only felt it now that her eyes were fully open. Focused and bright, like the eyes of some hunting bird, she absorbed everything that took place around her. Her eyes were golden-brown, flecked with glints of gold and bronze and some colour closer to electric blue. They didn’t simply look around. They probed and extracted. They surveilled.

Scorpio and the other seniors had gathered in the usual meeting room, facing each other around the dark mirror of the table. He studied his companions, mentally listing his allies and adversaries and those who had probably still to make up their minds. He could have counted on Antoinette, but she was back on Ararat now. He was sure that Blood would also have seen things his way, not because Blood would necessarily have thought things through, but because it took imagination to think of disloyalty, and imagination had never been Blood’s strong point. Scorpio missed him already. He had to keep reminding himself that his old deputy was not in fact dead, just out of reach.

It was two weeks since they had left Ararat. The Nostalgia for Infinity had pushed its way out of Ararat’s system at a steady one-gee acceleration, slipping between the meshing gear-teeth of the battle. In the first week, the Infinity had put twelve AU between itself and Ararat, reaching a fiftieth of the speed of light. By the end of the second week it had reached a twenty-fifth of light speed and was now nearly fifty AU from Ararat. Scorpio felt that distance now: looking back, Ararat’s Bright Sun, p Eridani A—the one that had warmed them for the last twenty-three years—was now only a very bright star, one hundred thousand times fainter than when seen from the the planet’s surface. It looked no brighter now than its binary companion, Faint Sun or p Eridani B; they were two amber eyes falling behind the lighthugger, pulling together as the ship headed further and further out into interstellar space. He couldn’t see the wolves—only the sensors could even begin to pick them out of the background, and then with only limited confidence—but they were there. The hypometric weapons—there were three of them online now—had been chewing holes in the pursuing elements, but not all of the wolves had been destroyed.

There was no going back. But until this moment their course had been dictated solely by Remontoire’s plan, his trajectory designed merely to get them away from the wolves with the lowest probability of interception. It was only now, after two weeks, that they had the option to steer on a new heading. The pursuing wolves had no bearing on that decision: Scorpio had to assume that they would eventually be destroyed, long before the ship reached its final destination.

He stood up and waited for everyone to fall silent. Saying nothing himself, he pulled Clavain’s knife from its sheath. Without turning it on, he leant across the table and made two marks, one on either side of the centre line, each requiring only three scratches of the blade. One was a “Y,” the other an “H.” In the dark lacquer of the wood the scratches were the colour of pigskin.

They all watched him, expecting him to say something. Instead he returned the knife to its sheath and sat back down in his seat. Then he meshed his hands behind his neck and nodded at Orca Cruz.

Cruz was his only remaining ally from his Chasm City days. She looked at them all in turn, fixing everyone with her one good eye, black fingernails rasping against the table as she made her points.

“The last few weeks haven’t been easy,” she began. “We’ve all made sacrifices, all seen plans upturned. Some of us have lost loved ones or seen our families ripped apart. Every certainty that we had a month ago has been pulverised. We are deep into unfamiliar territory, and we don’t have a map. Worse, the man we had come to trust, the man who would have seen the right way forward, isn’t with us any more.” She fixed her gaze on Scorpio, waiting until everyone else was looking at him as well. “But we still have a leader,” she continued. “We still have a damned good leader, someone Clavain trusted to run things on Ararat when he wasn’t around. Someone we should trust to lead us, more now than ever. Clavain had faith in his judgement. I think it’s about time we took a leaf from the old man’s book.”

Urton, the Security Arm woman, shook her head. “This is all well and good, Orca. None of us has a problem with Scprpio’s leadership.” She gave the last word a heavy emphasis, leaving everyone to draw their own conclusions about just what problems they might have with the pig. “But what we want to hear now is where you think we should go.”

“It’s very simple,” Orca Cruz replied. “We have to go to Hela.”

Urton tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise. “Then we’re in agreement.”

“But only after we’ve been to Yellowstone,” Cruz said. “Hela is… speculative, at best. We don’t really know what we’ll find there, if anything. But we know that we can do some good around Yellowstone. We have the capacity to take tens of thousands more sleepers. Another hundred and fifty thousand, easily. Those are human lives, Urton. They’re people we can save. Fate gave us this ship. We have to do something with it.”

“We’ve already evacuated the Resurgam system,” Urton said. “Not to mention seventeen thousand people from this one. I’d say that wipes the slate clean.”

“This slate is never wiped clean,” Cruz said.

Urton waved her hand across the table. “You’re forgetting something. The core systems are crawling with Ultras. There are dozens, hundreds of ships with the sleeper capacity of Infinity, in any system you care to name.”

“You’d trust lives to Ultras? You’re dumber than you look,” Orca said.

“Of course I’d trust them,” Urton said.

Aura laughed.

“Why did she do that?” Urton asked.

“Because you lied,” Khouri told her. “She can tell. She can always tell.”

One of the refugee representatives—a man named Rintzen—coughed tactically. He smiled, doing his best to seem conciliatory. “What Urton means is that it simply isn’t our job. The motives and methods of the Ultras may be questionable—we all know that—but it is a simple fact that they have ships and a desire for customers. If the situation in the core systems does indeed reach a crisis point, then—might I venture to suggest—all we’d have is a classic case of demand being met by supply.”

Cruz shook her head. She looked disgusted. If Scorpio had walked in at that moment and only had her face to go by, he would have concluded that someone had just deposited a bowel movement on the table.

“Remind me,” she said. “When you came aboard this ship from Resurgam—how much did it cost you?”

The man examined his fingernails. “Nothing, of course… but that’s not the point. The situation was totally different.”

The lights dimmed. It was happening every few minutes now, as the weapons were spun up and discharged; often enough that everyone had stopped remarking on it, but that didn’t mean that the dimming went unnoticed. Everyone knew that it meant the wolves were still out there, still creeping closer to the Nostalgia for Infinity.

“All right,” Cruz said when the light flicked back up to full strength. “Then what about this time, when you were evacuated from Ararat? How much did you cough up for the privilege?”

“Again, nothing,” Rintzen conceded. “And again, the two things can’t be compared…”

“You revolt me,” Cruz said. “I dealt with some slime down in the Mulch, but you’d have been in a league of your own, Rintzen.”

“Look,” said Kashian, another of the refugee representatives, “no one’s saying it’s right for the Ultras to make a profit out of the wolf emergency, but we have to be pragmatic. Their ships will always be better suited than this one to the task of mass evacuation.” She looked around, inviting the others to do likewise. “This room may seem normal enough, but it’s hardly representative of the rest of the ship. It’s more like a hard, dry pearl in the slime of an oyster. There are still vast swathes of this ship that are not even mapped, let alone habitable. And let’s not forget that things are significantly worse than they were during the Resurgam evacuation. Most of the seventeen thousand who came aboard two weeks ago still haven’t been processed properly. They are living in unspeakable conditions.” She shivered, as if experiencing some of that squalor by osmosis.

“You want to talk about unspeakable conditions,” Cruz said, “try death for a few weeks, see how it suits you.”

Kashian shook her head, looking in exasperation at the other seniors. “You can’t negotiate with this woman. She reduces everything to insult or absurdity.”

“Might I say something?” asked Vasko Malinin.

Scorpio shrugged in his direction.

Vasko stood up, leaning forwards across the table, his fingers splayed for support. “I won’t debate the logistics of helping the evacuation effort from Yellowstone,” he said. “I don’t believe it makes any difference. Irrespective of the needs of those refugees, we have been given a clear direction not to go there. We have to listen to Aura.”

“She didn’t say we shouldn’t go to Yellowstone,” Cruz interjected. “She just said we should go to Hela.”

Vasko’s expression was severe. “You think there’s a difference?”

“Yellowstone could be our first priority, as I said. It doesn’t preclude a visit to Hela once the evacuation is complete.”

“It will take decades to do that,” Vasko said.

“It’ll take decades whatever we do,” Cruz said, smiling slightly. “That’s the nature of the game, kid. Get used to it.”

“I know the nature of the game,” Vasko told her, his voice low, letting her know that she had made a mistake in addressing him that way. “I’m also aware that we’ve been given a clear instruction about reaching Hela. If Yellowstone formed part of Aura’s plans, don’t you think she’d have told us?”

They all looked at the child. Sometimes Aura spoke: by now they had all become accustomed to her small, half-formed, liquid croak. Yet there were still days when she said nothing at all, or made only childlike noises. Then, as now, she appeared to have switched into some mode of extreme receptivity, taking in rather than giving out. Her development was accelerated, but it was not progressing smoothly: there were leaps and bounds, but there were also plateaux and unaccountable reversals.

“She means for us to go to Hela,” Khouri said. “That’s all I know.”

“What about the other part?” Scorpio asked. “The bit about negotiating with shadows?”

“It was something that came through. Maybe a memory that came loose, but which she couldn’t interpret.”

“What else came through at the same time?”

She looked at him, hesitating on the edge of answering. It was a lucky guess, but his question had worked. “I sensed something that frightened me,” she said.

“Something about these shadows?”

“Yes. It was like the chill from an open door, like a draught of terror.” Khouri looked down at the hair on her baby’s head. “She felt it as well.”

“And that’s all you can tell me?” Scorpio asked. “We have to go to Hela and negotiate with something that frightens both of you to death?”

“It was just that the message carried a warning,” Khouri said. “It said proceed with caution. But it also said it’s what we have to do.”

“You’re sure of that?” Scorpio persisted.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Maybe you interpreted the message wrongly. Maybe the ‘draught of terror’ was there for a different reason. Maybe it was there to indicate that on no account should we have anything to do with… whatever these shadows are.“

“Maybe, Scorp,” Khouri said, “but in that case, why mention the shadows at all?”

“Or Hela, for that matter,” Vasko added.

Scorpio looked at him, drawing out the moment. “You done?” he asked.

“I guess so,” Vasko said.

“Then I think the decision needs to be taken,” the pig said. “We’ve heard all the arguments, either way. We can go to Hela on the off chance that there might be something there worth our effort. Or we can take this ship to Yellowstone and save some lives, guaranteed. I think you all know my feelings on the matter.” He nodded at the letters he had gouged into the table using Clavain’s old knife. “I think you also know what Clavain would have done, under the same circumstances.”

No one said anything.

“But there’s a problem,” Scorpio said. “And the problem is that it isn’t our choice to make. This isn’t a democracy. All we can do is present our arguments and let Captain John Branni-gan make up his mind.”

He reached into a pocket in his leather tunic and pulled out the small handful of red dust he had carried there for days.

It was finely graded iron oxide, collected from one of the machine shops—as close to Martian soil as it was possible to get, twenty-seven light-years from Mars. It trailed between the short stubs of his fingers even as he stood up and held it over the centre of the table, between the Y and the H.

This was it, he knew: the crux moment. If nothing happened—if the ship did not immediately signal its intentions by making the dust point unambiguously to one letter or other, he was over. No matter how much he wanted to see things through, he would have made a mockery of himself. But Clavain had never shirked from these moments. His whole life had lurched from one point of maximum crisis to another.

Scorpio looked up. The dust was beginning to run out.

“Your call, John.” At night, in her room, the voice returned. It always waited until Rashmika was alone, until she was away from the garret. She had hoped, the first time, that it might turn out to be some temporary delusion, the effect, perhaps, of Quaicheist viral agents somehow entering her system and playing havoc with her sanity. But the voice was too rational for that, entirely too quiet and calm, and what it said was specifically directed at Rashmika and her predicament, rather than some ill-defined generic host.

[Rashmika,] it said, [listen to us, please. The time of crisis grows near, in more ways than one.]

“Go away,” she said, burying her head in the pillow.

[We need your help now,] the voice said.

She knew that if she did not answer the voice it would keep pestering her, its patience endless. “My help?”

[We know what Quaiche intends to do with this cathedral, how he plans to drive it over the bridge. He won’t succeed, Rashmika. The bridge won’t take the Lady Morwenna. It wasn’t ever meant to take something like a cathedral.]

“And you’d know, would you?”

[The bridge wasn’t made by the scuttlers. It’s a lot more recent than that. And it won’t withstand the Lady Mor.]

She sat up in her narrow cot of a bed and turned the shutters to admit stained-glass light. She felt the rumble and sway of the cathedral’s progress, the distant churning of engines. She thought of the bridge, shining somewhere ahead, delicate as a dream, oblivious to the vast mass sliding slowly towards it.

What did the voice mean, that it was a lot more recent?

“I can’t stop it,” she said.

[You don’t have to stop it. You just have to get us to safety, before it’s too late.]

“Ask Quaiche.”

[Don’t you think we’ve tried, Rashmika? Don’t you think we’ve spent hours trying to persuade him? But he doesn’t care about us. He’d rather we didn’t exist. Sometimes, he even manages to convince himself that we don’t. When the cathedral falls from the bridge, or the bridge collapses, we’ll be destroyed. He’ll let that happen, because then he doesn’t have to think about us any more.]

“I can’t help you,” she said. “I don’t want to help you. You scare me. I don’t even know what you are, or where you’ve come from.”

[You know more than you imagine,“ the voice said. ”You came here to find us, not Quaiche.]

“Don’t be silly.”

[We know who you are, Rashmika, or rather we know who you aren’t. That machinery in your head, remember? Where did all that come from?]

“I don’t know about any machinery.”

[And your memories—don’t they sometimes seem to belong to someone else? We heard you talking to the dean. We heard you talk about the Amarantin, and your memories of Resurgam.]

“It was a slip,” she said. “I didn’t mean…”

[You meant every word of it, but you just don’t realise it yet. You are vastly more than you think, Rashmika. How far back do your memories of life on Hela really stretch? Nine years? Not much more, we suspect. So what came before?]

“Stop talking like that,” she said.

The voice ignored her. [You aren’t what you seem. These memories of life on Hela are a graft, nothing more. Beneath them lies something else entirely. For nine years they’ve served you well, allowing you to move amongst these people as if born to them. The illusion was so perfect, so seamless, that you didn’t even suspect it yourself. But all along your true mission was at the back of your mind. You were waiting for something: some conjunction of events. It brought you from the badlands, down to the Permanent Way. Now, nearing the end of your quest, you are coming out of the dream. You are starting to remember who you really are, and it thrills and terrifies you in equal measure.]

“My mission?” she asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of it.

[To make contact with us,] the voice said, [the shadows. Those you were sent to negotiate with.]

“Who are you?” she asked quietly. “Please tell me.”

[Go to sleep, little girl. You’ll dream of us, and then you’ll know everything.]

Rashmika went to sleep. She dreamed of shadows, and more. She dreamed the kinds of dream she had always associated with shallow sleep and fever: geometric and abstract, highly repetitious, filled with inexplicable terrors and ecstasies. She dreamed the dream of a hunted people.

They were far away, so far away that the distance separating them from the familiar universe—in both space and time—was incomprehensibly large, beyond any sensible scheme of measurement. But they were people, of a kind. They had lived and dreamed, and they had a history that was itself a kind of dream: unimaginably far-reaching, unimaginably complex, an epic now grown too long for the telling. All that it was necessary for her to know—all that she could know, now—was that they had reached a point where their memory of interstellar colonisation on the human scale was so remote, so faded and etiolated by time, that it almost seemed to merge with their earliest prehistory, barely separable from a faint ancestral recollection of fire-making and the bringing down of game.

They had colonised a handful of stars, and then they had colonised their galaxy, and then they had colonised much more than that, leap-frogging out into ever-larger territories, dancing from one hierarchical structure to the next. Galaxies, then groups of galaxies, then sprawling superclusters of tens of thousands of galaxy-groups, until they called across the starless voids between superclusters—the largest structures in creation—like apes howling from one tree-top to the next. They had done wonderful and terrible things. They had reshaped themselves and their universe, and they had made plans for eternity.

They had failed. Across all that dizzying history, from one leap of scale to the next, there had never been a time when they were not running from something. It wasn’t the Inhibitors, or anything very like them. It was a kind of machinery, but this time more like a blight, a transforming, ravening disease that they themselves had let loose. The dream’s details were vague, but what she understood was this: in their very earliest history they had made something, a tool rather than weapon, its intended function peaceful and utilitarian, but which had slipped from their control.

The tool neither attacked the people nor showed any great evidence of recognising them. What it did—with the mindless efficiency of wildfire—was rip matter apart, turning worlds into floating clouds of rubble, shells of rock and ice surrounding entire stars. Mirrors in the swarms of machinery gathered starlight, focusing life-giving energy on to the grains of rubble; transparent membranes trapped that energy around each grain and allowed tiny bubblelike ecologies to grow. Within these warm emerald-green pockets the people were able to survive, if they chose. But that was their only choice, and even then only a certain kind of existence was possible. Their only other option was flight: they could not stop the advancement of the transforming machines, only keep running from the leading edge of the wave. They could only watch as the transforming fire swept through their vast civilisation in a mere flicker of cosmic time, as the great swarms of machine-stimulated living matter turned stars into green lanterns.

They ran, and they ran. They sought solace in satellite galaxies, and for a few million years they thought they were safe. But the machines eventually reached the satellites, and began the same grindingly slow process of stellar consumption. The people ran again, but it was never far enough, never fast enough. No weapons worked: they either did more damage than the blight, or helped spread it faster. The transforming machines evolved, becoming steadily more agile and clever. Yet one thing never changed: their central task remained the smashing of worlds, and the remaking of them into a billion bright-green shards.

They had been created to do something, and that was what they were going to do.

Now, at the tail end of their history, the people had run as far as it was possible to run. They had exhausted every niche. They could not go back, could not make an accommodation with the machines. Even the transformed galaxies were now uninhabitable, their chemistries poisoned, the ecological balance of stellar life and death upset by the swarming industry of the machines. Out-of-control weapons, designed originally to defeat the machines, were themselves now as much of a hazard as the original problem.

So the people turned elsewhere. If they were being squeezed out of their own universe, then perhaps it was time to consider moving to another.

Fortunately, this was not as impossible as it sounded.

In her dream, Rashmika learned about the theory of braneworlds. There was a hallucinatory texture to it: velvety curtains of light and darkness rippled in her mind with the languor of auroral storms. What she understood was this: everything in the visible universe, everything that she saw—from the palm of her hand to the Lady Morwenna, from Hela itself out to the furthest observable galaxy—was necessarily trapped on one brane, like a pattern woven into a sheet of fabric. Quarks and electrons, photons and neutrinos—everything that constituted the universe in which she lived and breathed, including herself, was forced to travel along the surface of this one brane alone.

But the brane itself was only one of many parallel sheets floating in the higher-dimensional space that was called the bulk. The sheets were stacked closely together; were even, perhaps, joined at their edges, like the folded musical program of some vast cosmic orchestrion. Some of the sheets had very different properties from others: although the same fundamental rules of nature applied in each, the strengths of the coupling constants—and hence the properties of the macroscopic universe—depended on where a particular brane lay within the bulk. Life within those distant branes was bizarre and strange, assuming that the parochial physics even allowed anything as complex as life. Elsewhere, some sheets were brushing against each other, the glancing impact of their collisions generating primordial events in each brane that looked very much like the Big Bangs of traditional cosmology.

If the local brane was connected to another, then the fold point—the crease—lay at a cosmological distance beyond even the Hubble length scale. But there was nothing to prevent matter and radiation making the journey around that fold, given time. If one travelled far enough along the surface of one of these connected branes—through countless megaparsecs, far enough through the conventional universe of matter and light—one would eventually end up on the next closest brane in the multidimensional void of the bulk.

Rashmika could not see the topological relationship between her brane and the brane of the shadows. Were they joined, or separate? Were the shadows deliberately withholding this information, or was it just not known to them?

It probably didn’t matter.

What did matter—the only thing that mattered—was that there was a way to signal across the bulk. Gravity was not like the other elements of her universe: it was only imperfectly bound to a particular brane. It could take the long way around—oozing along an individual brane like a slowly-spreading wine stain—but it could also leak through, taking the short cut across the bulk.

The people—the shadows, she now realised—had used gravity to send messages across the bulk, from brane to brane. And with their usual patience—for they were nothing if not patient—they had waited until someone answered.

Finally, someone had. They were the scuttlers: a starfaring species in their own right. Their history was much shorter than that of the shadows; only a few million years had passed since they had emerged from their birth world, in some lost corner of the galaxy. They were a peculiar species, with their strange habit of swapping body parts and their utter abhorrence of similarity and duplication. Their culture was impenetrably weird: nothing about it made any sense to any other species that the scuttlers ever met. Because of this they had established few trading partners, made few allegiances, and accumulated very little knowledge from other societies. They lived on cold worlds, favouring the moons of gas giants. They kept themselves to themselves, and had no ambitions beyond the modest settlement of a few hundred systems in their local galactic sector. Because of their solitary habits, it took them a while to draw down the attentions of the Inhibitors.

It made no difference. The Inhibitors didn’t distinguish between the meek and aggressive: the rules applied equally to all. By the time the scuttlers had made contact with the shadows, they had been pushed to the edge of extinction. They were, needless to say, ready to consider anything.

The shadows learned of the scuttlers’ travails. They listened, amused, at the stories of entire species being wiped out by the swarming black machines.

We can help, they said.

At that time, all they could do was transmit messages across the bulk, but with the co-operation of the scuttlers, they could do much more than that: the vast gravitational signal receiver constructed by the scuttlers to collect the shadows’ messages had the potential to allow physical intervention. At its heart was a mass-synthesiser, a machine capable of constructing solid objects according to transmitted blueprints. Like the receiver itself, the mass-synthesiser was old galactic-level technology. It fed itself on the metal-rich remains of the gas-giant planet that had been stripped apart to make the receiver in the first place. But for all its simplicity, the mass-synthesiser was versatile. It could be programmed to build receptacles for the shadows: vacant, near-immortal machine bodies into which they could transmit their personalities. For the shadows, already embodied in machines on their side of the bulk, it was no great sacrifice.

But the scuttlers—nothing if not a cautious species—had installed clever safeguards, mindful of the danger in permitting physical intervention from one brane to another. The mass-synthesiser couldn’t be activated remotely, from the shadows’ side of the bulk. Only the scuttlers could turn it on, and allow the shadows to start colonising this side of the bulk. The shadows weren’t interested in taking over the entire galaxy, or so they said, merely in establishing a small, independent community away from the dangers that were making their own braneworld uninhabitable.

In return, they promised, they would supply the scuttlers with the means to defeat the Inhibitors.

All the scuttlers had to do was turn on the mass-synthesiser and allow the shadows to reach across the bulk.

Rashmika awoke. It was bright daylight outside, and the stained-glass window threw tinted lozenges across the damp hummock of her pillow. For a moment she lay there, anointed in colours, lulled by the sway of the Lady Morwenna. She felt as if she had been deeply asleep, but at the same time she also felt drained, in desperate need of a few hours of dreamless oblivion. The voice was gone now, but she did not doubt that it would return. Nor was there any doubt in her mind that the voice had been real, and its story essentially true.

Now, at least, she understood a little more. The scuttlers had been offered a chance to escape extinction, but the price of that deal had been opening the door to the shadows. They had come so very close to doing it, too, but at the final moment they had not been able to make that leap of faith. The shadows had remained on their side of the bulk; the scuttlers had been wiped out.

With that realisation she felt a groaning sense of failure. She had been wrong to doubt that the scuttlers were destroyed by the Inhibitors. Everything she had worked for over the last nine years, every pious certainty she had allowed herself to indulge in, had been undermined by that one revelatory dream. The shadows had put her right. What did her opinions matter, when set against actual testimony from another alien intelligence?

She had already considered the alternative: that the shadows had wiped out the scuttlers. But that made even less sense than the Inhibitor hypothesis. If the scuttlers had let the shadows through, and if the shadows had organised themselves enough to do that much damage, then where were they now? It was unthinkable that they would have pulverised Hela, wiping out the scuttlers, and then crawled quietly back into their own universe. Nor was it likely that they had crossed the gap, done that damage, and then vanished into some solitary corner of this one, because—or so the voice had told her—they still needed to make the crossing. That was why they were speaking to her.

They wanted humanity to have the courage that the scuttlers had lacked.

Haldora, she now understood, was the signalling mechanism: the great receiver that the scuttlers had built. They had taken the former gas giant, smashed it down to its essentials and woven the remains into a world-sized gravitational antenna with a mass-synthesiser at its heart.

What the Observers saw when they looked into the sky—the illusion of Haldora—was just a form of projected camouflage. The scuttlers were gone, but their receiver remained. And now and then, for a fraction of a second, the camouflage failed. In the vanishings, what the Observers glimpsed was not some shining citadel of God but the mechanism of the receiver itself.

A door in the sky, waiting to be unlocked.

That only left one question. It was, perhaps, the hardest of all. If everything the shadows had told her was true, then she also had to accept what the shadows told her about herself.

That she wasn’t who she thought she was.

Five days later, technicians plumbed Scorpio into the reefersleep casket. It was a surgical procedure: a ritual of incisions and catheters, anaesthetic swabs, sterilising balms.

“You don’t have to watch,” he told Khouri, who was standing at the foot of the casket with Aura in her arms.

“I want to see you go under safely,” she said.

“You mean you want to see me safely out the picture.” He knew even as he said it that it was cruel and unnecessary.

“We still need you, Scorp. We might not agree with you about Hela, but that doesn’t make you any less useful.”

The child watched fascinatedly as the technicians fumbled a plastic shunt into Scorpio’s wrist. He could still see the scar where the last one had been removed, twenty-three years earlier.

“It hurts,” Aura said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It hurts, kid. But I can handle it.”

The reefersleep casket sat in a room of its own. It was the same one that had brought him to Ararat all those years ago. It was very old and very unsophisticated: a brutish black box with squared-off edges and the heavy, wrought-iron look of some artefact of medieval jurisprudence.

But it also had a perfect operational record, a flawless history of preserving its human occupants in frozen stasis during the years of relativistic travel between stars. It had never killed anyone, never brought anyone back to life with anything other than the full spectrum of mental faculties. It incorporated the minimum of nanotechnology. The Melding Plague had never touched it, nor had the Captain’s own transforming influences. A baseline human contemplating a spell in the casket could have been quietly confident of revival. The transitions to and from the cryogenic state were slow and uncomfortable compared to the sleeker, more modern units. There would be discomfort, both physical and mental. But there would be little doubt that the unit would work as intended, and that the occupant would wake again at the other end of the journey.

The only problem was, none of this applied to pigs. The caskets were tuned to baseline human physiology on the unforgiving level of cell chemistry. Scorpio had made it through reefersleep before, but each time had been a gamble. He told himself that the odds didn’t get any worse each time he submitted himself to a casket, that he was no more likely to die in this unit than in the first one he had used. But that wasn’t strictly true. He was much older now. His body was intrinsically weaker than the last time he had been through the process. Everyone was being very coy about the hard numbers—whether it was a ten or twenty or even a thirty per cent chance of him not making out—but their very refusal to discuss the matter alarmed him more than a cold assessment of the risk would ever have done. At least then he could have compared the risks of taking the casket and staying awake for the entire trip. Five or six years of shiptime, making him fifty-five or fifty-six, against a thirty per cent chance of not making it there at all? It wouldn’t have been an easy decision—as a pig, he had no guarantee of making it to sixty under normal circumstances. But at least full disclosure of the facts would have enabled him to make a considered choice. Instead, what drove him to the casket was a simple desire to skip over the intervening time. Damn the odds; he had to get the waiting over with. He had to know if it was worth their while making it to Hela.

And before that, of course, he had to know if he had made a terrible mistake by persuading the ship to travel to Yellowstone first.

He thought of the dust leaking from his hand, spilling on to the table, the trail drifting towards the Y he had marked rather than the H. Within minutes it had been confirmed: the ship was executing a slow turn, steering for Epsilon Eridani rather than the dim, unfamiliar star of 107 Piscium.

He had been pleased with the Captain’s decision, but it also frightened him. The Captain had followed the minority view rather than the democratic wish of the seniors. It had suited Scorpio, but he wondered how he would have felt if the Captain had sided with the others. It was one thing to know that he had an ally in John Brannigan. It would be quite another to feel himself the prisoner of the ship.

“It’s not too late,” Khouri said. “You can stop now, spend the trip awake.”

“Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“At least until Aura is older,” she said.

The girl laughed.

“I can’t take the risk,” Scorpio said. “I may not last the journey if they don’t freeze me. Five or six years might not be much to you, but it’s a big chunk out of my life.”

“It might not be that long if they can get the new machines to work. Our subjective time to Yellowstone might only be a couple of years.”

“Still too long for my liking.”

“It worries you that much? I thought you said you never thought much about the future.”

“I don’t. Now you know why.”

She came closer to the black cabinet, lowering down on one knee, presenting Aura to him. “She thinks this is the wrong thing to do,” Khouri said. “I feel it coming through. She really thinks we should be going straight to Hela.”

“We’ll get there eventually,” he said. “John willing.” He directed his attention to Aura, looking into her golden-brown eyes. He expected her to flinch, but she held his gaze, barely blinking.

“Shadows,” she said, in her liquid gurgle, a voice that always seemed on the edge of hilarity. “Negotiate with shadows.”

“I don’t believe in negotiation,” Scorpio said. “All it gets you into is a world of pain.”

“Maybe it’s time you changed your opinion,” Khouri said.

Khouri and Aura left him alone with the technicians. He had been glad of the visit, but he was also glad to have a moment to marshal his thoughts, making sure that he did not forget the important things. One thing in particular assumed particular importance in his mind. He had still not told either of them about the private conversation he had had with Re-montoire just before the Conjoiner’s departure. The conversation had not been recorded, and Remontoire had given little more than his words: no data, no written evidence, just a shard of translucent white material small enough to fit in his pocket.

Now that omission was beginning to weigh upon him. Was it right to keep Remontoire’s doubts from Aura and her mother? Remontoire had left the final decision to him, in the end: a measure of the extent to which he trusted Scorpio.

Now, in the casket, Scorpio could have done with a bit less of that trust.

He didn’t have the shard with him now. It was with his personal effects, awaiting his revival. It had no intrinsic worth in its own right, and had anyone else found it, it was more than likely that they would have left it undisturbed, assuming only that it was some personal trinket or totem of purely sentimental value. What mattered was where Remontoire had found it. And aboard the ship, to the best of his knowledge, Scorpio was the only one who knew.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Remontoire said, handing him the curved white shard. Scorpio examined it, immediately disappointed at what had he been given. He could see through it. The edges were sharp enough to be dangerous, and it was too hard to flex or break. The thing looked like a dinosaur’s toenail clipping.

“I know what it is, Rem.”

“You do?”

“It’s a piece of conch material. We found it all the time on Ararat, washed up after storms or floating out at sea. Much bigger than this piece.”

“How big?” Remontoire asked, steepling his fingers.

“Large enough to use for dwellings, sometimes. Sometimes even for major administrative structures. We didn’t have enough metal or plastic to go around, so we were always trying to make the best use of local resources. We had to anchor the conch pieces down, because otherwise they blew away in the first storm.”

“Difficult to work with?”

“We couldn’t cut them with anything other than torches, but that’s not saying much. You should have seen the state of our tools.”

“What did you make of the conch pieces, Scorp? Did you have a theory about them?”

“We didn’t have much time for theories about anything.”

“You must have had an inkling.”

Scorpio shrugged and passed the fragment back to him. “We assumed they were the discarded shells of extinct marine creatures, bigger than anything now living on Ararat. The Jugglers weren’t the only organism in that ocean; there was always room for other kinds of life, maybe relics of the original inhabitants, before the Juggler colonisation.”

Remontoire tapped a finger against the shard. “I don’t think we’re dealing with marine life, Scorp.”

“Does it matter?”

“It might do, especially given the fact that I found this in space, around Ararat.” He handed it back to the pig. “Interested now?”

“I might be.”

Remontoire told him the rest. During the last phase of the battle around Ararat, he had been contacted by a group of Conjoiners from Skade’s party. “They knew she was dead. Without a leader, they were devolving into a directionless squabble. They approached me, hoping to steal the hypometric technology. They’d learned much already, but that was the one thing they didn’t have. I resisted, fought them off, but I also let them go with a warning. I considered it rather late in the day to be making new enemies.”

“And?”

“They came back to help me when the wolf aggregate was about to finish me off. A suicidal move on their part. I think it convinced me and my associates to accept terms of cooperation from Skade’s people. But there was something else.”

“The shard?”

“Not the shard itself, but data pertaining to the same mystery. I viewed it with suspicion, as I still do. I can’t rule out the possibility that it may have been a piece of disinformation sown by Skade when she knew her days were numbered. Just like her to throw a posthumous spanner into our works, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her for a second,” Scorpio replied. Now that he knew it had some deeper significance, the piece of conch material felt like some holy relic in his hands. He held it with reverential care, as if he might damage it. “What did the data tell you?”

“Before they transmitted the data, they spoke of the situation around Ararat being more complicated than we had assumed. I didn’t admit it at the time, but what they said chimed with my own observations. There had, for some time, been hints of something else in the game. Not my people, nor Skade’s, not even the Inhibitors, but another party, lurking on the very edge of events, like spectators. Of course, in the confusion of battle it was easy to dismiss such speculation: ghost returns from mass sensors, vague phantom forms glimpsed during intense energy bursts. There was a great deal of deliberate confusion.“

“And the data?”

“It only confirmed those fears. Added to my own observations, the conclusion was inescapable: we were being watched. Something else—neither human nor Inhibitor—had followed us to Ararat. It may even have been there before us.”

“How do you know they weren’t part of the Inhibitors? We know so little about them.”

“Because their movements suggested they were as wary of the Inhibitors as we were. Not to the same degree, but cautious nonetheless.”

“Then who are they?”

“I don’t know, Scorp. I only have this shard. It was recovered after an engagement during which one of their vehicles may have been damaged by drifting too close to the battle. It is a piece of debris, Scorp. The same applies, I think, to every piece of conch material you have ever found on Ararat. They are the remains of ships, fallen into the sea.”

“Then who made them?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do they want with us?”

“We don’t know that, either, only that they have taken an interest.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“I’m not sure I like it either. They haven’t contacted us directly, and everything they’ve done suggests they have no intention of making their presence known. They’re more advanced than us, that’s for sure. They may skulk in the darkness, slinking around the Inhibitors, but they’ve survived. They’re still out there, when we’re on the brink of extinction.”

“They could help us.”

“Or they could turn out to be as bad for us as the Inhibitors.”

Scorpio looked into the old Conjoiner’s face: so maddeningly calm, despite the vast implications of their conversation. “You sound as if you think we’re being judged,” he said.

“I wonder if that isn’t the case.”

“And Aura? What does she have to say?”

“She has never made any mention of another party,” Remontoire said.

“Perhaps these are the shadows, after all.”

“Then why go to Hela to make contact with them? No, Scorp: these aren’t the shadows. They’re something else, something she either doesn’t know about, or chooses not to tell us.”

“Now you’re making me nervous.”

“That, Mr. Pink, was very much the idea. Someone has to know this, and it might as well be you.”

“If she doesn’t know about the other party, how can we be sure the rest of her information’s correct?”

“We can’t. That’s the difficulty.”

Scorpio fingered the shard. It was cool to the touch, barely heavier than the air it displaced. “I could talk to her about it, see if she remembers.”

“Or you could keep the information to yourself, because it is too dangerous to reveal to her. Remember: it may be misinformation created by Skade to destroy our confidence in Aura. If she were to deny knowledge of it, will you be able to trust her any more?”

“I’d still like the data,” Scorpio said.

“Too dangerous. If I passed it to you, it might find its way into her head. She’s one of us, Scorp: a Conjoiner. You’ll have to make do with the shard—call it an aide-memoire—and this conversation. That should suffice, should it not?”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t tell her, ever?”

“No, I’m merely saying you must make that decision for yourself, and that it should not be taken lightly.” Remontoire paused, and then offered a smile. “Frankly, I don’t envy you. Rather a lot may depend on it, you see.”

Scorpio pushed the shard into his pocket.

[Help us, Rashmika,] the voice said, when she was alone. [Don’t let us die when the cathedral dies.]

“I can’t help you. I’m not even sure I want to.”

[Quaiche is unstable,] the voice insisted. [He will destroy us, because we are a chink in the armour of his faith. That cannot be allowed to happen, Rashmika. For your sakes—for the sake of all your people—don’t make the same mistake as the scuttlers. Don’t close the door on us.]

She thrashed her head into the damp landscape of her pillow, smelling her own days-old sweat worked into the yellowing fabric during sleepless, voice-tormented nights such as this. All she wanted was for the voice to silence itself; all she wanted was a return to the old simplicities, where all she had to worry about was the imposition of her own self-righteous convictions.

“How did you get here? You still haven’t told me. If the door is closed—”

[The door was opened, briefly. During a difficult period with the supply of the virus, Quaiche endured a lapse of faith. In that crisis he began to doubt his own interpretation of the vanishings. He arranged for the firing of an instrument package into the face of Haldora, a simple mechanical probe crammed with electronic instrumentation.]

“And?”

[He provoked a response. The probe was injected into Haldora during a vanishing. It caused the vanishing to last longer than usual, more than a second. In that hiatus, Quaiche was granted a glimpse of the machinery the scuttlers made to contact us across the bulk.]

“So was everyone else who happened to see it.”

[That’s why that particular vanishing had to be stricken from the public record,] the voice said. [It couldn’t be allowed to have happened.]

She remembered what the shadows had told her about the mass-synthesiser. “Then the probe allowed you to cross over?”

[No. We are still not physically embodied in this brane. What it did reestablish was the communication link. It had been silenced since the last time the scuttlers spoke to us, but in the moment of Quaiche’s intervention it was reopened, briefly. In that window we transmitted an aspect of ourselves across the bulk, a barely sentient ghost, programmed only to survive and negotiate.]

So that was what she was dealing with: not the shadows themselves, but their stripped-down minimalist envoy. She did not suppose that it made very much difference: the voice was clearly at least as intelligent and persuasive as any machine she had ever encountered.

“How far did you get?” Rashmika asked.

[Into the probe, as it fell within the Haldora projection. From there—following the probe’s telemetry link—we reached Hela. But no further. Ever since then, we have been trapped within the scrimshaw suit.]

“Why the suit?”

[Ask Quaiche. It has some deeply personal significance for him, irrevocably entwined with the nature of the vanishings and his own salvation. His lover—the original Morwenna—died in it. Afterwards, Quaiche couldn’t bring himself to destroy the suit. It was a reminder of what had brought him to Hela, a spur to keep looking for an answer, for Morwenna’s memory. When it came time to send the probe into Haldora, Quaiche filled the suit with the cybernetic control system necessary to communicate with the probe. That is why it has become our prison.]

“I can’t help you,” she said again.

[You must, Rashmika. The suit is strong, but it will not survive the destruction of the Lady Morwenna. Yet without us, you will have lost your one channel of negotiation. You might establish another, but you cannot guarantee it. In the meantime, you will be at the mercy of the Inhibitors. They’re coming closer, you know. There isn’t much time left.]

“I can’t do this,” she said. “You’re asking too much of me. You’re just a voice in my head. I won’t do it.”

(You will if you know what’s good for you. We don’t know all that we would like to know about you, Rashmika, but one thing is clear: you are most certainly not who you claim to be.]

She pulled her face from the pillow, brushed lank, damp hair from her eyes. “So what if I’m not?”

[It would probably be for the best if Quaiche didn’t find out, don’t you think?]

The surgeon-general sat alone in his private quarters in the Office of Bloodwork, high in the middle levels of the Clocktower. He hummed to himself, happy in his environment. Even the faint swaying motion of the Lady Morwenna—exaggerated now that she was moving over the rough ground of the ungraded and potholed road that led to the bridge—was pleasing to him, the sense of continuing motion spurring him to work. He had not eaten in many hours and his hands trembled with anticipation as he waited for the assay to finish. The task of prolonging Quaiche’s life had offered many challenges, but he had not felt this sense of intellectual excitement since his days in the service of Queen Jasmina, when he was the master of the body factory.

He had already pored over the results of Harbin’s blood analysis. He had been looking for some explanation in his genes for the gift that had been so strongly manifested in his sister. There had never been any suggestion that Harbin had the same degree of hypersensitivity to expressions, but that might simply mean that the relevant genes had only been activated in his sister’s case. Grelier did not know exactly what he was looking for, but he had a rough idea of the cognitive areas that ought to have been affected. What she had was a kind of inverse autism, an acute sensitivity to the emotional states of the people around her, rather than blank indifference. By comparing Harbin’s DNA against Bloodwork’s genetic database, culled not just from the inhabitants of Hela but from information sold to him by Ultras, he had hoped to see something anomalous. Even if it was not immediately obvious, the software ought to be able to tease it out.

But Harbin’s blood had turned out to be stultifyingly normal, utterly deficient in anything anomalous. Grelier had gone back into the library and found a back-up sample, just in case there had been a labelling error. It was the same story: there was nothing in Harbin’s blood that would have suggested anything unusual in his sister.

So perhaps, Grelier reasoned, there was something uniquely anomalous in her blood, the result of some statistical reshuffling of her parents’ genes that had somehow failed to manifest in Harbin. Alternatively, her blood could turn out to be just as uninteresting. In that case he would have to conclude that her hypersensitivity had in some way been learned, that it was a skill anyone could acquire, given the right set of stimuli.

The analysis suite chimed, signalling that it had finished its assay. He leant back in his chair, waiting for the results to be displayed. Harbin’s analysis—histograms, pie charts, genetic and cytological maps—were already up for inspection. Now the data from Rashmika Els’s blood appeared alongside it. Almost immediately the analysis software began to search for correlations and mismatches. Grelier crackled his knuckles. He could see his own reflection, the ghostly white nimbus of his hair floating in the display.

Something wasn’t right.

The correlation software was struggling. It was throwing up red error messages, a plague of them appearing all over the read-out. Grelier was familiar with this: it meant that the software had been told to hunt for correlations at a statistical threshold far above the actual situation. It meant that the two blood samples were far less alike than he had expected.

“But they’re siblings,” he said.

Except they weren’t. Not according to their blood. Harbin and Rashmika Els did not appear to be related at all.

In fact, it looked rather unlikely that Rashmika Els had even been born on Hela.