He’s a machine, I reminded myself. Made of flesh and blood, but still a machine programmed by a computer.

‘What are you doing?’ Pharaoh demanded. His voice had risen, a note of worry puncturing the confidence, and I suddenly realised that the experiment was ongoing. He was making it up as he went along. Two years and four months. I remember when Luke was that age, how little I knew him compared to now.

The screen went white. At first, I didn’t understand what we were seeing. The contrast was so high, almost monochrome, that everything looked alien and unworldly. White-speckled black, with a thick black mass churning at the bottom of the screen, flowing from a jagged white hole. Ice forming?

A shape at the top of the picture caught my eye. I recognised the familiar peaks that loomed over Zodiac. But then—

I was looking at Zodiac. But not as I’d left it, a few hours earlier. The Platform had been blown open. Black smoke poured out of it. The jagged edges I’d taken for a hole in the ice were pieces of metal, broken struts and bits of roof that had been hacked open like a tin can.

I looked at Pharaoh. He looked as confused as me.

‘What—’

‘I don’t …’

He picked up a remote. He must have indexed the video; in a few seconds, he’d jumped to a different scene. The camera slightly straighter, the Platform intact. I could make out a cluster of snowmobiles in the foreground, a few of the huts further back. The time-stamp in the corner of the screen said 21:57.

Pharaoh restarted the video. After a second, two figures came into view from behind the Platform and headed towards the snowmobile park. Too far and indistinct to make out, but they must be me and Greta.

Greta. Even as a few distant pixels, it hurt to see her there. As we reached the snowmobiles, a third figure stood up among them. He’d been there all along, though I hadn’t noticed him. Quam. I watched us chat for a couple of minutes, then Greta and I walked away. Quam went back to fiddling with the snowmobiles. After another few minutes, I saw a blob that must have been the Sno-Cat crawling up the Lucia glacier in the background.

Pharaoh hit the fast-forward button. The Sno-Cat climbed comically fast, up over the top of the glacier and out of sight.

And then it happened. The centre of the screen flared into a white starburst where the explosion overwhelmed the sensor, smoke leaking from its edges. A second later, the whole picture shook as the shock wave reached the camera and knocked it askew. More explosions, more starbursts. Smoking pieces of metal flew in every direction, cartwheeling over the snow. The Platform’s legs buckled, and the whole rear end collapsed in an eruption of flames and smoke.

‘How …?’

Pharaoh rewound the last few seconds and played it again at normal speed. The doomed Platform reassembled itself; the Sno-Cat hurried backwards down the glacier, reversed, and crawled back up and over the top. Quam came out from behind a hut and walked slowly towards the back of the Platform, under the mess windows. I thought of the others, all the Zodiac staff enjoying Thing Night.

Quam fiddled with something, then extended his right arm, pointing at something in the space. The arm looked wrong, too long for his body, but that was because he was holding something. A flare gun.

The camera was too far away to see him pull the trigger. Just the faintest flash, before the Platform exploded and engulfed Quam. It went up so fast, he must have packed oil drums or something underneath.

I rounded on Pharaoh. ‘Is this something to do with you?’

One look at his face quashed that idea. He looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

I’m in the business of improving life, not ending it. I turned to the creature. ‘You?’

The creature shook his head. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed immune to what we’d just played back. Wasn’t even looking at the screen, but staring at one of the Hockneys as if thinking about something completely different. Perhaps he couldn’t comprehend tragedy.

‘I don’t care what you’ve done,’ I told Pharaoh. ‘We need to get back there. If there are survivors …’

‘Of course.’ Pharaoh was still staring at the screen, hypnotised by the carnage. Beside him, Louise looked sick. She slipped her hand into his.

‘Let’s go.’

Fifty-two

My coat and trousers were hung on a hook in the stairwell, mostly dry, though the coat zipper was still broken. I Velcroed it shut the best I could. The hard edges of the notebook in the inside pocket pressed against my chest.

I noticed again the DAR-X logo stencilled on the creature’s jacket. ‘Where did he get that? Another “overreaction”?’

A tight look from Pharaoh told me I was on the money. ‘An unfortunate encounter last September.’

They suited up, and led me down a long corridor lined with corrugated plastic to a heavy door in a concrete wall. Pharaoh unlocked it, stepped through some small sort of vestibule that smelled of sawdust, and out through another door. Daylight hit me, and I wondered what time it was. How many hours had passed in the tunnels, in the mine, listening to Pharaoh speak? It must be at least mid-morning. I’d gone through the night without sleep or food, and I felt it. I found my sunglasses in my coat pocket and put them on.

We were at the top of a narrow mountain valley, looking down at a cluster of tin-roofed buildings joined together by chutes and covered walkways.

‘Vitangelsk?’ I guessed. I’d only ever seen it on the map.

‘Mine Eight.’

We skidded down the slope, following soft tracks in the snow. At the bottom of the complex we came to a large building jacked up on stilts. It seemed to be the terminus for some sort of cable car or chairlift. In the space underneath, hidden behind sheets of rusting corrugated iron, Pharaoh pulled tarpaulins off two gleaming snowmobiles.

‘Get on.’

All I remember about the ride is the cold. No spare helmet or goggles — they never expected guests — so I had to keep my head down and clench my eyes shut. With the zip broken, I could only Velcro my jacket shut and keep close to Pharaoh. He kept his rifle in a sort of holster attached to the saddle — I could probably have reached it, if I’d wanted. But what would have been the point? We were beyond that.

Any hope that the video might have been a fake, some warped practical joke, died ten miles from Zodiac. Pharaoh paused at the top of a rise; I opened my eyes, and saw a column of oily smoke polluting the sky. We went on; the wind cut my eyes and made me weep, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. Wishing it would disappear.

We came down the Lucia glacier and saw the whole horror show. The Platform had blown open like a ruptured artery; several of the nearby huts had burned, and some of the further ones had been torn apart by shrapnel. You could see bare rock where the fire had melted away the ice around the Platform. The snow that survived was black and cratered with wreckage.

No chance to get into the Platform. Fires still burned inside; even as we dismounted the snowmobiles, another strut gave out and collapsed in a shower of sparks and screaming metal. We could feel the heat twenty metres away. No one could have survived.

Louise voiced the obvious question. ‘Why?’

I thought of the video, Quam taking the gun from his holster and calmly putting a flare into a pile of high explosives and oil drums. I remembered that night I met him in the corridor, the dead look in his eyes. This island’s trying to kill us. Was it the pressure that had got to him? The endless funding threats; the egos and the sniping; something in his personal life?

I think it was this place. Surrounded by nothing, his mind had expanded so fast it shattered, like brittle ice drawn from a deep hole.