‘I don’t feel hunger or thirst any more. They’re just things that people say. I eat when there’s food, drink when there’s water. If there’s nothing, it’s the will of God that I don’t eat or drink then.’

‘Don’t you love yourself?’

‘I hate myself. Everything I ever did was wrong, and I can’t change a single moment.’

Ariadne fluttered to her feet. It looked so real, Va expected to be buffeted by the wind from her wings.

‘Come and do good with us. Come and eat and drink with us and tell us your story. Then we will go and get your books and send you home.’

‘I lost one,’ he blurted. ‘I dropped it over the side of Rory macShiel’s boat so that the slavers wouldn’t get it. But it’s still there. Someone determined enough could find it again.’

‘Then perhaps we will have to be that someone, Va.’ Ariadne paused and looked sideways at him. ‘Who am I?’

‘You’re the ship, though I still don’t understand how that can be.’

The angel contracted to a glowing point of light, which hovered eye height above the floor.

‘Where have you gone?’

‘I’m still here. I’m all around you. Follow me.’

Va got up slowly, and the door slid aside. The light drifted on, and taking his courage in both bloody hands, Va walked along behind it. Even the footsteps he took reminded him that it was all made: the floor was slick and shiny, entirely without joints or edges. It flowed seamlessly up into the walls and curved overhead to vault the ceiling.

They came to a crossroads. Ahead was a door, but the light turned left, then left again when they came to another junction.

He started to hear voices: Arabic, and another he didn’t recognize at all. The light stopped in front of the door where the others were, and faded until all that was there was a small black pebble of glass.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now,’ said Va in a whisper.

‘Go in. Greet the others. Introduce yourself. Eat bread, taste salt. Drink Benzamir’s favourite beer,’ said Ariadne with laughter in her voice. ‘Sit with the unbeliever, the woman and the child. No one is better or worse than you.’

‘But what will I say? I can’t speak to any of them but Elenya, can’t understand what they say.’

‘There’s no problem, Va. I’ve listened to you all, spoken to you all, understood you all. There’ll be no confusion. I can play Elenya’s part for everyone. I’m very smart.’

The door slid open and the pebble moved aside. Across the table sat the two Maghrebi and the Ewer woman. They had food and drink in front of them, and it was this simple thing that made him walk forward: he recognized what they were eating.

The woman looked at him, chewing slowly. He watched her swallow. The silence grew. The boy and the man glanced at each other, and Va wondered what they had been told.

The woman’s lips moved, and Va heard: ‘We were going to wait for you, but’ – and she held up a flat bread stuffed with meat and vegetables – ‘we didn’t know how long you were going to be.’

When he didn’t move, she poured him a drink and pushed it across the table towards him.

‘You’re welcome to join us.’

There was a chair. When he sat cautiously in it, it moved under him. He started, then settled again under the others’ watchful eyes. He picked up the cup, sniffed its contents. It was as the angel said: beer.

And good beer at that.

CHAPTER 37

IT FELT LIKE he had been away too long. Benzamir slid himself into the pilot’s chair and marvelled at the way his body eased into the contours of the seat. All the places he had travelled to, on foot, on camels, by ship, by carpet. Nothing compared to this.

‘Show me,’ he said, and the space in front of him turned hazy. Half the flight deck disappeared and he was looking out over the world. The sun was setting to his right, and the terminator drew a line down the middle of the Pacific. He was heading into the dark.

Once, the view that would have greeted him would have been vibrant: bright baubles of cities hung together on chains of light stretching off towards the horizon, and an elegant tower reaching from the surface to the stars, spotted with luminous insects that crawled over its face.

Everything had gone: the tower had fallen, the bulbs that burned had been extinguished. The land was a vast, blank canvas for someone to write their name large across. Benzamir was determined that it wasn’t going to be any of the traitors.

‘Ari? Anything?’

‘We haven’t been scanned. There’s no broadcast signal from anywhere on the planet. And there’s still no sign of Persephone Shipsister. She isn’t in orbit, and her drive signature is absent. I’m worried, Benzamir.’

‘She turned traitor too. Perhaps she’s too ashamed of what she’s done.’ He looked at Earth as it rushed under him.

‘There is something I need to tell you. I’ve been meaning to for a while. I didn’t know how important it would turn out to be.’

Benzamir’s view grew dark, and a vector map bloomed in its place. In it, Ariadne, smaller, faster, was cutting a chord away from rho Cancri, and Persephone was ahead of her on a different path. Given time, she would have caught the larger ship up, but time was precisely what she didn’t have.

It had started as nothing more than a futile chase that was bound to end in failure, but Benzamir had asked for targeting solutions anyway. The city-ship was keeping the rebels talking, and Persephone’s o-space engines were quiet.

Persephone was at extreme range, almost a light-minute distant, but she thought that she wouldn’t be shot at while the human factions were still in contact. The spectrograph showed a hit, but by the time the information had got back to Benzamir, she’d jumped.

There was no way of following a ship in o-space, and Ariadne had turned for home.

‘Why do you keep torturing yourself with this?’ said Benzamir. ‘You fired at your renegade shipsister. You shouldn’t have had to do that, but we made the decision together that it was for the best.’

‘It was for the best,’ she said. ‘I flinched. I could have burned her through. I ought to have, but I didn’t. The guilty would have died and the innocent lived.’ She paused, not for thought but for agony. ‘I have failed you.’

Benzamir sat in thought for a long time and eventually realized that her mistakes were sadly all too human.

‘Peace, Ari. Peace.’

‘It would have been so much better if we hadn’t needed to come here in the first instance, any of us. How are we going to restore Va’s lost brothers? How do we repair the damage to the Kenyan empire? What of spaceships over Great Nairobi and drop-pods? Answer me, Benzamir. What are we going to do?’

Benzamir watched the arrows on the map, the line that marked the laser’s wave-front tunnelling through simulated space until it bisected the point that was the other ship, which then made tight, random manoeuvres before vanishing from the display. Persephone’s o-space vector had been calculated, the line searched, and nothing found. She and her crew of rebels had moved on.

‘And look what I’ve done,’ he said. ‘Personal force-field. Satellite navigation. Language modules, light-bees, o-bombs, lasers. Five contacts on board. We share the blame equally.’

‘You always said that the mission parameters were too strict, that you needed to be adaptable, flexible, able to improvise.’

‘You always disagreed.’

‘Perhaps your way has something to commend it after all.’

Benzamir dragged a half-smile from the depths. ‘Did we make all this happen then? Is all this a result of the choices we’ve made?’

‘I could argue Fate or Destiny. I could argue accident-by-design; that we subconsciously manipulated events so that we would end up at this point. Or we can just accept that we got here by a mix of chance and skill, and that this is, while not the best of all possible outcomes, where we are. So what would you do differently?’