Penny stood. ‘What do you mean? Have you found another “loose end”? Have you got some kind of proof?’

He smiled as she loomed over him. ‘Well, wasn’t it logical to at least look? If there is one ragged corner there could easily be more. So I looked. And—’

Stef said, ‘Is that why you brought us to France? Is there something you want to show us?’

‘I can do this virtually,’ he said. ‘Or it may be better if you travel physically and see for yourselves, with your own eyes.’

‘Later,’ they both said, their identical voices double-tracking.

‘Just show us,’ Stef said. ‘Please.’

Penny sat down, looking frankly scared.

Earthshine nodded, waved a hand, and the room dissolved.

CHAPTER 43

A footprint.

Yuri froze.

Beside him, Mardina pulled Beth close.

A human footprint, in the mud. Clear as day. Yuri could see the ball of the foot, the heel. He could count the toes.

‘Where there’s one print,’ Mardina murmured, ‘there are going to be others. Look, Yuri. That way . . .’ She pointed west across the arid country away from the lake.

The trail of prints was clearly visible, like shallow craters in the crusty ground, one after another, left, right. Off to the horizon.

‘Let’s get back to the ColU,’ Yuri said.

‘Right.’

As they headed, half-running, back around the lake, Beth’s excitement turned to alarm. ‘What is it? Have I done something wrong?’

‘No, sweetie,’ Mardina said. ‘Not at all.’

‘Is it that footprint? Is it somebody bad?’

‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Yuri said. He murmured to Mardina, ‘We’re scaring her.’

‘She’s a right to be scared.’

‘This shouldn’t be possible, should it? The Ad Astra drops were supposed to be too far apart.’

‘Yet it’s happened.’

They got back to their new campsite, still little more than a heap of supplies, the logs and beams and panels of their dismantled house, a mound of carefully manufactured terrestrial topsoil, other junk. Yuri rummaged until he found a crossbow and bolts. He already had his hunting knife tucked into his belt. ‘I’ll go and check it out. You look after Beth.’

Mardina curled her lip. ‘Go ahead, hero.’

Yuri picked up their one flare pistol, it still had a few cartridges left, and stuffed it into his tunic pocket. ‘Well, if I fire this, come and save me.’

‘I’ll save you, Daddy.’

‘Thank you, sweetie.’ He kissed the top of Beth’s head, grinned at Mardina with a confidence he didn’t feel, and set off.

He tracked back the way they had come. There was the first footprint, bright and sharp. Completely ignored by the builders nearby.

Without hesitating, he went further, following the track of prints across the dry country, heading steadily west, jogging, the crossbow in his hand. In the years since the stranding, Mardina had insisted they both practised with the crossbow until they were reasonably expert. Yuri hadn’t disagreed. There was nothing to shoot at round here, but you never knew. Now it looked as if that might pay off.

More humans! There had been times, especially before Beth had come along, when he had longed for other people to show up, somehow, somewhere – even his enemies, even arsehole Peacekeepers, even that smug bastard astronaut McGregor. He still felt that way sometimes. But now it was different; now he had Beth to shelter and protect. If there were other survivors of the drops down here, who knew what state they would be in? Who knew how they would react to him?

He had come to think of Per Ardua as his, he realised. His and his family’s. It made no sense, but there you were. Now he resented having to share it.

And he feared for his family. He had a mental image of the jilla builders’ efficient genocide: the imprisoning, the wordless, relentless butchery.

He stopped. Straight ahead of him now was a sandstone bluff, low, eroded, sticking out of the ground, a typical Arduan feature. And beside it, a figure, a single human being. He, she, was crouched by the bluff, digging into the ground with one hand – no, drinking, he saw, there must be a spring there, a pool.

He walked steadily forward. He held the crossbow at his side, loosely, his finger away from the trigger. He didn’t call out.

Soon enough the figure by the rock bluff spotted him. A slim woman, she stood up straight. She wore no shoes, trousers that were the cut-down remains of an orange jumpsuit, a black shirt that looked like half an astronaut’s uniform, and a homemade coolie hat made of stem bark, not unlike his own. She had lost one arm, amputated above the elbow, he saw, shocked. The tattoos on her face were solid black slabs, and seemed designed to emphasise the glare of her pale blue eyes.

He knew her. She was Delga, who he’d known on the ship, and on Mars before that. The snow queen of Eden.

Delga grinned at him. ‘Hello, ice boy.’

CHAPTER 44

Having met, they had to decide to go one way or the other. Yuri chose to walk west with Delga, towards her group, which she called ‘the mothers’, rather than back towards Mardina.

‘Only a few klicks,’ she said.

‘Yeah. We’re further away than that.’ That was a lie; in fact Mardina and Beth were a lot closer. His instinct was to obscure, to hide, to protect. Of course she might know all about his little group already.

Delga had aged, and life on Per Ardua had evidently toughened her; she looked scrawnier, more wrinkled, but strong, leathery. Her tattoos hadn’t faded, her face was just as blade-like, just as threatening. Despite the loss of that arm he was quite sure she’d have weapons available. As, indeed, he had.

He was trying to work through the shock. Just encountering another human being, any other human, here on this static world, changed everything. And now it turned out to be Delga.

Delga’s face was a tattooed mask, under a scalp shaven in elaborate whorls. Yuri barely knew her. He’d only come across her a couple of times on Mars. On the Ad Astra she’d been in the same hulk as him, but again he’d kept his distance. He’d wanted nothing to do with her products, her chain of contacts, her suppliers and users. The last time he’d seen her, he remembered now, she was leading a bunch of rebels up towards the ship’s bridge, after the arrival at Proxima. She was the type to have survived, he supposed.

He said now, ‘So what were you doing all the way out here?’

‘Stretching my legs. What do you think? The one thing this place does have is room, room to walk off until you’re over the horizon and alone. Can’t do that in a Martian hovel, right? Or in some hulk of a ship. Or on most of Earth these days, probably.’ She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘I come out this way for the water. The springs. And there’s a hollow a little further out that way, more springs, but it just got flooded.’

She must mean the hollow that now held the jilla lake.

She looked at him, shrewd, analytical. ‘You don’t know this area well.’

‘No. We’re on the move.’

She picked that apart. ‘We. Who, how many? How heavily armed? On the move. From where, to where?’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be sharing soon enough. You know, ice boy, of everybody in that dumb hulk I never picked you out as one of the survivors, here in the Bowl.’

The Bowl? The air ahead was misty; as they walked he thought he smelled water, but his view was blocked by a low rise, worn hills. ‘Why not me?’

‘Because, back in Eden, you came out of that cryo tank like you’d been dropped from the sky. You never fitted in, even on Mars. You didn’t make any contacts, you didn’t have any networks. You didn’t even have a way to pay off the Peacekeepers. We noticed you, though. The ice boy, right? Your name is Yuri. What the hell kind of a name is that?’