Текст книги "The Abyss Beyond Dreams"

Автор книги: Peter F. Hamilton

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‘Why would you cover a hill in metal?’ she asked as they put the tents up.

‘There is no reason for that,’ Nigel said. ‘But then, I don’t think it is a hill, either.’

‘What then?’

‘Some kind of ship. Nothing else it can be.’

‘Is that what the colony ships looked like?’

‘No. At least, not any human one I know of.’

That made her shudder.

Despite a hard night in the saddle, Kysandra could only doze through the long day. She was bursting for them all to get back on the horses and ride to the hill. Solve the mystery! Though some deeper, more cautious, part of her mind was urging her to turn round and gallop for Croixtown, sail cleanly down the river and be safe.

‘Do you want to go home?’

Kysandra snapped fully awake, staring belligerently at Nigel, who was lying on his mattress next to her. She tightened her shell immediately, annoyed that she’d been spilling her drowsy thoughts. Irritated with him, too, for studying them. ‘No!’ she snapped. ‘This is a mystery that even you don’t understand. I want to find the answer. I want to know what’s out there.’

Nigel grinned. ‘That’s my girl.’

They watered the horses and packed up the tents. This time the pace was less frantic than it had been that morning. They’d been travelling for ninety minutes, with the sun dropping close to the mountain peaks, when they found the first body. It was sprawled on a crude cart, made from what looked like a circular door of some kind with a glass porthole in the middle. Solid-looking hinge mechanisms had a melted appearance. Wheels were circles of crudely cut metal that were twisted and cracked, stuck on axles that were lashed to the hatch with filament. A couple of tarnished boxes lay nearby.

Kysandra didn’t want to look, but couldn’t resist. The wizened body was strange, its skin grey and taut, as hard as stone; wisps of straw-like hair swirled round the skull. Remnants of clothes seemed to be fused with the skin. There was only one boot, on the left foot; the right foot was bare, twisted at an odd angle.

‘Mummified beautifully,’ Nigel said to Fergus as she approached. The two of them were examining the body enthusiastically, poking modules into it. ‘That’s kind of inevitable, given the location.’

‘Is it . . . ?’ Kysandra took a breath, calming herself. ‘Is it human?’

Nigel turned to frown at her. ‘Of course.’

‘I mean: is it a Faller?’

‘Oh. Hard to tell. There’s not much left to do a biochemical analysis on. And, in any case, I still need to get my hands on a Faller to find out exactly what their biochemistry is.’

Kysandra shuddered. Who else but Nigel could casually say: I still need to get my hands on a Faller? She gave the metal hill a pensive glance. It was closer now, just over eight kilometres away. They’d determined its size, too: u-shadows working it out as five hundred metres wide at the base, and two hundred and sixty three metres high at the precarious-looking apex.

Nigel and Fergus turned the body over. Its arm broke off with a dull crack. Kysandra flinched and clamped her jaw together. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be weak, not now.

‘Female,’ Fergus proclaimed. He ran a scanner over the skull with its empty eye sockets. Heavily creased lips ringed a wide-open mouth, making Kysandra think the woman had died screaming – a last action steadfastly preserved by the desert environment.

‘Picking up traces. She had biononics. Commonwealth citizen, then.’ He gave Kysandra a reassuring grin. ‘Human.’

Russell opened one of the boxes. The lid crumbled out of his fingers. ‘Nothing much in here. Metal bottles and some dust.’

‘Food and water,’ Fergus said. ‘Too bad she didn’t make it very far.’

Nigel knelt beside the rickety cart, his eyes closed as he reviewed data from the modules he’d placed on the body. ‘Crud. She’s been out here for three thousand years. Whatever happened here, happened when the colony ships arrived.’ He stood up and faced the hill, squinting against the dying sunlight. ‘What the hell is that thing?’

Fergus ran his hand over the hatch/cart, tracing the broken hinges. ‘This is from some kind of space vehicle. A shuttle? Exopod, maybe?’

Kysandra saw it, actually saw the shock flare on Nigel’s face. She’d never seen that before. It was hard to believe he could be shocked. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his shell weakened enough to let out a corresponding pulse of dismay. He stood up slowly and pulled his goggles down to stare at the hill. ‘Oh crap,’ he said quietly. ‘The profile. Look at the profile. It’s segmented. That isn’t some geological rock spike, it’s a pile.’

Fergus made no attempt to hide his flinch. ‘It can’t be. That size? There’d be . . .’

‘If it’s solid,’ Nigel said. ‘Well over a million of them. Which means the fabric is all parachutes – not tents. It fits, dammit! Where the hell did a million exopods come from? The Commonwealth never manufactured that many.’

‘What?’ Kysandra shouted. ‘What are you two talking about?’ The way they were sharing thoughts, how weirdly unified they were, frightened her. Because they so clearly knew something was wrong. Very, very wrong. ‘Tell me!’

‘Jymoar was mistaken,’ Nigel said sombrely. ‘It’s not ten thousand bodies out here. There’s going to be more, a lot more. You need to be ready for that.’

They found the next body ten minutes later. Female again. It was on a cart almost the same as the first: identical hatch, but with different improvised wheels. There was no sign of them; they’d flaked away to dust down the millennia.

Over the following kilometre they encountered another eight of the carts with bodies. Those were just the ones lying along their path. Retina zoom showed them similar carts scattered across the desert.

‘All female,’ Fergus announced as he examined the sixth. ‘And they all have the same severe damage to their right ankle. The fracture patterns match perfectly, which is absurdly odd.’

There were few carts after that. Now the desert sand was littered with the same identical female body. She’d crawled along through the sand and pointed stones with her ruined ankle, always hauling along a box or bag. And how desperate would you have to be to do that? Often, the woman had died with her arms outstretched, as if reaching for something. Many were curled up. In defeat?

Kysandra cried quietly to herself for a couple of kilometres as the sun went down. The night obscured all the bodies lying away from their direct route, but the horses were having to weave about constantly to avoid stepping on the desiccated carcasses.

So she rode on in silence, her tears all dried up. She was completely numb, her feelings banished to somewhere deep in her mind. This much death was impossible to grasp. Instead she ignored it, and focused only on following Nigel’s horse as it picked its way across this pitiless land of corpses. In front of her, the metal hill grew steadily closer. She imagined this was what it must be like for a soul arriving at Uracus itself. Eternal anguish was unavoidable. You could watch it coming, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Nothing.

With the nebulas shimmering sweetly in the clear air above, they halted the horses five hundred metres from the base of the hill. The bodies were lying so close together now that the animals would be unable to avoid walking on them.

‘Wait here,’ Nigel said kindly.

‘I’m staying with you,’ she replied firmly.

So she and Nigel and Fergus walked the remaining distance to the hill, treading round the bodies where they could. As they grew closer, they couldn’t avoid stepping on the limbs any more, they were packed so close together. She felt them crunch and crumble beneath her boots. The baked three-thousand-year-old bodies were tragically brittle, shattering at the slightest touch.

Soon they were trying to dodge venerable, deteriorating pieces of equipment as well as corpses. The ground was jamming up with survival equipment cases, their contents of bottles and tools and cracked powercells and wisps of clothing and tarnished axes and ragged photovoltaic sheets spilling out, amalgamating to form a rigid hardware stratum for the bodies to sprawl across.

They stopped before they reached the base, where the bodies were piled up on top of each other, producing an embankment five or six times her own height. Here the majority had clearly fallen to their death from the tricky slopes of the hill above, to be mummified in contorted positions, legs and arms snapped and bent in grotesque angles, necks and spines broken. Every awful lonely death perfectly preserved by the desert.

Kysandra lifted her gaze above the gruesome mound of desiccated skin and bone that was melding together, up to the metallic structure of the hill itself. It was a stack made up from spheres about three metres in diameter, though it was difficult to distinguish them. This close to the base, the weight of the spheres above had crushed and squeezed the lower layers out of shape. But like the female body they’d brought to this world, they were all the same, all with a single bulging oval window at the front, a circular hatch that hung open, and inert clusters of disturbing tentacles that Kysandra’s implanted memories identified as electromuscle. Her ex-sight probed into a few of the artefacts, finding a maze of wires and pipes, the heat-wrecked hardware of complex systems.

‘What are these things?’ she asked.

‘They’re exopods,’ Nigel told her. ‘Larger spaceships carry them to perform maintenance work outside. In an emergency, they can aerobrake into an atmosphere, and land.’

‘So they all landed here together?’ Kysandra asked, desperate to understand. If she understood, she knew she wouldn’t be so afraid. ‘Why did they all bring the same woman? Is she . . . ?’ Her memory implants held the concept, one she’d never bothered to consider, it was so . . . so, Commonwealth. ‘A clone? Did she clone herself?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nigel said as his shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’

6

They made camp half a kilometre from the hill of exopods. Fergus and Russell cleared an area of the dissolving bodies as best they could, creating an unpleasant cloud of gritty dust in the process. Once that was done, Kysandra actually welcomed the distraction that came from setting up the awning and the tents. It was familiar, something useful she could abandon herself to.

She’d just started to give her horse some water when Nigel and Fergus both looked up in unison. That fast nervy reaction made her worry, but then everyone was edgy. Her u-shadow was telling her one of Nigel’s sensor modules was sending out an alert, supporting a stream of fresh data. Displays appeared in her exovision, but even with the u-shadow tabulating them neatly they were incomprehensible.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘Localized quantum field fluctuation,’ Nigel answered. ‘Spike’s over. They’ve reverted.’

‘Oh right.’ His casual, confident answer was obscurely reassuring after days of uncertainty. Of course, what it actually meant was another thing altogether. Her physics memory implant wasn’t terribly helpful, something about quantum fields underpinning spacetime, and some reference codes for further memory implants. ‘Does that happen much?’

‘Never. Not in the outside universe, anyway. In the Void – who knows?’

That was when the sound began – a distant clattering and banging. It made Kysandra jump. The desert had been devoid of sound since the moment they started trekking across it. Sound was alien here. Shocking.

They all stopped what they were doing, staring round, trying to pinpoint the noise. Kysandra realized it was coming from the exopods, and well up the hill if she was any judge. The clattering went on for a few moments more, then stopped.

‘What caused that?’ Madeline asked anxiously. ‘It’s the monster, isn’t it?’

‘No monster,’ Nigel said. ‘I’d say an exopod shifted about. It certainly sounded like that.’

‘Has another one landed?’ Kysandra asked. She studied the top of the hill, her infra-red scan trying to find an exopod that was a different temperature to all the others. They all remained stubbornly identical.

‘No such thing as coincidence,’ Nigel said. ‘Whatever instigated the quantum fluctuation knocked the exopods about.’

‘The monster,’ Madeline said in dread. ‘It’s coming for us.’

‘Now listen, all of you,’ Nigel said forcefully. ‘There is no monster. These corpses, everything we’ve seen here, it’s all three thousand years old. Whatever happened, happened back then. Today, here, now, you are perfectly safe.’

Whatever the sound was, it didn’t come again. They carried on putting the tents up. Kysandra kept using her ex-sense and infrared vision to scan around, making sure nothing was creeping out of the darkness. Just in case.

Once the tent was up, she went inside and took her robes off, slipping into the baggy white shirt. Nigel came in and unwrapped his turban, but left the rest of his sand-encrusted robe on.

‘What now?’ she asked, sitting on the mattress, hugging her knees.

‘We wait until daylight. Even with all the senses I’m enriched with – nice irony, that – I do need to have a clear field of vision to assess things properly.’

‘And when it’s light?’

‘Fergus and I will start a decent, detailed investigation of the exopods. There are well over a million of them piled up out there, stuffed full of solid state components. Sheer probability is that some processors and memory blocks can be salvaged, especially those that haven’t been crushed. And I saw a lot of array tablets jumbled up with the bodies. There have to be some files somewhere I can retrieve and download into my storage lacuna.’

She managed a weak smile. ‘I’m so scared,’ she confessed, on the verge of tears again. ‘Something killed that woman. All of her.’

‘That’s the bigger puzzle,’ he said. ‘Why so many? Nobody has over a million clones. It’s insanity. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t as simple as a monster.’

‘Is it going to get us?’ she asked, hating how pathetic she sounded.

‘No.’ And he actually grinned, squatting down beside her. ‘I really meant it when I said we’re perfectly safe. This is probably the time to tell you. You see, the people on Querencia found out something else about the Void. Something utterly amazing.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a kind of time travel possible in here.’

It was no good; her mind had gone blank, unable to process what she’d just heard him say. ‘Time travel?’

‘Yes. You know, when you travel into the past.’

‘You can time travel in the Void?’

‘Yes. If you know how, and if your mind is strong enough. I tried it once, the day I landed. I can just do it; it takes a hellish amount of concentration, and I could only manage to perceive a couple of hours. But I went back in time. My first couple of encounters with Ma’s boys at the Hevlin Hotel didn’t go too well. But the third time, I knew what didn’t work, like trying to reason with them, so I just started straight in with domination. And . . . here we are. So you see, if anything does start to go catastrophically wrong, we travel back in time and avoid the danger.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re just saying that to try and make me feel safe. Nice try, though.’

‘Listen, outside in the real universe, time is a one-way flow. We learned how to manipulate that flow in a wormhole, slow it down so we can take a relative jump forward if we want, but it is impossible to go back. Always. But here, the Void is different. Remember I told you it is made up of many layers?’

‘Yes.’

‘This layer, where we exist, is only one of them. The Heart, where you say your soul lives on in glory after death, that’s another. But there are two more layers that are critical here: the memory layer and the creation layer. The memory layer stores everything: you, your thoughts, your body’s atomic structure. And the creation layer, well, that can take a version of you from any moment of your life and physically manifest it.’

‘I can go into the past?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You mean I can go back and stop Dad from going on that sweep?’ Tears began to prick her eyes.

Nigel sighed. ‘I can only manage to go a few hours, I’m sorry. There was one person we knew of who could travel back decades, but he lived on Querencia a thousand years ago.’

‘I see.’ She dropped her head so he couldn’t see the misery that was written there.

‘The point is, if you produce a – I don’t know what to call it – a short circuit between the memory layer and the creation layer, you basically reset this whole section of the Void to the moment you’ve chosen. But here’s the important thing: anyone who does that remembers the future they just left. No one else does. You quite literally become the centre of the universe.’

‘Riiight.’

‘Stand up.’ Nigel stood and beckoned to her.

She thought about ignoring him, but this was Nigel . . . She stood up, and he took her hands in his.

‘I don’t know if I can take you with me, but—’

Kysandra perceived him gifting her a complex vision and let it stream into her mind. It was Nigel’s mental perception, but so finely focused she could hardly distinguish anything. He was perceiving the tent with the two of them in it, but pushing further, into everything. Pushing hard. And there behind the phantasm shapes and shadows that were her eldritch world lay a second image, identical to the first. Nigel’s sense probed at that, and another more distant image was revealed. Another, and another. They began to sink through them, and she saw herself shift back down to her knees where she’d been a few moments ago.

Somewhere in the real world she heard a gasp escape from her own lips. Then the images were racing past. Played out in reverse was their whole conversation. Nigel left the tent. Then she was alone sitting on the mattress having a good old wallow in misery. Then earlier still; she was taking off the shirt. The robe rose up from its puddle on the floor into her hand. And the perception froze. Her mind twisted through the image until she was looking out through her own eyes. The real world came rushing back in and she dropped the robe to the floor. Hot air licked over her skin. Kysandra yelped in shock.

‘Told you so,’ Nigel said.

He was standing at the far end of the tent. He’d materialized there.

Kysandra screamed. Then stopped, her hand flew to her mouth and she stared at him in astonishment. She gave a feverish little giggle. ‘Crudding Uracus!’

‘Are you all right?’ Fergus ’pathed from outside.

‘We’re doing just fine,’ Nigel ’pathed back.

‘It’s real,’ she grunted. Then gave a start. She was standing there in front of him in sweaty underwear – and nothing else. One arm hurriedly slapped across her bra, and her teekay yanked her baggy shirt from the duffel bag.

‘Pardon me,’ Nigel said in amusement and turned his back.

She slipped into her shirt.

‘So now do you believe me when I say we’re not in any danger?’

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, crudding yes, do I ever!’ This was more fantastic than finding out he was from another universe, that he had a spaceship, that she could learn all the knowledge of the Commonwealth. More fantastic than anything.

‘So . . .’ She grasped at words. ‘So, like, that piece of time we just lived through, stopped? And we came back here?’

‘Yes, and only you and I know those five minutes ever happened. Everyone on Bienvenido who died in those five minutes is alive and about to die again. Every baby that was born is about to come into the world again. Every drunk falling over – bang, ouch. Everyone who got kissed . . . is going to get kissed again.’

‘But they don’t know.’

‘They don’t know because it hasn’t happened for them. It never did.’

‘Nigel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please, don’t ever go back to before you met me. Don’t let me live that life. Please.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘But if you ever become strong enough to go back to rescue your father, then you go right ahead.’

‘Uh huh.’ She was already trying to use her ex-sight the way he had. It was unbelievably difficult. She could barely perceive an instant ago.

‘So, do you understand that we’re not in any immediate danger out here?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ She smiled, actually meaning it.

Nigel sat down on his mattress. ‘There’s another reason I told you about that ability.’

‘Yes?’

‘The creation layer. I think it’s glitching somehow. I think that’s what’s happened here. Somehow, for some reason, it recreated the exopod and the woman time and time again. Only on this occasion, it doesn’t reset everything else.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no idea. But it’s the only logical explanation. Her body has the same ankle damage every time; that tells me she was constantly recreated from one specific moment.’

‘So the Void must still be doing that?’

‘I’m not sure. All the bodies we’ve seen have been here for the same length of time. That’s a paradox – or it would be in the universe outside. There’s something very strange happening here. And that’s what I’m going to try to understand. Anything which can affect and alter the structure of the Void is tremendously important.’

*

In theory, Nigel declared next morning, the exopods at the top of the pile should be the newest. Their systems would be in better shape than their squashed and smashed cousins at the bottom. They might be able to get some useful data from them.

So Fergus started off at first light. He clambered slowly up the pile, gingerly testing every foothold to make sure it could take his weight, that the whole mound wouldn’t suddenly shift and an avalanche of pods come tumbling down on top of him.

Kysandra couldn’t bear to watch. She winced at each move. Constantly scanned the surrounding exopods with her ex-sight for any signs of instability. Sent ’path after ’path telling him to be careful.

‘Go away,’ Nigel told her eventually. ‘You’re distracting him, and more importantly, me. Leave him alone and go find me some intact array tablets.’

She and Madeline started walking a circuit of the exopod hill. The embankment of the woman’s mummified bodies was the same all the way round, as was her tight-packed sprawl over the cluttered caseloads of emergency survival hardware.

‘There might not be a monster here,’ Madeline said, ‘but this place is cursed. The women that died here, their souls screamed and screamed their bitterness and fear as they were cast into Uracus. That anguish will linger here even after her last corpses have turned to dust.’

Kysandra gave her a sullen glance, but couldn’t disagree.

Nothing responded to the pings sent by Kysandra’s u-shadow – not that she’d expected any replies. As they made their way round the hill, she let her ex-sight flow over the technological wreckage, searching for array tablets. Unopened cases were her best chance, Nigel had decided. She located several buried amid the debris, and she and Madeline had to grit their teeth and walk over mummies that were pulverized beneath their boots. Once they pulled the cases out, the arrays they contained didn’t seem any different to those exposed to the desert, their electronics no more active than the sand, but she put them in her bag and carried on.

She almost missed it. One more axe amid the jumble of survival supplies and the horror of merged bodies. Nothing unusual there. But this axe blade had slammed through one of the skulls. Kysandra focused her perception. She wasn’t wrong. The mummification process had welded the axe in place.

Now she’d seen one, she started to look for more. Quite a few mummies had similarly damaged skulls, some with the axe still in, some without. Other mummies had loops of filament wrapped round their necks. Strangled.

It took them nearly fifty minutes to complete a circuit. When they got back, Fergus was at the top of the hill, studying the exopods there.

‘Nothing different,’ he ’pathed. ‘The decay is identical. They’ve all been here the same amount of time. But they must have landed one after the other.’

‘Paradox,’ Nigel sent back, indecently cheerful.

‘She was killing herself,’ Kysandra told him as she handed over the bag full of arrays. ‘She was an axe murderer, among other methods.’

‘This place,’ Nigel said. ‘There’s too much death here. It’s haunted.’

‘I don’t think her soul stayed behind, not any of them.’

‘Not that kind of haunting, not a Void-engineered one. This is purely human. She left her imprint on the sand and in the exopods. How could she not? There were so many of her. Spiritually, this reeks of her.’

‘Madeline said something similar.’

‘Did she now? Maybe there’s hope for her yet.’

‘Do you need me for anything?’ Kysandra asked. ‘I thought I might go back to the tent.’

‘Sure,’ he said gently. ‘Have a rest. I don’t think there’s actually much more we can do here. We’ll gather some memory processors from exopods and see what we can do with them when we get back to the Skylady.’

Inside the tent, Kysandra stripped off her robes, trying to contain the sand that fell out of them. By now, there wasn’t a square centimetre of the tent that wasn’t contaminated with sand. It was even in her sleeping bag, despite her best efforts to shake it out.

She lay down on top of the mattress and withdrew her ex-sight. It wasn’t that she couldn’t help at a practical level; there were a dozen housekeeping jobs that needed doing every day while they were camped. In truth, she simply didn’t want to spend any time outside where she couldn’t ignore the mound of corpses. In here, confined by the bright walls of the tent fabric, she could shut out the horror. Pretend her little bubble of existence was somewhere else entirely.

‘You were right,’ her whisper told the memory of Jymoar. ‘This desert can drive you mad.’

Her u-shadow produced a list of books she’d loaded in her storage lacunas from Skylady’s memory. She picked one called The Hobbit, and started reading.

*

It was past midnight when the noise woke Kysandra. The same as the previous evening – a pronounced clang, metal scraping raw against metal. Then silence.

She was sitting upright, heart pounding, sending out her ex-sight to probe the night beyond the tent.

‘It’s all right,’ Fergus said. He was sitting close to the tent, rifle cradled across his lap. ‘Nothing here.’

‘Humm,’ Nigel said. He was lying on his mattress next to her. A module close by had a purple light winking steadily. It was sending out a stream of raw data.

Just like last night.

‘Was that another quantum event?’ she asked as the nonsense tables slipped across her exovision.

‘Yes. The same as yesterday. Except it’s not precisely a daily event. The last one was twenty-seven hours and twenty-nine minutes ago.’

‘Is there something inside the exopod pile, some piece of machinery that’s still working?’

‘I’m not ruling anything out, but if it’s there, it was amazingly inert during the day for us not to detect anything at all.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Hey, it’s okay. This place freaks me out, too.’

‘When are we leaving?’

‘Tomorrow. Promise, okay? Fergus and I will finish off during the day, then we’ll pack up and start the trek back. We’ll be back at Blair Farm in three or four weeks.’

Kysandra exhaled loudly. ‘Thank you.’

*

Most of Croixtown turned out to greet them as they rode back into the village. Sitting up in her saddle, her clothes filthy, sand itching everywhere, a sunhat flopping down over her eyes, Kysandra couldn’t help but grin at the sight of them. Men, women and children gathering around, gazing up, half in awe, half in fear.

The mayor stood in front of them, flanked by several tough-looking men. She saw Jymoar hurrying through the crowd behind him, smiling in relief and delight. She grinned at him, gave a small wave.

‘We are happy to see you again, señor,’ the mayor said to Nigel. He looked awkward. Apprehension was leaking through his shell. ‘Nobody has ventured into the Desert of Bone in living memory.’

‘It is not a place you want to go,’ Nigel replied solemnly. ‘I will never return there.’

‘Is it true? Are there mountains of bones at the centre?’

‘There are bodies there,’ Nigel said loudly. The villagers let out a collective gasp. ‘A great many bodies. Thousands, probably.’ He gifted them the image of the mummified face, forever arrested with its mouth open, teeth amalgamated with the lips. ‘They are incredibly old, killed thousands of years ago. We don’t know by what.’

‘Were they eaten?’

‘No. The bodies were all intact. There are no Fallers in the Desert of Bone, no nests.’

A few people applauded. Everyone was smiling openly now, and began to press forward, eager for details – mainly about the monster. ‘We did hear strange sounds at night,’ Nigel said gravely, ‘but we never saw anything.’

Kysandra shook her head at his consummate showmanship. He would say nothing that was an outright lie, yet by the time he was finished, no one from Croixtown would ever travel into the desert, and the word would spread among the other ranchero villages skirting the savannah, reinforcing the legend. The exopods would remain inviolate for another century. Or, ‘Long enough for me to sort this mess out,’ as Nigel said on the trek back. She thought that pure bravado. But . . .

She climbed down from her horse wearily and handed the reins to Russell before slipping though the crowd. Jymoar was standing in the same place as she’d seen him, his face anxious, yet optimism burnt hot behind his shell.

‘Told you I’d make it back,’ she said with a taunting grin.

He took an uncertain step forward. ‘You did. I never doubted you, señorita. Not you.’

She leaned forward quickly and gave him a small kiss. And he was the one who blushed. ‘I’m a mess,’ she said ruefully.

‘Never!’

Kysandra laughed, and gestured down at herself. The brown suede riding skirt was creased with mud and water stains. Her long boots were coated in sand, inside and out. White blouse had turned grey, made worse by the unpleasant sweat stains. ‘Stop being gallant. I haven’t washed since we left, and that was weeks ago.’

‘You’ve been through a desert,’ he said. ‘And you still look amazing.’

‘Come on.’ She started walking towards the Gothora. When she took her floppy hat off, her hair barely moved, it had so much dirt caked in.

Arriving at the gangplank, she was inexplicably glad to see the old steamship. It resembled a stability she hadn’t known she missed, a stolid representative of her world and the way she had lived before Nigel.