Hard to tell. And all Lord Katchatka said when she and Luc entered the study was, “That was quick.”

“This is Luc d’Alambert,” said Lady Neku. She watched the boy look round the huge room, searching for the source of the voice. “It’s in your head,” she told Luc, when he started looking for a second time.

“How do you do,” Luc said.

“Well enough,” said the voice. “All things considered.” It sounded amused about something. “I’ve got a question for you…”

Luc waited.

“What did you see during the drop?”

What Luc can still see. It was all Lady Neku could do not to answer for him. She stopped shuffling her feet long enough to peer through a window in front of her. It was a very high window, arched and with little marble pillars to support the curves where they dipped in the middle and then soared away.

“Sand,” said Luc, having considered the question carefully. Sand was all anyone saw when they looked at Katchatka Segment. Sand, mud, cracked earth, and a rotting lake. There was life in the lake, so people told him. Mud skippers, maybe. Evolution was going backwards. At least life was being killed off in reverse order of appearing, or something. As he’d already told Lady Neku, that part of future history went straight over his head.

“What was there before the sand?”

“More sand?”

The room sighed. It seemed that before the sand had been mountains, formed when two continental plates collided. For a while, the lake had been a sea; not quite big enough to be an ocean, but perfectly able to support trade in a city that sprawled along its western edge: until one of the overhead wires making Nawa-no-ukiyo had snapped and the sky torn, letting in what High Strange and every node like it had been created to hold at bay, the solar-induced disaster of a planet in decline.

End days, Lord Katchatka called it.

“You know why this happened?”

Luc blushed.

“It was before your time,” said the voice. “Before even mine. The truth can be useful sometimes.”

“The sails,” said Luc. “They broke.” He meant the sky sheets high above Schloss Omga, the ones controlled by Lady Neku’s family. The 33.2 million square miles of mirrored gossamer that constituted Katchatka’s responsibility.

“All sails break,” the voice said. “Such is the nature of fragile things. Our failure was not to act until it was too late.”

“It’s not,” said Luc. “My father says the sails can still be mended.”

“Using what?” asked the voice.

The boy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You know what else puzzles me?”

It was obvious that Luc didn’t, just as it was obvious that the voice had every intention of telling him. “Why you are marrying my daughter.”

Opening his mouth, Luc shut it again.

“Yes, I know,” said the voice. “You’re marrying her because that’s what you’ve been told to do. And that’s also why she’s marrying you…”

Lady Neku and Luc looked at each other. “But that doesn’t answer the question, does it? What would a family as cryozoic as the d’Alamberts want with one old woman, three boys, and a half-wit girl? Because that is what’s left of Katchatka’s rulers.”

A voice woke her in the darkness. As unexpected as it was unfamiliar, until gut-level instincts caught up with the obvious and Lady Neku realised it was Luc, sounding close enough to be in the same room.

“You awake?”

Pulling herself out of sleep, she sat up and glared around her, even as she realised how absurd that was. Alarms would have gone off long before Luc reached this far inside her private quarters.

Only she was still in the castle. A graphite silver night visible through the high windows of her father’s study. She seemed to be wrapped in a silver blanket and lying on leather cushions taken from three different chairs.

“You must be awake,” said Luc. “You’re sitting up.”

And then Lady Neku saw him, in the half darkness beside her, also wrapped in a silver blanket. Although she was glad to notice it was a separate blanket.

“Are you scared about tomorrow?” he asked.

No, thought Lady Neku, as she wondered what tomorrow was meant to bring and then remembered. Banquets, marriage, and a public bedding. Compared to most of her life, it would be simplicity itself.

“Of course not,” she said.

“I am.” Luc’s voice was thin, unashamedly lonely. “Tell me again,” he said. “How your family was first chosen…”

The idea to cut the moon into segments came from one of Lady Neku’s ancestors peeling an orange, either that or it came from the province of Satsuma itself. One was a family holding in pre-Meiji Japan, later folded into the Kagoshima prefecture, the other a citrus fruit with a high tolerance to cold.

Japan, Kagoshima, and cold Lady Neku knew only as concepts. She knew the whiteness of satsuma blossom and the smoothness of the leaves from personal experience. Almost all of the plantings in the Stroll Garden bore fruit; the few that didn’t were saved by the medicinal qualities of their sap, leaves, or bark. The original culling of plants had been carried out with a ruthlessness Lady Neku admired but wondered if she would be strong enough to imitate.

The Stroll Garden held sakura, plum, and satsuma. The willow only survived because of its ability to lower fever, and even kouyou, the flaming red foliage of autumn, so loved by Lady Neku’s grandfather, had not been enough to save the maple. She’d seen the pictures. Well, one of them. A woodblock print so ghostly that leaves fell across rice paper in a waterfall of fading ink.

It was possible that the idea to segment the moon came from Satsuma itself. A hard core of her family had taken to referring to the vanished province by its old name, which was their way of rejecting the original Meiji settlement and the abolition of the provinces.

The fact the destruction of the shogunate had happened in 1851, nearly seven hundred years before, they regarded as irrelevant. After all, the world was considering the first, and quite probably, the greatest exploration of time ever undertaken. What were a few centuries when millennia were about to be opened?

Lady Neku shook her head. So naïve. So ridiculously childish. Even a half-wit like her could see that opening up time was never going to work like that. All that shit about avoiding the Great White and sending humanity to explore its own future history. It was obvious what time shifting was really good for.

Where better to house every criminal and political refugee than here, the end of the world? As for exploring the future of human history, that might have been possible if whatever humanity became hadn’t already left by the time their visitors arrived.

The area of South London through which Maxim drove was not quite suburb and not really inner city. A sea of small white-faced villas, redbrick shops, and pubs filled the gaps between old Victorian houses, all of which had been converted to flats.

A handful of shops on a run-down estate were still in business and one of the pubs, but most of the ground floor flats stood empty, with studded steel plates sealing doors and windows against squatters. Signs warned that guard dogs patrolled the area and the estate was awaiting redevelopment. To judge from the faded state of the signs it had been waiting quite a while.

When Maxim turned up a narrow alley before exiting into a busy road, Kit felt obscurely relieved. As if the grey concrete of the estate behind him was one thing too many.

Time had not been kind to the local high street, or maybe it was town planners. The people who lived there, however, made do. East European kabaks had replaced most of the old kebab shops in the fifteen years since Kit had been anywhere near this part of the city, and newsagents had sprouted icons and window posters written in Cyrillic, although they still had the metal grilles. A Methodist church on the corner had been made over in Russian Orthodox style and a crowd of old women were spilling from its door.