‘Damn you.’ Smartlenses do not prevent tears. ‘All right.’ She blew out a breath. ‘Perhaps I needed that.’

‘And perhaps I can’t imagine the stress you live under, in this place.’

Gunnarsson reached inside her plain garments and extracted a cloth-wrapped bundle. She folded back one corner, revealing a crystalline object. It looked like a spearhead. ‘It came from an archive chamber,’ she said. ‘Part of the Palace museum. The stores are filled with old stuff.’

‘Surely they check inventory.’

‘I replaced it with a quartz replica. Here.’

As he took it from her, deVries’s eyes widened.

‘Right,’ said Gunnarsson. ‘Hard not to feel it.’

‘But it’s a forgotten relic? Where the hell could it have come from?’

‘That’s going to take Labyrinth’s finest to work out. If they manage it.’

(Kenna cursed. Whatever she might have been once, her sensors picked up nothing untoward now.)

Then deVries switched his attention back to Gunnarsson’s welfare, and she unburdened herself by sharing stressful details of her life, but refusing deVries’s offer, clearly genuine, to extract her from Nulapeiron. ‘There’s opposition to the status quo,’ she said. ‘I’ve gathered some of them together and the group has a name, Grey Shadows, with an elected leader. Not me.’

Recruiting assets, running networks. Kenna remembered how that went.

Meeting over, deVries ascended to the part of the Palace he was staying in for the duration of his contract. The start date was immediate. Looking exhausted, his sleep-wake cycle clearly out of synch with this place, deVries performed a light stretching routine, ate a frugal meal delivered by a servitor, and went to bed, leaving his cloth-wrapped bundle on the bedside table.

His tu-ring nicely subverted the bedchamber’s inbuilt security system, so that it kept watch over him more than on him. But his espionageware remained unaware of Kenna’s system intrusion, subtle and deep: she had had five decades to work on it.

Motile fibres extruded from the wall.

For seconds, they sniffed the air for smartmiasmas, sensing nothing. Then they stretched out, growing microscopically fine as they extended all the way to the bedside table, to the cloth-wrapped package on it, and finally through the fabric.

It took an hour, while deVries slept but could have awoken at any time, to determine the shearing angle and the force required, and projection angles for collimated anti-sound to counter the tiny snap accompanying the act itself: the cutting off of a tiny sample.

Slowly, slowly, the motile fibres drew the minute crystal splinter back to the ornate wall; then the splinter was inside the quickstone, and the first stage of the operation was complete.

By capillary action, the crystal splinter moved within the Palace walls, with speed no longer an issue, only the need to keep it undetected as it travelled to the laboratory chambers, close to Kenna’s main components that remained, static as ever, in place.

There was no hurry now.

TWENTY-SIX

EARTH, 2154 AD

Jared Schenck was orphaned two days before his seventh birthday. The call came for Rekka at 7:32 in the morning, while Jared was asleep in her guest room, no doubt with his chocolate-brown teddy-bear in his arms. She was already up, even though it was Sunday, her limbering-up asanas complete, and about to drink her one and only espresso of the day.

‘No,’ Rekka told her wallscreen. ‘They can’t be dead. Not Randolf. Not Angela.’

She put down the tiny cup.

‘I’m so very, very sorry.’ Google Li, on screen, looked shocked herself. ‘It was only a short passenger hop, but they’re saying everyone on board was killed.’

Rekka stared at the door to Jared’s room.

‘Oh no.’

‘Do you want me to come over?’

In the seven years that Rekka had worked in Singapore, Google Li had not become a friend, but there was no real enmity. Google Li cared only what UNSA management thought of her; and provided you took that into account, you could at least deal with her as a colleague.

Jared’s door clicked open.

‘Auntie Rekka?’

He was holding the teddy bear.

‘Oh, honey.’ She turned to Google Li. ‘I’ll call you later.’

‘Do it any time. I mean any time.’

And then there was the stomach-wrenching task of telling a young boy that his parents were gone. It was one of those things you see on holodramas and hope never to have to do yourself; one of those dealing-with-tragedy procedures you don’t get to rehearse in advance, and wouldn’t want to.

‘They’re gone away,’ she told him. ‘Gone to . . .’ But she did not believe in heaven, because a single copy of software does not survive the immolation of the hardware it resides on; and she had a deep distrust of education founded on the concept of lies-to-children. ‘They don’t exist, Jared. Dead means gone for ever, and there’s never any way to—’

But then the sobbing took hold of her, and she crushed Jared to her, as he in turn hugged the bear, and he cried because she did, for he surely could not understand what she was telling him, not yet.

It would be Randolf and Angela’s continuing absence over the years and decades to come that would render meaning to untimely death.

Of course Jared’s biological parents were Amber and Mary. Amber was committed to her life as a Pilot, and deeply unhappy during her times on Earth, for her eye sockets were metallic I/O interfaces linking her to her ship, her occipital lobes and visual cortex having been nanovirally rewired for that purpose during the procedures that turned her into a Pilot.

Mary, absent from Jared’s life since before his first birthday, had contributed the rest of the DNA; and she had also stolen fractolon infusions from the long-preserved Ro McNamara cultures, so that Jared might be a true Pilot. That had still required Amber, who carried Jared inside her, to spend the final months secretly in mu-space, there to give birth to her beautiful, wonderful obsidian-eyed boy.

Jared’s legacy would be a golden universe unimaginable to ordinary humans, and yet he would be fully functional on Earth: a child of two continua.

Rekka was technically, legally, a friend of the family, still seeing Amber and shunning Mary, who had eloped with Rekka’s partner Simon. Randolf and Angela had been Rekka’s friends, and Rekka had introduced them to Amber and facilitated their adoption of Jared.

Until now, it had worked out perfectly.

As the month progressed, legal processes crept into action.

Given that Rekka had exactly zero rights where Jared was concerned, you could say that UNSA did everything right. The shocking thing was her own ambivalence: love and obligation on the one hand, against a deep conviction that she would be an awful stand-in mother. After all, had Rekka’s own mother not tried to kill Rekka along with herself? Was she not an accidental survivor of a Suttee Pavilion? And what kind of legacy was that? But she needed to know that Jared would be safe; and perhaps the UNSA welfare psychologists who talked to her picked up on that: Rekka left those meetings feeling reassured, without ever understanding what had been accomplished.

Perhaps, in retrospect, the same psych specialists were equally adept at manipulating Amber and Mary. Legally, it was the biological parents whose wishes counted now.

‘Zurich is supposed to be the best,’ said Amber, sitting in the tropical garden at the back of Rekka’s apartment block. ‘With Karyn McNamara in charge.’

It would be a long way for Rekka to visit; but the point of a residential school was that you saw children only on holidays, wasn’t it? She had no right to tell Amber what to choose.

It was now three weeks since the memorial service.

‘But I told the welfare people,’ Amber continued, ‘that Switzerland was too far for Auntie Rekka to travel to, and Sue, that’s Dr Chiang, told me that Kyoto is excellent. Better in some ways than Zurich.’