‘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.