Eli Tanjung had killed herself with a tailored neurotoxin favoured by the Red Brigade. It suggested that Tony's guess about the identity of the claim jumpers had been correct, but that counted for nothing when he stood before an extraordinary session of the family council. He was commended for his actions in locating and neutralising the traitor, but his plea that the wizards should be given more time to complete their work and his offer to travel to Dry Salvages and confront Raqle Thornhilde were brushed aside. A majority vote supported Opeyemi's proposal that the wizards should be transferred to the care of the Commons police as soon as possible 'My uncle broke his word,' Tony told Danilo. 'I did as we agreed. He should have supported me. Instead, he whispered in people's ears before the meeting, telling them that Eli Tanjung's duplicity meant that we could not trust any of the wizards, and spreading lies about the dangers of the research. And now everything will be lost. The police will shut down the work and exile the wizards to some remote facility on an otherwise deserted planet. That is what they do with any discovery that threatens the status quo. They lock it away, or they destroy it. And the funny part is this: I helped them. I blew up the stromatolites left behind on the slime planet, to keep them out of the hands of the claim jumpers. Now the police will get rid the rest.'

Tony had drunk too much gin, knew that he was letting all his anger and self-pity show, and didn't care. He had not told Danilo about the eidolon in his head, had not told Ayo or anyone else, either. He felt wretched and soiled.

When Danilo said that the news feeds were claiming that Tony was a hero, Tony told him that it was the family's spin. 'I failed. I failed to take the traitor alive. And I failed the wizards. I had a contract with them, and I have reneged on it. My ship will be taken from me, and sooner or later I'll be shunted into an off-world marriage . . . And then I will lose you, because I will have to go and live with my husband. That is how my family gets rid of embarrassments like me.'

'Well, but at least you won't starve,' Danilo said. 'Even if the worst comes to the worst you'll still have everything most people can only dream of.'

'I won't have you.'

Danilo smiled. 'You're sentimental because you're drunk.'

Tony took the singer's hands in his. 'I mean it.'

'You'll forget me soon enough.'

'Never. There's a freighter coming in two weeks. I could have a word with its captain, arrange to stow away on it. Run off to another world.'

'That isn't something people like me do.'

'Of course it is. How do you think your ancestors got here?'

'And anyway, your family would find us. And what would happen to me then?'

'I'll make sure nothing ever happens to you, Danilo. I swear.'

He would buy his lover a cafe, or a bar. Make sure he was set up for life. It was not much by way of making amends, but it was the least he could do before his family found a way of exiling him. But when he told Danilo about his plans, as they held each other in the dark, the singer said that he didn't need his help, that he knew how to look after himself. And anyway, why was Tony talking of leaving?

'I am talking about losing you.'

'Silly man. I'm right here,' Danilo said, and put his hand on him, and tenderly squeezed.

'Yes. Yes, you are.'

But Tony knew they had only a little time left.

Two days later, Ayo invited him to go hunting in the hills with her and her eldest son, Chidike. They hiked up through plantations of pine and larch into the forest of native trees (although they weren't really native to Skadi, had been introduced ten or a hundred thousand years ago by an Elder Culture known as the Constant Gardeners), where spires clad in leathery black plates soared skywards, sprouting clumps of feathery yellow sporangia at their midpoints, topped with mops of filmy orange and red banners. Chidike walked ahead of his mother and Tony, a crossbow slung over his right shoulder. Ayo was likewise armed, even though this was more of a ramble than a serious hunting trek. Two forest rangers and a pair of house servants followed at a discreet distance.

Tony told his sister about his latest plan: he could join the Commons police, sign up and ship out, and enhance the family's honour by serving on the line.

Ayo smiled. 'We already have two hostages. We don't need another.'

'Abass and Henry are hardly hostages.'

Abass was a police flight commander; Henry an executive officer in the civil service.

'They entered public service to prove our loyalty to the Commons,' Ayo said. 'But they have suffered because of our history. Henry should be a director general by now. And Abass should be a commodore, working on one of the fleet worlds. Instead, he is commanding a little no-place watch station, and knows he will never be given any more responsibility than that.'

'I wouldn't care,' Tony said. 'Anywhere up and out would be better than being stuck at the bottom of a hole.'

'As holes go this is rather lovely, don't you think?'

It was a cold crisp day. Clouds had swallowed the mountain peaks and snow was predicted, but here in the foothills sunlight lanced between the trees and splashed on granite boulders and patches of creepmoss, and high above translucent red banners snapped in the crisp breeze.

Tony barely noticed the beauty of the native forest. He was still trying to come to terms with Opeyemi's betrayal, the possibility of exile, and the stark realisation that he would never fly with his ship again. The silence in his head reminded him of losing a tooth when he'd been a child. How his tongue would keep going back to probe the tender gap.

He said, 'You could give me back the ship, Ayo. All you have to do is say the word. I will do good out there. I will make you proud.'

'I am not the queen of the world, Tony. I am merely the chief executive of our family's business. We tried to do something different, you and I. And I think we made a good go of it. But our family has decided that it has reached an end point, and we must abide by the majority decision.'

'Even though the majority are frightened of their shadows. Even though, as a reward for my service, I suppose I'm to be sent away and married off. That's not my life, Ayo, and you know it.'

'Right now the kind of life you want is not possible. But I have been thinking about how you can best be employed, and I believe that I may have a solution.'

'So we have come around to the point of this little walk.'

'I wanted to talk to you about it before I put it before the council,' Ayo said, and told him that he could make good use of his experience of trading by becoming the Lord of the Market. 'It is past time Felicia retired. She has made several deals lately that were not to our best advantage. Trade has become harder. Worlds are turning inwards. But you might have some good ideas about shaking things up, brother. You would work with Felicia at first, as her assistant. And after a few years you would take her place. And in a few years more, who knows, you might need to go up and out to make some deals.'

'But not on my ship.'

'Abalunam's Pride was always the family's ship. Think carefully about this. Do not dismiss it out of hand. It is important work, I think you'll be good at it, and you can stay here, with those you know and love.'

Tony wondered if that was a reference to Danilo. He knew that Ayo wanted to help him and he tried to show a little gratitude, saying, 'You will have to get it past Opeyemi and his little gang. I hear that he wants to put me in charge of one of the tank farms.'

'Let me deal with the council. Now, let's make the best of this lovely day. Let's find Chidike. He has got ahead of us.'

They walked on through the trees, and saw the boy leaning behind a flat-topped rock, resting his crossbow on it. As they approached, he turned and put a finger to his lips, then pointed. Tony saw the banners of a tree in the middle distance threshing in the windless air, then saw the slint reared up at the tree's base, clasping the scaly trunk with its middle set of limbs, rubbing and scraping it with its armoured forelimbs. He touched Ayo's arm and she nodded. She had seen it too.

Tony and Ayo sidled up to Chidike's lookout spot. Behind them, the servants set down their packs and the rangers unslung their rifles and moved forward on either side.

The boy, grinning with excitement, said, 'It's a big one. A mother.'

Slints had three sexes. Males and females were small swift carnivores that hunted in bonded pairs; mothers were big, slow plant eaters that incubated eggs injected into their body cavities by females and fertilised by males. Males and females died immediately after impregnating mothers, and after they had been impregnated by a dozen or more male-female pairs, mothers dug burrows in which they hibernated, never to wake again. In the spring, the young hatched in the bodies of their torpid mothers and ate them from the inside out. This one was big, more than six metres from the flat stub of its tail to the tip of its needle snout, and was still patched with the oranges and yellows of its summer coat.

'It is marking the tree with scent glands on its forelimbs,' Chidike said. 'Leaving a trail so males and females can find it.'

He was a sturdy boy with a spray of freckles across his flat nose and a prominent gap between his front teeth that showed when he smiled, dressed like a sheep herder in felt trousers and a woollen jerkin. He loved hiking and hunting, and was being given tutorials by Aunty Jael in the patchwork ecologies of the world. Now he asked his mother if he could shoot the slint. Speaking in a low whisper, not taking his eyes from his prize.

'It's very big,' Ayo said doubtfully.

'Exactly,' Chidike said. 'Think how fine it would look on display.'

'Suppose you only wound it?' Tony said. 'It might charge at us. How fast do those things run?'

'Pretty fast. Twenty kilometres an hour on flat ground. And it's no use climbing trees to get away from them, because they can climb too,' Chidike said. 'But don't worry, uncle. My crossbow bolts are hollow-tipped, and contain a fierce neurotoxin.'

'One bolt might not be enough for such a big beast,' Ayo said.

'Then I will shoot it twice.'

'And what will it be doing while you rewind the crossbow?' Ayo said.

'It won't be able to do much, because of the toxin,' Chidike said. 'But if it somehow manages to look menacing, Vic and Charity will shoot it dead.'

Vic and Charity were the two rangers.

'They are here to protect us, not to help you kill animals,' Ayo said. 'No, I think we will let this one live.'

'Listen to your mother, lad,' Tony said. 'If you want to take a slint as a trophy, you need to prepare in advance. Let this one make more baby slints, and you will have a chance at them next year.'

Ayo was looking at him.

He smiled and said, 'I still have a little common sense, sister. Contrary to Opeyemi's slander.'

Off in the distance, the slint mother stopped pawing at the tree and turned its tiny head towards them. Perhaps it had heard their whispered conversation, or had caught their scent. In the corner of his eye, Tony saw one of the rangers raise her rifle. But the slint dropped to the ground and with a fast, scuttling gait headed further up into the forest. When it was at last lost amongst the trees, Ayo said that it was time to go home.

On the way back to the spinner that would fly them back to the city, Tony thought of that slint. Did it know of its destiny that it would be eaten by children not its own? Would it do anything differently if it did?

19. Control.

Lisa was released at eight in the evening. She refused Nevers's offer of a ride home, called Bria as soon as she walked out of the UN building. She wanted to apologise for the trouble she'd caused, compare notes, work out what to do next, but the call went straight to voicemail, and when she phoned Bria's husband he told her curtly that his wife was still being interviewed by the police and hung up before Lisa could ask any questions. Well, fuck.

She found a coffee shop and sipped a flat white and thought about her options. Finally she called Valerie Tortorella and asked for a lift home.

As they set off towards Highway One in Valerie's beat-up Honda, Lisa said, 'I hope this won't get you into trouble.'

'For giving a buddy a ride?'

'I didn't tell them you'd handled the tessera,' Lisa said. 'They didn't ask, I didn't volunteer it. But they knew all about my visit with Willie's girlfriend. They could know I visited you, too.'

'If the geek police come snooping around I'll tell them the truth,' Valerie said. The tight bun of grey hair at the back of her head was skewered with two chopsticks today. She wore an ancient Pearl Jam T-shirt, blue jeans speckled with acid burns. 'I can't see what harm it could do. And it won't be the first time those cock-knockers have asked me about a customer.'

'Nevers isn't your ordinary geek police. He has a beef with Ada Morange that goes way back, and now I'm caught up in it. He told me, just before he let me go, to be extra vigilant. Told me that although Outland Archaeological Services was eliminated by the breakout, there might be other followers or sympathisers of Ada Morange active in Port of Plenty. Said that I could have put myself at risk from them because of what he called my meddling.'

'Did he offer you any kind of protection?'

'No, and I didn't ask for it. I think he was trying to put a scare in me so I wouldn't go any further with this thing. But here's the thing,' Lisa said. 'That tessera definitely has something to do with Willie's jackpot. I think that he found it before he partnered up with the Outland crew, and left it with his girlfriend because he wanted to sell it on the side. But it can't have anything to do with the breakout. If it did, Nevers wouldn't have sat across a table with me, and he wouldn't have let me go, either. He would have slammed me straight into quarantine. And it didn't have anything to do with the fire at Bria's place, either. Remember how people said the Jackaroo were responsible for the fire in the code farm where the Ghajar navigational data was discovered?'

'I remember some thought it was an inside job,' Valerie said. 'An insurance thing. And others thought a rival crew did it.'

'I reckon Nevers and his gold-skin friends burned down Bria's place to cover up something. It's all about control. They confiscated my copy of the records, took Willie's tessera . . .'

'They wouldn't have needed to break into the code farm,' Valerie said. 'They could have knocked on the front door with a warrant.'

'Then maybe they burned it down as a warning to others. You know stay away from this shit or this could happen to you. But there's no way a mirrored copy of the code could have generated some kind of salamander eidolon from inside a sandbox. And I had the original, in the tessera. It didn't burn down my barn. And it didn't burn down the bar where Brittany Odenkirk had stashed it, either.'

'You're trying to make sense of what just happened. Trying to justify it. In a few days you'll get some perspective.'

'The only way I can get any perspective on this will be to go out there and find it.'

'Why is it I get the feeling you aren't going to let this go?'

'Willie's jackpot killed him,' Lisa said, heart-stung by a fresh pang of grief. According to Nevers, the geek police were still digging out the collapsed shaft. Willie and several other victims of the breakout were still down there in the dark. 'It put me in this shit. Bria too. And it has something to do with the Bad Trip. It's not exactly the kind of thing I can let go.'

There was a silence. Valerie negotiated the junction at Highway One and drove north at exactly the speed limit, overtaking road trains strung with constellations of lights. Lisa's mind buzzed with half-realised ideas and patterns. Wave functions she couldn't yet collapse to a single eigenstate because she lacked crucial data.

The homestead was quiet and dark when they arrived. The gate was open; so was the door to the barn. And there was no sign of Pete, no response when Lisa hollered and whistled. She remembered how he'd chased the Range Rover as she was driven away. Maybe he'd given Nevers's people the slip when they'd tried to round him up. He'd come back when his blood had cooled down.

Then she found the receipt on her kitchen table.

It was a yellow form filled out in a neat angular script, listing everything that had been confiscated. Bria's laptop, the contract, the tessera . . . And paper-clipped to the form was a scribbled note advising her that her livestock and her guard dog had been taken away and put down because of the danger of cross-infection with an unknown algorithm.

She read the thing again. Her heart a cold stone.

When Valerie asked what was wrong Lisa thrust the form at her. 'Nevers took my fucking hurklins. And he murdered Pete.'

20. Sky Fall.

Snow fell overnight and continued to fall through the day. Fat flakes thickly whirling out of a pale sky, falling on the forest and farms, falling on the city's roofs and streets, slanting past the towers of the Great House. By nightfall the blizzard had blown out to sea and the sky was clear and the black air bitterly cold. People bulked up in fur coats and down jackets jostled through the Rua Santa Clara street market, past stalls that sold spiced wine, toffee apples, pasteis, doughnuts, fries with melted cheese, nutmeg coffee and little cups of thick hot chocolate.

Trailed by two different security detachments, his own and Opeyemi's, Tony walked through the crowds towards the club where he had arranged to meet Danilo. His heart jumped when he saw a tall slim man in a white fur coat, hair braided in cornrows, at a stall selling bolinhos de peixe, but then the man turned and Tony saw he was not his lover.

He was numb with shock. The desolation of bereavement. The hammer finally had come down. He had come straight from the Great House and a brief meeting with Ayo, who had told him that a police ship would arrive in six days to collect the wizards and the stromatolites, and that the family council had decided to sell Abalunam's Pride. Once a suitable buyer had been found Tony would climb aboard his ship for the last time and null the keys that linked him to the bridle. Meanwhile, he would begin shadowing Felicia's work, and in the fullness of time would take her place.

Ayo had delivered the news with brisk sympathy. She had told him that it was best to get it over with now so that he could move on. He had tried to marshal a defence, protesting that he had been given no warning that the family wanted to get rid of the ship, that it would traduce half a century of tradition, that by giving in to Opeyemi and his allies Ayo was fatally weakening her position. No use. Ayo had told him that like everyone else he must put the interests of the family first, and had ended the meeting before he could say anything more.

Now he would have to find a way of breaking the news to Danilo. Tell him that he had lost his ship and would have to return to the Great House. He could see his future unrolling along a narrow path hedged by duty and tradition. Working as an assistant to his aunt before taking over her office. His formerly unbounded life shrinking to the curtilage of the Great House and the petty politics of the family; an arranged marriage and the occasional sop of an off-world business trip. He supposed that he would be allowed to keep Danilo as a lover, but knew how that would go. An apartment in the good part of the city. Visits that he would always have to arrange in advance; the high days and holidays Danilo would spend alone; coded gossip in the news that he owed his career to his association with Tony. No, it was impossible. It would be best for both of them if Tony set him free. And it would be best to do it as soon as he could. But not quite yet. He would not be as brutal as Ayo. He would find a way of disengaging that would cause Danilo the least pain. And tonight he would mourn the loss of his ship and forget all his tomorrows by getting gloriously, roaringly drunk.

He had just glimpsed the sign of the club above the heads of the crowd when Junot Johnson called.

'Something's come up,' the sidesman said.

'What have they done now?'

'Not the wizards,' Junot said, with a bluntness that meant he was seriously worried. 'The police stationed here got a heads-up from their commander. A problem raised by traffic control. It looks like an intrusion. I had one of them give me a copy. Here.'

Tony opened a window: an image of white streaks across black sky, radiating from a single point. It reminded him of the diagram several of the wizards had begun to draw after they'd been infected with the eidolon. He had caught himself sketching it in the condensation on the glass mirror of the shared bathroom yesterday. He had tried to persuade himself that it was autosuggestion, but it had left him feeling unsettled for the rest of the day.