*He's well, don't worry.' Soya was pouring something into a glass. Bangles clashed against each other on her wrist, making a constant metallic hiss whenever she moved. *You don't remember much about being rescued?'

*No,' Sunday said.

*But you know my name.'

*We've met before.'

*Yes, we did.' There was a note of reproach in that. *And still you got into trouble with those people. Well, you can't say you weren't warned.' Soya leaned down and offered the glass to Sunday's lips. *Drink this.'

The liquid was sugary and welcome. It rinsed some of the dryness from her mouth and throat; notched her one step closer to the living.

*I don't know who you are, Soya.' Sunday dredged a hard-won memory from the recent past. *You told me you were born here, on Mars. You said something about Nigeria. We're still on Mars, aren't we?'

*You've only been out about thirteen hours. It's tomorrow.' Soya smiled at that, and the smile cut through Sunday. She'd seen it a million times, in her own reflection. Just not as much lately as she might have wished.

*And that's all I get? We're related, Soya. I've known that from the moment I first saw your face. And why would you make contact with me if it wasn't connected with my family?'

Soya smiled, but with less assurance than before. *I know you want answers, but you've had a difficult couple of days and you should probably rest first.'

*You just told me I've been asleep since yesterday.'

*After nearly dying.'

Sunday took a leap into the void. The question was absurd on a number of levels, but she had to ask it. *Are you . . . related to Eunice? Are you some granddaughter or grand-niece I never knew about?'

*No, I'm not related to her. I'd offer you a cell scraping, if you had a means of testing it.' Soya looked down, fiddling absently with the necklaces. *But you and me, that's a different story. We do have a common ancestor. But it's not Eunice.'

Sunday pushed herself up from the couch. Heavy blankets slid away from her. She was wearing lime-green football shorts and a cheap yellow tourist T-shirt with an animated space elevator printed on the front. The logo said Pontaniak.

*Who, Soya?' The other woman had half a head on her, but she still took a step away, as if she hadn't anticipated a show of determination quite this valiant.

*Jonathan,' Soya said. And as if that was not enough a there was only one Jonathan in Sunday's firmament a Soya added, *Beza. Eunice's husband. The man she came to Mars with.'

Sunday shook her head reflexively. *Jonathan Beza died more than sixty years ago. Eunice and he had divorced by then. There was an accident, here on Mars. Some kind of pressure blow-out.'

*And that precludes me from being related to him?'

*He remarried before his death. He had more children, and some of them had children themselves. Nathan even came to the funeral, and I know about all the others. There's no Soya anywhere in that family tree.'

*In which case you're looking at the wrong tree.'

It had not been Soya who said that. This voice was deep and sonorous, varnished and craquelured. It spoke Swahili, but with an old-fashioned diction that called to mind nothing in Sunday's experience but Memphis Chibesa.

She turned to follow the voice to its origin. There, standing in a gash of the curtain a like an actor hesitating to join the stage a was the oldest man she had ever seen.

*I am Jonathan Beza,' the man said. *I am your grandfather, Sunday Akinya. I was married to Eunice. And yes, I am very much alive.'

Jitendra was looking to her for guidance. She signalled with the slightest nod that yes, she believed this man to be exactly who he said he was. As absurd as that was to take in, after everything she had accepted in her life.

*It was easier to die then,' Jonathan Beza said. *You must remember that this was a different Mars, a different time. Even now, as you've experienced, there are places on this world where a person can disappear very effectively. Or be made to disappear.' He stopped to pour chai for his daughter and their two guests.

*You mean there was never an accident?' Sunday asked.

*There was. The same sort of accident that still happens very occasionally nowadays. It was real, and I didn't engineer it in any way. I should hope not: good people died in it, after all.'

*But you saw your chance to vanish,' Jitendra said.

*The thought had been at the back of my mind for some time. The Mech was so primitive back then we didn't even call it the Mech. The few implants I carried were easily disabled, or fooled into giving false reports. When the opportunity to fall off the edge of the world presented itself, I took it.' He fixed his gaze on Sunday. *Your grandmother didn't know. She wasn't complicit in this. She even came to my funeral.'

*That was when she returned to Phobos,' Sunday said.

*Yes.'

They were sitting in a different curtained room. Sunday still had no idea where they were, beyond Jonathan's assurance that it was still Mars. There was no aug reach, no Eunice. In their place was a noise like distant engines and the occasional bump or sway that led her to think she was in a vehicle.

A possibility had presented itself, but she'd dismissed it instantly.

*You found us in the Evolvarium,' Jitendra said. *Have you any idea what we were doing there?'

Jonathan said, *Dying?'

*Other than that,' Sunday said.

*Yes, I have a shrewd idea what you were doing. Better than a shrewd idea, actually.' He paused, apparently to collect himself, marshalling energies before proceeding. Jonathan was small, wiry, obviously immensely old but nowhere near as frail as Sunday might have expected for one of his age. He was even older than Eunice: she'd have queried the construct for his date of birth, if the construct had been reachable. Born 2020 or thereabouts, if not earlier. A man now in his hundred-and-forties. That made him old, but not impossibly so. He wore the inner layer of a spacesuit, a tight black garment sewn with coolant lines and studded with the gold-plated discs of biomonitor sockets. His arms were scrawny but there was still muscle tone there, and no trace of arthritis or neurodegenerative tremor in his fingers. Sunday had watched as he poured the chai; he hadn't spilt a drop. His head was mostly hairless, save for a corona of fine white fuzz around his scalp, his face abundantly wrinkled, the already dark skin mottled by pure black lesions, yet remaining startlingly expressive. His eyes were clear and focused, his smile alarmingly youthful.

*Then you'll know it was a waste of time,' Jitendra said.

*I know Dorcas cheated you. That may not amount to quite the same thing.'

*How much do you know?' Sunday asked, directing her question at Soya. *You were in Crommelin. You must be registered as a citizen or tourist to be anywhere on Mars, so you can't have dropped off the map the way your father has.'

Jonathan answered for her. *Soya has been my lifeline, Sunday. She has been able to move in the Surveilled World, be my eyes and ears. She has arranged medicine for me, on the few occasions when I have needed it.'

*I have a false history,' Soya said, looking at Sunday and Jitendra in turn. *My connection to my father . . . and by extension your grandmother . . . isn't part of that history.'

*You could never do such a thing on Earth, or any place where the Surveilled World is fully developed. On Mars, now, it would be difficult. It was easier when Soya was born.'

*How old are you?' Sunday asked.

*Fifty,' Soya said. *Does that surprise you?'

*I don't suppose it should.'

*Eunice wasn't her mother,' Jonathan said, confirming what Soya had already told Sunday. *There was a woman, an investigator. Her name was Lizbet. She had her doubts about my death, and she followed them to me.'

*I never heard about any investigation,' Sunday said.

*Lizbet decided not to go public with her story once she'd heard my side of things. She became my companion, and we had a daughter. We were happy. Lizbet died twenty years ago.'

*I'm sorry,' Sunday and Jitendra said in unison. Then, on her own, Sunday continued, *And what was your side of the story, Jonathan? Why this secrecy? What persuaded Lizbet to keep it to herself?'

*I know why your grandmother came back to Mars. My funeral was a useful pretext, but she'd have found a way to do it whatever happened. She spent time on Phobos, more than she needed to. I don't know what she got up to there, but I presume whatever it was led you here?'

Sunday eyed Jitendra before proceeding. *We've been following something ever since she died. It began with an anomaly in her private banking files. That led us from Africa to the Moon. On the Moon my brother found something in a safe-deposit box. That led us to Pythagoras. What we found in Pythagoras led me to Phobos. Phobos led me to the Evolvarium.'

*And now to me,' Jonathan said.

*Except I didn't find you,' Sunday said. *You found me. Soya knew I was on the planet: that's why she contacted me in Crommelin.'

*It was easy to track your arrival,' Soya said. *Given the timing, there couldn't be any other reason why you'd come to Mars, other than to find out what your grandmother had buried here.'

*I failed,' Sunday said.

Jonathan braced his hands on his knees and rose from his chair. *Do you have any idea where you are?'

*Somewhere out in the sticks, I'm guessing. A camp or station everyone assumes to be unoccupied. Probably quite near the Evolvarium, since I doubt we travelled very far overnight.' She was careful not to voice her suspicion that they were moving.

*Not near,' Jonathan corrected, with a smile. *In. We've never left it.'

It came back to her in disconnected glimpses, as of a dream forgotten until some chance association called it to mind, much later in the day. Jitendra had seen it first: that hill, a feature in the terrain that ought not to have been there, glimpsed from within their makeshift shelter as they waited for night and whatever it might bring. A hill that was approaching.

The Aggregate.

Not a hill, but a machine as large as a skyscraper, crunching slowly across the Evolvarium. Sunday remembered what she had learned regarding the Aggregate, aboard the Overfloater airship. It was not one machine, but a society of them. From the level of sifters to apex predators, they had organised in the interests of mutual reliance and interdependence. It was a stinging affront to the basic function of the Evolvarium. Whereas the other machines toiled and clashed and evolved, sparking off industrial novelties as a by-product of their struggle for survival, the Aggregate gave nothing back. Whatever it innovated, it kept to itself.

It had sent out an envoy to meet them. With that memory came the aftertaste of the fear they had both felt as they crouched in their makeshift shelter. The Aggregate's envoy was a quick-scuttling thing like an iron ant, black-armoured and as large as the rover whose wreckage they had repurposed. Even if their suits had been working at full capacity, they could never have outrun it. It had ripped away the petals of their shelter, flinging them to the winds, and loomed over them in all its eyeless belligerence. Its head was a blank metal sphere, its torso a pinch-waisted cylinder. In addition to its pistoning black legs it had whipping cilia. It had plucked them from the ground, not without a certain carelessness, and a red-lit aperture had opened in its belly.

After that, Sunday didn't remember very much.

Yet here they were, in the Aggregate. There was no need to take Jonathan Beza's word for that. From a high vantage point, the queen of her own castle, Sunday was looking down on the very machine she had assumed meant to have her crushed and recycled for useful materials.

It was motley. Hundreds of basic organisms had fused or locked together to form the structural outline of the Aggregate, and that didn't begin to touch the implied complexity of its interior. Not a skyscraper, then, for that conveyed entirely too much symmetry and orderliness. The Aggregate was more like a city block, a dense-packed huddle of buildings constructed at different times and according to varying objectives and governing aesthetics. It was approximately pyramidal in shape, wide and flat at the base, rising in steps and pinnacles and buttresses to a sort of summit, but there was nothing geometric or harmonious about it. Sunday saw where some of the machines had fused into the main mass, like gargoyles on a cathedral. Others must have changed beyond all recognition, so that it was not easy to tell where one began and another ended, or what their original forms and locomotive principles must have been like. From here, looking down, she couldn't see how the Aggregate moved its colossal bulk. She presumed countless legs and feet were deployed under the flat base of the city, working in concert so that the ride was mostly smooth. Dust welled up constantly from the Aggregate's margins, stirred by whatever mechanisms toiled underneath it.

*No one ever mentioned anything about this thing being inhabited,' Sunday said. They were in a many-windowed cupola, a hundred or more metres above the ground.

*They don't know,' Jonathan said. *No one does, except Soya and me. Maybe some of the Overfloaters suspect, but that's not the same thing as knowing and it's certainly not something they'll talk about in polite company. They can't tell for sure, from the outside. The glass is one-way, and with all the waste heat and chemistry a machine like the Aggregate radiates, there's no way of picking out the signatures of a couple of human occupants. Especially when the Aggregate doesn't want anyone to know about us.'

*So you're its prisoners?' she asked. But that didn't work: Soya clearly had free roam of Mars, and must have come back here of her own volition.

*No,' Jonathan said. *I'm its client. The Aggregate benefits from a human consultant. That's really all I am to it: just another modular component it can depend on when the need arrives. It makes me comfortable a more than comfortable, actually a and it tolerates my absence when I'm not here.'

*It lets you come and go as you please?'

*We agreed terms. It would rather put up with that than have me kill myself. Needless to say, I can't go very far a that's one of the drawbacks of being dead. But I'm not a prisoner.'

*I'm finding all this a little difficult to take in. I've spent my whole life thinking you were dead.'

*I'm afraid there was no other way. The best that Soya could do was warn you to be on your guard against the Pans. It was obvious to us that they couldn't be trusted simply to let you walk away with the prize.'

*You knew they were planning to steal it?' Jitendra asked.

*No, but there was a strong possibility of that happening. Had this all taken place in the Surveilled World, there wouldn't have been much scope for treachery. But the Evolvarium gave them the perfect opportunity to commit an unwitnessed crime.'

*I witnessed it,' Sunday said.

Jonathan allowed a thin smile to play across his lips. *You don't count.'

*We'll see about that, when I get back to Earth. They're going to find out that I'm still an Akinya, and bad things happen when you cross us.'

*Yes . . .' Jonathan stretched the word, managing to sound less than entirely convinced by Sunday's statement. *Funny how you're so keen to slip back into the fold the moment you're wronged. You've been running away from your family all these years, but the moment life throws something at you that you don't like . . . you're straight back into the arms of the household, a good little Akinya with the family behind her.'

Sunday bristled, but said nothing.

*I don't blame you for that,' Jonathan continued, conveying entirely the opposite impression, *but it would be unwise in the extreme to underestimate the Pans. They're not just a movement with a few ships and people. Behind the Initiative is the entire geopolitical armoury of the United Aquatic Nations. Take them on, you're taking on half the planet.'

*You've kept up with Earthside politics, then,' Sunday said, her tone sour.

*I may be dead, but I'm not a hermit.'

*Well, it's all for nothing anyway,' Jitendra said. *We don't have a clue what was in that box, and we can't even prove they stole it. Without corroboration, the evidence of our eyes won't be admissible in any court. Whatever's in the box may mean nothing to them without Sunday's background knowledge of Eunice. That's assuming they ever gave a shit. Maybe all they wanted was for us not to get our hands on it. Well, they succeeded. We're all losers now.'

*The Overfloaters must have been surprised,' Jonathan said.

*Surprised by what?' Sunday asked, irritated and fatigued.

*That the object was still underground after so many years. Did they not express scepticism that it would still be there?'

*Dorcas said it was strange that the machines hadn't found it,' Jitendra said. *But there it was.'

*Or rather, there it wasn't,' Jonathan said. *Come, let's go back downstairs. I have something you might be interested in.'

CHAPTER THIRTY.

*And there was I,' Jumai said, *thinking maybe I'd get paid for nothing. Silly me. As if anything's ever that easy.'

*I didn't mean to raise any unrealistic expectations,' Geoffrey said.

They were moving side by side down the docking tube, brushing themselves along with fingertip pressure against the rough-textured walling.

*Look at it this way, though,' he went on. *You're hoping this is going to do wonders for your reputation. Wouldn't work if it turned out to be too easy, would it?'

*Fuck my reputation. Right now I'll settle for easy.'