UP AND OUT.

Twenty-four hours later, refuelled and provisioned, the Ameline left the Ark again, dropping away into empty space. Alone on its bridge, Kat watched the crystal walls recede, feeling like a bug falling from a windshield.

Below her, down in the passenger lounge, Alice, Toby Drake, Professor Harris and half a dozen Acolytes sat strapped into acceleration couches. Below them, Ed lay wrapped in his cocoon under the bows.

Toby Drake hadn't regained consciousness since being carried aboard by the Acolytes, and Kat had specific instructions to deliver him to the Bubble Belt as soon as humanely possible.

"He's going to save us all," Harris had told her, despite the fact that when she looked at Toby, he appeared half-dead and incapable of saving anything, including himself.

"What do you think?" she asked the ship. Through her implant, she felt it stir. Like her, it was glad to be underway again, and glad to be putting some distance between itself and Strauli, and the continuing risk of contamination.

> Shucks, don't ask me, lady. I just work here.

It paused, its attention snagged by a signal from the Ark.

> Incoming message.

Kat smiled. She knew who it would be.

"Put it on screen."

The star field dimmed, to be replaced by the faces of Verne Rico and Feliks Abdulov. The two former rivals stood in the human quarters of the Ark, both wearing stretchy black ship suits. Kat's smile grew broader. She'd never expected to see the two men in the same room, let alone standing side-by-side.

"Hello," she said. Her smile slipped a notch. "Or should that be goodbye?"

Feliks looked at her with undisguised affection.

"How about au revoir?"

Despite her protests, both men had elected to stay behind to help with the evacuation of Strauli. To Feliks, it was a matter of family honour; to Verne, a chance to redeem himself for past mistakes. Standing together, they made an unlikely pair.

Verne said, "By the time you reach Tiers Cross, we'll only be a few months behind. We'll see you soon enough."

"You better make sure of it, because I'm not doing this alone." Kat rubbed her belly. "This little one's going to need her father, and her grandfather."

Verne raised an eyebrow. "You're still sure it's a girl, then?"

Kat gave him a grin.

"Aren't you?"

She signed off. Ahead, the screens showed only stars. Each one had a tiny name printed next to it. The ship had even superimposed their target-the system containing Tiers Cross and the Bubble Belt-with a golden crosshair. For a second, she closed her eyes, savouring the feeling of freedom. Everything else fell away, leaving just the ship and her, and the tiny speck growing inside her.

"Are you ready?" she asked the Ameline.

The ship fired its lateral thrusters, turning its nose in the direction of Tiers Cross. Deep in its bowels, she felt the two purple coils of the jump engines drawing power, building energy.

> Always.

She took one last, lingering look at her home planet, and the obscene red blooms now disfiguring almost a third of the visible land mass.

"We'll be back one day," she promised the little life growing within her. Then she shook herself. The future would have to wait. She pulled herself upright in her seat. Right now, she was a trader captain, an Abdulov, and she had a cargo to deliver.

The ship's engines hit full power.

> Ready to jump?

Kat turned her face to the anaemic light of the distant stars. She felt like an arrow aimed at the sky, ready to fly.

"Up and out," she said.

And vanished.

EPILOGUE.

A SKIN YOU ONCE SHED.

Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons, Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

Walt Whitman, Kosmos Imagine that you're standing naked in the snows on the surface of Tiers Cross, back where it all began.

You're standing in the street, on the corner of one of those windy junctions near the port, and the wind's coming in off the ice fields beyond the town. The cold prickles your skin. Your breath comes like steam.

Ships move to and fro on the landing field. Still more crowd the parking orbits above. More and more every day, each and every one packed to the gills with refugees from Strauli, Inakpa, Djatt. Other worlds, too. Now that it has access to jump capable ships, The Recollection's moving fast, its spread contained only by the impossibility of travelling faster than light.

Thank heavens the arches have started to evaporate. By allowing humanity to spread out, they've served their purpose. Now the Dho have pulled the plug on the network, to stop The Recollection taking advantage of it, and the individual arches have started to fall like dominoes, bleeding into the wind like the purple ash of a madman's dream.

Around you, here on Tiers Cross, the usual port trash ply their wares: pushers; scam artists; beggars; buskers. All of them doing the same old Downport hustle. Their numbers grow with every refugee ship that lands here, fleeing The Recollection. They own nothing, and they have nowhere to go. They can't see you. They walk through you as if you were a ghost. And deep in your heart you love them all, unreservedly.

Overhead you see the sparks of tugs exploring the jewelled fringes of the Bubble Belt. You know the breaker teams are working flat-out, pulling double shifts, opening up habitable bubbles for these people to settle. Here in the Belt, with a billion individual habitats, there's room for everyone.

And deeper into the Belt, where once you saw only a curtain of diamonds, a light glows. A miniature sun illuminates it all from within, like a crystal chandelier. The Gnarl at the centre of the cloud is now a rocket, pushing out light and energy in a thin jet, slowly building up the tremendous force it will need to move not only itself, but this small moon and the billion habitats of the Belt. Watching its radiance, you know it will take years for that movement to become evident, longer still for the background stars to start moving noticeably in the night sky.

The wind makes you shiver, but you don't mind. This is your home, after all. You're used to it. You've missed it, although it seems an eternity since you were last here.

Your childhood and the peculiar pains of adolescence: they all happened here, so long ago, their immediacy now lost in the days before the Ark, before the Gnarl. Even your name, Toby Drake, feels like an anachronism, part of a skin you once shed.

Once you had a life, now you have a purpose. There's no time for regret or resentment; you have your part to play.

For a long moment, you look up at the sweeping grandeur of the Bubble Belt, and wish the person who named it had thought of something with a little more gravitas, something more suited to the majesty and inhuman immensity of the crowded habitats, each one as unique as a snowflake and each following its own carefully prescribed and choreographed orbit around the waxy, streaming Gnarl at the centre.

You look down at the dirty snow beneath your bare feet. The snow of home. But of course, you're not really down here. You're up there, in the heart of the Gnarl.

And you can see everything.

You're everywhere and nowhere, baby.

Your mind roams the sky. It's you firing that colossal jet, and wherever you're going, you're taking this gaudy Christmas decoration of a cloud with you. You're leading the salvaged remnants of humanity away from the advancing wave front of The Recollection. Ships like the Ameline will cover your retreat. And soon, the Dho Ark will join you, with its own cargo of fleeing refugees. All you have to do is steer them all to safety.

You turn your face to the sky.

That smudge out there, what is that? Is that Andromeda?

Drowned in the greasy depths of the Gnarl, you smile to yourself.

Let's go there, you think.

And in a handful of decades, you're gone.

THE END.

Also by Gareth L. Powell.

The Last Reef.

Silversands.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Thanks to Jonathan Oliver; Neil Roberts; Lee Harris; Colin Harvey; Richard Scott; Neil Beynon; my sister Rebecca; my wife Becky; and my brother Huw.

Several passages in this book were inspired by or adapted from pieces published in my collection The Last Reef and Other Stories (Elastic Press, 2008). A few sentences from Chapter Five appeared in a slightly different form in the story 'The Winding Curve,' which I co-wrote with Robert Starr and which appeared in Rob's collection Sophistry By Degrees (Stonegarden, 2008).

end.