‘Why?’ she asked miserably. ‘If your own plan’s gone bad, all that’s left to explain the disruption is a meteor—’
‘We’re not there yet,’ he protested. He described what had happened to the occulter, and Tarquinia’s scheme to get out and fix it. ‘But if you have any non-suicidal alternatives, don’t keep them to yourself.’ Ramiro suspected that the three of them working together might have found a way to get Agata’s chemical into the cooling chamber, but it was too late for that now.
‘I have no more ideas,’ Agata said forlornly. ‘That’s why I asked Serena and Gineto for the books. The Council has all of Medoro’s notes on the time-reversed camera, but his design didn’t come out of nowhere. If I can retrace the steps of his education myself, there’s a chance I might see something that I missed.’
Ramiro pictured the bulging container she’d been lugging down the corridor; he couldn’t read that much in a year. But if Tarquinia couldn’t repair the occulter, they’d have three days to mine Medoro’s textbooks and come up with a new way to shut down the system.
‘I shouldn’t keep you from your study, then,’ he said. ‘Just promise me you won’t try anything like the last plan.’
‘Why couldn’t they have spoken more clearly?’ Agata asked, bewildered. ‘I thought they were giving me the courage I needed to go down that shaft . . .’ She began shivering again. ‘How can I fail them, when they know my whole future? How is that possible?’
Ramiro said, ‘There was no message from the ancestors.’ The stupid hoax had gone on far too long, and it had almost killed her. ‘Tarquinia carved those words into the rock, before we left Esilio. You and Azelio were sick, bedridden in your cabins, so it was easy for her to slip away to the blast site while she was packing up the tents.’
Agata was stunned. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘To make the messaging system look redundant, so no one would have to scratch out a living on Esilio.’
Agata drew away from him. ‘So the two of you lied to me for six years?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Because you wanted me to sell it on the mountain? You thought people might believe my testimony, so long as I didn’t know the truth.’
‘That was the plan,’ Ramiro admitted. There was no point going into the whole convoluted history of the thing, explaining his failed attempt to make the inscription his own.
‘We don’t know anything now.’ Agata seemed more wounded by this revelation than by the personal betrayal. ‘If the mountain’s wiped out, the Councillors might not make it to Esilio. We don’t even have that comfort any more – we don’t know that there’ll be any survivors at all, that the home world won’t burn.’
Ramiro said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He’d only meant to spare her the burden of imagining herself chosen by history, pinned to this impossible task by the ancestors’ gaze. But there was no way to do that without stripping away the whole lie.
Agata rose from the couch and dragged herself towards the door. She said, ‘When Tarquinia gets back, tell her I’m dead to both of you. I don’t care any more. Let the cosmos work it out.’
Six bells after she’d left for the observatory, Tarquinia had still not returned.
Ramiro knew that if she’d been arrested she wouldn’t tell her captors anything – but the mere fact of her transgression would mean that the two of them would have been under observation from the moment they’d left the Surveyor. If the authorities had found the link on her, they would have been searching for its signal all along, so they could have picked up the transmissions to the occulters. Even without decoding any of the content, they would have been able to deduce the machines’ locations from the direction of the beam.
But he didn’t know any of that with certainty. All he could do now was gamble on the chance that the plan could still be salvaged. If he could get outside and fix the occulter himself, everything might yet come together.
Ramiro checked the records on the console and committed the occulter’s trajectory to memory. Heading straight for the nearest airlock would be futile; he might as well turn himself in. But anyone who could get more than a dozen caches of explosives onto the slopes would have to know a safe way out. His allies had been wise to limit their contact with him, and they’d managed to convince themselves that having set the plan in motion there’d be nothing more they’d need to do. But if they hadn’t yet realised how wrong they’d been, it would be up to him to disillusion them.
‘I don’t know anyone called Giacomo,’ the man protested irritably.
‘I met him here a few stints ago,’ Ramiro explained. ‘I think he borrowed your apartment, because it wasn’t convenient to use his own.’
‘You must be confused about the address.’ The man closed the door.
Ramiro supposed it was possible that the apartment’s tenant had had no knowledge of the meeting, but he couldn’t think of any other way to attract the group’s attention. Perhaps they’d been monitoring the whole project independently and already knew what had happened to the occulter, but he couldn’t take that for granted and rely on them to intervene.
Back in his apartment, he sat and waited for contact. Greta’s people might be watching him, but that had always been true; either Giacomo’s group had ways around that, or everything they’d done would have been spotted long ago.
After six bells, Ramiro lost patience. He knew he’d have no hope of sleeping, so he went out hoping to be found.
By most people’s schedules it was night-time, and the corridors were lit with nothing but red moss-light, but the precinct was as busy as he’d seen it. Ramiro passed dozens of restless neighbours, crowding the guide ropes, moving as briskly and aimlessly as he was. When he met their eyes they turned away, confused. In two days the mountain might be gone, and any sane person would want to play a part in protecting it. But after three years of complying with the flawless predictions of their own private messages – or their friends’ messages, or whatever impinged on their lives in the public news – what could they do when they’d been told that they’d do nothing?
Two young men approached on the adjacent rope, avoiding his gaze like everyone else, but to Ramiro they seemed more self-conscious about it than any stranger ought to be. As they drew nearer he waited for one of them to bump him and pass him a note, and he readied himself to play his part and make the collision look plausible. Then he saw the edge of a blade sliding out from its hiding place in the first man’s hand.
He grabbed the assailant’s wrist and stared straight at his approaching accomplice. ‘If I’m not back in my apartment in three chimes,’ he said, ‘every detail goes to the Council automatically.’
‘Nothing stops us,’ the man informed him solemnly. ‘We already know how this ends.’
‘So why this?’ Ramiro bent the knife-wielder’s hand – then crossed ropes to let a woman move past, positioning his body to hide the blade from her.
‘It ends well because you take this as a warning and stop bringing attention to yourself,’ the man replied.
Ramiro said, ‘I think you might be confusing foresight and wishful thinking. I say it ends well because I have a meeting with Giacomo, immediately.’
The accomplice’s expression of certainty was wavering. He must have grown so accustomed to his plans unfolding perfectly that he’d lost the ability to rethink them on the fly.
Ramiro said, ‘I know it’s hard for people to organise their calendar these days, but the only way I’ll stop being a problem for your boss is by talking to him face to face.’
Giacomo sat on the floor of the food hall, chatting amiably with a dozen companions, but the gathering was large enough that he didn’t need to be contributing constantly to appear to be engaged. Ramiro sat two strides away with his back to the group, straining to hear the whispers directed his way, while trying to look like a lone diner brooding sadly on the fate of his friend.