you did contract work?’
‘Crazy question if you were asking anyone else, but . . . yes. Once or twice. Some of those server farms were designed by seriously paranoid arseholes.’
‘And you still went through.’
‘Had a job to do.’
‘So your judgement was correct, in the moment. You made a decision . . . and it paid off.’
‘Wouldn’t be having this conversation otherwise. I mean, I’m not saying I’d be dead, exactly, but sure as hell I wouldn’t still be in this line of work.’
‘In which case . . . I think you should open that door.’
Jumai’s hand was poised over the flip-out keypad on her sleeve forearm. ‘Let’s be clear about one thing, rich boy. No guarantees about what we’ll find on the other side, or how the door mechanism will look to me then. Might not be as easy to retrace as it was to come this far.’
‘Whatever it takes.’
After they had spoken to the
‘Guess it’s just dawning on me – I’ve burnt too many bridges to start having second thoughts now.’ He knuckled his fist against the chest plate of the suit. ‘Fuck it all. I’m Geoffrey Akinya. This is my grandmother’s house. And I have every damned right to see what’s inside it.’
‘Hell, yeah,’ Jumai said.
And tapped the keypad.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jonathan Beza whipped the blanket free with a magicianly flourish, beaming at Sunday as if this was a moment he had been planning for years.
The blanket had concealed a box. It was, superficially, much like the box that Gribelin’s proxy had unearthed the day before: the same dimensions, the same grey alloy casing. It looked older, though. Sunday couldn’t put her finger on exactly why that should be so, but she knew she was looking at something that had been locked and buried a long time ago. The dents and scratches had provenance.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Eunice came back for my funeral,’ Jonathan said. ‘This we know. But she didn’t just come back for that. I . . . followed her.’ He hesitated, looking aside as if there was shame in what he had done. ‘At a distance, obviously, and I don’t think she ever suspected anything. It wasn’t difficult to track her movements, and there was no Evolvarium then. I traced her return to her old landing site, near Pavonis Mons – the burial spot.’
‘You saw her bury the box?’ Sunday asked.
He shook his head firmly. ‘No – I couldn’t get that close, not without making my presence known. But when she’d gone, there was nothing to stop me returning to the landing site. I gave it a year or two, just to let the dust settle. Part of me worried that the whole thing was a trap to flush me out.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘As much as it pains me, I think I was the last thing on her mind by then. Even my funeral . . . it suited her to come back to attend it, but maybe she already had other plans . . .’ He trailed off. ‘Perhaps you’d better open the box.’
‘Do you know what’s in it?’ Jitendra asked.
‘Yes, and it’s perfectly safe. But it won’t talk to me.’
As Sunday worked the catches at the side of the box, she said, ‘I still don’t get it. The box Dorcas stole – where did that one come from?’
‘Oh, that,’ Jonathan said, as if this was a detail he had nearly allowed to slip his mind. ‘I put that there, obviously. I knew that the real box was meant for someone to find, someone connected to the family. For sixty years, no one came. Then Eunice’s death was announced, and less than four months later her granddaughter shows up on Mars.’ He touched his fingers to his chin, as if mulling a difficult problem. ‘Hm. I wonder if those two things might possibly be connected?’
‘I was keeping an eye on things for him,’ Soya said. ‘When it became clear that you intended to enter the Evolvarium, there was no doubt that you’d come for the box.’
‘While Soya was meeting you in Crommelin,’ Jonathan said, ‘I was out there burying the decoy box. No one saw me do it. With the machines sniffing around, it wouldn’t stand a chance of going undetected for more than a few weeks. But we didn’t need that long, just the few days it would take you to cross Mars and reach the burial site.’
‘It was good that I warned you that the Pans couldn’t necessarily be trusted,’ Soya said. ‘It meant that you understood the situation the moment Dorcas turned on you. From what we can gather, you played your parts very well indeed. Dorcas never had the slightest idea that she’d been duped.’
‘She got the wrong box,’ Jitendra said, marvellingly.
‘And left you to the mercy of the Evolvarium,’ Soya added. ‘She cut a lot of deals to make that snatch. Frankly, no one will be shedding any tears if the other Overfloaters rip the
Sunday had finally succeeded in opening the catches. She eased back the lid, the hinges stiff but manageable. She wasn’t sure what to expect this time. There had been a smaller box inside the decoy, but perhaps the point of that had just been to delay the Overfloaters. Inside this box she found a dense matrix of foam packing, and a rounded object poking through the top of the packing.
‘Take it out,’ Jonathan said. ‘It won’t bite.’
She understood the significance of his comment as she withdrew the ancient space helmet from the box. Even in Martian gravity it was heavy in her hands: like something forged from iron or cut from solid marble. She had never
