We stared silently at the map. We’d been told we were the biggest and most important island, but it now looked as though we were geographically . . . insignificant.

Hanson said nothing and instead tapped the barcode on my index finger. “The drones scan by line of sight only. All specimens on this Reserve work on legacy tech five centuries old. Your barcodes allow us identification data, nothing more, so positional data has to be drone-assessed at twice-daily intervals. Reserve Thirteen to the west of here uses

“What would they all do?” asked Lucy, but no one had an answer.

“That comet has visited before,” said Baxter. “In my four hundred and fifty-two years on this planet I have seen it five times, regular as clockwork every seventy-six years. The Previous will have observed them too.

It seemed the players spent their lives not performing, but preserving.

The Apocryphal Man looked up and thought for a moment. “Several comets would do it,” he said. We looked blank so he continued: “Eight years ago, in the daytime sky, you recall an aerial phenomenon?”

I could suddenly see the colour of music, and sense the softness of red. The dog’s barking grew louder until suddenly, it all cut out and everything seemed to swim back to normality.

The Apocryphal Man had no first name, or at least, not that he could recall, and it wasn’t known whether Baxter was his name, or some kind of label like “Saddler” or “Chef.” One in an identical series of ten, he’d been known officially as Baxter #4 and was blessed with not only full colour vision but negligible senescence, meaning he aged only slow

“A male,” I murmured as I read its massive barcode, about the size of a bath mat, “one hundred and twenty-one years old and, since there’s no sign of combat, probably died of old age.”