The sun had long since risen, but screened as it was behind the dust that skimmed unceasingly from horizon to horizon, it could have been any time of day. People who had lived there used to warn of it – caught unprepared hunger and thirst would kill you, but that could take weeks. It was the madness that took you first.

But that was long ago, and no one remembers anymore.

It was a cold, dusty desert whose grey sands stretched unendingly into the horizon. The wind whipped wildly over it, hissing through rotted trees that twisted up through the dust and ruin like ghastly figures of warning, sweeping over crumbling cities, whistling through decayed houses and toppled skyscrapers. All was lifeless, gloom and dust. All, that is, except a single moving blip, growing steadily larger as it neared.

Had anyone survived the fall of the Dome, the sight of the robotic woman piloting the nearing sailship while a young girl in a rabbit suit frolicked about her feet would have staggered them. They might have left the rubble of what was once a great city to stare into the sky, slant-eyed against the dusty wind, bare toes curling over protrusions in the stone as they hunkered down, thin and hungry, ever watchful. Or else they might have come skidding down the sand dunes and begged, pleaded for food and shelter and take me away, far away; they might have thrust blue-skinned infants into arms round with food; they might have left their children swaddled in rags and run down, hissing, brandishing thin metal spikes.

No one knows, because this was not the place it used to be.

Kristeva and Pino did not stop for long. Without the humans they had travelled with all that time ago there was no need to stop for food or drink or blankets. They just stopped for the sake of stopping.

Pino asked how long it had been. Since Re-l had died, since Vincent had vanished, since the city had fallen, she didn't clarify.

She didn't need to.

"I don't know," said Kristeva. Her mechanical insides gave the years, the minutes, the seconds to three decimal places, but when every grey day was the same the long years were just an eternity with time thrown in.