“Hurry up,” she said, sotto voce. “This stopped being fun hours ago.”

“Was it really worth it, for a single newspaper?” Cassandra asked.

“Of course it was worth it. You know it was. Newspapers are amongst the most valuable Void Century artefacts we can ever hope to find. Especially late editions, updated in the last few hours before it all ended. You wouldn’t believe how few of those survived.”

Cassandra pushed aside the curtain of black hair that had a habit of falling over her left eye. “What does it matter if there are some details you still don’t know, if you can still make out the bigger picture?”

Movement caught Auger’s attention: through the ceiling porthole she saw a squadron of dropships lowering down through the clouds on spikes of thrust.

“It means we stand a chance of not making the same mistakes over again,” Auger said.

“Such as?” Cassandra asked.

“Screwing up the Earth, for instance. Thinking we can fix one technological mess by throwing yet more technology at it, when every attempt to do that already has just made things even worse.”

“Only a kind of superstitious fatalism would say that we shouldn’t keep trying,” Cassandra said, folding her arms across her chest. “Anyway, how could things possibly be any worse than they are now?”

“Use your imagination, kid,” Auger said. She felt the rescue crawler tremble as the thrust from the nearest dropship washed over it. Bright light played over the cabin, followed by a lurch as the recovery cradle grabbed hold of the rescue crawler. Then they were airborne, pulled into the sky as the dropship gained altitude. Through the side windows, Auger saw the Champs-Elysées fall away, the slumped buildings on either side soon hiding it from view. She made out the surrounding streets, unable to turn off the part of her brain that insisted on identifying them. Haussmann to the north, Marceau and Montaigne to the south.