He coughed. “Bear, not a dog. A dog would have barked. Otso just bites. Nothing personal, that’s just its nature. Paranoid and grumpy.”

“Sounds like someone I used to know.”

“I’m not paranoid.” Kosonen hunched down and tried to get the fire going again. “You learn to be careful, in the woods.”

Marja looked around. “I thought we gave you stayers more equipment. It looks a little… primitive here.”

“Yeah. We had plenty of gadgets,” Kosonen said. “But they weren’t plague-proof. I had a smartgun before I had this”—he tapped his crossbow—“but it got infected. I killed it with a big rock and threw it into the swamp. I’ve got my skis and some tools, and these.” Kosonen tapped his temple. “Has been enough so far. So cheers.”

He piled up some kindling under a triangle of small logs, and in a moment the flames sprung up again. Three years had been enough to learn about woodcraft at least. Marja’s skin looked almost human in the soft light of the fire, and he sat back on Otso’s fir branches, watching her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

“So how are you, these days?” he asked. “Keeping busy?”

Marja smiled. “Your wife grew up. She’s a big girl now. You don’t want to know how big.”

“So… you are not her, then? Who am I talking to?”

“I am her, and I am not her. I’m a partial, but a faithful one. A translation. You wouldn’t understand.”

Kosonen put some snow in the coffee pot to melt. “All right, so I’m a caveman. Fair enough. But I understand you are here because you want something. So let’s get down to business, perkele ,” he swore.

Marja took a deep breath. “We lost something. Something important. Something new. The spark, we called it. It fell into the city.”

“I thought you lot kept copies of everything.”

“Quantum information. That was a part of the new bit. You can’t copy it.”

“Tough shit.”

A wrinkle appeared between Marja’s eyebrows. Kosonen remembered it from a thousand fights they had had, and swallowed.