“You’ll have to witness for these,” he said sulkily.

Camp security had bagged everything in a forty-centimeter-wide isolation strip, each item gripped tight in the vacuum-sealed plastic. Carl took the strip, unrolled it on the desk to check that everything was there. He pointed at the storage key.

“This is for a locker down by the bus park,” he said. “My pack’s in it.”

“You can collect it on your way to the helicopter,” Bailey said and flicked the release form impatiently at him. “I’ll have my men escort you.”

Carl took the form and laid it on the desk, tore the activation cover off the holorecorder decal in the corner, and leaned over it.

“Carl Marsalis, SIN s810dr576,” he droned, words worn smooth on his tongue with their familiarity “UNGLA authorization code 31 jade. I hereby state that the items on this list are the full complement of property taken from me by GH camp security on June 18, 2107, and now returned to me, date the same.”

He thumbed the disk to seal it and slid the form away from him across the surface of the desk. A curious suffocating sensation had settled over him as he recited the witness statement, as if it were he and not his personal effects vacuum-sealed in the transparent plastic.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

No, that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw the way Bailey and the two security guards were watching him.

I don’t want to be this anymore.

So.

Choppered out of camp, tilting across the brilliant blue of the lake and then on through bleak, mountainous beauty as they picked their way down from the altiplano to Arequipa. Helicopters like this had smart systems navigation that ran off a real-time satellite model of local terrain and weather, which meant the thing practically flew itself. Still, the pilot stolidly ignored him for the whole flight. He sat alone in the passenger compartment and stared out of the window at the landscape below, idly mapping it onto his memories from Mars. The similarities were obvious—it wasn’t just the thin air COLIN was up here simulating—but in the end, this was still home, with a sky-blue sky up above and the broad sweep of a big-planet horizon out ahead and the slow rolling weight of one full g pulling at your bones.