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‘don’t listen to me; I just spend too much time on Wikipedia. Besides, you saw it’s not happening to all the hives; more than half of them are buzzing fit to burst. Come on,’ she said, clapping her hands together and immediately feeling like a nursery teacher leading a bunch of five-year-olds in a sing-song. ‘Still got lots to do. Pack away your smocks and start breaking out the tools. We need to replace those dead hives.’ She flipped the lid off another plastic crate lying on the grass. ‘There’s everything you need in here. Tools, instructions on how to make a basic top-bar hive, bits of old boxes and lengths of timber. But remember, in the field you’ll be building hives from whatever you can scavenge. Not that you’ll find much lying around where you’ll be going. People who don’t have anything in the first place don’t tend to throw anything away.
    ‘You can’t use anything from the dead hives. If some kind of spore or parasite did cause the colony to fail, you’ll just import disaster to the new one.’
    Kathryn pulled open the driver’s door. She needed to distance herself from the volunteers. Most of them came from educated, middle-class backgrounds, which meant they were well-meaning but impractical and would stand around discussing the best way of doing something for hours rather than actually doing it. The only way to cure them was to throw them in at the deep end and let them learn by their own mistakes.
    ‘I’ll check how you’re doing in half an hour. If you need me, I’ll be in my office.’ She slammed the door shut behind her before anyone could ask another question.
    She could hear the dull clatter of tools being sorted and the first of many theoretical discussions. She turned on the radio. If she could hear what they were talking about, sooner or later the mother in her would compel her to assist and that wouldn’t help anybody. She wouldn’t be there for them in the field.
    A local radio station drowned out the noise of the volunteers with traffic news and headlines. Kathryn reached over to the passenger seat and picked up a thick manila file. On the cover was a single word – Ortus – and the logo of a four-petal flower with the world at its centre. It contained a field report detailing a complex scheme to irrigate and replant a stretch of desert created by illegal forest clearances in the Amazon Delta. She had to decide today whether the charity could afford it or not. It seemed that every year, despite fundraising being at an all-time high, there were more and more bits of the world that needed healing.
    ‘And finally,’ the radio newscaster said with that slightly amused tone they always reserve for novelty items at the end of the serious stuff, ‘if you go down to the centre of Ruin today you’re sure of a big surprise – because somebody dressed as a monk has managed to climb to the top of the Citadel.’
    Kathryn glanced up at the slim radio buried in the dashboard.
    ‘At the moment we’re not sure if it’s some kind of publicity stunt,’ the newscaster continued, ‘but he appeared this morning, shortly after dawn, and is now holding his arms out to form some kind of a . . . a human cross.’
    Kathryn’s insides lurched. She turned the keys in the ignition and jammed the minibus into gear. She drew level with one of the volunteers and wound down her window.
    ‘Got to go back to the office,’ she called. ‘Be back in about an hour.’
    The girl nodded, her face registering mild abandonment anxiety, but Kathryn didn’t see it. Her eyes were already fixed ahead, focusing on the gap in the hedge where the track fed out on to the main road that would take her back to Ruin.

Chapter 10
     
     
    Halfway between the gathering crowds and the Citadel’s summit, the Abbot, tired from a night spent awaiting further news, sat by the glowing embers of the fire and looked at the man who had just brought it.
    ‘We had thought the eastern face to be insurmountable,’