Watson retreaded and polished, the three of us walked out of Dig Town unmolested, where Sally Milkwood awaited us. She was dressed for travel, wearing the layers necessary for the open desert, a pair of goggles to keep her eyes free of sand—an item neither Joe nor I had thought to bring—and a pack and a rifle slung over her shoulders. I didn’t acknowledge her, nor did she acknowledge me. She did spare a dark glance for Watson, though. I filed that away in my catalogue of grievances. We set out onto the hard expanse leading to Peabody Crater at midmorning, none of us content.
The descent into the crater was easily achieved along a series of steep switchbacks not far beyond Dig Town’s boundary. They’d clearly been cut from the rock long before New Galveston’s founding, and had to be the primary route by which the Moths—and whatever other cultists might lurk in the crater—accessed the plain.
In school, stories of what mysteries might be found there were a favorite currency. We exchanged outlandish inventions about the place. Some of those stories we heard from adults, but usually we just made things up. For all I know, the adults were making things up, too. We regaled each other with tales of ancient alien cities revealed after the passing of one of the frequent dust storms, its glassless windows gaping like the eye sockets of skulls and its long avenues arrayed in impossible mazes, from which you might still hear the desperate, lost cries of the earliest astronauts from Earth carried on the wind; tales of genies rising from their Martian lamps, green-skinned and several-eyed, eager to grant any wish as long as one was willing to pay a devastating toll; tales of earlier human settlements, established in Roman times or even before, suggesting ancient, vanquished attempts to conquer the red planet far preceding our own, leaving only their dry bones as warning to future generations.
Though I knew all of this to be fantasy, the memory of those stories crowded my thoughts. The desert sands shone in bright pastel pinks and oranges, and the sky was butterscotch yellow. I felt like I was walking into a painting. Nothing about my life seemed real or safe.
Watson rumbled along at my side. I imagined he was enjoying his new method of locomotion. He responded to my occasional observations with his customary deference. “Yes, Miss Crisp.” “Oh most certainly, Miss Crisp.” “I’m quite sure all will be well, Miss Crisp.” I found myself quickly impatient with his innate passivity. This wasn’t the first time for it, but perhaps it was the most acute since my mother’s leaving. I wanted active conversation, not reaction.
I wouldn’t find it with the others.
And so we set out on our long, plodding trek.
Untold years of passing dust storms had filled the crater’s basin with sand, irregularly dispersed. Sometimes we would encounter steep drifts that could not be circumvented. We would have no choice but to cross, and it was at these times that Watson outpaced us all, his new treads grinding through the drifts as though he were back home in the diner, rolling over a polished floor.
Joe shuffled through the sand with the same unsure step I had: neither of us was accustomed to feeling the ground shift and slide under our feet. Sally, though, moved with a practiced confidence. She drew ahead and had to stop and wait for us about half a dozen times before she resigned herself to matching our own slow pace. I wondered how many times she’d crossed this desert, with or without Silas and his thugs, and what she’d seen along the way. While I understood the value of having someone experienced to guide our journey, I also recognized that her experience placed her firmly in control. My misgivings of the night before were only amplified.
In the daylight, Sally looked younger than I’d guessed last night—maybe in her mid-thirties. But the life she’d chosen for herself was hard. It had already carved lines in her face and put a few strands of gray in her hair. The flat, mean look, though: that I reckoned she was born with. No wonder the Shank kids had fallen in with her. Like calls to like. Still, she was clearly strong and athletic, and I found myself admiring her grudgingly.
“How long will it take us?” I asked.
Nobody answered. Joe was breathing hard, laboring alongside me. Sally walked a few yards ahead and acted like she hadn’t heard me at all.
“I asked a question,” I said.
Watson said, “I don’t know, Miss Crisp.”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
I felt a pang of guilt for snapping at my friend and patted him lightly on the chassis. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but it made me feel better about myself.
Joe paused to catch his breath. He wiped sweat from his forehead. I stopped, too, glad he’d been the first to do it. “Sally?” he said.
Sally walked another ten feet before she stopped. She turned back to look at us impassively. She did not seem to be straining herself at all. “We’re headed to the rocks out in the middle. Three days. Maybe more, the way you two are going.”
“Why did you decide to come?” I was curious, but I was also stalling for time. Each moment she talked was another I got to slow my breathing. Miss Haddersham taught us that Mars was several degrees cooler than Earth, but I stood there sweating like a farmer regardless. I was used to a different kind of work.
“You two idiots would get yourselves killed on your own. You never cross the desert without an experienced guide. Don’t they tell you that in the city?”
I shrugged. “Watson is programmed with local knowledge. He has all the basic survival protocols.”
Sally just shook her head and laughed. “Shit,” she said.
“You ain’t gonna convince me that you come out here from charity, or even from guilt. What’s the real reason? You planning on betraying me to your cultist friends?”
“I ain’t with them,” she said.
“You could have fooled me.”
“I guess fooling you wouldn’t be no challenge.”
“You sure are trying hard not to answer the question.”
Sally smiled at me. “You’re a firecracker, ain’t you?”
“I told you,” Joe said.
Though she might have meant it as a compliment, it felt demeaning. Look at the little girl, all full of brimstone. She sure is cute! I wondered how hard it would be to shake free of her.
“I’m going because of Joe. And because I think this fool quest of yours is interesting. That’s all you need to know.”
It wasn’t, though. It didn’t tell me anything. “What about the Shank kids? Ain’t they gonna flounder without you?”
“Hell, Laura Shank runs that still and takes care of her brother. I got nothing to do with it. I don’t take care of them, they take care of me. When I’m in town, at least, which I try not to be too often. And now I’m done explaining myself to a child. Are you two ready to start walking again?”
Joe sighed. “Ease up, Sally. This isn’t a race.”
“The hell it isn’t. Get moving.”
She turned and started marching again, and we had no choice but to follow. We slid down one dune and climbed another, over and over, hour after hour. At the crest of each new hill I expected to see some variation in the landscape, but there was nothing—just more waves of sand, pink and rust-colored, for as many miles as the eye could hold, the wall of the crater on the far side just a faint discoloration on the horizon. Watson carried on behind us, and already I could hear the grit collecting in his gears. His grand moment of clean circuitry hadn’t even lasted a single day. It occurred to me for the first time that this trip might be fatal to him, and that was almost enough to turn me around. What good would it do to get my mother’s cylinder back if I didn’t have an Engine to run her?
Finally, Sally came to a stop. She peered around for a few moments before declaring that we would camp here for the night. I could detect nothing special about this location that might recommend it over any of the other identical locations we had slogged through the last several hours, each minute of which I felt pain shooting up my calves and pulsing in my shoulders. I knew from his heavy breathing that Joe felt it too. And now it seemed that even Sally Milkwood, though she was born of devil’s stock, must have been suffering at least a little discomfort.
Phobos peered over the rolling horizon, about to begin its second circuit across the sky. It was bone white in the late afternoon light. The sky had shaded to a faded rouge, and a low wind—the first movement of air all day long—started to kick up. Night was still at least an hour away, but when it came it would do so quickly and brutally; we would not want to be caught fussing with our camp when the temperature went into free fall.
Joe slid the backpack from his shoulders with a groan, dropping it to the sand. He yanked a few strings and the whole thing unfurled like a set of workman’s tools. He pulled two folded heat tents from their places and began to set them up. They were designed to seal the cold weather out and generate enough heat within to keep one person safe and comfortable. I’d seen them for sale before, but this would be my first time spending the night in one. They looked cramped and unpleasant. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic, but I guessed I’d soon find out.
Sally had her own, which she also assembled in short order. Watson would be fine in the cold, though I would wrap him in a tarp to protect him from as much of the blowing sand as I could. It all seemed very mundane.
And yet, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that I had crossed a forbidden border, that I had transgressed into a place hostile to me and to my purpose. Even the strangeness of Dig Town and the widow’s basement seemed somehow tame compared to this new feeling. At least the people there were known to me once. If they were different, it was because I could compare them with who they used to be.
This, though: this was altogether new. Something seemed to be hidden behind the banal face of the landscape. Something wary and curious.
I turned from my examination of the desert to find Sally staring at me. “You feel it?”
My instinct was to deny anything she thought she saw in me—I wished to remain entirely inscrutable to her. “I don’t feel anything but tired.”
“And here I thought you were smarter than the rest.”
The compliment worked to soften me, and I damned myself for it. “I do feel something,” I said. “What is it?”
Instead of answering me, she gestured at Joe, and the two of them walked several feet away from the campsite. They turned their backs to me and Sally started talking. It left me with an ill feeling. Joe Reilly was out here because I had threatened his life; were they planning to leave me out here alone? Were they planning to kill me? It suddenly seemed not only plausible, but their most reasonable course of action.
I looked at Watson standing beside my little tent. I knew he could be of no help.
“Watson, I might have made a mistake.”
His head swiveled toward me. “A mistake, miss?”
“Coming out here with them.”
“I see. But how else might you recover the stolen cylinder? The sheriff did not seem inclined to help.”
“I don’t know. But I’m worried about those two. Joe I could handle, but Sally scares me.”
He turned his head again, taking them in. The sun had dipped below the horizon, and evening was falling fast. His rich orange eyes glowed like lamps in the twilight. “She is rather coarse,” he said.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?”
“I cannot. Shall I go ask, Miss Crisp?”
“No.” I tried to rub some warmth back into my arms. I didn’t want to get into the tent while they were still conferring. “Will you protect me from them?” I hated asking the question, hated the way it made me feel, but I was cold and alone and Watson was the only one here I could trust.
“I am a Kitchen Engine, Model 17643. I am not programmed for conflict.”
Of course I knew that. Everything extraneous to that simple duty was artifice. His namesake, from the stories, was an ex-British soldier turned medical man. He was strong, devoted, and capable. Utterly loyal. That used to provide me with great comfort. It was like having a strong uncle to watch over me. Now it just seemed stupid. His whole personality was nothing more than a pretty decoration, like a hood ornament on an automobile. Why did I keep forgetting that?
“Just wake me up if they try to come near my tent, okay?”
“Yes, Miss Crisp.”
“Thank you.” I felt better despite myself. I resisted the urge to kiss him on the cheek.
The temperature was dropping rapidly. Stars began to frost the sky, and both moons shivered among them. The others were still talking—well, Sally was, while Joe stood there and listened—but I could see their breath clouding, and I knew they wouldn’t last much longer. My will broke, and I turned toward my tent. I dropped to my knees, preparing to unzip the end of it, when Watson spoke to me.
“Miss Crisp? What is that, if you please?”
He was looking some distance ahead of us, where sand began to ripple in another series of dunes. I followed his gaze.
Something like a centipede as long as a wagon train undulated over the peaks, turning over itself, looping in great, sweeping circles. It looked for all the world as though it were in a state of joy, as though it were cavorting like a filly in a field. Its body was black. Long, cruel-looking spines ran along its back, coruscating with flickering colors arcing between them like electrical charges. It moved in complete silence, running over the dunes with as much ease as I might tread a wooden floor. And then it seemed to climb directly into the air, where it looped over again and descended back to the shifting ground. There was nothing like this supposed to be living on Mars anymore, nothing larger than the palm of a human hand; and yet there it was, defying gravity, defying extinction itself.
One of the fabled ghosts of Peabody Crater. I was reminded that granules of the Strange blew in the wind with the sand down here.
I watched it mutely, in the grip of a sudden unaccountable happiness. Joe and Sally, having ceased their talk, watched it, too.
We stood transfixed.
“Will it come up here?” I asked. As though I’d broken a spell, I suddenly realized how cold I was. My voice shook, my body trembled.
They both turned to me. They looked like they’d forgotten I was there. “No,” Sally said.
There was nothing else to say. I wanted to keep watching, but the chill was becoming unbearable. I knelt down and slid into my heated tube; Joe and Sally retreated to theirs as well. As I zipped myself inside, I glanced up at Watson once more. He had not moved from his position. His eyes glowed brightly as he continued to watch the miraculous creature’s glittering configurations in the night. Not for the first time, and not for the last, I wondered what secret thoughts warmed the copper coils inside his head.