THE FIRST MORNING BACK, he was up early. Bella gave him breakfast before Felipe came down, and he had time to cycle up to Santa Cristina before going to the clinic. There was no service until that evening, but he was grateful for the cool transparency, beneath a sky already glowing like hot iron, of the air inside the decrepit church. It smelled faintly of the incense that Felipe had used in the few services that he had given, clanking up here in his cart and on his leghelpers, while John was away. And the Inmaculada, John saw, had gained a few new ornaments in his absence. He played the cards that had been left in the tray, refraining, as he always did, from using the translat until he tried to decipher the words himself. But either way, they made little sense to him.

He arrived at the clinic to find a queue stretching around the block. Nuru, his feet up on the desk in the backroom, wore a new white coat and an air of importance.

“Fatoo find the mountains?” he asked.

John, already feeling tired and hot, disliked Nuru’s newly proprietary attitude to his desk, and the reek of disinfectant had begun to sting his eyes. “Let’s just see how you managed, shall we?”

Nuru raised his hands to shrug, then pointed at the doctor’s screen, which was already on. He remained seated at the desk and watched as John scrolled through new records that detailed a treatment rate that was almost double anything he’d ever achieved.

He was out of the church quickly after Mass that evening and cycling down Corpus Vali in oddly mercurial light. Kassi Moss hadn’t been in her usual spot midway back in the pews, and although he had no pickups or deliveries to make, he felt vaguely worried about her. Days in the Endless City were longer now. Places he was used to seeing only in darkness were exposed in flickering light. And the heat was everywhere, pushed and sucked by the wind, as if the air too was trying to settle somewhere in the coolness that never came. He saw a woman’s face in the crowd that had gathered around an ice seller. She was jostled by those near her, and the drifting smoke revealed the brown flesh of a narrow cheekbone, strands of dark hair tucked behind one ear. She sensed his gaze, turned and looked at him, and quickly made the sign against the evil eye. She was older, thinner, not Laurie. A beggar called to him as he cycled past. But today he had no money. He’d forgotten his pouch—his translat too, he now realized, which lay with the pouch on the rail by the Inmaculada; a new and unplanned addition to the tributes to Our Lady. And the cassock he was wearing, in this heat, was absurd. He should have gone back to the presbytery after Mass and changed.

Mokifa now seemed just another part of the sprawl. The only difference he could see amid the buildings beyond the shock-wire was that the windows were closed. He imagined the people sheltering inside from the heat, clustered around coolers and purifiers. He dismounted in front of the Cresta Motel and walked under the archway into the shadow of the courtyard’s walls, picking his way between bags of soiled laundry and rubbish, brushing away the flies that, too sluggish to rise into the air, crawled over his cassock.

As always, Kassi’s office was open. But, pushing through the hot beads of the curtain, blinking in the windowless halogen-lit room, he saw that another woman was sitting at Kassi’s desk. She was youngish, one of Kassi’s helpers, her face scarred by the burrowings of the skin parasite for which she’d been treated here. John had seen her wandering in the background on his visits, emptying buckets and bundling up sheets as Kassi showed him from patient to patient along the dimming corridors and asked if it was all right to bring an end. But he and the woman had never spoken, and now she stared at him, her hands pressed to her narrow chest as if she’d never seen him or any other European before.

He reached to his belt and touched the space where the translat should have been.

“Where’s Kassi?”

The woman shook her head.

He pointed. “Is she upstairs in the wards?”

The woman moved her lips. He waited while she swallowed. “Kassi vendu,” she said eventually.

Vendu? Gone—going? He wasn’t sure. It was one of those context-dependent words.

“So she’s not here?”

The woman shook her head.

John rubbed his gloved fingertips together, plastic on plastic with the sodden flesh trapped beneath, as he looked around at the tiny office. It seemed oddly empty without Kassi, and the halogen lamp threw everything out of proportion, made holes of the shadows. The cheap plastic Christ was on the wall above the desk, a clear presence in the darkness and the stink.

He said gonenanh and left. A family of rats watched him from a broken outflow in the courtyard, their paws delicately raised as they picked at something long and pale. Irritated, he walked towards them. After a moment of hesitation, they retreated.

Avoiding the temptation of shortcuts, he cycled back along Corpus Vali, then across the Plaza El-Halili to the Cruz de Marcenado. There was no discernible smoke rising from Martínez’s gabled house, and light glowed from only one of the top windows. A wounded caroni bird disentangled itself from an alleyway and, mewing, dragged itself across the street as John knocked at the door. He waited.

When the door finally swung open, the sour gust of ill-smelling air and Kailu’s face told him that Martínez was worse. John felt again for his forgotten translat, unable to remember whether Kailu spoke any European.

“How is he—ice uhe?”

With an odd, quick motion, Kailu shook her head.

“Look, if I…”

He made to step inside, but her face twisted. She spat at him.

“Inutel mal! Comma…”

He stumbled back as she lunged forward, her hands clawing for his silver eyes. She was yelling in Borderer, her voice clamoring down the hot dark street where the wounded caroni bird was still mewing, trailing blood in the dust. Shutters swung open, figures stood in doorways. Kailu was saying, Fatoo-baraka, you’re killing him, you’ve made him ill! She lunged again. It was an awkward dance, and he sensed that she didn’t quite have the final twist of whatever it took to actually touch him. Eventually a neighbor emerged, gripped her shoulders, muttered crooning words, and drew her away.

Breathless, weary, covered with sweat, John cycled back up to Gran Vía and left his bicycle in the presbytery hall. Peeling off his gloves, pulling the thread, and tossing them on the floor to curl and flare, he climbed the stairs and picked up and ignited a foline lamp. He worked open a damp-swollen door and stepped around the soggy piles of analogue books, paper printouts, unlabeled tapes, disks, and cards to get to the transmitter.

Sitting down on the old leather stool, he turned on the flat screen. Static buzzed as he scanned. There were faces and voices, rippling shapes from all the weird, cheap, faulty 2-D and half-encoded transmissions that flooded the Magulf, then the big winged silver H of the Halcycon logo demanding identification and his personal password. Entering the sudden order of the net, he called up Laurie. Her face smiled at him from the airwave’s screen.

“Hello, Father John.” Silver-eyed, she tilted her head. “How are you?” But even before she spoke, he knew it was the answerer.

“I want to speak to Laurie.”

“I’m afraid she’s busy at the moment. Can I help you?”

“Tell her I’d like to see her tomorrow. I’ll be coming into the Zone.”

The answerer nodded. “Of course.” She waited, looking at him, amused.

“How well do you speak Borderer?” he asked.

“As well as you like.” She blinked and pursed her lips. “Do you want me to talk—”

“No. I mean, I’m unsure about one particular word. Vendu—what does that mean. Gone? Away?”

“It all depends,” the answerer said, still smiling, “on the context.”

Next morning in the Zone, the tires of the cars and trucks ticked as they passed over the sticky roads. And the vans, sagging to wait at crossroads, their vents shimmering, seemed unlikely ever to rise again. Things worked at this time of year in the Magulf—but barely. The machines had all been designed for cooler, more generous skies, and the cost of fashioning anything specifically for so limited a market would have been prohibitive.

Beyond the admin blocks leading to the medical center, the people wandering through the haze that hung above the lawns were lightly dressed, in shortsleeves, cotton frocks, and shorts. A purplish scum had glazed the wind-rippled lake, and a Halcycon engineer crouched by the outfall and maneuvered a cleaning crab with helmet and joystick. He was watched from the water’s edge by a line of ruffled and impatient ducks.

Entering the air-conditioned medical center, John felt his flesh tauten with the shock. Tim jumped up when he entered the office, seemingly surprised to see him despite the appointment John had made.

“So. The wanderer returns.”

“Well,” John said, sitting down, realizing as he did so that he was moving his hands as Borderers did when they shrugged. “Here I am.”

With his usual eagerness to get things over and done with, Tim had already begun to tap commands into the screen on his desk. He’d had his hair cut while John was away; the fringe was a little shorter. When he leaned forward to peer at a corner of the display, John saw that the hair was combed and woven to hide its thinning. Funny, he thought, that we still can’t do much about that. In the corner, the doctor hissed and clicked, reconfiguring its receivers and probes to Tim’s commands, making minor adjustments. It looked sleek and predatory.

“Now. Let’s get started, shall we?”

Tim blanked the windows. John discarded his clothes. The air raised bumps on his flesh as the doctor slid out on smooth runners. He submitted to its embrace.

“You’ve got the results there?” he asked afterward.

“Marvelous, isn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

Tim shrugged. “There’s no problem, John. Of course there’s no problem—you have God on your side.”

John buttoned his shirt. “No isotopes?”

“There’s a little in your intestines and lungs, but it’s broadly distributed. No hot spots. The viruses haven’t deprogrammed a single precancerous cell. Not that you should worry—you of all people. You’re fit, John. To be honest, you were in a worse state before you left. There’s a record of some blip in your cpu. But it self-corrected.”

“And Laurie Kalmar. She’ll be okay too?”

“She’ll be fine,” Tim said, “unless she was digging up the dust and eating it. Of course, I don’t do the high-grade Borderer tests. It’s a separate specialization. Not that I’d mind giving it a bash. With Laurie.”

John concentrated on his socks.

“And what’s it like out there?” Tim said. “Is it really as ghastly as everyone says it is?”

“The people up in the mountains are poor. But it’s…more lifelike than here.”

“Lifelike.” Tim nodded. “That’s not a word that often comes to mind, in or outside the Zone.”

“I didn’t know you went outside much.”

“Oh…” Tim said. “Every now and then. And you got all the way there, I gather? To the site of the blast? You managed to take samples?”

“You’ve spoken to Laurie? To the engineer?”

“To neither, actually,” Tim said. “But you know what it’s like here, the way word gets around. We hardly need the net.”

“I can imagine.”

Tim gave John a glance that said he probably couldn’t, then concentrated on the screen, tapping with his fingers. The window was still blanked, and the screen’s lines of lights and letters scrolled over his face in the half darkness. John finished dressing. He had expected Tim to show more curiosity about the journey, though he knew now that the question of the contaminated koiyl in itself held little interest for him. But Tim didn’t ask how John and Laurie had got on. What they’d got up to.

“It’s a kind of holy place for the witchwomen,” John said. “I collected some fresh leaves along the way. They were fresh five days ago, anyway. And the flowers of the plant, the people in the village just gave them to me. For free.”

Tim kept his eyes on the screen. “You want me to look at them?” He seemed to be comparing sources of data, and John wondered momentarily if it was possible for Tim to tell from the readouts whether his patient had been sexually active with a Borderer woman.

“If you could. But tell me—and I know this is probably a stupid question—is there some way of filtering the isotopes out of the leaf? Some process? Or a way that people could chew the leaf without absorbing them?”

“You’re right, John—it’s a stupid question. The main contaminant at Ifri Gotal is strontium 90, which is a particularly nasty isotope because of the way it builds up inside living things. The reason it’s in the leaf, and the reason it’s finding its way into your patients’ bones, is that it’s so chemically similar to calcium that it gets absorbed along with it. It becomes part of what you are, John, and stays with you for up to thirty years. And all the while it’s emitting beta waves that have more than enough energy to kill cells, or damage them—or make them cancerous.”

“I just thought—I don’t know. That there might be some way.”

“There isn’t. But I thought you just wanted to stop the contaminated leaves being sold.” Now, that John was fully dressed, Tim cleared the windows. The purplish scum had been cleared from the lake, and the ducks were back out, bobbing like little sailboats. “But yes, I’ll take a look at the new leaves if you want.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Anyway, I have only one more appointment for this morning. What would you say to going out for a sip and a bite?”

“Sorry, Tim. It’ll have to be some other day.”

“Okay.” Tim looked down and touched his screen again. “But let me know if your hear about any free drinks—remember, like we had at Trinity Gardens?” Glancing up from beneath his fringe, he seemed almost boyish again. “You will do that, John, won’t you?”

John arrived at the little bar on Main Avenue ten minutes early. Laurie was already there.

It wasn’t quite the place he remembered. The chromium machine was still busy serving, but there was no leaving party today; the tables were little islands occupied by solitary diners. She’d sat close to the window, in the motes of light that filtered through the glass from the cherry trees outside. She looked up at him and pushed back a chair.

He sat down. His throat was tight. She’d ordered wine while she waited but no food. The waiter whizzed between them to whisk away the butts of two tubes that lay in the steel saucer, and she watched with her chin propped on her hand. Her hair was tied back today. It was cool in here, but the strands that had escaped the ribboned knot curled damp against her neck and forehead.

They settled on cannelloni from the small nonseafood section of the menu. And more wine. The food came. They discussed the koiyl. Now, at least, John had the kind of evidence the governor had been talking about. Even if John feared for the fate of the village of Lall, he had a duty to make sure that something was done…

Despite the wine, his mouth was dry, and he found it difficult to talk and swallow. Yet Laurie was still Laurie and seemed to be treating this as though it were all so ordinary, just the meeting of two friends. He wondered if there was some subtle Borderer sexual code that he, a European, had no knowledge of. Or perhaps her expression was obscured by the wonderful, continuing strangeness of her green eyes. He crossed his legs as the waiter tinkled to another table.

“Did you hear,” she asked, “what I just said?”

“I’m sorry Laurie, I was just…”

“I know. Elsewhere.”

“What was it?”

She pushed back her plate and folded her arms. “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. That was how I could tell.” She tilted her head. “So what are you doing this afternoon?” There was gentle mockery there, but at least she didn’t call him Father John.

“Do you have anything planned?”

“Nothing. What about you?”

“Only things that can wait.”

“Then let them wait.”

He opened his eyes. He hadn’t thought he’d been asleep, but the glow of his watch told him that it was hours since they’d come to the bungalow. They’d made love, and afterward Laurie had gone to the bathroom, and he’d watched her shadow shift across the tiles as she stooped to wash herself. Sex was, after all, inherently messy. Now she was asleep. He raised himself up on his arm and gazed down as she lay breathing, complete, composed, with that tiny puckered scar on her upper arm. He turned over again, staring up into the dark, rubbing at the crust around his eyes, wondering why the best moments always seemed to slip away.

He felt uncomfortable, it was true, under the silver-eyed gaze of people who, no matter how careful he and Laurie were, would soon be talking about yet another priest who’d gone a little strange here in the Endless City. And all his efforts with the koiyl, the meetings he would have to attend, the studies he would try to promote, would fit in so neatly as an excuse for these frequent visits to the Zone…

He turned and saw that Laurie was awake, staring at him.

“I should go to your church,” she said, sitting up a little. “That might make it easier.”

“Make what easier?”

“To understand what all this is doing…”

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, breathing her scent, feeling the warmth of her skin.

“Did Hal ever want to be a priest?”

He smiled at the thought. “It was the last thing he’d be.”

“Is that,” Laurie said, pressing closer to him, “the reason you chose it?”

They walked out through the Zone. It was late, and quiet. The lights along the streets hummed, the occasional machine clattered by. They crossed the pale lawn past the gray spire of All Saints, where Father Orteau was just emerging. John raised a hand in acknowledgment, but the little man scuttled off through the hot wind towards his air-conditioned suite at the Hyatt, seeming not to notice them. They walked on, past the admin blocks towards the shuttleport, where lights shone out from the plain glass windows of the Borderer hostels and the sky seemed at its blackest and reddest, its most volcanic. Down by the shore, even after midnight—and in this heat—a shift was still working. Engines moaned, chains crackled, generators hummed, Borderer voices shouted. But a silence seemed to descend and the stares were hostile as John and Laurie walked by a great loading bay where a shuttle engine was being hauled up from a barge. From somewhere a frothy blob of spit patted the hot pavement in front of them.

“How long do you have left,” Laurie asked, linking his arm as they turned the corner, “in the Endless City?”

“A few months. Four. No…three.”

“You’ll go back then?”

“No. I won’t go back.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of everything.”

They walked on.