SOMETHING IN THE AIR, clear and metallic, turned and flashed, then cracked into separate notes. He opened his eyes as the room snapped back around him, and the tang of tubesmoke still hovered above the soggy earthbound scent of koiyl leaves, his own sweat, the dust and damp of the presbytery. He sat up, and pain ran through his spine.

He crossed the room, gripping the waxy corners of the ancient furniture. No leaf today, he thought, seeing the chair by the window set at an angle, and the scatter of Laurie’s tubes in the wastebin beside it. He dressed in the dysol-reeking clothes that Bella had put out, and light poured with him into the corridor as he descended towards the smell of cooking.

Felipe was already seated at the table, the steam rising from his coffee.

“A good day for it,” he said. “Don’t you think so, my son?”

John went over to the window and looked out. The air was still. Every brick, lintel, and patch of flaking plaster on the tenement opposite was sharply etched. The windows and rooftops were held in glassy suspension as the sky glowed white—no, the sky was gray, like the pressure he felt at the back of his eyes. Still somehow gray despite all the brightness.

He turned when Bella emerged through the doorway with the breakfast tray tinkling in her hands. He sat down, and Felipe grunted and flapped out his napkin as she leaned over the table, the bare stretch of her forearm touching John’s shoulder as she placed the plates before them. There were fungi leaking grayish juice, fried kelpbread, several crustacea, two rashers each of bacon, the pale watery eye of a fresh egg.

He said, “Laurie was here last night.”

“Yes.” Felipe watched the sway of Bella’s departing rump. “So I gather.”

“There seems to be some concern about me,” John said. “Tim Purdoe thinks I’m unwell.” He looked down at his plate, the blue pattern that he’d stared at many times before without really noticing. “Not, I think, that I’m exactly…” The beaded black eye of the shrimp stared back at him. He knew that if he put the thing into his mouth, he’d only spit it out again. “Not that I’m entirely fit. I’ve been taking the leaf…” He swallowed, conscious of the brightness flooding from the window at his back; of how the noises in the street sounded so different now that there was no rain and even the wind had stilled; of the dry, odd-sounding croak of his own voice. “I’ve been chewing it in a spirit of scientific experiment. But now I seem to be coughing up a little blood.”

“I’ve seen people looking worse, my son,” Felipe said. “But also better. If you really want to stay here, then you should stay.” He waved the eggy tines of his fork at his feet. “That is, if you want to become like me. But otherwise, I think you should go back to Europe right away. You only have—what is it?—two weeks left of your term.”

“Is that all? I’d thought…” He felt as though he should be getting up. Running somewhere. Doing something.

Felipe chuckled, mopping kelpbread around his plate. “After all, you’ve left me often enough already. And I see the bishop’s flag is flashing on the airwave again. Has been for the last couple of days…But this time I decided not to take a message for you.”

“I’d like to see today through at least. This carnival after the rains…”

“Of course.” Felipe pushed back his plate and folded his arms over his stomach. “Bella,” he called, “excellent as always!” He turned to John. “And after that? Your plans for the priesthood?”

“I’m still going to leave.”

Felipe nodded. Then he leaned forward across the table, his face suddenly grave.

“Now, my son.” His gaze shifted down to the untouched breakfast. “If you’re not wanting that, perhaps I might…?”

He checked his bicycle in the hall; he’d used it little lately, but the powerlight still gleamed and the tires were firm as he wheeled it out into the street. The clear flat puddles reflected fractured images of the roof-segmented sky as he cycled down to the clinic. Outside, a queue was forming, although Nuru had already arrived and unlocked the doors. He was sitting inside at his desk in the outer office, little columns of coins on the desk before him, busy with his preparations.

“Fatoo…”

“Gunahana.”

John changed gloves and took out a fresh wad of dysol cloths. The doctor’s lens followed him as he entered the backroom. He heard the usual chatter of voices when Nuru began to sort out the queue. Those who were keeping a place for someone else, those who’d let a friend in, those who weren’t really sure why they’d come. John listened, smiling, watching the play of shadows through the half-open door.

The first patient came in. A tall man, he mistakenly held his wounded hand out to John rather than to the doctor, his eyes downcast.

“Not many this morning,” Nuru said cheerfully from behind him. “People got other…”

“Yes. The carnival.”

The man mumbled, and Nuru explained that he should step towards the doctor’s suite of mandibles. Sitting on the edge of the desk, John watched. This patient was, for all the difference in his clothes, the spiky hair, the stubble on his jowls, the unmatched shoes, and the bloodshot green eyes, almost the exact double of Father Gulvenny, the priest of John’s teenage years at St. Vigor’s. Father Gulvenny would be dead now, of course. The cut along this man’s thumb had already been frozen by some kind of fixative; there was no real danger, but John watched anyway as the doctor’s delicate mandibles drew the sides of the wound together and bound them with a filmy fluid that would soon change, harden, and become part of the flesh. When the doctor finished, John was still looking at the man’s face. Father Gulvenny, he was tempted to say, it really is you, isn’t it? This wasn’t the first time he’d glimpsed people he knew, in the Endless City. There was the witchwoman who, but for the steel eye and the caroni bird on her shoulder, could have been his mother. And there was Annie, standing in a spice souk one night last winter as the snow fell and the lanterns swung, casting light and shadow over her lovely half-turned face. But he hadn’t seen Hal yet. He was still looking.

Blinking, half dazed, Father Gulvenny left the clinic, making a surreptitious sign against the evil eye with his damaged hand as he left. There were other patients. A blind man who often came on some pretext or other, hoping that John or the doctor would suddenly offer a cure. And children with bellyaches and sores, muttering ma, madre, today worried that they might end up confined to bed and miss the carnival fun. And elderly people, pulling aside baggy elastic to show joints swollen by nothing more than a lifetime’s use. Some were past seventy, even eighty, although they seemed grumpy, ungrateful for their fullness of years. But he envied the way life here could begin or end like the turning of these streets, narrowing, widening, opening suddenly into a whole new vista or closing unexpectedly on a dead brick wall.

The final patient came and went. Light billowed in from the open window. Even today there was a breeze. The posters on the wall crackled. “Don’t,” one of them muttered, the remnant of some long-forgotten health campaign. “Danna…” The doctor creaked forward slightly to regard him, a lens focusing in his direction as it absorbed the odd metabolic changes that had taken place in his body, changes it recognized as human yet also alien and beyond its capabilities to heal. Looking down at the screen as he moved his fingers to turn it off, John briefly saw the flashing image of his silver-threaded body.

“I won’t be here much longer,” he told Nuru, who stood waiting in the doorway. “You know that?”

Nuru nodded and pushed his hands into his pockets. His hair was freshly cut in neat sharp lines across his ears and forehead. His eyes fixed on John’s, tracked away, came back again.

“This may be my last day.”

“You last?”

“It’s a little early. But you know where all the codes and cards are. You know that you can call on Felipe. And there’s Kassi, of course. And the people at the Zone.”

Nuru nodded.

“And I’ll make sure,” John said, “that you can keep on working here when someone else arrives in a few days. But you really need a proper salary.”

“Salary?”

“Regular money paid by the church instead of cash from that box over there.”

Nuru looked at the cashbox, then at John, his face a little pained.

“Well…” John leaned back on the desk, spreading his hands to take the strain from his back, feeling the gloves pull and wrinkle, the painful itch of his palms. “Perhaps things work well enough as they are. But, you know, you could run this place on your own…”

Nuru nodded, but he still looked pained. He wouldn’t want that, either. Without a European and aid from the Zone to keep the doctor going, he’d just be another local healer.

“But thanks, Nuru. Thank you. I’ll never forget the help you’ve given me. And don’t worry about Mass this morning—just go and do what you want to do. And there’s that bicycle outside—my bike, you know?—I’d like you to have it, as a gift.”

“Yes Fatoo.” Nuru looked at John thoughtfully, probably calculating whether the machine would be worth more sold in one piece or broken up. “Thank you too…”

John left Nuru to lock up. He walked away from the clinic, where his bicycle leaned with its powerlight glowing, across the Plaza Princesa, and up the hill. It felt good to discard things—and the odd sense of lightness that had been with him all morning was even stronger now. This was a different city, strangely quiet under a white haze with the smells of coalsmoke, fresh paint, and wet jelt breaking over him in papery veils. He wandered the climbing alleys and quarrelsomely tangled streets, nearly losing himself, tripping over duckboards and puddles. In this odd, detached silence, he missed all the usual clues. He checked his watch, seeing frozen lines, and jumped as a cat hissed unexpectedly at him from the top of a glass-strewn wall. He now recognized the big brick-paved square where Sarai and Mo had their tenement. They would be busy with their goat this morning, washing, combing, putting in ribbons, trying to cover up the remains of the foot rot. He looked up at the windows, but they all shone black. His footsteps clipped and echoed in silence as he walked towards the open door of the big warehouse where the carnival floats were stored, expecting noise, the commotion of the last hours before the procession. But even here it was empty. A small girl sat alone, snipping out shapes from paper, her face pale with concentration, her cheeks two angry red spots. She looked up when he came in, and shook out a tumble of people holding hands. He said gunahana and pushed his way through the gleaming displays. Close up, they were hard to make out, really just angles and curves, splashes of primary color, but the big spidery float at the back of the warehouse had at last taken shape into something familiar. It was covered with sheets of the thin film that the old man had been sewing, and it had been painted filigree-white and given great ghost wings and spars. John sat down on a crate beside it, looking up. A cloudpicker. It was big, but still far too small, and wrong, he guessed, in every detail. But it was also unmistakably right. The taut membranes shimmered rainbows, popping and straining as if ready to take flight.

There had once been nights, he thought, blinking, his shoulders hunched against some unaccountable pain, when the sea and the sky joined, became one element, when the climate was pure and warm and the rest of the world slept far away. But the summer after Hal’s accident, they hadn’t gone to Ley; Hal’s condition hadn’t stabilized yet; although actually, if you looked back, Hal had been stable enough. He was settled and at peace—it was everyone else who hadn’t stabilized, who still oscillated wildly from joy to hope to anger to puzzlement and grief at the merest twitch of his eyelids, or at the unexpected stab of a memory or regret. Two years afterwards, they finally went back to Ley. John, his parents, Hal. Technically, moving Hal hadn’t been so difficult. A big doctor was rented to lift him up, carry him downstairs to the van that his father had also rented and was even talking of buying. Hey, look at these features, Son. And the machine had stayed by him, monitoring and clicking on the strange and familiar journey to Ley’s seagull-wheeling streets, where the process, with some minor difficulty at a sharp turn in the stairs, was repeated in reverse. For all the weeks that they were there, the big doctor squatted self-importantly in the room with Hal, strung to him by silver. John had weird visions of taking the thing out with him with its heraldic head to walk the cliffs or navigate Omega—although that year he never quite got around to making her seaworthy. Or even—now that he was too old to do so—imagined sitting with it on Chapel Beach, digging castles and canals in the pale hot sand. The hope, of course, had been that if they reenacted some of the normal rituals of their old summers at Ley, a still functioning part of Hal’s consciousness would clear. He’d hear the seawind, feel the soft grit of the sand that John dribbled between his toes. He’d awake to the cry of gulls and the tinkle of spars and say, Hey, Skiddle. Or he’d come in the night to the cabin where John lay awake and gazing up at the big sea moon that so often filled his window, waiting, as sometimes happened, for a shape, winged, dark, to pass between him and it…Not that it happened, not that he expected it to happen, even if the sun each morning was as bright as ever, and the sky—well, the sky; he still hadn’t worked out a proper word to describe that deep blue that lay over your eyes in those noonday depths. But nothing happened, and they went back to Hemhill when the evenings began to chill. They caught the house and the garden, as always, in green and ragged surprise, and arrived just in time for the festival of harvest, the big carnival, and the night when the long trucks went past and the low deep humming of the compound at the end of the valley rumbled deep between the hills.

John stood up. The cloudpicker squealed and fluttered. He could almost feel the pull of it, like a kite, and now he could also hear voices and the growl of a handtool back at the entrance of the warehouse. He walked out. The people drifting in to prepare for the carnival made a space for him to pass.

Darkness was already rising in the square when John stood above it, swaying on the steps that led back through lost alleyways to the church where he had waited, lost as well, in a timeless moment of empty prayer. The sky was still pale over the rooftops, but dim now, faded as white paper fades. Twilight billowed up, softening the paved square where the people wandered through a mist. Suddenly, now, they were all here, and dragons and hippogriffs unfurled their wings from the big main doors of the warehouse. He walked down the steps as a giggling river of girls dressed in white ran by him. There were cheers when the warehouse disgorged a giant dark-eyed figure, the leering half-solid head emerging through the roof even before the body left the doorway. Then came the cloudpicker, hardly visible, a bubble of light.

Now, the goat was coaxed down the ribboned steps of the tenement, Sarai and Mo leading it. The crowd sighed. Doubtless drugged more heavily than ever, but with its coat a glossy white and its legs apparently fully healed, the creature managed to look regally important as it was coaxed onto the back of a flatbed truck that was now wreathed in rocket cones of pink and yellow hyacinth. A figure, caped and many-jeweled—possibly a witchwoman, although today they were hard to distinguish from the rest of the population—raised a hand that glinted with a vial and proceeded to anoint the goat. Then the engines started. White balloons lifted from the square, the drums commenced their clatter, colored lights played through the smoke, the procession began to move.

John followed at the back, where the small boys scampered. He felt empty-handed, and almost wished that he’d followed Felipe’s example and brought the incenser with him. But at least he was in the carnival now. It had lost the intimidating strangeness he’d witnessed looking down at it from the window of the presbytery all those months ago; the demons were mostly papier-mâché, and the faces behind the painted-on skulls usually seemed to be laughing. In many ways, it wasn’t that different from the carnival at Hemhill, even if Hemhill’s was confined to a field. The occasional talk there of a procession down High Street always came to nothing, because people were too busy with the harvest to get things organized, or they were away on holiday like his parents. Lifted up in Hal’s arms in the days when he was small, he’d often watched the trucks arriving on the empty field, the big rigs and the gaunt, scary shapes of the self-propelled gantries.

People lurched around him, bearing monolithic heads on their shoulders, barely able to see where they were going through the eye slits in the mouths. One, either weary or drunk, staggered into him. The looming face, he saw, was unmistakably one of the stone kings on the cliff face of Hettie’s cave near Ifri Gotal. Then something stuck John hard on the back. When he looked around, he saw a black-robed woman at the side of the road. She was bending down to the mud to scoop up more.

He was borne in the river of the procession now. The sky was fully dark, and the buildings flickered with lights, screens, and lanterns. Looking over the bobbing heads at the Pandera presbytery, he saw the open window of the top room where Felipe would be sitting. He shouted out the old priest’s name as a tinkling keyboard rang in his ears, but the crowd surged on and, looking back, he couldn’t even be sure that he’d seen the right building. But he knew that everyone was here. The image in his head was of this carnival procession running like a glittering snake east to west for all the thousands of kilometers of the Endless City, as far as Mizraim and over the wreckage of Jerusalem to the domes of the albino people, the clifftop dwellings, the ash deserts of the tundra. All joining together under a dark-white sky.

He looked ahead for the goat now as the procession spilled out into the Plaza El-Halili and the purposeful movement of the crowd grew turbulent and air filled with the sound of arguments and the smell of spice, fried onion, sour manure, fresh popcorn. Parents grabbed anxious hands, and he heard the wailing pull of children’s voices. Madre, ossar. Ah protho…He wandered the lines of stalls, finding his way easily past bats fluttering in cages, crabs scuttling through mazes and urged on by cheering crowds, and, everywhere, balloons squealing. Some stalls, it seemed to him, contained monstrous clawing shadows, and there was an edgy sense that it would be easy to step sideways from here into the darkness that underlies every kind of carnival, to take a wrong turn where feathers and blood trickled in the gutter beside him. But by the stage and the brightly lit Kasbah wall, the local bands were playing music while people clapped and danced and nodded their heads and held babies and camera screens up to see. He was hit by the bass and the heat, the thrump of many generators, the dizzy lights that swept the sky. Ah, fatoo, gunafana…Fireworks and rockets clattered over the stage, and he shivered, looking up and losing his sense of horizon as the fire-threaded black poured over him. Whoosh. Bang. Nach. Ahhhh. He stumbled out of the crowd towards the steps of an empty alley, vomited quickly and discreetly in a gap between the buildings, then sat down on the slick paving to nurse his dizziness and watch the show.

It was easier here, anyway—just watching being apart. That autumn after they returned from the Annie-less summer in Ley, he’d gone down through the carnival turnstiles at Hemhill when the grass was still wet and the rides were scarcely open. He’d wanted to catch the day off-guard, and in a way—in a wrong way—he’d succeeded. For the first time he found himself looking at the back of things, the way the tents were pegged, the screens supported, the rides powered and anchored; looking at the hot juddering cables and the chipped corners and the flaking paint, the half-broken crabs that climbed and tended the great wheel that he’d broken his promise again last year to ride. This year Hal had been too absorbed with departure to extract the same promise from him.

It already had the feeling of a last carnival, and John wondered if Hal would even find the time to come. He hadn’t seen him that morning. Hal would probably be in his room packing now, or off somewhere with Annie, or saying farewell to one or another of his secret haunts. This was, after all, his last day before London. But John really wasn’t that bothered. He was glad, for once, to be back in Hemhill. At Ley this year, his brother had pottered around like some mournful ghost, getting in the way. And things went wrong, were misarranged. Omega hadn’t been serviced, John had to do it himself, and even a lazy afternoon on the beach had been polluted by the atrocity of that seagull. Although he knew it wasn’t fair, John blamed Hal for that as well.

It was still too early for any sign of his own friends at the carnival, or for anything really to happen. He walked into the beer tent, wondering if he’d be stopped this year as he’d been every other. But no one noticed; the invisible barrier that had always separated him from this dim and green-lit adult world, where he’d once peered under the flaps and seen old Father Virat staggering drunk, had dissolved. He walked past the largely empty lines of trestles. He asked for a beer at the counter and looked for a place to sit after the machine served him.

And there was Hal, sitting alone with a beerglass in his hand and a corral of empty ones around him. He looked up without smiling when John sat down beside him.

John took a sip of his beer. It was cold, slimy. “I was thinking,” he said, “that this year, I’ll go on the great wheel. I won’t run like I did last year, you know.”

Hal nodded, a half-moon of foam drying on his upper lip and a popped blisterpack of soberups lying by his elbow. He wasn’t even bothering to get drunk. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“I mean, I don’t expect you to pay, Hal. Not after wasting your money last year.”

Hal looked mournful and bilious in this greenish light. Music began to crunch outside, then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

“Did you hear the truck last night, Skiddle?”

“Truck? No.”

“I thought…” Hal looked pained. “I went down there this morning, before I came here. There was dew on the shockwire, and the compound was alive. They were everywhere.”

John nodded, wondering what the point was in staring at people you couldn’t understand or even touch.

“Oh, there are stories,” Hal said, gazing down into his glass. “But I expect you know that.”

“Well, Hal, I…”

“A few years back, you know, one of them went missing. One of the Gogs. A girl—she was kidnapped. It never really came out what had happened, but I heard it was some Hemhill lads. You know—my age. Or yours…Or only a little older. They tied her up in the back of an agripede and took her down to the ruins around the old cathedral. There’s an old building that’s kept its roof. It was once a pub called the Orange Tree, and the sign still sticks out into the street. They dragged her into a room with wet plaster falling off the walls. Ripped the lydrin implant out of her arm, raped her, held her, pissed on her, spat on her. Made her eat…” Hal squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them hard with his fist. “You know, for the viruses. Just to see what would happen. Of course, she died.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah.” Hal took his blisterpack and popped another soberup tablet. “So why do I keep thinking about it?”

“These things are—”

“Thinking about it even when I’m with Annie. Pretending in my head that I’m…That she’s…”

John stared at him, feeling an odd, disconnected anger, something that blazed and passed through without finding a focus. You, my brother, he thought, waiting for something else to come into his head. But he was simply glad that Hal would be going to London tomorrow, that Hal wouldn’t be coming into his bedroom again as he’d done on recent nights, overwrought with the world and the prospect of things to come and the souring of his once golden relationship with the sweet and lovely Annie. John was sick of Hal opening the door and breaking through the clean silence just as John was falling into sleep.

“Well…” Too quickly, John finished his beer. He stood up, feeling his gut clench and ache. “See you later, Hal.” He walked out of the tent into the light of the carnival, and stood looking up at the great wheel. The sun was glinting through the spokes, spilling the warmth of what would be—what always was, for the carnival—a hot day. He no longer felt afraid, but the cost of the ride was exorbitant and the queue was slow and long. You wasted a small fortune and half your afternoon simply waiting to get on. He already knew that with or without Hal, this year or any other year, he wouldn’t be going on the great wheel. It wasn’t a question of fear. It was simply a matter of giving up…

“Skiddle?”

John started and turned, looking up the enclosed Magulf alley behind him, then down through the steam and smoke across the stalls and the dancing, shifting people. But the sound had come only from his own head. Wincing, he clambered to his feet and wandered back through and into the carnival. He saw a woman’s face as she turned and laughed—looking startlingly like Laurie for a moment. It was getting late, and the crowds were both thinner and more frantic, the competing lights, attractions, sounds, and the generators that powered them had all been turned up. He watched a carousel spin, a dragon roar, and a shooting gallery where the targets burst and spouted blood; the split wreckage of what might have been a cloudpicker or the wings of a dead insect blown in on a counterwind from Europe; and a wrestling machine oiled with the sweat of a hundred competitors—it now lay slumped in a corner, in flickering light, its screen blind and its mandibles dislocated. Gazing down at its smeared and dented golden dome, John thought it was familiar. But everything was familiar in this place.

Crowing laughter and fistfights. A stale, hot wind. The snap and clatter of empty cans and tubes, snakes of vomit and urine and the weak fizzing of chemlights trapped in puddles. The half-laughing, half-protesting cries of a woman, as a man, his voice thick with all the pressures of the night, leaned against her. Everything was lost and waiting on a still wind. Everything banged and clanged. His gloves were red from fingertip to wrist now, and the color had even spread inside, with the angry burning of his palms. There were nights, he thought, looking up at the glinting white lace of interference lines in the sky, and the turning, beckoning wheel of the stars. There were nights…

Shadows flickered from a fire over the pink Kasbah wall. Voices crackled, rags of clothing swept back like ash from the flames, throwing furrows across the silently gathering crowd. Walking the tightrope line of space that opened around him, John pushed on towards the front, looking for faces he knew, for Sarai and Mo, Juanita, Nuru, Kassi, for Martínez, for Father Gulvenny, looking even for Hettie and the witchwoman he’d seen on the night of the spring carnival at Banori’s tenement. But the faces all drew back into the shadows that flowed and opened towards the space where the figures flew upward, caught on the sweep of this wild and hallucinogenic wind.

The goat was tethered to a post now in the middle of a madly dancing circle that thinned like smoke as John reached to join hands. He looked at its wise white head, pulling off his gloves as he did so and seeing the red fluid that dribbled out from them and the deep gashes that had somehow appeared in his palms. His fingers left streaks on the goat’s coat, drawing the fur into beaded clumps. He felt a gasp ripple through the crowd like the wind that tousled the green cloud-racing hills where once he had stopped to talk to creatures almost like this, looking up at the mystery of their slotted eyes, feeling the waiting melancholy of the backrooms to which—here, Father, and he seemed so bright and chipper in the summer—he was later taken. And the goat’s eyes, he saw, were each a different color. One was brown and the other silver.

The crowd gasped again. A thrilling tension ran through him—that he should be here where the flames danced on the walls, with the cold emerald light of the fire and the drip-tap of drums and the swaying, scurrying witchwomen who were fingering their honeycombed moonrock and drinking their Venusian vials, and that the crowd should be with him, touching without touching, sighing with the wind, pushing him on. A black shape scuttled up to him. Something silver flashed from the sky. It touched his hand, and his fingers slipped, almost dropping the metal. The knife handle was cold and smooth, and he watched a red line dribble out along the curved and shining blade from his hand, watched the droplet that formed at the tip and grew and hung there. A white wind poured around him. This, he thought, as the bead of blood finally broke from the knife and dropped slowly towards the paving, as the goat tried to raise its tethered head and clattered its hooves, this is my blood, my covenant, my rainbow, my promise to a ravaged world. His raised his hand, and brought the knife down in a red blur. Once, and then again, feeling something break, feeling something crumple, feeling the gasp of life and a hot spray like the salt of the ocean and the pull of the tide washing over him.

He dropped the knife, looked down at the still-kicking, half-butchered animal, then turned, dazed, his feet sticking in the spreading pool, his eyelids glued with blood, and stumbled back through the parting crowd. There were faces he recognized now, people he had seen, and they were more afraid of him than ever, the fatoo baraka who was madder than the witch-women, than chicahta. At least the witchwomen believed only in the whirl of this planet through the stars…

“Skiddle?”

John spun around. But he saw only Borderer faces and carnival light. He stumbled on, kicking over brimming chemical buckets and clattering through a stall, staggering up the slope and away to the dark and hidden streets, falling against doors and walls beneath the churning sky, leaving a bloody trail behind him, smearing hieroglyphs and symbols, swirls and crosses. He had no idea where to go.

He began to slow as he ran from the carnival, lost in these empty ways, his breath rasping, hearing the beat of music echoing far off. He stumbled through a courtyard and along an unlit corridor past the communal wastebarrels and water butts, up the creaking steps to a landing and a door that rocked back with the swaying imprint of his hands. But there was no one inside—this was the wrong room. He looked around and saw fresh white walls, screens and bowls of flowers and cheap but newly gleaming furniture, and he smelled kelpbread and Borderer flesh. It wasn’t Banori’s room. Not any longer. A cheap, decently placed apartment, it would have been taken and rearranged within a few days of his death. John wandered, bumping into things, his fingers sticking and skidding. He worked a drawer out along its glides. Inside were a few cracked disks, a large dead beetle, some dried-out tubes—and a postcard. It glowed up through the smears of his fingers as he lifted it out, and it formed the image of a wide, empty shore where the waves were white-tipped, rolling high, breaking green over blue, freezing to ice, then breaking again. He heard the hissing of shingle; smelled, too, the clear tang of the River Ocean; saw the grass that covered the dunes at his back bowing in the wind, and the pantiled roofs along the sandy road where graceful birds circled like flecks of foam. Then the sound of the sea ended, and he heard—

“Skiddle?”

Dropping the postcard, he turned and saw, as the light flashed and faded over the smeared walls, that a figure stood in the doorway.

She blinked at him with pebble eyes and beckoned amid the sway and glitter of her beads, jingling a forest of silver.

“Come with me, Skiddle,” she said. “Come this way…”

Almost immediately, the witchwoman retreated into the dark. He stumbled from the room to follow her. She was shifting and indeterminate now along the corridor and down the stairs, past the black mouth of the courtyard then out into the streets, where she seemed to scuttle and slide over the wet roads, splashing through puddles, her black image thrown back at him and across the mottled walls. On this night, when even the carnival now lay silent, he could hear her muttering, the tinkle of the ribboned clothing that would suddenly flash scatters of sparks. She was in no hurry—humming, picking things up from the gutter, tasting them, even, spitting them out—yet he felt slow, thick, clumsy as he followed her past the loneliness of black windows, along turns and alleys that unfolded into wide, vacant squares. These streets were unfamiliar to him now, and the silence was huge and strange, amplified, it seemed, by a deep humming. But he recognized the lines of shockwire and the empty warehouses and the wide sweeps of concrete, shot through now, as his breath grew ragged, by white lines and shimmers of pain.

There. She was fluttering across Kushiel’s gleaming concrete, pausing, hopping, tumbling beneath the pylons and gantries that leaned and bowed. Dark whiteness seemed to be flooding up from the earth, enclosing him as he struggled to follow. Something clattered, and a spray of sparks scattered around him, raising the matted hair of his head and neck.

“Skiddle.”

There was a rusted ladder before him now. On it, the shape of rags was crawling towards the sky. Feeling the earth crackle with static at his feet, he began to climb after her. Metal swayed and clanged. Dust rained down on him. His hands glowed. He could see the wires that were threaded beneath the flesh, the stuff that made him. He was weary as he climbed, but he willed another part of him to take over, those strong silver threads, and clambered finally over the sharp edge of a girder and stood swaying as stars and sparks fell around him on the wide slope of a long, high roof.

Far ahead, the large black bird-thing leaped and flapped. He skidded down and across the mossy tiles. The stickiness of his hands and body were a help now, giving him adhesion, and even the gashes in his palms were useful. When he slipped over into space, a wound in his flailing hand caught on the bracket of a broken gutter and stopped his fall. He hauled himself back up towards the sky. I’m climbing, he thought, crawling on his knees now, shaking his head in a wet spray, even though the power here in Kushiel surely lay below, in the earth. But beyond the last flock of scattering tiles there was a doorway. And the humming was louder. And with it came the promise of light. He pushed through a frost of glass and crawled inside.

“Skiddle…”

There was a long corridor, and the stiff crackling of an electric wind. Filaments and cables curled out from shattered housings, twisting in sparks and flashes of quaternary lines.

His feet crunched over a snowfall of cards. They were bigger and thicker, he saw as they stuck to his face and hands, than cards were now, fountaining out from cabinets and drawers and billowing around him. Probably at least fifty years old. And many were broken, trailing a wet lace of nerve tissue, corrupted and yet reactivated in this wild storm, muttering the garbled syllables of voices long dead.

“Skiddle…”

Hal’s voice was still there on the crackling wind as John saw a stairwell on his left and a bobbing, leering face that could have been real or a trick of the spinning light, or a carnival balloon.

A last turn, and he saw the doorway that he knew. Half open already, with the light fanning out over the familiar landing. And Hal sitting there amid the disorder of his life with the cases that he was supposed to be packing open and empty, the palettes and books and games on the bed and the floor all around him. And on the desk, in a weird geometry, there were lights, wires, screens, the tiny, humming city of whatever strange and new project he was currently working on. And the semeny hot smell of nerve tissue, the humming and the charged scent of electricity, of armpits and whisky, of the bright cruel sea.

“Skiddle…”

Hal turned to him and beckoned. “Come on, Skiddle,” he said, holding out his hand. “I have something to show you.”

John hesitated, then reached for the room, the doorway. As he touched, interference lines crackled

GATAGGCGCTTGCTCCCTCGATAACCGCTTTACG

running through this ancient and abandoned screen somewhere in Kushiel. And the image of Hal froze, flattened, then gained depth again.

Hal beckoned. “Come on, Skiddle.” He held out his hand. “I have something to show you.”

This time John pushed straight through. White fire shot around him and he felt something hard, then soft and giving. He hovered for a moment in black, open space. The darkness where the net was unwritten and lacy nebulae hung far above and below him.

“Skiddle…”

Floating, spinning, he looked.

The sound came through the blackness. And other voices, too. The endless babble of lives. People talking, exchanging. The music of cloud formations and crop codes, of bodies embraced by machines, of a Borderer couple in their room saying anything, whatever, and the scent of the koiyl leaves was there too, and the wind in the Northern Mountains, and even, faintly, the voice of Laurie’s answerer, the smell of antiseptic and flowers, the far-off click-sigh of mechanical breathing.

John began to fall, swimming towards a growing cluster of quaternary light. There was Hal’s voice again.

“Skiddle. Come on, Skiddle. I’ve been going through my things before I go…”

He saw the shadowy figure in the bedroom, explaining through a snow of lines of how he’d done this, how he’d done that, how he’d found some long-forgotten high-level port into the net, routed through it and accessed the codes to his own implants, his own cpu.

AACGCATAGTCCCTCGGTAGAAATCGGGGTCGATT

“See, Skiddle. We’re in.”

John looked and saw the pulse of blood, the whole turbulent angry river of life.

“Will you look at that? Would you believe?”

The voice faded as lines shot out and through, as the white lattice became a cage and fell away into bright points. And there was Hal again. Real and living for once and surrounded by the whole mess of a life he couldn’t find it in him to discard. He was holding out his hands.

“It’s all ready now, Skiddle. The virus that I’ve made. All it takes is a final link to make it combine. Just a seed, a ripple in the ether…”

The palms of Hal’s outstretched hands, John saw, were hollow, pooled with spinning white.

“Touch me, Skiddle. Here—take my hands. I’m full of the charge. Just touch me—make it happen…”

He could smell Hal’s body, hear him breathing, and see his eyes shining, his hair sticking up at the crown, feel him radiating into that moment all his love and life and hope and energy. Wanting to hold, to touch, to share and understand, John reached out for his brother, and fell endlessly through into whiteness.