The next world was empty: a plain of shining stone beneath an amber sky. The atmosphere was just breathable enough for Zen and Threnody to get off the Neem train and back onto their own. Zen carried Nova’s head, and Uncle Bugs and one of his new friends came with them, carrying Nova’s body. When they stepped into the state car of the Damask Rose, the interface of Mordaunt 90 hugged them all, even the spiky Neem. “I was so worried about you,” he said. “And Chandni? Where is Chandni?”
“She didn’t make it,” said Threnody.
“She is dead?” His face crumpled. He hated the idea of people dying.
“I think so,” said Threnody.
“She double-crossed us,” said Zen, flinging himself down in his favorite seat before Threnody could take it. “She tried to sell us out to the Kraitt. Why would she do that?”
Threnody shrugged. But she thought she knew why Chandni had done what she did. She had just been trying to keep herself and Threnody alive. She had thought Zen was leading them to disaster, and she had probably been right — she couldn’t have known the Neem were going to arrive. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked. “If you’d said the Neem were going to help, your plan would have made sense…”
“I didn’t know,” said Zen.
“So it was just a coincidence?” asked Nova’s head, in its tinny little voice. “The Neem busting in had nothing to do with you?”
Zen was silent. He was thinking that if he said he had planned it all, it would make him seem like a mastermind, but Nova and Threnody both knew that he wasn’t, and he didn’t think that he could keep up the lie.
He shook his head.
“Well, that was a stroke of luck, then,” said Nova.
“Not at all!” said the Neem that called itself Uncle Bugs. “The Nestworld Zzr’zrrt is only one gate away. The Kraitt are our neighbors, and if you have neighbors like the Kraitt, you keep an eye on them. We had an agent in the Tzeld Gekh’s house, a hive without a suit. Her people thought it was just an infestation of insects. The Neem have long been wary of her tinkerings with technology. We cannot let those rude lizards develop weapons that would allow them to assault our Nestworlds. Our agent sent word when Miss Nova arrived. When I told the Mother-hives what Miss Nova was, it was decided to send a team to the Shards of Kharne to observe the situation. Some of our hives trade minerals with the Karneiss, so a Neem train arriving was not unusual. We were planning to attack the Tzeld Gekh’s house only if she seemed to be making progress, but when I saw you arrive, I guessed that you were planning rescues. So I persuaded the others that we must help.”
“We’re grateful,” said Zen, though he was still uneasy about being cooped up in a carriage with those big, spiny arachnid bodies, even now that he knew they were just suits. He could hear the billion beetles that made up Uncle Bugs and his friend, seething and stirring inside their carapaces.
The Damask Rose was uneasy too. “The Neem morvah is hooting at me,” she announced. “I think it wants me to go on.”
“Yes!” said Uncle Bugs. “We must not stay here, in case the Kraitt come after us. The next gate leads to the Nestworld Zzr’zrrt. We will be safe there, among the many hives. And I will show you the Nestworld, Zen Starling: the Insect Lines my people longed for!”
“What about the way home?” Threnody asked Zen.
In the chaos on the Shards he had forgotten that he had ever promised her such a thing, but Nova guessed what she meant. “We’re already on our way. The border of the Black Light Zone is farther down this line, beyond the Nestworld,” she said.
“And there is really a gate in this Black Light Zone that leads back home?”
“There has to be. The Neem prove it. They’re made of Monk bugs, just like our Hive Monks are. That means there must have been K-gates connecting our Network with the Web of Worlds at some point.”
“And you think we can open them again?” asked Threnody.
“Only one way to find out,” said Nova’s head, cheerfully.
The train was moving again. The interface came swaying through from the dining car, carrying a big metal tray filled with bowls of rice and small pots of spicy sauces. Little wedges of steaming flatbread had been stuck in between the pots at jaunty angles, garnished with sprigs of edible greenery that the Rose’s spiders had found growing beside the tracks somewhere.
Threnody grabbed some and started eating. When the Neem came and the fighting started, she’d thought it was the end of her. Finding that she was still alive after all had given her a fearsome appetite.
Zen couldn’t eat anything. He carried Nova’s head through to the rear car, and the Neem followed with her body. Nova had already been communicating wirelessly with the 3-D printer, and it was whirring away, creating the components she would need to repair herself. The Neem set her body down on the seat beside the printer, and she reached out and took her head from Zen. She smiled at him as she carefully fitted it back into place, the ends of ducts and cables reaching out like eager little snakes to reconnect with each other, ceramic vertebrae locking into place with a satisfying click. “Zen, I missed you so much,” she said.
“Me too. Missed you, I mean.”
“You’re always coming back for me.”
“That was the last time,” he said, mock-sternly. “I don’t know what would have happened if the Neem hadn’t shown up when they did.” But he knew really. The knowledge of how close he’d come to dying made him tremble now.
“You need to rest,” said Nova, smiling up at him. The shock of finding her in kit form was leaving him; she was becoming herself again, and lovely. “Go and sit down, and eat something,” she said, brushing his face with her remaining hand. “Uncle Bugs and his friend can help me here. I’ll come and find you when I’ve pulled myself together.”
So he left her there, with the Neem using their delicate manipulator-arms to fit freshly printed parts into the holes the Kraitt had made in her, and went back to the state car. The interface had fallen asleep again, and Threnody was finishing off the food, scooping the last smears of sauce out of the bottoms of the little bowls with chunks of flatbread. She looked up when Zen came in and said, “How is your Moto? Is she ready to show us the way home?”
“She’ll be fine,” he said.
“You don’t look very happy about it.”
Zen slid into the seat opposite her and helped himself to a last triangle of flatbread before it vanished. He was happy; he just wished Threnody had not seen Nova like that, with the secret machinery of her insides laid bare. He wanted her to understand how he felt when he lay beside Nova in the flickering light of the passing lamps of unknown stations, how he felt when she smiled at him, when her wise eyes narrowed and looked at him as if he was someone worthwhile and wonderful. But he couldn’t explain that. Threnody was about his own age, maybe a year older, but she seemed suddenly very young to him, because he had learned, and she had not, that love grew wild and didn’t much care about things like who was human and who was a machine.
“So do you think she’s right?” Threnody said, wiping chutney off her chin and trying to look empress-y. “Can she find our way home?”
“Yes. I mean — Nova’s usually right. But…”
“What?”
“It could be dangerous. Everyone else on the Web of Worlds is afraid of the Zone.”
“Who cares? They’re primitives. I expect they still believe in gods and ghosts. I’m sure we can handle whatever’s out there.”
“Maybe. But what do you think the Guardians will do with us, if we do ever make it back to the Network Empire?”
“We have a version of Mordaunt 90 with us,” said Threnody, turning to look at the interface, who was snoring softly with his head resting against the window. “The instant we arrive on a world with a Datasea he can start communicating with the other Guardians.”
“But the Guardians don’t like you. They let the Prells kick your family out of power.”
“That was the Twins,” said Threnody icily. “And when the other Guardians hear about what the Twins did on Desdemor, they’ll stop letting them have their own way.”
“And what about me?” asked Zen. “It’s all right for you — you’re a Noon and everything…” He wondered if he should tell her that he had Noon blood too; how his mother had run off with the surrogate baby she had been carrying for some rich Noon couple, and brought him up as plain Zen Starling. But that wouldn’t help; to Threnody it would just mean that his mother was a thief too. The family would long ago have had a new son to replace him; they wouldn’t want him back. Better if she just thought he was a kid from Cleave. “I’m nothing,” he said with a shrug.
“That’s true,” said Threnody. “But you have served me well, Zen Starling. We would not even be thinking about going home if it wasn’t for you and your Motorik. I’ll make sure you’re all right, when we get there.”
They were quiet for a while, eating the last of the flatbreads. Then Zen said, “I’m sorry for everything. The Noon train. Lying to you, and the Spindlebridge.” Hating himself as he said it. “Sorry.” As if he’d dropped her favorite mug or forgotten to feed her goldfish. It wasn’t enough. She had told him how everything had spiraled after he left. Kobi’s death, the Prell attack. You couldn’t just apologize for the kind of things he’d caused.
But Threnody nodded, and looked away, and said, “Malik told me it wasn’t your fault. He said this Raven person made you and Nova let loose the program that broke the Noon train. I suppose you didn’t know how much damage it would cause.”
“We guessed,” said Zen. “We both guessed.”
Threnody kept looking out of the window. She couldn’t afford to hate him. She needed him too badly. She couldn’t afford to hate him yet.
“Just get me home,” she said. “Then we will be even.”