Tomorrow came. They extracted Y before sunset, when purple skies gave into brown, and thin clouds like cracks appeared and ran to the serrated horizon. Several armed makers escorted her across the training lawns and down the mansion’s drive. “You’re ready, you’re ready,” they chanted, like an incantation.
They passed rock gardens where the flowers had faded into blue and brown, a thousand sad things left unwatered, and Y noticed that the sprinklers were limp, dribbling, and that even the drinking fountains were off. Everything was losing its colour.
She walked her last walk in this place with bare feet, her training pumps in two hands, her third hand coiled into her chest, taut over the pendant. She thought of her brothers and sisters left behind, with their incubators fixed above, and wondered if they’d leave today, too.
The grass was still tickly, its heat from the day starting to dissipate. She found she could scrunch her toes and pull little clumps from the soil – a final act of petty rebellion. She tried to smile to herself, but a numbness stayed her. Whatever happened in the bursor room had exhausted her. Her shoulders wouldn’t rotate properly, and the articulation of her joints was different. In her mind she kept revisiting the space; remembered the anger, the warmth in her hands. Then she felt frustrated: it was all too abstracted – another misremembered dream.
What would she miss? Certainly not the asinine things the makers and their minions said when they woke her. Certainly not these lawns. In fact, she’d miss nothing except perhaps the homeliness of routine. The structured monotony of life here. Now, she knew, it was only her ability to adjust that mattered.
At the same time, she knew she was good at adjusting. She’d become even better at forgetting. By design she’d become a woman of sinew and tough, gristly meat – there was no capacity for floundering. And if she came back here, it would be to do one thing.
Beyond the mansion’s gates sat a matt-black vehicle with enormous caterpillar tracks. For a time she stood in the warm breeze of its exhaust vents, until someone behind, another maker in a surgical mask, gestured towards the top hatch. Y climbed it and turned to the mansion, its immaculate lines. In the odd light it was the colour of baby teeth; had the smoothness of bone. She blinked at it. It was him. It was all him, here.
A maker on the ground said, “You’ve done him proud. Our finest work yet.”
And the whole squad saluted her in unison.
Y lowered herself through the hatch, her sore lats taking the strain. Her feet found purchase on something hard, and she found herself in a cramped hold that reeked of disinfectant. She took a seat on a slab bench facing inwards. The surfaces were greasy with oil and condensate. With the engine running, everything squeaked and rattled around her. The disinfectant stung her eyes.
She wasn’t alone. Three others sat on the opposite bench, one hooded, two asleep. A troop escort dropped in after her; stood on the footplate beneath the turret. He pushed the gun up its channel and out on its rails. Then he turned and kneeled and cuffed Y to a pipe.
“Wanna watch her if I was you,” he told Y, pointing to the hooded traveller opposite. The hooded head rose, flopped again. “Yeah, that one. Spitter.”
Y closed her eyes.
“Look at me, girl.”
Y looked at her bonds, the pipe.
“I said look at me.”
Y defied him again. She stared at the top of the passenger’s bowed head, saw patterns in the hood’s weave.
“Dickhead,” the escort said, and tutted. “Was only gonna say you’ll want to keep shuffling. Give you piles that bench will.”
Y responded by tensing her muscles.
You could snap him if you wanted to.
The thought jolted her. Intrusive at best. It exploded from nowhere – but she knew in her bones, in her molten insides, that she ought to believe it.
The rattles intensified. Something clanged against the hull, and the transport juddered and rolled away.
The escort stood up. His hips swivelled left and right; swung his gun turret accordingly – the squeak of the mechanism audible even over the engine.
Y closed her eyes and tilted her pelvis. She braced against the seat. When she opened them again, the escort was back down in the hold, sitting on his platform. He was skinning something with a small knife: a red fruit with a sharp smell. “Only a short hop to the Slope,” he said, tearing out a segment and eating it. “So listen up.”
Y watched a line of juice run from the corner of his mouth.
“Bet they haven’t told you about the Slope,” he said, chewing wetly. “They never do.”
Y looked down. Only that once, in the canteen. She shook her head.
“It’s cosmic up close,” he told her, eyes blazing. “Everything’s this weird colour. But it isn’t a place for humans. The Slope isn’t tarmackable – you can’t wire it, run a staircase down it, make it safe. It won’t roll out the red carpet for you. We shouldn’t be using it, to be honest. No one should’ve found it. Beggars belief we even did. And surprise surprise, it’s got a million ways to let you know you aren’t welcome.”
The escort looked young; seemed younger even than her. There was a little rash of hair on his chin.
“Fucked-up climate on there as well,” he went on. “Goes widthways forever – they sent parties both directions, and only a few came back. The ones who did say there’s creatures beyond. Forests of gore, canopies of skin, failed teeth. Mad stuff like that. And it’s always cold, and slippery – this crazy white dust on everything. Ruins your boots, like lime, you know? And the wind, the stories you hear about that wind – it kicks up from nowhere and puts the powder in the air. It’ll sand down your suit and flay you to bone if you even look at it the wrong way. And then he’ll find a way to collect you. He owns all of it, that way.”
Y listened. In her mind’s eye, the mansion was receding.
“Then you’ve got these random, spilled-over slips,” the escort said. “Anti-holes you can fall in, lose things down. Like your feet. Your legs if you’re really unlucky. Or the slips that open up and dump second-world shit on you. Silly bastards on the other side not using the official bridge in here, you know? And what else…” He scratches his head. “Ahh, stormdunes. Ruthless like waves: they’ll slide over and smother you. Shred everything they pass, when they’re big enough. And there’s ash. Your breathing gear has to chew through that stuff when it starts spewing. Man, the Slope’s just nasty… a nasty place.” The escort smiled. “But needs must,” he said. “Otherwise they’d find the mansion, wouldn’t they? And that’d be no good for business.”
Y started to feel ill.
“You’ll be grand, though. Honest. I’d just feel lucky you’ve got a trolley squad, anyway. Most of you – them, sorry – go boxed up, on sleds.” He nodded, as if the comment were simple fact – as casual as a comment on the weather – then shook his head and looked away as if he’d only just remembered he wasn’t meant to speak about it. “Most of you, yeah.”
And the transport lumbered on.