THE YEAR OF GROWTH

He came awake gradually, rising in increments toward consciousness, peaceful, knowing he was at home, in the pen. There was no pain. Warm under the covers of his daybed, not wanting to open his eyes, not wanting the effects of a rare and sound sleep to dissipate. Crospinal smelled ozone. Had this smell woken him? The familiar pulse of nutrients through father’s conduits was almost a heartbeat; Crospinal smiled.

Far away, dogs barked, and barks echoed.

But when Crospinal changed position, to roll, languorous, his left knee popped, bones ground against each other, and sobering darts of pain shot to his hips and up his spine. Grunting, he almost put his hands down to touch his legs, verify his rickets had indeed returned, but of course they had. They had never left.

He opened his eyes. Flat on his back. Bent legs splayed and throbbing. He felt himself filling with frustration and anger. He punched his mattress. Freedom from affliction was impossible in life. But at least father was alive. Maybe Crospinal could only have one or the other. Father was alive. That must be good for something. . . . 

Just above his head, the ambient illuminated ceiling of his little corner sloped away—old composite, like the rest of the pen, with details of a structure all but hidden underneath, the particulars of which he had imprinted, remaining unchanged for longer than he had been alive. When he turned his face, to see father pacing, the clump of tethers were sweeping in a broad curve.

Three dogs—no four—noticed Crospinal had awoken and came bounding forward.

“Crospie, Crospie, Crospie,” they barked. “Crospie, Crospie!”

He tried to be as pleasant as possible, making a show of greeting the apparitions, for they did actually cheer him somewhat, dispersing their bodies of light with waves of his hands when they leaped onto the daybed, so they quavered, yapping excitedly, coming back again and again, but he got tired of this game before they did, and soon he let his smile fade and the dogs break against him.

Father had stopped pacing. Watching now, standing as close to Crospinal as he could get, mitts open, eyes like holes in his sunken face. Crospinal gave one quick nod and looked away, levering himself to a sitting position and grimacing as he swung his crooked legs over the edge of the daybed, one at a time, to put his feet flat on the floor—

They didn’t reach.

“What year is this?” He met father’s gaze. “How old am I?”

Some sort of trick was being played. Crospinal scowled at the dogs now, just sitting there, panting stupidly. He remembered the bay, and the swift elemental, and he found himself irritated to be back here.

“You all right, Crospie? Didn’t you sleep well? You look pale.”

“I slept fine.”

“I haven’t slept at all yet. I haven’t slept in ages, it seems. But I will.” Father’s smile was shaky. “Soon. I’m just trying to recall . . . a certain . . .”

A thin metal spike, concrete ephemera, fell from the ceiling and clattered to the floor. Father looked at it, concerned.

Though gaunt, father otherwise appeared fairly healthy, especially considering the last time Crospinal had seen his dad he had been a nylon sac of bones and sores, lying dead on the floor.

“This afternoon,” father said. “I’ll nap when you do.”

One dog, then the others, winked out.

Crospinal managed to stand. Everything ached. He turned his scowl toward father. “I don’t nap anymore. And my name’s not Crospie. Tell your dogs, too.” He felt hunched and ugly. Any positive residue of sleep was long gone, or perhaps the lingering benefits were squandered, entirely ineffective on him. His eyes were dry as ash. “I haven’t needed to take a nap in years. How old am I today? That’s what I want to know. I asked you a question.”

Father stared for a moment, blinking. “Uh, you should take it easy this morning. Don’t get worked up, son. You seem a bit off. Let’s look at you. Can you come closer?”

Drawing breath sharply through his teeth (making the filter hiss; the shield was working again), Crospinal decided not to confront father about what he had learned, about the world beyond, and about what had been removed from his arms. He glanced at them now, saw that he wore a fresh uniform, with fresh mitts. The processor hummed smoothly when he peed. He would say nothing about the incessant lighting. If the elementals’ talk was accurate, and the encounters had actually happened—the ride through darkness; the massive chamber; the crew cabins—then Crospinal could never know or trust this man. This passenger.

He averted his gaze. What he wanted most was an end to this intrusion, this return to the pen, but he waited and hoped and the end would not come. Father remained silent. Was Crospinal truly a young boy all over again, with his grotesque knees, sullen by the side of his daybed, head filled with jumbled knowledge of the future?

Some pellets, he thought. And several cups of cool water to boost the systems. Should help. And if his girlfriend really didn’t want to see him again, then a long visit to the dream cabinets. Some hope remained to salvage this day, on one level, if this day insisted on lingering.

But before Crospinal dragged himself over to the emerging food dispenser to grab breakfast, he heard a voice speaking to him from a great distance. Calling his name. The voice did not have the cool qualities of the myriad intelligent or semi-intelligent devices, and local personalities, not of a machine: this was a human’s voice, with inflection, emotion. He imagined a girl, though not his sister, or a manifestation. Frowning, he looked around the pen, saw no one but father, of course, who appeared—though suitably concerned by Crospinal’s behaviour—as if he had heard nothing. An absence of apparitions in the pen. Which was weird. The dogs hadn’t come back. Crospinal couldn’t tell what else the girl was saying but could still hear her talking, whispering. He leaned against a short counter, straining to listen, to understand what was happening.

“Crospie,” father said, “are you all right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m calling in the elementals. To run a scan. Your face looks pale.”

“No more scans,” Crospinal shouted, spraying spittle. “No more fucking scans! I’m sick of scans!”

Father recoiled. Clearly at a loss, staring at his son for a moment longer before turning away, he dragged behind him the ponderous mass of tethers.

“Look,” Crospinal said, almost immediately, “I just don’t feel like one today. That’s all. I don’t want to see Fox right now.”

“You should never have named the elementals, Crospie. That was wrong. They’re machines. They’re not your friends. I tell you all the time. Only you have a name. That’s your power.”

“And my name is Crospinal.”

“Crospinal. Of course. I’m sorry. I think of you as a child, forever. My baby boy. Forgive me. You would never name the dogs, would you?”

“Of course not. That’d be dumb.”

“Let’s get some food. We’ll need energy.”

The lecture had been a familiar one, but Crospinal was feeling chagrined for losing his temper and would debate no longer. “Dad?”

Long fingers of one hand were beckoning to the dispenser, which had fled Crospinal’s outburst, and now cautiously extended its neck, about to regurgitate a fistful of pellets.

“Sorry I stayed away so much.”

One after another, the stout morsels dropped into father’s mitt. Food of the world. But the world didn’t create dispensers. Like Crospinal, they were at odds. Everything was. Father’s face, turned quarter profile, waiting for Crospinal to continue.

“Well, when I get older,” he said, but that didn’t sound right at all. Crospinal frowned. “When I’m—”

“Waking,” replied father. “Waking now.”

In a different, melodious voice. A girl’s voice—

Without time to question, Crospinal’s vision was eclipsed by a face. Looming above him. Father, the banks, the entire pen: gone. In the wide and shining eyes, like his own, looking back at him, were concern, and affection, and other emotions Crospinal could not begin to fathom because he had heretofore seen no likeness: he tried to speak, but released only a low moan.

“Awake now.” Her mouth barely moved.

Lying on his back again, but on a hard surface, in some dim confine, with wind whistling nearby and the gloom broken by flashes of brilliant light that flickered at regular intervals. The smell of ions, of machines. Light stung his eyes. He was close enough to this other to feel the heat of breath, and of a body, upon him. A tremble against his spine: what he lay upon—what they were in—moved.

Only when Crospinal felt again the slightly sour exhalation of her breathing against his cheek—and he stared into her eyes, inches from his own—did he fully grasp that this was no apparition, no sculpture of light or energy. Putting his unsteady hand up, the tips of his fingers touched flesh; her cheek, as alive and yielding and transitory as his own, tingled now through this thin layer of Dacron.

He was already weeping.

“Good,” said the girl. “Good, at last.” But there were tears glittering her eyes, too.

“You’re alive,” he said. “Like me.”

This seemed to put her off a bit. With a terse nod, she placed the tips of her own hot, bare fingers to the back of Crospinal’s mitt, gently trapping his hand to her face. He saw, in the sudden, brighter glare from that intermittent light—which appeared through a sort of gap in the low ceiling, filling the compartment with a moment of white, and burning the silhouette of this other person against his retinas—her bare arm, and a set of black markings in contrast to his own, inside her forearm, exactly where his own white scars were, before grey returned, consuming all detail.

She was nearly naked. Her torso wrapped only in a few rags, a material he could not, for the most part, identify, and which could serve no practical purpose.

“Who are you?”

She didn’t answer.

His eyes were still watering profusely, but from the light, he told himself. From the light. Long, tangled hair—much longer than his had ever been—brushed against him as she shifted. Father would have frowned to meet this girl. No uniform. Long hair. Father had wanted Crospinal to let groomer wasps depilate Crospinal’s head at least weekly. (Though Crospinal generally refused.) Hair is a haven for microbes, and hair can disrupt the effectiveness of your filters.

A few days ago, certain of death’s impending visit, Crospinal had acquiesced. Father, too ill to appreciate the effort, dribbled blood from his mouth.

Crospinal’s pate was an itchy expanse of stubble. Moving his fingers against the line of the girl’s jaw, he traced underlying bone, toward her chin. Solid, warm. A vein ticked, and the mitt reacted, faintly, but a persistent stinging grew and he had to pull his hand back; he saw no source of discomfort.

What he feared most was that this person might vanish. He did not want this dream to end. When he tried to sit up, he discovered he was far too weak. His extremities throbbed. The stinging spread, flush with his heartbeat. He recalled nothing from before his nap. Talking about memories? Memory seemed a dubious concept at best. “Where am I?”

“Trainboard,” she said, all breathy. She had shadows under her cheekbones, and a scent that put him on edge. Her lips were fuller than his, and red. “Hubward,” she said.

“Where?”

“The supply train. He brought it back, and now we found you.” She smiled thinly, the way father used to when Crospinal had made unwanted suggestions or asked too many questions. “We’re taking you back.”

He needed to explain as much as he needed explanation. “My skin, my hands and feet hurt. But not like when, not like before. Something—”

“Burns,” she said. “From the face. Why did you? They’ll only try to burn you.”

“Who will?”

A finger to those lips, indicating he should stay silent, or rest. He wanted to put his finger there, too, to her lips, just as her profile lit up again like a magnesium flare. Pointing at him, but his eyes watered so much he could not see her expression. “Batches are sent,” she said. “They’re looking for you.”

He inspected his tender hand, and saw nothing out of sorts—except, perhaps, stressed contusions, a split on the thumb, further thinning at the palms of his mitts. Crospinal finally managed to get up onto his elbows. His head pounded.

The compartment was small, with smooth walls, like those around the back of the pen, behind the throne. A low ceiling. He could not have stood, had he the wherewithal. And, resting on the floor nearby, next to the girl (who, he saw now, was kneeling, as if praying), a lantern of sorts, with a flame, burning in a metal cup. A candle. Like at his birthday parties. But a real candle, burning a real flame. He stared, agog. To be absolutely certain this was no haptic or apparition, he extended his hand, felt the heat singe his already-stinging skin, the mitt unable to do anything remotely protective, and he withdrew quickly, burnt, as the light passed over again, limning the girl’s outline, her tattered rags, her flesh, where a uniform should be. Her long hair. Incongruous walls behind her vanished into gloom again.

He managed to rub his face with the crook of one arm. His uniform stank of recycling and the spicy tang of feces, backing up in the processor, which was really shot.

The sound of the wind came from the slot in the ceiling, where the bright light was.

Whatever they were on moved fast.

And then Crospinal realized two more things. One: his legs, though throbbing, were not crooked (again), which meant father was most likely dead (again), and all this—the flesh and blood girl, the motion of the train, the candle’s flame—might just remain tangible. Two: more people quietly watched him.

Turning his head, he saw them, crouching very near, a group of five. Quietly watching. Five silent humans, in tattered rags of plastic, crouching in the shadows, eyes downcast now. But despite the exposed flesh, for a long moment Crospinal could not distinguish which were boys and which, if any, were girls. He was suddenly not entirely sure of the criteria, now that theory had ended and application failed to kick in. Was it length of hair, or the distance between their eyes? Or the smell? Their bodies seemed almost the same as his own, as far as he could recall, though not as pale, or as thin.

The smooth walls of the compartment extended beyond the group an additional two metres or so, and the top rung of a ladder—just like one of the seven leading up to porthole of the harrier—descended into a hatch.

“Where’s your father?” he asked. “Do you all have the same father?”

They must have made their own tattered garments. A preposterous notion. No amount of inert shreds of plastic and scraps of insulation were able to protect delicate flesh and the systems of a complex biotic. Not in this world. They were on borrowed time.

“Where’s your pen? You’ll all get infections—”

Now the light erupted off stark cheekbones, pale skin, and wrists thrust out, exposed to him, like offerings. He had seen the black marks, the inlays that the elemental had told him he lacked.

“Shit,” he said. “Can you speak? Can you understand me?”

No one moved or even looked at him. Not even the girl now. During the period between the flares, the candle’s light did little to illuminate the area where they crouched. Each of the five wore a loop of foil, like a cowl, over their heads. Were they all boys? He could hardly see any features.

“Your shower’s broken? Electrostatic energy is a drag. It’s best to encourage them to shut off for a day or two. But your father must know that. Where is he?”

A sudden image of stark obeisance, ten marked wrists, exposed for him.

“Shit . . .”

The girl by his side said, “Talking too much. Rest. But, oh, certain, for certain. Real as real. No fathers here. Not with us. No fathers.”

Crospinal said nothing until twice more the girl was haloed by the passing light. His eyes stung from looking into the nimbus and the beauty of her face within. “Was that you,” he asked, “in the garden?”

A thin, almost pained smile, and her naked hand sweeping, indicating the silent companions, or maybe whatever strange, unseen landscape rapidly fell behind. “Bayside, not as far as growth. Paladin trapped you close to the depot. Waiting a long time, watching. Sailor told us you were coming. Sailor sent us to find you.”

Laying back and closing his eyes, he half-expected the girl and the other five people to be gone when he opened them. “Sailor,” he repeated, but cognition failed him. As the light exploded again beyond his eyelids, he felt distances between himself and everything he had once been widening, a chasm. He grabbed at the girl abruptly to close the gulf, gathering stiff mylar sheets in his mitt, pulling her closer. The weight and resistance of her mass, the strength of her tugging free, her scent, was too powerful a shock and he faltered.

“Who sent you?” he said. “A sailor? How did the sailor know I was there?”

Her eyes widened; he was scaring her.

“The elemental told me two runners hid in the trees,” he continued. “But we never found them. And in the cabins, on the far side, where I talked to the controller, I was betrayed. I walked into a trap.”

Because Crospinal remembered now: there had been a dream, but without a cabinet, in which he had returned to the pen, and father had not died, not yet. His legs were bowed like grotesque tree roots. (Looking at his limbs now, a rush, almost giddy to see them straight, side by side. But his feet were throbbing—the bottoms of his feet—and getting worse; the tingle in his extremities was insufferable.)

“I was attacked,” he said, rubbing his mitts together to clean them. “Before I even put my arms in the holes of the console.”

“Console,” repeated the girl. “You called the paladin.”

Crospinal thought he understood an aspect of this explanation, and he clung to the notion like it might save him. Paladins were not devices or elementals, but manifestations, roaming inside the structures of the world, showing up at the consoles. These were the paladins. Including his girlfriend.

Paladins had hurt him, trapped him, tried to kill him.

Paladins were after him.

His girlfriend was in trouble, wherever she was. Because she fell in love with him? Maybe he shouldn’t talk to this flesh and blood girl about his relationship. Maybe he was too trusting. He needed to learn more about allegiances, about truth. Was this girl telling him the truth? What was her version? Like the elementals he’d met, she spoke in riddles. Each perspective looked upon a different facet of the enigma. He could not express himself.

Shadowed by the candle’s dim light, searching for a clue or a signal, he stared into her eyes until the compartment flared blindingly again and she turned away, trembling. The glare seemed brighter and brighter each time. His hands were on fire.

“She was all I had,” he said, lamely. “She was all I ever had.”

Touching his shoulder, then the skin of his cheek, the girl said, “Paladin of the outlands. And the rejects. The year of miracles. Bayside now, exiled there. Angry, for certain, and angrier now. But sailor watched you. Sailor cares for us.” Her hand was firm; she let it drop away. “These are endtimes. He tells us at every opportunity.”

“Your father,” because he was drifting off, thinking about his own dad. Confused, exhausted, Crospinal struggled to stay awake, to sit up, to clear his head. The soles of his feet, and his burning palms, were sending messages of distress to each other. He was going under.

The girl said: “Bayside no longer. Sent up the tower.”

I don’t understand.

A whine he had never heard before hit a higher note, helping him stay awake.

She was making a cage with her fingers.

“I have a headache,” Crospinal muttered. “And my hands, my . . .”

Helping him recline once more, she leaned over him, to push against the wall, where a slot squealed open, revealing a small aperture, through which she now peered. He lay directly under her, in contact, pressed by her warmth and proximity and by the subtle, acrid smell of her body. Her chest was smooth, and muscled with fine, grimy definition. Breathing in, holding the scent in his lungs, he was certain he felt circuits that had gaped open all these years close. The sound of a primitive motor fell over him, lulling. They were inside some form of device. He was so tired. “Where are we going?”

“To where sailor waits.”

“Who you talking about? Who’s the sailor?”

“You would help him. You would teach us.”

“I’m going to help you?”

She smiled, nodding. Her eyes shone. “He has answers. A good sailor. He brought this train back. He teaches us, but now he sleeps most of the time. He knows the paladins can’t see you. Not really. You’re like him.”

“They see me.” This seemed important. He wanted to be seen. Invisibility was anathema.

The girl brought her hand down so that her fingers approached the broken ring of his collar. Controls there hissed lightly and a brief flicker of electrostatic energy quavered the air between them. He lifted one arm, and saw dark scorch marks on the sleeve of his uniform—

“You are deicida,” she said.

He was staring at the frayed discolouration with disbelief. What could possibly burn the neoprene off the base of his sleeve? He had neared the real candle, felt its heat, but even the worn Dacron of an old mitt could withstand two hundred degrees, and for some time, bursts of heat much higher for short periods. Bur the flesh of his hands, through the mitt’s thin layer, seemed darker now, mottled. He might be transforming. He wanted to whimper. “Who’s the sailor,” he asked, “if not your father?”

“Deicida.”

The black duplicates of his own scars on both her wrists were again held out, close to his face, and when he looked back at the others, they remained as they had previously, wrists exposed, immobile, faces covered and eyes downcast.

The light erupted and faded.

He was supposed to say something, do something. But he was tired and he felt his eyes close at last.

“You’ll help,” she repeated, her voice coming from far away, then rising, reverberating, getting louder, as if this comment was proper resolution to all of the questions and was being sent out into the world to stake claim. Funereal mist, black as the marks on her arms, rolled from nowhere over him. Crospinal heard the girl say: “And you’ve come to save us.”

Words drove him, stumbling down hallways and through ambient-lit extensions; they seemed his only hope for respite. Of course Crospinal was terrified, fleeing where no apparition could follow, but he couldn’t stop, or turn back; he was equally terrified of those options.

Enraged, father had shouted: “I don’t know why I ever had a son!”

Irrelevant to think about why the argument had started. The petty butting of heads, a son testing father’s limits, the father perhaps concerned about danger, keeping the dark at bay. . . . Maybe there was guilt at bringing a suffering child into the world, one who would, in time, expire. Crospinal was not keeping his area clean. Crospinal didn’t change his uniform. He didn’t let the electrostatic showerheads give him a good going-over. Prevented the depilatory wasp from trimming his hair. Whined about his legs. His inability to shift or turn anything substantial, or hold his own torch very high. Father never slept. And Crospinal was constantly in pain of some sort. He was miserable company, didn’t listen, or comprehend very well. They were both miserable company. But this declaration from his dad, this shouted truth, cut Crospinal to the bone.

He had to keep moving, to escape.

I don’t know why I ever had a son.

When he first turned, to lurch out of the throne room, father, shuddering from his anger, clearly aghast at what had emerged from his mouth, was desperate for Crospinal to stop, yet Crospinal lurched away nonetheless, pulling himself farther and farther down increasingly dim and empty halls, hoping never to turn back, or even survive, vision blurry with tears.

The ladder he found in a narrow cul de sac led up through a hole in the ceiling, to a small platform. As he gripped the lowest rung, a controller arced out, to hover in front of his face:

“Welcome to the harrier. We are functional and free from parasitic intrusions. Welcome.”

Crospinal grunted, tried to push the device aside, and climbed, to punish himself.

Another ladder, and another one after that—even though his knees had given out, and he had to use his arms to pull himself rung by rung, throwing his elbow over, one after the other, and grunting, trying to harness his pain to continue.

The controller, whistling happily, accompanied Crospinal for a spell but got bored with the boy’s slow progress and random, loud bellows. If the tiny device was at all concerned that Crospinal might fall as a result of his disability, or that he was in such a state of alarming distress, there was no indication. Seven ladders, in fact, Crospinal mounted that day, filled with remorse and self-pity, trying to retreat from the echoing words, and from the notion that, as he had suspected for some time, father regretted the day he was born.

Each rung, taken with diminishing strength and stubborn perseverance, brought him to where he was lying on his back, on a platform, between the lengths of ladder, roaring out his pain, raging and screaming until his throat was raw and he was left drained.

He managed to take the next bar in his already-blistered hands. (He let his mitts, even back then, become compromised.) He was empty and would climb forever, if need be, higher and higher until he snuffed out. Luella was the one who should have remained with father, not him. Luella would have made father content. Instead, he was stuck with a cripple, a dismal boy who struggled to laugh, who saw the dim and grey in everything, and who could not perform even the simplest of tasks.

Mitts in tatters, skin sloughed from his palms, knees pounding, feeling like he might die and fulfill father’s wish, Crospinal made it to the top.

This was his year of growth.

He was six.

Emerging headfirst into the harrier station that first time, Crospinal pulled himself onto the final grille. The world seemed to be thrumming like a heartbeat, getting more insistent. Engines were faint. He was far above the pen, far away from father, in some sacred recess.

With a full console.

He took the handles of the odd periscope, pressed his face against the lens, one eye shut, drawing a sharp intake of breath, but saw that ash horizon, the orb’s eternal glare. He would never peer upon the rapturous sights father described, let alone find himself walking a cool green landscape between sky and land, transforming into fabled mountains, the winds cool and hushed.

He turned from the eyepiece and let it close. Thumb plates activated a haptic table. A series of statistics and coordinates sprang luminous in the air, spinning too fast to read. He batted at them. Another plate was broken and fizzled under his touch. Could he live here forever? There were no dispensers.

He wondered where the controller had gone.

Under the flap, twin holes, easily large enough for his fists—each marked with a small, quavering icon of just that. Slipping both hands in, he felt a gentle tug, as if he were being pulled closer, to confide, or be confided in, and then the hum spread through his body, up from his hands, in his bones.

He would answer the world’s call.

From within the walls she approached, some form of apparition, to manifest next to him. In her dark uniform, a light smile on her face. An intangible girl, appearing slightly older than him, whose spirit lived in the structures and amorphous composites beyond the pen. She made his heart race; he presumed this was fear. When he pulled his hands free, she vanished, so he put them back, felt the connection like a mild shock, and she appeared again.

“Hello,” she said. Her eyes were wide and blue. She was not thin like him, but more like father, with thick limbs, or at least the way father’s limbs were before he got sick. “I’ve been waiting.” Her voice was not quite synced with her lips.

Crospinal had no idea what to say.

Her smile grew as she watched him. When she laughed, he was lifted up, taken away from concerns and doubts and expectations. He was free.

“What took you so long?”

They shook him awake and helped him to his feet while he mumbled thank-yous and nodded idiotically. He could not straighten fully in the cramped compartment, and was reminded of this by banging his skull against the hard ceiling. Putting tentative fingers up, he felt no blood on his scalp. He’d fully expected his mitt to engage with a gushing mess. The stinging in his palms had diminished, though his feet felt tender against the metallic floor. Crospinal was dazed, but he had been dazed long before hitting his head. He stood in the candle’s glow, supported by strong hands, their grip a sensation he could not process or get over. Sinews and tendons, taut against him—muscles, bones, flesh—while he held his own head, waiting, unsuccessfully, for confusion to finally vanish.

“Starting descent,” said the girl.

He muttered something. He wasn’t sure what. The girl was behind him now. By the motion relayed through his soles, he knew he was still inside the giant device she had called the train.

Where memories had once intruded upon him, dreams now seemed to bleed. By nearly drowning in the cabinet, had he released dreams into the world?

Bright lights no longer flared through the slot above. He saw ambients out there, far away, diffused through the opening, but no sudden glare.

Carrying the tin cup, flame wavering within, casting both light and shadow, the girl had appeared peripherally, so close he could see downy gold hairs highlighted on her cheeks, when he looked, and pores in constellations across her nose. Crospinal wanted to touch her skin again, to see if she remained composed of yielding, warm flesh, but was surprised by a sudden mouthful of bile, which he tried—turning quickly away—to spit out; this took several attempts and left his mouth foul.

The hands held him secure the whole while.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Convincing no one, least of all himself.

“Over station, near enough,” said the girl, clearly concerned for Crospinal’s well-being: glances were exchanged. “No more rest here, deicida. Prepare.”

The scorch marks went right up the sleeves of his uniform, all the way to the elbows. And he was stunned to realize—when he finally shuffled forward—that the tingling sensation in his feet was actually the texture of the floor directly against his bare skin: lifting his left foot—resting it against his right shin—he saw burn marks there, too, on his boot, and cuffs, and ragged holes blown right through the Dacron sole, exposing areas of blackened skin.

“We go,” urged the girl. “Station’s coming. No more sleep. We go.”

“How did this happen?”

They moved him toward the hatch in the floor, without an answer. The train’s tone and resonance shifted again and Crospinal had to adjust his balance as the boys holding him swayed. From beyond the walls came muted sounds: voices, audible shreds, torn swiftly away, and the brief din of other large devices, working.

He was third to descend. They had released him, pointing. He looked down the hatch to see another platform within a larger, confined area, with better lighting, made of the same metallic composition as the upper area. He went down backward, placing his feet onto the rungs, and grasping the ladder, disquieted by the contact. A few broken crates, construction tubes in tight bundles, spools of fibre . . . and an elemental—tarnished, on all fours—listing to one side and patiently facing the featureless wall. For a second, Crospinal thought it might be Bear, doubled over, but even old Bear would not have become this decrepit, not in a dozen lifetimes. The smart machine below paid him no heed but Crospinal frowned toward it nonetheless.

As those voices outside continued to swell, rising and fading, and it became cooler, he descended into a chill. The others, climbing after him—and the two already down—did not seem alarmed by the conditions or by the silent elemental, and so Crospinal tried not to be alarmed, either, but he recalled what the riding machine had said to him—before the betrayal—as they’d headed into the giant garden, about thousands of people in the world, and Crospinal wondered if they were all waiting for him, just beyond.

Jumping the last metre or so, Crospinal landed heavily on the platform, extremities throbbing. One of the boys who had gone ahead reached out to steady him and, as he turned, their eyes met. To his surprise, Crospinal grinned. The boy did not, averting his stare. Despite the burns, and the damage to his uniform, Crospinal’s new limbs were strong and worked well. He revelled in the tingling, in the physicality of the hands that grasped him once more, in the feeling of the floor against the soles of his feet. He was not alone. And a lifetime of struggles on ladders, of tumbles and scrapes—crying silently sometimes, for hours, the pain horrible in his knees, while father waited, staring into space—were gone.

Glancing up at the person following him down—bare legs, a wrap of plastic sheet—he wondered for a second if this might be another female, one he had not previously seen, or if he’d been wrong initially. Distinction between boys and girls no longer seemed very clear, if it ever had been. This entire group looked more like him, angular, slight, than like the soft beauty and grace of his girlfriend, or the taller bulk of father. How could Crospinal be sure who was who? Did it matter?

The tin cup came clanking down, against the metal ladder; the long-haired person stood next to him, the last down. Surely a girl. She took Crospinal by the shoulders, looked into his face (she was much shorter than he had thought), and said, “You all right? You ready?”

He nodded, but doubted very much that he was either. Her eyes, close together, were mostly blue, yet the shape was different than his own.

“Leave when we leave. Walk like we walk. Face down.”

Next to Crospinal, the elemental minded its own business—once or twice when they were coming down, it had glanced over.

Then the girl pulled a recessed handle, and an entire segment of the wall vanished with a popping sound, revealing colour and sound and scents behind a broad, protective shield: Crospinal stood there, looking out, blinking and bewildered.

The train had stopped.

There was activity.

Just past a narrow catwalk, flimsy structures sloped up—rows of small cabins—crew cabins—dozens of them, small, and geometrically arranged—merged into the base of a massive, composite wall that rose, even higher, out of sight. Two data orbs whizzed past, so near to his face that he recoiled, causing the shield between them to ripple. People, too, on the catwalk platform, though certainly not a thousand; maybe seven or so, all without uniforms, nearly naked, all filthy, paying Crospinal no attention whatsoever as they broke through the shield from the other side, passing him to ransack the already-broken crates and torn packages on the floor of the train, kicking through the refuse with a calculated sense of efficiency and desperation.

The ancient elemental groaned and took a ponderous step forward, out onto the catwalk, bowing under the weight of its own body. Crospinal saw another machine, identical, farther along the platform, emerging sluggishly, from another part of the train. They moved as though crippled, as he had once been. They had been altered, modified.

Nudged from behind, Crospinal stepped through the shield, and felt a warm, cloying humidity against his exposed skin.