He ran along the beach.

“Maxie!”

Before she had taken a couple of strides after him he had joined the Runners, who were clustered together, fingering their wounds. She caught one last glimpse of his small face, hard resentful eyes peering back at her. He seemed to be pulling off his clothes.

Then he was lost.

There was a cry, a grisly, high-pitched cry, a child’s cry, eloquent of unbearable pain. The woman. Grass, stood and peered mournfully into the forest. Emma slid into the gloom of the forest, for she had no other place to go.

Reid Malenfant:

Events unfolded quickly now, faster than they had for the Apollo astronauts. The Red Moon’s gravity, stronger than Luna’s, was pulling hard at their falling spaceship, dragging it into a curve that would all but skim the atmosphere.

Nemoto murmured to herself, still working through her tasks as calmly as if they were in just another simulator in Houston… Malenfant tried to focus on his checklist. But he kept looking up at the strange, shifting diorama beyond the window.

Suddenly he saw the dawn.

Light seeped into the edge of the great disc of blackness. At first it was a deep red, spreading smoothly out around the curve of this small world. Then the band of light began to thicken, growing orange-yellow, and finally shading into blue. The light was coalescing at its brightest point, as if gathering to give birth to the disc of sun itself. And now Malenfant saw shadows of low clouds in the atmosphere; they drew clear dark lines hundreds of miles long over deeper air layers. The surface began to pick up the first of the light — it was an ocean, dark and smooth and sleek, glowing a deep bloody red. And still the light continued to leak into the sky, diffusing higher and higher.

This was a sunrise, not on airless Luna, but on a world with an atmosphere actually deeper than Earth’s — and an atmosphere left laden with dust by a chain of great stratovolcanoes. It was a startling, full-blooded dawn, somehow unexpected so far from home.

For the first time Malenfant’s thoughts swivelled from Earth, his departure point, and turned with a rush to the world he was approaching. Suddenly he was eager to be down on the ground, to be sinking his fingers into the soil of a new world, and drinking in its air.

Emma Stoney:

The light seeped away, and the shadows turned a deeper green.

She moved as silently as she could. But still she was aware of every leaf she crushed, every twig that cracked. And each time she heard a rustle or snap, she expected an Elf to leap out at her.

She didn’t know where she was going, what the hell she was doing. But she knew she had to get away from that beach.

The screaming began again, startling her. It was very close, very loud. She crouched down in the bush, staring, listening, too frightened to move.

And she glimpsed movement, through a screen of trees to her right. Smart, Emma. You walked right in on them.

They were the Elf-folk, of course. They had the Runner child spreadeagled against a bare patch of ground. His eyes were wide and staring. Elf teeth closed on the boy’s upper thigh, and came away bloody, huge ape lips wrapped around a handful of meat.

The boy thrashed. Emma saw how his eyes turned white. And he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

After that — as Emma watched, frozen in place by her fear of detection — the boy was steadily dismembered: the drinking of blood, the biting-off of genitals, the startlingly efficient twisting-off of an arm. And through all of this the boy was still alive, still screaming… There was a hand on her shoulder.

She gasped, swivelled, fell back in the bush with a soft crash. Someone was standing over her, a shadowy figure.

It was not an Elf, or a Runner. It was a woman. She was wearing a loose tunic of skin, bound around her waist with what looked like a rope plaited from greenery. There were tools stuck in the belt, tools of bone and wood. Her body looked shorter, stockier than a Runner’s. Her face protruded. She had no chin. Her skull was large, larger than a Runner’s, but she sported a thick ridge of bone over her eyes, and there were prominent crests of bones at her cheeks and over the crown of her head.

Not a human, then. This was one of the powerful, shadowy creatures the Runners had called a “Ham’. Emma felt savage disappointment, renewed fear.

But the other beckoned, an unmistakably human gesture.

Still Emma hesitated. Somewhere on this brutal world were the people who had taught the Runners to speak English. If she couldn’t get back to Earth, then if her destiny lay anywhere, it was there — and not with this Ham.

But now she glanced back at the Elves. They had pulled open the boy’s rib cage, and the child gave a final, exhausted moan as his heart was torn out.

You’re kind of short of choices, Emma.

She followed the Ham.

The Ham glided away through the forest, pointing to the footsteps she made in the dead brush on the ground. When Emma stepped there, she made no sound.

Reid Malenfant:

Nemoto said laconically, “Three, two, one.”

The booster pack fired, and Malenfant was pushed deep into his seat.

The light of their rockets illuminated the deserts and forests of the Red Moon. All over the little world, eyes were raised to the sky, curious and incurious.

— III —

HOMINIDS

Manekatopokanemahedo:

Manekato lingered on the threshold of the room, held back by a mixture of respect and dread.

Her mother, Nekatopo, was dying.

Nekatopo, breathing evenly, gazed at the soft-glowing ceiling. A slim Worker waited beside the bed for her commands, as still as a polished rock.

Nekatopo’s room was a hexagonal chamber whose form was the basis of the design of the House, indeed of the Farm itself. This room had been occupied by matriarchs throughout the deep history of the Lineage, and so it was Nekatopo’s now — and would be Manekato’s soon. But the room was stark. The ceiling was tall and the walls bare panels, glowing softly pink. The only piece of furniture was the bed on which Nekatopo lay, itself hexagonal.

Manekato remembered how her grandmother had decorated these same walls with exuberant fruits. But her daughter had stripped away all of that. “I honour my mother’s memory,” she had said. “But these walls are of Adjusted Space; they are not material. They do not tarnish or erode. They have a beauty beyond space and time, as our ancestors intended. Why deface them with transience?…”

But Manekato found the unreal simplicity as overwhelming, in its way, as the happy clutter of her grandmother. When this room was hers, Manekato would find a middle way: her own way, as all the matriarchs had done — and she felt a sudden flush of shame, for her mother was not yet dead, and here she was calculating how she would use her room.

Now she saw that salty tears leaked over Nekatopo’s cheeks, soaking the sparse hair, and trickled into her flat nose.

Manekato was troubled to her core. Her mother had never cried — not even on hearing the news of her imminent death — not even on the day when she had had to send away her only son, Babo, Mapping him to his marriage on a Farm on the other side of the world.

Manekato fled, hoping her mother had not noticed she had been here.

She walked alone, along the path that led to the ocean. The Wind was gentle today, comparatively; she was barely aware of the way it ruffled the thick black hair on her back, and shivered over the trees that clung to the ground nearby.

To a human she would have looked something like a gorilla: stocky, powerful, all of eight feet tall, she knuckle-walked elegantly. She pressed her knuckles into the crushed gravel of the path with gentleness, even reverence. Every speck of land on the Farm was precious to her, like an extension of her own heart. Even this humble path served its purpose with quiet dignity, and had borne the weight of her mother and her mother’s mother, deep into the roots of time, as it bore her weight now.