“Is Elwood still with us?” asked Fandango. “News travels so slow these days.”

“He succumbed last year at the age of eighty-eight,” I explained. “The whole village turned out to cheer him off as he was wheeled into the Green Room.”

We had driven out of the arboreal tunnel by now, and aside from the invasive rhododendrons, which Fandango explained were due “for a burn” quite soon now, the countryside was more open. The river was to our right and on the opposite bank was the railway we had traveled the day before. To our left was a steep, rocky slope, and as we swept around a corner, Fandango stamped on the brakes. Lying in the middle of the road were several large boulders, one the size of a garden shed. There was space to drive around them, but we were in no particular hurry, and stopped to watch. The rockfall was recent, and already the roadway was working to dispel the intruders. With a series of sinuous, wavelike movements, the Perpetulite gently shifted the broken rock toward the side of the road. As kids, we’d sat on baking trays and planted ourselves in the middle of the road, then raced one another to the curb.

“How long have you been janitoring?” I asked as we watched the largest boulder being moved as easily as if it were a feather.

“Thirty-one years, give or take,” he replied. “Seen three Leapbacks in that time, each one worse than the one before. I dread to see what they’ll ban next. I suppose you’re too young to remember tractors?”

We felt the Ford start to move as it too was recognized as useless debris to be rejected, and Fandango reversed gently back and forth to fool the Perpetulite.

“Not quite,” I replied, as the Leapback in question occurred when I was five. Horses did the plowing and drilling these days, and any devices that needed static power, such as threshing machines, were run off agri-exempted Everspins, each one about forty times the size of the one I had in my valise.

“I’d been more annoyed by the loss of gearing on bicycles,” I said as the larger of the boulders was successfully toppled onto the verge, and we moved off. “Direct drive doesn’t really excite, to be honest.” We drove on in silence for a few minutes, which allowed me to enjoy the untouched countryside, and after negotiating a long, unbroken stretch, we drove past the remains of an old town, reduced to little more than tussocky rubble by a series of aggressive excavations. “This was Little Carmine,” said Fandango, slowing so we could see, “picked clean of all hue in 00453. Great Auburn is about six miles to the east. It’s been our principal source of scrap color for almost three decades, but even that’s nearly exhausted. Most of our toshing parties these days concentrate on rediscovering individual villas or hamlets. It’s quite a skill, you know, reading a soft lump in the ground.”

We continued the journey, and Fandango and I chatted some more, mostly about the maintenance difficulties of the carbon-arc mechanism that lay at the heart of the central streetlamp—something that seemed to sap a disproportionate amount of his time. And it was in this manner that we passed the time until we arrived at the deserted railway station. Across the river was Rusty Hill, untouched and unvisited since the Mildew took everyone in it four years before.

Rusty Hill

Dad and I climbed out of the car, and Fandango told us he would wait at the top of a nearby hill in case the Ford “proved difficult to start.” He wished us good luck, told us to signal when we wanted to be picked up and that he would ahoogah twice if he saw any swans. He then departed with almost unnatural haste in a cloud of white smoke.

Dad sat on a low wall and examined the town through his binoculars. Although unlikely this far west, it wasn’t unknown for Nomadic Riffraff to use abandoned settlements as homesteads, and neither Dad nor I had the slightest wish to bump into a grunge of well-established and dangerously territorial wildmen.

There were gruesome stories that related to well-hued men being kidnapped, with the threat of plum removal if ransom wasn’t paid. I knew of no one who wore their spot beyond the boundaries.

“Dad?”

“Yes?” he replied, still studying the deserted buildings.

“I learned something interesting this morning. Lucy Ochre’s been hitting the Lincoln pretty badly. She thinks her father was given the murder.”

I had thought Dad might reject the notion as quickly as I had, but he momentarily appeared ill at ease. He put down the binoculars and looked at me. “What’s given her that idea?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. Why, could he have been?”

“Technically, it’s possible. He could have been tied to the Departure Lounger and had his eyes taped open.”

“They would have seen evidence of that on the body.”

“Agreed. Here’s another scenario: Let’s say he was planning to Chase the Frog. He would have controlled the light coming into the room with the lever next to the Lounger. He’d rotate the shutters open to get the full effect of Sweetdream, then close them when he’d had enough, recover in the dark and creep out.”

“There’s another lever,” I said, understanding where he was going with this, “outside.”

“Right,” he said, “and they’re linked. Someone might have just held the lever in the open position.”

I shivered. “Is that likely?”

“No. All he’d have to do is close his eyes. Besides, what possible motive could there have been? He was a healer—and a very good one at that. Seven years without a single Mildew. I think it was just a tragic mistake in pursuit of the frog. But it would be interesting to see if Lucy has any more information. By the way,” he added, “deMauve bent my ear this morning.”

“Oh.”

“He said that if you ignored a Direct Order of a prefect again, he’d be down on both of us like a ton of bricks.”

“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

He carried on studying the town.

“Dad?”

“What?”

“How likely is it that there are Mildew spores still kicking around?”

“Almost nil,” he replied. “A twenty-year quarantine is needlessly long, but those are the Rules.”

Satisfied that the town was empty, he placed the binoculars back in his bag, and we walked past the faded quarantine board and across the stone- arched bridge. The Perpetulite spalled at the center of the bridge, where the organoplastoid had been cut and bronze spikes driven in to stop self-repair. The method was crude but effective, and the roadway had sent off only a few dark grey tendrils before giving up. We stepped off the smooth roadway and trod the well-worn cobbles into the village. It was unnaturally quiet, and evidence of rapid abandonment was everywhere: Discarded possessions lay scattered in the street and the shops were still open, tattered curtains blowing from windows. Between the paving slabs, grass had once more gained a toehold. Occasionally we came across the remains of the departed, their bleached bones lying within weathered remnants of clothing. I’d been told eighteen hundred had been lost, and all in the space of forty-eight hours.

We stopped by the village color hydrant, which looked relatively new and not at all like the unit back home, which was a fir tree of multiple connections to all points of the village. This one was not connected to anything at all—the color feeds were simply four-inch pipes with threaded caps and a couple of pressure valves, with the stopcock wheels removed to prevent mischief. Grid color had reached Rusty Hill not long before the outbreak. The village must have worked and saved and sorted scrap color for years to obtain the spur line, but ultimately, for nothing.