20.1. Forty-Sixty Calder Farris

Pol’s room that night was unbearable. He had an attack of paranoia so strong that he found himself jerking open the hallway door and looking out three or four times. No matter how he tried to talk himself out of it, he could not escape the feeling that they were coming for him, that they knew everything. He searched for bugs again, this time not caring what damage he did: wrenching open the pipe under the bathroom sink, prying the mirror off the wall, making his knuckles bleed probing the shower drain. He found only himself, looking back from the glass.

Alien.

His eyes looked haunted. It was no longer a matter of simply being mad or brain-damaged, was it? There were too many things that didn’t add up.

He went out and checked the hall again, went back to the mirror.

Who am I?

Gyde wanted to find out. He had felt Pol’s arm, which, as far as Pol knew, felt like any other Silver’s arm. He had asked him to go to the gymnasium. Bullshit. Gyde had friends from his youth that he trained with every day. That was not a clique Pol ever had or ever would be invited to join. No, Gyde wanted to see him unwrapped, naked, or maybe had just wanted to see what Pol would do at the mere threat of it, how fast he would scramble. And he had scrambled.

He grabbed his coat, unable to stay in the room any longer. He did not go to the rec club on the Silver campus. Instead he took a bus downtown where a few mixed nightclubs were open past curfew for those with merit passes.

There had not been an air raid that day and the nightclub crowd was edgy, nervous, and overly loud. Pol recognized a few Bronzies from the Department of Monitors. He sat by himself at the bar and ordered fifty proof.

He was on his second when a young Silver in battalion uniform sidled into a seat beside him. The youth was well made, with a square jaw and lively face.

“Greetings, classmate. Are you a detective?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you like it—compared to combat, that is?” The boy was eager.

“I like it.”

“How much?”

Pol looked down into his drink.

“That was a stupid question. Listen, I heard you’re partners with Gyde 332.”

“I am.”

“By the blood! He was at Cross-Plain, wasn’t he? He’s a legend. I’ve heard he’s got so many merits he’s practically—”

“Excuse me.” Pol got up and went to a private table. He ordered two more drinks.

From his semihidden seat he could stare with impunity at a Silver female at the end of the bar. She was a beauty and men hovered near her like planets around a sun. Her form was lithe and muscular, her hair soft and limp around her perfect face like silk tassels in an egg-yolk hue. Her eyes turned to his, bright as little fishes.

He tried to feel something for her, but all he felt was emptiness. Had he had a woman, where he came from? He stretched for the memory, but there was only that aching hollow. He took the pamphlet from his pocket and smoothed it out on the table.

It is possible to travel to other worlds. I have done it myself.

Pol had never tried entering the Department of Monitors late at night, but to his surprise, there was no red tape. The doors remained open for late-night arrests and his ID alone did the trick. It was well past midnight.

Up in the office he went directly to the telex, but the results from Research had not yet arrived. While he waited, his eyes kept wandering to Gyde’s desk. He tried the top drawer, where Gyde had put that file. It was locked.

The desk, like most things the state made, was heavy, built for maximum functionality and length of life. Its lock was the size of a small mouse and its hasp, Pol knew from his own desk, went deep into the wood and metal. But he found he knew how to pick locks just as he knew how to search for bugs. He took out a pocketknife, the regimental one he’d taken from Pol 137, and began working carefully with the tip inside the keyhole.

He was close to getting it when the telex when off. The loud, clanking noise made him jump. He closed the knife and went over to peer at the paper.

Research had found a match: a Bronze 2 construction foreman originally from Madamar. The name and address were there and it was not far, in the Bronze housing on the west side of the city. Pol put his knife in his pocket and grabbed his coat.

20.2. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle

By the time Denton reached the horseshoe gorge he’d been walking for six hard days and nights, alone. The journey itself had changed him. He had already done things, and thought things, that were like nothing Denton Wyle had ever done or thought before.

After he’d emerged from his vision of Jacob’s ladder, his sickness was gone, as the old man had promised. And he’d had an undeniable certainty about what he had to do. He hadn’t liked it, but that was no longer material. So he’d borrowed several knives from the Khashta tribe. One of them he put in his belt. The other he tied with a vine to a long branch, making a rough spear. Then he began the long trek to Sapphia.

He had pressed his pace because he had a gnawing sense that Eyanna was already in trouble. The last night he slept only for a few hours, following the riverbank in the dark. But when he drew close to the entrance of the horseshoe gorge, it was already too late. Through the foliage came the tender grunts of beasts and the muffled cries of Sapphians.

Denton stopped in the jungle, the sounds on his ears turning him cold. How soft they were for what was actually going on, and how ghastly.

His memory of the skalkits, of what had happened that morning in the clearing, came back to him in vivid, reeking color. How easily the beasts had consumed the Sapphians, how enormous they were, how intelligent, how strong. When he’d left Khashta he had not even let himself think that it might come to this. If Eyanna was there, she was among the victims in the clearning, there was nothing he could do. He could never fight the skalkits.

The momentum that had gotten him this far—self-disgust more than anything—deserted him. He was swamped by a sense of futility and insignificance. He would have to turn around and leave. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. Right?

Then he remembered the feeling of someone behind him, cutting his bonds when he’d thought all hope was lost. Eyanna had done it. She had faced the skalkits.

He was no less terrified, but he raised his spear up in one shaking hand and the knife in the other. It felt stupid, out of character, like a rag doll wearing armor. Who did he think he was kidding? He couldn’t do this. Yet he crept on, step by step. And suddenly he could see the clearing through the trees.

There were two skalkits, the same ones that had almost fed upon him, and there were three empty, bloodied trees, the vines hanging down ripped and worn like used dental floss. One of the skalkits was tonguing the ground underneath one of the trees. The other was licking a forelimb clean.

Two of the trees were still occupied. On one was a Sapphian boy, barely a man. On the other was Eyanna.

Denton was both genuinely relieved to see her and, shamefully, disapointed. It wasn’t too late to save Eyanna. She wasn’t, for example, dead. That meant he actually had to do this. He took a deep breath, his stomach starting to get seriously upset, and began to edge around the clearing. He would approach her from behind her tree. The skalkits wouldn’t be able to see him. He would do just what she had done. He’d cut her bonds, keeping himself out of the skalkits’ sight, and they’d slip away noticed. It could work.