There would be a clear shot after all. The navvy didn’t seem in all that much of a panic. Its brushed aluminum carapace stood out against the green valley beyond. The range was reasonable.

Killeen raised his weapon and heard a burst from Toby, who couldn’t have a good angle yet and was wasting fire. Rounds kicked up turf, far wide and high of the navvy. A second burst came closer but still high.

The navvy stopped and seemed to look around. Crosshatching was clear on its side panels.

Killeen shot it. He saw pieces of the cowling tumble away in the clear air.

The navvy made a quick motion and a dark spot came up the slope fast and low and hit him in the face.

It came in through his right eye. He toppled backward and felt a swift black storm squirt into him. A searching coldness spread through his forehead and left arm and hand.

Ice ricocheted blue in his eyes. Chrome-hard lightning stung in his left elbow.

Vision came back. Smells. A roaring.

He was rolling downhill. He tried to stop himself. Stones dug into his side and his left hand wouldn’t move. He kicked at a boulder with his feet and that slowed him enough to fetch up against a bush.

He tasted warm blood. Somebody was shouting. Bitter cold seethed in his neck, down his chest. Shouting, loud and too fast to understand.

He rolled over. Heavy firing, quick hard slaps in the stillness.

He used his right arm to prop himself up. He had rolled a pretty fair distance and the navvy was on its side nearby. Its guts spilled out in a gray tangle.

He tried to lean on his left side and gasped as sharp yellow barbs thrust up into his shoulder. It felt as if something raw and rough was chewing on his left hand.

He managed to get out a strangled cry. Purple specks swam in the bleached air. Voices called incoherently.

Killeen looked around wildly and nearly lost his precarious balance on the hillside.

Shibo came over the horizon on a high leap. She landed with legs spread to pivot and fire in any direction, weapon at the ready.

Killeen called, “Toby… I…”

—Over there.— Shibo pointed.

Buzzing hot gnats circled his head, nipped at his eyes.

He wrestled himself over onto his left side. The hill veered, tilted, wavered in shifting greens and yellows. Killeen blinked to clear his watery vision.

Toby was down. He sprawled on his back, eyes fastened on the sky.

“Son!”

Toby’s eyes moved. His hands scrabbled down toward his twisted legs. Across the sea of Killeen’s sensorium came a weak, “Dad… I… can’t move… my… legs.”

“Lie… lie down,” Killeen managed.

He opened his mouth to speak but nothing would come out. The sky, he saw, was utterly clear and empty of meaning. He had to get up.

Gasping, he pushed with his hands so he could sit up. His right arm was rubbery and shot through with tingling. His left arm was a hollow weightless vacancy.

He could not sit up. With a grunt he rolled partway over so he could see most of the hillside. The navvy was not moving. Shibo came down the hill, leaping among slate-gray boulders. Cermo was behind her. They were all very slow and shining in the bleached hard light that slanted through the air.

And the buzzing gnats were biting his eyes now and they would not go away.

SEVEN

Twilight came laced with high orange clouds.

Killeen felt as though he walked on similar high puffy softness, for he could barely feel his lower legs. He had been marching for some time, unmindful, knowing only that he had to press forward into the neutral, dimming air. He felt himself merge with the settling mind-mist that swarmed about him, a fog through which he could see the details of a long, downsloping valley slide past. The scenes jogged and rocked so he knew he was walking through the cool dissolving grayness.

Some had said he should be carried. A part of Killeen had wanted to yeasay, to ease onto a stretcher. But he knew the subtle balance of the Family. Toby had to be carried, since his legs were gone entirely. On even a moderate march the carriers would tire. Best not to double the cause of complaint by adding Killeen’s heaviness to the Family burden. For the rule of the Family was plain: no permanently disabled were toted on the march. They were left—sadly, with proper ceremony—to whatever fate they could meet.

This time was different. Killeen knew this but could not immediately summon up how and why. He simply walked numbly through the pearly fog of his own diffused and quiet world.

Directly ahead of him Toby swayed in a shoulder-hinged carry between two men. The boy was sleeping. Even so Killeen could see Toby’s eyes roll and jerk behind pale lids.

Killeen wondered if the boy felt anything below the hips at all. It had been hard to get him to talk as they lay together on the rounded hillside. The grass had been cushion enough, but Shibo and Cermo had brought sleep pads for them, a luxury neither had felt in years. They had lain there and Toby said little as the Family fretted and busied themselves around them.

Killeen had felt as though he were a boy himself. It had been like that long ago, lying in the fields near the Citadel, drowsy and speculative as he gazed into a sky that unfolded into infinite cobalt fineness. This hillside also gave itself to the sky as though he and his son were offered to it on an altar. Killeen had tried to focus himself then but faces and times had come flitting into his mind like birds. His father, leaning with casual grace on a mech strut at the end of a successful raid, grinning in a way Killeen found mysterious until he saw years later that it was triumph tempered by still-raw memories of many defeats. His mother, picking among mechwaste and coming up, prettily agog, with silvery cloth no one had seen before. All the pictures had flowed by as if behind thick glass. He had talked to Toby about them in the unthinking way a father feels that the merest detail of the past, shared, preserves that instant in the character and perspective of the son.

“Near now,” Shibo said at his elbow. Killeen nodded. “Kingsmen come.”

“Kings… ?”

The word triggered memory. The scattershot piping voices heard on the left flank had been hails from the Family King. While the right flank pursued the navvy, the left was held back by Ledroff’s order to group defensively. So meeting the Kings had been delayed until the navvy was dead. The wonderful news from and of the Kings had come to Killeen as he lay sprawled, his sensorium a sheltering hazed cocoon.

And there ahead were the Kings.

Ledroff had sounded a full alarm. Outrunners watched all approaches. But this time there was no sign of the Mantis as the Families met The Bishops came down a dusty draw canyon and emerged onto a plain ripe with swelling green life.

A man led the small party which met them. He was tall, with thin, blackclad legs and gaunt arms, and his every gesture said he was Cap’n of Family King. His face gave him his name: Hatchet. The brow was wide and bare, beneath a fine red carpet of hair cropped to avoid the rub and snarl under a helmet. A blue tightweave rag circled above his ears. From a square forehead tapered an angular nose and slanting cheekbones. A narrow yet powerful mouth checked their descent. Below the full lips Hatchet’s face came together in an extended sharp triangular wedge, bare of beard.

All this swam toward Killeen in layered air as Hatchet approached, the Kings’ Cap’n radiating authority with every step. Around them the Families greeted one another. Ledroff escorted Hatchet and made introductions but it was not until Hatchet directly said to him, “Just the arm, is it?” that Killeen registered anything.