Her look framed her question. Killeen said, “Seems fine ’cept for the legs.”

“Head?”

“Well, he talks okay. I’ll take him out tomorrow, test his reflexes maybe.”

She blinked slowly in the slanted, dry light. Her eyelids slid like gray ghosts and he had the feeling that he could see through them to the ivory masks of her eyes. “You?”

“What, this arm? ’S okay.”

She kneaded it with both hands. “Feel?”

“No, nothing.”

“Fix?”

He shook his head, still thinking about Toby. Nobody knew how to fix much of anything, it seemed. They began to walk together, directionless. It seemed profoundly odd to be moving down a path, amid forms shaped by human hands. The small, almost obsessively precise details of mechwork were missing. In their place were agreeable errors, lines askew, artless curves. “Hatchet say?”

“Family King doesn’t know if any other Families survived. We’re the only ones who’ve found them. If the Splash attracts more…”

He let the thought trickle away. He could not think far ahead to distant, theoretical possibilities when Toby’s face bobbed in his memory, pale but still cheerful.

In the boy’s eyes had been a puzzlement with his own body that would quickly turn to futile anger and then despair. Killeen knew the cycle. He had seen it on the march with the injured.

“You talk Mantis with Hatchet?”

He was always surprised at how much she knew without his telling her. “Yeasay naysay,” he quoted an old rhyme, “mansay noway.”

“Mantis?”

“He’s worried ’bout it, sure.”

“Wonders if Metropolis safe.”

“Yeasay. I do, too. Hatchet’s… hiding something.”

“What?”

“Dunno. Me, I wonder why Metropolis is here at all. How come the Mantis left it alone?”

“I checked defenses. They’re good, but…” He could tell by her arched eyebrows that she didn’t believe this explanation.

“Wish Fanny was here,” he said wistfully. This was the first time he had said her name in a long while. The events since her suredeath had opened a chasm in all their lives. He wished she had left an Aspect he could carry.

“Fanny?”

“Oh, course. I forgot you never knew her.”

“Your Cap’n?”

“Was. Best damn one ever. She’d go through this Hatchet like a hot knife through butter.” He liked this old phrase, even though it reminded him that he hadn’t seen butter since the Citadel.

Shibo said abruptly, “Hatchet not right.”

“Huh? ’Bout what?”

She tapped her temple. “Not right this way.”

This startled Killeen. “Why you say?”

“You hear his welcoming speech?”

“No, fell asleep. What’d he say?”

“Metropolis greatest city ever.”

Killeen chuckled. “These mud huts?”

“Great ’cause can withstand Marauders.”

Killeen’s mouth turned down in puzzlement. “Not many Marauders come this far in the Splash. They catch on we’re here, we’ll see plenty them. Hatchet’s been damn lucky so far.”

“Yeasay. Then he talk about reuniting Families.”

“Huh?”

“He wants be Cap’n.”

“Cap’n all the Families?”

“Think so. Kings cheer him all the time.”

Killeen shook his head. “This Hatchet, he’s done a lot, I give him that. He can lead. Look how proud the Kings are. Not a wise Cap’n, though.”

“Yeasay.” Softly she added, “Fanny wise?”

He smiled. “She used to say, old people don’t get wise, they just get careful.” He paused. “Or was that my father said that?”

“Not always true, anyway.”

“Yeasay. Fanny was wise, even though she’d rag you for sayin’ it. Hatchet, he’s not.”

“Yeasay.” Her face was somber as she regarded passing warm yellow rectangles that looked into the narrow huts. Family singing drifted outward on the soft breeze.

Metropolis used a line of sentries and outer defenses beyond the ring of nearby hills. They could sense any mech approach. That made possible this casual indifference to an exposed light. Killeen did not think it wise.

The sprawled town shimmered in its fragrant haze of campfire smoke. Moist air cloaked his face, its welcome weight filled his lungs. This was the tang of life, riding winds and burrowing in the rich loam. Once, Arthur had told him, all Snowglade had been this way.

He forced his thoughts back to practical things. “Why’d the mechs rebuild the Mantis each time? After the Calamity the Marauders could’ve hunted us down, if they wanted.”

Shibo said, “Tried. Pick us off if they run across us.”

“Yeasay, but they didn’t hunt the way the Mantis does.” Killeen balled his right fist. “They just let us go for years. Forgot us, ’cept for Marauders we’d run into by accident. That was bad enough. Now they’ve sent the Mantis. Why?”

Shibo smiled. “Don’t frown. Makes you look old.”

He noticed that she had completely redone her hair. It swooped upward from her broad crown in twisted braids flecked with silver. Then it fanned outward in a frozen black fountain. Her eyes glistened and her jumpsuit was clean and brushed.

Ready for romance, he thought. She gave him a slow, up-from-under look.

He wasn’t in the mood.

He could not bring himself to tell her that he was certainly interested in an abstract kind of way, but lacked the motivation. When his Family laid down the law about sexcens, Killeen had not minded so much. He’d been sleeping with Jocelyn then, but the sweet memory of Veronica kept coming back to him. He was past that wonderful time of his youth when the simple and almost unexpected pleasure of the act was enough to hold him entranced. It had been clear that Jocelyn could never be what Veronica had been, and that had brought a bittersweet aftertaste to every touch and gesture.

He opened his mouth to skirt around the subject but nothing would come out. Damn! Like I was a kid! He cast about for something to say, mind spinning in vacuum, and ahead of them saw a tube set on a frame.

He knew full well what it was but managed gratefully to seize upon it with fake puzzlement. His delight, though, was real.

The Citadel had boasted one such, and he could not imagine how Family King had managed to save theirs. Maybe they had rescued it from their own Citadel ruins, years after their Calamity. That would fit Hatchet’s style.

He peered through the ancient viewer. Clouds drifted away, revealing a shimmering band of starlight. He could see that the dense stream of stars lay beyond the nearby ruby lanes of dust. Arthur said:

A welcome vision! I have not witnessed this for so very long. That is the Mandikini—an ancient Asian Indian word of fabled Earth. It denotes the plane of the galaxy, the so-called Milky Way. The Indian translates literally as “great sky river,” since they believed—

“Come look,” Killeen said to Shibo, cutting off Arthur.

Shibo had never seen an electrotelescope before. She dutifully looked through it, scanning the twilight sky, and then asked him about something in the finder screen.

Killeen peered at the small, crystalline object. A memory from childhood rushed through him. “The Chandelier,” he said. “There’s one still left!”

“What is?”

“A city. Human city! Didn’t Family Rook come from a Chandelier?”

She shook her head, puzzled. Killeen said, “We all did, long time back. Came down, settled Snowglade.”

Arthur had reminded him of these forgotten tales only yesterday. Killeen had been letting the Aspect speak more often, trying to learn more mechtech. He had not told Shibo this, hoping to pick up a few craftsman tricks to impress her.

“Families built?”

From the inner whisper of Aspect Nialdi Killeen plucked a quick fact. He was glad to have some area where he could at least seem to know more than Shibo.

“Families were formed when humanity came down from Chandeliers. ’Way long ago.”

“One Chandelier?”

“Uh, no, three,” he got from Nialdi.

“We made?”

Her incredulity echoed Killeen’s unspoken feelings. It was flatly incredible that men had ever known how to shape things in the high blackness, or even to fly there. Even the strange whitestone monument they had found the day before seemed an impossible accomplishment.