“The best,” Hatchet said with casual smugness.

“It operating alone?”

Hatched blinked, as though this was a new idea. “Yeasay. I never saw it with another mech.”

Killeen didn’t think that meant much, since mechs communicated through their sensoria over huge distances. He let it pass. “How’d you make contact with it?”

“The way things was, it found us,” he said. “We’d been running over a year after the Calamity. It tracked us some way.”

“Maybe has a tip into the whole Marauder comm net?” Killeen asked. Shibo sat silently studying Hatchet, her face giving nothing away.

“Not a steady one,” Hatchet said. “Else we wouldn’t get the occasional Marauder wanderin’ into Metropolis.”

Killeen frowned. He hadn’t heard of this. “Any get away?”

“Not that we know. We peg ’em square.”

“So the Marauder net still doesn’t know Metropolis is there?”

“The Renny takes care that.”

“Risky.”

Hatchet’s ball chin stuck out farther as the rest of his face hardened. “That’s in our deal. The Renny’s got some trick, can tap the mech geo-survey. He kinda paints over the picture for us. Makes Metropolis look like somethin’ natural.”

“Call it ’he,’ do you?”

Hatchet blinked. “Well, Rennies’re almost human, some ways.”

Shibo said, “Not good, think that way.”

“Listen, I got Metropolis built,” Hatchet said sternly. “Kings’re settled, eating good. Better’n wanderin’ like you!”

Killeen nodded but he didn’t set his uneasiness aside. Mechs were enemies, no way around that. Any thinking that forgot that fact was dangerous, foolish. Who knew what Renegades really wanted?

The afternoon was hard going because Hatchet insisted they reach the target point by Denixdown. They were marching directly into the hotpoint of the Eater and the seeing got worse. Toby did not wake from his long swaying sleep but he made small troubled sounds. Killeen could not tell if the anxious groans and sleep-clogged sighs were from true pain or were the escaped remnants of nightmares. Everyone had those; among adults it was often Aspects striving to live. Toby’s face wound into wrenching lines, eyes sliding spasmodically under eyelids. Somehow his injuries had triggered growth. Toby’s hair was shoulder-length and his fingernails jutted out, slim white spikes.

Shibo was tiring of the load, her exskell slowing. Killeen could feel a spreading ache in his shoulders where the slingstraps bit in. He put his mind to ignoring it by making everything else in the world hard and sharp and clear, so clear it pushed aside the pain. He managed to keep that until he saw the landing site. It was a broad plain, flat without having been scraped by mechs.

There was nothing on the plain. No mechwaste, even. They took shelter under an overhanging rock ledge so nothing could see them from the sky. Then they waited. Denix reddened as it sank and a chilled blue came into the rest of the sky from the Eater-glow brimming at the other horizon. Killeen liked to watch the play of light on the few high skittering gray clouds. He had not seen many clouds in these last years. Arthur told him unbidden that most lands were now dried so much they could not breathe moisture into the sky anymore. He guessed that was why there were some flat, silverfringed slabs of haze back toward Metropolis, with its upwelling icemelt. He squinted, trying to find the Chandelier as the blue above hardened. Then the Duster came up on them.

Killeen froze. The Duster kept on a straight glide. Its underbelly was seamless and polished, reflecting the terrain below. It came down low as though it was searching the plain. No hatch opened to spew forth vermin. Killeen sat absolutely still until Hatchet clapped him on the shoulder and said loudly, “Easy. That’s ours.”

A Kingswoman was already swinging on her pack, grinning at the little scare they had caused the Rooks and Bishops. Killeen saw the rest look a bit sheepish but he felt nothing like that. Just because the Kings treated the Duster as a known thing, something they’d dealt with before, didn’t mean he should.

He and Shibo brought up the rear. Toby was asleep again, his mouth open and face a strange white. Killeen could see the pulse beating firmly in the boy’s neck, though, so let him sleep.

The Duster gave a thin, high shriek as they straggled out onto the plain. It did not use wheels but instead seemed to hold itself up with air alone in a way Killeen could not understand. Then, when it slowed, he saw four things like skids pop down. A thick plume of tan dust burst forth behind. It slowed and came toward them. He had to make himself keep walking. The Kings were nonchalant as the Duster came rumbling near.

They were making a show of having mastered a Renny, of knowing what to do. Killeen knew they thought it was dumb to bring Toby this way, that the Kings had already written off the boy. If they hadn’t been able to extract much medical help from their Renny, certainly this bunch of vagrant and battered Bishops wasn’t going to. But they needed a translator and would tolerate his dragging along a doomed boy if that was the price. Hatchet’s face had said that the day before, but the civility between Families still meant something, so he had not spoken it.

The polished belly split. A ramp clunked into the dust. Hatchet led the others up it, the Rooks and Bishops coming last, their eyes showing white and jumpy.

Killeen had to make himself go up the ramp. The prickly smell of active mechworks alerted him, set his senses dancing.

They settled among large, blunt housings that jutted from the walls. Inside the Duster was gloomy, the grids of struts and snubnosed machines a looming canopy. Luminosities stirred fitfully in the walls. The vagrant bands cast dull red wedges of light into the strained faces of those sitting. Killeen remained standing and alert. He felt the deck tremble. A sudden bump sent him glancing off a smooth aluminum housing and made the others laugh. It was the first human sound anyone had made inside the Duster. Everyone chuckled as Killeen felt ruefully for a seat, and then they settled into an apprehensive yet silent waiting. A strumming filled the walls and soothed them. Toby slept.

Killeen watched the dim, smoldering darkness. Dirt and mechmess inhabited the corners. Everything looked old, worn. He guessed that the Duster was not smart itself, was just a tool other mechs used. He remembered that Toby had called the small machines that fell from Dusters “sky-roaches,” after an insect that had infested the Citadel. He had no idea if they lived inside Dusters. If he came up on one of them in the ash-glow dimness, he would kill it without question, no matter how jaunty Hatchet was.

Killeen watched the timer tick in his left eye. He managed not to think about being in the air, of how far down they could fall. It was more than an hour before he felt them slow. The others stirred as the Duster nosed down. Landing jarred several from their seats.

The ramp sighed down onto pale yellow concrete. Black skid marks and cracks forked across the rectangle Killeen could see. Hatchet led them down. They emerged onto a vast field of speckled concrete that stretched to the horizon. Mech factories dotted the hills. The first thing Killeen did when he reached the ground was closeup the hills and check them. Navvys swarmed everywhere. Wedge-backed trucks ground loudly among sloping roads and curious tapered towers. No Marauders.

Shibo whispered something and Killeen turned. He went absolutely still. A Crafter stood beside the Duster. It was doing something to an electrosocket in the Duster’s side. Giving it orders, Killeen guessed.

But the size. It was fully five times larger than any Crafter he had ever seen. The general outlines were still there, ornamented and elaborate. Grainy layers of added housings gave it a muscular presence. From pylons fore and aft hung burnished conical pods. Antennae turned nervously to regard the humans.