The three of them circled around and reached the rutted path just as a small cart emerged from the gathering amber dusk, drawn by six women. Killeen stepped aside for them to pass and at that moment the crowd saw the cart and a collective sigh rose. Twisted, anguished cries filled the gloom.

An honor guard flanked the cart, weapons at port arms. People swarmed around, pressing Killeen against the cart. He saw three bodies arranged formally on the flatbed, their arms at their sides. Each stared open-eyed at the night above, faces unlined and dispassionate above bodies that belied their calm. Two were women—scrawny, their skins puckered and lacerated. And each bore a massive bruise that spread down from her prominent collarbone to her belly.

But it was not truly a bruise, he saw. The purpling had spread up into the women’s breasts, pushing up ridges of yellowing flesh. The edge of the wound was crinkled and warped, as though something inside had tried to escape by prying off the chest of each woman, and finally had failed, and so was still lurking within them, the pressure of it forcing the ribs apart and making of their bellies and lungs a great swollen blister that peaked in a watery, transparent sac.

The male corpse between them lay face down; ragged hair covering his head entirely. A bulge split the back of his uniform. Another glossy, stretched dome. His was ringed by a crusted brown scab like dried mud.

The three were laid close together, just fitting into the width of the cart, so that the bodies could not roll and burst the tight, shiny, grotesquely bloated wounds.

Killeen felt his mouth water with incipient nausea. He turned away, sucking the air through his teeth to take away the sudden foul taste that came through the air like a slap. Pushing out against the press of bodies, looking directly into the eyes that stared past him without seeing, he made his way back to the path. The two women were waiting. He whispered, “What…what caused…”

“Cybers,” the talkative woman said. “They do that sometimes, when they can get in close.”

“But…what…”

“Infested, that’s what those people are. His Supremacy says they must be cleaned, purified. Dealt with right.”

“Let’s…let’s go.”

She shook her head, the coils of her black hair wrestling like living ropes. “We leave now, it’d be disrespec’ful.”

Bodies pressed against him, their mute momentum carrying him toward the bonfire. In the wake of the cart the slow grave swell of the Eight of Hearts’ mourning song rose. He watched as gloved hands drew the dirty, stiffening bodies from the cart. The corpses were laid out gently, the man still in the center and face down, and a single red heart made of cloth laid upon the head of each. Then a tall woman wearing a Cap’n’s signifiers spoke, her voice well modulated and practiced and strong.

Killeen did not follow the words. He was watching the bodies. As the corpses stiffened further their legs and arms jerked and trembled slightly, as though the rhythms that defined a Family’s way—running, the endless succession of nomad flight—carried on remorselessly across the divide of death.

Then the Cap’n approached the first woman, made a ritual pass with a long knife, and plunged it hard and sure into the glassy blister. The shiny dome broke with an audible pop. Milky fluids gushed all down it, over the corpse’s face, running into the open rictus, covering the still-staring eyes, trickling down over the legs. There seemed an impossible quantity of the stuff and when it drained away the yawning husk of the blister cracked and broke under the Cap’n’s repeated thrusts.

She probed deeper. The point of the knife burrowed in and abruptly the body shook within, shuddering with a wet sucking noise. Something struggled inside, rocking the body from side to side, jerking, pushing the broken ribs farther out. A spasm, a last convulsion, and then the body went completely still. Snapped ribs collapsed inward.

The dead woman looked shrunken, emptied. In final rest her face now resembled those of her Family hemming in the spectacle, a blade of a nose between prominent cheekbones. Her eyes seemed to sink beneath the darkened lids. A tiny insect crawled out of one nostril and lingered on a bloodless lip.

The Cap’n pulled out her blade. Pinned on its sharp point was a thing hard and brown and chitinous that still wriggled with frantic energy. It was tough but somehow unformed, as though legs and head had still to push their way out of the moist, interlocking brown segments. It fought the knife, twisting. Then suddenly the life drained out of it and the thing went limp.

The crowd backed away. The Cap’n threw the brown mass to the ground. Instantly a woman leaped forward and crushed it with both boots. She cried out something Killeen could not understand, a shout of anger and sorrow and despair. Then she backed into the crowd again. Men and women nearby clasped her, passing her among them, hugging and sheltering her with soft murmurings.

The Cap’n did the second woman the same way. Killeen watched numbly. This time a man crushed the brown thing. It snapped like the joints of a hand being crushed. The man sobbed as he did it and stamped the thing again and again before going back into the crowd.

The blister on the man’s back was larger than the women’s. The bulge was thinning, growing translucent. In tiny movements the skin pulsed—a convexity here, a concavity there, until the whole back and chest of the man was alive with purpose. The trunk of the body was unrecognizable now, save for the parentheses of ribs that yawned aside to frame the quaking fleshy hill that rose and throbbed.

The Cap’n of the Eight of Hearts quickly brought her blade up, calling out some ritual words. Before she could plunge it into the man’s back the blister began to split. Milky ooze gushed out. Dark cracks ran down from the summit.

Something crabbed and small pushed itself out into the flickering firelight. It scuttled away. The Cap’n did not hesitate. She slammed the knife into the thing as it ran down the corpse’s leg. Small legs fought and scraped their way up the blade. But the knife made its point.

A collective sigh rose from the crowd. The three bodies were flaccid and spent now. Their nearest relatives—for all present were related, however distantly—came forward to accept the honor of burial.

Killeen made his way on wooden legs away from the roaring, snapping bonfire. Regaining the path, he said hoarsely to the Sebens’ Cap’n, “That’s what the Cybers do? Plant their, their seeds in us? They don’t even let us die straight and clean?”

The sunburned woman answered, “Yeasay. Only those li’l things, they’re not Cybers.”

“What, then?”

“Some kinda li’l scrabblers. I seen ’em doin’ small jobs, followin’ Cybers. Sometimes climb up on Cybers, pick at their joints ’n’ stuff.”

“Like fleas?”

“I’d guess.”

Killeen said disbelievingly, “Just use us for hatching out fleas.”

“They leave us lyin’, few hours later out comes those things. Or they’ll kill clean from the distance, if they ain’t got the time.”

“What they use mechs for?”

“Dunno. Parts, maybe.”

Killeen sucked at his lip to hide his queasiness. The woman said, “Cybers’re worse ’n mechs, plenty worse.”

The woman who had said nothing until now put in bitterly, “Damn sure, but we’ll triumph. ’S God’s way, givin’ us a trial.”

They moved on through gathering murk lit by oily fires. Above them the sky yawned and flexed.

FIVE

To Killeen the look on Jocelyn’s face was abruptly, immensely funny. She gaped, eyes and mouth making big round Os.

They embraced, then, and the other Bishops squatting near a small sheltered fire leaped up loudly and were all around him.