Antiphon

He felt the blood leave his face as the hair on his arms and neck rose. “I’m Neb. How do you know my-?”

She leaned forward, interrupting him, her eyes suddenly wide and wild. “You’re in grave danger. My sisters hunt you even now, and through you, the mechoservitors. You must go.”

Neb blinked, his memory pulling him back to his encounter with the carved kin-raven and the woman in the Wastes who had spoken to him. We see you there as well in your glass cave. He thought of them, magicked and racing across the Wastes, and then he recalled the phial of blood magicks this woman had in her pack. “And what of you?” he asked. “Are you here hunting me as well?” And how is it you can use the magicks and not be killed by their potency?

Their eyes met. “I was not hunting you, though it is what I was sent to do.” She looked away. “I have other matters to attend to.”

He looked to her bandaged shoulder and saw the fresh blood seeping through. “I don’t think you’ll be attending to those matters any time soon.”

Even as he said it, he could see the pain and weariness registering on her face. She settled back into the makeshift bed. “You must leave,” she said again. “My sisters will tend to me.”

Neb glanced toward the mouth of the cave. The kin-wolves had gone quiet, and that meant it was time for him to take up his post. He looked back to the girl. There was urgency in her voice and written into her furrowed brow. “Why would your sisters wish me harm?” Another question dug into him with the sharpness of an Entrolusian cavalry spur. “And why do they call me Abomination?”

“They do,” she said, “because of what you are. But they need to stop the metal dreamers first, and only you can find them.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

Her eyelids drooped, and her voice faltered. “So that you will listen to me and leave while you can.”

She closed her eyes now, and her breathing became heavy. He looked once more to the mouth of the cave, then set himself to changing her dressing and rebandaging her wound. She stirred twice and tried to push him away, but he easily held her in place long enough to finish his work.

Then, he slipped back to the mouth of the cave. He fished the cloth-wrapped icon from his pouch and studied it, careful not to touch it. He had no idea what it was or how it did what it had done, but he did not doubt for a moment that it had shown him one of the mechoservitors who had fled Sanctorum Lux, and that he’d seen Winters, though she looked foreign to him, cleaned and dressed like any other woman in the Named Lands instead of wearing the dirt and ash of her people. The strange carving had even reached beyond the grave to his father Hebda. And he’d seen the women who hunted him, too.

More importantly, they’d seen him. And if this girl spoke the truth, they wanted him to help them find the metal dreamers.

He put the wrapped image away and thought for a moment about pulling out the plain box and the silver crescent that lay within it. The moon was up, and the canticle would be clear. He could taste the code buried in that song, could feel the equations and formulas within the numbers it hid. He knew it lay there, ancient and beguiling, and that somehow the mechoservitors had found a dream within it.

The metal dreamers.

The idea of the metal men dreaming intrigued him. He’d spent a good deal of time with Isaak during their early days at the Seventh Forest Manor. He’d found him different from the others, somehow set apart after his experience with the blood magicks at Windwir. Of all his kind, Isaak seemed the most advanced, and Neb had watched fascinated as the metal man became more and more human each day.

He had passed Isaak the scroll from Sanctorum Lux, and he believed that it was a copy of the metal dream. He wondered if the metal man had run the script. If he had, what had he seen?

And what about it brings these strangely carved women, hunting us in the Wastes?

His eyes went back to the box, and he glanced to the sleeping girl. He craved the song in its fullness, but knew if he used the crescent, the woman might hear it as well. And he could not trust her. Not yet. Certainly she’d seemed sincere in her effort to convince him to flee. And he believed her-believed his own ears, having heard them say so-that her sisters hunted him. Some small voice in the back of his head assured him that he did not want to be found by them.

Still, how could he leave?

It was a question for another time because there was time. Tomorrow, he would check her wounds and reassess.

He closed his eyes and called up a map of the Wastes by memory and recalled what geography he’d seen when he saw and heard the Blood Scouts. The closest had been the one at the well-at least a week by the root. But he could not be certain that the blood magicks didn’t cut that time drastically. Regardless, there was time. He could not afford to panic.

“Panic,” Renard had told him again and again, “is the Waste’s swiftest killer.”

They do because of what you are.

Her words were cryptic. How or why anyone could see him as an abomination eluded him, but nothing he’d experienced these past two years had made any kind of sense. Rationally or not, it was happening. Even his very father-dead now these two years-had cast his own warning.

Neb shook his head and moved his focus to the song. He could hear the crescent in its lockbox, and again he resisted the urge to open it and cradle it against his ear.

Outside, the kin-wolves broke their silence and bayed as the swollen stars guttered overhead. The canticle was indeed loud tonight.

Settling into his dark corner, thorn rifle laid carefully across his knees, Neb watched the night and listened for the dream beneath each note.

Rudolfo

They burned bonfires in the courtyard to illuminate the rubble, and Rudolfo paced and cursed as the rescuers dug the last survivors and bodies from the wreckage.

He stung from a dozen cuts and burns; he ached from the same number of bruises. His right arm hung broken in a sling, and his stomach clenched and unclenched as rage and anguish washed through him.

Be alive.

Twice, he’d tried to move past the Gypsy Scouts set to keep him from the wreckage. Both times, their hands upon his chest had been enough to subdue him, though the first time he’d raised fist to them before he caught himself.

Be alive, he willed again.

Once more his mind veered into that place he could not bear it to go. His first thought was of them when he first stirred to wakefulness in the medico tent, and he’d felt the world shift and slide when Aedric, battered, burned and bleeding himself, told him that they still hadn’t found his wife and child. Or Isaak.

How long ago had that been?

Hours.

A white bird flitted back from the blast zone and was caught in the catch net. He’d seen it happen three times now this night and had watched the medicos race out. He heard shouting, and a team set out even now at a sprint, carrying a stretcher between them.

He saw Lysias barking orders to teams of refugees as they moved books by wheelbarrow around to the entrances of the subbasements. He’d been told that the general’s men had extinguished the flames quickly, forming a bucket brigade within moments of the blast, even as the Gypsy Scouts took up a perimeter and rescuers began pulling out survivors. Of course, he’d been unaware of this, and he still felt the knot on the back of his head. As close as he was to the explosion, he had no idea how he had survived.

He also had no idea how it could have happened. After Ria’s infiltration, he’d doubled the watch. And still, somehow, someone had done this terrible deed. There were over thirty dead now and three times that number of wounded.

And still they dug. The entire roof and front portion of the wing had collapsed in the blast.

I did not listen to her. Ria had warned him, and he’d not listened. Certainly, some