Wasteland of flint

stacked up beside the door. 'We're here at last, and better off than I expected.'

Without a dozen people milling around and the smell of bacon frying and coffee perking, the base's common room was cold, echoing, and unsettlingly empty. Hummingbird sat on the nearest table, feet bare, running an electrostatic vacuum over his boots. Gretchen pulled up a chair – the plastic was badly discolored and the legs were streaked with a calcitelike crust – and sat down. She stared down at her own shoes, grimacing at the ragged edges of the soles and the general ruin of the uppers. Even Fitz couldn't fix these.

'I am going to go outside,' Hummingbird said, banging his left boot against the edge of the table. Reddish grit rained down onto cracked quickcrete. 'Before the weather gets any worse. I am…a little worried.'

'Huh! Why? We've finally reached some shelter, where we can refuel and resupply and you're worried?' She pointed a finger at the roof. 'We're even out of the wind. That tent was starting to smell.'

'Yes.' Hummingbird looked around, his expression becoming almost morose. 'That is the problem. I had no idea the camp here was so extensive.'

'Ah.' Gretchen ran the edge of her thumb against the boot sole. The material was porous and spongy. Bits of glittering crystalline mica spilled out. She felt a little ill at the sight and dialed her lightwand into UV and stuffed it inside the boot. My feet feel fine…sort of. I hope.

'Well,' she said, trying not to stare in sick fascination at her socks, 'humans get kind of busy sometimes – I mean, they planned on being here for two, three years. A camp for a long-term expedition isn't just some tents or a carryall. It's a little town.'

'I can see.' Hummingbird fingered the goggles hanging around his neck. The glassite looked like it had been attacked with a power sander or a steel rasp. 'I think – no, I am afraid we are too late. Man has been here too long, put too much of his mark on the land. Even our passage across the world has stirred up rumors, echoes…'

'You mean the Russovsky-thing I spoke to.' Gretchen swallowed, preparing herself for the worst, and tugged off one sock. The moisture-wicking, thermally insulated fabric disintegrated in her hand, leaving a blue ring of elastic material around her ankle. Suddenly, she felt light-headed. 'Oh, oh sister…'

'You saw more than a rumor.' Hummingbird was staring out the portholelike windows. Sodium-tinted shadows turned his face to graven brass. 'I know it was gone when we went back – but such things are real. We're a stone, cast into a still pond. Though we sink and disappear, the wave from our entry propagates through this world. Some of the waves turn back upon themselves – well, you saw the effect – and the memory of our passing through this place is retained. Layers build on layers…' His voice trailed off, wrinkled old face growing stiff in anger.

'Sure.' Gretchen forced down a surge of nausea, bile tainting her throat. She felt faint, but gripped the edge of the table and waited for the sensation to pass. Hummingbird was saying something, but the words were far away and indistinct, unintelligible. Jerkily, she swung her leg up and put her foot across the opposite knee. In the muted yellow light from the windows, the sole of her foot was shiny and slick, almost glassy. 'Uhhh…'

A trembling finger reached out to touch the discoloration – she felt a hard, smooth surface and jerked away again. 'Oh blessed sister, deliver us from all the fears of the world, from evil, from want…' Is it deep? Why didn't I feel anything? Is it my whole foot? Oh, Sister, how deep does this go!

'What happened to your foot?'

Gretchen looked up, sweating, and saw Hummingbird looming over her, eyes narrowed.

'I – it ate right through my boots.'

The nauallis knelt beside her, firm hands grasping her ankle and toes, turning the sole into the light so he could see. Gretchen slumped back into the decaying chair, fist jammed into her mouth to keep from crying out.

But there was no pain. Hummingbird squinted, turning her foot this way and that. She could feel the strength in his fingers, immobilizing the offending limb better than a surgeon's vise. White-shot eyebrows gathered over dusky green eyes and then his face became still, wrinkles fading, a sense of release and settling peace washing over his countenance. After a moment, he reached into his vest and produced a small folding knife.

Gretchen's eyes widened and her leg tried to jerk violently away. Hummingbird's hand tightened and her movement was stillborn. 'Hold still,' he said, eyes focused on some unseen distance. The blade snapped out of the handle with a sharp click and he put a mirror-keen edge against the heel of her foot. Gretchen felt the world swim again, vertigo surging around her.

'You should start counting,' he said, eyeing her with interest. 'Or look away.'

There was a scraping sound, but Gretchen felt nothing more than a tugging. She blinked, surprised. Shouldn't it hurt? The old man made a hmm sound and his fingers tightened. This time, Gretchen could feel more than a tugging; there was a sharp, piercing bolt of pain.

'Ayyy! Oh, sister…is that blood?'

'Sorry,' Hummingbird said, cleaning the blade on his thigh pad. 'Nicked you a little.'

'How bad is it?' The pain parted a cloud of nausea. Her medband reacted, flooding her arm with a pleasantly cool sensation. Gretchen looked down and her teeth clenched. Hummingbird was carving away a slice of her heel; metallic, glistening skin peeling back from the edge of his knife. 'Guuuhhh…why – why isn't that bleeding?'

'Dead skin,' he said, lips pursed in concentration. 'Whatever got into your boot doesn't seem to have done much more than eat up your calluses.'

The nauallis finished with the heel and cleaned the blade again. Gretchen could feel her foot start to throb, but realized the sensation was more from the tight grip he had on her ankle than anything else.

'Now let's see…' He switched the blade around to hold as a scraper and began to work on the instep. Gretchen's leg jerked again and the chair gave out with a little groan as she moved. 'Ticklish, I see.'

'Just pay attention,' she hissed, hoping his hand didn't slip again. Her fingernails squeaked on plastic. 'I've only got the one left foot.'

The view from the second floor windows was no better than from downstairs. The sun was gone, reduced to a muddy flare in the sky. A sickly yellow fog had swept across the camp, driven by wild, intermittent winds. Gretchen perched in a deep window embrasure, bandaged foot sticking out into the room, her eyes fixed on a narrow view of the quadrangle. Hummingbird had gone out into the storm – she'd seen him open one of the airlock doors and hunch out into the blowing dust – but he'd vanished from sight almost immediately. Grimly nervous, Gretchen kept one hand on the grip of the Sif at all times. Their gear was piled downstairs, but the echoing vacancy of the common room set her on edge.

Out in the blowing murk, the gritty fog parted for a moment. Anderssen stiffened, searching for the nauallis, and caught a glimpse of a dark-cloaked figure near the lab building. She frowned – the shape was moving strangely, a sort of duck-walked sideways shuffle. The head bobbed from side to side – and then the dust closed in again.

'What is he up to?' Gretchen spoke aloud, depressed by the leaden silence in the abandoned room. The echoes of her voice fell away, leaving another bad taste in her mouth. It's almost worse to speak, she thought in disgust. A frown followed. He can't 'align' an entire building, can he?

A gust roared past outside the window, rattling the heavy pane. Even the bright patch of the sun had disappeared in a gathering darkness. There was an intermittent glow from the east, but the light was far too low in the sky to be the sun. Gretchen checked her chrono. Not quite midday. She put her hand against the wall, cheap plaster cracking away from the concrete backing at her touch. The entire building shivered in the storm. Snatching her hand away, Gretchen swung around on the window ledge and gingerly tested her bandages. Her left foot, which had suffered the most damage, was completely shrouded in healfast gauze, medicated antiseptic cream and a layer of spray-on dermaseal from Hummingbird's medical kit.

Her boots had been a complete loss, which left her slopping around in a spare pair of mulligans Hummingbird had found in a downstairs locker. These would fit Tukhachevsky…okay, let's see about walking.

'Ow. Ow. Ow. Dammit.' Trying to walk very lightly, Anderssen limped down the stairs to the lower floor and began checking each of the rooms. She didn't think there were any ground-floor windows besides the portholes in the common room, but a queer prickling feeling urged her to check. The kitchen was entirely dark, as were the storage rooms behind the grill.

'We need to get the power working,' she muttered after banging her knee on a chair. The circle of radiance from her lightwand seemed very small in the thick, heavy air. A handful of the precious glowbeans broke up the