They were in a landscape that looked every bit as naturally formed as the rugged mountains to the north. A vista of low hills and twisting dales, filled with the gentle splash of running water. And yet there was no grass or plants or mud to paint the scene. The entire landscape was built of concrete and brick. Broken buildings reared around her, rubble and bricks forming scree at their base. Tarmacked roads, cracked into eroded plates, formed jigsaw paths through the greyness. And now, off to one side, silver VNMs were spilling out of a depression, spreading over the land like water welling from a hole. Eva gave an involuntary whimper, and Ivan placed a gentle hand on her knee.
“It’s okay,” said Fiona, “they won’t get this far.”
Silver spiders flooded out across the land, washing over the road ahead.
“See?” she said triumphantly. “See, if you’d been up there they’d have stripped this cart apart and made it into copies of themselves! Look at them, can you see how they wave their little legs about? They’re looking for something, sensing for metal. Look at how their bodies are silver, and you can’t see any joints.”
Fiona had remarkable facility for describing what was perfectly obvious to everyone else.
“See they are still coming, but fewer and fewer of them…”
The tide slowed, hesitated, and began to run backwards.
“Okay,” she called, “they’re reversing. It will be safe to follow them now. Come on, you’ve got to see this. Julian says he has never seen anything like it.”
She climbed down from the britzka and made her way up a low slope of broken bricks to the sound of clinking and scraping.
“It’s okay,” she said, pausing at the top of the pile to wipe her hands. “Come on, you’ll be perfectly safe. They only eat metal.”
Eva looked at Ivan, who nodded. He pulled something out of his orange-banded toolbox and helped Eva down from the britzka.
They stood at the edge of the dusty road, staring at the shifting sea of bricks.
“Does that look safe to walk on to you?” asked Eva.
Ivan took her arm and helped her across the uneven surface. They kicked silver beads of melted glass to set them bouncing over the dry ground. Fiona didn’t seem to notice; she puffed on ahead, keeping up a constant monologue.
“We were out here looking for railway lines, you know. We’re close to the border with East Coast Company and they keep trying to grow them through here. If DIANA or Berliner Sibelius can get a link across to Enterprise City, then they’ll have a corridor through the RFS that they’ll slowly widen. They’ve already got pipes under here from Colourtown to Openport, carrying oil and carbon, but they’re too deep to touch. Still, you’ve got to do what you can, haven’t you? And now there’s the flower. It’s just over here, not long now, Eva. Emily thinks it’s some sort of signaling device. She says she saw something like it over in Patagonia back in ’75. She says it will be sending a pulse to some receiver, describing the layout of the land. Anyway, here it is, down here.”
The red landscape rose and fell around them like an industrial moon surface. Eva coughed, her mouth dry with the heat and the smell of brick dust all around her.
“It’s so dry and broken,” she said. “It makes me think of bones rubbing together.”
“Bones?” said Fiona. “No. Sloppy sentimentalism. Look, there it is.”
Eva guessed that they were looking across what had once been the basement of a building; she saw a set of stone steps climbing into the air nearby, and she wondered who had once skipped down them, and for what purpose. Now the building was long gone and they stood at the edge of what looked like a silver pond of VNMs, silver insects the size of Eva’s hand, waving their feelers in the air. And yet the pond was contracting while bulging at the center. A silver column was rising into the air, made up of the swarming insects climbing over one another to get the very center of the pool. The column rose until it was roughly twice Eva’s height, and then the top began to swell. The pond at the base was shrinking away to nothing, leaving the dirty tiled floor of the basement exposed, and now there was only a metal flower, its stalk thinning as the top bulged larger and larger.
“What
“It’s nothing,” said Ivan, woodenly, and Eva felt her hopes come tumbling down. For once, he didn’t seem to notice her distress. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, “it’s a—”
“It
