“Get off here,” the woman said from close behind.
Bill jerked me to one side. We ran down a corridor that moved beneath our feet, weaving through clots of people moving more slowly. I stumbled when the corridor ended, only to be hauled up and dragged onto another one. There were several more corridors that moved slow or fast. People stared at me curiously. I lost my footing and fell down and was jerked upright by my panting escort. Suddenly we were standing on an unmoving surface in front of a door. Bill put his hand flat on a place at the side of it. The door opened, and we were inside somewhere with the door shut behind us and the noise mostly gone, though I could still feel it rumbling in my feet. I felt the scream bubbling in me.
“Home-sweet-home,” said Bill. Much of what he said was unintelligible, and I’ve doubtless got a lot of it wrong, but I know he said “home-sweet-home,” because he always said it, whenever he came in.
“And what’s your name again?” he asked me.
I swallowed the scream and started to say, “Havoc.” No point in that. He knew I was a girl. “Beauty,” I said, in a kind of mumble, trying to see on all sides of me at once. I would not have called it home-sweet-home. It was tiny, half the size of my tower room, full of complicated surfaces, with more of those ropes on the walls, very straight, like lances. When we brushed them with our bodies, they clanged.
“Mind the pipes,” said Bill. “You’ll knock off a steam valve, and then where’ll we be?”
I shook my head at him, signifying I did not know either where we were or would be or what a pipe or a steam valve was. I must have looked frightened, for he became less cheerful and tried to soothe me. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Just sit down and relax. Sit down. It’s all right.”
Grumpkin heard him if I did not, for the cat came out from under my shirt all in one movement and crouched at my feet yowling.
“He’s hungry,” I said. I knew he was, because I was. We had not eaten during all that grieving time at Westfaire. And now—I had the feeling much time had passed.
“What do they eat?” he asked me, pointing to the cat.
I could not imagine anyone not knowing what cats eat. “Milk,” I told him. “Meat. Eggs. What any animal eats.”
“Milk,” he said, laughing. “Meat. Eggs. Ha, ha. Ha.”
It was not amused laughter. It was bitter laughter, the kind Papa’s fool sometimes got up to when he remembered his wife who had run away with his children.
“You don’t have any?” I asked.
“Have none. Have never seen any. Would not know any if I saw them.”
“What do you feed your animals? What do you eat?” I asked him in amazement.
“We have no animals. We couldn’t have both animals and Fidipur. We eat orange one and two. Green one through four. Red one through five, though I don’t much care for three. The original white series, all ten of them.” He turned to open a door in the wall and take from it a bowl of things. Wafers. Little flat cakes. Orange ones, and dead green, and pottery red, and white, with numbers stamped upon them. He waved the bowl at me, offering. “It doesn’t take much to feed me, so I’ve got more than I need. ‘Balanced protein and fiber with all necessary vitamins and minerals.’ ”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I took a green thing and nibbled at it. It did not taste like anything, and yet I could not honestly say it tasted nasty. I would not have thought it was food, yet I could tell it would stifle hunger. I gave a piece of it to Grumpkin, He sniffed at it, crunched a bit of it, then yowled again.
“They go better,” Bill said, “if you have a bit of water along with them. White one and two actually have taste.”
“I would prefer beer or wine to water,” I said.
“Ha,” he muttered. “Ha, ha. Ha.”
“You have no beer or wine?” I guessed. Only fools drank water. One could grow ill, drinking water.
“No wine. No beer. Nothing that takes food to make. The food must go directly to Fidipur.”
A god, I thought. Some kind of religious being? Perhaps an ogre or dragon that demanded sacrifice? Had I fallen among the heathen? Or were they Christians still? I felt it might be dangerous to ask that question.
“And you have no meat or milk?”
“That would take grain, also, which must go directly to Fidipur.” He gazed at me. “How old are you.”
“Sixteen,” I replied, honestly enough. As of today, I was sixteen. Only, of course, it wasn’t today.
“Oh, God,” he sighed. “A minor.”
“No,” I told him. “I am a miller’s son.” I wasn’t, but Havoc was, so to speak.
“I mean you’re not yet eighteen,” he explained. “In our society, you’re not considered a full citizen until you’re eighteen.”
“What am I then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A person we don’t want to come to the attention of the pop-patrol, that much I know. If they find you, they’ll find you don’t have an implant. Then they’ll wonder how anybody could get here without an implant. Then they’ll question you with the truth machines and find out how you got here, and then it will be my neck. Mine and the rest of the team. They’ll claim Janice did
