Danivon’s senses said westward. He pointed wordlessly. They were headed that way anyhow. No change of plans needed.
Zasper nodded, fighting to keep his mind still, his body relaxed. Enforcers had no time for grief. Time or not, he felt it, had to express it. “Danivon,” he said evenly. “She was … she was like a daughter to me. Like family.” He had never had any other family. She—and Danivon himself—were all there were.
“Don’t say was,” Danivon demanded angrily. “Oh, don’t say was, Zasper. Maybe … maybe she’s—I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t what we think. Maybe she’s not dead. No. Something….” He couldn’t say what. Something else. Something even worse, maybe, he couldn’t tell. “Don’t say was. Just … just something wrong, that’s all.”
Talking would not help it, but he had to talk.
“She wouldn’t … she wouldn’t love me, Zasper. You were right about my loving her, but she wouldn’t love me. She wanted to. I know she wanted to, but she wouldn’t.”
“She wants something else more,” said Zasper. “Jory knows about it. About that wanting.”
“What? What does she want more?”
“Damned if I know, Dan. There’ve been times maybe … when I was younger … when I felt like that. Wanting … wanting something else. Almost as though I had a hunger that had never been fed, some kind of tastebud that hadn’t ever been stimulated or something. A hole in my mind asking to be filled. Something itching at me. You ever feel like that?”
Danivon shook his head. “Not that I know of. When I want something, I’m pretty sure what it is.”
“Not Fringe. I’ve tried to figure her out since she was a little girl. She wants something that doesn’t exist, maybe.” He thought deeply. “She wants something beyond, Dan. I think … I believe there’s a place of satisfaction, an attainable plateau, that suits ninety-nine point nine percent of all people. For those people there’s a destiny that fills all their needs. That’s the answer to the Great Question, maybe. But for that one in a thousand, or maybe even one in a million, other people’s destiny is no good at all. Nothing will suit except a singularity. Fringe is one of those.”
Danivon shook his head, not in disagreement but in dismay. “Oh, I wish …” What Danivon wished, Danivon didn’t go on to say. Instead, he fell silent, mumbled to himself for a moment, then turned to check Zasper’s wounds, which were painful but not serious, already healing under the balm of the med-kit growth agents and the universal antidote. After this, they ran once more. Time spun by, and distance, rock and tree, hill and valley, always the river sparkling on their right, bright or dim as clouds moved across the sky. At last, as they crested a hill and faced the lowe of the setting sun, they saw a shadowy line along the horizon to the northwest, as though an artist had brushed a long black stroke to separate earth and sky.
Danivon stopped and pointed. “The Great Wall west of Thrasis.”
“West of Beanfields too. It makes a great circle all around the center of the continent, in fact.”
Danivon nodded slowly in realization. The line had been on the maps, and he had known it was there—he had even seen it when in Thrasis—but the reality of its size hadn’t come to him until now. “I wonder who built it? Jory could probably tell me.”
Zasper, conscious of several aching vacancies, could not care about the wall at the moment. “We brought food?” he asked, mopping his face. “I hope.”
“Yes,” Danivon replied, turning from his examination of the lands to the west. “Field rations in my leg packs. We need water. We’ll get down to the river.”
“Tributary streamlet just below us,” Zasper said, pointing. “How long shall we keep moving?”
“Until it’s too dark to move at all. If it’s clear, there may be enough starlight reflected off the river to keep going. Can we run faster than they can build?”
Zasper barked weary laughter. “Than they can build the network, yes. But there’s nothing to prevent their creating autonomous units, flying eyes and ears, maybe even killing machines. We can do it, so I assume they can. Anything we can do, they can do … and more.”
“Damn,” said Danivon, who had not considered autonomous machines. “Then that’s what I’ve been seeing.” He turned to stare back along their trail. At the limit of sight swarmed sparkles, brightnesses, reflective gleams, growing larger and more obvious even as they watched. Something or somethings had found their trail and was coming very swiftly along it.
Zasper saw them and cursed as he did a quick inventory of the weapons and devices he carried, plus those built into his clothing and into his body, regretting those he’d had removed when he retired. Built-in weapons were useful, but damned uncomfortable. Now he wished for every one he’d ever had.
“Another thing,” he grunted, pointing to a fold of ground to the west, where a glimmer of lights moved near the river. “We’re going through Beanfields, and we have no mother with us nor any pass from Motherdear.”
Danivon bit his cheeks in frustration. He hadn’t considered that, either.
Shallow under the sand lie Nela and Bertran Zy-Czorsky, bits and pieces of them tucked away in impenetrable vitreon, unbreakable dura-plast. Not far away is buried what is left of Fringe Owldark, her shredded, blood-drained head, more or less intact. The sand is dry on top where the wind combs it into sparkling surfaces, but it is moist beneath. Between the grains small darknesses gather, tiny dampnesses, miniscule wombs of wet from which something, no doubt, could grow.
Something, no doubt, has grown. All the sandspit is full of rootlets, fibers, hair-thin, thread-fine, wavering between the sand grains with blunt, exploring noses, wriggling like elvers, slithering like snakes, soft little fibers, moist and tender, gathering and multiplying like mold on bread, cell by cell. Inevitably, eventually, the tip of a fiber
