That night, evidence came to us from near and far. In the middle of the night, I needed some air and I needed to piss, and we had no bucket. So I snuck out, a scrap of shadow, and squatted over a lucky clump of weeds near the ancient stones. A painful stance with all my bruising.
Way back in the direction of the Balcony Cliffs I could see cracklings of flame licking out over the tops of rocks and trees, and to the northeast and the west other fires had broken out—as if the action taken against us had been part of something larger. Much of the center of the city from that vantage seemed in dispute, but who fought, whose fortunes rose and fell, and in what neighborhoods, lay hidden from me.
I was finishing up when I noticed the perfect stillness of the night, which I had put down to my impaired hearing but might mean something more. I stood, quickly buttoned my pants, climbed up the cistern stones as best as I was able, and searched for hints of movement out in the night. It was all twisted bands of black: the branches of the dead, deformed forest at a slant down to the dead plain that preceded the Company building. Between the trees, for a long distance, patches of lighter shadow shone in the dim light, the clouds above almost blue-violet.
Nothing appeared, nothing moved, but I was patient, let my gaze drift. From the top of the cistern, so much territory spread out below that anything moving there would be in sight for quite some time.
Then, down through the forest, to where it leveled out before one last gentle slope—a rippling of invisible turbulence, a kind of rising through the air as of steam that manifested across those lighter patches. I could not be sure, but my instincts told me someone was running at great speed down the slope and had been visible from that angle for some time. Even if I couldn’t see them. And you only ran like that if you were being pursued.
So I followed a line back from the flustered air, and maybe two hundred feet back up the slope, I found a coarse, moving river, too familiar. Too much like fur. A silent bounding and a wraithlike darkness, a surging, churning bloodlust, all bear in its reckless but joyful trajectory. At least three proxies, in pursuit of … what?
Their prey had lost a step on them, I saw, had stopped as if to think, that whirlpool of shadow, and then a swift turn on the heel toward new coordinates farther south. The shimmer against the trees reminded me of someone.
Then it was all just silence and movements I could not make sense of, and I went back inside.
To my surprise, Wick waited for me, standing as if he had never been asleep. The light from the well water washed over him in shades of electric blue.
“Mord proxies,” I said.
Wick nodded.
I didn’t tell him I thought the Magician might be out there, headed south like us. Even free of the Balcony Cliffs, I felt if he knew he might be influenced in a way bad for both of us.
As we packed, Wick said, “You need to figure out what you want to be after. Other than a scavenger.”
“After what?” I asked.
But he never told me.
WHO WE MET ON THE DESOLATE PLAIN
We headed south, staking our hope on the idea of the Company building as our salvation. In our belief we were now no different than those acolytes who had worshipped Mord. Our rituals and our words were just different. Wick talked of his special knowledge of a side entrance near the two holding pools abutting the Company building. Wick assured me that with Mord now based in the north, the ruined levels would have already been picked clean and the scavengers moved on to other places. I humored him, although it felt less like a plan than the only thing we could do.
“Do you know how to get into the levels below?”
“Yes. Mord showed me, when he was still human.”
“Isn’t that old intel?”
“Nothing has changed.”
Hadn’t it? Wick spoke in such alchemies and distillations of hope that I couldn’t pick out the facts from the fictions, or which he told me to reassure himself.
Deep, deep night we traveled through, in a no-man’s-land between the city proper and the Company building, having exhausted the stretch of dead woods. This expanse had been seeded with biotech by the Company long ago, and over time abandonment had driven the traps deep; if we were lucky we would not set off any living land mines. For now, the buffer zone seemed lifeless except where precarious or perilous life emerged: a kind of mud flats without mud where the broken-up concrete foundations from dwellings long gone shifted beneath a cracked surface of salt and the miasma of pollutions far distant in time. Runoff seeped up through the ground from storage far below. If you were wise, you did not seek out the watering holes created by the runoff, or drink the essence of the once-living, expressed as spontaneous gouts of thick, oily liquid.
Still, it was better at night and better crossed at night, the ground in places faintly luminous from some memory of artificial microorganisms. In daylight, the plain was hotter and unpleasant and any predator could see you coming from miles away unless you had camouflage like the Magician. Cement foundations lurked beneath a sluice of crushed and useless things, with no landmarks for coordinates and even the vultures rarely hovered over the hinterlands. It stank of sour mud and chemicals, and depending on the wind we had to cover our mouths and noses.
The Company building through the ancient safe-house binoculars was a cracked egg well ahead of us—a flat white oval from the air, perhaps, and the damage spread out around it like Mord had been rummaging in the building’s internal organs. But as Wick pointed out, the walls still disappeared into the ground, gave a suggestion of depth and of further layers preserved from damage.
To the southeast, huddled next to the building, we could make out the wide leaking ponds, more like lakes, that still held the dead and failing bodies of the Company’s mistakes and the things that had escaped, or thought they had. I had escaped them for a time, too, but now I was coming back.
We had picked up hints of conflict during our trek across the plain. In the first hour, we could hear what sounded like Mord proxies distant on our trail, and as the light faded and sunset bore down on us in a searing bloodred flecked with gold, accompanied by a hot wind, there appeared two of the beasts in the middle distance.
By then we had already started our journey across the plain and felt exposed, hit the ground painfully behind a mound of gravel and surveilled the proxies with our binoculars. On my stomach, I felt as if the ground was going to curl up around me and devour me. I was hurting and knew I would have to get up soon, even if just to crawl, if I was to make my brain override my body.