Gob reached across the shop, plucked Milo off his feet, and slapped manacles around his ankles.
“You don’t need those,” Milo whined. He had no plans to run. Where would he go?
“Be quiet,” grumbled Gob. Casually, he reached down with a pair of crude, twisted scissors and snipped off a bit of Milo’s left ear. It bounced off his knee and lay on the floor amid iron shavings. Milo’s stunned brain could only think how dirty it looked and wonder if the rest of him was that dirty.
His asthma rose up and overwhelmed him.
—
In his two days at Gob’s forge, Milo watched the giant whittle metal as if it were wood. Watched him bleed, sometimes, when his muscles and machinery tore through overtaxed skin.
Sometimes Gob asked him to fetch things, and Milo fetched. Sometimes Gob had other uses for him. Milo tried to force himself to sleep when that happened. Breathe in, breathe out, be someplace else. In this way, he found, he could keep his asthma at bay.
The second morning, a round, heavily scarred man came in and cut thin strips of skin from his legs, for which Gob paid him. Gob ate one of these and offered Milo another. Milo refused.
“Obey,” rumbled Gob. “You eat when you can.”
Gob threatened him with the scissors. Milo refused.
Roaring, Gob made a noose and hung him from an iron peg high on the wall.
“No!” Milo cried, before his airway collapsed. He kicked and swung, feeling his vertebrae stretch, feeling nothing, and then dark.
—
Gob laid him down on the floor. Milo’s neck and lungs burned. He wanted to vomit, but his throat wouldn’t work right.
Gob straightened and glared down at him like an evil god.
—
When Thomas came back, he wasn’t happy with his new tool.
“It won’t cut straight,” he muttered, turning it over in his hands. “The threads will stick.”
Gob made a dark, inquisitive noise. The noise seemed to make Thomas nervous.
“No,” he said. “I can make it work.”
Turning to Milo, Thomas said, “Let’s go. I’ve got something to show you. Something you’ll like.” He actually seemed excited and almost happy. Weird. What could he have to show that he would think Milo might like?
But Gob reached out with those great, half-robotic arms and grabbed them each by one shoulder.
“The boy,” said Gob. “Let’s talk about the boy.”
“You can’t have him,” answered Thomas, though he didn’t seem too sure of himself.
Gob shook his head. “Not that,” he said. “I tried to hang him.”
Thomas’s eyes flared, but he also inched toward the door. “Goddammit, Gob! You promised me—”
“It didn’t work,” said Gob.
“Well, good,” said Thomas, through his teeth.
“Think about that,” said Gob. “Stop trying to walk out the door. Think about it until you see what that means.”
—
“What it means,” Thomas told Milo, when they finally left the blacksmith’s shop, “is that we can get rich. As rich as you can get in here, anyway.”
Milo had listened to the two big prisoners talk, and all he had gotten out of it was that he, Milo, was going to be “trained.”
They shoved their way through the crowded streets. Thomas was in a hurry, still excited about something. He wouldn’t say what.
“Trained to do what?” Milo wanted to know.
“Tested first,” said Thomas. “Then trained, if you pass. You’ll see tomorrow. Right now, look! We’re here.”
Thomas had led them up into the cliff dwellings and stopped before an open doorway on the second level.
“Where’s here?” asked Milo.
“Home. A new home.”
“How?” Milo asked. “Is it expensive? I don’t get it.”
Thomas shrugged. “I wanted it,” he said.
They stepped inside, and there was the explanation. A naked man lay crumpled against the far wall, neck twisted, head smashed open. The floor was a dead sea of drying blood. Milo could taste the tang of iron on the air. He shook and then threw up.
“I took it,” said Thomas.
The room was bigger than their grave hole, Milo noted. Maybe four times as big.
“You decide about dinner,” Thomas said, laying a heavy arm around Milo’s shoulders. “I can go out and get…you know, food…or we can…you know.”
He indicated the dead man.
Milo threw up again.
“We call it ‘long pig.’?”
And again.
—
“It’s called ‘diving,’?” Thomas explained.
They were on their way up-tunnel, toward the surface. Toward the test Thomas had hinted at.
“Diving?”
“Do yourself a favor,” said Thomas. “Breathe in and out as deep and fast as you can.”
“Why?”
“Do it!” Thomas shouted.
So Milo began hyperventilating. They turned a corner and started up a steep ramp.
“Stop when you feel faint,” advised Thomas.
Milo started feeling faint just as the tunnel opened up into a chamber roughly the size of their new dwelling back in the village.
One whole wall was a window, overlooking a rugged crater. Beside the window, a door, and near the door, an old woman who looked like a wizard. Long white hair and blue eyes. Not just blue irises—both eyes were completely blue. Was she blind?
He stumbled and would have passed out on the floor if the woman hadn’t caught him.
“Been hyperventilating, have you?” she asked.
“He told me to,” gasped Milo, jerking his head at Thomas.
“Good. I’m Arabeth. As soon as your head clears, we’ll go.”
Milo’s head cleared rapidly. His thoughts and vision came back into focus.
“Does he know…?” Arabeth asked Thomas.
“Not a thing.”
“Good. Less likely to panic if he doesn’t have time to think about it. Now, boy, listen to me. Look and listen.”
“All right,” said Milo.
She slapped a big metal knob in the middle of the door. The door, which looked as if it had been hammered together out of old steel buckets, hissed and popped open. Beyond, a rusted air lock.
“We’re going to space you, boy,” she said. “What you need to do—”
Milo howled, backing away, but Thomas caught him and held him.
“When that outer hatch opens, you’ll have about ten seconds to get to the next hatch, about twenty feet that way”—she pointed—“before you go dark.”
Thomas hurled him into the air lock. Milo tried to claw his way back, but they were shutting the hatch.
“Hey!” he screamed.
Pppppppppssssssssst! Thump! He heard the hatch seal.
He sprayed urine, flinging himself against the hammered metal.
Then—psssssssst!—the glowstrips in the air lock went out, and the air went out, and the outer hatch opened, and he saw stars up above and total dark below…
At the same time, a violent feeling as if he were blowing up like a balloon…
Air jetting up his throat and out through his lips, his chest like a pancake…
Cold that burned, a volcano of cold all over…
He was in space, naked.
Raw, wild panic—
If you panic, said his old, wise voices, you will die. Quickly—do what the old woman told you.
Milo straightened his mind like an arrow and aimed it at the problem.
He pushed with his toes and caught with his fingers at the hatch—it burned! Everything burned all over, like sticking your tongue on a lamppost in a cold snap.