by Steve Berman
Then a gnashing metal meteor dropped from the top of the sculpture onto Pepe’s back. Valentin hollered, scrambling backward, heaving to his feet. Pepe and the machine creature writhed, rolled, tangling flesh limbs with jet-black running blades. Valentin was frozen. The furious buzz in his implant and every chemical in his body screamed for him to run.
But Pepe still had his shadow. Valentin watched as the wilder flung himself back against the base of the head, smashing the clinging creature free. Its segmented body whirred in midair and it landed on its feet like a cat. Quadrupedal, skeletal black carbon, and where the head might have been, a pair of jagged rotary saws now hummed to life. Scarestories bounced through Valentin’s head and he knew the lobos had not all been recycled, not a chance.
Pepe had his knife out now, dropped to a crouch, wrapping his offhand in his scarf. Valentin didn’t see what either could do against the lobo’s spinning maw. It hurtled at Pepe again; the wilder spun away, slashing low in the same motion. His knife screeched against the lobo’s underside to no visible effect. The buzz in Valentin’s implant was skull-splitting. He could feel the crude machine mind roaring for function completion, for disable, maim, refuel.
This was not a god. This was an animal.
As Pepe and the lobo broke and collided again, Valentin clenched his teeth and probed inside the buzzing hive. In midstride, the lobo jerked to a stop, shivering in place. Valentin felt a rush of elation. The machine mind was still yammering objectives, but Valentin had it clamped down, iced over. Pepe didn’t take his eyes off the lobo, only switching his grip on the knife and circling closer.
“Is that you done that, Prophet?” he panted.
“Yeah,” Valentin said, tamping down a grin. “Yeah. So give me my shadow back before I set it on you again.”
Pepe was silent for a long moment, maybe trying to suss out if Valentin was bluffing, then he barked an anguished sort of laugh. “All right, Prophet,” he said. “Fuck you. But all right.” Still watching the lobo, he slid the rucksack off his back and undid the clasp. Valentin’s heart laddered up his ribs when he saw the nanoshadow rustle within. He reached out a hand, already imagining the feel of it on his skin.
The buzz in his implant changed pitch. Distracted, Valentin probed. His mouth went dry. The machine mind was trying to squeeze him out. He dug in hard, desperate, but a wave of defenseware carried him away and he felt himself lose his hold all at once. The lobo’s formless head swiveled to face him, ignoring Pepe and his knife. The saws began to spin.
Valentin didn’t even have time to shout before the lobo pounced, brushing past Pepe and slamming him to the ground. He kicked frantically, but the lobo’s black running blades had his arms pinned, and now the grinding, shrieking maw was a millimeter off his face and—
Pepe’s scarfed hand drove the knife between the saws. Sparks spat wild; one sizzled through Valentin’s shirt. The lobo seized, shuddered, and Pepe dragged Valentin from underneath. He hauled to his feet and spun around just as Pepe’s knife shot out of the lobo’s mouth and pinged against the side of the sculpture. A ripple clacked through the creature’s joints.
“I need my shadow,” Valentin panted. “I can kill it with my shadow.”
“Do it, then.” Pepe shoved the open rucksack into Valentin’s chest. As the lobo turned on them again, Valentin plunged both hands into the cold, gritty gelatin. His nanoshadow rippled in response to his touch, his biorhythm, the signal of his implant. The lobo darted forward. The nanoshadow was weak from days without sun, days without electricity. Valentin gripped it hard. As the lobo sprang, the nanoshadow shot away from his hands in a long plume of pitch and met it in the air, streaming into every crack in its carapace with a horrible shredding noise.
The lobo dropped to the dirt as the nanoshadow writhed through its body, leaving it a collapsed husk hemorrhaging sparks. Valentin finally exhaled. Pepe’s eyes were wide as the nanoshadow pooled under the lobo’s corpse, regaining its shape, then slithered back to its owner.
Valentin’s shadow webbed its way up his knee, slipping underneath his shirt to spread cool and gritty and pulsating across his thumping chest. Tendrils wove between his fingers, licked up his neck, wicked sweat from around his nostrils and lips. Valentin closed his eyes as his shadow warmed to skin temperature. With his eyes closed, with his shadow pressing gently against him, he could almost be back home.
“So that’s it, then. That’s your shadow back.”
Valentin opened his eyes. Pepe was unwrapping the scarf from around his left hand. The cloth was stained a dark wine-red, and when it peeled away from his skin he didn’t wince but his tongue flicked fast against his scar. The lobo’s saw had shorn through the scarf and left gouges on his wrist, his palm. Blood was welling steadily and dripping to the ground.
“Guess you leave now.”
Valentin considered it. With his nanoshadow, he could make good time back to the Town with no fear of scorpions or lobos or wilders. Then he would give some catshit story about the gods sending him out into the campo to receive a vision, which Javier would not believe. Then, the prueba. Again.
“Yeah,” Valentin said. “I go back to the Town with my shadow. You bleed to death in a field of giant heads. I won, you lost.” He directed his shadow down his arm in a soft, black ribbon that waved in the space between them. “Here. Let me staunch it.”
Pepe looked wary, but also pale and slightly dizzy. He held out his injured hand and watched as the nanoshadow shrouded over his skin, sealing to the wounds. He blinked at the sensation. “How many of these shadow things have you got in the Town?”
“A few,” Valentin said. “But you need an implant to work them.”
“That’s too bad. Wouldn’t mind one for the next lobo.”
Valentin glanced over at the corpse of the machine and shivered. It looked smaller now, and he could see it was malformed, slightly warped, with one unfinished limb shorter than the others. “I thought they were all gone,” he said. “That’s what I was taught. That they were all gone. Extinct like the actual animals.”
“They were gone for a long time,” Pepe said. “Last winter they started to come back.” He gave Valentin a considering look. “You don’t actually know anything, do you, Prophet? You’ve never left the Town before.”
Valentin bit back his urge to argue. The wilder was right. He’d been right about most things. “So what do you usually do?” he asked instead. “When there’s a lobo.” He pulled his shadow back up his arm.
Pepe inspected his hand. “Usually you die.”
The smaller cuts were beginning to scab shut, but Valentin guessed that the gash along the wilder’s wrist would need to be stitched or glued. And disinfected, preferably soon. He still remembered watching the Town’s surgeon lop off a woman’s two gangrenous fingers. He cast a glance toward the rucksack.
“Have you got anything in there to clean the cut?” he asked.
“Only water,” Pepe said. He paused. “The autofab’ll make medicine kits. Food for you, too. For your way back.”
“Why are you so set on this autofab?” Valentin demanded at last. “If it’s so important to your tribe, why’s it only you taking me there? And what the hell was your plan if you hadn’t found me in the gully? Were you going to knock on the Town gate and ask to borrow a godchip, or what?”
Pepe’s face darkened. “What was your plan, heading over the wall?”
Valentin’s mouth opened. Closed. “To get away,” he finally said. “Just away.”
“Yeah,” Pepe said. He stumped to his rucksack and pulled it up onto his shoulders, gingerly for his left hand. “I want to help my family,” Pepe said. “I want to help the band. If you can’t contribute one way, you’ve got to find another. The autofab would help us. Would make us strong again.”
Valentin looked down at the inky black edge of the nanoshadow pressed to his collarbone. He thought of Pepe journeying back to his tribe alone, dragging the same weight Valentin knew so well. Getting muck in his cuts, dy
ing of fever, maybe even running into another lobo.
“What’s your name, Prophet?” Pepe asked.
Valentin hesitated. “Valentin.”
The wilder’s eyes were shiny and desperate. “I can’t go back with nothing. Will you help me, Valentin?”
The autofab had to be nearby now. Valentin could try. It would be like a fourth prueba, only with a different god, and with nobody watching but Pepe.
“All right,” Valentin said. “Fuck you, but all right. To the autofab.”
The autofab was about half the size of the Town’s, a featureless black mushroom cap that Valentin knew extended far below the ground. When they stopped in front of it, he felt a familiar twinge of fear, taken right back to his very first prueba, his sixteenth birthday. There’d been a procession through the Town’s narrow streets, men carrying the plastic mannequins of the saints, women throwing red sand at his feet. He’d sat in front of the hulking black autofab, with Javier behind him and everyone watching, and the god inside had refused to speak to him.
“They used to keep everything clean,” Pepe said as they passed the pockmarks of old fire pits and stepped over shattered tent poles. “They used to lay wreaths. But it’s been a long time. Nobody comes here anymore.”
Valentin probed hard. He could hear a faint, rustling whisper in his implant. The god was communicating, maybe with the pod that had passed over them in the night. Valentin sat, folding his legs, and his nanoshadow slid underneath him to cushion his tailbone. He sucked down a deep breath.
“Should I cant?” Pepe asked. “Don’t know any prophet cants. But I could do the one for snakebite.”
“Just don’t talk,” Valentin said, fixing his eyes on the slick surface of the autofab. He could see his own warped reflection in its black mirror. He took another deep breath, reminding himself that nobody was watching, only a wilder, only a stupid wilder with long, lean arms and deep, dark eyes and a careless laugh. Valentin closed his own eyes and willed the whisper in his implant louder. Through the electric cascade of the god’s thoughts, Valentin could see, or feel, a fresh stimulus-response that could only be their presence. The autofab knew they were there.
Valentin reached, like he had for the lobo, but this time softly. And he thought: Help us. For the briefest instant, he felt the god turn sluggishly toward his probe, felt an interface blink open like a sleeper’s eye. Valentin’s heart leapt. Then it was gone, walled off behind impenetrable code, and the whisper in his implant receded. He’d failed his fourth. His stomach churned sick with it. Valentin opened his eyes.
Pepe was crouched down in his peripheral, tongue working against his scar. “What did you tell it?” he murmured. “What did it say?”
“It said nothing.” Valentin knuckled a bit of sand away from his eye. “Like always.”
Pepe’s face fell. He stared at the autofab wall with an expression of fury, and for a moment Valentin thought he might try to put his uninjured fist through it. Then his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, like always?”
“I mean I’ve never talked to a god,” Valentin said. He wasn’t scared of Pepe’s knife anymore, not with his shadow thrumming against his skin. All he felt was dry and tired.
“The lobo,” Pepe said. “You talked to the lobo. You made it stop.”
“For five fucking seconds, yeah,” Valentin admitted. “But that was a crude mind. Not a god.” He tapped his implant. “When you turn sixteen, to be a prophet, you have to take a test. You have to talk to the Town’s god, ask it to do some sign. Pulse the electric lights, or print up a plastic bird, or something stupid like that.” He swallowed. “The god doesn’t speak back to me. I’ve failed it three times already.”
“Three times?” Pepe asked, disbelieving.
“Yeah. And if you count this—”
“Three times is nothing,” Pepe said. “Nothing. Listen. I used to footrace my older brother. I wanted so badly to beat him I’d wake up an hour before the sun, go out to the field. Scratch lines in the dirt and run, to train my muscles. Every morning, even if I was sick or if I was up all the night on a scavenging party.” His nostrils flared. “It took two years of that before I won. Took a hundred races.”
“Running a footrace is nothing like interfacing with a god. If they don’t speak to me, there’s nothing I can do to change—”
“You said your tribe’s got only two godchips,” Pepe interjected. “Two in the whole Town. So they must have picked you for a reason.”
“Not the one you think.”
Pepe leaned close and put his good hand on Valentin’s shoulder. “A hundred races, remember?”
Valentin shut his eyes again. He breathed in through his mouth, out through his nose. His nanoshadow pulsed comfortably against his chest, and Pepe’s hand resting on his shoulder was comfortable in its own way. Valentin reached out for the autofab. The whisper in his implant rose. A minute passed. Two minutes. More. Valentin’s hands were clenched, nails digging crescents in his palms. A blank eternity later, he opened his eyes. He wanted to lie, to keep Pepe’s fingers cupped against him.
“Nothing,” he admitted.
Pepe’s hand squeezed his shoulder, but didn’t leave it.
Valentin tried off and on again as dusk dropped over the campo, with no success. The first probe had at least elicited the autofab’s attention, but now he was blocked out entirely. They ate the last of the tortilla and a handful of dry dates. Pepe used a bit of water to wash his cuts. He’d stopped bleeding but his face was still drawn and pale. Eventually they camped down at the base of the autofab, Pepe wrapped in a blanket and Valentin using his nanoshadow like a cocoon, exposing only his face. Neither of them had spoken for hours.
As Pepe shifted, finding elevation for his injured hand, Valentin couldn’t help but eyetrace the slant of his shoulder blades, his hip, imagining the body underneath the blanket. He felt himself getting hard, and his nanoshadow moved to slide a tendril around his cock. Valentin chewed his lip. Then Pepe gave a ragged groan, and Valentin felt a wave of shame. He yanked his nanoshadow away from his groin and pretended to be asleep.
“You awake still, Prophet?”
Valentin hesitated. “Yeah. I am.”
A moment later, Pepe shuffled over, dragging his blanket with him. The nanoshadow stretched membranous to accommodate the both of them, at the same time wrapping Pepe’s injured hand. The wilder smelled like sweat and copper. When their arms brushed together, Valentin’s heart beat hard. When Pepe touched the back of his head, just below his implant, his breath caught.
“Do you hear them all the time, then?” Pepe whispered.
“Only when they’re close,” Valentin said, trying to breathe evenly.
Pepe’s finger traced the metal edge of the implant. “You can hear them, but they can’t hear you.”
“Can’t. Won’t.” Valentin squirmed, freeing one arm. “Either.” He reached out, hesitantly, heart hammering, and touched Pepe’s face.
The wilder stiffened, turning away. His anxious eyes raked across the sky, as if watching gods might be drifting overhead. Then he relaxed and turned back into him with the smirk Valentin recognized from the night before. “Fucking Townies,” he said, fitting his good hand around the edge of Valentin’s hip.
The kiss was brief and badly angled and went through Valentin like voltage, making his nanoshadow thump against him. When it broke, Valentin leaned forward, unsleeving a grin in the dark, not caring about the autofab or the prueba or anything else, only feeling Pepe’s lips on his again. He ran his thumb along the wilder’s jaw and found the rippled scar tissue.
“Who cut your mouth?” he asked.
A long pause. Valentin remembered when he’d asked in the ruins, wondered again if he had gone too far, but Pepe left his hand where it was. “My brother,” he said.
“Right. Because you beat him at the footrace.”
Pepe pulled back, staring at him. “No. It was for this.” He struggled up onto his elbow, careful with his injured hand. “He caught
me with someone. Again. This time he was shitface drunk and angry and he held me down and cut me. Said it was to keep the maricones away.”
Valentin felt his grin fall off. “I didn’t know it was like that. With wilders.”
“I’m seventeen now,” Pepe said dully. “I have to start fucking who they tell me. I’ve got good blood. Can’t waste it. I have to help make the band strong again.” His voice splintered. “I thought if I do something big. Something like this. I thought if I give them the autofab back, maybe it’ll be enough.” He kneaded his eyes hard. “And then he’ll love me again.”
Valentin swallowed. “Maybe I’m lucky,” he said. “Not having family. That’s the real reason they pick you for a prophet. Nobody would have missed me if the surgery went bad. It’s not because I was anything special.”
Pepe looked at him for a stretched moment. “You are, though. I think.” He blinked and turned over.
Valentin stared at the back of his dark head, wishing he could window inside of it and see where he’d been placed. He thought a thousand thoughts as Pepe’s breathing slowly steadied. He pictured the pair of them setting off on their own, not back to the Town and not back to Pepe’s band and his psychopath brother. Maybe to the wilderness up north in Old France, maybe further south to where the gods were busy reshaping the coastline.
He was half-submerged in a dream when his implant gave him a short, sharp shock. His eyes flicked open. For a moment, Valentin thought he was still dreaming because the glossy black hide of the autofab was now veined with soft orange status lights.
His first instinct was to wake Pepe, but as he sat up the autofab’s orange lights wriggled together to form an image. Valentin rubbed his eyes. The autofab had drawn a pixelated face, and as he watched, a pixelated finger rose to its lips. The gesture was unmistakable. Valentin looked down at the sleeping wilder, then back up to the image. The orange ghost stared at him, then slipped around the side of the autofab.
Valentin got quietly to his feet. His nanoshadow came with him, slithering up his body. Pepe shivered. Valentin debated leaving the wilder his shadow, peeling at it half-heartedly with his fingernails. In the end he pulled the dirty blanket overtop of him instead. Sweat was beading along Pepe’s hairline. Valentin bit his lip, remembering the fever prediction.