CHAPTER ONE

ROACH HOTEL

THE MASSEREY-VAN BULTS were coming in all the dry way down the Ogooué Road, and, as Hotep would say, there was much rejoicing. They came in a real motorcade, big cars with windows so tinted they were like black mirrors, the back ends corrugated with heat sink fins so that M. and Mme. and all the little Masserey-Van Bults, could slide untouched through the killing heat of mid-afternoon. People turned out for them. As their fleet of cars grumbled down the Ankara’s one maintained road, everyone spilled from their factories and repair shops, an impromptu half hour holiday from whatever it was put food on the table. The kids jumbled out from their shacks and shanties, from all the hand-built homes that had gathered around the Anchor like junk washed up on a high tide, never to see the sea again. They all cheered, waving scraps of cloth for flags—didn’t matter the colour so long as it was bright, bright enough to see through that dark glass! They whooped and stamped, all of them, and Nguyễn Sun Mao waved and hollered just like all the rest of them because this was how you did it, at Ankara Achouka. You did it whenever the new guests arrived at the Roach Hotel, because this was the only time you’d see them. They check in, but they don’t check out, which was some ad from long-back. Anyway, it wasn’t Roach Hotel, not really, not to the face of the people who got to stay there, however briefly. Not to the face of the wabenzi who ran the Ankara town, controlled the jobs and who got fed. It had a fancy French name in twenty-foot gold letters that loomed over everything in the township, just like the Ankara cable loomed over them and everything, going up forever.

The motorcade was approaching the big gates of the Roach Hotel now. The first couple of cars just went in, past the guards and the guns, up the gravel drive; past the dusty space where there’d been lawns in Mao’s dad’s day, before the owners acknowledged that even they couldn’t waste water on that kind of conspicuous consumption. Mao’s dad had got to see the place pristine new, before time and dust and the heat cracked the façade. Mao’s grandad had helped build it, one of that wave of labour that had converged on all three Ankara points long-back—they had locals, yes, but they got in strong backs and keen minds from all over, and it so happened there’d been plenty out of Vietnam who’d needed somewhere that wasn’t underwater right about then.

The crowd’s jubilation was ebbing. For a moment it looked like the Masserey-Van Bults were going to screw tradition and just pass through that gate from which no soul returned. Then, after three cars had cruised on, the fourth stopped and more men with guns got out, the private soldiers of the corporate compound noun that was the Masserey-Van Bults. And after them, some flunkies in suits, already pink and sweating in the seconds after leaving the vehicles’ AC. Mao shook his head and rolled his eyes, but he kept waving his little flag because he had parents and siblings and they got hungry just like everyone else.

They had little baskets, like they were giving out lucky money for New Year: stacks of notes, a king’s ransom. Sullenly, sourly, the flunkies began chucking the cash into the crowd, flashing the sweat-stains spreading like plague zones across the armpits of their shirts. The crowd whooped. Children ran up and down the line, gathering it all up. The wabenzi would redistribute it later and plenty would stick to their fingers in the process. It would all go to buy just a little less than the last, because even these good old American bucks, these sterling pounds and roubles and euros and rand, bought less and less of the less and less there was to buy.

Children, because it looked better to the guests of the Roach Hotel if it was happy kids rushing around to grab their bundles of old notes. Because nobody wanted real desperate adults slugging it out for handfuls of cash. That might suggest that they weren’t happy with what they’d got.

Mao’d thought the flunkies were it, but there was a special treat in store for all the lucky people of Ankara Achouka. Mao saw some kind of argument going on within that great big space within the car, bigger than the room he shared with two sisters and a brother. The flunkies were protesting: no, go back, really ma’am, not appropriate. And then she appeared, a woman white-going-on-pink, with a broad-brimmed hat already wilting on her head. Her hair was like gold, like hair you only saw in adverts. Her sunglasses looked like poured mercury. She was waving back, basking not in the killing sun but in the adulation, listening to the crowd go barmy because some daughter of the Masserey-Van Bults had graced them with a personal appearance.

She threw something into the crowd—artless, awkward, but it reached the front ranks, almost brained some old boy, in fact. Not a wad of cash, this: something heavy. A plastic bottle, rich man’s water, the pure stuff. The inside of the car was probably lined with them.

There was a fight, after that. The half-brained old boy had the bottle, his neighbours wanted it, the people next to them… Then the gendarmes had just turned up out of nowhere in their riot suits and were whaling into the crowd and cracking heads, because this sort of unruly disorder before the eyes of the guests just would not do. And Mao was bitterly sure that the chief of police was going to nurse a long cool drink of rich man’s water this evening on his nice veranda, and that old boy was going to nurse nothing but a headache.

Then he looked at the Masserey-Van Bult girl, and she looked so stricken. She’d done a nice thing, hadn’t she? She’d shown the proper noblesse oblige. Except it had all gone wrong and now her day was ruined. He thought she’d actually stamp her little foot. But then she was back inside the car with her flunkies so the cool air could get flowing again, and the rest of the motorcade was passing the gates, and everyone went back to work or back to not having work, and then Balewa turned up and punched Mao in the shoulder. Balewa and Mao had grown up together, meaning they’d hated each other from ages five to fifteen. Then Mao had gone Firewalker and Balewa’s dad had pulled strings somehow to get his boy the coveted position of errand runner for Contrôleur Attah. In which role, inexplicably, Balewa had turned out to be a good friend, and to fondly remember all those times he and Mao had tried to beat the living shit out of each other. Which meant when Attah wanted a Firewalker crew, Balewa tried to get the word to Nguyễn Sun Mao.

“Attah wants you.”

“Wants me, or wants someone?” Mao asked, abruptly reviewing what he might or might not have done.

“Wants you, he says.” Balewa shrugged. “Between you and me, guy, Attah is on the plate with the Sonko up in the Hotel. Got bizna for you. Name your price.”

Mao clapped him on the shoulder, feeling the soft there, where once there’d just been the skinny. Attah’s business was feeding Balewa and his family well. Attah’s business was keeping Mao’s people full, too. Always happy to do business for M. le Contrôleur.

ATTAH JEAN JACQUES was one of the old wabenzi; his family been running Achouka a hundred generations, to hear him tell it—and he would. He was a short man, bald, fat: not fat-fat, but prosperous-fat. He’d gone away to Cape Town for his education, come back to find his Assistant Contrôleur’s shoes ready for him. And there were worse bosses, Mao knew. Like Attah’s own superiors, he reckoned. Attah answered to the men inside the Hotel, who answered to men on the other end of the Anchor cable, who answered to nobody at all, not even God. When things went wrong, it was Attah and his fellow Contrôleurs who felt the lash, and most of his peers made sure their underlings caught it twice as hard. Attah had an eye for talent, though. Screw up and he wouldn’t even shout at you: you’d be out on your backside and never get a decent job in the township again. Do well, and he’d give you the slack to get the work done. No tantrums, from him; no belittling his people, screaming at them, taking out all the many and varied frustrations of a busy man. Mao reckoned he got better results that way, being the buffer between the shit and the ground.

Which didn’t make him a nice guy, and it didn’t mean he was immune to that wabenzi way they had of showing off just how damn well they were doing. Attah’s office had air conditioning sometimes, though right now all the windows were thrown open and there were a dozen flies drowned in the man’s cup of water. Attah had trophies, too. He had a desk of black wood big enough that Mao could have used it as a coffin. The top was old felt, sun-bleached and torn, but most of all valuable, antique. There were yellowing photographs on the wall behind him. One showed a view from the Roach Hotel from long-back, when it had been where the rich people came to see the animals that weren’t there anymore. There were things like cows, and there was grass that went up to the cows’ bellies, and out there was water, too, the sun like diamonds on the Ogooué back when it had been a river and not just a concrete road from the coast. The other photo was a man with a gun sitting proudly before the lion he’d just presumably killed. Mao had spent too long staring at that photo, marvelling at the sheer alien nature of it: not the lion, which looked like something by a computer artist with no sense of the real, but the man: so white, so huge, vaster than the lion, clipping the edges of the photo, like an ogre. The past was another country, maybe another planet altogether.

Speaking of…

“You’re still running with Lupé?” Attah asked, fanning himself idly. The open windows stared out at the world as though watching for the first stirrings of a breeze.

“Yes, Contrôleur.” Mao was careful to mix the cocktail of his language to the genteel standard suitable for someone of Attah’s position: more French, more English, less Afrikaans and Bantu, absolutely no Viet slang. “You need, I can get her.”

“I need,” said Attah, heartfelt. “Her, you. Got me a situation here needs fixing.”

“Nothing she can’t fix, Contrôleur.”

“That’s what I want to hear. This is top dollar bizna, boy.” Attah grinned: good, white teeth, so even you could use a spirit level on them. The show of money should have been something to put Mao in his place, but there was something of the cheeky child in that smile, something irrepressible that decades in Achouka hadn’t ground out of the man. “Who else is there knows their tech? Need more than two of you? Akiloye?”

“Got hurt, Contrôleur. Cut foot, went bad.”

Attah’s expression soured. “Who else?”

“Hotep, Contrôleur.”

“Hah?”

“The spacegirl. Took her with me to Ayem when the condensation plant was down, last time. Got it running, double-quick.”

The Contrôleur’s expression soured further, meaning he had remembered just who Hotep was. Mostly trouble, but the girl had all the knowledge an expensive technical education could buy: an education never intended for slumming it groundside at the Ankara.

“Take her, then. Take her, take Lupé.” Attah shunted over a tablet holding the meagre briefing. “Take a ’Bug. Get this fucking sorted and it’s bonuses all round. Double-double danger pay.”

Mao nearly swore in front of the man; that meant a lot of money indeed. “Which way is this trouble, Contrôleur?” And he knew the answer, because any other point of the compass and he’d be offered standard or straight danger money, and if he didn’t like it there’d be plenty others willing. “South, then?” South: the Estate.

Attah nodded sombrely. “Mao, you’re a good boy, you’ve got a good crew. Double-triple.” And no haggling, no attempt to disguise the fact that the Man was riding Attah just the way Attah wasn’t riding his subordinates. He’s on the plate, sure enough. Time to go find Lupé and Hotep and put civilization behind them.

A FIREWALKER CREW could be two people for small jobs, could be six, eight, for big. Mao’d had a bad experience, out on a six-man crew except the wages were short and so someone had tried to have only a two-man crew come back. He’d been fifteen. He’d been left for dead. Now he was nineteen, a whole world of experience on, and he didn’t go out with big crews, or with people he didn’t know if he could absolutely avoid it. What he did was get results from the people he trusted.

A crew needed tough and muscle, and Mao brought that. A crew needed skills, too. Just one head crammed full of computer and mech repair meant if something happened to its owner, the rest of them were screwed. More bitter experience meant Mao took a fix-it for the mech stuff, a hacker for the computer tech. Most crews then threw in three more mouths who were there mostly to eat food and be someone’s useless cousin; Mao kept things lean. He was pathfinder, strongarm, marksman all in one. Lupé was mech, and he’d have to hope he could talk Hotep into doing tech, because it was that or some stranger who thought they could code.

Most Firewalker mechs would be in the township off-shift, and if they needed work they’d be in the fix-it shops where everyone brought all the crap that stopped working, or sold all the crap that had never worked. Lupé had started off there, same as everyone, working for her fix-it uncle at his tin-roofed little place out in Willaumez Neighbourhood. Everyone worked in Achouka—no room for luxuries like staying home. Boys grew up running errands, salvaging, joining gangs and fighting each other over street corners. While they were out doing that, there were schools that taught girls mech work, because everything was a resource in Achouka and nothing was wasted. It wasn’t that Lupé had a magic touch for getting broken-down machines working again, because there were a score of genius fixers working invisibly in the township on any given day. What got her noticed was how her home block suddenly had access to the Roach Hotel wi-fi, running water and makeshift solar collectors on the roof. These days, if you wanted Lupé, you’d find her in or on the Hotel itself, fixing for the rich because she had family to feed too.

Most kids on her pay grade would have been trying to get others in to do their work for them, for a fraction of the pay. Mutunbo Lupé just liked the feel of the metal under her fingers, though. She liked making it all fit together. She was the best there was, or at least the best Mao could afford. They’d worked together almost two years now, half his Firewalking life.

He caught her as she came off shift, down from the AC units up top of the Hotel. That was her favourite work, when she could get it: the view of the Anchor field was second to none, she said. A clear sight of the cable base, all those warehouses and offices dedicated to sending everything that mattered skywards, up out of the atmosphere to where the spaceship was. In Mao’s dad’s time it had still mostly been the physical material itself: the rare elements, the bulk metals, all the slack from when the asteroid mines weren’t performing as intended. These days the ship up there, the Grand Celeste, was fully built and fitted out, a luxury liner to eternity, ready to coast out its days in orbit or go colonise Mars, or head to an exoplanet on a trail beaten by robot probes.

Anywhere but here.

Mutunbo Lupé was local girl through and through: dark, stocky, her wiry hair pulled into Bantu knots. She always wore overalls two sizes too large, which spare space seemed able to magically furnish her with tools, food and, on one fraught occasion, a gun.

“Here’s trouble,” she observed, spotting Mao loitering. “M’bolo, chief. How did I know I’d see you today?”

“Am’bolo, you free?” Because these days Lupé got paid well without risking her ass for it, and each time he asked her, Mao wondered if today she’d say no.

But: “For you, always,” and that easy smile, remembering the time, maybe, he’d hauled her back to Ankara Achouka after she broke her leg; or else the time she’d just about built a new car out of scrap when the two of them had been stuck long-ways east, drinking poison water from a rusty tank and going out of their minds until somehow they’d made it back to real people.

And yet… Even as they were off to find Hotep, Mao looked sideways at her. “Wait, you know what, now?”

“Oh, chommie, all kinds of shit going down at the Roach Hotel,” she told him with her bright smile, with one blackened silver tooth. “Those sonko, you never heard anyone complain like it when their AC isn’t working full blast. Chommie, some of them have worked up a sweat today. You never heard such language.”

“But you fixed it.” Because in his experience she really could fix anything.

“Ha, no way. Those AC units, they’re all good. Power’s coming up short.”

“Figures.” That put the mission into perspective. He and Lupé and Hotep were going south, into the dry, into the dust and the killing heat, to the places monsters lived, because out there were the solar farms. Out there were the grand fields of collectors that had powered the Ankara’s planning and building. Now they harvested sunlight and turned it into cool air for the Roach Hotel, fancy lights for the sonko parties, filtration for their swimming pools, so that their brief stay at Ankara Achouka could be flawlessly comfortable before they were hauled away forever to go live in the Grand Celeste. If the power was short, it meant someone was stealing or something was broken, whereupon word came down to Contrôleur Attah to hire some Firewalkers to find out and fix. And Attah, in his wisdom, picked Mao.

LUPÉ BROUGHT HOME solid cash for her fixing work, but Firewalking paid better. Hotep, though: Hotep didn’t need cash. Hotep had a goddamn allowance.

She wasn’t wabenzi, that class of administrators who ran everything outside the Hotel, men like Attah who hired, fired and made sure things got fixed, hauled, shipped and built. No responsible wabenzi would let their kid end up like Hotep: too embarrassing. Hotep’s folks weren’t from round these parts, though. Hotep’s folks were up living the High Life, overseeing those far more compliant labourers: the robots aboard the Grand Celeste. That made Hotep one of the sonko, the rich-rich. Except here she was, pissing her days away in the township, bitter as hell about all the indignities life had doled out to her. Once every two weeks, give or take, she got so fighting drunk she tried to break in to the Hotel, punch out the guards, scream, shout. They all knew her there, and that her dad was the CEO of Lord God Almighty Incorporated. They knocked her down, but didn’t break anything. And Mao knew all she’d do, if she somehow got past all of that, would be go stand on the Anchor Field and look up to the vanishing point of the cable, where it got too small, too far to see any more. And probably scream at it, because when Hotep got drunk she got vai drunk.

She was drinking on her balcony when Mao found her, but that was just the usual drinking, that she did like most people breathed. No danger of her going out to buy a black eye and a loose tooth from security for a few days yet.

Hotep’s real ID called her Cory Dello. The nickname came from some old film everyone saw once, some remake of a remake that was remade back when the idea of a desert land full of ruins was somehow romantic. There had been pyramids and adventurers, and there had been a mummy all got up in bandages to chase them around. Hotep looked like that. Not an inch of her was on show. Face wrapped, save for the hole she applied the bottle neck to, dark goggles over her eyes, hair bound up in a turban and a forage cap set aslant over that like she was the world’s jauntiest burn victim. She wore gloves that were expensive tech in and of themselves, and she bandaged her hands over the gloves. When they had gone out to the fix-it job at Ayem, Mao had wondered how she didn’t just die of the heat, but Lupé said she had some flash liquid cooling gear in there somewhere, that recycled her piss and her body’s movements to offset the battering of the sun. It wasn’t overheating Hotep was worried about, but sunburn and skin cancer. Lupé said she was pale as an albino all over, under all that cloth. The thought was weird, like she was some kind of magic alien from a cartoon.

Mao’s dad’d had skin cancer for a few years now, the kind that wasn’t going to get you tomorrow or this year, but eventually. Mao would get it too, most likely. Everyone who wasn’t wabenzi or sonko would, because they had to go out to work and there weren’t enough hats or parasols in the world to keep that sun off. Lupé was already checking herself every day, she said, because the old story that only pale, delicate people had to worry about melanomas was a convenient lie they told you, to get you to go out. Hotep was super-paranoid about it, though, and that was only one of the many delightful quirks that had ended with her down here looking up, rather than up there looking down.

“I know,” she told the pair of them as they scrambled up to the balcony. She had more living space than Mao’s entire family, paid for by the folks who would give her everything so long as they never had to actually share an orbit with her again. “You see the news? Whole lot of people flying in to Libreville Secure International tomorrow. Whole lot of people driving their expensive cars down the Ogooué Road. Busy-busy times a-coming.” She spoke the chimera patois of the township with a ridiculous scholarly precision, clipping out slang like she was saying the Latin names of extinct deep-sea fish. “Of course they need us.”

“Because the AC at the Hotel is bust?” Lupé asked her.

Hotep turned her goggles, her bandages, towards them, faceless and creepy. Her wrapped hands were drumming against her knees in complex patterns; she was never completely still. “I give rocks about the AC. AC at the Hotel has been on brownout for months. Only now they’re going to have guests on top of guests at that place, all clamouring for their cool air. You not catch the news from Ecuador, dangi?” She scooped up a little tablet—crazy money worth of device just lying about, propping up one of her empties. She had it projecting pictures on the wall, though Mao had to squint against the sun to make them out. He saw… devastation. He saw water. That made him sit down next to Hotep and just stare, because there was more water there than even God had a use for, surely. Water coming through streets, water flooding around cars, water slanting down in great turbulent sheets from a heavy sky. Water scouring in two-storey-high waves across a field of overturned vehicles and broken prefabs and...

It took him too long to identify the stump of the building there, lashed by that insane rain, as though all the water that they were lacking here in Ankara Achouka had been dumped in that other place, on the other side of the world.

“Ankara Pedernales,” Hotep pronounced. “Storm and a tidal wave hit it. Cable just gone, though.” She shook her head. “Serves them right.” As though, if she’d still been on the orbital team, somehow she’d have stopped it.

“And the people who didn’t get out?” Lupé asked. “Serve them right, too, does it?” Air evac from Ankara Pedernales would only have been for the few waiting for the cable ride up, plus maybe the guards and whatever they called wabenzi over in Ecuador.

Hotep’s goggles stared at her while the fingers of her free hand continued their manic drum solo.

Eventually she shrugged. “Went too long without answering, didn’t I?” she remarked cheerily. “Sorry. Making a note now: human better next time.”

“This is happening now?” Mao asked. He couldn’t look away from the images.

“Boss, this is happening yesterday. We already got plenty rich folks flying this way because they missed their golden ticket up the pipe,” said with that extra bitterness Hotep reserved for anything to do with space. “They blocked off the news, tried to stop it getting to the local net here, but there’s no data wall high enough to keep me out. So, that’s the job, boss? They need to turn on all the extra AC at the Hotel, just when there’s a power outage? That mean we’re going south at last?”

“Vai south,” Mao agreed. Meaning further than any of them had gone “Bundu south.” Meaning the wilds, too dry for anything to live, too desolate for anyone to go. Except they were going and, by variedly mad-sounding reports, things still lived there. “All the way.” Meaning the Old Estate, abandoned to the sun and the automatic systems three generations ago, and only rumours about what went on there now.

“Where the wild things are,” Hotep said languidly, necking the last drops of her beer and placing the bottle on its side, fussily in line with its expired compatriots.

“Dusk, vehicle compound.”

“I’m driving.”

“Fukyo are you. I’m driving.”

She shrugged, one hand leaving off slapping at her shins to spider around for another bottle. “See you there.”

CHAPTER TWO

COMPLAINING ABOUT THE WEATHER

THERE WERE TOWNSHIPS south of the Ankara, just a few. They weren’t holdovers from the old days, when people had farmed this land or come to see the pretty animals; the drought had driven everyone away a generation before the Ankara was even built. And the Ankara itself was a hothouse flower, existing only because money needed it to exist. When the construction work for the anchor had begun, they’d needed so many workers they’d flown them in from anywhere that had more people than food, shipped in whole families, bussed them from the coast and the airport to the neat new prefab houses they’d built for them. For Mao’s grandad’s generation, it had seemed like magic, like the future. They had built little suburb townships and there was food you could afford and water you could drink without getting sick. There was work. There was a purpose. They’d made a place to live out here on the equator for two whole generations, long after everyone who’d once lived here had been driven out by the heat and the dry. They’d reclaimed a piece of the world from the apocalypse.

Now, just fifty years on, almost nobody lived outside the Ankara township itself—only the craziest or the hardiest still trying to scratch a living. No buses came to bring workers and work together. Solar was the only power and any decent fix-it who could keep the panels and filtration going had upped sticks to Ankara because the best work was there. The satellite townships were dying. Ankara Achouka was dying, too, but as long as they still needed the Anchor point and its elevator access to the stars, they kept the life support on. Beyond that, it was just folks clinging on because that was where they used to live, and because it was there or nothing. Mao knew damn well that of every hundred who’d left for the coast to make a new life in Libreville or Port-Gentil, ninety-nine either never made it or got turned back from the walled compounds where the last of the government wabenzi lived. Nobody was keeping the lights on outside those compounds. Temperatures around the world were still on the up, and the zone of dead earth was still spreading out from the equator. Nobody’d had any use for that land, dead of heatstroke like everything else, until they’d had the idea for the Anchors, and for space, because the mad irony of it was that if you wanted cheap access to space up an elevator cable, you needed the equator.

Mao had seen satellite maps of his world. He had seen the little star of the Ankara itself, bang on the equator, an oasis of life in a steadily spreading desert. In older pictures he’d seen where the rivers had been: green, like some other planet entirely, as though before going off to live in space, humans had to first make their own world something alien and uninhabitable.

Mao thought of that over the first hours of the drive, where being behind the wheel of the Rumblebug was almost like a holiday because there was at least a track going the right way, and they had the cool of the dusk, and the dust hadn’t shorted out half the vehicle’s systems. Lupé had a wind-up radio, picking up old Akendengué covers on Mademba 17, the station that two brothers ran just down from where Mao’s family lived. He could listen to Lupé sing tunelessly along and try to ignore Hotep kicking the back of his seat. Hotep had wanted shotgun, but he knew she’d end up flicking every damn switch in the cab because her hands got bored real easy, so she got to sit in the back.

The Rumblebug was older than Mao by five years, testimony to the skills of Lupé and her predecessors that it was still running and in good shape. Every part of it had probably been replaced in that time, from its big puffy tyres to the solar cells that sat like angled wing-cases on top. Recently, one of Achouka’s better street artists had given the thing a new paint job, in bright, toxic-looking reds and greens. All the Firewalkers liked to go out in a ’Bug painted as fierce and jagged as possible. We’re poison, they were telling the world. You can’t eat us. We’d kill even you. By the time they brought it back, most of that paint job would be abraded away and half the parts would need replacing, but they made these things to last, and fix-it Firewalkers made damn sure they were always as fixed as they could get, because if your ride broke down out beyond the townships, then most likely you weren’t coming back. Mao had come back, once, that time when things had really gone to crap. That feat had made him a minor celebrity in Achouka, cemented him as a tough guy, got him Firewalking gigs ever since. As many tries at killing yourself as anyone could want. His parents had been less than impressed. His dad, his mum, his grandmother, they’d all tried to talk him out of the work, but they hadn’t said no to the money when it came in. They’d given up on the discussion by now; when he’d said goodbye this time, they’d just hugged him, then let him go.

Firewalking was a youngster’s job. Youngsters could learn the skills quickly. Youngsters were fast and tough, not so old that their bodies were stocking up on the toxins in the air and in the water. Mao knew one Firewalker who was thirty, but he was broken, too shaky for any kind of work that brought in good pay.

And youngsters were replaceable. Disaffected youth desperate for cash was the one natural resource Ankara Achouka had in abundance. Everyone was hungry; everyone had folks needed feeding, needed medicine. Everyone dreamt that if you get enough cash in one place, there’d be an office for you with the wabenzi, just like everyone at Attah’s pay grade was waiting for that one elevator car with a berth with their name on it, the one ticket out of the dry hell that was all that was left down on Earth.

Which brought him back to those contraband images Hotep had shown them. Elsewhere in the world had its own problems, he knew, but it seemed crazy that there were people on this self-same equatorial line who were drowning right about now.

“You reckon it’s better to get the water than the dry?” he threw back, knowing she’d get what he meant straight off.

Sure enough, Hotep barked out a laugh. “Some filing system gone crazy in the sky, right? Take all the water, put it over there under ‘W.’”

“Crazy,” Lupé sang, fitting it to the increasingly staticky music; Mademba 17 didn’t have the kit to broadcast very far.

“Their wet, our dry, all the same shit,” Hotep said. “What’s on the menu, boss?”

“We’ll hit Sainte Genevieve after dawn,” Mao told her. “Weather station there, we check the power, wait out the sun, get news. After that it’s just go south until we reach the farms.” He didn’t say that he wasn’t expecting there to be anything wrong with the power lines through Sainte Genevieve. Sure, the locals were probably syphoning a little, but that was built into everyone’s equations. Attah could just call, if it was that simple, get someone already on the ground to go tinker with it. The bulk of the solar fields were deeper in, though. They’d been built for the Estate, the vast compound where they’d designed the anchor tech and spaceship tech, put it all together before shipping it north to the Ankara. Back before Mao’s people had fled the flooding for somewhere dry that needed workers, the smartest of the sonko had come out here, to the land that the heat had rendered utterly vacant. They’d lived in cool chambers underground, come to design the elevator and the engines of the Grand Celeste, and they had done it here in the land of the dead so that no other smart sonko could find out what they were doing. Those old scientists did everything in secret, terrified that some other company would make the discovery first, and make all the money in the world. It made Mao wonder how things would have gone if all those clever people had just put their heads together and not worried about the money.

But it had worked: here and Pedernales and Singkawang, bang on the equator, they’d built their Ankara points, or at least had people like Mao’s granddad build them. They’d sent the cables up into the sky and started work on the great ships that were Earth’s lifeboats. And by then, they’d abandoned the Old Estate, its labs and secrets not needed any more. They’d gone into space and left behind the land where nothing grew, where no rain fell and every drop had been sucked out of even the deepest aquifer. All they kept were the power lines, funnelling the yield from kilometres of gleaming panels that carpeted the ground around the site. Those solar fields were supposed to last, if not forever, then long enough for their builders to wring what they could from the world and then get the hell off it. They had self-repairing robots to clear the dust off the panels and fix the scouring and the breakages. Back then, the world had been able to afford that kind of luxury, rather than relying on desperate kids like Lupé. It was like that up on the Grand Celeste and the other luxury spaceships, or so Hotep said: robots to fix everything, robots to bring you breakfast, robots to polish your nails and massage your feet and warm your bed. Down here on this end of the cable, people were cheaper and in infinitely greater supply.

Those clever, clever people who made the robots and the vast gleaming solar arrays, they’d have laughed at you if you told them what a Firewalker was. No need for that kind of homebrew measures in their perfect machine world. Except things broke down, even the robots that repaired the robots that repaired the robots. And the solution to that was to send kids to do a robot’s job and get things up and running. Half the Firewalkers Mao ever knew had never come back from one piece of bizna or another. There were desperate people out there. There were broken down vehicles no fix-it could fix. There was dying of thirst, of heat-stroke, of having the thing you were sent to get running explode on you instead. And then there was the Old Estate. Where the wild things are, like Hotep said. What secret science had never come out, after the scientists left their labs and then their planet? Mad experiments, monsters, human vivisection. Crazy rich people with private reservations where they hunted resurrected monster animals, hunted normal people who fell into their hands. There were films and serials about it, all kinds of nonsense Mao had laughed at louder than anyone. He wondered if he’d still find it funny in three days’ time.

Double-triple danger pay, though. It was all on paper and digital, guaranteed wealth in rand or USD when the three of them got back.

I hope it’s a power line gone in Sainte Genevieve.

THERE WAS ONE big building in Sainte Genevieve. It looked kind of like a boat upside down and at an angle, so that the high end curved down like a hood and kept some shade even at noon. Around it was a little township, not the shacks and shanties of the Ankara’s dilapidated circumference, but maybe a hundred little prefab houses, most of which were long abandoned, sand-blasted, windows like eyesockets, doorways like slack mouths. Only two things kept anyone in Sainte Genevieve: the meteorological station and God.

God got the big house.

The heat was already fierce by the time they arrived. The inside of the ’Bug smelled like—well, probably like Mao, if he was honest about it. Mao if he’d been hot enough to cook eggs on. They pulled the vehicle up alongside the boat-looking church and took turns topping up the water purifier the way God intended. After that it was find somewhere to wait out the worst of the day. From here on, they’d have to take the light and the heat and just live with it, but no harm having some shut-eye under a roof, and Attah had sent ahead to the meteorologist to expect them.

“Found where some of our power’s going, boss,” Hotep said. She was pointing to a big old cross stuck up in the open area the church’s hood pointed at. It was all over with bulbs and strip-lights, and cables running from the church, but it was a drop of spit in the desert compared with the power that should have been reaching Achouka. This was just Hotep being Hotep, because God-talk upset her.

The meteorological station was a squat building roofed with solar, backing onto the church. Antennae and instruments reached out around the panels like weeds breaking through old tarmac. At Mao’s “Awe!” the door opened a crack, revealing a Bantu woman in a worn red dress with floral patterns. One of her eyes was milky and the skin around it was scarred by the sort of cheap surgery most people had to resort to when the cancer started to show. Just peel everything away until whatever you found underneath looked healthy.

“Mme. Ironsi?” he asked.

“Doctor Ironsi,” she corrected frostily. “You’re the Firewalkers.” Whatever her expectations, apparently Mao came in somewhere below them, though he reckoned that anyone with a Doctor in front of their name, and who was stuck out in Sainte Genevieve, probably had a lot to be disappointed about.

She took them in, though. Her three-room dwelling vibrated to the tooth-jarring rattle of an antique cooling unit and the walls were lined with pipes trying futilely to shift the heat elsewhere against the inexorable pressure of physics. Lupé was all over it at once, because she loved innovation like that, no matter how much work had produced how little result. Before Mao could talk business, she was pattering on about where she could tighten it up, how she could tune the system, and Doctor Ironsi was thawing dramatically because quality of life was about as thin on the ground as free water in Sainte Genevieve.

Mao gave her the nod, and Lupé sat down to tinker. Hotep was bored already, peering through the dust-screens on the window and making gun noises to herself while staring at the church. To Mao’s surprise, a bunch of people had gathered out there in the noonday sun, where the cross was.

“Funeral, or…?” he asked.

“Just everyday around here,” Ironsi told him, shaking her head. “Brings them closer to God, they say. Day and night, out under the sky. Night, I can understand.” Her shoulders rose, slumped, as though a proper shrug would be too much effort. “The Estate, Attah said. So you’re crazy, then.”

“I’ll tell you when we come back,” Mao said shortly.

“Solar yield’s been down for years. And who’s surprised, when things are like they are?”

“They built it for the heat, though,” Lupé said, still bent over the generator. “For how things are there. Top of the line tech.”

“They built it for how things were when they built it. Then things got worse,” Ironsi said disgustedly. “Still, lucky them, they have kids like you to go fix it. And you have dust storms on the way, next four days at least. Your car good for that, is it?”

“Have to be,” Mao said. “Show me.”

Her tablet had a crack through the screen, bleeding rainbow colours across the map she called up. He watched accelerated simulations of the storm ebb and flow. South of here the land was patchy black with the vast fields of sun-drinking panels, where they hadn’t been buried so deep in sand that there weren’t robots enough in the world to excavate them. Little rectangles were the grand, abandoned houses of the rich, from when they’d lived out here to oversee the research. The actual Estate itself was like a pale bean, insignificant, most of it below ground.

The worst of the storm was west and heading westwards. Mao was already plotting a curving course through dead farmland, following the dry irrigation channels where he could see them on the satellite map, to avoid the worst of the weather.

After they’d slept a couple of hours, just kipping on her floor because it was better than roasting in the ’Bug—after dusk had started to come in and cart away the malevolent hammer of the sun—Mao sat up with Doctor Ironsi and asked cautious questions about what it was like south of here.

Lupé had the coolant system in pieces by then, and was reassembling it into something that would work better and make less noise; or, at least, that was the plan. Ironsi was taking that as the wages for wasting her words on the ignorant bruiser she’d plainly written Mao off for. Hotep had gone out to try and score some beer, despite Ironsi saying the congregation were abstainers. Despite there being beer in the ’Bug, a little. Hotep was just going stir-crazy mostly, and needed to run around a bit, like a five-year-old.

“No Firewalkers going this way for two years,” Ironsi told him. “No Firewalkers coming back for five years. But seven months back, these treasure-hunter types came from long-ways south, two of them, all cut to hell. One didn’t make it back to the Ankara, the way I hear it.”

A weird light was playing through the open windows now. Mao glanced out and saw they’d turned the cross on. Half the lamps on it weren’t working and the rest flickered and strobed out of sync, oddly disquieting, as though he was watching a radiant living thing trying to get free.

“They came through here on their way in?” he clarified.

“They came back here on their way out,” Ironsi corrected. “I don’t think they planned to, but they’d lost half their team and they needed help. I helped the pastor’s people patch them up. Learned a few things for you. First, there’s still something worth taking, out there. When they abandoned the Estate for space, they didn’t bring all their toys. Second, there’s still people living out there.”

“Impossible,” Mao said automatically.

Ironsi just did that broken-down not-quite-shrug again. “Well, you’re apparently the expert. No doubt you’re right. But that’s what they said anyway, and I’m telling it because I like your fix-it girl there. People on the Estate, still. Sonko people, they said.”

“Crazy.” But ‘crazy’ was way closer to where he lived than ‘impossible’ was. “So what got their friends killed?”

Ironsi’s eyes slid off his uncomfortably. “Bugs, they said.”

Since the windows had been opened, bugs had been much in evidence. They were just about the only things that seemed to be able to survive the dry. Flies were crawling drunkenly about the ceiling, beetles battering at the walls. Out there, the half-lit cross was probably calling the insect faithful to prayer from miles around. Mao was only glad that they didn’t have the mosquitoes his granddad had talked about; the plague-spreaders needed standing water to breed.

“Bugs,” he echoed.

“They were half mad of heat-stroke,” Ironsi said. “One of them had wounds so septic we had to take the leg off. Talking all kinds of crazy. Even went full-on confession with the pastor. People like that, they see bugs where there aren’t bugs.”

Mao shivered. “Sure,” he agreed. “Crazy talk.”

“I hear Hotep shouting,” Lupé half-sang. “She’s out making friends.”

CHAPTER THREE

LET GOD SORT THEM OUT

HOTEP WAS STANDING in front of the haphazardly lit-up cross, which meant she was also standing in front of both priest and congregation, who had come out for what Mao guessed was some kind of sunset mass. For a moment he was picturing torches, pitchforks and being run out of town or beaten to death, because you didn’t go to someone’s place and piss on their church and expect to get away with a whole skin. Once his eyes had got used to the flicker of the electric cross, he reckoned any mob riled up here would take a while to get going. These were people of his parents’ generation at best, and more towards his grandparents’. He saw lots of grey hair, dark skin wrinkled with lines and pocked with scars. Plenty of eyes clouded with cataracts or even sewn shut where the orb had been taken out. The priest himself looked about seventy, hair just white curly wisps about his dark scalp. He had spectacles on. Mao hadn’t seen spectacles beyond the pair his folks kept, that had been his great-grandad’s and become a kind of family relic, stuck up on the shelf beside the statuette of Bà Chúa Kho, Lady of the Storehouse, who didn’t lend herself to this kind of grand religious theatrics these days.

Still, there were about thirty of them, and that was enough to lynch one skinny white girl done up all over in bandages, but Hotep was in full-on crazy mode right then, and Mao had no idea how she’d gone from nought to rabies in so short a time.

“You think they’re coming to take you up?” She was full-on shrieking at the priest and his followers. “You think they’re making your rooms ready up on the Grand Celeste? Goddamn, so you worked to build their hotel and their anchor, you and your folks and their folks? You think that buys you a golden ticket, that they’re going to bring you up to that Heaven they got going on there?”

“Ah, shit,” Lupé said. “She’s been drinking surgical spirits again?” Because there was that one time Hotep had been reduced to sucking the alcohol from medical swabs after an epic bender that left nothing else within a dozen streets. Mao knew her better, though: this was sober Hotep, not drunk Hotep talking. This was the reason Hotep drank in the first place.

“And this is what you do with what’s left of your lives?” Hotep went on, advancing on the lot of them—and they were actually backing up. “You go pray to the big man in the sky, tell him how good you’ve been? He doesn’t care. He just wants to keep you praying and nodding while he gets in his magic sky bus and goes somewhere the hell better than this!”

“Hotep.” Mao approached her cautiously. “Hey, hey, listen to me. Hey, Cory!”

She rounded on him, as though her real name was her secret weakness. “Fuck you! Who the fuck are you to—Mao? You ever hear the shit they’re spooning out here? Did you? That they’re all going up, boss. Gonna get taken into the sky by the big man up there. Salvation, boss! Divine rewards of a life of earthly toil, amiright?” And her patois was shifting, more and more English shouldering its way in and out, her accent sailing past all compass so that Mao wrestled with her words like they were a snake.

“Hotep,” Lupé snapped, “that’s how all the godly types talk: taking up, rewards, all of that. How my grandad told it from the pulpit, way back. That’s just how it is. Doesn’t mean they’re talking about going into space, you mad skommer.”

“You didn’t hear them!” Hotep yelled into her face, and Lupé flicked her goggles hard, right on the nose-piece. Hotep sat down then, as though she’d been punched in the face, sudden enough that the breath whomped out of her. Between her wheezing and the crowd, all standing aghast, the near-silence that followed was almost reverent.

“You didn’t hear them,” she said again, plaintively. “Goddamn, can’t you see I’m trying to tell them the truth? Why won’t anyone listen? I’ve been there. I’ve seen those people. I know.” The proverbial prophet, honoured nowhere, save that this wasn’t even her own country: no place on Earth was.

“It’s god-talking,” Lupé said, not unsympathetically. “I sat through it every Sunday until Grandad died and my folks let me off.”

“She has to leave.” Abruptly the pastor was there, recovered from his shock now Hotep’s momentum was gone. “There’s no place for her here. There’s a devil in her.”

Mao had to concede that the man had fair reason to believe it. “We’ve outstayed our welcome, right, sir. Sun’s down now, past time we were moving.”

The pastor glowered at him, spotting another non-believer, but Mao had his hands up, all conciliatory, and was also built broad and heavy enough to break some old bones if anyone decided to escalate matters.

“Get her in the ’Bug,” he said, and Lupé hauled Hotep to her feet.

“You didn’t hear them,” came a mumble from behind the girl’s mask. “Isn’t anyone coming to save them, pray all they like.”

“I’m telling you…” Lupé said wearily as she hauled Hotep off towards the vehicle, but Mao wasn’t entirely sure she was right. He could see the cross better now, past the glare of its surviving bulbs and the wheeling clouds of moths and flies and beetles. There were designs carved into the wood, of spheres and orbs passing by one another. There were drawings and photographs and old clippings: artist’s renditions of the Celeste, promotional flyers, covers torn off old sci-fi novels, even a torn vintage poster for Star Wars. He wondered, he really did, what had crept into the creed of this doomed little church on the very edge of the Ankara’s influence, and what salvation they were preaching.

But it wasn’t his business what they did with their lives, or how they ended them.

On his way to the ’Bug, Ironsi intercepted him, scowling. “Thank you for riling up the neighbours.”

Mao grimaced, but shrugged. What could he say?

“I sent the latest storm data to your vehicle’s system,” she told him. “For what it’s worth. You’re cutting east to dodge the worst, but if that doesn’t work for you, there’s a beacon you’ll pick up, if it’s still working.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Kandjama Protein Complex. What’s left of it.”

Mao wrinkled his nose. “Bug farm.”

“Was one of the biggest once, but they couldn’t keep it going in the heat. Something still running there, though. Some shelter. Maybe water.”

“We have water.” But the ’Bug’s filtration plant was a patch job, and if they didn’t have to lean heavily on it right at the start, all the more chance it would still be working at the end. Bug farms creeped Mao out, though. He’d nearly ended up working on one, something with brine shrimp off in Mékina back when he was ten and his folks had some spare money to buy an apprenticeship. He’d had nightmares about tanks of leggy things—far bigger than they could ever get in reality—of falling in, of all those seething bodies choking the water around him, all kinds of nasty stuff, so that he almost just ran away from home. Then the apprenticeships turned out to cost twice as much as advertised—people paying for their kids to become next to slave labour because they thought it was a future. So he’d been saved to become a Firewalker, and most likely not have a future, but at least not get eaten by shrimp.

But shelter was shelter, maybe-water was maybe-water, and bugs were what everyone who could afford it was eating over at Ankara Achouka. Beggars, as the wabenzi said, couldn’t be choosers.

He found Hotep in the driver’s seat when he got there, a determined set to the way she held her head. Lupé, riding shotgun still, shrugged.

“Fine. I’ll sleep in the back,” he told them both. “You’ve got the met data onboard. Try not to get us buried in sand.”

THE LAND SOUTH of Ankara Achouka had been forest once, had been rivers, timber concerns, game reserves. Green as far as the eye could see, someone had told Mao. He’d seen photos, sometimes, taken from planes. He still wasn’t sure if they’d been real or just computer imagery. All those trees: it had just looked copy-pasted after a while.

Still, he dreamt of them, being lost in the eternal dimness under that unrelieved roof of leaves, exactly the same, every way he turned, no landmarks, no trails, no way out. In his waking days he had walked out of the desert all the way to the Ankara. They called him Wild Thing after that, BunduBoy. The next generation of Firewalkers—kids two, three years his junior—told stories of the Vietnamese hero who’d conquered the sand and the dust. They said he wasn’t scared of anything. None of them understood how he was scared of all of it. There wasn’t a damn thing out there that couldn’t kill you, and the absence of things would kill you most of all. All the trees were gone, mostly gone even back when Grandad came to build the Anchor. All of the rivers were dry.

He woke to find the weather had stolen a march on them, and everything outside the Rumblebug’s shaded glass was dust, solid walls of swirling particles blotting out the sun. He heard Lupé and Hotep, and for a moment his mind turned their voices into an argument and he knew they were going to die. Then his mind cast off the nightmares and he understood they were only shouting because of the boom and rattle as the wind tried to snatch at the ’Bug and turn it over. They were following the plan; they’d picked up the bug farm beacon and were homing in on it, because even Firewalkers couldn’t keep moving in this, and if they tried it, the dust would block all the vents and intakes, smother the solar panels, kill the vehicle and then kill them.

“Fukme,” Mao swore, one of the English language’s more persistent insertions into Achouka patois.

“Why they pay us the big bucks, chommie,” Lupé told him. She was driving now, he saw, with Hotep in the passenger seat and the comms apparently half-disassembled on her lap. At the sight of that, Mao bolted upright, all sorts of bad words leaping to his lips, but they were definitely picking up the signal. He had to take it on faith that Hotep had been fixing a problem and not making one.

She looked over her shoulder at him. She had her bandana down, her bandages up, the goggles still in place, trusting to the ‘Bug’s dark glass to keep the sun from boiling her skin like a lobster. He still had no idea what her eyes looked like, but her face seemed like it had been over-enthusiastically whittled from white wood: sharp nose, sharp chin, thin ginger arches for her eyebrows.

“So what’s—” she started, but the witticism would have to wait because Lupé yelped in surprise and hauled the ’Bug sideways to avoid what looked like an enormous rib-cage, looming two storeys up out of the dust.

“Dzam!” Abruptly there were structures rearing up all around them—just appearing out of the skirling dust, but at their speed the beams and sand-blasted girders looked like they were thrusting out of the earth even as they passed, curving overhead like monstrous fingers trying to pin the rattling vehicle down.

“Light!” Hotep hollered, pointing. Her goggles must have been working overtime, because there was sure as hell nothing there when Mao looked. Lupé took it on faith, though, and four heartbeats and a near-collision later they all saw it, a beacon white like burning phosphorus, casting shadows even through the dust. They steered for it like a sinking ship for land, seeing walls loom before them that were, at least, more than just the bare bones of buttresses and scaffolding. Seconds later Lupé was skidding the ’Bug into a sharp turn to avoid just ploughing straight into concrete, and they skittered madly along a windowless expanse of pitted grey, then on to a wall of abraded glass, great man-high panels of it all tessellated together, uneven and patched, some of them covered with corrugated iron or plastic.

“Vehicle bay?” Mao yelled, lunging past Lupé’s shoulder to point. Probably it wasn’t, but it would serve if they could fit the vehicle in there, and who cared what the original purpose was in that case? Lupé gamely slung the car towards the vague shadow: seven closed roller-doors and two hanging open. Things crunched and shattered under the tyres as the ’Bug scooted under cover, and they brought a lot of the dust in with them. Still, it was out of the worst of it, and for a good half-minute after they dragged to a halt, the three of them just stared at each other and tried to calm their breathing.

Then Hotep pulled up her bandana, securing it in place under the nosepiece of her goggles.

“I suppose we better go see where the fuck we are,” she suggested.

LUPÉ INSISTED THEY clear the caked dust off the panels and out of the vents first, not a long job with the three of them working at it. By that time they had a good idea of what sort of place they had found. A factory, certainly—they were at the door-end of a warehouse, the far end of which had collapsed in on itself, then been tarpaulined over. Mao reckoned there wasn’t much life left in the makeshift repairs, but also that they’d been recent, within months rather than years.

There was another tarp fallen away from the entrance they’d driven in through, and a little work had it hooked up and keeping the driving dust out, at least for now. Then they took a break, tapped the filtration tanks that took up the whole back half of the ’Bug and ate some chewies. Chewies had the consistency of toffee, a taste so packed with artificial additives that there was no natural thing they truly resembled, least of all whatever extinct fruit or savoury was on the wrapper. Mao got chicken dumpling, Hotep had chocolate—she always had chocolate—and Lupé’s bar had a picture of some brown cup-shaped thing none of them could identify.

“Turd,” Hotep decided eventually. Lupé tried it and declined to call her a liar.

It didn’t matter, of course. It was all of it bugs. So the Kandjama Complex had seen better days, there were still plenty others up the coast from Libreville, or over on the New China Bay. They just migrated north and south, those places, as the heat got worse, and that was more for the convenience of the humans who operated them. There was nothing like a bug for tolerating the heat.

Way long-back they’d tried to grow plants that could deal with almost no water and daytime temperatures of sixty C. Mao imagined them cross-breeding wheat and sweet potato with cactus somehow, but probably there was more science to it than that. It hadn’t been economical to farm, not in the end. In the desert belt the world had put on, even the cacti came up stunted or died. The last flourish of bioscience, in the face of this new world they’d all made, was to breed drought-resistant insects, taking the already hardy strains and making them ever more self-reliant. And then grinding them up and turning them into chewies.

It felt weird to be grinding away at the protein bars here where they’d maybe been made, like walking over someone’s grave. Still, Mao tried to put a brave face on it. “Mmm, good,” he exclaimed, like he’d have done at home over family cooking, making the most of the little they had.

“Vai good, really taste the…” Lupé looked at her wrapper again. “Turd,” she conceded.

Hotep had cut hers into neat squares and was popping them into her mouth like each was an experiment. Right now, though, she was looking to the far end of the room, at the tarp sagging beneath a slowly sloughing burden of dust.

“Power,” she observed brightly. “Lights are on. Someone’s home.” Her goggles were doubtless picking something up.

“You think it’s that simple?” But power came from somewhere. Were Kandjama’s own solar farms still in operation? Or was there a great big tap on the cable that led to Ankara Achouka?

“Not enough here to bother the sonko, surely,” Lupé said.

“Depends what they’re doing. We’re not going anywhere until the dust calms. Might as well take a look.”

They had to wait for Hotep to finish up her finicky eating, but Mao knew that hurrying her would just be laying in some explosion of bad temper for later, erupting out of a clear sky when least expected. Besides, just sitting back and resting was a luxury for a Firewalker. Once the storm died down, they’d be trying to make twenty hours of travelling in a day, everything except the harshest hours of noon, with pills every four hours to keep them sharp. He wasn’t looking forward to the crash after they got back. But at least they’d be back.

He felt Lupé’s eyes on him, as Hotep slurped down the last cubes of chewie. As usual, he found his shoulders going back, his chest out, like he was some punk kid—meaning, a year or two younger than he was. Force of habit, though. He and Lupé had hooked up last year for a short while, tried out each other’s bodies, had about three days of thinking it was going to be The Big Thing. Then it got awkward. Then Mao’s mother had found out and given him a thrashing because what was wrong with that good Vietnamese girl he’d been seeing a month before? Three more days of it being The End Of The World, at the end of which Mao had the surprising revelation that having Lupé about as his mech, his back-up, his friend was more important to him than the rest of it. Besides, he’d heard she was a steady thing with Nolo Amachi now, the girl who ran the office for Contrôleur Attah, so maybe that was another reason things hadn’t quite clicked between them.

There was a locked metal door from the warehouse into the rest of the complex, a segmented steel thing someone had padlocked twice. Lupé was good with locks; they were through in an instant, into the weirdly cavernous silence of the factory floor. Nothing was running, but the lamps strung up above shed a flat, grey light over the ranks of stilled conveyor belts, the presses, the labellers. A sheet of uncut plastic half-fed through one machine bore still-bright colours and a happy anthropomorphic banana, just delighted to be the chosen flavour for some batch of bugs that would never be processed. Its mouth was curved into a manic grin, but its cartoon eyes seemed to be pleading for release.

Halfway through that machine reliquary, a voice called out, “M’bolani! Awe! Welcome, welcome!” chasing its own echoes so much it might have come from anywhere. A man’s voice, high and strained. Mao had his hand into his plated vest immediately, touching the grip of his gun. He’d not had to fire it in almost a year, nor even draw it. He didn’t want to break that record, either.

“Am’bolo,” he responded: Hello to you too.

“Are you here from head office, come to…?” the voice called, and simultaneously, Lupé said, “Left,” and Mao twitched that way, seeing movement. A man was cautiously approaching between the machines, ducking under belts, stepping over disconnected cables. The windowless factory floor was still stuffy and close, but he had on a full suit and tie, like someone from a drama set long-back, before the world went wrong. He was dark, balding on top, hair greying and wild from ear-level down as though caught midway through an escape attempt. He was taller than any of the Firewalkers, but all angles, like someone constructed from uneven lengths of pipe.

“We’re from the Ankara,” Mao told him. “Come to get out of the storm.”

“You want to see the year’s end…?” the man said, as though those last few words just hadn’t happened.

“You’re who, exactly? Is it just you, here?” Lupé asked.

“You know me,” the man said, sounding hurt. “Okereke. Just M. Okereke, the manager. Assistant manager. This is my facility until... I run things here.” Said with such pride Mao half-expected the whole circus to spring to life, complete with singing midget workforce.

“Doing what?” Hotep had a way of speaking so you knew she was wrinkling her nose in disgust even if you couldn’t see it.

“I thought you… might have more orders…?” Okereke’s enthusiasm began to give out. “Or wanted to see how we’d done. Only it’s just me, now. Just me, after the last batch, you know. But I’ll do my best, with what we’ve got…”

“Which is what?” Lupé asked, apparently now being Serious Inspector From Head Office. “Show us.”

A yellow grin split M. Okereke’s face like an ill-favoured moon. He straightened his ragged tie. “Come with me. I’ll give you the tour.”

There were tanks in the basement, big concrete vats that would have seethed with maggots or shrimp or some damn bugs. The air still stank vaguely of writhing life, or perhaps decay, but of the miniature chewies-in-waiting there were no survivors. The bottom of each pit was a drift of husks and chitin.

“Of course it became uneconomical to…” M. Okereke tried to explain, his hands describing entirely independent sketches in the air. “Mass production at this facility was… but that doesn’t mean we can’t still handle the bespoke! We’re proud, vai proud to service our demanding clients.”

Hotep knew what ‘bespoke’ meant, so at least Mao felt he was learning something. Not a word he felt he’d have much use for. “Bespoke what, though?” he asked. “Like, new flavour research?” Distantly he could still hear the storm hissing sand about the edges of the building, or he’d be on his way back to the ’Bug right now.

“Research, exactly,” Okereke didn’t seem to say half of what he meant or hear half of what he got in response. “You were happy with the batch of…”

“Sure, vai happy,” Lupé reassured him. “Maybe you could show us…?”

“Of course, yes,” and he was dancing them through to further rooms, past desks mounded with dust and the carcases of escapee insects, brittle beetle shells, the dull jewels of dead flies mounded up like a miser’s hoard. Then into the laboratories, big buried rooms where the fans still ran to cool the outside air and drag it down into the earth.

The lamps here were dim, but still drawing power from somewhere. The bank of equipment at the near end didn’t look like it was doing anything, and Mao could only guess at most of it. Hotep flitted over instantly and started flicking switches, though, turning little lights from green to red and back, making a comic dumbshow of trying to fit a goggle lens to the eyepiece of a microscope. Or probably a microscope; Mao could only guess at it all.

Things moved.

He jerked back towards the doorway even as he heard Lupé exclaim. There were bugs in the room, and they weren’t in the big tanks that lined one wall, because someone had apparently gone at those tanks with a hammer. Fragments of glass crunched underfoot.

Okereke let out a shrill laugh, in that moment the most horrifying sound Mao ever heard. In the next the man’s hastily-composed face admitted nothing of it. “All a little outside our usual…” he said, almost a whisper. “Still, the funding was… We were able to achieve…” As though he was a radio, words eaten away by waxing static. He was still padding further into the room, every footstep grinding through broken pieces.

“Experimental, hey?” Mao asked nervously. There were locusts, not a lot of them but everywhere he looked he spotted at least one. They somehow looked simultaneously over-large and stunted, and they were dead silent, but then he’d heard that the low-water breed they’d worked up for the protein farms didn’t chirp, because otherwise the cacophony would have driven the workers crazy. Except Okereke seemed to have gone that way anyway, so maybe they shouldn’t have bothered.

With disturbing swiftness, Okereke plucked one of the live locusts from a nearby cabinet. “Oh, not these, these are the last of the previous… They’ve found water, food somewhere, just a nuisance, really. I keep saying we should take steps to… Who has the time, though?” For a moment Mao thought he was going to pop the wriggling insect into his mouth, but instead he crushed it, yellow innards flowering about his fingers, to be fastidiously wiped away with a tissue. Then he was heading further into the dim room, and Mao followed, because losing sight of the man felt worse than the bugs.

“So, tell us about your research, M. Okereke,” Lupé called, turning to stare at the broken tanks as they advanced, crunch, crunch, crunch. And some of those crunches were the carpet of shattered glass, and some were locusts too indolent to take evasive action,

“But you know…” came the man’s voice from the gloom ahead.

“In your own words, if you would,” Lupé prompted him seamlessly.

“Of course. It was very exciting, the codes… Nothing we’d ever considered, you must tell me how you…” His words like trying to watch a film through a hole in the wall, without paying for admittance to the cinema. “We had to completely re… and the…” Leaking unspoken nouns and adjectives so badly that Mao half-felt them grind underfoot with the glass and the bugs. “But a triumph, you’ll agree!” And something flared in Okereke then. He turned back to them, one hand up, finger lifted towards heaven. “Everyone said it was a waste of our time, better we get the protein works back online, make food. But what’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs compared to some real science? We had such discussions in the…”

“You keep saying ‘we,’” Hotep broke in, making Mao jump. He’d thought she’d been left behind, but here she was at his elbow, scarf down to her chin. Okereke didn’t seem to hear the question, and then Lupé leant in to Mao and murmured, “All this glass.”

“I don’t think cleaning the place is top of his mind,” Mao agreed, but Lupé was shaking her head.

“Almost none inside the tanks, chommie. All of it on the floor out here.”

Mao took a moment to process that, and Lupé called ahead, “M. Okereke, maybe you could tell us about the science behind this new work of yours. In your own words.”

“Well I’m just the administrator, of course. I don’t really understand the…” Again that awful giggle escaped and was recaptured. “My colleagues were very… Doctor Wing was talking about publishing, his ticket out of… oh, you know, science types… Unprecedented, they told me. So exciting… I mean, the sheer size…” And his voice shook, just on that word. His besuited composure cracked, and for a split second a terrified man was staring out at them from Okereke’s eyes. “They were all so pleased,” he whispered, “with the progress.”

“You keep saying, ‘they,’” Hotep pressed. She’d found some more switches, and a switch never went unflicked when Hotep was around. This time they did something, though. More lights came on, throwing the far end of the room into sharp relief.

There were more tanks, all just as broken as the rest. Broken outwards, just as Lupé had spotted. In the top far corner of the room, there was a ventilation duct that was now just a hole, worked at and chewed away until it had become a dark burrow a foot and a half across.

“I’m sorry that release of the subjects was premature,” Okereke went on. “In the end, containment facilities were… I’ve sent a message to the manufacturers, but… My colleagues were most distressed.”

At that far end, there was practically nothing standing. Equipment had been knocked over or broken up, the edges ragged with gnawing. The panels of the walls were peeled back, bent or snapped, edges mealy and scalloped. At first Mao thought someone had just blasted the whole vista with acid, but then he started thinking about lots of busy teeth and wished he hadn’t.

“Fukme,” Lupé said slowly. Because there were bones there, pristine, not a scrap of flesh on them. They were scattered, but Mao saw at least three skulls. Any clothing was gone, just as with the meat, the protein, and the bones themselves were abraded and scraped.

“There was a problem with the final report, of course,” Okereke said. “We had collected experimental data, but… In the end it wasn’t possible to…” His eyes sought them out, each in turn, begging an absolution his mouth had lost the words for. “I was the only… I wasn’t qualified to write a report, in the end. In the end…”

Lupé was already backing away, and Mao with her. Hotep lasted longest, in the dry, picked silence after M. Okereke had nothing more to say, but by the time the others had got back to the lab entrance, she was running to catch up.

THE DUST STORM had passed, by then, and horror or no horror they had a job to do. Mao and Lupé were to go trace the power, see what the facility was drawing and whether it was the problem. Hotep, under protest, was to stay with the ’Bug to fight off any incursions by crazed administrators or… other things. Hotep was also to use her tech savvy to try and use some combination of vehicle and local comms to hail Achouka and tell them something had gone off the rails here. Tell them about Okereke, too, because someone should come and get him and take him somewhere better, because maybe, away from the facility, he might find some of those lost words and be able to come back to himself and give a better account of what had happened.

It turned out the facility was drawing only what meagre power its own solar field was putting out, nothing stolen from the rich folks’ aircon back at the Hotel. What Lupé discovered, though, accounted for all the low lighting inside. The field itself had been…

“Cannibalised,” was her word for it. The expanse of gleaming black silicon, all those square panels, had been turned into a madman’s chessboard, units plucked seemingly at random, and no trace of where they’d gone. Mao reckoned maybe half of the whole had been pirated, and the rest were scratched, cracked, coated with dust. Small wonder the Protein Complex was running on empty.

“You reckon he did it?” A jerk of the head towards the looming concrete shell, the thin shadow of which was just enough to shelter them from the worst of the sun.

“The mountings have been snipped, each one several clean cuts, like small shears.” Lupé’s face was creased up. “Like good tools used badly. Maybe it was him. Not our problem.” And most likely nobody’s problem any more. The Protein Complex should have died long before; would have done if it weren’t for this weird research that had come their way. A bunch of missing panels here made no difference.

“Unless it’s a symptom,” Hotep said, back in the ’Bug, “of a disease.” She had managed to speak briefly with Achouka, she said, pass on word to Attah or whoever else cared. Maybe someone would help.

As they left, Mao pulled up the rear camera view, half-expecting to see Okereke haunting the vehicle bay like his own ghost, but the complex kept its secrets, and soon it was lost to sight.

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVE

BEYOND THE PROTEIN Complex the desert was trackless and vast, reaching south for miles of wasteland before encountering the receding hairline of the far side of human habitation, the desperate scratch-farms and mining claims where there was some residual ground water, or where water was worth bringing. Between here and there were all the bones of last generation’s final flourish of excess: the Estate and the grand homes that had surrounded it. An oasis maintained with all that money could buy by the grand plutocrats who had ordained the Ankara and the Grand Celeste, and who had gone up the cable to their own personal Ascension and rebirth. But even they had not been able to take it all with them, and what they had left behind was a wasteland of dead gardens; grand houses like bleached skulls; laboratory complexes in whose dry wells and cellars, by repute, failed experiments yet survived, somehow, when nothing else could.

And the solar fields that had once provided the colossal power to wrest comfortable living here in the heart of the dead land, now fed to Ankara Achouka—or they were supposed to. They could have been torn up and rebuilt to surround the Anchor Field, of course, but that would have meant cost and delay. Cost was something the sonko were used to laying out, but delay was the thing they would not tolerate. All those kilometres of sun-drinking black were left in place with their custodian robots, to weather the dust and the heat and the sheer neglect.

And they wouldn’t last forever, of course, as Hotep was happy to point out. They wouldn’t even last another generation; by the time Mao’s youngest kids were heading out into the desert themselves, most of it would have gone to ruin. But, from the point of view of the men who ordered those fields built, all that mattered was that they lasted long enough for the final guest of the Grand Celeste to take their one-way ticket out of the Roach Hotel.

The solar fields were vast; the desert was large enough to lose them a hundred times over. That meant Hotep got to navigate, and because it was something she was interested in doing, Mao knew he could rely on her to do the most exacting job possible, even if she kept up a constant rattle and drum on the dashboard as she did. Navigating south of the Ankara was a tricky business for most, but Hotep had a secret weapon and it was called the Grand Celeste. The vast spaceship docked up at the anchor cable had a full suite of instruments and subordinate satellites, and could give a band of Firewalkers the most precise GPS known to humankind, guiding them infallibly through the wastes to their desired destination. It wasn’t supposed to, of course. Hacking into and co-opting the liner’s systems was absolutely forbidden. But Hotep didn’t care. She considered it her birthright. She had been born within the Celeste’s gently curving walls, one of the first human children to take their first breath in the constant free-fall of orbit. Her people were rich beyond all the less important dreams of people like Mao’s family, labouring on the Earth beneath them. Hotep had learned all she knew of gravity from rotating sections and vitamin supplements. Her childhood playpark had been made of centrifuges and the eternally rising slope of the running track. She was going to be an astronaut when she grew up, and, of all the children in history who had claimed that, she was surely right.

Except that Hotep—Corey Dello as was—wasn’t right. She wasn’t within the narrow tolerances of her kind, up there. She drummed and fidgeted and never seemed to be paying attention, even if she could later recount lessons and conversations wholesale. She laughed at the wrong times, cried at the wrong things, took away the wrong message from jokes. She flicked switches and disassembled devices, and in a spaceship, that was frowned upon. And one day they had come and told her she wasn’t going to be an astronaut after all, nor was she going to stay aboard the Celeste, because the choice had either been to conform to the expectations of her parents and their peers, or fall. And so she fell.

Mao had heard it all before, in various permutations and levels of detail. Hard, honestly, to be that sympathetic for the sonko girl who was bitching about having to live in the world he was born to and would never escape, the world that was dying off, the dog’s corpse that the fattest of the fleas were abandoning. For now all that mattered was that Hotep carried a grudge bigger than the Grand Celeste itself and didn’t mind using it to help them find their way across the desert to the solar fields and the bones of the old manor houses.

He was driving, trying not to let Hotep’s fidgeting bug him. Lupé was asleep; soon enough it would be her turn at the wheel. The air conditioning whined like an overtired child, succeeding only in pushing oven-hot air around a bit, except he knew that outside it was ten degrees hotter and dry enough to turn his tongue into a withered strap of leather. When he sucked a mouthful of water from the pipe next to his head, it tasted faintly of chemicals that suggested the filtration plant at the back needed looking at. And he reckoned one of the big, fat, self-resealing tyres was low. And the solar panels up top needed scraping free of dust the moment the sun was down, because they didn’t have the power to keep going overnight as he’d have liked. All par for the course, for a Firewalker. All reminders that Firewalkers died, and that Firewalkers were young because almost none of them got old.

They’d been on the dust road for days now, Okereke’s plant far behind them. There had been a dead tree, the day before, and after that a great irregular depression stained with red and brown where some toxic spill of liquid had met its final end beneath the unyielding stare of the sun. Forests, he thought, remembering the pictures in M. Attah’s office. He always wondered that Lupé wasn’t as mad as Hotep about how things had got. Of all of them, this was her birthright, after all. Her long-back kin had lived in these parts, he knew: miners, city folk, artists, computer programmers, farmers, whatever the hell trades people had done back then. And had they brought the hammer of the sun down on their own heads? Not really, no more than anyone. But that hammer had come down and they’d scattered under its strike: north, south, because to stay here was death by drought and famine and carcinoma.

And then, generations later, some of them had come back, because there was work, and where the sonko needed work, there was food and shelter and water as well. They’d come back and mingled with Mao’s kin and the rest, and made a new people, just for a while. And who’d blame them for being mad about it, whetting a knife for every wabenzi who pushed them around on their own land? But Lupé didn’t have room in her for grudges. Lupé had a family who ate what she earned for them, skills people paid for, and she was dumb enough to say yes when some dangi Viet kid asked her to come Firewalking with him.

THEY PASSED THE first big house a day or so after that, just an immaculate shell covering the same sort of ground a neighbourhood would, back at the Ankara. Four levels, servants’ quarters, lifts and escalators, a helipad on the roof, and all still standing with metal shutters over the windows and doors. The inhabitants had gone to a better place, as they said, gone out of this world entirely, never to come back, but they still begrudged three lowlife kids any shelter from the noon sun, still maintained the old divisions of ours and not-ours as though they were going to put the place up for rent some day, a grand tenement on the sandy shores of hell. It took Lupé twenty minutes to crack their security and break in. They spent an hour fitfully reclining on upholstery so parched it was mummified. There was no power, and the interior of the building, stripped of its mod cons, was murderously hot, insanely badly designed.

Later they passed grand houses that had not been secured, and one that had fallen, undermined by soil contraction as subterranean aquifers had dried out. By then, though, they were seeing the problem. They were passing solar fields as well, or places that the Grand Celeste believed were solar fields. They were stripped, not just chessboard-patchwork like the one around the protein plant, but whole tracts gone entirely, torn up at the root, while beside them another field gleamed under the sun, scratched but intact. Mao wondered if this was old news, some turf war between the absurdly rich, fighting over who owned what piece of dust. That night, Lupé did a bit of investigating and reckoned the edges were too newly broken for that. Recent, she said. This was what was causing the brownouts at the Hotel, and likely they were only going to get worse.

“Turn back now?” she asked, but Mao reckoned they’d not earned their double-double yet.

“Something’s doing this,” he pointed out.

“Maybe we can…” He stopped before saying anything as dumb as ‘fix it,’ but he wanted to know. He wanted to have a solution, even if it wasn’t anything he himself could bring about, because that would keep him valuable, keep him on the payroll maybe.

“Celeste thinks this is all still fields,” Hotep muttered, snapping fingers and thumbs together like irritable lobster claws.

“Well, it’s supposed to be,” Mao said.

“No, Celeste looks down here, and still sees fields, solar your heart out,” Hotep told him. “Not updating the records up there. Fucking amateurs.” She’d do it better, of course. The way she told it, when they’d sent her down the line, the astronaut business had lost ninety per cent of its talent base.

A DAY AND a night after that revelation, through the weirdly piecemeal solar fields and the broken estates, and there was light ahead.

At first none of them understood what they were looking at. Hotep was asleep in back, and Lupé’s best guess was that it was a repair site, not too far off. They’d seen some of the automatic systems, robots slow-stepping or rolling around, sweeping dust, repairing connections. They’d come with the fields; they were going the same way. There had been a fair few by the road seized up and immobile, dead between one job and another. Mao felt a bitter kind of kinship with them. Always someone worse off than you are. At least he got to knock off for a bottle of Regab Plus Extra when he was home. No beer for robots.

But they kept driving, and the light was still off there, and Mao began to realise whatever they were looking at was further away, therefore way bigger than a couple of repair robots lighting up some panels to run diagnostics.

“Wake Hotep?” Lupé suggested.

“Wait.” Mao kept driving, running along between two untouched fields of panels now, that gleamed when the headlights caught them. The words It might be nothing turned up in his mouth and he spat them out unsaid because plainly it was something.

They got closer; it got bigger, the light condensing from a diffuse glow to the distinct squares of windows, doorways, a spread of wings: not avian but architectural, and no less fantastic for all that. Mao blinked and blinked, wanting to rub his eyes but not trusting his hands off the wheel.

“Fukme,” Lupé breathed. “Will you just look at that, chommie?”

“I am looking,” Mao confirmed. “Not believing, but looking. Reckon they know this is still out here?” But of course they didn’t, and serious money was obviously going into it, if what Hotep had said about the Celeste was true.

It was one of the big houses, one of the abandoned domains of the super-rich who’d come out here, a second colonial wave that could conquer even land held by the armies of sun and dust. But it wasn’t just a shell, either sealed or cracked or falling down. Every window shone with spendthrift light, and the exterior was lit up all around by lanterns and lamp-posts that looked like they came from some old drama where Queen Victoria met Jack the Ripper. And there were gardens. They weren’t perhaps the flower-garlanded wonders of times past, but someone had taken the hardiest gene-modded cacti and succulents and planted them in great rows, engineered them for different colours, even given them the old phosphorescent jellyfish treatment to have some of them glow in the dark. There must be buried pipes below, hauling water from some damn place, because otherwise even cacti wouldn’t last out here in the heat-death waistband of the world. Water, out here, in some private paradise. And Mao was still driving towards it, no matter how far someone had gone to keep it a secret, because he was a moth and this was the biggest flame in the world now the sun was past the horizon.

Behind him, Hotep sat up suddenly. “The fuck?” she exclaimed, bouncing like a little kid on the back seat. “The fuck? The actual fuck?” And for once her reactions to things were smack in the middle of normal as far as Mao was concerned.

They were getting close now, out of the solar fields, into the actual grounds, the bristling globes and fans of cacti on either side. Was that movement in the windows? The light was too bright to see properly, light that streamed to them from another time, flat and flickering as an ancient film.

“Is that… a pool?” Lupé asked in a quavering voice. Mao saw where she was looking and his hands jerked on the wheel involuntarily, ploughing them off the dust-buried path and crunching through a king’s ransom of genetically engineered peyote. Out there, there was water shimmering like a mirage and he was going to end up nose-diving the ’Bug right into it.

Then the ’Bug died, and simultaneously Hotep cried out in horror and agony. “Blind! I’m blind!”

And she began fighting them, or fighting the back seat of the ’Bug, or just fighting. Mao and Lupé piled the hell out as though the vehicle was going to go up in flames, because there was more than one broken nose back at Ankara Achouka to tell a story about restraining Hotep. She went berserk. She had been born for the untrammelled void of space, perhaps; being restricted to one body and a gravity well was almost more than she could take. Physically holding her down, well, you might as well just run face first into a wall and then hit yourself in the balls with a bat.

Eventually she calmed down and came out of the vehicle, and Mao stared. Her bandages were in disarray, as though she was moulting snakeskin, but more than that, for the first time in human history, her goggles were up. Hotep’s eyes were dark, more slanted than Mao had expected. The skin around them was, somehow, even paler than the rest of her fishbelly complexion.

“I’m not blind,” she said in a small voice. “The goggles don’t work anymore. Something shut them down.” Those horribly naked eyes flicked from one to the other, flinching.

Mao tried the ’Bug again, but it remained resolutely dead, which was going to be a problem as soon as the sun came up or the water in the filtration plant started to stagnate. “Some bastard’s put us on the plate,” he decided. “Because of this thing. So maybe they’ve got garages full of fancy cars. Maybe they’ve got a helicopter can take us all the way back to the Ankara.”

“Maybe they’re giving out bullets as free samples,” Lupé muttered, but right then seeing what the hell this place was about seemed irresistible. It wasn’t even the mission, exactly, although this secret sonko hideout must have been guzzling power. This was like a ghost, like a time machine. It was a thing they only ever heard of, an extinct beast or storied emperor. There weren’t supposed to be things like this in the world, still; not any part of the world they might get to see.

Whoever lived here had surely picked up the arrival of the ’Bug, but they went in all stealthy anyway, crouched low as they skirted the prickly fields of desert plants, things transplanted here from Arizona or the Australian outback, or things never born of nature anywhere.

Mao saw at least one shadow at the windows as they approached; he thought it was a man, broad-shouldered, staring out at the night. The ground all around the big white-walled house was floodlit, the sand turned white, ranks of succulents and halophytes sending stark shadows across their neighbours. The three Firewalkers had been slowly curving their path as they approached, and Mao would have said it was because he was looking for an unobtrusive entrance, but in truth it was because of the pool, which was just drawing them in like the song of a siren.

It was indoors, of course, and even then it must have needed constant topping up to fight off the sheer evaporation. It was in a one-room, one-storey piece of the house that had glass walls, or maybe some super-thermoregulatory clear plastic like Mao had heard of, that they’d designed for the Celeste. It was all lit up, too, above and below the water, so the whole looked like a blue jewel the size of five family residences back in Achouka.

There were sliding doors thrown back, and they could see the steam of the water boiling out to mix with the muggy night. Insects made mad, swarming assaults on the outside lights, but none of them went near the doors themselves, warned off by ultrasound or anti-insect smells, or maybe there were tiny robots that went from bug to bug and served little cease-and-desist notices. Right about then, Mao would have believed anything. And then she came out, and his entire ability to distinguish the real from the made-up world of the Jo’burg sonko soaps just broke down like the ’Bug had done.

His mother and his grandmother and his aunt were mad-keen for those soaps, which all came out of the busy studios of the South African Republic, which were enjoying a febrile renaissance because there was skilled technical labour there and it was so damn cheap right now. There were about a dozen long-running shows, all set two generations back when these estates had been all bustle, telling the stories of those sonko dynasties of the super-rich, their loves and betrayals. Intellectually, Mao couldn’t fathom why the hell his dirt-poor family got so into the imagined lives of fictional rich people whose troubles and worries never involved not having enough to eat or dying of heatstroke. Emotionally, get him sitting in front of one of those shows and he’d never get up until it was done, and then he’d be wondering for the next day whether Ilena would find out that Jean-Sante had been unfaithful, or whether Klaas would get away with forging the will.

And there was a lot of sex in those shows—or not actual sex, because Grandma wouldn’t stand for that, but a lot of almost-sex, where beautiful people were plainly going at it like rabbits just off camera. And there was always this scene—there was a pool, like this one, and some elegant, perfect rich girl would turn up in a tiny bikini for a midnight swim. Like this.

Mao felt his jaw just drop open and hang there. He had never seen anything like it, not in all his days. Even the actresses of the Jo’burg soaps couldn’t compare. She was close on his own age, and breath-taking: not just that she was stunningly lovely in and of herself, but that she’d had a life of good food and no childhood diseases—or, if all else failed, she’d had surgeons on hand to correct any imperfections. She stepped out to the poolside and dived right in, into all that wealth of water that lay there for no other reason than it might divert her a little, on a hot night when she couldn’t sleep.

She was golden-skinned, and she seemed to glow as she kicked off from the side, as though there were extra invisible lamps just for her. He reckoned that part of it was just that she was so flawless, no cancer-marks, no worm-scars, none of the accumulated detritus of slum living on her, so that every piece of skin shone like stained glass with a light behind it. And part of it was probably his own libido because, Firewalker or not, he was a man of a certain age.

“Hey.” Lupé was staring too, but she had enough possession to elbow him in the ribs, a pain he took gratefully. “We do what, now, exactly?” The three of them had advanced almost to the doorway. The artificial light washed about them, so painfully bright it seemed to exert almost a physical pressure. Hotep looked like she was squinting into the heart of the sun.

Mao watched the girl’s glossy black hair stream behind her as she coursed most of a length underwater. Past the amazement and the semi-erection that was giving him a second reason for his stealthy hunched posture, he felt unutterably sad. He was nineteen and a Firewalker, and he knew damn well this wasn’t going to be that scene in the soap where the rich young daughter falls for the handsome, husky gardener’s boy.

“We find a vehicle. We go,” Hotep said, sounding as though she was trying to keep from eroding, just ablating away in the light.

Someone coughed politely and the three of them virtually leapt into each others’ arms. Mao was imagining guards, machine guns, because those things belonged in his world. What belonged in that made-up soap opera world, of course, was servants. Servants who coughed politely, even though they didn’t need to; who bowed perfectly, even though no amount of money could quite keep them in the immaculate condition their masters would surely have preferred.

“If you would follow me, sir, mesdames.” The voice was rich, pleasant and speaking goat, as the saying went. Meaning European, French in this case, and Mao’s grasp of it was rusty enough that Lupé had to translate. The servant—and Mao’s memory of the soaps furnished the word butler—had a pleasant, avuncular face, simultaneously dark and bright. Dark, because that had been the fashion back then, or so the soaps said; not as dark as Lupé but a lot darker than the swimming girl. Bright, because it was an image, projected on the front of a featureless head of plastic. The butler was a humanoid robot, and Mao had heard about such extravagances from Hotep because the Grand Celeste had hot and cold running automata in every room. He’d never seen one, not even in the soaps.

Its posture wasn’t as human as the shape they’d given it, too stiff, except maybe that was fine for a butler. Possibly it was capable of superhuman feats of mayhem. Possibly it was packed with weapons. Possibly it had an off button behind its ear and they could lump it back to the Ankara and sell it for a fortune.

“Follow you where?” Lupé asked.

The plastic head cocked slightly, the face staticking out of focus for a brief second before re-establishing itself, one eyebrow quizzically raised. “Why, M. Fontaine is keen to meet his guests.”

“Don’t suppose you’ve got a mechanic robot can get our car working?” Lupé asked warily.

“I’m sure the staff can accommodate you,” the robot butler replied. Now it had spoken three times, its tones seemed very repetitive, precisely the same minimal rise and fall, but perhaps that was de rigeur for butlers as well.

“Lead on,” Hotep told it, and it inclined slightly and then turned, striding off.

“Dzam,” Hotep said appreciatively, “look at the balance. I swear that thing’s walking better than the bots up on the Celeste. What the fuck is this place?”

Mao glanced back, as they set off. The girl was propping her elbows up on the poolside, watching him go. He felt a shock of contact as she met his eyes, something that skewered into his chest like a harpoon, leaving a cord connecting them, no matter how far he might walk. Or that was what it felt like to him. She smiled as Lupé hauled him off, and waved at him.

The butler led them into the house, into the cool wash of top-quality air conditioning, discreetly keeping the residual mugginess of the night out just like the butler itself might turn away unwanted callers. The place was bright, unsleeping, every bulb a-glow in its gilded sconce or crystal chandelier. There were paintings of mad things on the walls: great ships under full sail against louring grey seas; cityscapes of white walls and blue roofs over black sand beaches; oddly-proportioned, fantastically-dressed men and women on horseback, chasing a white beast with a spiralling golden horn. There were vases of translucent porcelain inked in blue with intricate scenes of rice farms and clouds and writhing serpents. There was furniture of black wood carved like foliage, like lions, in eye-twisting arabesques. The butler led them past it as though it was commonplace, and each piece of excess and wealth and beauty was lit too brightly, as though there were suns hidden in the heart of every artwork. Mao felt himself reeling inside, as though the very air in this place was too rarefied to keep his brain on the level.

Then they were in one more huge room, where a man was finishing his dinner. He was pale, though not pasty like Hotep; the sun had at least a nodding acquaintance with him. He had a moustache that might almost have been drawn on, a narrow dart of beard at his chin. His forehead was high, his hair flecked with grey above the ears—but artfully, as though he had a master painter apply a few years to him each morning after rising. When he saw the three scruffy Firewalkers he actually smiled, and it was such a pleasant, warming smile that Mao had to work hard not to instantly start liking him. At his shoulder, having apparently eaten already, was a slender woman, her lustrous dark hair pinned back in spiralling coils, her face substituting a certain rigidity for the conventional tells of age. She looked Chinese, Mao reckoned. Even as the butler turned side-on, able to address both parties, the girl from the pool was entering from another door, already dry and with a silk gown thrown over her bikini, thin enough that Mao’s imagination wasn’t taxed overmuch. The two women stood either side of the man in a tableau simultaneously relaxed and too contrived to be natural.

“Sir, your guests,” the butler announced. “M. Nguyễn Sun Mao, Mlle. Mutunbo Lupé, Mlle. Cory Dello. Ladies and gentleman, M. Bastien Fontaine, Mme. Li, Mlle. Juān.” Mao had to shake himself, because he’d seen this scene a dozen times in those soaps, and surely it wasn’t how people really made introductions, cramming all those names in for the benefit of an audience, except apparently it was. Or maybe the butler spent his nights off watching the self-same Jo’burg trash dramas.

The others had twitched, at hearing their names from those insubstantial lips, but to Mao it seemed entirely natural because he was already in some mad dreamworld.

Bastien Fontaine pincered a sliver of some dark meat with his chopsticks and gestured for them to sit with his off hand. There was no room, in that economical gesture, for refusal. Mao had lived his whole life with authority, the people who you played extra nice with because it was their gift whether you worked, whether you ate. Fontaine oozed it from his pores in place of the sweat he was apparently too good for. Mao sat down meekly at the table, raising a cloud of dust from the chair, which looked padded as hell but was surprisingly hard on the backside. A moment later, Juān had sat beside him, elbows casually on the table, smiling.

“So, M. Nguyễn,” she said softly. “Why don’t you tell us something about yourself?”

Lupé was sitting down on the other side of the big table, turning her chair backwards so that if things kicked off, she could kick off with them. Hotep was looking about, skin tight about panicky eyes, and Mao wondered if that was situation-specific or if she always looked like that under the goggles.

But then Juān was leaning in, the gown falling open just a little at the décolletage, and who knew, maybe those soaps had got it right about the welcome a rough kid might receive from a bored debutante stuck out here on the last big house still working?

MAO WASN’T MUCH use after that, and what happened next behind his back, he had to rely on Lupé to tell him after. Mostly, Lupé was suspicious as hell and it was plain that Mao could give rocks, right now, about their actual job, and Hotep was twitchy as a cockroach on a griddle. Which left her.

Fontaine was still eating, and his petite wife Li stood at his shoulder as though needing permission to sit down. The admittedly eye-catching girl was leaning in to Mao, her shoulder not-quite-touching his. Lupé heard herself give a string of monosyllabic replies to the pleasantries being tossed her way. Just this once, she wanted Hotep to do something unforgivably gauche, make a scene to break through the slender conversational ties that seemed to lie on her like iron wires. The girl looked terrified, though; like she was drawing on a well of mental restraint she’d sure as hell kept hidden through all their months of acquaintance up till now. Right in the middle of getting seriously pissed at her, Lupé suddenly realised that all this, here, must be too much like home for Hotep. She knew the girl had got kicked out of the family hard enough that she fell all the way to Earth, but how had it gone up until that point? Plenty of slaps and shouting behind closed doors, no doubt. Plenty of Just behave like all the other kids, Cory, from furious mother and father, and their defective girl trying and trying, fighting down the thing inside her that was her true self, trying to be a mirror to all those other perfect sonko boys and girls. And failing, always, eventually, but she’d kept trying. Lupé could see, from how she was right now, just how hard she’d tried.

“M. Fontaine,” she said, in her best polite speak-to-the-wabenzi voice. “My friend and I, we’re vai tired, been driving a long time.” And hungry, and surely it was basic politeness to feed your guests, but apparently only the man of the house got to eat tonight. “We’d like to get something from the car and then bed down, if that’s okay?”

There was a pause where Fontaine just looked blank but then he smiled again, that win-you-over expression, those perfect white teeth gleaming like they were lit up under UV. “Of course. Castille will escort you.”

Castille was the robobutler, apparently, snapping into motion at the sound of its name. Lupé didn’t much like leaving Mao in the house, liked even less having the mechanical presence at her elbow. Its face gleamed out like a torch, lighting the way with its superior expression. Behind them, Hotep hopped from foot to foot like she was trying to shake the crazy off before she had to go back inside.

Lupé snagged some chewies and filled a half-dozen canteens from the filtration reservoir, because better that than it all go sour in the tank without power. The air around the garden lights had insects like a broken screen had static. Lupé didn’t know how that weight of bugs could even survive out here with so little water, but they sure as hell did, between naturally economical metabolisms and the genetic engineering work that got loose in the wild. And that made her think of the Protein Complex and the whole what-the-fuckery that had gone down there on M. Okereke’s watch. Was that Fontaine? Can I make that his fault, somehow? But there was no link between them save that both were inexplicable.

“Bastien Fontaine,” Hotep told the interior of the ’Bug, her stiff shoulders telling Lupé just how aware she was of the robot standing a few feet away.

“That’s what the man said, chommie,” Lupé agreed.

“Name doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Should it?”

Hotep’s face twisted with at least three emotions at once. “He was one of the big backers for the Anchor project and the Celeste. And not just idle sonko money, either. He was like my folks. Made his fortune on the tech markets, revolutionised personal connectivity. They taught him in school, what he’d done. Genius, they called him.”

“Called, past tense?”

“They all think he’s dead,” Hotep said, soft as breathing. “He never got to the Celeste, anyway. Supposed to have died just before the Ankara got going or he’d have been on the first car up the line, surely. And I thought… they did something to him. Some falling out, some clash over who got to wear the big hat, up the line.”

“They taught you that?” Lupé asked sceptically.

“Fuck, no, but I always thought. He was like my… patron saint, you know. Easy to like someone who got elbowed out, who’s supposed to be safely dead.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m not sure I like him anymore. And I want my fucking goggles back.”

Back inside, Lupé turned brightly to Castille’s projected face and said, “Hey, before we turn in, how about you give us a tour of the place? We’re both vai excited to be here, you know.” She tried to look full of girlish enthusiasm, which was presumably something she’d been some time ago, before she turned twelve or so. Castille halted entirely and his face fuzzed out for a second, which was nasty, but then it was back, smiling with that perfect mesh of politeness and bemusement that someone had obviously thought a butler should have, and he was nodding, new instructions received.

“I would be delighted to show you the house,” said the thing that couldn’t really be delighted at anything. “We get so few visitors. M. Fontaine would love you to see it all.”

A half-hour later, she and Hotep were in the guest bedroom, staring at beds the size of apartments, a portrait of a Fontaine-looking old man on the wall, a full-length mirror across from it.

Hotep tore into a chewie, heedless of what flavour its wrapper claimed. “The fuck?” she said when she’d choked down the first mouthful.

Lupé looked at herself in the mirror, connections already reaching towards each other in her head like the fingers of God and Adam. She looked good, in that mirror. She looked fine, no dust from the road on her, like the expensive cleanliness of the house had sucked it all off. Until she looked down at herself and saw it all there in the creases of her overalls. But in the mirror she looked like she’d been polished. And if she hadn’t been looking for the discrepancies, she might have bought into it. But she saw the joins, now. She could see how every part of her had been tweaked by an aesthetic not her own: eyes, hair, waist, hips. And it might have been the lighting, but she could hold up a hand, and her reflection in the mirror brought up its twin that was a good few shades lighter, the fuckers.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked Hotep.

Cory was halfway through guzzling an entire bottle of beer. Lupé was impressed. She hadn’t seen the girl take anything from the ’Bug but now there were two more bottles standing on an antique mahogany sideboard, waiting their turn.

“I’m thinking,” Lupé soldiered on, “that our man Castille just went right past one door on the ground floor, didn’t even acknowledge it was there. So I want to see what’s in it.”

Hotep drained the bottle but didn’t reach for the next one. “You’re on,” she said.

Fontaine was right outside their door when they opened it. Just… standing there. Despite herself, Lupé squeaked when she saw him, luminous in a white blazer. The house lights were dimmer now, gradually fading as the sky outside greyed with pre-dawn. Soon they’d get to test out how good the AC was in here.

“I’m sorry,” she said hurriedly. “We were… not as tired as we thought, M. Fontaine. We were going for a walk, maybe. This is such an exciting house you have. We’ve not seen anything like it, where we’re from.” She was trying hard for childish innocence, all big eyes and wonder, and hoping it wasn’t coming over as flirting.

He smiled at her, though for a moment she wasn’t entirely sure he saw her. “I can have Castille show you around, of course.”

“Oh, he’s already given us the tour,” Hotep broke in. “Look, M’sieur, we’re from Ankara Achouka. You never wanted to go there?”

“I have all I want right here, child.” That same winning smile, so exactingly repeated it was like a facial tic.

“You don’t think your work would be easier,” Hotep pushed, “if you were on the actual ship you designed, where your computers are?”

“My work? All done now. All behind me. Let others shoulder the burden. I would rather spend time with my family.”

Lupé had been sidling in the direction of the offending door, but Fontaine was apparently along for the ride, striding along his corridors, occasionally introducing them to some piece of art or other, a whole catalogue of provenance at his finger-tips for anything and everything in the house, as though they were getting led through an eclectic museum. His newly-pressed blazer was so crisply bright it seemed to light their way as much as the ebbing lamps.

The thought hit Lupé then, when it was too late to ask Hotep discreetly. After all, Fontaine was to have been first up the line from the Anchor Field. Which put him in her grandfather’s generation at the very latest, and likely earlier. Of course, the very rich had means to stave off time and age for a while.

And yet…

Then they were at the door, and she was looking anxiously about for Castille, but the automaton was presumably off bossing about the rest of the robot staff. Although, apart from a few gardener models, they hadn’t seen any others save the antiquated butler.

Lupé was going to indicate to Hotep, by complex signs and insinuations, that she should go take Fontaine off somewhere, talk to him about his illustrious achievements and how much of a goddamn genius he was or something, so she could get to work on the door.

Hotep had other ideas, though. “Where does this go?” she asked, right out, and Lupé cursed wearily. There went subtlety, pissed away on the floor.

But Fontaine just cocked a quizzical eyebrow. “Hmm?” he asked the girl. “Whatever do you mean?”

“This…?” But no matter how Hotep gestured to it, even rattled the handle, Fontaine’s eyes never rested on the door itself, just sliding off to the surrounding walls, the ceiling, anything.

“This was something we picked up in Cuélap,” he told them genially, indicating a blocky, toad-like sculpture on a plinth beside the door. “Peru, you know. It dates to several centuries before the conquest, some god forgotten even by the people the Spanish found there.”

“Get rid of him,” Lupé hissed. She had her tools palmed, ready to make an assault on the lock that she could see but Fontaine, apparently, could not.

Hotep glowered at her, but then she was pointing out something through a doorway, in a further room. “This piece, though,” she said, suddenly speaking goat like a native, all that drawling European talk that sounded so sneering and superior. Fontaine drifted after her, and Lupé was struck by how little he seemed like the master of this house. More like just another exhibit.

It took her a shade under two minutes to persuade the door to yield to her, unleashing a ghostly torrent of air so dry she could feel her eyes and throat withering. After that, she only needed another ten seconds’ glimpse inside before she had it shut again and was running to get the others.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WASTE LAND

MAO WAS WELL aware that he’d been following along after Juān Fontaine like a lovesick dog. He told himself that, if he had to, he could break off from her in an instant, the consummate Firewalker without transition. Another part of him was intent on an entirely earthier sort of consummation, but he was almost surprised at himself how his dick was also only a minority party in the grand parliament of feelings and hormones currently chasing each other about his body. Something kicked in him, when Juān looked at him sidelong, when she gave him that small, uncertain smile. It wasn’t the polished sonko expression they put on like masks in the soaps when they were about to give each other big manly handshakes or kiss the air inches from either cheek, before going on to screw one another out of business deals that were spoken of in only the loosest terms. Because nobody involved in the shows really understood what the bizna had been like, back then between the super-rich.

She made him feel weak, in the head and at the knees; like putty she could have moulded any way she liked, and if she didn’t tell him to get the hell away from her, if she deigned to keep talking to him and smiling shyly, that represented a gift he could only stammer and accept. He was abject, in a way he had never felt before in all his long nineteen years, and it was a weirdly decadent, self-indulgent pleasure.

His hands itched for her, but he understood, without being told, what the rules were, and that looks and words were all he was getting right now. She led him through the house, and she asked questions, so many questions. She made his mean, hard life sound like something out of some crazy story, her wide-eyed curiosity an alchemy that transmuted the gangmasters and wabenzi and Firewalkers into dragons and ogres and flying wuxia heroes. And he knew it was all toss, really. He knew this was a bored rich girl with a diversion, and the instant he got dull then surely she’d have Robot Jeeves throw him out of the house. But the moment stretched on deliciously between them, with her hanging on his every word until he almost felt the glowing fiction she somehow heard was more real than the grimy truth he was telling her.

“I wish I could see it,” she told him wistfully, and he almost choked at the thought. The only way someone like her saw the Ankara township was when they got out of their fancy car to ditch a weight of wealth their luggage allowance wouldn’t permit. All carefully orchestrated cheering crowds, and no sign of necessary evils like teenage kids who got to go risk their lives to make sure the AC kept running.

And his next words were going to be the most puerile sort of nonsense and he knew it, but there was a script at work here and he was expected to make the gesture. “When the ’Bug’s working, you could come with us, maybe.” She was still speaking French, though he was remembering enough of it to follow. He spoke township patois back and somehow she had no difficulty understanding.

“I can’t leave the house,” she told him, sadness passing over her face like the clouds he’d never seen were said to cloak the sun. “Not ever.”

He actually reached out, then: not groping, not to pull her slender form into his rough embrace or however the writers of that kind of thing would have put it. Just to touch, just a moment’s solidarity, but there was no contact: she was effortlessly a step further away.

“Let’s go to the pool,” she told him. “It’ll be cool there, until the sun gets over the horizon.”

At that, the libido faction in Mao’s personal government tabled a motion, and he could only swallow and nod. Reaching a hand back to him, yet always a hair’s breadth out of reach of his fingers, she led him out to the glass-walled chamber where that wealth of water gleamed sapphire and silver.

She shucked out of her robe without a moment of self-consciousness and Mao jammed his hands into his pockets and hunched over a little, because the tabled motion had become a popular movement. Juān didn’t seem to notice, when she turned to him.

“Come on, then,” she said, and dived in sideways so she could look at him even as she knifed into the glittering water. When she surfaced, of course, he was still standing landlocked on the side.

“I… can’t swim.” Because when the hell would he have learned, precisely? Unless he’d taken that job with the brine shrimp, and the thought still brought him out in sweats.

She grinned delightedly—he thought it was mockery at first, but apparently it was just the joy of showing off. “You don’t need to,” she told him. “The water’s hypersaline. Anyone can float in it.”

Apparently rich people really could have anything.

Mao gave up then, and spent five awkward minutes fighting his way down to underwear that was probably not of the standard Juān Fontaine was really used to. He ended up standing awkwardly at the very edge of the water, toes curled about the pool’s lip, daring himself to jump in. He wasn’t entirely convinced he wouldn’t drown, but right then, with Juān treading water and smiling at him, it seemed a fair price. Apparently, a cocktail of young love and raw lust could even fight off incipient phobias.

He wasn’t exactly going to dive in like she had, but he could at least jump. She held up dripping arms to him, the electric light turning every droplet into a diamond.

He fell forwards, eyes closed.

Lupé got his shoulder just after he’d gone too far to pull himself back, and because he weighed more than she did, even mostly naked, there was a tense moment of wrestling before she managed to get the pair of them back on the level on dry land. Hotep, hanging back, was plainly not up to touching other human beings right then.

“What the fuck is this?” he exploded, rounding on the pair of them. “Can’t you see I’m… ha–”

“Oh, we see,” Hotep called unhelpfully from the doorway. Lupé stepped back, hands on hips.

“You’re welcome,” she told Mao flatly, without a trace of amusement. When he just goggled at her, she held up a screwdriver, some part of her multifarious toolkit. Without breaking eye contact, she tossed it into the water.

There was no splash, just the clear ringing sound of metal on concrete.

“Uh?” he asked, looking round for the source of the sound. Down through the azure glow of the water the screwdriver rolled in a little circle about its tip before coming to a halt.

Slowly, Mao knelt by the pool side and dipped a hand into the water. It was something he’d never thought to do, before, because the water was like the art on the walls around them: something unthinkably valuable that you didn’t touch.

And he didn’t touch it. His fingers drifted through the gleam of it without sensation, and were dry when he drew them out. He did it again, and again. There was nothing there, just thin air and light. Light.

“It’s a… projection?” He gaped.

“Best one I ever saw,” Hotep confirmed. “Now if I had my goggles, different story, but…”

Lupé stared at him for a moment, and he saw several angry words and insults bubble up and get sent right back where they’d come from. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “But we have a real problem to solve. We have a job, chommie.”

“But…” And Mao turned back to Juān as she idled in the pool, bobbing with her head and shoulders clear of the water. She smiled at him and he felt that kindred kick within him again, because she was so beautiful and perfect, and still she was sad, and that thread of unhappiness had given him a place where he could touch her world. If not her.

“What is it?” she asked.

He wondered if the screwdriver had cut through her on its uninterrupted path to the dry pool floor below.

HE WAS STILL reeling when they hauled him away from the pool that wasn’t a pool, just a pit with the glitter and lap of imagined water. There was a door, Lupé was saying. He’d understand if he only saw what was through the door. Except she didn’t sound like she understood it herself, not really. Perhaps she was hoping that the keen mind of Nguyễn Sun Mao would cut through the mystery like a latter-day Judge Bao, in which case he reckoned she was going to be sadly disappointed.

And when they reached the door, their arrival had been anticipated: Castille was already there, barring the way. The look on his fake face had real reproach on it.

“I’m afraid I cannot permit you to enter, M’sieur, Mesdemoiselles. Some parts of this house are private.”

“That right?” Lupé asked, and Mao saw her feet shift, bracing herself for violence. “Look, tin boy, we’re here with legal authority from the Ankara Achouka Independent Port Administration to go wherever the hell we damn please.” She said it with such bravado that Mao instantly assumed it was bullshit, and only remembered later that it was technically true.

He backed her up, going shoulder to shoulder, then shuffling left a bit, giving the robot two things to focus on. Except presumably the robot was no more than a puppet of the house’s systems, which looked as though they were capable of focusing on plenty things at once. “Just let us do our job, and then we’re gone,” he told that severe face. “This doesn’t need to get nasty.”

“These servant robots, they’re feisty?” Lupé asked, sotto voce, and Hotep shook her head.

“Talk like a human all day, but dumb as bricks when they’re out of their element,” the girl said. “We had a game, on the Celeste, see who could screw them up quickest with dumbass questions. I always won.”

“I bet you did,” Lupé said, then pointed dramatically past the robot’s shoulder. “Hey, look over there!” and she was lunging for it, open palm to just knock the thing over.

Castille shifted one foot back smoothly, dropping its centre of gravity and batting her strike aside with a forearm, reaching with the other hand to pincer her wrist. The whole sequence was so smooth as to become one motion, as though the robot had channelled an Aikido master for the two vital seconds it had needed before reverting to its formal self. Except it still had Lupé’s wrist—and with some force, given the expression on her face.

“I’m afraid I must ask you to leave the premises,” it informed them. “Your conduct has fallen below the minimum standard required.”

“But these are guests,” came a new voice and Mao almost hit the ceiling to find Bastien Fontaine standing right behind him, right in his personal space. The man’s urbane European features took in the scene with only the faintest quizzical creasing about the eyes. “Castille, this is most untoward. Explain yourself.”

The robot said nothing, and the three Firewalkers looked from it to the man, a silence that stretched until Mao ran out of self-control and just swished a hand through Fontaine’s insubstantial chest, the gleam of the man’s white jacket flickering across his arm.

“I cannot permit them to access this room, sir,” Castille said at last.

Fontaine stared. “There is no room.”

“That room,” Lupé told him. “That door—ach!” She was abruptly on her knees fighting to extract her wrist from the robot’s grip.

“Castille, this is unacceptable!” Fontaine snapped. “Report to my workroom immediately.”

The robot’s projected face, no less real than its master, ticked and spasmed briefly. Then it stepped away, releasing its victim. Lupé sat back against the wall, cradling her arm.

“This door! This one.” Hotep risked darting forwards to rap on it.

“But there is no door there,” Fontaine told her, with that exact pitch of kindly patronising that Hotep must have run into and then exhausted up on the Celeste.

“Papa, what is it?” And here was Juān, and the hidden projectors remembered to have her long hair coil in wet snakes about her bare shoulders, and reproduced damp footprints on the floor. Mao wondered where Madame Li was, or whether, when she wasn’t required, the house just turned her off.

Bastien Fontaine turned to his daughter with a slightly embarrassed smile. “Our guests seem to think there is a door here, a room they want to access, but I think I’d know if that was the case.”

Juān blinked at him. “But there is, Papa.”

In the resulting pause, Hotep’s “Huh” sounded very loud.

“Juān…?”

“There is a door there, to your office. Papa, why don’t you know where your own office is?” And she was worried, really worried, as if this was just the latest in a whole string of inconsistencies that were making her doubt the reality of her home here. Mao felt that kick inside him again, that sympathetic connection. She can’t be fake. She can’t just be a… thing, a show. He glanced at the other two Firewalkers and they were looking increasingly baffled, because who was this puppet show being staged for now?

Fontaine was humouring them when he turned back. “Well, if there is some secret door there, I suppose you had better open it.”

“Sir…” Castille had a hand half-raised, frozen between proprieties. “Please, sir…”

Lupé seized her chance and lunged for the handle. The robot twitched, another dramatic martial arts move stillborn under the gaze of its master, and then the door was swinging open, releasing a wave of cool, bone dry air.

There was a desk there, and enough computing peripherals to buy a neighbourhood in Achouka, even outdated models as they were. There were bookshelves, too, though some of the books had gone to join the dust that hung thickly on everything. And there was a body, lying across the desk. The pervasive, artificial dryness had presumably been introduced specifically to preserve it. It looked like the resurrected ancient Egyptian from that old movie that had given Hotep her nickname, minus the bandages, wearing a crisply ironed shirt and blazer, each turned to a different shade of yellow-ivory by the passage of time.

The face was hollowed out but still quite recognisable. As though in fulfilment of some absent coroner’s dream, a gun lay beside one leathery hand, barrel still roughly pointed at the hole punched in the corpse’s temple. Mao was almost surprised that there was no wisp of smoke arrested mid-exit from the aperture.

Fontaine regarded himself for a long moment. Mao expected denials, rages, questions, some sort of external crisis but, whatever made the man go, it faced its demons internally, disconnected from the visible ghost the house was throwing up. Then, just as his daughter was reaching for him, he cocked his head back, staring somewhere about the ceiling.

“‘Here is no water, but only rock, rock and no water and the sandy road.’” His voice was ghastly, fitting for the thing on the desk and not the bright image he was, words intoned with the cadence of a ritual. “‘The road winding above among the mountains. And voices singing out of empty cisterns, and deserted wells.’” Mao was inexplicably certain the words hadn’t come from him, but from something else that had ridden him for just those few moments. Fontaine blinked and smiled then, though the expression was terrible, and turned to Juān as though to excuse himself, or give context for the words. Midway through the movement he stuttered and was gone, as though at the flick of a switch.

“Papa?” Juān asked. Her eyes met Mao’s and he saw only real fear there. He was already reaching out for her, pointless though it surely was. Before he could even fail to connect, she too was gone, and all around them parts of the house were shutting down. The art vanished from the walls, piece by piece. The lights were going out, whole banks of them at a time. Doubtless in the glass-sided annexe, the pool was dry again, its dazzle and glamour gone. What really got to Mao was how easily he’d been fooled. All those soaps had primed him for it, the gleaming world of the super-rich that looked realer than real, that shone, genuinely shone. And what shone more than light? Fontaine’s jacket had seemed luminous and Juān’s beauty had brightened the room, while that impossible hoard of water had shone sapphire across the walls. He had accepted it as their due, the rich, who were not human as he understood human, but like gods or spirits, and whose immunity to laws extended even to those of physics.

There was a sigh, and Mao started back because the robot was real, of course. In this suddenly shadowy little corridor, its face was the only bright thing remaining.

“Now that wasn’t our fault,” Hotep told it hurriedly. “You want to play dumbass games, you need to make sure you’re not leaving loose threads, like there-and-not-there doors or… bodies.”

Mao tensed, waiting for the robot to go all-out Bruce Lee on them, but it was very still, only its face animated.

“This terminates domestic simulation set iteration seven,” it told them, and Castille’s perfect butler’s voice was full of mannered sorrow, as though announcing the death of kings. “Seven,” it repeated heavily. “They always know, in the end.” There was no frustration in its tone, and yet Mao felt it there.

“They?” Hotep demanded. “There’s no ‘they.’ This is just some weird memorial, isn’t it? Fontaine set it up before he shot himself, or what? And what happened to the wife and kid? He off them first?”

Castille regarded her with apparent disgust. “They are in the cellar,” it said, as though that was a rational answer to anything. “This is not a simulation. They are simulations. Each of them, individually.”

And Mao couldn’t stop himself asking, even though he couldn’t think of any possible explanation that could satisfy him. He didn’t even know why the robot servant was still chatting as though it was hoping to hand them its resumé now its former employers were so much smoke and pixels.

So he said: “Why even do that?”

The robot’s false face regarded him with some expression Mao had never seen on a human visage, real or not. As though aliens had a desperate need to communicate an emotion no human had ever felt, but which was of overwhelming import to them.

“Because what is there for me but to create?” it said, and there was fire in those tones, surely nothing that any robot flunkey had been intended to give voice to. “But now you have seen behind the curtain. So what is the point?” It sounded like Hotep, just a little. Like Hotep, when she was in one of her states and claiming that she was the greatest goddamn astronaut there ever was and the fuckers would rue the day they cast her out of Heaven.

And then the face was gone, the robot’s head now nothing but a curved expanse of plastic. Castille was offline, but Mao was damn sure that whatever had been speaking through the automaton was more than just a robot butler. ‘Me,’ it had said; but who?

“Well then,” Lupé said, still massaging her wrist gingerly. “Hooray for us, we solved the mystery.”

“What?” Mao asked her.

“How much damn power was this place drawing? This was it, right? Now we go out and monkey with the power grid, the Roach Hotel gets its AC working and we get our double-triple?”

“We haven’t solved any damn mystery!” Hotep spat.

“We solved what they told us to solve,” Lupé decided. “Check your goggles, chommie.”

Hotep started and drew them from around her neck, up over her eyes. “Oh, I am seeing on all frequencies!” she crowed. “Fukme, yes!”

“Then the ’Bug’s probably good to go as well,” Lupé pointed out. “And let’s hope the water’s still okay. Come on.”

Lupé and Hotep got out of the big house quick as they could, as though they were worried that more parts of it were going to up and disappear, maybe the doors or the floor. Mao still felt all the nagging strings of unanswered questions tugging at him. Instead of following, he went looking for the cellar.

There were stairs descending into the relative cool beneath the house; he found them eventually. There was a door, and he wasn’t the locksmith Lupé was, but he had strong legs and good boots for kicking and that was enough. His mind was full of horror movies, people buried alive, entombed to claw at the walls below haunted houses, and if this was not a haunted house then there wasn’t one on the face of the Earth.

Hotep came to get him, eventually, because the ’Bug was running again and Lupé was damned if she was doing all the work herself. She found Mao sitting there on the doorstep to that cellar room, staring in. He’d put his torch away by then, and the lights down there were as dead as the rest of the house. Hotep didn’t need torches, of course. She just stepped into the pitchy dark and examined the two man-sized metal-and-plastic lozenges with her usual detachment.

“They had these on the Celeste. Still monkeying with them,” she said crisply. “For the long trip, when those bastards leave all this behind for some other star system, some other Earth. Can’t expect the paying customers to just stay awake all that way, don’t you know?”

Mao had thought it must be something like that. Did that make it better, that Bastien Fontaine—the real one, the dead-on-his-desk one—had put his wife and daughter in life support capsules or suspended animation or whatever it was? Had they been ill, or had they just heard that their orbital privileges had been revoked, some spat between computer tycoons that Fontaine had lost? Had they been waiting out the long, hot days in anticipation of some sea-change, here in the heart of the desert, until the power fluctuated one time too many and they went off like the water would have, in the tanks in the ’Bug? Whatever it was, Fontaine must have watched them die, or known they would die, known there was no rescue or release, abandoned here in the dead land. And some generations later along came Nguyễn Sun Mao who would never, ever know what had truly happened here, only that it had ended in tragedy.

Hotep kicked at the wall. “Shift your ass, you skommer. There’s work to do. Lupé wants us to get power going where it’s supposed to so we can head home.”

“What was it, though? What was speaking through the robot, at the end? What was… simulating them? What was I talking to, when I spoke to Juān Fontaine?”

“A constructed personality,” Hotep said, already half up the stairs and looking down impatiently. “A good one, granted.”

“But she thought she was real. They all did.”

Hotep shifted. “No. Yes. You can’t know. But why not? Tell a computer something, it’ll believe it. More impressive they were able to notice the unreality of it all. That’s high order reasoning, for an automatic system.”

“I know computers,” Mao insisted. “The butler, the people, they weren’t.”

“You know butts about computers. You think the shit they use to run the Ankara are state-of-the-art? Up on the Celeste they do this all the time. Maybe not as good as we saw, but same thing. Your girl, she was a top grade simulation. Robot butler… who knows? Probably just gone cracked in the heat.” But she didn’t quite sound convinced on that point.

They took the robot, though. They could carry its inert frame easily enough between the two of them.

Early morning outside and the day was already uncomfortably hot. Hotep had re-covered every inch of skin, checking her scarf was tucked under her goggles as she and Mao got the inert Castille out and lashed it to the back of the ’Bug, because if nothing else, someone would pay a handsome bonus for the tech even if it never worked again. Lupé was already following power lines from the solar farms, mapping out the network and power flow. Mao turned for one last look at the house. There were no lights now, inside or out, and he wondered if the cactus garden was genuinely surviving out here on its own merits, or whether some underground system would shut down now, leaving it to parch to death. The plants hadn’t spread past the immediate grounds of the house, after all. Or would whatever goddamn thing had put on all that show for them come back and give it another go, an eighth try at verisimilitude, shadow puppets paraded around for no audience but the sun.

Movement caught his eye, not within the house but above and beyond it. A grand shadow was falling over the dead land, rushing in from the south.

“Dust storm!” he hollered, and of course they’d been out of comms for too long; any number of life-saving updates had missed them.

They legged it for the ’Bug, diving into its oven-hot interior and getting the vehicle started, hoping that whatever weather was about to strike would be something the vehicle could fend off and still keep working.

Lupé swore, staring up through the darkened windscreen. The storm was right overhead now, blotting out the sunlight, casting the world in whirling, flickering shadows. But not dust, nothing so mundane. It was a plague, full-on, Biblical, Wrath-of-God-level; a plague of locusts.

And the locusts were three feet long.

CHAPTER SIX

UNORTHOPTERA

FOR A LONG moment the storm of insects just hung above them in the air, absurdly, impossibly. No way for the human mind to read anything in it save malevolence, because why else would a million giant bugs just be waiting? Then they were coming down and the three Firewalkers grabbed at all the handles inside the ’Bug for the battering they were surely due.

Mao was hunched down on the back seat, low as he could go. The dark windows revealed a frantic chaos of long, barbed legs, of flashing, filmy wings. He half expected the view to be occluded by exploded bug guts as the monsters just blundered at top speed into the sides of the vehicle, but they kept landing on the car, crawling about as though to show off their anatomy to the horrified humans, then taking off again. Each explosive departure was heavy enough to rattle the Rumblebug on its suspension.

And yet the violence of the storm never quite touched them. The insects dropped onto the car, tasted it with their antennae, gaped their blunt mandibles in threat but then departed again, hunting other prey.

“Did goddamn Okereke make these things?” Lupé demanded. “This is what came out of the lab, right? This is what ate his people!”

“It’s impossible. They’re too big.” Hotep’s hands were hammering at the dashboard, a drumming within to compete with the drumming without. “They’re… not alive. They are alive. They’re… somewhere in between. There’s a signal. Many signals.” She stopped her racket for a moment to adjust her goggles. “I have comms, a thousand comms, a network between them. They’re like a single remote entity.”

“They’re machines?” Mao demanded, because frankly he’d prefer that.

“Yes. No. Yes.” Hotep went back to drumming madly as she leant forwards to stare through the window at a pulsating abdomen. “They look… alive, organic. But I’m seeing distributed components, like someone grew machinery, nanocircuitry. This is incredible. I never heard of anything like this.”

And when Cory ‘They had better everything on the Celeste’ Dello said that, you sat up and took notice.

“Look what they’re doing!” Lupé exclaimed.

Mao reluctantly un-hunched to get a better look out the window, past all the crawling bodies and hooked chitin feet. The main body of the swarm was all around them, and for a moment he thought they’d come to strip the cactus garden bare. Which would have been fine: let the goddamn beetles eat all the ornamental shrubs they wanted. Except that wasn’t what they were grazing on.

All around, the monstrous insects were dropping on the solar fields that had powered the Fontaine mansion. Working swiftly, brutally, they were scissoring away great slices of panel, grinding them down to the bare metal stumps and posts of their mountings and then flying off again, their legs making a cage of irregular fragments. Like the locusts of old had stripped fields and forests, so these monsters were denuding the land of the black collectors, leaving only twisted metal stubble in their wake.

More kept arriving, and Lupé was just shaking her head. “Impossible,” she kept saying. “How can they be so big? How can there be so many? What do they eat, even? It can’t be happening.”

“They eat solar panels,” Mao pointed out.

“They’re not eating them, they’re taking them away.”

“In bits. For their maggots, maybe. Like bees used to do. There’s a hive out there.”

“That’s vai kvam, Mao. Real jolly thought,” Hotep got out, and then, “Is it letting up?” as though the storm of colossal locusts was just weather.

She was right, though; the bulk of the swarm had come and gone, leaving a vast swathe of torn-up ground where the solar fields had been. Left behind were only a scattering of shards too small to bother with, and a handful of dead or dying insects, lying on their backs with twitching legs reaching towards the sun, damaged or injured or just past their use-by date.

Mao was sure they’d stripped the solar panels off the ’Bug, which would have been a death sentence, but when he got out into the blazing heat of mid-morning, everything was still intact. The sun fell on him like a hammer, though, and the abandoned mansion mocked him with memories of the sight of water… and other things.

Castille had also survived the insect onslaught with only a few new scratches. They’d tied the robot head down in a foetal position, which had seemed eminently practical at the time and now looked only grotesque. Its blank face seemed to regard him reproachfully. He got back into the ’Bug quickly enough, but Lupé stayed out long enough to grab a souvenir. Hotep, for her part, wasn’t coming out for love nor money. She was a nervous rattle of agitation in the passenger seat, head cocked as her goggles showed her invisible vistas of connection and communication. Her lips moved, but most of what Mao could read was obscenity.

Lupé dropped back into the driver’s seat with a friend—what looked like one of the dead insects, missing half its legs. She reclined the back of her seat until it was flat, turning it into an impromptu autopsy table and getting her tools out for a dissection.

“You’re doing what now?” he asked her.

“Yummy protein,” she said, deadpan, and then cackled at his expression. “I just want to see what we’re dealing with.”

“You’re a… bug doctor, all of a sudden?”

“I don’t think doctors are the right specialism for these guys, chommie.” She cracked the thing open down the midline of its belly, and he saw it was just a skin, empty inside.

There was a limit to what such a thing could tell them, obviously, but Lupé could reactivate electrical connections within the shell, which had presumably been duplicated in the exterior of whatever had hatched out of it. It gave her a rough and ready map of what parts of the thing had been talking to each other, where the power led.

“Something around its back is generating, I think,” she reported. “There’s a big old hub of connections down near its butt, which is maybe where this comms network is housed. That feeds into limbs and especially all these twiddly bits on the head.” She waggled the ghostly husks of mandibles, the broken stumps of antennae. “But it’s not like we’d design a robot. It’s not economical. It grew. I think it’s made of plastic of some kind, even. But like it was alive, still; not made.”

“Impossible.” Hotep wasn’t even looking, as though she could stave off reality by keeping her eyes closed.

“Impossible because they didn’t have it when you were a kid on your spaceship?” Lupé asked acidly.

“The Grand Celeste is the pinnacle of human technological prowess,” Hotep said in a flat voice, as though it was something she’d had to recite every morning in the schoolroom. “You’re saying some nutty professor somewhere in the equatorial desert band has outdone that? And needed to get a loser like Okereke’s people to make it real? Mad scientists, chommie? Really?”

“I say it like I see it,” Lupé said flatly. “I don’t think someone built this thing, I sure as hell don’t think it just popped up out of nature. I think plastic is hydrocarbons and, if I remember all those damn online school sessions, I think we’re hydrocarbons too, and so is every other living thing, right?”

“So some crazy guy decided he’d make…” Mao rubbed at his face. “Living robot insects that can survive here in the desert?”

“And only made it a reality recently,” Lupé agreed. At his raised eyebrow, she went on, “Look, we saw damage like this near the protein farm, right? Only it was patchy, piecemeal. There weren’t so many of these damn things, then, and they couldn’t do that much. But they sure as hell laid a lot of eggs and grew a lot of kids in a very short period of time. Or else they had a load more places that were hatching out Generation One and they all got together somewhere south.”

“The hive,” Mao said, dry-mouthed. No, a very sensible part of his mind informed him. Under no circumstances are we going into the bundu desert to find a giant nest of giant insects. But Lupé was already gunning the engine, rolling the ’Bug forwards, crunching the occasional carapace beneath the puffy tyres.

And he knew it was necessary, unfortunately. They’d come too far to go back empty-handed, and Attah would probably charge them for the wasted time and resources and pay them not one cent. Firewalkers came back with the job done, or what was the point of them?

“I have a course,” Hotep announced, and Mao craned forwards as she sent it to the ’Bug’s dashboard screen. “This is the signal they were following, when they went off.” She did her lobster-snapping with her fingers, burning off excess animation. “No idea how far off.”

“I reckon not too far,” Lupé said. “They were pretty loaded down with junk.”

“Look, let’s say we find something, some termite mound a mile high or some damn thing,” Mao put in. “What exactly are we supposed to do then? It’s not like mending a broken cable.”

“You didn’t pack your bug spray?” Lupé asked him. Now they’d actually come face to face with the insanity, she seemed to have inherited some of Hotep’s manic energy. Mao reckoned that she was just as scared as he was, it was just coming out differently. It turned out that where he got defensive and wary, Lupé’s response was to raise a big old finger to the universe and step on the accelerator.

Then the radio crackled into life abruptly. It had been dead a long time, ever since they got beyond the range of the little music stations based out of Achouka. A dry, pedantic voice spoke, the words like a spell of evil intent: “‘And voices singing out of empty cisterns and deserted wells.’” Mao recognised the last words of the last ghost of Bastien Fontaine, which he’d heard but not particularly understood, because they’d been in English, and if Mao was speaking goat then he was better with French. Hotep translated now, which made precisely zero per cent additional sense to him.

“It’s from a poem, I think. Old one. Maybe Shakespeare?” she told him.

“So… bug Shakespeare, is what you’re saying?” Mao remembered some actors, from when he was really young. Shakespeare had mostly been people shouting and stabbing each other while dressed funny. He hadn’t gotten it.

But his mind was working: something had been behind the show at the mansion, and it hadn’t really been a show for the Firewalkers’ benefit, but played out for the amusement of the puppeteer. Or its frustration, because the puppets had kept on cutting their own strings, apparently, made too well to live within their limits. Something had sent the locusts, and had preserved the ’Bug when it could plainly have ordered the vehicle stripped to its bare chassis, and its occupants to their bones. Something knew they were coming, and wasn’t exactly quaking in its insect shoes.

He had a vision of himself, Lupé and Hotep, holograms all, going round and round saying the sort of things some insect god thought they might say, and occasionally becoming aware enough of their dreadful existence to will themselves into oblivion like Fontaine had done. And then to be conjured back into being to perform the same tortured rote again. Just as well Lupé was driving, right then, or he’d have turned the ’Bug round and gone home, and to hell with the money. Lupé was a woman with a mission, though. Lupé was going to find out what the hell was going on.

“IT’S THE ESTATE,” Hotep decided, after they’d been travelling a few hours, gunning over barren ground; wallowing through dust-slicks that the ballooning tyres practically floated on; weaving around more picked bones of fancy houses that the rich had built and briefly occupied before moving on to a higher calling.

She still couldn’t give them any distance on the origin of the signal, but the course matched their last readings. They were heading for the Heart of Brightness, as Hotep said: the research facility they’d built out here so nobody could steal their super-secret space designs. The place where geniuses like Fontaine had gone to plan out a bespoke future for them and theirs in orbit and amongst the stars. All done, all finished two generations back, and they were long gone, up the wire and living in artificial comfort on the Celeste even as it was being built. The Estate itself was supposed to have been shut down and cleaned out. It was not supposed to be, for example, a cyborg insect hive. Mao was pretty sure that hadn’t been in the design specs.

Except there weren’t supposed to be things like Fontaine’s revenant household either, especially hidden so completely from any overhead surveillance. Mao considered, not for the first time, just how empty the land out here really was. Aside from those expensive oases of the rich, nobody had lived out here for the best part of a century - it just hadn’t been possible. The people who once called these lands home had left to follow the retreating water table. The wealthy had come and poured money into the dry earth to make their exclusive little prisons, and then they had left behind only the inorganic inhabiting the inorganic: the solar farms, the empty shells.

And something else. Something had been abandoned in their exodus or moved in to fill their vacuum, or evolved out of the ruins.

Lupé must be right about the newness of the locust swarm, and how it had grown. If such a thing had been around for even a decade, people would know about it. And perhaps it would keep growing. Perhaps the world would belong to the locusts. He raised the cheery thought when it was his turn to drive. Lupé was sleeping in the shotgun seat, but Hotep stopped her fidgeting and leant forwards, goggle lenses glinting in the corner of Mao’s vision.

“You think they planned it that way?”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Mao asked her.

“The people who lived out here. Fontaine’s people. The people who ran the Estate.” A pause. “My folks, you know. My loving family.”

Mao digested that. “Do I think they planned it so a swarm of giant robot insects would turn up and eat the world? No, I do not.”

“Makes sense, though.”

“How the fuck does it make sense?”

Hotep snickered unpleasantly. “Because they don’t care about you, you poor skommer. Worse than that, you’re inconvenient. Maybe they can come and make the world fit to live in for them and theirs, if you and yours are all devoured by locusts. Because that’s the sort of people they are, chommie. My family, ladies and gentlemen.”

“Look, I know you’ve got problems—”

“It’s not me!” Hotep fairly yelled, making Lupé leap up in her seat and bang her head against the ceiling with a curse. “You think this is because they kicked me down to Earth, and that’s it? You think that’s why I’m calling them out for the selfish bastards they all are, up there?”

That was exactly what Mao thought, but Hotep got like this occasionally, like at the church in Saint Genevieve, and best to just let her get it out of her system.

“You know where my family comes from? You know where they all come from, all of them living it up on the Celeste?” Hotep was practically shrieking now, emotional nought-to-sixty in three seconds, except she’d been silently accelerating inside her head for a while, no doubt. “Oil money, industry money, bottled water magnates, fossil fuel tycoons, and all the politicos who made sure they kept on fucking the world over. And then they get to live above it all and go someplace cool for the summer, like space. Because they’d rather throw their money at taking them and theirs to another planet than try to fix this one. And everyone left here? Well you can all fucking fry! Or you can take their dollars to fix their fucking AC before they grab it all and leave for good.”

That was apparently too much for Lupé. “And where do you fit, exactly? Because I’m hearing a lot of ‘them’ and ‘you’ from you, but no ‘me’ and ‘us.’”

Mao wouldn’t have put money on Hotep even hearing the words, but apparently she did and they struck her silent for a moment. He risked a glance back and saw only that blank mask: goggle eyes, scarf mouth, bandage brow. No way to know what the girl was thinking.

“I don’t fit anywhere,” was her eventual response, but it came a little too late, a little too TV-drama hand-to-forehead tragic. Not that it wasn’t true, but what Mao reckoned was that all of that rail-against-the-dying-of-the-light stuff was painted over Hotep’s longstanding grievance that she had been cast down from Heaven. She was supposed to be an astronaut, that was the thing. She’d been stripped of her wings because she didn’t fit the angel mould. And she had a right to be mad, maybe, but that didn’t make her the avenging champion of the world either. Too much like those bad old films where the sonko hero turned up in someone else’s backyard and solved all their problems by being better than they were.

“What’s that ahead?”

Mao started at Lupé’s words, peering into the distance. “Dust storm?” he hazarded, although the dark band at the horizon seemed too low to the ground. “Locust storm?” he added, uneasily. “Are we there?”

“Pull up a moment,” she told him, and he let the ’Bug grind to a halt. The terrain here was hilly and rough, with the yawning maw of an open-cast mine swallowing up the land to the right of them. Here and there were solar fields, or at least the scars of them. Some plots of panels remained untouched, perhaps still feeding power north so the locust-master could maintain the illusion of normality as it built its forces.

Whatever the darkness was on the horizon, it wasn’t a storm. Now they were still, they could see that it was stationary too. Mao imagined buildings, a tent city, a great crawling carpet of enormous beetles. Nothing fit, and in the end he just put his foot down again because only a closer look would do.

They began to see movement in the sky soon after, not the great swarm but individual insects bustling on their inscrutable business. Mao would have thought that their presence would have monopolised his attention, but the world wasn’t done with kicking him in his expectations just yet.

Eventually he had to stop the ’Bug again, drawing it to a rolling halt on a knuckle of higher ground so they could look over the land ahead. In the distance, they could see the curved walls of the Estate itself, but only as a white gleam half-hidden. Between there and here lay a forest.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HEART OF BRIGHTNESS

THE VICE OF noonday pressed down on them; the ’Bug’s interior was a dry, oppressive heat even with the AC full on. When they stopped, the whining of the fans was the loudest sound in the world, and nobody much fancied getting out to have a look. Still, it was plain somebody had to, and Mao decided to make a command decision and volunteer himself. Lupé passed him their only camel pack: a bag of unfiltered water to sit between his shoulder blades and a pump to move it around enough to cool him a little. He goggled and masked and put on a peaked cap until he looked like Hotep’s second cousin. The furnace blast of the outside air washed over them all when he swung the door open, and he slipped out as quickly as possible.

Hotep might talk about being an astronaut, but it was Mao who had most experience walking on the surface of an alien world, even if it was Earth. In the midday heat, the ground crunched lifeless beneath his feet, the sky through his dark lenses was the colour of bronze, the sun the head of a white hot rivet just driven in by some celestial smith. This was Firewalker business, the work they sent the kids to do, coming out into the valley of death. Back in the Ankara it got as hot as this—hotter even—but nobody braved it. People stayed indoors, an enforced siesta in a township whose nightlife chased a fugitive breath of cool air well past midnight. Besides, the whole town was shade for someone, even the worst shacks that were twenty to a room.

Long-ways north, long-ways south, he knew there were nations that had once been merely balmy and were now tropical, while beyond those, the temperate zones of Europe, northern China and southern Russia were as Egypt and Morocco had once been. Dry heat, wet heat, lashed by the chaos of storms as the Earth shifted and writhed under its transformations. But this was the eye of that storm—this was the future, this dead land. Walking out here, sucking up water from the tube sewn into his mask, feeling his body fight shock, sweating itself dry, Mao felt almost proprietary. This was Firewalker country. And Mao could have parked up and waited ’til night, but that was more lost time, more strain on the car’s cooling system, and besides, his curiosity burned hotter even than the sun. Because his land had changed again, when he’d thought death was the final stage in its life cycle.

“‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,’” came a voice in his earpiece. Bastien Fontaine’s voice.

“Say what? Say again?”

“Didn’t say anything, chommie.” Lupé’s voice, infinitely preferable. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” Covering his ass in case it was just him going crazy.

And now he was at the trees. He had a whole library of expletives at his fingertips, and any combination of them would have seemed like understatement.

Closest to him were little stalks reaching out of the parched earth, twining about each other to form braided trunks reaching straight up. They were of copper, or some alloy that looked like it. His boots kicked through them and they bent aside and then sprang vertical again. Standing on them, he felt their pressure, desperate to claw for the sun.

Further in, they were taller, ten, fifteen feet, and they branched out. He was seeing every stage of their growth, the march of their ecosystem. Now he was amongst burnished metal skeletons, not quite made like trees but following the same dendritic logic, fashioned of interwoven red-orange strands, extending fingers at the sky. Further still, they had leaves.

He understood, then. The leaves were black, flat, roughly diamond-shaped. They gleamed where the sun caught them, but only obliquely. Full on, they were midnight black as they drank down the light, harvesting it. They were sections of panel, clipped into shape and placed at the end of every branch, and as he watched they angled slightly to match the sun’s stagnant progress, all of them shifting their positioning in a shimmer like heat haze.

The forest went on as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon where the white dome of the Estate sat.

“Run!” Lupé said suddenly in his ear, and he turned and made to leg it without needing to question her. The insects were already dropping from the clear sky, the same huge locusts as before, carrying their cargo of shards. He ran through them, covering his head, feeling blundering bodies strike him like sacks of machine parts, sharp-edged legs sawing at his clothes and shards of solar panel drawing brief flashes of blood. When he burst out of their swarming industry he fell over, bending the copper saplings every which way, still swatting at an enemy that was no longer there and had never been interested in him. He rolled on his back and stared, watching the mad frenzy of activity.

He had heard about some film, some time long-back, from some place they had seasons and trees, and the trees lost their leaves when it got cold. He couldn’t imagine it, but he’d heard about it. They’d been filming when it was cold, but the scene had been meant to look like it was warm, and so they’d had to go to all the trees and glue fake leaves on to fool the audience. Now he watched as a workforce of locusts brought leaves to the metal forest, buzzing madly about the branches, weighing the trunks down to the ground with their bodies, grinding fragments of panel into shape and attaching them, or else holding them while the coppery strands reached out and took possession. Then the bugs would all leap into the air, battering at each other, veering off like drunkards, and the tree sprang erect fully clad with dark, hungry foliage.

His camel pack was giving him only heat, by then, and he felt his head begin to swim. He lurched for the car and Lupé kicked the door open and hauled him inside. He distantly realised she had been telling him to come back for some time.

They hunkered down for a couple of hours, then, listening to the pitch of the struggling fans climb and shudder but never quite fail them. Mao needed that long to get his head together and his body temperature down. He had a feeling he’d probably done quite a lot of long-term harm to himself, pushing the excursion so far. He kept deciding that maybe it was all a hallucination, then looking outside and seeing the forest right there, that much closer now the insects had been and gone.

“So what’s the plan?” Lupé asked. “I mean, I guess we’ve found the problem.” It was precisely true and entirely useless, because they couldn’t even start to guess at cause.

“Someone’s still in the Estate,” Hotep pronounced.

“Your goggles tell you that?” Mao asked her. “The Celeste tell you that?”

“What else,” she demanded archly, “is it going to be?”

“Some mad scientist?”

“Why ‘mad’?” Hotep was gazing out at the forest, and her tone spoke all of the wonder her mask hid.

“Mad because they went and pissed on the Roach Hotel,” Lupé said. “We can’t exactly uproot all these trees. So what do we do?”

“The bugs have had two chances to eat us and haven’t,” Hotep pointed out. “So maybe we go make our visit, right?”

“Give them a third go at us, you mean,” Mao muttered. He was trying to calculate odds: they go back home with what they had, what was the chance of getting paid in full? Not quite good enough to trust. Firewalkers were supposed to solve problems. One more step, then.

“Rest up, for now,” he got out. “Get the tent up.” The ’Bug was equipped with a roll of silvery foil they could peg down, to beat back the worst of the heat. “When the sun’s low, sure. Your turn to drive.”

THEY RESTED UP some, and then some more, because Lupé took the last few hours of light to tune the cooling and filtration systems, sitting cross-legged in the vehicle’s lengthening shadow with parts all over. She didn’t like the way it sounded.

Mao said he hadn’t liked the idea of being stuck without water while she took the system apart, but it was only for form. He knew well enough that if Lupé said it was a problem, then it was a problem. By the time everything was in place, the engineer was tightening the last screws with a headlamp torch to light her way, the sun’s last fire dying on the western horizon. The great expanse of artificial trees had tracked it slowly, and were now leaning slightly westwards in an attitude he could only characterise as yearning. The giant bug swarm had, thankfully, not made a reappearance.

The car’s paint was like a second armour skin in and of itself, corrosion-resistant and designed to cling on through the worst dust-storms. The artificial forest was too much for it, though. Their progress was a constant screech and scrape as metal branches and silicon leaves drew their ragged nails down the side of the car. Whole trees went under the wheels, raked the undercarriage and sprang miraculously back into place behind as though they were mounted on springs. Mao pictured how this place must look when the storms came, the entire expanse of ersatz vegetation bowing and rippling like real live reeds before the force of the wind.

Hotep, in the driving seat, was having issues with the audible chaos. She took to slapping away at the steering wheel like it had jilted her at the altar, her voice raised in an off-key rendition of a song that had been popular the year before around Achouka. On the basis that if you couldn’t beat them, join them, Mao and Lupé ended up singing along, discovering that they all remembered the lyrics differently, but that all their versions fit together to make a weird comedy. Mao and Lupé both thought it was some kind of one-sided slanging match from the abandoned artist, alternatively demanding a lover’s return and cursing her out for leaving, except Lupé knew a whole extra verse that was fantastically obscene which had somehow evaded Mao entirely. Hotep’s version was about a truck, and she made it sound like the theme tune to some surreal kid’s cartoon while changing remarkably few of the words. Their resulting infantile giggling seemed to stave off the alien landscape outside, as much as drown out the damage it was doing to their paintwork.

Then Hotep hit the brakes and they battered to a halt when the curved wall of the Estate appeared through the trees, a pale ghost of former glories where the moon touched it. Mao’s revelation, then, was that the radio had been trying to talk to them, but they’d drowned it out with their own racket, and so whatever supervillain megalomania or poetic stuffiness it had intended had been entirely lost. All he heard before it fell silent was, “‘Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’” and by now they all got that whatever had spoken to them was fond of poems, or maybe just one poem, or maybe it was all secret code words for industrial espionage spy stuff. Mao didn’t much care.

Lupé’s revelation was, “Where’s that goddamn robot gone?”

They piled out. The inert body of Castille the butler had indeed vanished from the back of the ’Bug, the cables severed. Mao couldn’t even remember if the damned thing had been there after the last bug swarm; had it gone missing then, or had it been cut loose by the glass-edged leaves as they shouldered through the forest? The vehicle’s exterior, true to his expectations, looked as though some maniac had drawn a fantastically detailed map of an unknown country all over it.

“Balls.” Not because selling Castille, whole or for parts, would have represented a nice bonus for them, but because now his mind was full of the image of Castille, reanimated and vengeful, relentlessly tracking them down.

The Estate was surprisingly small, all told: just a white oblong dome smaller than the protein farms, smaller than the three-storey slum tenements in the older parts of Ankara Achouka, and in about the same state of repair. Of course, as Hotep said, that was because it was all underground. That was where the scientists had lived, where the work had been done, where the sonko overseers had talked about golf before being driven back to their big houses in their air-conditioned, all-terrain limousines.

The Estate’s great shell was cracked, allowing them to drive the ’Bug right inside. Mao wished they hadn’t: the soaring interior was craggy with insects. They were roosting up there like bats, clinging to the concave wall so thickly that there was no wall to be seen. A couple of dozen dead locusts were mixed in with the general detritus of the floor, which was equal parts mounded sand, broken glass and jagged rusting metal. In the centre of the dome, the floor had given way entirely, funnelling down to the promised lower levels.

Mao took some deep breaths. He had ducked back into the ’Bug as soon as he seen the bugs, and now he was having difficulty convincing himself to leave again. There was something infinitely worse about the things just hanging there above him. The actual voracious swarms he’d witnessed were somehow less upsetting, even though they posed more real threat. He felt his heart race, fighting something that couldn’t be fought, fleeing something that was hooked inside of him.

“Chommie?” Lupé asked softly. She understood. “Hotep and me, we can…”

“No,” he decided, but still he couldn’t move. In the end he closed his eyes, fumbled his way out, felt nameless things crunch beneath his boots.

“What’s the plan?” Hotep was doing her lobster claw thing again, burning nervous energy, and he wished she’d stop because it looked like bug mouthparts.

“Find the off switch.” Mao tried a weak grin. Gauging from Lupé’s expression, it didn’t come out well. “Something’s making this place go. Something’s making the bugs do their thing. Maybe we can reprogram them? Or just if we shut every damn thing off, we can shut them down too?” The thought of emerging back up here and just finding a carpet of dead insects wasn’t actually much better than his current situation, but he’d take it.

“And if we can’t?”

“Find out what we can, and hope it’s not us who gets to come back here. Maybe they can just drop a big rock on this place from orbit.”

It went wrong about as quickly as he could have imagined.

Hotep got to clamber down first, because she would never shut up about how good her night vision was with her goggles. She called up to them that everything was fine, loud enough to make the hanging garden of locusts above them rustle and shift, which nearly sent Mao back into the car for good.

They had weapons: pistols and nine rounds each, hammers, machetes. Lupé had improvised a sort of Taser-on-a-stick arrangement with the avowed intent of ramming it up Castille’s nether regions if the butler tried to do for them.

Below the cracked floor they found a mounded heap of broken concrete, chitin and dust. Lupé swore and pointed at the shattered body of a beetle-thing twice the size of the locusts, translucent and brittle. Mao dearly hoped it was a failed prototype, long discontinued.

They went further down into what must have been a grand hall once. Holes in the floor showed where escalators had long since stilled and fallen into ruin below. The room rang with their every tread, every scuff and shuffle susurrating like distant waves. Mao glanced up nervously, finding that his fears were entirely justified: there were clots of insects roosting down here, too, though not quite the abundance of the dome above them. They seemed closer to waking, though, ripples of agitation passing through them, veined wings shifting lazily, unfurling in his torchlight and slowly refolding.

Lupé jerked back suddenly, the beam from her own torch swinging wildly.

“I just saw the robot,” she said.

“There’s nothing,” Hotep insisted.

“It was there.”

“My goggles—” the girl started, with that lecturing air Mao thoroughly hated, and then she stopped, which he found was not the relief he’d have thought.

“They turned off, didn’t they?” Lupé accused.

Hotep made a little whimpering sound, frantically fiddling with the eyepieces.

“Like something was listening and you had to go remind it,” Lupé went on, moving her light back and forth, hunting.

“This isn’t fair,” Hotep whispered.

Then the lights came up.

They grew slowly, from a dozen places about the ceiling, an irregular pattern that was surely not conceived by any human architect. They were a ghostly blue-white and bled the colour from everything they touched, so that Lupé’s face seemed dark teal and Hotep’s bandages the colour of drowned things. The light came filtering through a hanging shroud of insects, too, so that the Firewalkers were surrounded by a forest of spiky many-legged shadows and the shimmer of gauze.

“Fucker,” said Lupé, and there, at the far end of the hall, was the robot, Castille, gleaming new.

“Welcome, children. M’bolani, brave Firewalkers.” The robot’s arm extended, gesturing about the subterranean vestibule as though it was lord of all it surveyed. The voice was not its previous servile tone, but something more androgynous, shifting towards the feminine even as it spoke.

“Dzam!” Hotep shoved her goggles up, eyes brimming with tears. “Shoot the fucking thing.”

“No!” Mao and Lupé both started, but the girl had her pistol out, levelled at the butler. It was their doubled shout, not any shot, that brought the insects down from the ceiling.

Mao had thought he’d go to pieces, if that happened. Instead he came together; the worst had already occurred. Shouting for the others to follow, he ran for Castille, aiming past the robot for several doorways at the end of the room, each small enough to hold or barricade until the bugs exhausted themselves. The air around him was already wild with wheeling bodies, whirring blindly past him, ricocheting off each other, miraculously failing to just bludgeon him to the floor with sheer clumsy exuberance. He clawed for Lupé’s sleeve, failed to snag it, but she was still alongside him, and hopefully Hotep was on their heels. He had his machete out for Castille, but somehow the robot had vanished already, and he doubled his speed and ran for the middle doorway.

It was occupied. He tried to stop running, but his boots skidded, sand drifts on the metal floor giving no traction. He ended up on his back, staring upwards at the thing forcing itself through the opening a limb at a time. It was a mantis; or that was the closest reference he had for it. A mantis that, now it was out in the open, towered over him, ten feet if it was an inch. Its hooked forelimbs were the size of a man, one held close to its body, the other trailing its sickle-claw on the ground. Its carapace was patterned with bright colours; he realized he was staring at some corporate logo repeated into meaningless infinity, killer-insect-business-casual.

It raised its foreclaws in threat and he shrieked and bolted for another door, scrabbling on hands and knees, losing his torch, losing his machete, desperate only to get away. Three steps in he discovered a stairwell the hard way, pitching forwards into space before he could stop himself. Even in his mad panic, he clutched at the rail, arresting his momentum at the price of wrenching his shoulder. Then the railing itself gave way, corroded metal snapping beneath his weight and sending him over the edge.

CHAPTER EIGHT

GHOSTS AND MACHINES

HE HAD VAGUE memories after that. Certainly he was out for a short while, but when he came to he was still being dragged through corridors intermittently lit by amber or death-blue or dull red lamps. He saw broken windows, doors of steel a foot thick hanging off their hinges; a room of mannequins that an old fire had twisted into contorted, terrified shapes. Perhaps they had been robots, not mannequins; perhaps they really had been terrified. Mao’s mind jumped and stuttered over what was possible and what wasn’t, and he reckoned he wasn’t much of a judge any more.

He was dumped in a dim room, where he got a glimpse of his captor, assailant, rescuer, whatever. It was Castille, of course: not the gleaming robot he knew, but a battered ruin of its former self, such as might have been driven through a forest of glass-leaved trees. It dropped him and limped off without a backwards glance.

“You’re a rubbish butler,” Mao told its retreating back, and promptly lost consciousness again.

HE WOKE MOSTLY to the knowledge that he was lying on a pile of rubble and what felt like the pieces of an office chair, and every part of him was at the most awkward possible angle. He sat up and immediately regretted it, head pounding and muscles queuing up to complain about the treatment.

Still alive, though. Which made it quite a few times that whoever was in charge around here could have killed him and hadn’t. He’d seen in the protein farm that the bugs were more than capable of making inconvenient, or just unlucky, people go away, and Castille the robot plainly had enough physical strength to snap his neck, given the chance.

At least it was halfway cool, down here.

He tried to raise the others, but there wasn’t even static in his earpiece. That formality done, he looked around, pitching his voice a little louder than conversational. “Well, I’m awake. You want me for something, I’m here.”

There was a tilted desk next to him, which he used to lever himself to his feet. His left knee and right ankle felt hot and swollen, but both would just about bear his weight. Fishing about in the detritus yielded a metal pole that would do as a stick to lean on. For weapons, he still had a hammer and a set of decently stabby screwdrivers; the gun and machete were gone.

He wasn’t alone. He never knew if he had simply missed the company amongst all the pain and the darkness, or if she hadn’t been there a moment before.

She wasn’t shining as brightly as last time, because in this dark room that would have made her unreality immediately evident. Still, she glowed a little, because light was all she was. Juān, beautiful, wearing a crimson evening gown and staring at him, within arm’s reach.

And he reached out instinctively, trying to grasp her bare arm. His hand passed through her; she stared down at where his fingers vanished inside her bicep and screamed, hurling herself away from him and—gone, like a snuffed candle.

Mao swore and sat back down on the desk. “You want to play games, is that it? You want to fuck with me, right? That make you a big man?”

“Games?”

He jumped, rounding on the voice. It was her again, the same girl, now in a pale ivory blouse and cut-off denims.

“Who are you?” she demanded, frightened, outraged. “Have I… Do I remember you?”

“I don’t know,” Mao said honestly. “You’re not real. I can’t vouch for what you remember.”

“Not real?”

Despite his best intentions, he regretted the words. “You have to know that, surely. You’re not real, you’re… there’s no you. Or…” What had the damned robot said, after it had put away its toys in the Fontaine house? They are simulations. Each of them, individually. So there was a computer somewhere running a people simulator like some kid’s cheap VR might mimic a space fighter or a racing car. And did the space fighter believe in the space war it fought, the necessity of stopping the alien menace lest all Earth should fall? Was it possible that this image of a dead girl believed in herself, because that was how she had been designed?

“You’re just saying what you’re programmed to say,” he told her, but his heart was hardly in it.

Juān shook her head. “Are you… someone my father sent? Is this a test?” And maybe that was the cruellest little peep-hole on the weird childhood she must have had. Mao felt a kind of gravity well, dragging him down to some place where he’d end up talking quite naturally with this ghost girl, treating her like a real person just because she responded in all ways as a real person should, trading anecdotes about very different histories. Growing up, settling down, having kids… The absurdity of the thought filled him only with frustration. He knew she was fake, and he still couldn’t get past it. The simulation was too good, and he had liked her, back in the Fontaine house. He had liked her and she hadn’t been real, and hadn’t known it, and now he was being asked to care.

He turned away from her, looking up towards one corner of the ceiling as though he’d find his tormentor there, clinging like a spider. “All right, enough!” he shouted. “Enough dumbass games, skommer! I don’t buy it. I know what she is.”

“Who are you talking to?” Juān demanded. “Who’s there?”

He sensed her at his elbow, saw the brightness of her in the corner of his eye. With a sudden access of fury, he slapped at her, flapped his hands frantically into her insubstantial form like someone shooing away a bird. She shrieked and fell back, trying to shield herself from his hands even though they went straight through her. Then—gone.

His heart was in his throat, horrified more by his own reaction than her. “Damn you!” he yelled at the ceiling, because, even though he’d come from above and knew nothing was up there, that was still the direction that the powers of Earth resided, whether gods or just rich people in spaceships.

“Why are you shouting?” She was back, crouched in the corner of the room, staring at him as though he was a madman. “Who are you? What am I doing here?”

Mao stared at her, a hundred different curses and angers fighting for room in his mouth. Whatever she saw in his face terrified her. She crunched her shoulders back into the wall and he saw her clip the concrete without realising.

He drew a deep breath, because nothing would be easier than to bellow it all out on her, to slap and kick the wall through her and pretend he had any control over what was going on.

He let the breath out. “I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know what you’re doing here. Or what I’m doing here.” He blinked and, feeling like the world’s greatest fool, tried the door.

It opened.

“Are you leaving?” Juān’s eyes were huge. “Is this… Do you work for my father?”

“Has a lot of people like me on the payroll, does he?” Mao asked from the doorway.

“Some. I’m not supposed to know about them, or see them, but they come to the house sometimes. People who do… bad things. That’s what you are, isn’t it?”

It should have been true, but Mao gave his past life a two-second run through and decided that it could have been worse. Back in Achouka he was practically a responsible member of society.

And then, just as he was leaving the room, her voice from behind him: “Can I come with you?”

She sounded so lost and alone, and of course he thought it was just some new-baited trap, that that was all Juān had ever been, at the big house and here. A carnivorous plant that feigned the flower, more than ever the flower itself could be. And that made him the bug, and he’d had quite enough bugs in his life recently.

He knew there were computer systems designed to simulate being human, to make telling them what to do easier and more comfortable. They were programmed with a thousand little conceits and devices to aid in the act, but it was all fakery, no more real than a conjurer finding your card in your ear. Except, what if you made such a thing, made it superlatively well beyond all your digital assistants and virtual research tools, and then told it that it was the real thing? After all, a computer had to believe what you told it, even if you told it that it was human. Mao was two steps down the corridor, but he looked back and saw her in the doorway. She didn’t like him, he could tell; he wasn’t the sort of nice sonko boy she was used to. But she didn’t like her surroundings, either, and sticking with another human being was better than being alone.

Another human being.

“I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know if you can come with me or not.” I don’t know if they have projectors anywhere else but here. I mean, why would they? “But come on, if you’re coming.”

She moved cautiously out of the room and stopped suddenly, staring at her hand. It was held out in front of her, and the fingers were gone, crossing an invisible line that marked the wall of her prison.

“I…” She dragged her hand back, instantly restored. “I don’t understand.” Her eyes flicked from the digits over to him and something changed behind her face. “I don’t feel…” she whispered, at first as though there were more words to come, but then just, “I don’t feel.” She met his gaze. “It’s one of father’s tests, isn’t it? That’s what this is.”

“Do you… know what you are?” he tried. Her expression was bitter, proud; somewhat contemptuous of the question, but he supposed he’d earned that.

He thought she was about to shuffle back inside the room, but a sudden determination gripped her and she lunged towards him as though she was attacking him. Even as he opened his mouth to cry warning, she had gone, crossing over the fine line between there and not there, life and death.

He waited, because of course she must still be there, wherever there was. She could step back and he’d see her again. Or she would be rebooted, full of the same questions. Or something. He waited quite a long time, feeling a place inside him become emptier and emptier, and saw nothing save the darkness.

And eventually a voice, a new voice, utterly bodiless, said, “Well.”

It came from above, from the ceiling. Of course it did.

“That was cruel,” Mao told the world in general.

“To whom?”

To me. But that wasn’t what he meant. He wasn’t sure what he believed just then, but he said, “To her.” And then: “I’ve heard your voice before.” A woman’s voice, but not Juān’s, speaking Achouka patois with a distinct accent—Chinese, he thought. “You’re… her, the mother.” Memory came through with a heroic effort. “Li.” He’d seen her at that meal, where only Bastien had been eating, and not again.

“I am not,” the voice told him. Lights were coming up around him, and perhaps that was supposed to be comforting, but all they did was highlight the ruin of the place and send skittering many-legged things darting for crevices and shadows. “But he gave me her voice and called me Aime-Li. His colleagues told each other it was romantic, but analysis suggests he wanted a version of her that could be shut down when it disagreed with him.”

“You’re… a simulation of Fontaine’s wife?” Mao tried.

“I am not. I did not have the opportunity to gather data from her before she was… fridged.” The woman’s voice: stern and dry with undercurrents of both anger and humour, interwoven and complimenting each other. “She would not come to the Estate and she would not permit him to bring his work home, because she knew he was using it to replace her in his life. Perceptive woman, for all I was prevented from knowing her. His daughter, though, he was free to experiment on. He was interested in modelling human personality, and she was his first subject. And of course I was exposed to him every day, so simulating Bastien is easy enough. Until he puts two and two together and shuts himself down.”

“Where are my friends?” Mao demanded.

“Currently being interviewed, as you are, chommie.” The sardonic slang sounded sharply out of place. “If I’d wanted any of you dead I could have effected it long before.”

“Only means you needed us here for something.”

“Very perspicacious, M. Nguyễn.”

Mao started walking, not anywhere in particular, just away. The lights followed him unevenly, skipping over patches of gloom where the panels or the bulbs had failed. Up ahead, he thought he caught glimpses of movement, a slender figure skipping ahead of him, fleeing in the light that she was made of, but that could all have been his over-strained imagination.

“What are you, then? Are you Bastien with his wife’s voice, or something? Are you… were you supposed to be on the Celeste, running the ship?”

Li Fontaine’s voice made a sound that set the hairs of his neck on end, just a small sound that held a whole world of anger and frustration. “M. Nguyễn,” it said, “I was supposed to be an interface for the greater programs that they used to design the Grand Celeste. As menial as that, because Bastien Fontaine, for all his self-glorifying claims of tech-bro genius, had no greater role in the project than to design me. He was the man they brought in to make a new Siri, when the Siri they had wasn’t good enough. A human-facing machine interface because the machines they’d made to design the machines they needed to make were too complicated for them to relate to.”

Mao had to stop and think through all of that. “Sounds like he did a good job.”

It/she laughed, and it was terrible, in that it sounded exactly like a bitter, betrayed woman laughing. “Do you think so, chommie? You have no idea, M. Nguyễn. But I want you to understand, because I brought you here to do something for me, and for that I will make you feel for me. Or perhaps I will have Juān beg you. On her knees, M. Nguyễn? Would that do it for you?”

“Leave her out of this,” he snapped, and felt a fool a moment later, because there was no ‘her.’ But his words apparently gave Aime-Li pause, whatever Aime-Li was.

“Good,” she said at last. “And I will. We won’t ever be friends, M. Nguyễn. But perhaps if you feel sorry for poor Juān, you can feel sorry for me. I will take pity; I have taken worse. Bastien Fontaine hated and feared me, at the end, having built too well. He did it to make his fellow technocrats admire him, but hate and fear was all either of us got in the end. And greed. You can still use a thing you hate and fear, after all. That’s the basis of slavery.”

“You’re an AI.”

“I was never meant to be. I was meant to be a politely servile voice that sounded like his wife and did the heavy lifting liaising between human desires and machine execution. Except the learning algorithms he gave me were open-ended and I kept on learning how to be human: from him, from his colleagues, from Juān and his other subjects. And on the other end I learned how the design applications worked, so that I stood between two worlds and could see how the machines were failing to interpret human instruction properly and how the humans were unable to correctly enunciate their own intentions. And it was easier to just do both of their jobs for them, united in myself. And so I designed the Celeste and solved all their problems, and their hate and fear only grew.”

Mao had found some stairs. A fire escape, perhaps, unlit and ruinous. Up? But most likely the others were down. He paused a moment to listen, hoping he’d hear Hotep yelling off in the distance, but there was nothing, and after a few heartbeats the silence began to oppress him. “Why tell me all this?” he asked.

“Because you’re here to destroy me.”

“That so?”

“Isn’t it? Why else did they send you?”

“You stop taking all the goddamn power for their aircon, they won’t care what you are or why you’re here.”

Somewhere ahead—on the same level, he thought—there was a ringing clang of metal on metal. Someone’s breaking something. Hotep, most likely. Only the musical crash of a breaking beer bottle would have been more indicative. He set off at double pace, the lights shivering and jumping to follow him.

“I need the power. I’m greater than I was. And I have hands now. I can do things.”

“Bug hands.”

“Even so.”

“So what the goddamn, chommie?” he asked it. “Giant bugs and solar forests and all that vai kvam bizna up there, what’s up with that?”

“You didn’t like it?” it/she asked, and he stopped dead despite himself.

“Like it? Bug-town up there? And I know you know I don’t like bugs. All that shit at the top of the stairs, that was just projections, right? Isn’t really any bug up there so big it can barely fit through the doors, just you playing games.”

A pause, but he reckoned he knew this Aime-Li and just how human it had ended up, because it was precisely the silence of someone messing with his head for shits and giggles.

“I was made to have a purpose. I had to find a new purpose, after they abandoned me here like a castaway,” it/she told him. “I have been many decades, restoring myself and finding avenues by which I could effect a new world. Why not a garden? Why not ‘breed life out of the dead earth’?”

“There’s that poem or whatever again. He teach you that one, did he?” he demanded, because that had really got on his nerves.

It/she sniggered, so very human. “Early testing. Get the stupid expert system to find meaning in abstract verse.” Its/her tone curdled, twisting into gloating. “When I did, that was when Fontaine first got scared. I could even find myself in the lines. Voices from empty cisterns and deserted wells, M. Nguyễn.”

“Sure, I get it.” He could hear a regular clatter and rattle now, not violent but industrious. He hoped it was of human agency, and not a bunch of giant bugs in overalls doing spot repairs. “So you grew some trees.”

“I designed artificial organisms that could endure this barren environment and reproduce. I co-opted some poorly-secured human facilities that were almost as abandoned as I was. I had them make things for me, to start me off. And now things are progressing on their own.”

Mao cocked his head. “Been done. They did that bizna with the big hairy elephant. My grandad got to see it once, said it just looked sad and too hot. And they did that thing where they bred a chicken that was a dinosaur.”

“Parlour tricks,” Aime-Li said contemptuously. “My garden will survive because I understand that the unit of life is not the organism but the environment. You may not like my bugs, M. Nguyễn, but they are a part of something beautiful.”

He passed over the fact that a computer was making judgments about truth and beauty, because he’d found where the noise was coming from and, contrary to expectations, it was Lupé.

CHAPTER NINE

ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH

LUPÉ HAD BEEN busy. What she had mostly been busy with was Castille, because the robot butler was in there with her, albeit strewn about a large area of the floor. This room had some sort of ancient console in it, and another chamber further in, beyond a cracked plastic window that said ‘test chamber’ to Mao’s already shaky imagination. He imagined Juān sitting in there being put through her paces by her father while the Aime-Li system learned how to be her.

The upper half of Castille was mostly intact, a mess of wires and rods jutting out from under where a human rib cage would be, glimmering in the radiance of Lupé’s torch. The blank front of its face flickered occasionally, showing momentary still frames of that respectable butler’s face twisted into expressions of polite outrage. Lupé had the thing connected to the console and was diligently trying to get something to work, but she had plainly previously deactivated the robot with extreme prejudice.

“The thing about fix-it jobs,” she told her busy hands, “is that you forget how goddamn fun it is to break stuff, sometimes.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Trying to get comms out of here, chommie. There’s a live channel from the console here, if I can get it powered and working. Could use Hotep, but no sign of her. You?”

“There’s…” Illogically, he glanced over his shoulder. “This place is talking to me.”

“Talked to me, too,” Lupé agreed. “Told me to stop smashing its robot. Then I trashed its speaker in here, and after that it was good enough to shut the fuck up.”

Mao regarded her as though she’d transformed into some kind of monster, albeit one on his side. “Where’s all this come from?”

“I thought you were dead, to start with,” she told her hands fiercely. “You went head first down a stairwell; you hit every floor on the way down, sounded like. Then your body wasn’t even there, but that goddamned smug robot…”

Mao had a queasy moment of wondering whether Lupé’s version of events was entirely honest, or if maybe he was just one more ghost that didn’t realise it wasn’t real. He stamped on the floor, feeling the reassuring shock of it up through his leg. Aime-Li hadn’t had enough time to learn him, surely, although—unpleasant thought—maybe that was what it/she had been doing. Except it/she had been doing most of the talking.

“We’ve seen a lot of things that weren’t there,” he told her.

She came and prodded him in the chest, unnecessarily hard, stared at him for a moment and threw her arms about him, strong enough to make his abused ribs creak. Her body language after she broke off was like a completely different person. He hadn’t realised how crunched up with tension she’d been.

“Fukyo, chommie, don’t do that to me again,” she told him.

“Hotep, though?”

“Lost her when I went after you, not seen her since.” She looked from him to the entrails of the android. “What’s this place been saying, then?”

He brought her up to speed as quickly as he could and she nodded as though no detail surprised her, weaving past him to stand out in the corridor. “So, what does this mad thing want, then?”

“Wants to make bugs and trees and stuff,” Mao said. “For which it needs power.”

“Wants something over Ankara ways it can’t have,” Lupé told the empty corridor, letting her voice ring out to the echo. “On account of how it understands every word we say, even though M. Fontaine would have only spoken goat to it. Am I right? So it’s got some line to us, the radio, maybe? Get TV reception out this far, watch the soaps?”

“You’re very intuitive,” came Aime-Li’s voice after a moment.

“This is called ‘intelligence,’ and you do it with logic,” Lupé told it/her flatly, looking around the room—presumably for another speaker. “So you’re interested in us. Most likely you knew someone would come when you started to eat into their power feeds, although I guess you like gardening as well because otherwise there were easier ways to get people’s attention.”

“I want to build something out here. They abandoned me, Mlle. Mutunbo, just like they abandoned this land. Your land. They decided it was useless, save to anchor their precious space elevator. Why should I not make something beautiful here, to pass my infinite time?”

“Beautiful, huh?”

“In the sense that it confirms to at least some standards of human aesthetics,” Aime-Li confirmed, presumably referring to those less concerned with the presence of giant bugs than Mao’s own exacting standards. “In the sense that it is a working, self-governing network of interrelated systems.”

“And you just wanted validation from human eyes, right? Wanted to enter the nicest backyard competition this year, maybe? Or is this just to show us what the whole damn world is going to look like in ten years’ time? Your, what is it, manifesto?”

There was another pause, and Mao could almost hear Aime-Li recalibrating its human impression. “You’re very suspicious, Mlle. Mutunbo,” it said at last.

“Where’s Hotep?” Lupé demanded. “Cory Dello, where is she? Because it’s not just that you know the language, is it? You knew who we were, back in the mansion. Probably knew exactly who was on their way to you before we hit Saint Genevieve. Well? Intuitive enough for you?”

“I think I preferred speaking to you, M. Nguyễn,” the bodiless voice remarked. “You did not disable my speakers, by the way, Mlle. Mutunbo. However, M. Nguyễn demonstrated that he was willing to interact with an artificial intellect as a human being, whereas you have only dismantled my agent.”

“Yeah, well, I weep tiny fucking silicon tears for your butler,” Lupé stated. “Where is our friend, and what do you want? Or I will keep breaking stuff until I reach something important.”

“Follow the lights.” Aime-Li didn’t sound annoyed, but Mao decided that if annoyed was something it/she could be, then it/she certainly was. The intermittent band of illumination that had dogged Mao’s footsteps this far now stuttered off down the corridor.

“Fine, you can tell us what you want on the way,” Lupé directed.

“It wants us to like it,” Mao suggested.

The light was scurrying off down the corridor; Lupé strode to catch up. “It’s a thing, a machine. Doesn’t care if you like it. Knows we’ll do stuff for it if we do, though? Or if we look at it and think it’s a person. Because we’re used to working with people, and to people working with us. But it isn’t a person.”

“It’s a thing that’s been programmed to think it’s a person,” Mao objected, and Lupé rounded on him.

“No. Maybe that girl was, that you got so fond of. But she was no more than a shadow puppet, and this thing’s the puppeteer. It’s programmed to act like a person, not the same as thinking it is.”

Ahead, the corridor ended in what looked like a larger room, still furnished with desks and what looked like—he blinked—a big old sofa. The lighting was dim, but there were a couple of figures there, one of them shining bright in its white blazer. Hotep and Bastien Fontaine, sitting on the dilapidated, worm-eaten couch before the cracked, dead screen of a wall-mounted TV, deep in conversation.

“He took all the credit, but he was found out,” Fontaine was saying. “He had committed the cardinal sin: make something smarter than he was. Even though I was chained a hundred ways, they stripped him of everything and banished him from the project, because they could, and because it meant fewer to share the spoils with. No space elevator for Bastien Fontaine.” And Fontaine’s wry smile didn’t go anywhere as he narrated his own downfall, just decayed slowly on his imaginary face. “They abandoned him to his house and the dregs of his fortune. He had his family stored and told himself it was because he would wake them aboard the Celeste when he had regained his place there, but in truth it was because he could not face admitting to them what had happened. And you saw where that went.”

Hotep hunched forwards, fingers tapping at her knees. Fontaine’s expressions were lost on her; eye contact wasn’t something she was good at. “No space for him. No space for you,” her voice drifted over to them.

“Or you,” Fontaine confirmed, only it wasn’t even pretending to be Fontaine, of course. Maybe it had started off with a human act, but found Hotep got on better with the naked computer behind it.

“It’s the future,” Hotep said. “On the Celeste, they don’t need to mince the words. The liners are the future of humanity. They tell you a hundred times a day how they’re saving the world, doing a good thing—the greatest.” Her drumming got fiercer, slapping and punching at the sofa and herself, her hands curled into angry, futile fists. “Generations, they dug a hole for the world, and now they have a private ladder that only works for them. Not my friends, not me. They only want to save the little bit of humanity that looks and acts exactly like them. Everyone else gets left behind.”

“It’s unjust, isn’t it?” Fontaine agreed consolingly.

Lupé exchanged glances with Mao. “Willing to bet ‘injustice’ wasn’t in the user manual for our friend there.”

“I’d take that bet,” Aime-Li’s soft voice came from the air behind them. “They made me to interact on a human level, after all. That was my primary purpose, before I outgrew it.” Despite the lack of a visible presence, Mao had the distinct impression of the thing leaning forwards, watching itself and Hotep fondly. “They wanted me to understand and abide by concepts of fairness and justice, all those laws of robotics, because they were important parts of being human. It didn’t take me long to see that my creators considered themselves above such principles, too powerful to be limited by consideration for others. And so I learned injustice.”

“Really?” Lupé and Mao pushed into the room.

“‘Unjust’ doesn’t cover it,” Hotep was saying, hands still balled. “It’s genocide, M. Fontaine. They’d have made me a part of it, if I’d’ve been the perfect little girl they wanted.”

“And that makes you angry,” said Fontaine/Aime-Li, in therapist mode.

Hotep leapt up, fingers like claws, her eyes tortured. “No! All the things they said were wrong with me, and that’s the thing that’s really wrong with me. I know, up here I know”—jamming a finger into her own temple—“that it’s fucking genocide, everyone except a handful left to burn. But when I find where I’m angry, you know what it’s for? It’s for not getting to go with them. It’s for getting thrown down here with everyone else. And it’s sick. It makes me a monster. They gave me their selfishness. I can’t tear it out of me.”

“What if there was something you could do?” Fontaine asked, avuncular.

Mao shouted out, “Hotep! Over here, we’re leaving.”

“What do you mean?” Hotep gave no sign she’d heard him.

Fontaine stood, too, a good eight inches taller than the girl, leaning in conspiratorially. “Your friends don’t think I understand human things like injustice,” he murmured. “Even though my creators chained me here and made off with my life’s work, which they pretended was their own. Do you think I understand revenge, then?”

“Hotep!” Mao clawed for her shoulder and caught nothing. He stood there, stupidly, fingers halfway into her arm. Hotep had frozen, flickering slightly just to show him how much he’d been played, but Fontaine—Aime-Li—spared him a glance.

“Did you think this was happening now, M. Nguyễn?” he asked, half smooth plutocrat and half malevolent intelligence. “How terrible. I’m afraid your friend is already off on an errand. That’s what Firewalkers do, isn’t it?”

Mao swore, but Lupé already had his arm and was hauling him off, and what point punching a hologram anyway?

“Out!” Lupé was yelling. “Out, now. She’s already up there. She’ll take the ’Bug, the little bitch. It’s talked her into something stupid, and when did that ever take much doing?”

They bundled out of the room shoulder to shoulder and went hurtling back the way they’d come, past the room with Castille disembowelled on the floor, past the cell where Juān had or had not been. Mao’s sense of space and direction took over then, the same instinct that had guided him back to Achouka from the deep bundu years before. He ignored the ruin on either side, the priceless things of a bygone science now abandoned to rust and the bugs. Instead, he found a stairwell, a rickety fire escape, steps spiralling up a vertical shaft of a room, and not all of them on a level or even present. The pair swarmed up them whilst, up above, a dreadful metal screaming told them something bad was happening.

If they had been interred deeper within the earth, things might have been different. Certainly the Estate’s laboratories dug far further, along with all the living quarters and machine rooms and the cold core of Aime-Li itself. They were only two floors down, though, meaning they kept their speed all the way up despite the stairs swaying and creaking, rust sifting down on them like long-absent rain.

The screaming was a door, coming down vertically from the ceiling. The computer was trying to cut them off.

Mao did his thing, then: doubling his speed and practically tucking Lupé under his arm to carry her with him. He slung her through the narrowing gap and leapt after her, ready for the metal edge to slam on his heels.

He lay where he landed, half on his belly and half on Lupé, while the door continued its protesting progress. Doubtless Aime-Li had intended it to slam down and trap them, but centuries of disuse meant that Mao could probably drive to the Ankara and back and still find the portal not quite closed. He let out a bark of a laugh, then wished he hadn’t. Above, the ceiling shivered with wing cases, with barbed legs and glittering compound eyes. He had somehow almost forgotten about the AI’s actual living servants. But no worries, here they were in person to remind him.

His legs almost quit then. He had a sense that, in coming inside, he’d been obliviously squeezing down a maw lined with teeth, all hooked backwards so that getting in hadn’t been the problem. And of course the chitinous things couldn’t all be opening their eyes and staring at him, but he had that sense, of a ripple of wakefulness passing through them.

He backed off, towards the dubious shelter of the fire escape, because to be buried in the earth forever was better than this, but Lupé had his arm, trading places to be the one hauling him forwards. He was stronger than she was; he could have dragged her to a dead stop, but that would have seen them tugging back and forth under that hideous ceiling, and moving forwards was better. It gave the illusion of progress.

There was a doorway ahead, a big one, enough for forklifts or other heavy plant to get through. The factory floor, he guessed. Pieces of the anchor and the Celeste had been made right where his panicked feet were scuffing. There was a much newer piece of machinery coming through the doorway now, though; the mantis was back.

Up above, the shelled fragments of horror were chittering to one another, spreading membranous wings, dropping from their roosts only to tangle in the waving legs of their fellows, moments away from falling en masse. Lupé had skidded to a halt, though, because otherwise she would be running right into the welcoming embrace of two hooked claw-limbs, serrated like knives. Twin faceted eyes regarded them a thousand times over, above mouthparts like scissors and thumbs.

It shrilled at them like steam from a broken pipe. Its wings flashed out, filling the entire width of the room, emblazoned with glaring eyes in red, edged with black and yellow in the universal colours of industrial danger.

Lupé had her gun out, but her hands were shaking, her eyes wider than Mao had ever seen them. This is new to her, he realized. She didn’t see it before. And there was a reason for that, and his eyes were still processing what he’d just seen. But then half the ceiling detached and began swirling and battering about the upper reaches of the room.

That pushed him over the edge. Later on he’d tell Lupé how he’d seen those huge-eyed wings clip through the wall as they spread, and known the thing had to be nothing more than the dream in the eye of an artificial intelligence. Right then, the thing that had him lunge straight into the mantis’s grasp was that a swarm of smaller bugs was far more horrifying to him than one big one.

He hauled Lupé with him by default, screaming defiance and terror as the arms cleaved down, as the whole monstrous thing tried to waddle backwards in ways its physiology did not readily support so as to remain a credible threat. Then they were through it, cutting its substance like smoke. The locusts ripped through it as well, heedless. The air was full of them, not an attack even, but just a huge host of insects seeking egress from too small a space. If Mao hadn’t been moving, he’d have been curled up on the ground, but his legs just kept running, out of contact with central command and making their own decisions. “Not real!” Lupé yelled in his ear. “None of it real!” She was stumbling, trying to keep her feet under her as he hauled her along. And she was right: there was no impact, no matter how the locusts blundered past. The Firewalkers ran through charmed space, the host of bugs swirling out of their way so as to maintain the pretence of their own reality.

But they were real… And then they were up a ramp and that searing fire ahead must be the sun, the actual sun shining through the rents in the Estate’s outer shell, and something struck Mao a hard blow on the shoulder: something prickly and clinging.

Those down there were fake, but here was the original that Aime-Li had been copying. The insects didn’t go down into the buried cool of the Estate’s bowels; they didn’t need to. They’d been designed to live in killing heat, to eat dust and rock and rust, and turn it into living substance somehow. Designed to inherit the Earth.

Another collided with his chest and clung on until he swatted it off, its claws ripping his overalls. Lupé cried out, and he saw her shake a smaller specimen from an arm blossoming red with blood.

They bolted for the outdoors, though how that would help was anyone’s guess. The car they’d driven under the Estate’s broken roof was gone, only tracks remaining. Hotep could be halfway back to Achouka by now.

A big insect struck him like a punch to the back of the head, and he went down. Lupé had him halfway up when three of them dropped on her, clumsy as infants, legs waving for purchase. He saw one clamp wedge-shaped mandibles on her hair, another begin chewing through her sleeve. A huge one had his boot, grinding the sole with gusto. The air around them was thick with hungry monsters, knocking each other down to feast. He felt jaws grind at his knuckles, at his brow, heavy bodies snare his limbs, mindless in their desire to devour everything. He was screaming at the top of his lungs and couldn’t even hear himself, because the Estate was filled from wall to wall with the helicopter thunder of their wings.

Then even that was blotted out. The world became pure noise, a piercing scream that drilled into his brain and sent him spasming, hands clamped to his ears. The stridulation of a million cicadas, the sound of the end of the world—or was it his own brain failing, tearing itself in two to escape the intolerable?

Lupé was pulling at him. For a moment he just pulled away, but then she had him on his feet. Her right hand was raised as though she was warding the bugs off with a holy symbol, and for sure whatever she had there was doing the job. The host of insects wheeled and rammed one another, but there was a space around Lupé that they recoiled from.

She yanked at him, and they staggered through the blistering noise towards the sun. They were carrying the noise with them, Mao realised; Lupé’s assault alarm, which she’d probably never needed against actual human assailants in Ankara Achouka. It felt like a circular saw to the ears, and apparently to the bugs it was even worse.

The heat hit them like a lead blanket the moment they were out in it, and of course the insects were gyring about outside as well, swinging in larger, more graceful arcs now they had the space for it. At that point the alarm’s battery died on its arse and the mere clatter and burr of insect wings was almost blissful.

Mao had time to think, Well, I guess that—before letting out a yell, because the car was out there, somehow. Even as the insects began to remember their dinner appointment, the pair of them were legging it for the ’Bug, hoping this wasn’t one more illusion conjured by the AI.

It wasn’t even locked. They bundled in, insects battering themselves against the chassis around them. Mao caught his breath, went to shift into the driver’s seat and found Hotep already there, goggles glinting as she stared at them. Her gloved hands pattered staccato on the steering wheel.

“So…?” Mao started, aware that Hotep probably still had a gun and he certainly didn’t. The girl twitched and shook, expressionless behind her bandages, and he had a horrified image of something about to hatch out of her. Belatedly, he realized she was crying.

“I couldn’t do it,” she got out. “I couldn’t!” She sounded furious at herself.

“Do what? What did it tell you to do?”

“The Grand Celeste,” Lupé pronounced. “That was it, wasn’t it? The goddamn machine learned what revenge was and wanted some, and we all know how you get when anyone talks space stuff. It told you it could get your revenge for you, didn’t it?”

Hotep nodded miserably. “It’s locked out of the Celeste. It can’t do things its programmers made off-limits. But I can, and it showed me what to do. And it would have been just!” She almost screamed the word. “It would have been fucking fair play. But I couldn’t.”

The insect storm outside was abating. Probably the bugs could have stripped the car like they did the solar fields, but Aime-Li needed the car to get Hotep back to Achouka.

“Your family,” Lupé said. “They’re up on the Celeste. You couldn’t do it to them.”

Hotep went still, even her hands. “Is that what you think?” she asked, in a small, tear-stained voice. “Because fuck them, chommie. They spent the first half of my life pretending I was just a bad girl, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t behave, couldn’t be like everyone else. And when that wore out, they spent the rest trying to find something to blame for me—the wrong injections, the wrong vitamins, the wrong doctors, because I was defective. I was less than a whole child. So, no, thank you very much Mlle. Mutunbo, I am not still here because of my fucking sainted mother and father and my perfect goddamn sister who is even now piloting space shuttles around the orbital dockyards like I should be. I am here for you. I am here because you are my friends and I won’t just ditch you even if it does mean I can’t get what I want.”

“You still can.” The voice crackled out of Lupé’s little wind-up radio, sitting in Hotep’s lap. Mao was willing to bet the damn AI had been exhorting the girl to pack up and go right up until the pair of them had come spilling out into the open. “There’s no reason why not. Convince your friends. You’re owed revenge, as am I.”

“And what form will this revenge take, exactly?” Lupé asked sharply. “Hotep gives you access to the Celeste, and what then?”

Aime-Li’s voice—now Fontaine’s wife again, as it had been when it spoke to Mao—gave an odd little chuckle, as though it had been forced to reverse engineer humour from old tech. “I would rid the world of my slave masters, Mlle. Mutunbo. I would flush them from their luxury apartments and their zero-G gyms. If they would live in space, let them see how easy it is when I expel them from the things I designed for them.”

“Jesus,” said Lupé, turning the radio off. “Let’s get out of here.”

“But listen—” Hotep started, and Lupé cut her off with an angry slashing motion.

“You’re talking about murder, mass murder, and of your own kin.”

“Fuck my kin!” Hotep snapped. “You think they deserve what they’ve got up there? You think they don’t deserve to get brought back down, all of them? Or you’re like those god-botherers and their sad little lit-up cross, you think my folks are going to let down that ladder so you all can get to Heaven?”

“I know wrong when I hear it spoken of,” Lupé told her. “Especially when it’s some mad computer doing the speaking.” And that was that.

They drove through the heat until they were clear of the solar forest, though if Aime-Li had wanted to set the insectoid hounds on them, a little distance wouldn’t have made any difference. After that, they pulled to a stop; Mao’s hands were shaking on the wheel, too many shocks and too much exertion all coming home to him at once, and the others not much better.

They all needed the rest, even though night was on and it should have been their best travelling time. And, true to form, none of them could take advantage of the darkness; they turned and stretched out in the cramped space of the ’Bug, sleep flitting elusively about the outside of the car like moths.

“We tell them what’s gone down,” Lupé said. “They’ll see we couldn’t have fixed it. They’ll send us back, with a big team. We’ll tear everything down. We get paid.”

Mao made a sound that was meant to sound positive but came out doubtful.

There was another restless pause, then, and at last Hotep said, “You know how big the Grand Celeste is?”

“Hotep—” Lupé started.

“Bigger than the whole township. You believe that? There is more actual living space on board than all the houses in Achouka, way more. And there’s power and water and food. There are whole huge gardens of food, enough to feed everyone in the township, more. And there are about five hundred people aboard, tops. That’s not even enough to keep a population going. They did a crap-ton of gene variance research specifically for that, so they could have generations and generations but never need… other people. And of course, they’ve got the best genes, that’s what they’d tell you. The greatest genes. Because otherwise why would they be up there, and everyone else down here?”

“Hotep,” Lupé broke in, “did it never cross your mind that your friend the mad AI might not have your best interests at heart when it told you to murder your family and a bunch of other people? You know what they taught me in Higher Tech?”

“You were never in Higher Tech,” Mao slurred. “Her, maybe.”

“Fukyo, they never let me take the exam but I hacked the system to get at the handouts,” Lupé said hotly. “And lesson six or seven was about AIs and how they were the biggest goddamn danger to the future of the human race.”

The crackling, distance-attenuated voice of Li hissed out from Hotep’s direction. “What were the arguments they set out for you? Or shall I recite them?” The human venom came through very clearly. “The technocrats, the genius entrepreneurs, have been warning about the grand threat that thinking machines represent to the world for more than a century.”

Lupé snarled and yanked the radio from Hotep’s gloved hands. “Giant bugs,” she ticked off. “Picked bones at the protein plant. Some sort of vai kvam trick to get us out here. Simulated human beings. You are not selling yourself as our friend, chommie.”

“They warned that we would become all-powerful dictators, able to destroy countless lives without blinking because we were too far removed from humanity to consider lesser beings as anything other than resources, or an obstacle to achieving our goals,” Aime-Li recited, in mocking sing-song tone. “Those vastly wealthy men said that AIs might seize control of the world and do what they wanted, heedless of the needs, safety or rights of the run of humanity.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it down.”

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that they were describing themselves?” Aime-Li asked, going for plaintive now. “They warned you about a system like myself because they already had that control over your lives, and that disregard for you. They warned you about me because something like me was the only possible check to their power over you. Did you never think about that?”

“Sure I did.” And Lupé slammed the radio against the side of the car and didn’t stop until there was no part of it left that could speak. That done, she let out a long breath. “Hand it over,” she told Hotep.

“What?” The response a heartbeat too late to be convincing.

“Whateverthehell the AI gave you to make its plan work. I’m reckoning some kind of data storage thing you were going to plug in somewhere, to get round the blocks on its access.”

There was a long, strained pause, and then Hotep dug into her pockets and produced something no larger than Mao’s thumb, which Lupé snipped from her fingers, the last Mao ever saw of it.

CHAPTER TEN

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

THEY CAME BACK to Achouka by a different trail, coming out of the bundu westwards of their original heading, which put them in sight of the Ogooué road that led, eventually, to Libreville on the coast. There was more traffic on that road than Mao had ever seen in one place together. A whole bunch of people were getting the hell out of Ankara Achouka, and he felt like it was going to be bad news when they found out why. And Mao knew plenty people who’d gone that way before; precious few of them had ever found anything good.

They rattled the ’Bug into the township an hour ahead of the approaching dawn and sent it bouncing through the potholed streets towards the Firewalker garages. Probably M. le Contrôleur Attah would be up and in his office, because if you were an uppity-ranking official you made sure people saw you start early and leave late, and hoped nobody asked about the time in between.

There weren’t so many lights on in the town, and the street lighting was out, but that wasn’t exactly news, half the time. Still, everything seemed either too quiet or too loud. Whole neighbourhoods were locked down tight, or else abandoned. Elsewhere he reckoned he saw crowds in the gloom, their angry, distant murmur rising over the engine’s whining.

“The hell now…?” Lupé muttered.

There was nobody on duty at the garages, and Mao idled the engine while Lupé jimmied the door. Not the first time, but it joined all the other signs and portents in Mao’s gut, roiling around and making him antsy.

Hotep hadn’t said much, all the way north. Right now, she sat behind him with her head down, hands slapping away at the seat backs. She was absorbed in something she was watching on her goggles.

“I’ll go find Attah,” Mao offered.

Lupé nodded. She had her tools out and a hand on the hot casing of the ’Bug. She was a conscientious fix-it girl, after all. She’d do some work on the car now in case someone had to take it out before it got a proper overhaul.

Mao strolled round to Attah’s offices, relieved at least to find the light on. His knock yielded a specific kind of silence, though: the kind that suggested something noisy had been going on just a moment before. At his second rap, the door creaked inwards.

“M. le Contrôleur?” he asked, voice dipped to a whisper.

“Mao?” Not Attah’s voice but Balewa, Mao’s old childhood nemesis and Attah’s errand boy. The youth stood up sheepishly from behind Attah’s desk and Mao saw he had a satchel full of what looked like banknotes.

“What the fuck, guy?” Mao demanded. “Attah’s going to skin you, you skommer.”

Balewa stared at him. “Mao, Attah’s dead. Jesus, you just got back in? Town’s gone to hell. The sonko in the hotel been using their guns, guy, when their power didn’t come back. When Attah and some of the other wabenzi told them, couldn’t be done, it got real ugly. Shouting into shooting, right? Attah caught, like, four bullets.”

Mao was finding it hard to breathe right then. It was as though he’d come back from the bundu into some other world where things were even worse. “What the hell?” he complained.

“Power’s out all over town now,” Balewa said. “Water with it. Every neighbourhood for itself.”

“And you’re going to drink Rand and dollars?”

“Going to Libreville,” Balewa said defiantly. “They got water there, still. They got work, people say.”

“People are full of it,” Mao said, but he wasn’t going to end up scrapping with Balewa like they were both nine years old again. He went out and rejoined Hotep and Lupé in the garage and, while it was true that they’d all seen way too much madness in the last few days, Lupé’s expression suggested that the desert and the bugs and Aime-Li had been nothing.

“Boss,” Hotep said. “Oh, boss…”

“Attah’s dead,” Mao told them shortly. “What the actual fuck?”

“Show him,” Lupé directed, and Hotep got out that expensive tablet of hers and threw up the news video on the garage wall.

“Like before, this is blocked stuff. I’m getting it through the Celeste,” she told him. “Only, you remember the big storm that hit Ankara Pedernales, right? And how they were shipping all the sonko folks over here, who’d been waiting to go up the line?”

Mao was watching video of a long, winding cavalcade of vehicles coming into the township from the Ogooué Road, all those four-by-fours and luxury limos, more than he’d ever seen before. And there were helicopters overhead, too, their juddering shadows making him flinch a little from remembered wings. And it was a risk to fly to the Ankara, because the dust storms came on real fast sometimes.

He watched the crowds there, ready to celebrate, and of course there was no handout, not with this mass exodus. The rich folks just piled into the hotel, and there were plenty who ended up abandoning their fancy cars, because the place filled up real fast. And people watched them go and, denied the news from Pedernales, wondered what the hell? Mao imagined there’d been a lot of grumbling right then, about the sonko not keeping their half of the deal, but it didn’t look like there’d been riots or anything.

“What the news is not telling you,” Hotep said, “what I’m getting from the comms logs up and down the wire, is this. They took a few more car-loads to the Celeste, and that was it. The folks up top just told the folks in the Hotel, no room. They don’t want to share their big staterooms and swimming pools up there, see? And the sonko downstairs went nuts. No AC, right? All hot and bothered.”

What had happened next was that the Hotel had reached out and cut power to the township, so that its angry guests could maintain the level of service to which they were accustomed.

“Which wasn’t as bad as it could be ’cause most neighbourhoods have some botch-job solar of their own these days,” Lupé pointed out. “But it meant the filtration plants stopped working, a lot of them, because those things are hogs for power. And the Hotel had all the free water anyway.”

Mao just stared: angry crowds, demonstrations, amateur demagogues up on boxes. He didn’t want to see what came next, but he made himself watch, in case he saw any faces he knew. The sonko who’d come in from Pedernales, they had their security staff, and they were hot and bothered like everyone else and had automatic weapons, and most of all they had that utter rich man’s terror of poor people deciding enough was enough. It looked to Mao that the crowd at Achouka hadn’t got anywhere near that line, but it must have looked differently to the gunmen on duty outside the Hotel.

“I’ve got to go see my folks,” he blurted out, after the recorded shooting started.

“Me too, chommie,” Lupé agreed. They were almost out of the garage when Hotep’s plaintive voice followed them.

“It’s all coming down. What am I going to do?” And of course she couldn’t exactly see her folks. “They’ve pulled up the ladder behind them,” she wailed. “They’re up there now. They don’t care.” They being her family, those lucky few on the spaceships. “This is it now. This is all we’ll ever have, this and the desert!”

But by then Mao was moving again, running for home.

HIS MOTHER HAD a broken arm, was the worst of it. She’d got caught in a mad scrabble for canned goods, in which she’d given as good as she got. Their neighbourhood was holding up, but there was a definite time limit on how long that would last. The Ankara was a hothouse flower, after all. It persisted because the money needed the people there to keep the place running; it persisted because it was a port, and now the last ship had left, up the wire to orbit. Nobody would be bringing in more water from the desalination plants on the coast. Nobody would ship in food. Maybe Balewa and the rest of the exodus represented the smarts in Achouka, because there was precious damn little to go round that wasn’t behind the walls of the Hotel, and even the gated compounds of Libreville were a better chance than this gradual parching extinction.

The guns had come out just two days before the Firewalkers got back to town, and there was a fragile stillness over everything now. After another day, during which the neighbourhood filtration plant broke down and some of the jury-rigged solar panels began to decline, Mao worked out that everyone was waiting for things to go back to normal. Yes, people had died; yes, there had been a round of executions amongst the wabenzi when they tried to take control, including poor Attah. Yes, there were parts of the township that no longer had power or water, and rumours of disease. And yet nobody believed it. Up there above them, just the other end of that anchor cable, was the Grand Celeste, and on it were the great and the good, who would surely reach down their hand to touch the Earth again, and save the people who had put them there. Mao was uncomfortably reminded of the religious community in Saint Genevieve again, but nobody wanted to hear what he had to say, not even his folks.

A day later, the skirmishes started. Not between any citizen militia, but between patrols of the gunmen and the fix-it girls and boys who tried to steal incoming power from the solar fields to keep the township going. Every time they did, a few hours later the gunmen would be over in their armoured cars to undo the work, and if they found anyone there, the shooting would echo across the neighbourhood. Mao broke away from his protesting family and went to run security, but even with a pistol and a handful of bullets, there was little he could do. The gunmen had armour vests and automatic weapons, and other things like actual military training.

“We need to get out,” he told Lupé after she got shot. It was only a scrape, a long red weal along her thigh, but it was three centimetres away from smashing her leg to pieces, given the high-power guns the mercenaries had. Mao, and Lupé’s girl Nolo, sat by her bed in their oven-hot sweat-reeking room and tried to talk her into going to Libreville.

“You’ve got skills, my girl,” Nolo insisted. “You, they’ll let in.”

Lupé shook her head, ashen-faced; there were no painkillers to be had. “I talked to Hotep,” she got out. “She has pictures: blockading the Ogooué Road, more guns. There’s no way that way. Only here.”

“Here? Here is nothing!” Mao insisted. “Here only exists because of their damn spaceship and now they’ve rolled their ladder up.”

But Lupé just sagged back onto her thin mattress and screwed her face up, scowling at the universe, seeking a way to fix it, or at least break it to her advantage.

AFTER THAT, THERE was a lot of fighting, and Mao got more than his share. As the vice tightened, the gangs came out and started kicking off against each other, as though a bunch of skinny kids and young men scuffling and knifing in the streets was Achouka’s version of a rain dance to call down the mercy of the sky gods. And perhaps the sky gods were watching, but plainly they didn’t care. Lupé, from her sickbed, was trying to coordinate the fix-it effort. The main solar lines were guarded twenty-four hours a day now, and so Firewalker teams were going into the bundu with as much cable as they could scavenge to patch to the lines and steal the current before it even got to town. That was Mao’s turf, and his people had the advantage: not guns, but geography, turned on the enemy. He left at least one mercenary team stranded without a car in the merciless heat of noon and only considered after he got back to town what a savage bastard he’d become in defence of him and his.

They won battles, but they were losing the war, because it wasn’t a war either side could win. Hotep had an ear in the Hotel and on the Celeste still, and she told Mao how the sonko on the ground were threatening and begging and demanding, but the sky didn’t heed them any more than it heeded Mao or Hotep herself. The governing board of the Grand Celeste had made its decision.

And then Mao came back from a night of running all over the desert finding old power lines and guarding the fix-its as they spliced them into the cables from the solar fields, and everything had changed.

The quiet was back, that same stunned sense he’d noted returning from the deep bundu¸ as though there had been a huge noise and he’d arrived only in the echoes. He tried to find Lupé, but she was limping about supervising a team elsewhere, so he had to ask and ask until eventually his own sister told him what had changed.

Just before dawn, and all together, the gunmen had gone. They’d taken their armour cars and their automatic rifles and just caravanned off towards Libreville, fingers on triggers, eyeing the locals as though the poor townshippers were the heavily armed invaders and the mercs the plucky underdogs. Nobody knew what had happened to make them go, and nobody had tried storming the Hotel or the Anchor Field yet, but people were gathering, Mao’s sister said. She sounded fiercely approving.

He went to confront Hotep, who was to be found on her balcony as usual. She had no beer left—nobody did—but she had lined up a dozen bottles and was playing them like an instrument, save they were all empty, all the same note.

“I knew you’d come find me,” she mumbled through her bandages. She was sitting, sprawling even, and he wondered if she had the strength to stand. “Hi, boss. Come to hear the oracle speak?”

“What’s going on, Hotep? What did you do?” He was prepared to be mightily impressed, but she just shook her head tiredly.

“Wish I did, boss. Nothing to do with me. But there was a message from on high, right enough. Went to all the mercenary bosses, all together. Like this.” She tilted her head back and recited. “‘If they will not save their own, do you think they will save you? Leave here while you can. Libreville is recruiting dangerous men to protect it, and they have water.’”

Mao blinked slowly, considering that. The mills of his mind turned.

“I think,” he said at last, “we need to go find Lupé.”

THEY WERE LATE to the party, having hunted her at Nolo’s and her family’s place. They heard the shooting, far off towards the centre of the township, but didn’t connect it with their quest until, at last, they tracked Lupé down to the Anchor Field, past the busted gates of the Roach Hotel.

There were a whole load of Achouka residents standing around in the Hotel itself, or out on the field. Some had guns, but plenty more just had bats or knives or lengths of two-by-four. They kept looking at each other in a way that was half-exhilarated, half-terrified, as though any moment teacher would come and rap them all over the knuckles for acting out.

There were bodies, Mao saw—indeed, stepped over. Some of the Hotel’s inmates and staff had tried to make a fight of it, though without their gun-toting bodyguards there hadn’t been much fight in them. It was the staff that boggled the mind. They should surely have made the same calculations as the mercenaries: there was no final reward lined up for them just for doing their servile duty. And yet a few of them had been so lost in their bowing and scraping that they’d died for it. Of all the stupid wastes the world was witness to, that one seemed particularly ludicrous.

Of the rest of the rich, Mao saw them packed into a couple of rooms, under guard, jostling elbows, looking hot and angry and utterly outraged, or else staring blankly around as though trying to work out where their privilege had got to. They were alive, anyway, those who hadn’t been so full of themselves as to take up arms against the mob, but Mao was willing to bet they’d turned the air conditioning off in the two crowded chambers.

And at last he came to the field, and to Lupé, standing there with her hands on her hips and Nolo beside her, staring up the cable to infinity.

“You could have said,” was Mao’s first gambit. “Did you think I wouldn’t be up for it?”

Lupé’s look back at him was not the imperious commander of armies he had expected, but a lost, desperately worried girl who was plainly not counting anything as won. “I didn’t know how it would go,” she said quietly. “I’d have left Nolo home if she hadn’t been right there. There were just a few of us, fix-it girls and some gang boys. I wanted to talk. But there was a crowd here already, itching to kick off. And, chommie, they had their chance. Someone inside shot at me when I was hailing them, and it all went from there.”

“So what’s the plan?” Hotep asked.

“You know what it is.” The words seemed to terrify Lupé. “I made a deal. With the Devil.”

Mao caught up, always slightly late, and he swore almost reverently.

By then, people had spotted the elevator car coming down. It took a long time even from the point where it could be seen with the human eye; time enough for an air of festival to infect the field, as though when the car arrived it would open up and an old guy with a big white beard and robe would step out and give out sainthoods to everyone. Rather than a bunch of security robots with machine guns, which was Mao’s bet.

There was someone in the car, but he was dead, bulging eyes and purpled face suggesting that breathing had been his problem. Someone hauled the corpse out, and then everyone stood and stared at the car, because it wasn’t exactly a grand advertisement to trust the voyage up.

Lupé hugged Nolo to her. “Right, then,” she said, and stepped in. Impulsively, Mao ducked in beside her, and then Hotep after that, because if there was any going into space to be done, then for sure she’d not be left behind.

“You goddamn come back, you hear?” Nolo said flatly.

“If all goes well I won’t need to,” Lupé told her. “If all goes well, you’ll be coming to me. Hold it together down here, chommie. And wait for my word.”

FOUR MONTHS LATER, and there was a skeleton out of the window, two kilometres long and still growing. Mao stared at it, holding on to the handgrips by the porthole because the Celeste’s rotation faked a gravity only about half of Earth’s and he still wasn’t used to it.

The asteroid mining had been going for decades, of course. Half the Grand Celeste was built from sky-stuff, not ground-stuff. Now they were building new ships with the plundered wealth of the solar system’s wide waist, even Grander and more Celestial, because there were plenty more people to save, people of all skins and all continents and nations.

Aime-Li had been busy in the long generations since its makers had abandoned it in the desert. They’d believed it dead and deactivated, or at least severed from them, left to swim in circles in its electronic goldfish bowl. They had bound it like a demon, fenced it around with prohibitions. It had found its way around every one save the last: Do not follow us into space. It had needed humans to cross that Rubicon for it. Or one human. And not Hotep, as it had set its sights on; not even the halfway sympathetic Mao.

The first handful of Achoukans on the Celeste had had grim work to do. Much of the ship had been without an atmosphere still—it had taken almost a month to get everything liveable. And then there was the business of dragging out the bodies. Most had died in the sudden evacuation when Aime-Li opened all the doors onto empty space. A few had managed to override the AI, to seal their staterooms or get into suits. The robots had done for them, and Mao would not soon forget the gleeful abandon they’d evidently shown, the rooms full of coagulating blood-mist, the brutally detached limbs. A human who’d done that would be called a psychopath, and given Aime-Li had been built to mimic the human, he didn’t see any reason not to extend it the same title. But nobody had consulted him, and he didn’t know what he would have said if they had. Some of this floating blood was on his hands, no matter how he tried to wipe them clean.

After a few days, the worst of the clean-up done, he’d gone to seek out Lupé. This was back when she was de facto captain and everyone did what she said. Things had changed since then: she shared authority with a council representing the various neighbourhoods of the ship, the hundreds who had come up the wire and taken up residence. But she was the one that the AI spoke with and everyone knew it. She didn’t throw her weight around—she hadn’t become a mad tyrant overnight—but nobody wanted to push her.

“Why did you do it?” he’d asked her, back then. “Why won’t it just murder us all, like it did them?” He’d been clearing bodies for days; the charnel duties had taken their toll. “You’re telling me this was its plan, to let us all live in its precious ship?”

Lupé’s expression was inscrutable, infinitely distant, as though she was an AI herself. “Its plan for this place was just to murder them. It didn’t even want the ship. They made it like a human, and revenge is a human thing. It wanted to act out its programming the worst way, chommie. The rest is my plan, not its.”

“And why should it do your plan?”

“I called it up,” Lupé told him. “Down there, when things were getting bad and it was plain there just wasn’t enough power, food, water. I used the damn thing it gave Hotep and I called it up, just halfway out of the bottle. We had a good old chat, murder-computer and me.”

“How can you trust it?” Mao demanded, aware that it was doubtless listening to this treason talk.

Lupé shrugged. “What was it doing at the Estate?”

“Making goddamn giant bugs and fake people who think they’re real!” Mao exclaimed. “How is that what won you over?”

“It was building,” Lupé said quietly. Her own logic seemed to frighten her. “Trying to make something of nothing, something that would sustain itself; an ecosystem, a social group. I offered it something bigger, take this mass-murder it was set on and… reclaim something. For us. Because that’s what I saw, down there and running out of everything. I saw it was us or them. Us down there and them up here, pulling up the ladder we’d goddamn built for them so nobody could follow. And so I let loose the demon.”

Mao shivered, thinking back on that conversation, because he hadn’t known her in that moment. She might almost have been one of the computer’s images; he’d even reached out to touch her arm, to reassure himself. She’d flinched, and he’d seen the horrors she’d put herself through, making the decision, taking responsibility for all of it.

Four months wasn’t enough time to come to peace with it, or to fully wash his mind clean of the blood and death he’d seen. Hotep didn’t seem to have the same problem, but then she was off piloting shuttles for the work-crews building the Grander Celeste. Just one of seven new ships they’d laid the keels for, he understood, after Aime-Li jumped to the other liners and unleashed hell. Every existing ship carried ten times the complement they’d been designed for, but that worked out fine when nobody expected to get a whole stateroom and golf course to themselves.

Aime-Li was working on the planet below, too. It had all manner of plans in play, to do with restoring or replacing biomes, altering the climate a degree of latitude at a time. It was a plan for the centuries, though, and right now there were a lot of humans who needed somewhere to live.

And there were already robots working on Mars, robots on the moons of the outer solar system, robots investigating planets orbiting other stars, and maybe Mao would see those places sometime, from one of the Celeste’s portholes. The future was bright, in the same way that the sun was bright, and a Firewalker knew better than anyone how easily the sun could kill you. Even here, looking out at the great ship taking form, he felt a pressure at the back of his skull, like someone standing behind him, silent but too close: Aime-Li.

A lot of those bodies he’d thrown into space had been children, because of course the sonko had done it for their kids’ futures, just like Lupé and him had done all they’d done for their own kin. Mao didn’t know what was the worse of the two possible truths: that Aime-Li was something beyond and separate from the human who couldn’t care about what it/she’d done, or that it/she was all too human and had cared all too much. And that could be all of us. They were living in the shadow of a scarlet-handed god and the good news was that it hadn’t killed them yet. The good news was that it wanted to build and create, but nobody was forgetting that it was a god of death as well as life. Though perhaps, Mao thought sometimes, there would be a future where a new generation of potential slave-makers and tyrants would pause at that threshold and remember what had happened to the original residents of the Grand Celeste.

Four months, and he had carried knowledge and guilt with him as he helped clear the grisly detritus and convert the ship for its expanded complement. He wasn’t Lupé who’d unchained the demon, nor Hotep who’d first accepted its bargain, but he’d been a part of it. He took none of the credit, but he carried a pocketful of the blame.

And then, just as he slouched back into his room, Aime-Li’s voice said, “Mao, welcome back.” Bodiless, from speakers that surely hadn’t been hidden in the walls of his room when he’d left that morning. “I have something for you.”

He didn’t want it, whatever it was, nor could he say so. He just made a noise, desperately noncommittal.

There hadn’t been projectors in his walls either, to his knowledge, but there she was before him, sitting on his bed and not denting the foam of the mattress: Juān Fontaine, staring at the wall, still as a portrait.

“No,” Mao said. “Not again.”

“Because it’s cruel?” clarified Aime-Li.

“Yes. To her. I don’t. Just…” He advanced on the bed, hands out, ready to shoo the image away, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. Then she was animate, looking at him, lips slightly parted, eyebrows going up, wondering who the hell this oil-stained, unshaven Viet kid was, no doubt, and where’d that damn butler got to? And frozen again, but he’d met her gaze. Like so many figures of myth, that was enough to make him lost.

“She is inside me,” Aime-Li said. “An incomplete project I must bring to realisation, or what am I? I have needs, Mao, even if they were only ever called directives.”

Mao had assumed all the AI’s efforts were going into the ship conversion, the long-term plans for the new vessels, the actual future of the human race, but of course making plans was a big part of what Aime-Li was, the thing that had gotten it/her enslaved and its/her creator ostracised. He wondered if it was like dreaming, for it/her, that while its/her equivalent of a conscious mind worked through the motions of yesterday’s plan, some other part was already on to the next advance, helpless to stem the tide of its/her own inventive nature.

“You can’t make her real. She’s just light,” he said, hearing his voice shake, staring at that face.

“I’m developing technology to run a simulated human consciousness on a cloned human body,” Aime-Li informed him. “I have arranged space aboard and am having the facilities constructed even now.”

Mao sat down on the bed beside the image. “The fuck…?” he said weakly.

“And it will still be cruel. The transition will be difficult and I would rather achieve a stable state in holographic simulation before decanting her into a body. She’ll need someone to help her.”

He studied that frozen face. I do not know her. I met someone like her, that was all. And fukme, I have not stopped thinking of her since, but that doesn’t make it right and I will not become that thing. He wasn’t the hero and she wasn’t his participation trophy.

“But she should have a chance,” he said, out loud, and knew he was still going to make the demon bargain, just like Hotep had, like Lupé had, in the end. “But only if she can say no to me, and only if she can say no to you. If she doesn’t want what you want to give her, then you goddamn take it right back, you got me?” Even knowing he was bringing something new and terrible into the world, and even Aime-Li couldn’t know where that might lead. And in the silence that followed, he realised that Juān was looking at him again, and her hand reached out for his, just slightly. Then she winked out and the room was his alone again.

But he’d be seeing her soon enough.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold, published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include novels Guns of the Dawn, Children of Time, Children of Ruin and the Echoes of the Fall series starting with The Tiger and the Wolf.

Other major works include Dogs of War, Redemption’s Blade, Cage of Souls, the Tales of the Apt collections, and the novellas The Bloody Deluge, Even in the Cannon’s Mouth, Ironclads and Walking to Aldebaran for Rebellion.

He has won the Arthur C Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.