Toby was trying to keep up. “He … works for them?”
“He carries stuff, does light maintenance work, things like that. For the bots, yes. That way they don’t have to work, which minimizes wear and tear on them. They pay him less than the factory’s paying them, but at least it’s something. And so, he can buy the things he needs.”
She leaned forward. “You need to know this stuff or you’re going to stick out like a sore tooth.”
“Don’t you mean sore thumb?”
She ignored the comment. “Look, you’re the ultimate hyperrich kid, Toby. And more, you’re…” She seemed to think better of saying what that more was. “I don’t know how you feel about it all, but it makes me pretty uncomfortable, and I had a little warning about what you were. If more people find out … I don’t know what will happen. So be careful.”
Toby hugged himself, staring down and at the gray walls and at the cavorting furred things. “I want to know,” he said. “But nobody’s told me anything that makes any sense.”
“Well. You know who you are, right?” He nodded. “So does everybody else. Every single human being on all seventy thousand of our lockstep worlds, and all the other locksteps and probably most of the fast worlds, has heard of Toby McGonigal and his family. You’re one of the most famous people in history.”
“But…” He shook his head. “That makes no sense. No sense at all.”
Corva pressed her fists against her temples and yawned extravagantly. “Well, it should. If you really do know who you are.”
“And who are you? You haven’t even told me your name.”
“My name’s Corva Keishion,” she said. “My Universal Number’s 14-Tourmaline. Have you got a URN?”
He shook his head, eyeing her with uneasy confusion. She sighed in annoyance, but he didn’t care anymore. He just couldn’t keep up—and now he was yawning, too, and shivering again.
“You’re still wet,” Corva observed. She went to rummage in the heap where Shylif had gotten his diving suit and came back with a hollow metal tube. “Try this.” She thumbed the outside of the tube and it immediately began blasting hot air at Toby. “Ow!” Very hot air.
“I’ll stand back. This baby’s industrial, it’s not meant for hair.” She walked back a couple of paces and began waving the tube at Toby like a wand, head to foot. Warmth washed over him. Corva kept yawningextravagantly, and once she was finished with the heater she simply walked over to her bedroll and, without another word to Toby, lay down on it and fell asleep. Her furry companion came over to curl up under her arms. The unnamed one, who seemed to have adopted Toby, came over to sit at his feet.
Jaysir was watching, and after a few more words to the others seated around the stove, he came over. “Quite the force of nature, isn’t she?” he said, nodding at Corva.
Toby snorted in agreement. He definitely wanted to know more about Corva, but she’d told him he was too ignorant of this future he’d found himself in. He’d have to fix that problem.
“Jaysir,” he said, “can I ask you something? “What’s a neuroshackle?”
“NAH, I WON’T TELL her story,” Jaysir said a little while later. “If Corva wants you to know it, she can tell you herself.” They were sitting in a quiet corner, with two of the furry creatures Jaysir had said were denners.
Jaysir might not want to tell Corva’s story for her, but he was entirely happy to tell his own, and Shylif’s. He’d readily explained what a neuroshackle was, and it was every bit as horrible as Toby had suspected: a means of turning a person into a puppet, willing to do anything for his master, even murder or suicide. Ammond and Persea had been willing, even eager, to make Toby into a slave. He didn’t know Jaysir, Corva, and Shylif, but he already felt safer here than he had since awaking on Lowdown.
“This is Shylif’s guy, Shadoweye,” Jaysir had said to introduce his gold-and-white companion. The other one, which was notably smaller and completely black except for his golden eyes, was still sticking close to Toby, and Jaysir smiled. “You might have to name this one yourself.”
“Who does he belong to?”
“Corva got him for her brother, but…” Jaysir shrugged, “that might not work out. We’ll have to see.”
“What about you? Don’t you have a denner? You’re a stowaway, too, right?”
“Oh, I use that.” Jaysir pointed to another corner where a mass of tangled, glittering equipment lay on the concrete under the watchful eye of a hulking cargo bot. “Built it myself. Way more trustworthy than some weird animal, if you ask me. And it’s legal—I got a license for it!—’cause I’m not building them for commercial use.” Toby couldn’t imagine a comfortable way to incorporate oneself into that heap of metal and piping but decided not to say anything.
“Shylif’s an outsider, too,” said Jaysir now. “And it’s a hell of a tale.
“He grew up on Nessus, one of the Alpha Centauri worlds. It’s a fast world, terraformed thousands of years ago—but there are lockstep fortresses there.”
“Fortresses?”
“Yeah, on fast worlds like Earth or Nessus, lockstep communities need special protection from the elements and vandals and stuff. Shylif’s village had grown up around a fortress, which is pretty common. Every thirty years, the fortress’s gates would open, and the lockstep people would pour out for a month of celebration and fraternizing with the townspeople. Jubilee, they call it, when two worlds are awake at the same time. Locksteps Jubilee, too, like when 360 and 72 sync up, every two turns for us, every ten for them. Anyway, the last Jubilee had happened about twelve years before Shylif was born. That’s the funny thing—you grow up with stories and evidence of these mysterious people from the fortress, and you hope to meet them just once in your whole life. Just as he was becoming a man, Shylif met them.
“Thing is, he was deeply in love. Childhood sweetheart kind of thing, and she loved him, too. When the fortress opened, they both went to meet the people who lived in it. There were the usual parties and tours and stuff. What Shylif didn’t know was that there was a man visiting the fortress from somewhere else in the lockstep who had taken a fancy to his girl.
“On the last day of the month, the town held their traditional big send-off for the locksteppers. Shylif lost track of Ouline, his girl. Next morning he asked around, but nobody’d seen her. Gradually it dawned on him: she was still inside the fortress.
“There was nothing to be done. The place was impregnable, and it wasn’t going to open again for another three decades.”
“That’s … awful,” said Toby. The words felt foolish, not even remotely able to express the despair Shylif must have felt. “What did he do?”
Jaysir looked down, then met Toby’s eyes. “He waited.
“He waited for her for thirty years, and when the fortress opened its gates the next time, he was standing there, still waiting.
“Ouline emerged, and she hadn’t aged a day. But Shylif had, and so had everybody else she’d known. Her parents were dead, her brothers were grandfathers already. She told Shylif that she’d been lured by a man named Coley, who’d seduced her on the last night of the Jubilee and abandoned her to sleep in one of the rooms of the fortress. He’d deliberately stranded her.
“For Ouline, only a single night had passed—in the blink of an eye she’d lost her whole world, her parents, friends. Even the trees and buildings were different. She couldn’t handle what had happened. She … she killed herself.”
“Aw, no.”
Jaysir nodded. “And Shylif, who’d waited thirty years for her, had nothing left. Nothing but revenge. He went hunting Coley, but Coley fled the fortress. Shylif followed and ended up wintering over in another lockstep city. Just like her, in one night”—he snapped his fingers—“he left behind everybody he’d ever known. He’s been after Coley ever since. Corva and I met him because he thinks the little monster’s gone to ground on Thisbe, her homeworld.”