Toby approached a woman who was directing people. “Excuse me, I was told I could get to Destrier from here.”
“Ha-ha, very funny,” she said. “You can get fitted for robes that way.”
“Okay, but seriously, can I get to Destrier from here?”
She stared at him. “Where else would we all be going?”
“How much does it cost?”
“Pilgrimage doesn’t cost anything!” She seemed genuinely offended. “Who told you it did?”
“Then I can just show up?” he said hopefully.
She nodded. “Just take the vows and find a role in the Order you’re assigned to, and you can go.”
Vows. Orders? He nodded politely but stepped backward. “Uh, thanks. Maybe, maybe in a bit.” Sure, you could get to Destrier to free—provided you joined some religion or other. Who knew what that would involve?
Disappointed, he was turning away when he spotted a commotion near the line. Was that an actual fight?
A small group of people had approached the line and were apparently handing out printed (physical, not virtual) pamphlets of some kind. This was being taken very badly by some of the ones in the queue. Toby couldn’t make out all the words, but the pilgrims were shouting something about blasphemy, and the pamphleteers were saying something like, “Origin is false!”
Everybody around the tents seemed paralyzed with shock or indecision. That wasn’t really surprising; Toby had seen no real violence since he’d arrived in the lockstep. Even now, he kept expecting bots to step in and separate the men and women who were shouting at one another, yet it wasn’t happening.
Suddenly a pilgrim vaulted the line and struck one of the interlopers. Fists started flying. Toby crossed his arms and watched, increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that nobody was doing anything to stop it. He’d had to step in between Peter and Evayne on numerous occasions; it was what you did if you were a responsible adult. So where were the adults in this crowd?
A flicker of fair hair appeared among the fighting people. It was a young woman, maybe a year or two older than Toby, dressed in street clothes and carrying a shopping bag. She’d probably just been passing by, but now she was caught up in the mob.
One of the pilgrims grabbed her by the wrist.
Toby shouted, then found himself running across the plaza. Orpheus dug his claws painfully into his shoulders, complaining loudly. The man who’d grabbed the girl had raised his hand to slap her, but Toby got there just in time to grab him by the wrist and elbow, like Dad had shown him.
The pilgrim let go of his intended target and tried to hit Toby instead, but Toby pulled down on the wrist he was holding and pushed on the elbow. The pilgrim went down on his knees just as a spitting Orpheus landed on his head.
“Run!” Toby caught a glimpse of the girl’s face before she whirled and bolted. Then Toby too danced out of the reach of the gabbling, shouting mob. He ran back to the tent area, but by the time he felt he was safe and turned to look back, the girl was gone.
AN HOUR LATER, TOBY and Orpheus sat together at a sidewalk café while he tried to recover his strength. The whole incident had taken only seconds, and he hadn’t even been hit, but he felt like he’d run a marathon. Orpheus wasn’t much better. With his dwindling money, Toby was trying to revive them both with hot food.
He was wearing the tourist glasses, so the landscape around him was tagged and labeled, and he’d come to ignore all that information—but now the universal symbol for New Text Message suddenly appeared in the upper right of his field of vision. Startled, he said, “Somebody just texted me,” to Orpheus.
A WTF? icon appeared over Orpheus’s head. Toby laughed, then focused on the message flag. “Should I open it?” There were only three people on this world who might be contacting him.
NEED CASH? GOT A JOB FOR TODAY. —SHYLIF
“Huh.” Shylif, not Jaysir, and definitely not Corva. There was a kind of sting to that fact. She wasn’t talking to him. Or maybe he was just making that up? “Oh, Orph, I’m getting paranoid.”
It was true he was already out of money. Jaysir’s list had provided some alternative choices of lodging, and Toby had looked at a couple of those while they walked. The cheapest was a stack of shipping containers just above the warehouse level; Orpheus had growled as they approached it.
He thought for a while, then shrugged and replied: OKAY. WHERE DO I MEET YOU?
Shylif sent a map, and a little later Toby found himself down at the dock level of the city sphere, which was crowded with bots and machines, and almost empty of living people.
He spotted Shylif and raised his hand to wave—then lowered it and nearly ducked behind a pillar before cursing and stopping himself. Shylif was talking with Corva. After a minute or so she nodded to him and walked off to join a more-or-less human-shaped bot that handed her a bag of grippies and morphing tools. It poured a bunch of hand-sized swarmbots out of another bag and they hopped and danced around her feet. Wrecks swatted at these as they moved away.
It seemed Corva was working, too.
Toby shrugged off his misgivings and went up to Shylif. “Thanks for the job offer,” he said, then added, “And sorry about running out on you guys.”
Shylif laughed, a rich human sound among the otherwise mechanical noises of the docks. “I totally understand,” he said. “I’d probably have done the same thing.”
“But does she understand?”
“Corva’ll come around. She’s a bit like you—she needs time.”
Toby had no ready comeback for that, so he just followed as Shylif set off through the maze of gantries, cargo racks and rushing bots. Shylif seemed content not to talk, and soon Toby found himself saying, “So … What are we doing today?”
“Oh, just a little theft recovery from Lockstep 270/2.”
It took Toby a moment to process that. “There’s another lockstep on Wallop?”
“There’re six that I know of. Two-seventy-to-two is a pretty big one, and it’s also pretty aggressive. If you don’t watch ’em, their guys’ll raid our cities while we’re wintering over.”
“They … raid us?”
“Theft of resources and manufactured goods.” Shylif sent him a sardonic look. “Yeah, I thought it was pretty weird when I first heard about it. But then again, everything about the locksteps is weird.”
“No, really?”
“Locksteps raid one another during hibernation periods,” Shylif went on. “There’re treaties forbidding retaliation, but they don’t forbid recovery of the stolen material if you can find it. Some of 360’s missing supplies were spotted in one of 270/2’s cities, so an expedition is being mounted to recover them.”
“How did we get in on it?”
“I found a couple of bots that had been ordered to go after their owner’s stuff,” said Shylif. “They’re city units, not really built for wintering-over conditions. So I offered to subcontract for ’em. We’ll get paid one hundred fifty if we return with any of the bots’ stuff and two hundred if we return with all of it. I’ve got a manifest—here, I’ll share it with you.” An itemized list blinked into visibility in the corner of Toby’s vision.
“That’s it?”
“Well, no.” Shylif looked a bit put out. “It takes a lot of time and effort to find opportunities like this.”
“Can you teach me how to do it?”
Shylif grinned. “I can.”
“Thanks.”
“The ship’s leaving from Portal Eighteen in twenty minutes. You’re gonna need pressure suits. Are you bringing your denner?”