Miles Coley had joined his wife and daughters; they formed a protective wall in front of the old man. One of the women was comforting Sebastine, who had burst into tears at Shylif’s accusation.
Shylif’s struggles had slowed. It seemed it had begun to dawn on him that he wasn’t facing the callous young man who’d stolen his life but a pale ghost at the end of his own. He stared at Coley, and as he stilled, Corva came to him and let Shadoweye slide onto the metal shelf of the security bot’s enclosing arm. Shadoweye butted the underside of Shylif’s chin, but for the moment, he was ignored.
“She died, Coley,” he murmured. “She took her own life.”
The old man’s sobs intensified. His grandson gaped in astonishment, turning from him to Shylif and back again. “Granddad? Granddad, what’s this man saying?”
Coley stammered. The moment stretched, and though all eyes were on this scene, Toby knew that the long unfolding of the drama behind it wasn’t going to be resolved in the next minute, or the next day. He held up his hand.
“We’re going to deal with this, but we can’t do it here,” he announced. “We have to get out of here while we can.”
There was a startled silence, and then people’s gazes began to shift from Coley and Shylif to Toby. One of the men he’d spoken to earlier said, “Where is it we’re going, anyway?”
“Back to Thisbe,” Toby told them, “to reset your clocks. But to get there, first of all we’re going to have to go through the Weekly.”
ORPHEUS RODE TOBY’S SHOULDER as they strode under geodesic glass ceilings that revealed black skies and, ahead, the looming lantern glow of a city sphere. This was the one source of light in Wallop’s cloud continent. The passages they’d come through were eerie and silent, and though he’d ordered heat in the main thoroughfares that led to the lit city, now and then he caught glimpses of side corridors where hoarfrost still painted the walls and where the floors were drifted with oxygen snow.
Though still weak, Orpheus fired off happy emoticons and his head bobbed back and forth as they reached the outskirts of the Weekly lockstep. Toby should have felt similarly triumphant—he’d just escaped one of the lockstep’s most feared cultural enforcers, after all, and had rescued an entire shipload of people to boot.
The confrontation between Shylif and Sebastine Coley had deeply disturbed him, however. Not just for its own sake, but because it made him wonder, even more, what it would be like when and if he ever set eyes on his own brother and sister. Lockstep time wrenched you back and forth, and after Shylif’s experience he was beginning to realize just how unpredictable and brutal it could be.
They had only one encounter during the long walk through the frozen utility corridors linking the docks to the Weekly. About five minutes after they exited the customs area, Jaysir’s bot came stomping out of a side corridor, streaming vapor and with flecks of frost dripping off it like dandruff. Some of the passengers shied back in alarm, but Jay visibly relaxed, and after inspecting the monstrous thing, he gave a sharp nod and let it fall into step behind him.
Shylif was accompanied by bots, too, but in his case he walked head down and eyes glazed, and his bots were an armed escort. A few steps away, Sebastine Coley trudged in much the same stance, while his family fluttered nervously behind him.
It took awhile to get through the airlocks. These were set up to protect the Weeklies from the dangerous cold and toxic air permeating the rest of the continent, and normally nobody came through them until Jubilee, which happened every four weeks, local time. Visitors from 360/1 being unexpected in between times, bots and humans were now working furiously on the far side of the transparent glass walls, trying to get more doors to work. Meanwhile a trickle of humans cycled through, three or four at a time.
There was a lot of hand waving and emotional conversation happening with the workers and security people on the other side. The cover story Corva had come up with was that an explosion had vented some of the 360/1 habitats. Those gesticulating men and women had better be sticking to that story: they’d be telling the Weeklies that the bots that watched over the 360/1 cities during their long sleeps had woken a small army of emergency drones and backup systems when they detected a blast, and had evacuated everybody from the affected area. There was a problem with the power, though, and they were unable to find enough safe beds for the residents of one particular neighborhood. So here they were, arriving at the airlocks to the Weekly lockstep with just a few household bots and some luggage.
The story should hold long enough for them to pass through the Weekly and take passage back to Thisbe—which seemed to be most people’s plan. It helped that these “refugees” were accompanied by numerous official 360 bots, including an impressive military escort. When Toby finally cycled through a lock himself, he left that escort behind, but even so nobody asked him any questions.
The hubbub was subsiding by the time the last bots brought their masters’ luggage through the locks. Many of the refugees had bulled their way through the emergency responders and by now had lost themselves in the crowds of the city. That was a good idea, Toby thought. Since nobody seemed to need him anymore, least of all Corva Keishion, he eventually screwed up his courage and began walking into the tiered city himself. He’d find some sort of job, make some cash, and figure out how to get to Destrier. That had been the plan. It needed to be the plan again.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
He turned to find Corva glaring at him. She was clutching her brother’s arm, but all her attention was on Toby, and Wrecks sat at her feet glaring down his nose in imitation of his mistress.
“You got what you wanted,” he said. To his own surprise, Toby found himself feeling resentful and, before he thought about it, added, “though you nearly got us all killed doing it.”
“So you admit your sister would have killed us?”
He flushed angrily and turned away. “Good-bye, Corva.”
“Toby, wait!”
He didn’t stop, but she ran to his side. He waited for the next cutting comment.
“I’m … I’m sorry,” she said.
He stopped, blinked at her.
Corva stood with one foot twisted, toeing the pavement she was staring at. Her hands were clutched, all knuckle. Wrecks sat on his haunches, watching this performance in obvious surprise. “You didn’t have to do any of the things you did,” she said. “I know you risked everything for people you’d never even met. And setting Orpheus’s alarm like you did—that was a terrible risk you both took and I’m just … I’m amazed at it all, that’s all.”
He’d never seen her like this. “You asked,” he said. “I helped, is all.” Oh, but he knew that wasn’t all, not by a long shot. The thing was, Toby still hadn’t absorbed the implications of what he’d just done. Walking away right now would probably have been best. He needed time to work through it all. Strangely, though, now that he had Corva’s gratitude he was finding it made him even more uncomfortable than the indifference of her countrymen.
He had to laugh at his own words. “I guess it was kind of a superhero thing to do. It’s just … that’s not me, Corva.”
“I know. It wasn’t me a year ago either.”
“Corva Keishion, exchange student,” he said with a smile.
“And then subcontractor to bots, then stowaway, criminal, revolutionary…” She shook her head ruefully. “I could try to say that one thing led to another, but that really doesn’t begin to describe it.”