“What do you think?” asked Jane, sitting down beside me.
“It’s certainly impressive, if not a bit disturbing,” I replied. “The centerpiece of some long-abandoned town?”
“Actually, this is just the beginning of High Saffron,” she said as Courtland whooped with joy over some particularly fine spoon he’d just discovered. “The rest of the town carries on toward the coast. But it’s not deserted. Not always. Far from it.”
The sun went behind a cloud, and I shivered. The atmosphere in the piazza seemed suddenly oppressive, and I noticed for the first time that there was no wildlife of any sort, not even so much as a butterfly. I lifted my hand from the bench. There was a sharp pain as I left some skin behind, and a droplet of bright red blood splashed on the bench; a second later it began to bubble.
“It’s best to keep on the move,” said Jane, and we stood up. My foot knocked against a spoon that I hadn’t seen, and as I bent to pick it up, I yelled. Lying beneath the surface of the Perpetulite, like a drowned man under ice, was a blank face staring back up at me. His mouth was wide open and his hands palms up. His bones were all perfectly visible within the gentle overlay of soft tissue, and even the herringbone pattern of his jacket was discernible. Like the giraffe I had seen outside East Carmine, the indiscriminate organoplastoid had simply absorbed him as if he were nothing more than rainwater or leaf litter. But as I stared at the apparition in the smooth surface, I noticed that another, more fully digested body was just discernible to his left. And beyond that there was another. And another. As I looked around, I saw that the swirling pattern I had assumed was as random as that in linoleum was actually a jumble of semi-digested people, lying in haphazard profusion. The Perpetulite had consumed their tissue, bones, teeth, clothes—and left behind only the indigestible parts, which were simply moved tidily to the side. You didn’t take much to Reboot, but tradition dictated that you always took a spoon. And it wasn’t just spoons at the curbside. It was buttons, buckles, shoe nails, coins, all stained rust-red from the hemoglobin.
“The Night Train from Cobalt junction,” I murmured. “It doesn’t go to Emerald City at all, does it?”
“No,” said Jane, “it comes right here.”
I looked around at the piles of spoons. All those people who had been sent to Reboot because of sedition, unruliness, bad manners or disrespect, or by deceit or accident. They said you were reallocated to another sector once you had been educated. They lied. All the Rebootees ended their days here, except perhaps the few who got away—the woman in the flak tower and Thomas Emerald’s remains under the purple tree. Little wonder they had been dressed in Standard Casuals.
“But it’s against the Rules,” I cried, shocked not just about the murder but about the subterfuge that accompanied it. “The prefects lied to us. It’s against everything Munsell stands for.”
“Technically speaking, you’re wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s written that the pursuit of Harmony requires sacrifices from all of us. It just doesn’t specify what. Hard work, selflessness, Civil Obligation—and sometimes something else. And I’m not sure the prefects actually know anything about this at all. It’s Head Office.”
I looked around at the spoons and had an idea.
“All these people wouldn’t have had their postcodes reallocated, would they?”
“No,” she agreed. “Now you know why the Collective is so underpopulated.”
“But the Previous numbered eighty million or more! You’re not telling me that they were all sent to places like this?”
She looked across at me.
“I don’t know what happened to the Previous.”
“Does the Apocryphal man know?”
“He might have an idea, but to him it’s not emotive—merely history.”
We stood for a moment in silence. There was so much unknown, and so much to discover. But right now, I had only questions.
“Why didn’t more people attempt to walk out? Why would you just stand here and wait to be absorbed?”
“I wish it were as simple as that. Believe me, Eddie, you don’t know the half of it.”
She looked up at the sun to gauge the time.
“We need to leave. I’m not going to raise any suspicions by bringing you back after dark.”
“You can do that, right?”
“You have no idea how beautiful the night sky is. You can see the stars—bright points of light hanging in a sky of empty blackness.”
“I can imagine.”
“You can’t. No one can. The same can be said of fireflies, glowing in unison on a moonless night.”
“Fireflies?”
“My point entirely. And there’s the moon, too.”
“I can see that,” I said, “if dimly.”
“Not the moon itself,” she replied, “but the lights on the unlit side of the crescent. There are other glowing specks adrift in the night, too—pinpoints of light that criss-cross the sky.”
And she smiled at me. But it was a tired, relieved smile. She hadn’t shared this with anyone.
I walked across to Courtland, who was doing his best to weigh himself down with spoons. He had stuffed both satchels, all his pockets, his boots, and he even had two large handfuls. If he could have stuffed them in his ears, he would have.
“What?”
“We’re leaving.”
“Suits me. I’ll pay either of you twenty merits to carry this satchel for me.”
We told him he could carry his ill-gotten gains himself, and we walked out of the piazza. Despite our refusal to work as pack mules, Courtland was ecstatic and talked ceaselessly about his good fortune and how carefully he was going to introduce the spoons, so the market wasn’t flooded, and how it would take a month to check the engraved postcodes against the register to see if they had clear title.
“Can’t have the prefects asking questions,” he said, “even if Mum is one of them.”
He jangled and clanked when he walked, and in his intoxicating acquisitiveness, he hadn’t once noticed the lost Rebootees beneath his feet.
Courtland
1.1.02.01.159: The Hierarchy shall be respected at all times.
The progress was easy on the Perpetulite, but it slowed when we reached the spalling and the road reverted to thick rhododendron and tussocked lumpiness. Courtland was hampered even more by his load and was soon sweating and blowing like a steam engine. He called a halt as soon as we had reached the place where the road branched.
“I’m going to leave these here,” he said, unloading all the cutlery except the ones he was carrying in the satchels. “We could tell Yewberry that we need to come back for a further expedition.”
“We’re not coming back,” said Jane in a quiet voice. “There’s nothing here for anyone.”
Courtland laughed. “There’s enough spoons here to fund an entire color garden; forget the scrap color, East Carmine is in the spoon business, with me at its head. Are you tired, or is it just me?” He sat down heavily on a moss-covered lump of concrete.
“People aren’t supposed to come here,” said Jane, perching on a fallen tree. “After the wires corroded and the flak towers fell into disuse, the Perpetulite was necrotized to keep visitors away. No one was ever supposed to come back from High Saffron, and no one ever did.”
“Until now,” said Courtland.
“Yes,” repeated Jane, “until now. Tell me, Courtland, when you were pretending to conduct the chair census in the Greyzone yesterday, were you looking for anything in particular?”