With only the slightest guilt thinking of Javier, who would wake up in the morning to find his apprentice gone, Valentin slid down the other side of the wall and started to walk. It wasn’t long before he heard a familiar rumble of gods on the move. Valentin kept low but still felt a swirl of static inside his skull, the customary sting of his implant, as the pod of biomechanical gods thundered through the dark sky overhead.
He could sense them, but their thoughts were walled off from him, inscrutable as those of the god who controlled the Town, and a moment later their ghostly yellow lights disappeared into the distance.
Leaving him in the dark again.
“Wake up, little Townie.”
Still half in a dream, Valentin thought it was Javier’s voice, waking him for the prueba. Then he remembered scaling the wall, walking and walking, finding a crevice to sleep in cocooned by his nanoshadow.
His nanoshadow that he could no longer feel against his skin. Valentin wrenched his eyes open, jolted by adrenaline, and found himself face to face with what could only be a monster with beetle-black eyes and an impossibly wide mouth.
Valentin jerked backward, probing desperately for his shadow, and the bag clutched in the monster’s pale hand writhed.
“None of that,” the monster said sourly, shaking the rucksack where Valentin’s nanoshadow was trapped. “None of your Townie tricks. Alright?”
It wasn’t a monster. It was a boy, maybe his age, maybe a bit younger. His mouth was the normal size, but a raw-looking scar gashed upward from one corner of it, splitting his cheek. He had shaggy black hair and coarse skin and wore a black coat that was different fabrics all patched together, nothing like the identical gray garments made by the Town’s autofab.
The boy turned his head, and Valentin realized the other half of his face was beautiful, fine-cut with long black lashes. He had never thought wilders might be beautiful. It didn’t do much to help the cold panic numbing his limbs.
“A live shadow,” the wilder said, shaking his head. His accent was thick and nasal and dropped the endings off familiar words. “Thought they were only in tales. Are you a prophet, then?”
Valentin tried to clear his head. The wilder had found him while he was sleeping and peeled his shadow off him. Normally he’d still be able to control it, make it leap out of the bag, but he’d used it all through the night to keep warm and now, still without sunshine, it didn’t have enough strength to escape.
“I’m a prophet,” Valentin said. “Yeah. I am. So if you don’t give me my nanoshadow now, I’ll have the gods blast you to ashes and a little heap of bone.”
Alarm flashed over the wilder’s split face for a split second, then he tipped back his head and gave a warbling laugh. “Once you do something for me, Prophet,” he said, thumbing an eyelash off his cheek, “you can ask the gods to punish me however you like.” He hefted the rucksack onto his shoulders and strapped it tight.
Valentin’s heart pounded. Maybe he could run for it, but the cold, hard look of the wilder’s eyes and the long knife in his belt made him think otherwise. And no way was he returning to the Town as not only the first prophet to fail three pruebas in a row, but the first to lose his nanoshadow to a wilder.
“What do you want?” he asked, trying to sound brave, bored, maybe a little mysterious. The tremor in his voice gave him dead away.
“I’m Pepe,” the wilder said. “Who’re you?”
“What do you want?” Valentin repeated, and this time with no quaver.
The wilder shrugged. “To do what prophets do, Prophet,” he said. “Get a stubborn fucking god to care about us for a change. You help me, I won’t cut your toes off.” He patted his rucksack. “And maybe I’ll even let you have your shadow back,” he added.
The campo didn’t look like freedom anymore. Pepe set the pace and set it fast, leaving Valentin to stumble along behind him, watching for the telltale skitter of scorpions in the cracked mud. His skin ached for his nanoshadow. A few times he probed hard for it and managed to elicit a sluggish twitch from inside Pepe’s rucksack, which in turn made Pepe shoot him a suspicious look from under his eyelids. But without sunshine or Valentin’s bioelectricity, the inert nanoshadow was nothing but a lump of gritty black gelatin.
They walked and walked and only paused to eat—a slab of cold tortilla comfortingly similar to what they had in the Town—before they walked again. Valentin spent the time trying to think of a way to escape. The wilder had them heading west, toward his tribe’s derelict autofab, farther and farther away from the Town. Pepe thought Valentin was going to interface with whatever god was controlling it and set it working again. As if it was that simple.
And when Pepe found out that Valentin couldn’t do it, he figured the wilder would use his sawtoothed knife to cut out his implant as a keepsake, then let him bleed out in the dust. He shivered, half from the thought and half from the Andalusian winter, as they walked in silence across another barren field. The soil underfoot was pallid gray.
Another god, this one alone, hummed through the sky overhead, moving like the whales Valentin had seen clips of, the ones that used to inhabit the oceans. Pepe stopped where he was, pulled down his scarf, and craned his neck to watch its passage. The yellow lights bathing his face made the scar glisten wetly.
“Can you talk to them, then?” Pepe asked.
“When they want to talk,” Valentin lied, feeling Pepe’s dark eyes go to the crest of his head, where he had scar tissue of his own. Valentin pulled up his hood and glowered. He didn’t like people staring at the implant.
“Should tell them to give us a lift,” Pepe said, with his macabre grin, and started to walk again. They passed the husk of an old harvester stripped for parts. “There used to be olive trees here,” he said. “Far as the unaugmented eye could see, my grandfather says his grandfather said. The harvesters rolled up and down the campo all day long. Back when more things grew. Back when machines listened to anybody, not just prophets.”
Valentin probed the harvester as they passed by, wishing he could swing its clawed arm and knock Pepe to the ground, grind him into the dirt, but the farm equipment was long-dead. He didn’t feel so much as a flicker from his implant.
Before long the moon was rising overhead, fat and yellow, and the air was turning cold enough to bite. Valentin missed the slick warmth of his nanoshadow again, pulling his scarf snug against the chill. He could see Pepe’s exposed hands turning purple in the night air, and after a few more minutes his captor pointed to a crumbling stone derelict up ahead.
“We’ll hunker down in there for night,” he said, tongue flicking distractedly against his scar. “Start early in the morning, get to the autofab by noon. Make sure you have enough daylight to work.”
Valentin gave the ruins a dubious once-over. The sagging stone and twists of old rebar looked like something out of a scarestory. As they approached, Pepe found a torch and thumped it to life with the heel of his hand. The lance of harsh white light strobed damp ground and what was left of the walls. Following Pepe inside, Valentin felt immensely far from the gated pueblo he’d called home only a day ago.
“Wait here, Prophet,” Pepe said. “I’ll make a sweep for lobos.”
“Funny,” Valentin muttered. The spidery machines that once hunted down the survivors of satbombed Seville and the other ruined cities had been recycled decades since. Humans knew better than to make war with the gods now, and the gods were otherwise occupied.