His captor bounced off into the dark, and Valentin considered running yet again. The same counterweight held him fast: Pepe had his nanoshadow, and even if Valentin could make it back to the Town without being overtaken—not likely—he couldn’t return without his shadow. At that point, he was better off bleeding out in the dust.
A beetle scuttled past Valentin’s toe; he stomped it dead and when he looked up he found himself face to face with empty eye sockets and a ghoulish grin. He flinched.
“Boo,” Pepe said, waggling the dog skull on its jagged spinal column. He tossed it away. “Found us a nice corner. Venga.”
Valentin helped Pepe clear away a few ancient syringes and typically inscrutable bits of plastic, things from the old days. There was space for the blankets and the portable estufa that Pepe said had enough solar charge to keep them warm for at least a couple hours. Valentin had to admit that Pepe was far better equipped to wander the campo than he was. But then, Valentin had been counting on his nanoshadow.
“Could keep the heat longer if we use my shadow,” he said, watching Pepe strip down to sleep, uncovering the swathes of lean muscle Valentin had yet to develop—if he ever would. He spent his days sitting in the shade, learning his implant from Javier instead of boxing or playing in brutal games of barefooted football. Suddenly he remembered how Pepe must have touched him to take his nanoshadow in the first place. Suddenly he couldn’t help but imagine what the wilder’s sinewy body might feel like wrapping around his.
“Right, right,” Pepe said, sliding on his stomach under the blankets, clamping his arm over the rucksack with knife held loosely in hand. “So it can smother me in my sleep and then whisk you back home.”
“Something like that.”
Pepe shifted, showing the unscarred side of his face, blinking soot-black lashes. “What were you doing over the wall, anyway?” the wilder asked.
“What were you doing skulking around outside it?” Valentin parried.
The wilder looked at him full-on, exposing his scar. “Was looking for a way to set things right,” he said. His black eyes bored hard into Valentin’s, then he blinked, and what might have been a smirk tugged at the scarred side of his mouth. “Your ears are red.”
“I’m getting fucking frostbite,” Valentin said.
“Soft little Townie.” Pepe squinted at him. “Did it hurt when they put the godchip in you?”
Valentin’s hand went reflexively to his implant. The truth was that he barely remembered his seventh birthday, the scraping caul and needle, the incense-smothered fire. But he wanted an answer Pepe would respect. “They give you something to chew,” he said. “But yeah. It hurt.” He paused. “It’s only successful half the time, you know. There can be bad infection, or they can bore too deep. The two tries before me, one ended up dead, the other one damaged.”
Pepe nodded, spinning his knife idly in one hand, not as impressed as Valentin had hoped.
“How about that?” Valentin dragged a finger along the curve of his mouth. “Did that hurt?” Pepe clenched the knife hard and Valentin froze, realizing with a sick drop in his stomach that he’d overstepped, that the wilder was about to stab him in a fit of anger.
Then Pepe’s ruined smile returned and he pressed the gleaming flat of his blade against it. “He gave me something to chew.”
Valentin turned away to hide his shudder. Everything about Pepe unbalanced him. Even as he’d calculated escapes all day, he also catalogued the looks held too long, the brief moments when the space between them seemed to simmer, trying to decide if it was his imagination or not. Deciding what Pepe would do if he knew. Prophets were meant to be different and the Town didn’t care one way or another. But wilders were another breed entirely. Superstitious, hard. Dangerous.
As soon as Pepe was asleep or faking it well, Valentin tugged off as quietly as he could to an anonymous body, trying not to put deep, dark eyes on the face. He didn’t think he would be able to sleep tonight.
In the morning, when Valentin crawled out of his blankets massaging night-numbed fingers, he could smell oil and electricity in the air. Pepe was pulling food out of the rucksack. He handed Valentin a piece of tortilla smaller than yesterday’s.
“The gods were working in the night,” he said, tapping his nostril.
“They do that.”
“You ever ask them why?”
“It’s colder at night,” Valentin said, cobbling an answer from half-remembered lessons. “Machines think faster in the cold.” It was flimsy, even to his own ears, but Pepe nodded solemnly and went back to chewing with the unscarred side of his mouth.
When they stepped outside, a thick winter fog prickled Valentin’s eyes. Pepe took a moment to get his bearings then set off into it, not even bothering to check his captive was following. Valentin was, of course. The nanoshadow puddled in the bottom of Pepe’s rucksack was effective as any tether.
The gradient sloped upward, and gradually the dead soil turned to slippery shale under their feet. Pepe picked his way among the rocks as nimble as a lizard while Valentin labored behind, trying to hide his heavy breathing. The rucksack always bobbed just ahead of him, mockingly, he thought. With his shadow, he could scale a slope like this as easily as he’d slithered up and over the outer wall of the Town.
“Who’ll they send to look for you?” Pepe asked over his shoulder. “Will they have a shadow, too?”
Valentin thought of Javier setting out to find him, easing his creaking bones through the Town’s gate. No. Javier was sitting in his quickfabbed piso at the edge of housing, sipping anise and staring at the blacked window, murmuring to the gods in the dark. As far as he was concerned, whether Valentin came back or not was up to them.
“Nobody,” he admitted. “Nobody goes over the wall.”
“Your family, though.”
Valentin stiffened instinctively at the word, at the reminder of his mother, who caught the last kick of the bleeding virus when he was six, and of the fact no father ever claimed him.
“Don’t have one,” Valentin said. “That’s why I’m a prophet.”
“Ah. You came out an autofab full-formed.” Pepe gave another solemn nod. “That’s why your skin is all…” His hand looped in the air for the missing word.
“All what?” Valentin asked, trying not to sound too curious.
“Smooth.” Pepe shrugged. “I was joking,” he said. “You didn’t come out an autofab.”
“No,” Valentin said. “I didn’t.”
By the time they reached the crest, the sun was rising red and smeary like someone had rubbed their thumb across it. Pepe offered a hand for the last lift, and Valentin was tempted but struggled up without it. Pepe didn’t appear to notice the slight. He was peering down the other side with an unreadable expression. Valentin clambered up beside him, heart still thudding hard, and wiped the grime of the climb off on his knees. He took a deep breath and smelled overturned earth, and the machine fumes again, sooty and sharp.
“Look,” Pepe said.
Valentin looked. Down below, the barren field was no longer empty. Thrusting out from the mist, glistening the biomechanical black of godwork, were rows and rows of man-high carved shapes.
“Heads.” Pepe turned to Valentin with an almost pleading look. “A field of giant fucking heads. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Valentin said. “They might not, either. The gods don’t think how we do.”
“Straight through is still quickest to the autofab,” Pepe said, more to himself, tongue flicking at his scar. “Come on, Prophet. Maybe they’ll talk to you.”