Valentin imagined the mouths opening wide to swallow him and shuddered. But then he saw the rucksack strap had loosened on Pepe’s shoulder, saw how the wilder’s eyes were glued to the sculptures. When Pepe started down the slope, Valentin followed.
The fog thickened again as they descended, and at the bottom they found the field had been smoothed and leveled, with uncanny precision, into a flat, gray plane veined by darker streaks of clay. It looked unreal, and Valentin was almost surprised Pepe’s boots left prints. Pale vapor roiled back and forth in waves as they approached the heads.
They were taller than they’d looked from above, each at least twice Valentin’s height, looming out of the fog. Their enormous faces were cut symmetrical but the features themselves were crude, disproportionate, and with the mist creeping up past their wide mouths they looked like drowning men. Valentin probed. He felt a faint drone of machinery at work, but no god was inside. He couldn’t begin to guess the heads’ purpose.
“Is there a god here?” Pepe asked.
Valentin turned and realized the wilder had rooted to the spot, his dark eyes roving from one head to the next. “No,” he said. “They’re just sculptures. You coming, or what?”
Pepe shook himself, then stalked past to lead the way. Silence swallowed up their footsteps as they walked the row. The heads were coated in a glistening, raw black material that sometimes looked as if it was moving—the same material that the autofab in the center of the Town used to make tools and cables and brick molds. As always, Valentin wondered if it was somehow alive.
The strap on Pepe’s shoulder slid a bit.
“Tell me about your autofab,” Valentin said. “If I’m going to get it running, I need to know details. How old it is. Last it was used. All that.”
Pepe shot a shrewd look backward. “Old,” he said. “And it stopped working back when my grandfather was young. A few years after our last prophet died. The gods drove him insane, so he pushed his forehead into a spinning drill to get them out.”
“He wasn’t calibrating enough,” Valentin said, to hide the sudden lurch in his stomach. “He was careless.”
Pepe shrugged. The strap slipped lower.
“And the implant?” Valentin asked. “The godchip? Nobody else had the surgery?”
“Hombre.” Pepe stopped walking and stared at him with something like revulsion. “It was buried with the rest of him. Our band, we respect the dead.”
Valentin was equally perturbed. “You have any idea how valuable that implant was?” he demanded. “No autofab will make them anymore. Ever.” He frowned. “I mean, if he’d already shattered his skull on a drill bit, how hard would it have been to—”
“I thought everyone in the Town had a godchip,” Pepe cut across, starting to walk again. “In the stories you’ve all got a godchip.”
“No. We only have two.” Valentin wished he hadn’t said it. He felt the crushing weight again, the knowledge that had driven him over the wall. Two godchips in all of the Town—one in Javier’s graying head, and one in his own, and if he couldn’t learn to interface they would be better off prying it out of his skull and trying again with someone else.
“Guess I’m lucky I found you, Prophet.” Pepe flashed his warped grin. “The gods must have wanted—” He froze, head cocked. Valentin stopped, watching the sway of the rucksack. “D’you hear that?” Pepe asked.
Valentin pretended to listen, but he was coiling his legs, running his tongue around his dry mouth. As Pepe lifted the strap of the rucksack to readjust it, still peering into the mist, Valentin lunged. He ripped the bag free and hurtled past. Down the row, a dead sprint, clutching the rucksack to his chest and fumbling for the clasp as he gasped hot air. His pulse foamed in his ears. He could feel Pepe behind him, not bothering to curse or shout, just running him down like a hunting dog. Valentin’s cold, stiff fingers bounced off the clasp.
He hooked left at the next head, veering into the fog. He had a grip on the clasp now, thought he could feel his nanoshadow writhing under the fabric. He tore the rucksack open and plunged his hand inside at the very instant Pepe slammed him to the damp ground. Valentin scrabbled desperately for the slippery grit of his shadow, and for the barest slice of a second his fingers brushed against it with an electric tingle.
Then Pepe seized his wrist and pried his hand slowly, almost tenderly, out of the rucksack. Valentin probed hard, trying to make the nanoshadow leap, make it stream up his arm and turn into corded black muscle, make it wrap around the wilder’s neck like a noose. There was nothing but a weak ripple in response.
Pepe’s dead weight pressed him into the earth, and it was not as comfortable as he’d fantasized it. Valentin could feel his bony knee, his chest, his hot breath at the nape of his neck. He wanted to sink into the mud. His best chance, maybe the only one he would get, gone and wasted.
Pepe refastened the clasp of his rucksack and stood up. “Fucking Townies,” he said, breathing harder from the chase than Valentin would have expected. “I was getting to like you, Prophet.”
Valentin didn’t reply. He rolled over onto his back, getting his lungs back, then slowly sat up. The wilder was sitting cross-legged in front of the head closest to him, tightening the straps of the rucksack across his shoulders. His dark eyes looked almost hurt.
“My brother told me you Townies were snakes,” Pepe said. “Said I was going to give you it back, didn’t I? Said after you get the autofab working.” He spat a glob of saliva. “I should fucking stick you for that.”
“Sorry,” Valentin said dully. In the moment, he felt like he already had a knife in the gut and one more wouldn’t make much difference. They sat across from each other in silence, tendrils of fog creeping around their waists. Scowling, the wilder’s scar seemed to distort his whole face, making his mouth one wide gash. Almost as ugly as the sculpture behind him.
Valentin’s eyes trailed up the crude face. This head was different. There was a sort of topknot glinting at the peak of its carved skull.
“Did you not hear it, then?” Pepe said.
“Hear what?” Valentin said. His implant gave him a sharp prick of random static. He needed to calibrate again soon.
Then a gnashing metal meteor dropped from the top of the sculpture onto Pepe’s back. Valentin hollered, scrambling backward, heaving to his feet. Pepe and the machine creature writhed, rolled, tangling flesh limbs with jet-black running blades. Valentin was frozen. The furious buzz in his implant and every chemical in his body screamed for him to run.
But Pepe still had his shadow. Valentin watched as the wilder flung himself back against the base of the head, smashing the clinging creature free. Its segmented body whirred in midair and it landed on its feet like a cat. Quadrupedal, skeletal black carbon, and where the head might have been, a pair of jagged rotary saws now hummed to life. Scarestories bounced through Valentin’s head and he knew the lobos had not all been recycled, not a chance.
Pepe had his knife out now, dropped to a crouch, wrapping his offhand in his scarf. Valentin didn’t see what either could do against the lobo’s spinning maw. It hurtled at Pepe again; the wilder spun away, slashing low in the same motion. His knife screeched against the lobo’s underside to no visible effect. The buzz in Valentin’s implant was skull-splitting. He could feel the crude machine mind roaring for function completion, for disable, maim, refuel.
This was not a god. This was an animal.
As Pepe and the lobo broke and collided again, Valentin clenched his teeth and probed inside the buzzing hive. In midstride, the lobo jerked to a stop, shivering in place. Valentin felt a rush of elation. The machine mind was still yammering objectives, but Valentin had it clamped down, iced over. Pepe didn’t take his eyes off the lobo, only switching his grip on the knife and circling closer.