“Is that you done that, Prophet?” he panted.
“Yeah,” Valentin said, tamping down a grin. “Yeah. So give me my shadow back before I set it on you again.”
Pepe was silent for a long moment, maybe trying to suss out if Valentin was bluffing, then he barked an anguished sort of laugh. “Alright, Prophet,” he said. “Fuck you. But alright.” Still watching the lobo, he slid the rucksack off his back and undid the clasp. Valentin’s heart laddered up his ribs when he saw the nanoshadow rustle within. He reached out a hand, already imagining the feel of it on his skin.
The buzz in his implant changed pitch. Distracted, Valentin probed. His mouth went dry. The machine mind was trying to squeeze him out. He dug in hard, desperate, but a wave of defenseware carried him away and he felt himself lose his hold all at once. The lobo’s formless head swiveled to face him, ignoring Pepe and his knife. The saws began to spin.
Valentin didn’t even have time to shout before the lobo pounced, brushing past Pepe and slamming him to the ground. He kicked frantically, but the lobo’s black running blades had his arms pinned, and now the grinding, shrieking maw was a millimeter off his face and—
Pepe’s scarfed hand drove the knife between the saws. Sparks spat wild; one sizzled through Valentin’s shirt. The lobo seized, shuddered, and Pepe dragged Valentin from underneath. He hauled to his feet and spun around just as Pepe’s knife shot out of the lobo’s mouth and pinged against the side of the sculpture. A ripple clacked through the creature’s joints.
“I need my shadow,” Valentin panted. “I can kill it with my shadow.”
“Do it, then.” Pepe shoved the open rucksack into Valentin’s chest. As the lobo turned on them again, Valentin plunged both hands into the cold, gritty gelatin. His nanoshadow rippled in response to his touch, his biorhythm, the signal of his implant. The lobo darted forward. The nanoshadow was weak from days without sun, days without electricity. Valentin gripped it hard. As the lobo sprang, the nanoshadow shot away from his hands in a long plume of pitch and met it in the air, streaming into every crack in its carapace with a horrible shredding noise.
The lobo dropped to the dirt as the nanoshadow writhed through its body, leaving it a collapsed husk hemorrhaging sparks. Valentin finally exhaled. Pepe’s eyes were wide as the nanoshadow pooled under the lobo’s corpse, regaining its shape, then slithered back to its owner.
Valentin’s shadow webbed its way up his knee, slipping underneath his shirt to spread cool and gritty and pulsating across his thumping chest. Tendrils wove between his fingers, licked up his neck, wicked sweat from around his nostrils and lips. Valentin closed his eyes as his shadow warmed to skin temperature. With his eyes closed, with his shadow pressing gently against him, he could almost be back home.
“So that’s it, then. That’s your shadow back.”
Valentin opened his eyes. Pepe was unwrapping the scarf from around his left hand. The cloth was stained a dark wine-red, and when it peeled away from his skin he didn’t wince but his tongue flicked fast against his scar. The lobo’s saw had shorn through the scarf and left gouges on his wrist, his palm. Blood was welling steadily and dripping to the ground.
“Guess you leave now.”
Valentin considered it. With his nanoshadow, he could make good time back to the Town with no fear of scorpions or lobos or wilders. Then he would give some catshit story about the gods sending him out into the campo to receive a vision, which Javier would not believe. Then, the prueba. Again.
“Yeah,” Valentin said. “I go back to the Town with my shadow. You bleed to death in a field of giant heads. I won, you lost.” He directed his shadow down his arm in a soft, black ribbon that waved in the space between them. “Here. Let me staunch it.”
Pepe looked wary, but also pale and slightly dizzy. He held out his injured hand and watched as the nanoshadow shrouded over his skin, sealing to the wounds. He blinked at the sensation. “How many of these shadow things have you got in the Town?”
“A few,” Valentin said. “But you need an implant to work them.”
“That’s too bad. Wouldn’t mind one for the next lobo.”
Valentin glanced over at the corpse of the machine and shivered. It looked smaller now, and he could see it was malformed, slightly warped, with one unfinished limb shorter than the others. “I thought they were all gone,” he said. “That’s what I was taught. That they were all gone. Extinct like the actual animals.”
“They were gone for a long time,” Pepe said. “Last winter they started to come back.” He gave Valentin a considering look. “You don’t actually know anything, do you, Prophet? You’ve never left the Town before.”
Valentin bit back his urge to argue. The wilder was right. He’d been right about most things. “So what do you usually do?” he asked instead. “When there’s a lobo.” He pulled his shadow back up his arm.
Pepe inspected his hand. “Usually you die.”
The smaller cuts were beginning to scab shut, but Valentin guessed that the gash along the wilder’s wrist would need to be stitched or glued. And disinfected, preferably soon. He still remembered watching the Town’s surgeon lop off a woman’s two gangrenous fingers. He cast a glance toward the rucksack.
“Have you got anything in there to clean the cut?” he asked.
“Only water,” Pepe said. He paused. “The autofab’ll make medicine kits. Food for you, too. For your way back.”
“Why are you so set on this autofab?” Valentin demanded at last. “If it’s so important to your tribe, why’s it only you taking me there? And what the hell was your plan if you hadn’t found me in the gully? Were you going to knock on the Town gate and ask to borrow a godchip, or what?”
Pepe’s face darkened. “What was your plan, heading over the wall?”
Valentin’s mouth opened. Closed. “To get away,” he finally said. “Just away.”
“Yeah,” Pepe said. He stumped to his rucksack and pulled it up onto his shoulders, gingerly for his left hand. “I want to help my family,” Pepe said. “I want to help the band. If you can’t contribute one way, you’ve got to find another. The autofab would help us. Would make us strong again.”
Valentin looked down at the inky black edge of the nanoshadow pressed to his collarbone. He thought of Pepe journeying back to his tribe alone, dragging the same weight Valentin knew so well. Getting muck in his cuts, dying of fever, maybe even running into another lobo.
“What’s your name, Prophet?” Pepe asked.
Valentin hesitated. “Valentin.”
The wilder’s eyes were shiny and desperate. “I can’t go back with nothing. Will you help me, Valentin?”
The autofab had to be nearby now. Valentin could try. It would be like a fourth prueba, only with a different god, and with nobody watching but Pepe.
“Alright,” Valentin said. “Fuck you, but alright. To the autofab.”
The autofab was about half the size of the Town’s, a featureless black mushroom cap that Valentin knew extended far below the ground. When they stopped in front of it, he felt a familiar twinge of fear, taken right back to his very first prueba, his sixteenth birthday. There’d been a procession through the Town’s narrow streets, men carrying the plastic mannequins of the saints, women throwing red sand at his feet. He’d sat in front of the hulking black autofab, with Javier behind him and everyone watching, and the god inside had refused to speak to him.
“They used to keep everything clean,” Pepe said as they passed the pockmarks of old fire pits and stepped over shattered tent poles. “They used to lay wreaths. But it’s been a long time. Nobody comes here anymore.”