Valentin probed hard. He could hear a faint, rustling whisper in his implant. The god was communicating, maybe with the pod that had passed over them in the night. Valentin sat, folding his legs, and his nanoshadow slid underneath him to cushion his tailbone. He sucked down a deep breath.
“Should I cant?” Pepe asked. “Don’t know any prophet cants. But I could do the one for snakebite.”
“Just don’t talk,” Valentin said, fixing his eyes on the slick surface of the autofab. He could see his own warped reflection in its black mirror. He took another deep breath, reminding himself that nobody was watching, only a wilder, only a stupid wilder with long, lean arms and deep, dark eyes and a careless laugh. Valentin closed his own eyes and willed the whisper in his implant louder. Through the electric cascade of the god’s thoughts, Valentin could see, or feel, a fresh stimulus-response that could only be their presence. The autofab knew they were there.
Valentin reached, like he had for the lobo, but this time softly. And he thought: Help us. For the briefest instant, he felt the god turn sluggishly toward his probe, felt an interface blink open like a sleeper’s eye. Valentin’s heart leapt. Then it was gone, walled off behind impenetrable code, and the whisper in his implant receded. He’d failed his fourth. His stomach churned sick with it. Valentin opened his eyes.
Pepe was crouched down in his peripheral, tongue working against his scar. “What did you tell it?” he murmured. “What did it say?”
“It said nothing.” Valentin knuckled a bit of sand away from his eye. “Like always.”
Pepe’s face fell. He stared at the autofab wall with an expression of fury, and for a moment Valentin thought he might try to put his uninjured fist through it. Then his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, like always?”
“I mean I’ve never talked to a god,” Valentin said. He wasn’t scared of Pepe’s knife anymore, not with his shadow thrumming against his skin. All he felt was dry and tired.
“The lobo,” Pepe said. “You talked to the lobo. You made it stop.”
“For five fucking seconds, yeah,” Valentin admitted. “But that was a crude mind. Not a god.” He tapped his implant. “When you turn sixteen, to be a prophet, you have to take a test. You have to talk to the Town’s god, ask it to do some sign. Pulse the electric lights, or print up a plastic bird, or something stupid like that.” He swallowed. “The god doesn’t speak back to me. I’ve failed it three times already.”
“Three times?” Pepe asked, disbelieving.
“Yeah. And if you count this—”
“Three times is nothing,” Pepe said. “Nothing. Listen. I used to footrace my older brother. I wanted so badly to beat him I’d wake up an hour before the sun, go out to the field. Scratch lines in the dirt and run, to train my muscles. Every morning, even if I was sick or if I was up all the night on a scavenging party.” His nostrils flared. “It took two years of that before I won. Took a hundred races.”
“Running a footrace is nothing like interfacing with a god. If they don’t speak to me, there’s nothing I can do to change—”
“You said your tribe’s got only two godchips,” Pepe interjected. “Two in the whole Town. So they must have picked you for a reason.”
“Not the one you think.”
Pepe leaned close and put his good hand on Valentin’s shoulder. “A hundred races, remember?”
Valentin shut his eyes again. He breathed in through his mouth, out through his nose. His nanoshadow pulsed comfortably against his chest, and Pepe’s hand resting on his shoulder was comfortable in its own way. Valentin reached out for the autofab. The whisper in his implant rose. A minute passed. Two minutes. More. Valentin’s hands were clenched, nails digging crescents in his palms. A blank eternity later, he opened his eyes. He wanted to lie, to keep Pepe’s fingers cupped against him.
“Nothing,” he admitted.
Pepe’s hand squeezed his shoulder, but didn’t leave it.
Valentin tried off and on again as dusk dropped over the campo, with no success. The first probe had at least elicited the autofab’s attention, but now he was blocked out entirely. They ate the last of the tortilla and a handful of dry dates. Pepe used a bit of water to wash his cuts. He’d stopped bleeding but his face was still drawn and pale. Eventually they camped down at the base of the autofab, Pepe wrapped in a blanket and Valentin using his nanoshadow like a cocoon, exposing only his face. Neither of them had spoken for hours.
As Pepe shifted, finding elevation for his injured hand, Valentin couldn’t help but eyetrace the slant of his shoulder blades, his hip, imagining the body underneath the blanket. He felt himself getting hard, and his nanoshadow moved to slide a tendril around his cock. Valentin chewed his lip. Then Pepe gave a ragged groan, and Valentin felt a wave of shame. He yanked his nanoshadow away from his groin and pretended to be asleep.
“You awake still, Prophet?”
Valentin hesitated. “Yeah. I am.”
A moment later, Pepe shuffled over, dragging his blanket with him. The nanoshadow stretched membranous to accommodate the both of them, at the same time wrapping Pepe’s injured hand. The wilder smelled like sweat and copper. When their arms brushed together, Valentin’s heart beat hard. When Pepe touched the back of his head, just below his implant, his breath caught.
“Do you hear them all the time, then?” Pepe whispered.
“Only when they’re close,” Valentin said, trying to breathe evenly.
Pepe’s finger traced the metal edge of the implant. “You can hear them, but they can’t hear you.”
“Can’t. Won’t.” Valentin squirmed, freeing one arm. “Either.” He reached out, hesitantly, heart hammering, and touched Pepe’s face.
The wilder stiffened, turning away. His anxious eyes raked across the sky, as if watching gods might be drifting overhead. Then he relaxed and turned back into him with the smirk Valentin recognized from the night before. “Fucking Townies,” he said, fitting his good hand around the edge of Valentin’s hip.
The kiss was brief and badly angled and went through Valentin like voltage, making his nanoshadow thump against him. When it broke, Valentin leaned forward, unsleeving a grin in the dark, not caring about the autofab or the prueba or anything else, only feeling Pepe’s lips on his again. He ran his thumb along the wilder’s jaw and found the rippled scar tissue.
“Who cut your mouth?” he asked.
A long pause. Valentin remembered when he’d asked in the ruins, wondered again if he had gone too far, but Pepe left his hand where it was. “My brother,” he said.
“Right. Because you beat him at the footrace.”
Pepe pulled back, staring at him. “No. It was for this.” He struggled up onto his elbow, careful with his injured hand. “He caught me with someone. Again. This time he was shitface drunk and angry and he held me down and cut me. Said it was to keep the mariconas away.”
Valentin felt his grin fall off. “I didn’t know it was like that. With wilders.”
“I’m seventeen now,” Pepe said dully. “I have to start fucking who they tell me. I’ve got good blood. Can’t waste it. I have to help make the band strong again.” His voice splintered. “I thought if I do something big. Something like this. I thought if I give them the autofab back, maybe it’ll be enough.” He kneaded his eyes hard. “And then he’ll love me again.”
Valentin swallowed. “Maybe I’m lucky,” he said. “Not having family. That’s the real reason they pick you for a prophet. Nobody would have missed me if the surgery went bad. It’s not because I was anything special.”