“It takes a while to be reconstructed,” I lied... or told the truth, I wasn’t sure which. “You’re probably right,” I said, in the most comforting tone I could manage.

  She said nothing further that night, and I let her brood in silence. She was still awake when I set my system to power-save mode and bedded down for the night.

  But midway through, I found myself brought back to consciousness by the flashing words of an emergency alert.

  The outer entrance had been breached; the door destroyed.

  The Zoo Crew had stepped up their assault, and I knew there was no avoiding bloodshed now.

  SEVENTEEN

  Foal kept her silence while we waded back through the glowlands. The rain had rearranged things. I could now see channels and discolorations, due to the puddles, and temporary streams caused by the weather. The patches were much larger than the first time we’d come through, and we picked our way through with caution. Every stop at a relatively bare spot led to at least one layer being shucked.

  And four hours in, the centaur finally opened up.

  “I grew up in the Farm. We all did. There were maybe a dozen of us to start. We all played together, and Father was a face on a screenb. He said he loved us. We thought he did.”

  Rauph and Marb looked back to her, faces inscrutable behind the glass masks of the shine suits. I had the recon drone out, using the last of its charge to keep an eye from above so I didn’t have to look back at her. But I slowed, to let her catch up next to me anyway.

  Foal kept going, words tumbling from her lips like an avalanche down a mountain. “He kept us undergrounb. Said that it was danberous outside. He had rooms where he could make the walls look like anbything. He could make pictures and things in the air that werenb’t real.”

  “Holograms?” I asked.

  “Yes, that was the word.” She tossed her head, mane flying, and I watched her torso wobble. Not through any voyeurism, but noting how her human parts were fixed to her equine frame. The short answer on that was ‘not well.’ There were obvious stretchmarks where the two forms joined, and the whole setup put constant weight on her horse-based neck. There would be problems in the years ahead for Foal.

  “It took us years before we started bnoticing things. It wasn’t obvious until Father taught us to read,” she said, finding her words again. “The rooms we were ib, some of them had writing under the bunks, or behinb furnbiture. In hidden places. Once we could start reading, we started realizing what it was. Realizing that we werenb’t the first.” She snorted. “The writing inb my room said words I didn’bt understanb. It said there is bno farm out west. For months I wondered what that meanbt.”

  She took a deep breath. “Anb then Chummy didnb’t come back from his test...”

  The silence stretched on, with faint crunching as we walked over crystal-like green growths that had once been weed, past trees that had circuit-like yellow traceries under their bark, and hand-like branches that clutched whenever we got too near.

  “Chummy,” I prompted.

  “He was a bear. A small oneb, smaller than Broose. He was worried he wasbn’t growing right. Father pulled him in for a lot of tests, and on the last one he didnb’t come back. We asked him where Chummy was, anb Father said he senbt Chummy to the farm out west. To a place where he could grow, anb, he’d be back to us whenb he was all better.”

  “And your writing said there was no farm out west,” I prompted.

  “Yeah.” Foal said. “I stood awake thinking about that all bnight. And the next oneb. Chet bnoticed, asked me what was wrong, and I whispered it to him. And he said wait and see. Anb we did, and Chummy didn’t come back.”

  A swirling rainbow of colors warred in the now-full streambed below, and we took a wide berth around them, seeking an easy ford. We found it in a toppled log upstream. Foal just forged through, and the colors sheeted off her like oil from water. I took note of that, filed it away for future reference. I thought that if she hadn’t been so distracted by memories, she wouldn’t have shown that to us.

  “There were more, weren’t there?” I asked, keeping my voice as gentle as I could.

  “Oh yes,” she said, after she’d gone out a few dozen yards and shaken herself dry. “Three years. Ubtil onbly half of us from the first... from my batch remainbed. Father got more distanbt over those years. Said that his brother had gonb rogue, and we had to step carefully. He started letting us go up anb outside, to build a little farm up there anb practice.”

  “Practice what, precisely? Why did he make you?” I was getting a little pushy here, but this was the best chance I

  had to get these answers.

  “He said we had a destiny. He said the shinbe would always be a problem, but it was far less lethal to animals and non-humanbs. He said we could inherit the earth, and clean it up, and live outside, and be free. That he would spread his childreb well and wide throughout the world.”

  “Can you?” I wondered. “Is that what all his work was bent towards?”

  “We thought so. But...” she took a deep breath. “One of us, Masker, he came out really smart. Lots of physical problems, but really, really bright. Father started using him to keep track of things, taught him computers and programming. I think maybe it was so he’d have help if his rogue brother came for him.”

  I wondered about that. The brief confrontation I’d had with Not-Leony in the grid had taken place in seconds of real-time. But then, if I’d had a living assistant to pull me out of the trap he had left me in, I would have saved some time and trouble. An asset was an asset, no matter how small.

  I deliberately refrained from glancing over to Rauph and Marb. Assets, definitely. Friends? Not yet. I’d known them for less than a month. But still, there was something to this tribe business. Enough so that I felt invested. Even if I had allied with them to save my own artificial skin, we had been through enough in that brief time that I knew I would care if they died horribly. Hell, I’d care if they died good deaths, for that matter. Though I’d never seen a good death, so the matter was pretty moot.

  Foal looked ahead, which for her meant one eye was fixed on me. “We stopped seeing Masker a few weeks after he went for training. We thought he had been... senbt west. But then he started senbing us messages. Onb our teaching tablets. Telling us what was really going onb.”

  I glanced over to show she still had my attention. “And what was that?”

  “He was selling our parts. Selling us like... like things.” There was more venom in that single word than any nest of poisonous snakes could ever hope to dispense. “He had a whole productionb schedule. He would try to refibe batches of us, and the onebs that were flawed he would kill. Then he sold their remainbs off to others as raw material. We’d get chopped up anb shipped off anb used as shineb killing material.”

  And now I understood.

  The reason they could tackle shine, but not manufacture immuno-suppressant drugs. They didn’t have a secret formula to cure shine; they were the secret weapon against the stuff. Puzzle pieces clicked together.

  “You weren’t people to him,” I said, softly. “You were product.”

  “Damnation,” Marb said softly, and Foal twitched, shot him a look, then turned away. I checked too and saw the normally stoic man’s face full of sympathy.

  And I saw more than that. “Everyone, stop!” I barked.

  The sun had sunk as we’d been walking, and the last rays of it played across the glowing landscape. But there, on a rise southwest of us, up in a tree, sat a shape that I would have missed if the light hadn’t silhouetted it just so.

  I refined my receptors, and studied the big cat. Not huge as they went, only half the size of a human. Even with the visual reconfiguration, it still seemed to shimmer; purples and blacks and blues blending together, and yellow eyes staring out of the whole mess.

  The silence stretched on.

  “What is wrong?” Rauph whispered. “We cannot stop for long.” Next to him, Marb shifted uneasily.

  I flicked my gaze down to where a pink puddle was starting to crawl up his legs, millimeter by millimeter. “You’re not wrong. But look over in that third tree from the edge, the one with the yellow leafy top.”

  They did, and one cursed, while the other groaned as if he’d been struck. “Nighteyes,” Rauph finished, after his profanity was done.

  “A what? What are you looking at?” Foal asked, squinting.

  “Death on four legs,” Rauph said, glancing southward. “This must be the one that was scouting us out a month ago. We’re not too far from Our Cadia. It must have moved in after we left.”

  “Just luck we didn’t run into it the first time we passed through,” Marb muttered.

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “Worse,” Rauph said. “Fast. Smart. The only reason it hasn’t struck yet is that we’re in the glow.”

  It was close. We had guns. I started to vocalize the suggestion, then realized the issue; the guns we had were under six layers of shine suits. Unpacking them in here would practically guarantee infection. No, immediate violence wasn’t the answer here.

  “Let’s cut diagonally,” I suggested, and we moved south-easterly, leaving the pink patch of doom behind and trying to put more shine between us and the predator.

  It didn’t work. The thing kept pace with us, slinking between the trees like a shadow of a shadow. Even my augmented optics were hard pressed to keep it in sight. And as we went, the light faded.

  “Bno good,” Foal said after I pointed it out for a third time. “We’ll have to face it.”

  “We won’t,” Rauph said. “It’ll come in fast, pick one of us off, then drag them away. That’s how it works. That’s why these things are so deadly.”

  “What if we cluster?” Foal asked.

  “All it will take is a second, a moment where one of us lags behind or misses a step, and it’ll be there,” Rauph said, voice strained. “I’ve seen these things hunt before. In the darkness they’re impossible to see, and they’re strong and fast. It can tear out your throat in a heartbeat, once it’s away with you. We have found too many corpses like that, after it strikes.”

  “Unless there’s no throat to tear,” I said, sliding to one side and putting myself between the group and the cat. “We’ll give it a mouthful of metal and see if that throws it off its game.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Marb failed to hide the relief in his voice.

  “Seems like a simple plan.” I kept my voice low. I didn’t know if the nighteyes could understand our chatter, but we had a talking half-horse with us, so I didn’t feel like taking a chance. “It grabs me; I fight back, it fails to kill me, then you kill it.”

  Through my recon drone I saw Foal study me, look between me and the other two. I couldn’t read her expression in the fading light.

  Without a better plan, we shifted to put me to the western side of things.

  The light died, but the glow was enough to see by for a while longer. I could tell the thing was out there, watching, could feel the tension growing in our group. It rose as the glow faded, and if I’d had a heart, I knew it would be going a mile a minute.

  The thing didn’t jump us when we got clear of the glow, didn’t rush as we stepped into the darkness, the only light coming from the moon above and the patches of shine that had seeped into our suits. And then I realized the pickle we were in.

  “We’re going to need to take off our suits,” I said, keeping my optical sensors on the darkness around us. “It’s got a perfect chance to strike then. How smart is this thing, again?”

  “Clever,” Rauph said. “Not smart. Clever.”

  “So, it didn’t plan for this, this is just our bad luck,” I decided. “Good to see Murphy still loves me.”

  Tension rolled under the moon, and I got sick of it. This would end in one of two ways, and everything else was irrelevant. “Start stripping off,” I said, and stepped out into the night.

  It was on me in a heartbeat, and I heard them shout as about a hundred pounds of feline mutant hit me like a missile made of claws and teeth.

  This was the reason I hadn’t started stripping off the suit. Because in addition to the protection from shine it provided, it was actually pretty good as far as armor went.

  We fought, briefly. I was on my back and couldn’t get much leverage. I heard cloth and leather and wires tearing, as we wrestled. It was hard to see the damage. Then it managed to lock its jaws around my knee, and the next thing I knew I was bouncing off trees as it fled. If I had been in my core, I could have speeded up my perception of time, lived in the gaps between the seconds. But banished to this lesser frame, all I could do was note damage indicators as we went, shake off bursts of static, and realize that the jostling and impact was doing damage to me even through my layers of padding.

  Eventually it stopped, and before I could straighten up, the thing’s jaws were at my head.

  I couldn’t see its face from my angle, but I imagined it was surprised as hell when my gloved fingers found its eyes.

  I had no memories of my past self. I had images and pictures and bits and pieces, some of which were probably remnants of the living person I had been, and the rest were most likely bits of a character from a book, some fictitious or mythical hero or scoundrel that served as the template Juno had laid over me.

  But whoever I had been or was patterned after, I knew one thing as we got into it.

  I was one hell of a dirty fighter.

  I gouged at its eyes; I slammed stones and debris from the forest floor into its head and sides, and I never let up. The thing’s surprised howls and yowls ripped through my audio sensors, and I roared my own rage back at it.

  That was a mistake. The thing’s teeth found my face, and it worried me, wrenching back and forth. With a pop, one of my visual receptors went.

  And so I played my last card.

  The recon drone buzzed down from above. I’d flown it up above the canopy, tracked my shine-spattered self through its camera. Now I ploughed it into the big cat’s side.

  It leaped away, more shocked than anything else, I was sure. The drone was instantly wrecked, and I struggled to rise, felt an elbow joint give way. I had given, but I had taken too, and this body hadn’t been made for fighting in the first place.

  Hate-filled yellow eyes focused on me, practically glowing in the dark, and I watched it through the torn wire mesh mask with a sense of fatalism. Round two would not go my way.

  And I decided I’d do my damnedest to take one of those evil eyes before I went.

  “Fish or cut bait, kitty!” I snarled, making a claw of the fingers that still worked.

  It blinked.

  Then there was a thunder of hooves, and Foal was on it, sweeping her spear in a wide arc. The thing bounced backward, eyes winking out cheshire style as it fled into the night.

  Rauph and Marb followed in short order, struggling out of their suits as they hobbled to keep up.

  I checked my inner chronometer. The whole fight had taken a hair short of twelve seconds.

  Rauph was struggling the gun out, and I raised the arm that still worked. “No shots. We’re too close to the city.” The nighteyes was an afterimage under the moonlight as I spoke, one that faded away before I completed the sentence. No point in wasting bullets.

  “You think it’ll stay gone?” Marb asked.

  “Depends. Are my gloves bloody?”

  They checked. “Oh yeah,” Foal snorted.

  “Then I doubt it will be back. As long as we don’t get dumb, I think we’ll be fine. Get me out of this suit quick, though. I’ve got some broken bits and can’t manage it on my own.”

  Rauph gasped as the lower part of the suit came off.

  I saw the problem a second after he did. The stained, glowing layers of boots and wraps came off, but they came off torn, slashed by that damned cat. And among the bare metal and plastic legs, a tracery of glowing gold remained.

  “Infected,” Marb breathed.

  I ran a diagnostic, shoved away the various trauma notifications from the fight. And sure enough, there were some oddball readings from my left shin. The system didn’t know what was going on, but something was happening.

  It was nothing good, as far as I was concerned.

  Fortunately, I’d chosen the modular upgrade improvement. “Rauph, do me a solid. Grab my knee and follow my directions...”

  Three minutes later my leg was off and well to the side. Foal lifted me up, and the others inspected the rest of me. I was a mess, but there were no other glowing patches, and the internal diagnostics turned up no anomalies.

  “Well,” I said, as Marb let me brace myself on him. “Looks like I’ll need a crutch for a bit.”

  “Bno,” Foal said, and her long face was pale in the moonlight as she turned to my tribesmen. “Put him up on my back.”

  They hesitated.

  “You’re sure of this?” I asked, but in that moment, I knew I had her. The last barrier had been pushed through; the final bond had been forged. And with a minimum of deception, too.

  “I am,” she said, and I rejoiced silently as Rauph and Marb hoisted me to straddle our new ally’s back. “This is just unbtil we get you back home with that frienb you saved, you unberstanbd.”

  “I do,” I said, but I was glad that my face couldn’t smile. I doubted I could hide one at this point.

  But I knew the true deception was yet to come.

  The reports had been rolling in as we traveled. Foal’s kin were tearing through the outer halls of my bunker, damaging the inner doors, and worrying their way in. With neither trap nor forces to oppose them, they had time and persistence on their side.

  I had turned one of them to sympathize with me, but it would be tested soon against her loyalty to her own tribe. It was a knife, but one that would cut me down if I got sloppy.

  We rode into the night, driving for shelter, and I hung on and tried to figure out how I could turn this to my advantage.

  And after a time, long after we reached Arcadia and bedded down, I thought I had the bones of a strategy.