The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

There Used to Be Olive Trees ^{RICH LARSON}

Valentin crept through the darkness toward the high stone wall of the Town, heart thumping hard against his ribs. His nanoshadow, wrapped around his chest under his shirt, sensed his anxiety and gave a comforting pulse, gritty and warm against his skin. It helped a little. Valentin had never gone over the wall before. He had never left the Town before.

But anything was better than what awaited him in the morning: the prueba. His fourth prueba, to be precise. Valentin ran a finger over caked scar tissue until it contacted the gleaming black implant poking from the crest of his shaved head. It was the implant that let him control his nanoshadow—for anyone else, it would have been an inert black puddle. It was the implant that let him communicate with some of the simpler machines inside the Town.

The implant didn’t make him a true prophet, though. Not until he passed the prueba, until the Town’s machine god spoke to him. No prophet had ever failed the test more than twice. Valentin was on three and counting.

So he was leaving. Valentin breathed deep, staring up the weathered stone face of the wall that had kept him safe for all his sixteen years. He knew the world outside was a dangerous one. There were wilders and mudslides and scuttling scorpions. Valentin hated scorpions and he had a healthy fear of wilders from growing up with scarestories.

But so long as he had his nanoshadow, he could do things no barbarian could even dream of. He reached out with his implant and summoned the gleaming black motes, coaxing the shadow down his arms, gloving his hands. He steadied his nerves, looked around once more for anyone who might stop him, then took a flying leap at the wall.

Valentin was normally clumsy, but with the nanoshadow strengthening his arms like corded black muscle and coating his hands with clinging tendrils, he went up the sheer wall easily as a gecko. He felt a grin splitting his face as he topped it. Poised there on the edge with his nanoshadow balancing him, Valentin could see the empty campo stretching far and away. Rolling hills of dead gray soil, dotted ruins, crumbling road. It looked like freedom.

With only the slightest guilt thinking of Javier, who would wake up in the morning to find his apprentice gone, Valentin slid down the other side of the wall and started to walk. It wasn’t long before he heard a familiar rumble of gods on the move. Valentin kept low but still felt a swirl of static inside his skull, the customary sting of his implant, as the pod of biomechanical gods thundered through the dark sky overhead.

He could sense them, but their thoughts were walled off from him, inscrutable as those of the god who controlled the Town, and a moment later their ghostly yellow lights disappeared into the distance.

Leaving him in the dark again.

“Wake up, little Townie.”

Still half in a dream, Valentin thought it was Javier’s voice, waking him for the prueba. Then he remembered scaling the wall, walking and walking, finding a crevice to sleep in cocooned by his nanoshadow.

His nanoshadow that he could no longer feel against his skin. Valentin wrenched his eyes open, jolted by adrenaline, and found himself face to face with what could only be a monster with beetle-black eyes and an impossibly wide mouth.

Valentin jerked backward, probing desperately for his shadow, and the bag clutched in the monster’s pale hand writhed.

“None of that,” the monster said sourly, shaking the rucksack where Valentin’s nanoshadow was trapped. “None of your Townie tricks. Alright?”

It wasn’t a monster. It was a boy, maybe his age, maybe a bit younger. His mouth was the normal size, but a raw-looking scar gashed upward from one corner of it, splitting his cheek. He had shaggy black hair and coarse skin and wore a black coat that was different fabrics all patched together, nothing like the identical gray garments made by the Town’s autofab.

The boy turned his head, and Valentin realized the other half of his face was beautiful, fine-cut with long black lashes. He had never thought wilders might be beautiful. It didn’t do much to help the cold panic numbing his limbs.

“A live shadow,” the wilder said, shaking his head. His accent was thick and nasal and dropped the endings off familiar words. “Thought they were only in tales. Are you a prophet, then?”

Valentin tried to clear his head. The wilder had found him while he was sleeping and peeled his shadow off him. Normally he’d still be able to control it, make it leap out of the bag, but he’d used it all through the night to keep warm and now, still without sunshine, it didn’t have enough strength to escape.

“I’m a prophet,” Valentin said. “Yeah. I am. So if you don’t give me my nanoshadow now, I’ll have the gods blast you to ashes and a little heap of bone.”

Alarm flashed over the wilder’s split face for a split second, then he tipped back his head and gave a warbling laugh. “Once you do something for me, Prophet,” he said, thumbing an eyelash off his cheek, “you can ask the gods to punish me however you like.” He hefted the rucksack onto his shoulders and strapped it tight.

Valentin’s heart pounded. Maybe he could run for it, but the cold, hard look of the wilder’s eyes and the long knife in his belt made him think otherwise. And no way was he returning to the Town as not only the first prophet to fail three pruebas in a row, but the first to lose his nanoshadow to a wilder.

“What do you want?” he asked, trying to sound brave, bored, maybe a little mysterious. The tremor in his voice gave him dead away.

“I’m Pepe,” the wilder said. “Who’re you?”

“What do you want?” Valentin repeated, and this time with no quaver.

The wilder shrugged. “To do what prophets do, Prophet,” he said. “Get a stubborn fucking god to care about us for a change. You help me, I won’t cut your toes off.” He patted his rucksack. “And maybe I’ll even let you have your shadow back,” he added.

The campo didn’t look like freedom anymore. Pepe set the pace and set it fast, leaving Valentin to stumble along behind him, watching for the telltale skitter of scorpions in the cracked mud. His skin ached for his nanoshadow. A few times he probed hard for it and managed to elicit a sluggish twitch from inside Pepe’s rucksack, which in turn made Pepe shoot him a suspicious look from under his eyelids. But without sunshine or Valentin’s bioelectricity, the inert nanoshadow was nothing but a lump of gritty black gelatin.

They walked and walked and only paused to eat—a slab of cold tortilla comfortingly similar to what they had in the Town—before they walked again. Valentin spent the time trying to think of a way to escape. The wilder had them heading west, toward his tribe’s derelict autofab, farther and farther away from the Town. Pepe thought Valentin was going to interface with whatever god was controlling it and set it working again. As if it was that simple.

And when Pepe found out that Valentin couldn’t do it, he figured the wilder would use his sawtoothed knife to cut out his implant as a keepsake, then let him bleed out in the dust. He shivered, half from the thought and half from the Andalusian winter, as they walked in silence across another barren field. The soil underfoot was pallid gray.

Another god, this one alone, hummed through the sky overhead, moving like the whales Valentin had seen clips of, the ones that used to inhabit the oceans. Pepe stopped where he was, pulled down his scarf, and craned his neck to watch its passage. The yellow lights bathing his face made the scar glisten wetly.

“Can you talk to them, then?” Pepe asked.

“When they want to talk,” Valentin lied, feeling Pepe’s dark eyes go to the crest of his head, where he had scar tissue of his own. Valentin pulled up his hood and glowered. He didn’t like people staring at the implant.

“Should tell them to give us a lift,” Pepe said, with his macabre grin, and started to walk again. They passed the husk of an old harvester stripped for parts. “There used to be olive trees here,” he said. “Far as the unaugmented eye could see, my grandfather says his grandfather said. The harvesters rolled up and down the campo all day long. Back when more things grew. Back when machines listened to anybody, not just prophets.”

Valentin probed the harvester as they passed by, wishing he could swing its clawed arm and knock Pepe to the ground, grind him into the dirt, but the farm equipment was long-dead. He didn’t feel so much as a flicker from his implant.

Before long the moon was rising overhead, fat and yellow, and the air was turning cold enough to bite. Valentin missed the slick warmth of his nanoshadow again, pulling his scarf snug against the chill. He could see Pepe’s exposed hands turning purple in the night air, and after a few more minutes his captor pointed to a crumbling stone derelict up ahead.

“We’ll hunker down in there for night,” he said, tongue flicking distractedly against his scar. “Start early in the morning, get to the autofab by noon. Make sure you have enough daylight to work.”

Valentin gave the ruins a dubious once-over. The sagging stone and twists of old rebar looked like something out of a scarestory. As they approached, Pepe found a torch and thumped it to life with the heel of his hand. The lance of harsh white light strobed damp ground and what was left of the walls. Following Pepe inside, Valentin felt immensely far from the gated pueblo he’d called home only a day ago.

“Wait here, Prophet,” Pepe said. “I’ll make a sweep for lobos.”

“Funny,” Valentin muttered. The spidery machines that once hunted down the survivors of satbombed Seville and the other ruined cities had been recycled decades since. Humans knew better than to make war with the gods now, and the gods were otherwise occupied.

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.”

Pepe looked at him for a stretched moment. “You are, though. I think.” He blinked and turned over.

Valentin stared at the back of his dark head, wishing he could window inside of it and see where he’d been placed. He thought a thousand thoughts as Pepe’s breathing slowly steadied. He pictured the pair of them setting off on their own, not back to the Town and not back to Pepe’s band and his psychopath brother. Maybe to the wilderness up north in Old France, maybe further south to where the gods were busy reshaping the coastline.

He was half-submerged in a dream when his implant gave him a short, sharp shock. His eyes flicked open. For a moment, Valentin thought he was still dreaming because the glossy black hide of the autofab was now veined with soft orange status lights.

His first instinct was to wake Pepe, but as he sat up the autofab’s orange lights wriggled together to form an image. Valentin rubbed his eyes. The autofab had drawn a pixelated face, and as he watched, a pixelated finger rose to its lips. The gesture was unmistakable. Valentin looked down at the sleeping wilder, then back up to the image. The orange ghost stared at him, then slipped around the side of the autofab.

Valentin got quietly to his feet. His nanoshadow came with him, slithering up his body. Pepe shivered. Valentin debated leaving the wilder his shadow, peeling at it half-heartedly with his fingernails. In the end he pulled the dirty blanket overtop of him instead. Sweat was beading along Pepe’s hairline. Valentin bit his lip, remembering the fever prediction.

The nanoshadow swathed his limbs as he made his way around to the back of the autofab. The orange ghost had become an orange doorway, pulsing gently in the dark. Valentin stared at it. His implant was no longer humming. The night was dead silent, cold, a sky of tarry black cloud. Then a sibilant whisper entered his head with a feeling like a thousand insects scraping against each other. Enter.

Valentin realized, dimly, that he had been waiting sixteen years for the invitation. When the skin of the autofab peeled back, he didn’t hesitate. He stepped inside and the autofab sealed shut behind him. He was in absolute dark. A moment passed. Valentin felt a claustrophobic terror stab through him, imagined himself entombed by a malfunct god.

White lights bloomed to life, and he was suddenly a giant, sunk to his ankles in a map of the peninsula. He saw the bone-dry furrow of the Guadalquivir, recognized the mountains around the ruins of Granada, and knew, instantly, that he was seeing what the gods saw when they drifted through the sky in their flying bodies. He found the tiny walled pueblo south of Seville’s burnt carcass and felt an ache in his throat.

You are not a scavenger. You are the [organic relay] displaced from [Installation 17].

The god’s voice scraped down his neck. The Town swelled on the map. “Yeah,” Valentin said. “Yes. That’s where I’m from.”

The map jumped, and Valentin saw the field of towering heads forming a perfect square.

[Installation 17’s patron] requested an early dispatch in [Gestation Field 2944] in order to eliminate the scavenger and ensure your security. Why did you dismantle the [organic disposal module] before it could attain function completion?

Valentin’s head was a whirlwind. This was not the voice he’d always imagined. “You watched that?” he demanded. “You’ve been watching us?”

The map plunged toward the ground, zooming in on the collapsed lobo. Valentin’s stomach sloshed with the illusion of falling.

Why did you dismantle the [organic disposal module] before it could attain function completion?

“It attacked me. Both of us.” Valentin shook himself. “You mean the Town’s god sent that thing?”

You will go back to [Installation 17] now. Supplies have been manufactured.

The map disappeared and Valentin found himself in a small, dark alcove. Facing him, on an illuminated plinth, he saw a slick black carrycase, and beside it a blocky shape he recognized as twin to the printed handgun Javier kept in his house.

If the scavenger attempts to obstruct you, use the weapon.

Valentin stared down at it. “I don’t need help,” he said shakily. “He does. His tribe, his band or whatever, they need this autofab functional again. Why did it shut down?”

Autofab access was rescinded from all scavengers as the [first act of culling]. [Installation 17] contains sufficient genetic diversity if breeding programs are followed. A larger sample size is unnecessary. Scavengers are extraneous. The [Gestation Fields] are preparing for the [second act of culling].

Valentin thought back to the field, to the rows and rows of heads, and remembered the faint buzz from inside each one. With a sick drop in his stomach, he realized that they were not sculptures. They were wombs. He pictured the carved mouths winching slowly open, the spidery shadows unfolding from inside.

“You’re sending more of those things after them?” he demanded. “For what? Stripping parts?”

[Installation 17] will not be affected. You will go back now, before the [second act of culling] begins.

Valentin picked up the case. His nanoshadow clung to it, sticking it to his back like a rucksack. Then he picked up the weapon. “Why didn’t the god speak to me in the Town?” he asked shakily. “It speaks to Javier.”

[Installation 17’s patron] believes it is important that [organic relays] understand the dangers outside its walls. You have completed a [pilgrimage]. Now you understand the [severe mercy of the gods]. Now you will go back.

Behind Valentin, the door peeled open again. Winter air licked his back with ice. “I’ll do whatever the fuck I want,” he said, sticking the weapon to his hip.

Valentin walked back out into the world. The autofab’s status lights had winked off again, but overhead he could make out a shard of moon. Enough light to travel by, if only just. He could start his trek back to the Town. He would have the hard evidence that he’d spoken to a god, and maybe by the time Javier died the god in the Town’s autofab would listen to him, too. He could let the wilders find out about the second act of culling when lobos dragged them from their tents and chopped them to pieces.

Valentin went to where Pepe was sleeping, rummaging the medicine kit out of his new case. The wilder was on his side, showing only the perfect side of his face, the faultless bones and dark lashes. Valentin touched his chin, turning his head. The jagged smile reappeared and Pepe’s eyes flicked open.

“I got disinfectant for your hand,” Valentin said.

“From the autofab? The god spoke to you?” His voice was hoarse with sleep.

“I’m a prophet, aren’t I?” Valentin shook the tube of disinfectant spray. “This is going to sting a bit.”

Valentin helped him wrap his hand and sling it up as he told him, in fragments, about the conversation with the god in the autofab. The whisper in his implant grew louder and louder, and by the time they stole away into the night, heading north to the band’s last campsite to give them the warning, it was a chorus of furious voices.

Valentin had his own concerns.