Chapter 1: Barefoot on Hot Stone

Three questions came out of the dark before anything else did.

“Hey. You alive?”

“Wake up. Can you talk?”

“What’s your name? Do you remember who you are?”

Then the light.

It came from above and to the left. His pupils shut down hard; the room went white; water ran out of his eyes. Something was kneeling over him, blocking most of the glare, and for several seconds it was nothing but a shape: shoulders, the edge of a jaw, a hand raised and held.

He blinked until the shape became a man.

Black coat, collar up. A hat with a pinched brim. Short black hair, and a face worn thin around the eyes — tired, but the eyes were doing all the work, moving across Nate’s face the way a hand moves across a surface, checking for seams.

The gloves were black and thin, tight to the hand. Two fingers came down on his forehead.

Nate turned his head aside.

“Awake?” The man’s brows drew together. “Do you remember anything?”

“Who—“ His voice came out scraped. He tried again. “Who am I?”

The man’s whole body eased. “Good. You can talk.” He went down on one knee, bringing his face level. “How do you feel? Anything broken?”

“Where is this?”

Nate pushed himself up. Sitting was harder than it should have been. The floor was metal and cold through the seat of his pants, and behind him stood a tank with its lid rolled back, the inside webbed with tubing and smelling like a hospital shut up for a long time.

“Who are you?” he said.

The man tapped his own chest with two gloved fingers. “My name is Corvin. Corvin Ashe.” He said it slowly, the way you write something down for a stranger. “Look at me. My eyes, not the room.”

Nate looked.

Close up, the man took up more space than the room had. Deep-set eyes, a wide brow, two straight dark brows above them that gave his face a stubborn, easy confidence, the kind of face that had never once been argued out of anything. A belt, a knife sheathed on it, the blade maybe eight inches, and a pistol worn butt-forward. The hand that had touched Nate’s forehead had not gone near either of them.

“I’m a knight,” Corvin said. “That isn’t a boast, it’s a job description. I’m here investigating this facility.” He glanced back at the door. “You’ve been asleep a long time. However long it’s been, you haven’t seen sunlight. That’s why you look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like paper.” Corvin nodded at Nate’s hands.

Nate looked at his own hands — pale, blue-veined at the wrist — then at Corvin’s, brown where the gloves ended, then past him, at the room. Empty racks. An overturned chair. A wall of dead screens. Dust on the floor thick enough that Nate’s own shape was printed in it, and no other shape at all.

“Before this,” Corvin said, fast now, “what’s the last thing you remember? Anyone you spoke to. Anything they said.”

“Nothing.”

“Think.”

“I am thinking.”

He was. There was a door inside him, and behind the door was everything, years of it, and he could feel the weight of it leaning from the other side and none of it came through.

Corvin snapped his fingers three inches in front of Nate’s nose.

“Hey. Kid. Stay with me.”

“What facility?” Nate said. “What is this place, what—“

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t—“

“I know what the door said. I know what’s in the basement. That’s not the same thing.” The last of it came out flat and older, all the play gone out of it. Then he put the play back. “So. Your name.”

“Nate.” The word arrived ahead of the thought. He waited for the rest of it. It didn’t come. “Nathan Voss. That’s my name. That’s all I’ve got.”

Corvin considered him, nodded once, and turned where he knelt — quick, scanning the room, racks, chair, dead screens — and came back to Nate.

“Nothing else,” Nate said. “Besides the name, I don’t have anything else.”

“That’s more than most people get.” Then he was done with it. “Can you stand?”

He offered his hand. The glove was warm and dry, and the grip closed on Nate’s hand like a locking mechanism, and Nate got his feet under himself and stood and the room tilted.

Corvin’s arm came across his back and held.

“All right. You’re not as bad off as you look. We can’t stay here. They’re coming, and I don’t intend to be found standing still. What do you need to bring?”

“Bring?” Nate looked around. “Nothing. There’s nothing here.”

“Then take the coat.” Corvin had one shoulder out of it before he stopped, looked Nate over once, and put the shoulder back in. “On second thought, you’d be swimming in it. Walk fast, that’s your coat. What’s that around your neck?”

“What?”

“That’s the only thing you came with. The tank had ration packs and fluid, and that. Maybe it’ll help you remember.”

Nate looked down at himself for the first time. Thin trousers. No shirt. No shoes. His own bare feet gray with the dust of the room, the toes of them, the arch — and a black cord going down over his chest, and on the end of the cord, when he hooked it out with one finger, a clear six-sided prism the length of the first joint of his thumb, warmed from his skin.

He turned it. It showed him the ceiling, the dead screens, a warped little picture of his own eye.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Or maybe not.” Corvin was watching the corridor over his shoulder. There was nothing in the corridor. He watched it anyway. “Either way, it’s yours. Come on.”

Nate got two steps before he stopped.

There, on Corvin’s collar, catching the corridor light: a small mark. Not a letter. A short stroke with four rays breaking off it, cut into the fabric or stamped on it, and Nate knew it. Not the meaning of it. The thing itself, the way he knew the shape of a hand. It was familiar and it was nothing, and the two facts sat in him side by side without touching.

“Voss.” Corvin had stopped in the doorway. “Legs. Use them.”

The corridor was worse than the room. Bright, and long, and every surface scoured to the same dead white, and Nate walked it in his bare feet and felt the floor change temperature before he saw the open door at the end of it.

The last door stood open, and there was nothing over his head but sky.

The sky was the blue of paint freshly poured. Under it, a shelf of gravel and broken stone ran out flat from the wall of the facility, and past the shelf the rock stood up on both sides of a road that bent away downhill between them. Nothing green anywhere, no scrub, no grass, only stone stacked in shapes that didn’t belong to anything living. The wind came down through the gap and made a low complaining note in it, like a door swinging somewhere out of sight.

The air went down his throat cool and dry and stayed there, and it carried a smell with it from a long way off — dry grass, dry dirt, that particular smell that only came in the fall.

He put his right foot down.

The stone was hot, and the pain came up a half second behind the touch and rang in his back teeth. He kept his face still, because the alternative was to make a sound, and he had already decided not to do that in front of this man.

“I can walk,” he said.

Corvin whistled. One note, through his teeth, more signal than tune. “You’re barefoot.”

The next thing Nate knew, the ground had gone away from him. Corvin had an arm under his knees and another across his back and had lifted him off the stone as easily as a man picking up a coat, and was already walking.

“Put me—“

“You want to argue, argue from the bike.”

The bike stood where the gravel met the road, rust bloomed along the tank and the pipes, sand drifted up over the rear wheel. He set Nate down on it, swung on in front of him, and kicked it over. The engine caught, coughed, and opened into a roar, and dust came up around them in a sheet.

Nate got his feet up on the pegs. Both soles complained, and the ball of his right foot had already gone tight and hot, the skin drawn where the stone had got it.

“You’re probably the last survivor,” Corvin said.

“Survivor of what?”

Corvin turned his head and looked back down the canyon, and something in the set of his jaw had changed. “Hold the strap. Don’t put your hands anywhere I can’t see them.”

The bike rolled, and the walls of the canyon came up on both sides, and the wind of their going pulled the heat off Nate’s face and put sand in his teeth.

At the mouth of the gap, where the walls fell away onto open desert, Nate turned his head and looked back.

The facility door was sliding down into the rock on its track, slow and steady, and the dark behind it narrowed to a line and then to nothing.

The bike took the last of the grade and came out onto the flat.