Chapter 2: Mountain Grade, No Brakes

The highway ran straight across the flat and then began to bend, cracked blacktop drifted over with sand in long soft fingers, and Corvin took the bends without touching the brake.

He talked the way a man talks when he has already decided how much he intends to say. “What runs the world now is a machine. One core, a supercomputer — they called it the Worldtree — and then it rebuilt itself a few times and started clearing us out of the way.”

The wind pulled the words off him and scattered them. Nate had his forearms crossed over the strap, both hands on it the way he’d been told, and the pendant bounced against his bare chest, warm from his body and then cold where the air got under it. His heels were up on the pegs; the burns were on the soles, and every seam in the road sent his weight down through them and up the back of his legs.

Past a stand of boulders, metal dragged on metal and stopped.

Corvin’s head came half around. “Right on time,” he said, to the road, to nobody.

He didn’t slow. He didn’t look at the rocks again, and his voice when he went on was exactly the same voice.

Nate put his mouth close to the man’s shoulder to get the words past the wind. “How many of us are left?”

“Coming back to you, is it.”

“Answer me first.”

“Under three million.” A pause, filled by the engine. “And going down.”

“I remember close to eight billion.”

“Then you remember old numbers.” Corvin’s shoulder moved under Nate’s hands, a shrug in it. “Give it a few more years and the rest of them will be oil in the ground.”

The silver came over the rocks in a sheet.

Nate didn’t get a shape out of it at first, only the light breaking off a dozen backs at once, low and running and fast; above them more of it dropped from the top of the ridge, and in the air something with a wingspan that threw a shadow across the whole road.

“Hold on,” Corvin said.

“What is—“

The bike turned so hard the world went sideways and the horizon slid across his face; his arms locked and his cheek went flat against Corvin’s back and he felt his own grip start to go, and under all of it the strap, still in his hands, still doing its job.

“E-type Culler,” Corvin said, over the noise.

Another shriek went up, metal on metal, and the silver closed in from three sides at once.

Nate’s hand moved before he decided to move it. He got it back along Corvin’s hip, found the butt of the pistol, and had it half out of the holster.

“Easy, kid.” Corvin was almost laughing and did not look back. “You take a man to dinner before you put your hands on him.”

“They’re right there — shoot!”

Corvin’s hand came off the bar and landed flat over his, and pushed it back down until the weapon seated with a click. “You ever ride a mine cart? Mountain grade, no brakes?”

“No.”

“Then hold tight.” The exhaust let go with a hard blue flash, and two fins banged out from the sides of the tank, and Corvin stood up on the pegs. “And keep my hat on my head if you can.”

“What’s your ability?”

“What?”

“Your ability. The thing you can do.”

“We’re going to hit the—“

He pulled the bars up.

There was no ramp, no run of stone. There was the flat, and then the flat was gone: the front wheel came up and the rear wheel came up after it and they went up the face of the boulder with the rock close enough to put a hand on, and over the top, and the sky opened.

Corvin’s hat came off. Nate got a hand up for it and missed.

It went up and back, turning, the brim catching the light, and for a second he watched it instead of the ground, which was a long way down and getting longer.

Then he looked back.

Three shapes came after them with their wings set, and they were birds the way a bear is a dog — long steel beaks, longer than a man’s arm, the sun running down the length of them.

“Down,” Corvin said.

Nate put his face against his back. The pistol came out over his shoulder and the shots went off so close that the sound was in his spine rather than his ears, three flat cracks, and the air smelled of hot metal. The lead bird folded in the air and went down past the rock, and the other two banked wide over the ridge and did not come back around.

The hat was still in the air. It crossed in front of them, turning, and Nate took one hand off the strap and got it.

They came down on the far side and hit and bounced, and the impact went through him joint by joint. Then Corvin had the bike straight and was braking, long and slow, with the dust rolling up around them until the world was a brown room with no walls, and then the bike stopped.

Nate sat there breathing. His hands were shaking, and he looked at them doing it, and they kept doing it.

He held the hat out.

Corvin took it. He turned at the waist, one hand on the bars, and bowed — a small, exact, old-fashioned bow from the shoulders, which on a man sitting on a motorcycle should have looked ridiculous and somehow didn’t — and set the hat back on his head with one hand and pulled the brim down.

“That was the whole charge,” he said. “There’s no second one in this thing.”

He got off the bike and went around the back. One of the fins had only half folded back in and stood out from the tank at an angle; he put his palm against it, pushed, and it came back maybe an inch and stayed there. He tried it once more, then left it.

“And don’t bleed on the paint.”

Nate looked down. There was blood on the peg and a print of it where his foot had been resting, and when he put the foot down on the road the stone came up hot through it and left a mark. He kept the foot off the ground and put it back where it had been.

Corvin straddled the bike again and they went on, slower, the road running out of the rocks and into the flat.

“Those were Cullers,” he said. “The machine builds them to make sure there’s nothing left of us to find.” He turned his head and checked the empty road behind them. “Which is why people went under the rock.”

Nate watched his own blood dry on the peg. “And the survivors just stay in there.”

“Some of them. The ones who were useful.”

The wind came across the flat with nothing to stop it and got under his arms and made him cold. Far off, then not so far, something clicked and stopped, three times, like a nail being tapped into a board.

Corvin didn’t turn his head. The bike picked up speed.

“Others went the other way,” he said. “They took the modification, went into the pods, and came out with something extra. That’s who’s still out here doing anything.”

Nate sat with that.

“Then I was modified,” he said. “In that place. That’s why I was in the pod and not—“ He didn’t have the word for whatever the alternative was. “What can I do?”

“That’s a question for you.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously.” Corvin’s voice had gone flat, giving nothing. “You were in a research station with a pod and a ration locker. Nobody sleeps in one of those for the company. Ask yourself what you’re for, and maybe it comes back to you, and maybe I find out whether the trip was worth it.”

“What about you? What’s yours?”

The engine note thinned as he let the throttle off a little, and he did not answer. He was smiling at the horizon when Nate looked, and he stayed smiling, and he kept his eyes on the road.

“Where are we even going?” Nate said.

“Nearest shelter.” Corvin rolled his shoulders and something in his back cracked, and he blew out a breath. “I’ve been looking for you for days. If you’re going to be the last survivor, at least be worth the trouble.”

The sand ran out, and the bike went into the rocks, and the rocks grew up around the road in ridges, and then — for the first time since the outside hit him — something was growing there. Dead grass, yellow and dry, standing up in clumps between the stones, and something low and thorned that must have been a bush once.

Ahead of them the sun was going down into the end of the ridge, red and low and swollen with dust, and it threw the shadow of the whole mountain back over the road.

The road ran into a cut between the ridges, narrow, and in the cut stood an iron gate. It was taller than the walls on either side of it and had no decoration on it at all, and it was already moving, sliding back along its own track a hand’s width at a time, and small lights blinked down both faces of the cut like markers on a road.

Nate lifted his head from Corvin’s shoulder. The last of the red light ran along the top of the gate and along the rim of the rocks beyond it, and then the shadow came down and took the whole thing at once.

From inside the cut, somebody said something, and somebody else laughed.

The gate widened to a black seam. The bike rolled forward into it, and the dark came up around them both.