Chapter 3: Visitor, Unverified

The gate had a voice.

“Identity verified,” it said. “Commander Ashe. The Order.”

The words came out of a small black speaker set into the iron above the seam. The engine died under Nate. Behind them the gap they had ridden through narrowed to a red line and then lost even that, and the bike stood in a canopy of sheet metal with the dust still settling on it.

“Companion unverified,” the voice said. “State the visitor’s origin.”

Nate tilted his head back. Beside the speaker there was a lens, and the lens was pointed at him.

“He came out of a pod in the north,” Corvin said. He had his hat in his hand and was already walking, and he turned his wrist once without looking back, which meant come on. “Put him down as mine.”

“Visitor, unverified.”

A door opened in the wall of the gate. Corvin went through it, and Nate followed him, because the alternative was standing in the dark under a camera with a dead motorcycle.

The room inside was the size of a closet. The gate came down behind them with a sound like a boot heel on sheet metal.

“Take your clothes off,” Corvin said.

Nate said, “What?”

Corvin hung his hat on a hook. He shrugged out of the coat and unbuttoned the shirt and put both in a recess in the wall. Under the shirt he was pale and hard and there was no softness anywhere on him. He took off his boots, then his belt, and set them in the recess too, and stood with his hands loose at his sides.

Nate said, “What are we doing?”

“Relax,” Corvin said. “Let your guard down. Give me your body and I’ll give you mine, and we’ll have a night neither of us forgets — finest technique in the canyon, guaranteed, I’ll take you up past the clouds and you’ll thank me in the morning.” A pause exactly long enough for Nate’s face to do something. “Joking. Decontamination.”

Nate stood with his mouth open. He knew what the word meant. The meaning came with it, whole, and he put that down where he had been putting the others.

“There could be a locator on you,” Corvin said. “Cullers put them in people. Then the people walk back to us, and we find out where we live.”

Nate took off what he had, which was very little, and set it in the recess. The floor was cold. The cut on his foot had stiffened, and when he put his weight on it the ache went up into his leg.

The light came on blue and low. Corvin stood in it and did not appear to notice that either of them was naked. Nate looked at the wall instead, and at the vents in the ceiling, and at his own foot, which had left a mark.

Then a man’s voice came out of the corner of the ceiling.

“Somebody want to explain what I’m looking at?”

Nate jumped. A camera sat in the corner with a red eye lit, pointed at both of them.

“Come here,” Corvin said, quiet. “Close.”

Nate took a step. Corvin took his waist and brought him in the rest of the way, almost against him, and turned his face up toward the corner and smiled at the camera.

“I found him in the basement of Station 42.”

“Forty-two.” The voice moved when it said the number, and it was not a pleasant sound. “That hole. There’s nobody alive in that hole. What’s his name?”

“Does it matter to you?”

The water hit without warning. It came out of the vents hard and cold, and Nate got a mouthful of it and choked and doubled over coughing, and Corvin’s hand came up in front of his face and turned him in, so the rest came down on Corvin’s back and shoulder instead. His hair was soaked in a second. He was half a head taller than Nate, and Nate had his forehead against the man’s collarbone and could not get a breath in edgewise.

Then it stopped. Air came out of the same vents, hot and fast, and pulled the wet off his skin until he was dry, and the blue light went out, and that was the end of it.

Corvin took his hand.

His palm was wide and dry and warm. The small bad mood Nate had been carrying since the gate eased without his permission. A door opened on the other side of the room and let them into a corridor, and a hatch slid up and gave them back their clothes.

His hand went to the cord at his neck and found the pendant there and left it.

“Bring him to me,” the voice said. It could have been walking the corridor with them, the sound stayed so close.

Dressed, Corvin kept the one hand where it was and took his coat and bag in the other and pressed the button at the end of the corridor.

The door opened onto the whole inside of the place.

It was a canyon, and somebody had turned the bottom of it into a town. The sun was going down into the notch at the far end. The last of it came over the rim red and heavy and lay along the cliff, and the cliff was red, and everything below it was the color of old blood. In the middle there was open ground. On the ground were the machines: gearboxes, panels, wheel hubs, a whole truck with no wheels, stacked and leaning and half taken apart, and people moving between the stacks.

Their clothes had been worn by somebody else first. Their hair had not been cut by anyone in a while. They walked like people at the end of a shift that had gone on for years, and when they looked up at the two of them, they looked the way you look at weather.

Nate gave his hand a small pull. Not a scene. Just the ordinary thing you do when you have been holding a strange man’s hand for a minute and want it back.

Corvin’s fingers closed.

He took him to a storefront with a counter and a bell, and rang it. Behind the counter the shelves were all salvage, and there was a smell of oil and hot metal and something cooking further back.

“Help you?” A woman came out, middle-aged, hair tied back off her face.

“Shoes for him. Clothes. Something with taste, please.” Corvin sat down on the stool at the counter and put his hat on his knee. “And whatever you’ve got to drink.”

He took some pieces of metal out of a pocket and set them on the counter. They were irregular, no two the same shape, and the light came off them in a way that made it hard to look at one and then another.

The woman got a cup and a bottle off the shelf and poured a little of something brown, and Corvin drank it.

Nate was still looking at the metal. Corvin caught the look and answered it politely, in the voice of a man explaining something to a guest. “It’s gold. It’s money. I’m poor. That’s all of it.”

She took Nate into the back of the shop, which was not a room so much as a wall of other people’s lives. Pants. Coats. Socks in pairs tied together. Shoes in rows with the toes out.

“You’ll want more than that on,” she said, looking him over. “It gets cold here when the sun’s down.”

She pulled a pair of sneakers out of a cabinet. They were used and they had been washed and the laces were new. She found him socks, and a sweatshirt, and thick pants, and hung a curtain across on a wire. He changed behind it with his cut foot off the floor. It hurt to get the sock on, and he got it on.

“Is this a swap meet?” he said, through the curtain.

“People bring me what they can’t use. I sell it for them and take a piece.” She was quiet a moment. “Those shoes were my son’s. He was about your size.”

“He doesn’t wear them anymore?”

“He’s dead,” she said. Then, in the same voice: “Come out when you’re dressed.”

He came out. She took the old clothes out of his hands and looked at him once, top to bottom.

“They fit,” she said. “He was broader in the shoulders.” She folded the old pants. “You’re a friend of the Commander’s?”

Nate said, “The what?”

She glanced toward the front of the shop. From the counter Corvin whistled at him, a short one, and said, “Not bad.” He finished the cup, put the hat on, pushed the metal across the counter, and stood.

“How much was it?” Nate said.

“It’s a gift. Don’t thank me.” Corvin put the strap of the bag on one shoulder. “Now come on.”

They crossed half the canyon. The cold came down fast with the light, desert cold, all at once, and the people going past had their hands in their pockets. Lamps were coming on along the walls, and higher up the scaffolding went crooked up the rock in flights, one plank over another, men still on it, and the lamps came on along the planks in a line, one after another, like somebody walking up there with a light.

“Are we in a desert?” Nate said.

“Yes. That’s why it’s called Sandrest.” Corvin stopped at the foot of a rusted staircase. “I came through here four years ago. First we see the man who runs it, and he gives you a name that counts.”

“And then?”

“And then we find out how you’re going to live in the world.” Corvin went up ahead of him, easy. A man coming down nodded, and Corvin took his hat off and turned his shoulder and gave him a small bow without breaking stride, and did it again for an old woman with a cart.

Nate looked at the people doing the nodding. “Do they have abilities too?”

Corvin said, “No. They’re ordinary. Logistics.” And then, before Nate could ask the question he actually had: “Stay with me. I’ll tell it all to you, in pieces. Not up the stairs.”

The stairs ended at a construction elevator with two guards in front of it. One of them reached out and pressed the button before Corvin had asked for anything.

The cage went up slowly. The town dropped away and turned into a grid of lamps, and the walls of the canyon went from red to violet to nothing. At the top it stopped on a ledge, and when the gate opened there was a corridor in the air, an iron walk with guards standing at intervals, and the rock face at one side of it cut back into a door.

The corridor was cold and the wind found it. The guards looked at Corvin, then at him, one at a time. The people below had done the same.

Corvin knocked twice.

“Come in,” somebody said.

It was the voice from the ceiling, and Nate’s shoulders went tight before he had decided anything.

The office was cut into the rock, and the far wall of it was screens. They showed the corridor, and the elevator, and the ground in front of the gate, and the inside of the shop, and the room with the curtain in it.

The man at the desk was middle-aged, with hair gone thin on top and skin smooth in a way that did not agree with the lines at the corners of his eyes. He wore a black suit. On one cuff, small, there was a number stitched in gray: 20.

He glanced up from the screens. “Commander. You don’t visit. So this is a surprise.” His eyes came around to Nate and stayed there and went over him, front to back, the way a man prices what somebody has set on his table.

“This is Nate,” Corvin said. He had turned half sideways without seeming to, so that he was between Nate and the desk. “Nate, this is Joss Pike. He runs Sandrest.”

Nate said nothing. He looked at the number on the cuff and the black suit and the smooth skin, and the back of his neck told him something he did not have the words to hand to Corvin.

“Is this him?” Joss said. “The priest?”

“Don’t spoil it,” Corvin said.

“The priest?” Nate said.

“I’m not sure,” Corvin said. He said it to Nate, only to Nate, and it was not a joke.

Joss sat back. “You want me to run him through the checks here.”

“They can do a simple test,” Corvin said. “It’ll tell you what you can do. It’s quick. It doesn’t hurt.”

“You don’t know that,” Nate said.

“I know that.”

“He remembers nothing,” Joss said, not to Nate. “Is that the story?”

“He knows his name.”

“He tells you his name, and you believe him.” Joss turned one hand over, palm up, as though the hand had made the point for him. “How many is that now?”

Corvin did not answer. On the screens the shop was still going about its business. The woman was folding the old pants.

“How much time,” Joss said, “have you spent on a rumor nobody has confirmed?”

The screens had too much on them. Nate could see the corridor outside the door, where he had been standing a minute ago, and the gate, and the empty road beyond the gate, and the shop with the curtain across it. He could see every place he had been since dark, all at once, small, from above, and none of them belonged to him.

He wanted a door.

“I don’t want to stay here,” he said.

He stood up. The chair legs scraped back. His shoes made a sound on the rock floor, her son’s shoes, and they fit him. He crossed the room with his hand already out.

Behind him nobody said anything.

The door gave. The corridor was cold and the wind cut at his face, and the door closed on its own weight behind him and shut with a flat knock.

He got three steps. Maybe four. Behind him the door knocked again, a hand this time and not the weight of it settling, and somebody was coming.

It was Corvin’s walk.