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“And? Was she an animal or a machine or what?”

“I jeeked in, and there was a fat guy with a hood on hanging from this crossbar by his hands and feet and the hooker, she had her back to me, but she had this thing in her hand that looked like a claw, you know?” Serpio spasmed fingers into a Hand of Glory. “Well, you see something like that, you just have to keep looking, especially when the hooker, she started raking the fat guy’s ass with this claw thing and leaving all these red scrapes. And he was thrashing around up there but there was nowhere he could go and in like no time, his ass just all red, and there was blood dripping from it on the floor. And I’m still up there on the crate, staring. Then, it was like when you know someone’s looking at you but you can’t see them, like a warm feeling that there’re eyes on you? The hooker, she suddenly stands up straight, and I should’ve got out then, I should’ve jumped off and run like a champion, but I couldn’t you know? It’s like I knew something awful was going to happen, but I had to stand there and see what it was.”

“And was it? Something awful?” This, asked in the semi-wheedling tell-me voice of childhood ghost stories. And the answer, in that same intimate, mutual-conspiracy-of-let’s-be-scared voice: “She turned round and she looked right at me and all I can remember is her face. Where her face should have been, was silver. All silver. Not a mask. Like molten metal. I could feel the heat off it. I could feel it on my eye, I could feel it sucking all the moisture out of it, I could feel it shrivel up and go dry and hard and blind. That’s what I thought, it was blind, then when the eye-patch came off, I realised that I was still seeing the silver I’d seen in her face, but the silver was the like the colour of the light in another world where all the things from all the legends live.”

The linger after the end of the tale of the cataract seemed to request a response but Sweetness did not know how to best fill it. So she said nothing but edged a little closer to strange Serpio.

“So,” he said. “What about you?”

The question felt like a warm, intrusive probing between Sweetness’s thighs. She gave a little gasp at the violation of her selfhood, then yielded herself to it. Things she had not even told Uncle Neon she told Serpio Waymender. The drawing out of them felt like she imagined sex to feel, mutual and releasing, yet very very private. All night Serpio teased her out with questions until, with the first dip of the horizon beneath the sun, the story ended and Sweetness Asiim Engineer found herself tired and yawning and gritty-eyed and needing a wash but strangely exhilarated on the cold trackside.

“You hungry?” she had asked, thinking scraps and shavings among the party detritus; then Serpio had poked her in the third rib and said with voice forty-sixty longing and pride, Look, see?

Now the carriages had almost completed their evolutions: panels fixed and locked, joints and couplings met and mated. The machine outheld boom arms above wide metal skirts, above both rose a command torso of pumping engines and grinding conveyor trains. In a high glass cupola, the oldest and most experienced Waymenders steered the juggernaut over the grass past the procession of stalled trains. It made a tremendous noise. Dawn-grazing plainsbeasts skittered from its path, Surveyors rode them down on their terrain bikes, scooping up dust-hares and striped piglings. The machine inscribed sixteen parallel wheel tracks deep in the earth. It found the sheared track ends and settled over them like a venerable dowager of many skirts taking a piss. The booms dipped to the ground. Bucketwheel fingers threw up red dust. Conveyors spun their wheels.

“What are they doing?” Sweetness asked.

“Come and look.”

Serpio took her hand. Sweetness found she did not mind that. His was soft, with rather long nails. A nonworking hand. No handlebar or lever for it, the eye that guided it was as blinded by seeing too much as by too little. She felt sorry for that hand, as they sneaked around the side of the big machine, dodging flying clods, and so she squeezed it.

To make talk, she asked, “What do you think happened to the orph? I never saw one before, I thought they were all gone long ago.”

“Don’t know,” Serpio said. “Don’t care. Well shut of it. Well shut of them all. Poxy things were always going wrong; they weren’t very well made.”

This was mild blasphemy to an Asiim Engineer. The prickle of reflex impiety surprised Sweetness. She had thought herself young and free-thinking. She asked, carefully, “Is this because of your…you know?”

“Eye?”

“Aye.”

“You mean, because my angel-sight means I can’t work on the track?”

“Aye.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” He sounded as if the insight had genuinely tripped him up, like a diamond in a midden. “But I think it’s mainly because I don’t think they should be here. We don’t need them. So, they say they built the world, and they keep it running, and so we call them angels and say prayers but they’re machines and even if one machine makes another machine makes another machine, at the bottom of it all, there’s a person, not a machine. A human who designed the machine, and programmed it, and gave it a mission and a name and a purpose. They’re the ones built the world. They’re the ones we should be remembering, not bits of metal and plastic. Those orphs, they’re stupid. Big cow-machines. Cows got more sense’n an orph. I tell you, when you’ve seen as many as I have go ga-ga.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got a job, see? I don’t do nothing, no one does nothing on Iron Lion. I got a job. I guide the train. I stand up there on the fo’c’s’le and I look down the track and I see angels boiling off the horizon like dust-devils. Angels? Balls. Tired, bad, mad machines.”

“St. Catherine…”

“Woman. Like you.” Serpio looked at Sweetness askance from the eaves of his thatch of glossy black hair. “Nah. Not like you. St. Catherine, she was tired, mad, bad too. But she was a woman.”

“Who tells you all this?” An itch of irritation in the voice. She’d only known this boy one party and a night and he was niggling her already.

“Harx,” Serpio said and no more. While Sweetness was still deliberating if the monosyllable was a cough, a name or a Waymender curse, Serpio ducked down to peer through the dust-bunnies billowing up from the big machine’s hem. “Down here.”

Sweetness hunkered down on her hams beside the dark-haired boy. Through the soil and shredded grass, she glimpsed alchemy. The big machine ate soil and shat steel. Two gleaming parallel lines of steel, new forged, shimmering with heat-haze, married together by smoking obsidian sleepers.

“It’s making it straight out of the ground,” Sweetness said, amazed. Serpio nodded the nod of workaday magic, but Sweetness knew her delight had pleased him. Squatting side by side, they watched the steel rails creep across the gap of raw earth. Centimetre by centimetre, Sweetness thought. Measuring the time until the rails are joined. Shortening the gap between me and Narob and his stainless steel kitchen. A joining, and a joining. Grain by grain. Centimetre by centimetre.

Too dismal a thought by far for a crisp cold clear Deuteronomy morning. Serpio read the sudden gloom in her muscles.