He loved to watch people with problems he didn’t share—unruly families, exotic illnesses, addictions and compulsions of all kinds. He was especially intrigued by the phenomenon known as hoarding. Vikram—who owned only the one stuffed backpack’s worth of books, himself—had watched demented denizens be parted by force from the mountains of things that had rendered their houses unlivable. On the shows, a counselor would help a hoarder to sort and discard. When the victim of this help proved incapable, the counselor did the work without the hoarder’s participation. Well-meaning family members rented construction Dumpsters to cart away all the rubbish.
Reality TV, this type of program was called. He watched men and women be ousted from the nests they had built, the worlds that surrounded and sustained them. Watching this moved him. He wept, and felt a secret satisfaction when they wept, too.
From his TV habit, he knew the terminology. Some hoarders left clear spaces between their clots and clogs. Others made goat paths that allowed them to move over the piles in the room. A floor’s surface might be completely covered, but there were still ways of getting through that became part of the internal geography of the room. These ways were uneven and treacherous but passable.
When Hel appeared—when she entered Sleight’s bedroom through the door behind Vikram—she took in the flotsam that lapped at the walls faster than he would have believed possible. Before he could speak, before Klay could speak, Hel was vaulting over the piles at a run, finding footholds and handholds, Mrs. Defoe’s stuff crunching, breaking, collapsing under her weight, and yet in a blink, she’d gotten around behind Klay and looped an arm around her neck.
Vikram pressed the button on his phone to light the screen once again. “Hel.”
She didn’t acknowledge him. “You know I carry a knife,” she said, right in Teresa Klay’s ear. “You must know that about me. I’m an otolaryngologist. That means an ear, nose, and throat specialist. I know exactly what I’m doing. Put that lighter out. And tell me where my book is.”
In the gloom, Vikram could just make out Hel’s hands. There was no knife. Gripped tight in Hel’s fingers, something utterly the wrong shape to be a weapon pushed harmlessly against the soft part of Klay’s throat.
John Gund lay on the ground. In the distance, the lookout point outside the city’s entrance loomed. He watched the guardhouse atop the scaffold burn.
This was the highest structure around, though in the stunted, blackened landscape, nothing else remained to compare. The little house—the size of a garden shed or small garage—perched atop spindly ten-meter-tall legs, reachable by a zigzag of stairs, fifteen half-flight switchbacks. It had been guarded from the waves of immolation that had passed across the earth since the aliens’ departure. Once, park rangers with heliographs and passenger pigeons guarded the forest from this perch, alert for accidental fires. Now, the birds were dead, and there was no one to signal to, no one aboveground. Still, to this day, a watchperson staffed it at all times. No enemy approach would take Vic City by surprise.
John Gund watched the conflagration wreck the cabin. The tower’s metal legs and platform could not be destroyed so easily. They would endure. If materials for a new shelter could not be found, future watchers would crouch out in the open as punishment for letting Asyl approach their safehold.
When he’d woken at the filling station to find her gone, John Gund felt a sense of unreality, patting the empty place next to him, sure that he was dreaming. But no—she must have left at first light. He realized he should have anticipated it. He stepped outside the tent. No more sign of her than there had been of Aitch a few days before.
Taking stock of what remained in their campsite, he noted that in addition to her bedroll, she’d packed a few days’ rations, her flame pistol, and a spare tank. More disturbing was the presence of her helmet, which she’d left outside, placed deliberately over the ashes of the fire he’d made for companionship the day before. Through the clear plexi faceplate, he could make out a charred length of chair leg.
He gathered up the rest of his gear as quickly as he could, loading the essentials into his knapsack, hiding what he couldn’t carry inside the old ice chest, a cache to which he could return at a later time. He lashed her helmet to his belt. It was valuable—irreplaceable—and she would need it later. When she came to her senses. If too much damage had not been done.
He began to walk. Though this section of the Never was not within their patrol area, they’d skirted it on their westernmost circuits many times, and John Gund sometimes visited Vic City on his furloughs. He climbed the ring of hills and passed down into a valley he knew, shaped like a cupped palm. On a clear, bright day like today, it was easy to imagine how pleasant these outskirts must have been Before. It wasn’t long before he spotted Asyl up ahead, moving at the same pace he was. A tiny speck. His eyesight had faded as he aged; he couldn’t make out anything more than a vague person-shape, but the quality of its movements told him it was she.
If she happened to look back over her shoulder, she would see John Gund. Maybe she already had. But her lead was too great for either of them to be heard over the wind; she couldn’t tell him to stay back.
John Gund couldn’t hope to follow Aitch’s trail on his own. He didn’t have the tracking skills. Had Asyl abandoned the trail in hopes of asking the sentries which way he had passed? Or was this slow descent also the path Aitch had walked before them?
The house atop the watchtower appeared on the faraway ridge, dark against a pale blue sky, like a floating castle. Soon enough, his eyes made out the threadlike scaffolding that held it up. It swayed a little, as it was designed to do.
The watchers up there would have a powerful spyglass. They would see her uniform. They would also see that her helmet was missing.
John Gund reached the bottom of the valley as Asyl arrived at the far side of the bowl. She stopped at the foot of the tower. On high, the door of the watch post opened, and a figure stepped out. Asyl exchanged words with the sentinel. Or at least, that seemed probable. The wind roared, sucking her words away. Then, the ladder he couldn’t quite see must have been extended in invitation, and she began to climb. John Gund increased his speed, trotting now, his breath fogging the face shield. Her helmet struck him in a steady rhythm as it swung from his belt. He tracked the formless mote he knew to be Asyl, moving up and up and up. She gained the platform. She stood on the deck. She entered the little house.
A full minute later, he spied the smoke. At first, it appeared pale gray, wispy, and he doubted his eyes. Though why should he have? Fires were his livelihood now. They were all men’s livelihood.
(And all women’s, too, Hel was sure Sleight had meant.)
Then, the smoke became dense and dark, as full of portent as a thundercloud. Black smoke bubbled out of the cabin at an acute angle, carried fast on the breeze. Any pyronaut could read the signs. Asyl had gone into the house to parley for information on Aitch. Now, minutes later, the structure was on fire.
John Gund ran. He ran until his lungs ached, until his exertions overwhelmed the ventilation system in his suit and his face shield turned opaque, ran blind until one foot landed in a hole—the abandoned den of some poor animal, extinct now—and he twisted his ankle and fell. He couldn’t wait for the shield to clear. He removed his helmet. Took his first unprotected breath in years, expecting it to sting, to sear.
But it didn’t. The sky domed above him, still blue, the way it had always been Before. Fingers of flame poked up through the roof of the guard post. He knew the pale yellow color of a fire fed by good fuel and plenty of oxygen. The same air John Gund took now, unfiltered, into his lungs.