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Numbly, he let the bot clamp the unfamiliar braces around his calves and thighs. It offered a second piece for his back, but though the exos were thin and graceful, designed to be invisible under clothing, Toby waved it away. The bot offered a shirt and trousers, and he put them on—and damn it, they were in the Consensus Empire style, too, though with odd differences here and there. More details, different materials.

He stood up and the exo made the motion as easy as if his body had been virtual. The only problem with that idea was that he could still feel gravity pulling on his insides, which it never did in a simulation.

Toby walked to the open window and looked out on a grand avenue choked with vehicles and moving people. Tall towers soared into the sky, and there were real trees on the nearby rooftops and more down by the street. For a moment he forgot everything else, consumed with the intricate beauty of their leafy canopies.

It was a beauty that shimmered under the light of a strange sky. There was a sunsetlike quality to the light, but there was no sun; instead, the radiance came from a kind of red curling aurora that filled the whole sky. Lines of yellow and pale green flickered and fluttered up and down this astonishing firmament. He was able to open the window farther and crane his neck outside. There was a chill in the air, but he ignored that and gawked upward.

“Ah! So you’re awake.”

Toby banged his head on the lintel and winced. The voice was a man’s, deep but thin somehow, so he went from being startled to puzzled when he turned and saw a slender woman standing in the room’s only doorway.

“H-hello—” He’d been about to say more but his hands went to his throat. “What—?” His own voice was absurdly deep, a bullfrog rumble.

The lady laughed, her voice a chop of drumbeats. She was older, though still pretty, and dressed in a flame-red gown. She radiated the confidence of wealth. It was the wealth of people like her that had squeezed Toby’s family relentlessly toward poverty. It was people like her who’d made his parents try to colonize Sedna. That was what Dad always said, anyway.

“The air gets them every time,” she rumbled. “The natural atmosphere on this planet is a neon and argon mix. We add some oxygen and warm it up, and we can breathe it. But it plays your vocal chords differently than nitrogen.”

Toby bowed cautiously. This place was so obviously real, yet so similar to the gameworlds where he spent so much time that he found himself wondering how he would approach a moment like this if this really were a game.

“Thank you for rescuing me,” he said, and his own voice was a deep cello. “My name is Toby McGonigal.”

Her eyes went wide and she took a step backward, but Toby barely noticed. He’d realized what he’d just said, and what he had not yet thought about. He felt instantly guilty. “My family,” he blurted. “I need to contact them.”

She tried to speak, oddly discomposed; then her eyelids lowered, and she turned slightly away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That … that won’t be possible. They died … many years ago.”

Even the exos couldn’t keep Toby’s knees from giving out, though they did steer his collapse so he landed in a chair.

He’d exchanged his last e-mails with Peter and Evayne only a day ago, or so it seemed to him. How could they be gone? “How long…?”

“The time stamps on your cicada bed said twenty years since you last went into cold sleep,” she said. “But before that, Toby—can I call you that?—you’d deep-dived for so long that your ship’s radiation shielding had drained off. You were being slow-cooked by cosmic rays.”

The superconducting magnets should have been able to keep their magnetic fields alive for … well, practically forever. Suddenly he didn’t want to know how long it had been. “Where are we? What is this world?”

She’d come to stand over him and looked startled at his sudden question.

“You’re on Lowdown,” she said. Her voice made the name into an impossibly deep chord, like the two bottom notes on a pipe organ. “We found your ship in orbit two weeks ago. We’ve been repairing and regenerating your body ever since. The doctors said you’d be fine to be awakened today.”

What she said made no sense. “Our ship in orbit … We arrived here two weeks ago? So the engines were working after all!”

But she shook her head. “Your engines had been dead for a long, long time. You’d been in orbit, as I said, for twenty years.”

Toby stood up and moved to the window. “But that’s impossible. The world we found was dead, a frozen chunk. I mean it had cities, but they were…” No, it couldn’t be … He turned to look at her. She nodded.

“Deep-dived,” she said. “We were wintering over, just like you. But for us, it wasn’t an emergency.”

“Then that’s not sunlight?” He nodded at the orange sky.

She laughed. “So far as we know, it’s the biggest neon lamp in the universe. We discharge electricity through the air itself and it glows. Quite handy, really.”

“But what are you doing out here? We were the first to settle this far out. Everybody told us we were crazy, that nobody could survive out here, but…” He waved at the obvious disproof of that idea, at the well-designed streets, the tall buildings, and the solid architecture of the room they were in. It was all proof that these people had been here a long, long time.

“You’re right,” the woman said, and now she sat on the edge of the bed, her expression very serious. “You and your family were the first to settle interstellar space. But Toby … that was fourteen thousand years ago.”

For a long moment there was just faint street noise murmuring up through the open window. The drapes drifted a bit in the cold breeze, but neither the woman nor Toby moved.

Then he was running.

He slammed out of the room before she could shout her surprise. This put him in a long corridor with orange daylight at one end. He ran to the light, passing bots carrying laundry and brooms. He found stairs, began clattering down them, trusting the exos to keep his legs from giving out. She was somewhere behind him, calling his name at first, then cursing, then calling to somebody else.

Down two flights and then he was in a high-ceilinged chamber with big open arches on one side. The building’s inner courtyard lay that way. He ran into it, passed six men of various ages who were sitting in wicker chairs around low tables that had drinks on them. The serving bots didn’t move as he ran by, but the men boiled out of their chairs, gabbling in shock.

“Ammond!” It was the lady, puffing into the courtyard.

“Damn it, Persea, you couldn’t handle a simple task like waking the kid up?”

“He just bolted! I—”

“Forget it. I’ll deal with him.”

Toby’s back was seizing up. Even with the help of the exoskeleton, his muscles simply couldn’t handle this gravity. He found himself swerving, staggering, but he kept on going until he found another corridor and at its end another walled courtyard. A gate here seemed to lead to the street. He ran for it but was so deconditioned from weeks in zero gravity that he fell. He was puffing and nearly fainting. All he could see was spots while the world spun, and he felt like puking. His whole body was soaked in sweat.

Suddenly, he was aware of eyes watching him—from his own level near the ground. He blinked. They blinked back from only a couple of paces away.

The head was catlike, its body more an otter’s, though the tail, again, was cat. It was perhaps a little bigger than a house cat, but would have been easy to carry. The creature was crouched in the shadow of one of the entranceway pillars, its head cocked as it seemed to be thinking about what to do with Toby.