“Don’t worry,” she had assured him. “My NANs will heal me. they always do.”

Disconcertingly enough, what she told him seemed true. Her wound seemed to have already closed; even her Consortian clothes were already nearly spotless. He felt both disturbed and envious.

Traejan stayed up, Altheas’ actions fueling more internal conflict. Was it her trust in technology that made her act so carelessly? Were all Consortians like that? Did he remember anything about the Consortia right? Or had it changed so radically in battling the Macros?

“I was… improvising.”

Traejan couldn’t wrap his head around that statement.

After a night with little sleep, morning arrived without further trouble, minimal grumbling from the greggas, a warmer wind from the south. They left the glacier behind them, sped down over the tundra plain. Althea’s dramatics from the night before added to the muttering about the various kinds of mechs they might encounter. Only Teffa and Obe didn’t join the conversations, they huddled together in a corner of the lifter.

Looking as though the violence of the night before had never happened, Althea handled the lifter controls up above. He looked up, seeing Kyso talking to her, gesturing. Traejan sat down with the greggas, as he’d been told to. He preferred to look out at the tundra, preferring the dangers it might present, giving up on looking for allies. The lifter shuddered, not for the first time. He glanced up at the cockpit, worried for a moment.

“Been wonderin’ about that woman myself,” Amok Goa’s hollow voice came from behind him, the tall thin man lounged on a crate, looking relaxed despite the less than smooth ride of the lifter.

“You don’t have a clue what she’s up to either, do you?” the man observed.

“What do you think you know?” Traejan asked. He had reason to trust Goa almost as little as Enos. The man had a cheater’s ruthless reputation.

The man offered him an easy smile.

“I’m thinking, sleeper, that she’s got – you know – your friend, wrapped around her little finger,” Goa drawled, spinning his index finger around in the air to demonstrate. Traejan looked back up at Althea, Kyso, then back to Goa.

“Kyso isn’t wrapped around anyone’s finger,” he told the man sharply.

“Oh, what does a sleeper do when his other sleeper’s gone away,” Goa continued.

“Go streck yourself,” Traejan shot back, turned away. He tried to ignore the gregga’s laughter.

“But… I don’t know why she’s with you.” Traejan turned back. The man offered a knowing smile. “She ain’t like none of you sleepers.”

Did the man suspect what she was?

“What makes you say that?” Traejan wanted to know.

“Oh… she knows how to deal. With you sleepers it’s talk, let’s be friends, look what we can do for each other. She knows what to do.”

“What exactly is that?”

“Something don’t fit, you beat it into a shape that does. Woman’s got it right. Something you sleepers never figured out.”

“Piss off,” Traejan spat back, not caring for his smug philosophy.

“If you like,” Goa told him, then moved over to talk with Nur bek Nur. The next two hours he watched the landscape flow by, until the most unkempt of the greggas – Peca – approached him.

Traejan hardly knew the man, was surprised by an offer of a piece of a mushroom.

“Like one?” the stubbly cheeked, sunken-eyed gregga asked him.

Traejan’s first instinct was to say no, but instead asked, “What do they do?”

“Let the light in,” the man said cryptically in a quiet voice, holding his palm out… closer. Traejan shook his head. The man shrugged – popped a couple into his mouth – swallowed.

“Wasn’t trying to poison you sleeper,” Peca grinned a gap-toothed grin. “Don’t you think you’ve slept enough? Wanna stay awake, alert?”

He took three pieces.

Unlike all the times he’d gone south, they weren’t traveling at night or using well-hidden caches to hide. This was a full out screaming ride across the land to a ruined city over five hundred kilometers into the deadly territory of the mechs. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. Despite a pair of bubbling thrusters, the lifter didn’t fail them. As the sun was approaching zenith, they were nearing the massive fallen city, its bent hulk crumpled into the land in the distance. Spires like great grasping fingers rose up into the gloomy grey sky ahead of them.

As they approached the colossal structure, they sped past ruins collapsed and sinking into the tundra. He was again taken by the scale of it all. How could it ever be rebuilt – in even ten lifetimes, a hundred – even with the resources of the Consortia? The scope of the ruins was depressing, the dark skies above doubly so. Closer, larger, the city began to appear like the skeleton of some great beast, the ribs of the twisted skyscrapers reaching up into the sky, its skin, flesh, life – all long gone.