Lockstep

Twelve

HE’D FELT THIS BEFORE.

Thrum … thrum thrum. Pause. Thrum …

Not so far away, though, and never so weak. Toby struggled to move—even to open his eyes. He felt like a lump of stone neglected by the sculptor. Buried in a hill. Lost in time …

He could feel the source of that faint vibration: a small, heavy body sprawled atop his. Orpheus was struggling.

Toby remembered the first time he’d awoken in between destinations. He’d been confident, had no idea that the tug had missed its target and wandered for thousands of years. He’d fallen down a well of centuries and not even known it. And this time? How long had it been?

But this wasn’t like that time. Orpheus was with him. Yet Orpheus was dying, he could hear it in the weakness of the vibration that traveled up and down his body. Dying, and it was Toby’s fault.

He couldn’t move, but after a profound struggle he was able to crack his eyes just enough to see that the lid to his cicada bed was closed. Its transparent surface was mostly frosted over, but outside, dim blue light showed the ceiling furred by the same white frost he’d seen in the tug. Frozen air, Sol had called it. The internal telltales of the bed were active and registered red: emergency power-up. Orpheus must have tripped them when he climbed in.

Orpheus and the bed were fighting: he was using all his power to try to revive Toby, and it was using its to push him back into hibernation. There was no question which one would win. This bed wasn’t set to care for a denner, though; Orpheus would die if he stayed here. He couldn’t possibly have enough energy left to wake himself again.

“Go…” He tried to say back to sleep, but his jaw wouldn’t move. If only he had his glasses, he could contact Orph through his interface, tell him to reset his clock—

Interfaces … didn’t these beds have their own internal controls? Of course they would. He twisted, flailed around in the narrow space, and felt a keypad near his right hand. He mashed numb fingers against it and was rewarded as data windows blossomed into existence in the crystal canopy.

The display showed that the bed was drawing on an inexhaustible well of power from elsewhere in the city. It was programmed to push Toby back into sleep, and it would keep at it until it succeeded. After all, he wasn’t due to wake up for another twenty-two years.

Why twenty-two? Then he remembered it all: Nathan Kenani’s strange hinting statements and Toby’s own desperate plan. The order he’d sent to Orpheus just before they’d been sent to their beds.

“This is…” His voice was a ragged whisper, but he had to try it. “This is Toby Wyatt McGonigal. Wake me up.”

The indicators in the data window changed, and seconds later Orpheus’s drone ended. He felt the denner collapse into the gap between his arm and his body. Around them both, the bed was now humming into action.

Rest, Orph.

THIS TIME, TOBY AWOKE refreshed. He blinked lazily at the distant frosted ceiling, then remembered everything and turned on his side, gathering Orpheus into his arms. The denner was limp.

“Oh, no, no.” He hugged Orpheus to him, crying. The bed had woken Toby, but it had ignored the denner. Maybe it wasn’t too late, though. Cicada beds could perform medical wonders, and reviving creatures from the brink of death—or beyond—was their specialty. And somewhere nearby was the bed Orpheus had been in until today.

Toby went to lift the bed’s lid but got an alarm in response. “Toxic Atmosphere” and “Fatal Temperature Differential” were just two of the indicators that flashed red. He could lift the lid, but the first breath he took would freeze his lungs into solid cages.

“What do we do now, Orph?” From his position on his side he could see through the bed’s lid; most of the frost had cleared off it now. The beds containing Corva and Shylif were right next to his. Beyond them, the room was dark except for the blue telltales indicating where infrastructure machinery, designed to operate in hypercold conditions, was maintaining the ideal hibernation conditions for the city.

It was incredible, but Orpheus had survived that environment. Toby had known the denners could survive without air, and in deep subzero temperatures, for a little while. They had to have those abilities to be able to wake themselves from cold sleep. They were biological, but had been seriously genetically engineered at some point in the past.

He craned his neck to look down at the floor and saw little denner paw prints crisscrossing the thin snow that covered everything. There were broad drag lines through that snow, too. They seemed to start at a set of lockers in the dim corner of the room and ended up below Toby’s bed. What had Orpheus put so much effort into hauling over?

He couldn’t see it, but suddenly he knew. “Orph, you’re a genius,” he whispered to the lifeless body he cradled. “Hang on, hang on, I’ll get you help.”

Toby took several deep breaths, then, holding his breath, slammed the bed’s lid back.

The cold hit him like a hammer. He barely had time to roll off the bed and make a grab at the balled-up environment suit; then he couldn’t move. His fingers were painfully cramping into claws, and he just managed to reach out and cradle the suit’s helmet before his hands went numb.

The suit woke and swarmed up his arm, built itself over his head. It felt like he was plunging into an icy lake as the pieces conformed themselves to his arms and shoulders, covered his face and mouth, and ringed his torso. The thing flipped him over as it finished its work, and just as he was seeing spots and about to faint, he felt a blast of cool—but not cold—air shoot down his throat.

Coughing, frostbitten by the material sheathing his whole body, Toby rolled, thrashed, and banged his head on the base of another bed. Then he was able to sit up. The air rushing into him was getting warmer and so was the metal touching him everywhere. The suit was trying its best.

More coughing. He crouched there for a long time, until the painful tingling of reawakening nerves settled into mere clammy chill. Then he levered himself to his feet and looked around.

Half the room’s beds were showing amber telltales. They were trying to wake their sleepers. Toby stumbled over to one and scraped away the frost to reveal the face of a grim middle-aged man within it. One of Nathan Kenani’s soldiers, no doubt.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. The beds’ indicators flickered and then changed. Quickly, he gathered Orpheus into his arms and crunched through the frozen air to the denner’s original cicada bed, which he found by following Orpheus’s paw prints into the next room. The pet beds were little boxy affairs suitable for cats and dogs, set along the far wall. It was easy to find Orpheus’s—it was the one with the open lid, whose lights were flashing red while it beeped in alarm. He set Orpheus carefully inside and commanded it to start emergency treatment.

Next he had to take care of Kenani’s bots—which were, after all, McGonigal bots. Several stood in the darkened corners of the main room. These were watching Toby. They’d probably been awakened by the alarms that had gone off when Orpheus tried to override his bed. They were doubtless programmed to wait for the human soldiers to wake up before taking any action.

“You’re mine now, all of you,” he told them, and his voice overrode their settings. “Find my glasses and warm them up.”

He went to the other boxes and commanded them to awaken Shadoweye and Wrecks. Then he returned to the main room and gave the same order to the beds where their masters slept. One of the bots handed him his glasses, and he pushed them against his faceplate until the suit understood and built itself a mouth to bring them in. It fitted them onto his face, the interface sparkled into life around him, and he activated the Cicada Corp Console.

And then … there was no more to do. He found himself turning around and around in the middle of the room, adrenaline making him swing his arms and curse—but the beds were working. He was done here.

Toby left the main room to find a window. The suit’s interface said it was hundreds of degrees below out there, and what atmosphere there was, was hydrogen and very thin. The normally bustling spaces looked postapocalyptic with snowdrifts covering the carpets and frost on the dead video signs. Here and there, faint telltales glowed from dormant equipment. He soon found a door to the main spaceport hall and walked over to one of the transparent outer walls of the city. Outside, he could see the other spheres of the continent, vast dark curves breaking up the starscape. Stars meant the city must be very high in the atmosphere, and indeed, when he ventured a look down, he saw nothing but black.

Yet kilometers overhead, attached to the side of the dark spheres was a fantastical lantern. Glowing warm yellow, the single solitary city sphere cradled greenery inside it, while little bright dots of flying machines drifted lazily around its curving side.

The Weekly lockstep was awake.

Toby sagged against the clear wall. For a second he thought he was going to faint, but at least now he knew there was somewhere to go once they got out of this room. They could even find a hot meal up there.

He hadn’t really thought this would work. The only thing that made him set Orpheus’s alarm for seven years less a day, just after Kenani got the drop on him, was his memory of Corva and Shylif talking him into sleeping in the shipping container. It had seemed impossible, but they’d done it. More than that, they claimed to do it all the time. If they could perform such routine miracles, why couldn’t Toby do something as simple as set Orpheus to wake in seven years’ time instead of thirty? He’d guessed that the pet bed couldn’t override Orpheus’s own internal clock, and based on what he’d seen in the kitchen downstairs, Orpheus should have no problem getting out of it. His modified biology should let him survive long enough to open Toby’s own bed and climb in. And then he could wake his human.

Simple enough, but so many things could have gone wrong. Even a basic mechanical lock on the pet bed would have killed the plan—and probably Orpheus. Toby certainly hadn’t factored in the lack of air. It had been Orpheus’s own idea to drag a pressure suit over to Toby’s bed, though he couldn’t actually lift it in.

Toby turned his head. He could see Orpheus’s icon through the wall, or so the glasses made it seem. The indicator was no longer red, but amber.

He wanted to dance in a circle and shout his elation, but there was still something to do. This task was the biggest and, after bare survival, the most important by far. A responsible man wouldn’t be wasting his time jumping around. He’d be acting.

Toby selected a dozen or so military bots and told them, “You’re coming with me.”

With them thudding through the snow behind him, he headed for the elevators.

EVEN WITH THE HEATERS going full blast, the passengers were shivering as they entered the terminal lounge. Most looked around in sad confusion; they’d expected to be awakened on normal lockstep time, and it was clear that hadn’t happened. Some were angry, and a knot of these approached Toby where he sat at the exit.

At the far end of the hall, the elevator was just disgorging the latest of the refugees from Thisbe. Toby quickly scanned the faces, but nobody there seemed likely to be the one he was looking for.

He turned his attention back to the five angry men now standing before him. One of the military bots flanking him shifted slightly, and distant Weekly city light slid liquidly over its armor. One of the men glanced at it nervously.

“See here,” said the one in the lead. “Why’re we off frequency again? We know we were quarantined—”

“You tholes rolled over for the McGonigals,” said another. “It’s disgusting—”

“But why this?” The first waved at the creaking walls and wreathes of subzero vapor that coiled and flanked the passengers like cobras. “It’s a mess!”

Toby cleared his throat. He’d had plenty of confrontations with angry characters and usually dealt with them well—in gameworlds. Generally those characters didn’t all talk at the same time, as these guys were doing, nor did they egg their bot companions on to posture threateningly in front of combat bots that could squish them instantly. If combat bots had any sense of humor, Toby was sure his were laughing on the inside.

Suddenly he, too, had to laugh. The men glared at him.

“What’s so funny?”

“If you’re all like that on Thisbe, then I see where Corva gets it,” he said.

“Corva?”

Toby turned. A man not more than a few years older than Toby himself pushed his way through the encircling crowd. He had piercing dark eyes, black hair, and familiar high cheekbones. He wore a multipocket jacket and baggy trousers, had a collapsed pressure suit knotted around his waist, and a satchel slung over his shoulder. “Did you say Corva?”

“Corva Keishion of Thisbe sent me,” Toby said. “Who’re you?”

“Where is she!” The young man stepped forward and half raised his arms, maybe to grab Toby’s arms. The combat bots shifted, and he didn’t complete the gesture, but he said, “She’s my sister. I’m Halen.”

The other men had fallen silent; they were looking around themselves in a new way—appraising, even hopeful. “We’re outside the lockstep,” said one.

“You’re in the Weekly,” corrected Toby. He pointed at the distant lantern sphere hanging kilometers overhead. “Or you will be, as soon as we get up there.”

“But they won’t have us!” It was the first man who’d spoken. He had the same wealthy air that Ammond had exhibited, and he had a whole team of bots to carry his luggage. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 360 or the Weekly. We’re banned for twelve months!”

“You were,” said Toby. He was beginning to enjoy this. “As to the Weekly, leave it to me.”

“And who are you?” demanded Halen.

“Somebody whose life your sister saved.” It looked like the last elevator had unloaded, and the lounge was now full of scared but defiant-looking people.

Toby turned to the five men who’d confronted him. “Can you keep a lid on things here for an hour? There’s an … important reunion I want to arrange.”

They glanced at one another, and then a sly grin appeared here, a brusque nod over there. “You’re going to take us into the Weekly?” said the rich-looking one. “We could visit it back on Thisbe, but not stay or pass through—”

“This time is different.” I hope. Toby didn’t know what power he might have over the Weekly’s government, but unloading the passengers into the Weekly had been part of Corva’s original plan. She must think it would work.

“Come on,” he said to Halen and stepped into the fearsome cold of a connecting corridor. As they walked, Toby couldn’t help glancing over at Corva’s brother. He was tall and strong looking. Toby was acutely aware of how pale and scrawny he looked in comparison. What did Corva see when she looked at him? Certainly something substandard, if Halen was what she was used to.

“Where is she?” her brother repeated. “And how did you wake us up in the middle of winter?”

“I’ve … got an interface to the McGonigal clocks,” Toby told him as they slid carefully down an ice-sheeted ramp. “I was able to override them.”

“But … but nobody’s ever been able to do that! How—” Halen had breathed the dangerously cold air too deeply and started coughing.

“It’s a long story. I’ll let your sister tell you.”

THE MCGONIGAL BOTS LET them into the high-security area, and Toby led Halen to the chamber where Kenani had imprisoned him and the others. When he opened the door, Orpheus came bounding up and in his usual style climbed Toby with his claws out; luckily he was in the suit, which the denner’s claws wouldn’t penetrate. Still, Toby said, “Hey, watch it!” and only when he had the denner settled on his shoulder did he see it wasn’t just the denners who were awake. Shylif and Jaysir stood over Kenani’s bed. Shylif was pensively sipping a steaming cup of something. And Halen … where had he gone?

Corva sat on a crate in the next room, one hand tightly clutching her oval locket. Halen knelt in front of her and was speaking to her in an insistent way. Toby hesitated a moment in the doorway, then backed away to give them their privacy.

Jaysir noticed and grinned. “You did this, didn’t you? But how?”

“Nothing magical,” mumbled Toby, trying, while trying not to be obvious about it, to eavesdrop on Corva and Halen. Distractedly, he continued, “I just set Orpheus’s clock before we were separated. He woke me up.”

Jay nodded, and a grin battled against Shylif’s serious demeanor. “But your bed wouldn’t have let him do it,” said Jaysir. “Not unless you overrode that. Ours, too.”

Toby shrugged. “The secret was out the instant I reprogrammed the passenger unit. I can’t stop the McGonigal network from broadcasting my presence—it already did it, seven years ago.”

Of course, Peter and Evayne had already known. Were there others, though, like Kenani, for whom the news would just be arriving? He didn’t know how public the log-in details on the beds were. Or who might be monitoring them.

He stole a look at Corva and her brother. She seemed heartbroken. Why? Did Halen seem older? She’d spent all her effort to rescue him and the rest of her family, but now that it had actually happened, she would be faced with the reality of how time had already altered them.

Had it been too late all along? What was lost in time couldn’t be returned, and here in the locksteps, any innocent sleep might cleave you from those you loved by years, by generations. Toby hugged himself and turned away again, tears starting in his eyes. Finding a bench (all its frost gone now, he noticed with some remote part of his attention), he sat.

He gathered Orpheus into his lap and sat there hunched over until murmured conversation arose behind him. He turned to find Corva, Halen, and Jaysir standing there. They were all looking at him. “What?”

“Toby,” said Corva, alarm sharpening her voice, “where’s Shylif?”

PEOPLE WERE YELLING IN the passenger lounge. As Toby and the others ran in, he saw that a knot had formed over by the elevator doors; someone there was bellowing louder than anybody else. Around this cyclonic eye, other passengers milled like frightened clouds. The bots he’d left to guard the place were ignoring the chaos. As long as nobody tried to leave the lounge, they had no orders.

“Coley!” It was Shylif’s voice but transformed by rage into that of a stranger. “Sebastine Coley?”

Toby pushed his way through the encircling crowd to find one man standing in the open space at its center. Shylif was glaring down, fists balled, at a man who crouched at his feet. “Please—” this man whimpered. “I’m not—”

“You’re Coley! You said you were Coley!” Shylif’s denner, Shadoweye, was slinking back and forth behind Shylif’s feet, wailing and hissing. His tail was fluffed out, like a scared cat’s would be.

“Shylif, stop!” Corva stepped unafraid into the ring. “You don’t want to do this.”

He spared her an indifferent glance. “I’ve waited forty years to do this.” He reached for the man at his feet.

“He’s not Sebastine Coley!”

The voice was thin, barely audible over the jumble of voices surrounding them. But Shylif paused and looked over.

“He’s not Sebastine Coley,” repeated the very old man who stood, his weak legs braced by an exo, with a group of women and children.

“I am.”

Shylif blinked at him, and in that moment of indecision, Toby suddenly realized what he should have been doing all along. “Bots! Restrain this man!” Shylif straightened and began to turn, but the security bots were faster and he was lifted off his feet before he could even uncurl his fists.

Toby went to stand next to Corva. He offered his hand to man on the floor, who hesitated, then took it.

“I … I’m Miles Coley,” he said, ducking his head and looking around at everyone but Shylif. “This man said he was looking for a Coley, and I said, ‘I’m a Coley.’ Then he knocked me down!”

Toby turned to the old man. “You’re Sebastine Coley?”

“He’s my grandfather,” said Miles in a surprised tone. “Granddad, what’s this about?”

“I … I don’t—” But the old man wouldn’t look at them.

“You know.” It was Shylif, still straining against the implacable grip of the security bot that held him. “Her name was Ouline. You stole her from Nessus.”

“Ah. Ah!” The old man suddenly wilted, and he would have fallen over had his exo not compensated to prop him up.

“You lured her into the lockstep fortress and stole thirty years from her—from me!” Shadoweye was clawing at the security bot’s ankles, wailing. The bot ignored the denner, but Corva knelt down and clucked at him. Reluctantly, he climbed into her arms.

Miles Coley had joined his wife and daughters; they formed a protective wall in front of the old man. One of the women was comforting Sebastine, who had burst into tears at Shylif’s accusation.

Shylif’s struggles had slowed. It seemed it had begun to dawn on him that he wasn’t facing the callous young man who’d stolen his life but a pale ghost at the end of his own. He stared at Coley, and as he stilled, Corva came to him and let Shadoweye slide onto the metal shelf of the security bot’s enclosing arm. Shadoweye butted the underside of Shylif’s chin, but for the moment, he was ignored.

“She died, Coley,” he murmured. “She took her own life.”

The old man’s sobs intensified. His grandson gaped in astonishment, turning from him to Shylif and back again. “Granddad? Granddad, what’s this man saying?”

Coley stammered. The moment stretched, and though all eyes were on this scene, Toby knew that the long unfolding of the drama behind it wasn’t going to be resolved in the next minute, or the next day. He held up his hand.

“We’re going to deal with this, but we can’t do it here,” he announced. “We have to get out of here while we can.”

There was a startled silence, and then people’s gazes began to shift from Coley and Shylif to Toby. One of the men he’d spoken to earlier said, “Where is it we’re going, anyway?”

“Back to Thisbe,” Toby told them, “to reset your clocks. But to get there, first of all we’re going to have to go through the Weekly.”

ORPHEUS RODE TOBY’S SHOULDER as they strode under geodesic glass ceilings that revealed black skies and, ahead, the looming lantern glow of a city sphere. This was the one source of light in Wallop’s cloud continent. The passages they’d come through were eerie and silent, and though he’d ordered heat in the main thoroughfares that led to the lit city, now and then he caught glimpses of side corridors where hoarfrost still painted the walls and where the floors were drifted with oxygen snow.

Though still weak, Orpheus fired off happy emoticons and his head bobbed back and forth as they reached the outskirts of the Weekly lockstep. Toby should have felt similarly triumphant—he’d just escaped one of the lockstep’s most feared cultural enforcers, after all, and had rescued an entire shipload of people to boot.

The confrontation between Shylif and Sebastine Coley had deeply disturbed him, however. Not just for its own sake, but because it made him wonder, even more, what it would be like when and if he ever set eyes on his own brother and sister. Lockstep time wrenched you back and forth, and after Shylif’s experience he was beginning to realize just how unpredictable and brutal it could be.

They had only one encounter during the long walk through the frozen utility corridors linking the docks to the Weekly. About five minutes after they exited the customs area, Jaysir’s bot came stomping out of a side corridor, streaming vapor and with flecks of frost dripping off it like dandruff. Some of the passengers shied back in alarm, but Jay visibly relaxed, and after inspecting the monstrous thing, he gave a sharp nod and let it fall into step behind him.

Shylif was accompanied by bots, too, but in his case he walked head down and eyes glazed, and his bots were an armed escort. A few steps away, Sebastine Coley trudged in much the same stance, while his family fluttered nervously behind him.

It took awhile to get through the airlocks. These were set up to protect the Weeklies from the dangerous cold and toxic air permeating the rest of the continent, and normally nobody came through them until Jubilee, which happened every four weeks, local time. Visitors from 360/1 being unexpected in between times, bots and humans were now working furiously on the far side of the transparent glass walls, trying to get more doors to work. Meanwhile a trickle of humans cycled through, three or four at a time.

There was a lot of hand waving and emotional conversation happening with the workers and security people on the other side. The cover story Corva had come up with was that an explosion had vented some of the 360/1 habitats. Those gesticulating men and women had better be sticking to that story: they’d be telling the Weeklies that the bots that watched over the 360/1 cities during their long sleeps had woken a small army of emergency drones and backup systems when they detected a blast, and had evacuated everybody from the affected area. There was a problem with the power, though, and they were unable to find enough safe beds for the residents of one particular neighborhood. So here they were, arriving at the airlocks to the Weekly lockstep with just a few household bots and some luggage.

The story should hold long enough for them to pass through the Weekly and take passage back to Thisbe—which seemed to be most people’s plan. It helped that these “refugees” were accompanied by numerous official 360 bots, including an impressive military escort. When Toby finally cycled through a lock himself, he left that escort behind, but even so nobody asked him any questions.

The hubbub was subsiding by the time the last bots brought their masters’ luggage through the locks. Many of the refugees had bulled their way through the emergency responders and by now had lost themselves in the crowds of the city. That was a good idea, Toby thought. Since nobody seemed to need him anymore, least of all Corva Keishion, he eventually screwed up his courage and began walking into the tiered city himself. He’d find some sort of job, make some cash, and figure out how to get to Destrier. That had been the plan. It needed to be the plan again.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

He turned to find Corva glaring at him. She was clutching her brother’s arm, but all her attention was on Toby, and Wrecks sat at her feet glaring down his nose in imitation of his mistress.

“You got what you wanted,” he said. To his own surprise, Toby found himself feeling resentful and, before he thought about it, added, “though you nearly got us all killed doing it.”

“So you admit your sister would have killed us?”

He flushed angrily and turned away. “Good-bye, Corva.”

“Toby, wait!”

He didn’t stop, but she ran to his side. He waited for the next cutting comment.

“I’m … I’m sorry,” she said.

He stopped, blinked at her.

Corva stood with one foot twisted, toeing the pavement she was staring at. Her hands were clutched, all knuckle. Wrecks sat on his haunches, watching this performance in obvious surprise. “You didn’t have to do any of the things you did,” she said. “I know you risked everything for people you’d never even met. And setting Orpheus’s alarm like you did—that was a terrible risk you both took and I’m just … I’m amazed at it all, that’s all.”

He’d never seen her like this. “You asked,” he said. “I helped, is all.” Oh, but he knew that wasn’t all, not by a long shot. The thing was, Toby still hadn’t absorbed the implications of what he’d just done. Walking away right now would probably have been best. He needed time to work through it all. Strangely, though, now that he had Corva’s gratitude he was finding it made him even more uncomfortable than the indifference of her countrymen.

He had to laugh at his own words. “I guess it was kind of a superhero thing to do. It’s just … that’s not me, Corva.”

“I know. It wasn’t me a year ago either.”

“Corva Keishion, exchange student,” he said with a smile.

“And then subcontractor to bots, then stowaway, criminal, revolutionary…” She shook her head ruefully. “I could try to say that one thing led to another, but that really doesn’t begin to describe it.”

Now they both laughed. After a moment, though, Toby’s smile faded. “What are you going to do now? Go back to Thisbe?”

“I guess,” she said. “Though, you know, the basic problem remains. The blockade … the punishment frequency.”

“I can’t reset your whole world’s clock.”

She looked him in the eye, and that steely look was back in hers. “Are you sure about that?”

“No. I don’t know. I haven’t exactly had time to find out what I can or can’t do. But anyway”—he turned away from her again—“I don’t want to.”

“I get it,” she said stiffly. “You don’t want to take on your brother and sister.”

It wasn’t that at all. The fact was, waking these people, evading Nathan Kenani and taking over the lockstep bots—it had all been way too easy. Disturbingly easy. It was like playing Consensus in God mode, except that this was reality. You could blow up whole planets without a second thought in the game. Nearly anything he did with such powers in Lockstep 360/1 was bound to hurt somebody.

“Look, why should I stick my nose into any of this?” he demanded. “I don’t know anything about anything here, you said so yourself the first time we met. I’ve been trying to catch up, but how do you catch up? It’s impossible. Now you’re asking me to rejig time for an entire world? How am I supposed to tell if that’s a good thing to do or an evil thing to do? Corva, if I can’t tell, then I’m not doing it. That’s all there is to it.”

At some point in the argument Corva’s brother had come up to them, and a small half circle of refugees from Thisbe had gathered a few more paces back. “You’re right,” said Halen, putting his hand on Corva’s arm. “You have no reason to take our word for anything. Why don’t you see for yourself?”

Toby grimaced. “By going to Thisbe with you, I suppose?”

Halen’s lips twitched into a smile, with the same reluctance Toby saw in Corva. “If you’re feeling insecure,” he said, “you can bring that little bot army of yours.”

“But really,” said Corva, “how are you planning on getting to Destrier? Evayne and Peter have to know that’s where you’re headed. They’ll be waiting for you with an army of their own, and it won’t be one you can switch off.”

“And you can get me there?”

“Maybe. If you help Thisbe, you’ll have an entire planet on your side.”

Corva had lowered her voice and was glancing around, and Toby was also growing uneasy with the listeners. He started walking, and she and her brother fell into step beside him. Wrecks was gamboling around Corva’s feet and attracting a fair amount of attention from passersby, but they soon left her curious countrymen behind, and the crowds of the Weekly were diverse and strange enough that the three of them didn’t really stand out.

Once they were out of earshot of the commotion around the airlocks, Toby said, “How much have you told them—your friends from the ship?”

“Obviously I told Halen. Some of the others know you brought us out of hibernation early, but not how. They might suspect, but the whole idea of you being a real McGonigal is so…”

“You think they’ll figure it out when I retune your whole planet’s frequency?”

There was a momentary silence; Corva and Halen glanced at each other. Then Corva sighed. “How do you want to do it? I mean, you’re going to reveal yourself at some point. Right? So when? And how?”

Toby’s bravado collapsed. He’d actually been trying not to think about that, just as he’d been trying not to think about how his brother and sister had changed, seemingly overnight, from familiar friends to hostile strangers.

“What happens when I do?” he asked, spreading his hands. “I have no idea. You have to tell me.” And I have to trust you. But could he?

“Well,” said Corva. “Some people think the world will end. You’ll bring us all to paradise, because your return will be the fulfillment of time itself.” She saw his expression and quickly looked down. “I know, it’s crazy. But even the mildest interpretations … you have to understand, according to all our traditions—the stories, the religious orthodoxy, and about a billion books and stories—you’re the heir. The eldest son of the McGonigals and the original designer of the lockstep system.”

“Which I’m not,” he pointed out. “Kenani said that Mom created it.”

“But who knows that, other than a few people like him?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, Toby: you’re the heir. The Creator and Savior of the locksteps. If people thought you’d returned, they’d turn away from your brother and sister instantly. Many would follow you without question. And some…”

When she didn’t continue, Halen nodded to her, as if she’d just agreed with something he’d said. “Some would follow Thisbe out of the lockstep.”

“Not some,” said Corva flatly.

“A lot. Many. Most, maybe. Would you let that happen?”

Toby shrugged; he had no idea.

“More important, would Peter let it happen without a fight?” Halen leaned back, frowning at Toby. “Come with us to Thisbe and see what people really think of the McGonigals. Then tell us what you want to do. Though, I warn you, you might not like what you see there.”

“I don’t like any of this,” said Toby. There was no question he was trapped. With Peter and Evayne after him, he had nowhere else to go. Even so, the idea of pretending to be the messiah the legends said he was, was profoundly disturbing.

He sighed.

“I’ll go. But not as Toby McGonigal.”