Lockstep

Five

EVERYTHING BLURRED FOR A second and Toby realized he’d collapsed to his knees. His denner had jumped off his shoulder and was yammering in alarm.

Corva knelt in front of him, a look of alarm on her face. “Toby—what—“He was gasping as though somebody had punched him in the stomach.

“You didn’t know?” She fell back and, sitting on the ground holding her ankles with her hands, she gazed at him in wonder. “You didn’t know that? What did they tell you?”

“That … that Ammond and Persea were working for somebody called the Chairman. And that I … was the heir to Sedna.”

Her laugh was more a bray of disbelief. “Well, that’s true. And I guess it’s no big surprise about Ammond. So, yes, you’re the heir to Sedna. But you’re also the heir to everything else. To Lowdown, and Echo, and Destrier and Wallop and the rest of the 360/1 lockstep. All seventy thousand worlds of it. You didn’t know?”

“P-Peter is alive?”

The look of disbelief on her face shifted; there might have been a hint of sympathy there. “Of course he’s alive. Think! It’s only been forty years for those who were in the lockstep from the beginning. Peter’s alive, and so’s your sister, Evayne. Both rich beyond description, powerful enough that sensible people just stay out of their way. But the Chairman—Peter McGonigal—he’s…” She shook her head. “Bad news, Toby. Bad news.”

“Why? What…” He clearly remembered Ammond saying, The Chairman himself ordered us to kill the boy.

“Chairman,” blurted Toby. “Common term, right? There must be loads of chairmen on your seventy thousand worlds.” But Corva was shaking her head.

“It’s an old term. Ancient. Only ever used to talk about the Chairman of Cicada Corp. Your brother … well, your mother, once, but that was before I was born.”

“My mother? What about her and Dad—I mean, my parents? Are they alive, too?”

There was a shout from nearby. Jaysir was standing at the edge of the market, his big bot with its clattering, flailing cargo of pipes and cables lurking behind him. Apparently it couldn’t cross the invisible line into the market’s bot-free zone. “What’s goin’ on?” Jaysir called.

Shylif stuck out a hand and helped Toby to his feet. Corva was looking everywhere but at Toby as she too stood up and dusted herself off. “Your parents’ story is a bit more complicated. Look, we can’t tell it here in the middle of the gray market. We’ve got to keep moving.”

Toby felt a crazy laugh rising in him. “Why? Seems to me, I own this.” He stamped on the colorless concrete.

“Your brother controls it, but even he doesn’t strictly own it.” She grabbed his arm, and as his denner swarmed up his body (pricking Toby a dozen times as it used its claws for purchase) she pulled him into a walk. “But come on, we have to get off Auriga before you get caught. I’m happy to talk about this stuff, but not while we have to focus on evading cameras and spy bots.”

And she proved true to that threat, as did Shylif and Jaysir. Toby’s mind was crowded with questions, but all he got was terse answers while the others led them carefully through the industrial zone. Eventually they found an ore train headed through the human part of the city to the orbital freight elevators. Getting on board it involved watchfulness, careful timing, and a little luck, so when they were finally safe Corva lay back on a heap of dried seaweed and wearily waved away Toby’s questions. He and the others sat on barrels of hydrocarbons bound for orbital industries, while the train barreled deafeningly through narrow ice tunnels and past flickering flashes of siding caves and stations. Toby felt stunned; he needed some time to absorb the mere fact that his brother and sister were alive—and that Peter had apparently ordered him killed.

His denner provided a bit of welcome distraction, because he was fascinated by the train and all its rattling parts. The little guy kept hopping off Toby’s shoulder to explore, stopping right on the brink of falling off the train. Alarmed, Toby went to pick it up several times; after hissing on the first occasion, it let him. With nothing else to focus on, he turned his frustrated attention to it.

Wrecks had seemed half otter, half cat. This one was more catlike, but as the denner let Toby gently splay its front paws, he saw that they were more like little hands than feet. It could curl its half fingers around Toby’s, and as it exploredit picked up things to look at them. The shape of its legs and how it walked on them gave it the gait of a racoon, but its sinuous flexibility was all feline.

Jaysir noticed the attention Toby was giving to the denners and seemed a bit annoyed. “You want one of these,” he said, slapping the side of his strange machine. “Those guys are crude by comparison. You’ve got half the hibernation mechanism inside you already. It’s a set of synthetic organs that take care of all your natural systems, like temperature regulation, oxygen levels. It prevents shock and produces the natural antifreeze that keeps your cells from bursting when you freeze. All the cicada beds and denners do is take care of timing. Well, and they scan you as you’re waking to make sure you’re cooking evenly. Of course, the beds cook you, too. They supply energy while you thaw, microwaves to start with just to melt the ice around your cells. They talk to your synthorgans and send ’em the diagnostic information so the right enzymes and sugars can be produced to bring you round. Without all that, you’re basically just a lump of thawing meat. But denners don’t even do all that.”

“Yeah,” Corva protested, “but timing is the most important thing. You have to start the wake-up cycle at the right time. Exactly thirty years to the day after you go down … or whenever the McGonigals decide.”

“What do you mean, when we decide?”

“I mean, the Cicada Corporation has a monopoly on the hibernation beds. They control the cicada technology and the synthorgan franchises and everything else that sets or depends on their timings. Only they can change the frequency. And they do.”

“Corva,” said Shylif. It sounded like he was warning her of something.

She shook her head. “Anyway, you’re not a legal part of the lockstep if you’re not using the beds. Which means we are not supposed to be here. Luckily, there’re lots of ways people scam the system, and there’re all the other locksteps and people from them who turn up unannounced, and … well, you get the picture. It’s messy. There’s a space in there for denners with cicada-type organs, on a very gray market.”

Toby stared doubtfully at his new companion, who was rampaging among the barrels with Wrecks and Shylif’s denner. “But how does he do it? Wake himself up from being frozen solid at exactly the right time? And then what’s he got—a microwave projector in his head or something?”

“Basically,” said Jaysir, deadpan. “These little guys have about as much energy stored in them as a good-sized bomb. Their quantum clocks still work even at three degrees above absolute zero, and they’re their own cicada bed. That is part of their original design—it’s what made the denners popular to begin with, the fact they could survive without the beds. Makes ’em cheaper than other pets, right? We stowaways just added some upgrades, is all.”

He was talking about living creatures like they were machines. Toby didn’t like that. As he was reaching out to his denner, though, the ceiling of the tunnel suddenly flew away and they were in open air—or was it open space?

Far above, the sky was a black circle. The train was slowing as it rolled along a landscape of ice that made up the floor of a very deep, very wide pit. It must be kilometers across and tens of kilometers high.

The whole space was given over to tracks, warehouses, and yards packed with shipping containers. These radiated out like spokes from the center of the pit, where five threadlike white cables, each as straight as a draftsman’s line, rose up from the ice floor to pierce the domes and finally disappear in the circle of black above. These were space elevators, and based on what he saw rising on one, each was strong enough to support a vertical train.

“There’s our ride,” said Jaysir. “It’ll get us to orbit and stow us aboard one of the freighters.”

“As long as it’s a freighter that’s bound for Wallop,” added Corva.

Jaysir frowned at her. “You’re really gonna try it, huh?”

She gave a long-suffering sigh. “Jay, what choice do I have?”

The maker crossed his arms and glared at Shylif. “And what about you? You still think Coley was on that ship?”

Shylif shrugged impassively. “I have to find out.”

Toby’s thoughts were wavering unevenly between the shock of the revelation about his family and the idea that these people were proposing he ride a freight cylinder into orbit with them. Even apart from all the issues around hibernation, there was a pretty obvious problem with this plan. “Won’t there be security? If Ammond or … or my brother, if they’re really after us, won’t they be watching the docks?”

“Of course there’s security.” Jaysir shrugged as the train slowed and shunted into a siding. “But there’re legal limits on how much and what kind of technology they can use for security. That’s one of your brother’s policies. He wants to keep the lockstep at pretty much the tech level it was at when you … uh left. The price of that is that people like me can hack their way past the security pretty easily.”

The train bumped to a halt. “That doesn’t mean we can walk around like we own the place,” said Corva as she slung herself over the side of the car. “Don’t let yourself be seen. Jaysir’s only so good, and a lot of the bots here are still going to be under direct lockstep control.”

Toby followed her down the side of the car with Shylif coming last. “You mean,” he accused, “under Peter’s control. You said Peter owns this world, right?”

“He owns Cicada Corp—the hibernation system,” she said as they ducked between the shadows of stacked shipping containers. “That’s the cicada beds and all the machinery that coordinates shutdown and restart for the cities, the factories … You can build your own cicada bed, for private use, but it’s the whole industrial ecosystem around them that the McGonigals control. Supplies, diagnostics, repairs, emergency replacements in case of disaster … and the network that communicates with it all. It’s a monopoly.”

At ground level the freight yard looked like any one Toby had seen in any movie made in the past two hundred years: towers of containers, wide gravelly lanes between them, harsh lights and swiftly moving transport cranes like trucks on stilts. Bots walked here and there among the lanes, but there weren’t that many of them. Jaysir was following a particular route through the maze; he seemed to be looking for something.

“There.” He pointed at a stack that looked exactly like all the others. “They’re going to be loading that one in an hour. We need a bribable dock manager. Wait here, I’ll round one up.” He scuttled away into the shadows; his behemoth of a bot didn’t follow him.

“There’s an overlay for that,” said Corva sardonically. “Finding corrupt bots, I mean. There’s a big black market in bot hacks, and a lot of people deliberately turn a blind eye when their bots get infected with black-market viruses. You can make extra money from a hacked bot and still deny any involvement if the police catch your bots at it.”

Toby was thinking through the implications. “And Peter doesn’t own the police?” She nodded, but that was all, and he threw up his hands in frustration. “You said you would tell me the rest! About Evayne, and Mom and Dad? Or is keeping Toby ignorant just as important to you as it was to Ammond and Persea?”

Corva shook her head quickly. “No no, I just … it’s a big story. I’ve been trying to figure out where to start, is all.”

He glared at her. “How about anywhere?”

Corva stared off at the distant walls of ice. She was chewing her lip, her eyebrows scrunched in thought.

“I guess it grew out of a tiny seed, like they say,” she murmured at last. “But it’s all so crusted over with legend and myth it’s hard to tell. The fact is, the McGonigal family pioneered wintering over. They say your mother invented it so she could wait for your return from … well, heaven is usually the way they put it.”

“Heaven?” He shook his head. “Heaven wouldn’t be that cold. Or cramped.”

Shylif covered a smile, and Corva’s eyes widened before she turned away.

“What’d I say?” said Toby, puzzled.

“That’s the core of the legend, right there.” Now she was smiling, too. “That you were—are—some kind of genius at the least, or a divinely inspired prophet at most. That you preached a solution to all the problems of the world. You dropped hints but nobody would listen. Then you disappeared into deep space. Your mother converted and started wintering over to await your return, and people started following her. Peter and Evayne had this great conversion experience, too. That was how the locksteps started—and once they started, people began to realize that this was what you’d been preaching about all along.”

“This? What ‘this’?”

“This.” She waved around at the general world. “A way to defeat time while remaining true to what it means to be human. Your mother unwittingly built a way for human civilization to become eternal—or as close as is possible. Fourteen thousand years have passed, yet only forty for your sister and brother!”

“Wait, you’re talking and Peter and Evayne and Mom … what about my father?”

Corva looked uncomfortable. “There’s no mention of a father, sorry. Though there’re lots of stories about that, too—”

“I don’t want stories! So Peter and Evayne are alive. And Mom?”

“Your mother is wintering over until you return.”

He shook his head; that just didn’t make sense. “Where? Where are they?”

“Evayne travels around. Peter rules the lockstep from Barsoom. Your mother … she’s on a planet called Destrier, about half a light-year from here.”

Toby scowled up at the black sky. “Then that’s where I have to go.”

There was no response from the others. When he looked down, he saw that they were standing several steps away from him, both wide-eyed. Spooked, he would have said, had there been anything nearby to scare them. He glanced around in case, but no, they were alone here.

At that moment Jaysir reappeared with a gangly chrome-plated bot by his side. “This one’ll let us into the containers,” he said. “But we have to hurry. The loaders are on their way.”

He led them through the cargo stacks. Corva and Shylif hung back, whispering together heatedly. Toby shook his head and, growling under his breath, followed Jaysir.

The shipping containers were inflated cylinders with flat magnetic plates on top, bottom, and sides; the plates let you stack them under gravity or daisy-chain them in space. Each was about four by ten meters, and there were crude airlocks on either end. These were uncannily like the ones they’d had in his day, and Toby felt his steps slowing as he approached the one the chrome bot was opening. He knew these things had no windows, no propulsion, no power supply, no life support. They were just bags to stuff things in.

“See you on the other side,” said Jaysir. He and his cargo bot headed toward another cylinder, leaving the three stowaways with the denners standing by the first one.

“He’s by himself?” Toby watched him disappear into the maze of containers.

Corva shrugged; she seemed to have recovered her composure. “He and his … machine … weigh more than all of us put together. He’d tip the scales way over if we bunked together.”

Toby turned his dubious gaze to the shipping container the silver bot had brought them to. “We’re not seriously getting in that,” he said.

She squinted at him, a touch of humor returning to her face. “What part of ‘stowaway’ didn’t you understand?”

“But I thought … wouldn’t you find somewhere inside the passenger compartments—I mean, in a closet or…?”

She brayed a laugh. “Closets? You know there’s no such thing. Oh, sure, in the smaller ships you could hack the glasses interface, make it so people and bots don’t see you, but that only works until it doesn’t work. This,” she said, patting the side of the container, “always works.”

“Almost,” added Shylif as the bot did something beside the airlock door and it sprang open. “Quick, before the cranes get here.”

He and Corva rushed into the container lock. Shylif offered Toby his hand. Toby hesitated.

“Go on back to the city, then,” said Shylif, and he pulled his hand back.

“Wait!” Toby clambered up and into the square lock. Immediately, the doors slammed shut behind him. They were in darkness now.

The inner door opened and he heard somebody groping around for a switch. After a moment weak utility lights came on, back- and sidelighting a wall of plastic-wrapped merchandise that filled the cylinder right up to the airlock. Shylif and Corva let their denners climb down, and the little creatures slipped into crevasses between the packages, chittering back and forth as their humans crouched and murmured encouragement.

“Mrf?” Toby started as a little black-furred face appeared next to his. It looked at him, then after the other two. “Sure,” Toby said. “Go on.” He didn’t know whether the denner actually understood his words, but it got the sense of them anyway because it hopped down and began exploring with the other two. Toby found himself peering through gaps with Corva and Shylif, calling out encouragement with them.

After a few moments, the denners had identified a few spaces around the curve of the outer wall that a determined human might be able to squeeze through. “There’re always gaps in the packing,” said Shylif optimistically. “Like hidden chambers in a pyramid.”

The utility lights hinted at spaces back there, but still, Toby shook his head. “There isn’t even room to stand up. And what are we going to do for air?”

“Another secret of these places,” said Corva. She was burrowing her way after Wrecks. “Emergency air supplies—they’re required by law. Keep us going for a day or two on the other side, if we need it.” Her voice became increasingly muffled as she wormed her way between boxes. “We won’t need it on this end.”

“But this is insane.”

“Yeah,” she shouted back. “That’s why they never catch us at it. Nobody in their right mind would travel this way. But really—weren’t those early ships of yours this cramped?”

He thought about the little tug that he had taken into the vast empty reaches beyond Sedna. It really hadn’t been much roomier than this; it was just that its virtual reality and synthetic personalities had provided the illusion of unlimited space for its single passenger.

Toby’s denner poked its head out from between packages and meow-chattered at him. “All right, all right, I’m coming.” He took a deep breath and began forcing his way through the gaps.

It turned out the denners had found a sizable chamber, and with some shuffling and shoving, the humans were able to enlarge it until all three could sit, knees up, with their denners perched or draped on out-jutting boxes around them. Then Corva and Shylif brought out several survival bags—sleeping bags, really, but airtight when sealed and insulated to withstand deep cold. Corva handed one to Toby.

“What about, well…” He waved a hand.

“Bodily functions?” Shylif laughed. “You should have thought of that before we left home! Seriously, we are going to leave some evidence of ourselves behind here. They’ll know there’ve been stowaways. But as long as we don’t damage the merchandise or tip the freighter’s payload mass past its tolerances, nobody’ll care.”

Toby’s heart was pounding. He had the momentary thought that these two people he was with were actually crazy. How could a trio of animals—pets!—keep any of them alive through being frozen and shipped like packaged meat ten or twenty times the breadth of the solar system?

It must have been visible on his face, because suddenly Corva reached out to put her hand on his knee. “We do this all the time,” she said. “We really do! You have to trust your denner. What’re you going to call him, anyway?”

“How—” He laughed, half hysterically. “How can I trust him when I haven’t even had time to give him a name. And I’m expected to risk my life on his implants…” No, it was too crazy. Suddenly he knew he had to get out of there, and he turned and tried to stand up—and saw stars as he hit his head. “Ah!”

“Toby! Just keep it together!” Shylif and Corva held his hands and talked quietly, reassuringly, about how they’d done this before, and about how denner instincts drew them to curl up with sleeping people. In that space of shared mammalian warmth, the thrum of their purr would synchronize their metabolisms and keep both creatures alive. The denners’ synthorgans provided energy and diagnostic data to guide the systems that supported the more massive humans.

Toby calmed down enough to know he was going to try to go through with this. But he still needed something to keep him from thinking about it. “Tell me more,” he said to Corva. “About Peter and Evayne. Do they … are they … older?” She’d said something about forty years having passed in the lockstep, as opposed to the fourteen thousand that had gone by outside it. “Have they been awake all this time? Or did they winter over some of it?”

He could see in the dim light that Shylif and Corva were staring at him wide-eyed. “Amazing,” said Shylif. “Just to hear you say those names as if—well, like they’re your own family.”

“They are!”

“But you have to understand,” said Corva gently, “that we grew up hearing them spoken as names from legend. Like you’d hear about some ancient conqueror.”

He shook his head. “They’re just family.”

There was a long silence. Then Corva said, “Right. Why don’t I go on with the story, then, and you can judge for yourself when I’m done?” Cautiously, he nodded. She shot an uncertain smile at Shylif, who shrugged.

“Toby, I don’t know what really happened, way back at the start. The fact is, your family figured out how to thrive out here between the stars, and they made sure they controlled the technology. Well, mostly. For centuries of realtime, all the action was around the stars. Empires rose, posthuman species came into being, there were wars and crashes and exploration and terraforming and everything you can imagine and lots that you can’t. All the while that was happening, Sedna was growing bit by bit. Slowing down, too—we’re pretty sure the lockstep frequency was small at first, maybe even 1/1. See, if you can winter over, you use resources more slowly, so if your bots can mine and manufacture slowly and steadily over all that time, you’ll have so much more to work with in those times when you’re awake.”

He nodded. “But Ammond said that the big advantage was that you could trade more.”

“Right! If you can travel to any of twenty or thirty thousand worlds overnight, it’s a huge advantage. Because your potential trading partners aren’t scattered around a flat map but in three dimensions, if you double how far you travel while you’re asleep, you increase the worlds you can visit during that sleep by a factor of eight! They say you figured that out, and your mother took your message to the other Sedna colonists after you left…” He was shaking his head. “O-kay,” Corva continued uncomfortably. “So anyway there was constant pressure to winter over for longer and longer times. While she was Chairman, your mother got us up to thirty years down, one month up. We’ve been at that since before I was born.”

“And then she what? Went into sleep to wait for me?” He shook his head again. “That doesn’t sound like her. I mean … sure, she’d miss me, but she wouldn’t abandon Peter and Evayne. Or Dad. Just to wait for me. Something’s screwy here.”

“That’s the story I know. Your mother began the locksteps, and your brother and sister control ours, the biggest one.”

“Control it? Isn’t Cicada Corp just a company? Why not just skim profits like the trillionaires always have and sit back and let it run itself?”

“Toby, if only a hundred people decided to immigrate to the lockstep every real-time year, there’d be three thousand showing up every lockstep month and, what … thirty-six thousand new citizens per lockstep year! But people in the wider world have known about the locksteps for millennia. Tens of thousands come to find us every year … realtime. Sometimes, millions. You do the math.”

He thought about Sedna—but a Sedna without him and with a strange new custom pioneered by his mother. People hibernating, maybe just a few at a time at first, and not for too long. He could already see how useful that would have been: lower life-support costs, which would translate to a greater carrying capacity for the whole colony … more to go around. And then, blinking faster and faster forward through time, eventually the whole colony at once. Then people showing up, just a few at first, but soon floods. Three decades of colonization effort passing in one night: you’d wake and there’d be a new city next door that hadn’t been there when you went to sleep. Whole worlds could appear that way.

“How could you possibly deal with a pace of change like that?”

Corva gazed at him, looking … sad?

“Simple,” she said. “Peter and Evayne used you to do it.”

He was trying to figure out what that meant and what to ask next, when suddenly the whole shipping container shook. All around the three stowaways, packages and boxes shifted ominously. At the first rumble Toby braced his hands and feet in alarm against the plastic-wrapped walls that surrounded him. His denner chirped and leaped to his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” said Corva. “We’re just being loaded.”

A sense of swirling motion made Toby push even harder against the walls. It went on for nearly a minute, then they were thumped down hard somewhere, and it ceased.

“Why now?” he asked. “I mean, why are they loading ships if there’re weeks to go before everybody winters over? Wouldn’t they wait until then to leave the planet?”

Shylif shook his head. “There’s a sizable queue. These docks started running weeks before the population woke up, and they’ll keep going for weeks after everybody goes to sleep. It’s great for us—means we’ll be off planet and asleep while they’re still looking for us down here.”

“Unless they look for us up there.”

Shylif shrugged. “Then we’re screwed.” He reached out to ruffle Shadoweye’s fur, then said, “Well, I’m going to find a stable cavity and retire. See you in thirty years.” He and his denner clambered away through the jam-packed packaging.

Corva still wasn’t meeting Toby’s gaze. “We should, too. Toby, I want to tell you everything about your family and your … situation. But we need a better time and place. It’s pointless to use up what little air’s in here, because we won’t have time for me to answer all your questions anyway.”

“You keep putting me off—”

She clucked and Wrecks climbed into her survival bag with her. Toby could hear him purring.

“We have to do this now, Toby. Zip yourself into your bag with your denner,” she said. “He starts to purr, you fall asleep, and you deep-dive: your metabolism slows by ninety percent, and so does his. When we get to space all the heat’s going to leak out of here, so as the temperature drops he’ll stimulate your body to produce the natural antifreeze and other substances that’ll protect you in the next stage.”

“Which is…?” He thought he knew.

“You freeze solid and stay that way for three decades. Then, when we get to Wallop, our denners will wake up in anaerobic mode and start pumping energy into us. They’re used to the rhythm of this lockstep, their circadian clocks are accurate to the millisecond.”

“And you’ve done this.”

Wrecks was purring even louder now. Corva smiled as she zipped herself up to her nose and settled herself back against the crates. “Enough times that I trust Wrecks with my life, yeah.” She finished the zip-up and was completely engulfed in the survival bag.

His own denner sat at his feet, its tail coiled around its feet. It was looking up at him expectantly.

This was it. If he was going to get out of this death trap, it would have to be now. He could find a ride back to the city, maybe do some work for lazy robots like Shylif had been doing. He could hide out, learn what was really going on here. That was the sensible thing to do.

His denner was purring, a lulling, hypnotic sound. “Stop it,” he said. “I don’t even know your name.”

And suddenly there were tears in his eyes.

Corva hadn’t known anything about Toby’s father. That could only mean one thing: Dad was dead. Funny thing—Toby had spent the past month knowing this as a fact, thinking that Mother was long gone, too, and Peter and Evayne. Suddenly the others were alive again, but Dad wasn’t and somehow that made him … more than dead. Corva didn’t even know he’d existed. He was gone, erased from history, and somehow that was so much worse than his simply having died long ago.

Peter, tyrant of seventy thousand worlds? And Evayne, did she know Toby was alive? Had she agreed with this insane order to have him killed? It was all crazy.

He shuffled his way into the little chamber where Corva now lay like a lifeless doll and climbed into his bag. The denner watched him alertly as he zipped the bag up to his chin. “I’m alone,” he said aloud.

A little furry paw tapped him on the cheek. He turned to find himself staring into two golden eyes. His denner was small enough to be the runt of its litter and as lonely, maybe, as Toby.

Toby brought it into the bag, hugging it against his chest, and began to cry. “You need a name. You can’t go to sleep without a name.” Its purr was becoming hypnotic, and as had happened on the boat, Toby felt an answering vibration start deep within himself.

“It’s gotta be good,” he said sleepily. “Not Blacky or Midnight.” He laughed at himself.

He thought about the gods and heroes of ancient mythology, many of whom had come to virtual life in the games he and Peter played. Which of them had gone between life and death? —A lot of those crazy Greeks, actually. Persephone would be perfect, except that she was a woman and this denner was male. Charon, the boatman of the dead? Too bleak.

The song of the denner was all around him now, and he knew its name. “You’re Orpheus,” he muttered. Orpheus, the hero whose music was so powerful that he used it to lull all the monsters of the underworld into sleep, allowing him to sneak into the afterlife and steal back his dead wife.

“All right, Orpheus. Let’s go see Hades.”