Spares

At first they said it was the Internet, as it was called back then. They said the traffic on the network had gotten too dense, that this virtual world had grown too heavy and that all the man with the cat did was discover it had begun. They said all this, but it wasn’t true.

Yes, the Internet snow crashed two weeks before The Gap was discovered, and they never worked out why. True, they had to switch to the alternative Matrix which was already in place, and the old net never worked again.

But The Gap was always there, waiting.

Then they said computer code was at fault, the little lines of syntax we’d thought were perfect and inviolate, simple instructions to simple beings, the chips in the wild inside, flowering up through meaning into function. We’d believed the languages we’d created were protected from ambiguity, but there was seepage from day one. The same sentence in English said with two different inflections creates slightly different meanings: turned out we hadn’t appreciated the difference situation made to code, because we didn’t really understand the way computers think. All the unspoken half-meanings we missed, the sly words, hidden implications; all of these, it was said, added up to something and went somewhere else and created another place.

They thought they’d finally gotten to the bottom of it when they stopped the writing of collapsing code, a language based on the way the human mind itself was shaped. When written with perfect syntax it would collapse in on itself, creating software with just one line, a line whose meaning was opaque even to the person who had written the original. The writing process became like a childhood, lost and unreachable. The software would work, and work marvelously, but there was always the fear that something else, something unintended, had been sealed in with the instructions. Especially after computers themselves were given the job of writing the code. They were better at it, much better than us, but their motivations were sometimes uncertain, and after the code was sealed it was impossible to tell what was in there. Perhaps things were being said that we couldn’t hear; perhaps this was a conversation humans weren’t invited to eavesdrop on anymore.

Once they banned collapsing code, The Gap didn’t get any bigger, so maybe there was something in that. But some of us believed that if any of the above was true it had only been a facilitator, a gateway that let us find something people had been looking for all along without realizing what they might find.

We’ll probably never know for sure because, now that it’s over, no one wants to even think about it. Trying to conquer it was a mistake, and nobody brags about mistakes. The war was kept quiet at the time, and the silence since has been ear-shattering. There haven’t been any movies about what happened in there, and there never will be. It was one defeat too many. It wasn’t even classified as a war, but as a training exercise, and you’d be surprised how many Bright Eyes have died in suspicious circumstances since it ended. Especially those who started talking about it.

You won’t find it in the history books, but it happened. I know. I was there.

We discovered how to get into the world’s subconscious, but instead of respecting it, and letting its good influence seep out into the conscious world as it always had, we tried to charge in and take it over, as if it was a new territory which could be owned. We found Eden, and napalmed it; found Oz’s wells, and pissed in them; found the mainspring of power which kept the real world sane and spread the virus of insanity throughout it. Maybe we even found the truth my father believed the real world hid; if so, we should have left it alone.

It was never officially called The Gap. It had several names, their length increasing with the seniority of the person who spoke them. But the only name ever used by anyone who was actually there was The Gap. And when they took us in, units of teenagers with nothing better to do except be the guinea pigs in someone else’s war, why did they make us stand in such a way that no one could see—or be seen by—anyone else? Because, I believe, that’s what The Gap was all about. Falling between cracks, being cut out of the loop, consigned to dead code, which has lost its place in the program and which nobody remembers anymore.

I believe The Gap is made up of all of the places where no one is, of all the sights no one sees. It comes from silence, and lack, and the deleted and unread; it is the gap between what you want and what you have, between love and affection, between hope and truth. It’s the place where crooked cues come from, and it’s the answer to a question: Does a tree exist when there’s no one there to perceive it?

It exists all right, but it’s in The Gap. And there will be many more of them, and they will not shade you from anything and they will not be your friends. A flash of images: hydraulic stumps; bloody necks; weapon jam; fear. None of it real, just a spasm of remembrance.

Then Ghuaji in front of us, but not completely there; only his clothes running off between the trees, banking and dodging as if under heavy fire. The truck roaring in the silence. And the trees. All the trees were there.

Flash again, but real: a sharp crack as the truck ran into a bank of trunks, Vinaldi and I flung forward to collide with the windshield. It cracked, but not enough; we spent the first seconds back in The Gap barely conscious.

Then it cleared and I swirled my head up and saw the clothes still floating into the distance, like a runaway laundry basket. I felt a moment of dismay—as if entering once more a recurrent nightmare, barely remembered during the day, but like an old soiled glove at night. An incommunicable dread; of half-turns and stares, of screams in the shelves and shoes poking out from beneath curtains in the middle of the night. “Come and see me,” the shoes say, but you know the person they belong to is dead and the shoes shouldn’t be there at all.

When I could still see the clothes half a mile away, I knew it was really so. It is so dark there, silky dark, and yet that doesn’t stop you seeing. You can’t imagine it unless you’ve been there, and when you’ve been there you can’t forget. The quiet, an ultimate stillness; but once you notice the silence you spend an eternity covering your ears against the noise.

It’s not a nightmare. However you explain it, it is not a dream of any kind. It is all simply there. And so were we.

Vinaldi slumped in his seat, shaking his head, whether against the crash or Rapt or The Gap I couldn’t tell.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “No, I’m not fucking all right.”

I shook his shoulder gently. “We’ve got to go now or well never catch up with him.” Vinaldi reached blindly for the gearshift and pushed at it, but it was like moving a rotting stick in a stream; it didn’t make any difference to anything. “I don’t think the truck is really here,” I added. “Come on. Get out.”

I grabbed as much ammunition as I could fit in my pockets, together with one of the pump-actions Vinaldi had thoughtfully provided, opened my door, and climbed down from the truck. On the other side Vinaldi did the same, and we stood for a moment, looking around us.

The darkness in The Gap is strange. It is like the lack of any light at all, because our sun has never shone on it, and yet sometimes it is like a slanting sunset or twilight in the corner of your eye. As you move your head you see different things, changing lights. For a moment I thought I saw late-afternoon sun glinting off the roof of the truck, and then all was silky evening and the truck was only colored space in front of me. The light in there is blue, for the most part, a blue which I have only seen in one place since.

In all directions, as far as the eye could see, were the trees. A forest of unimaginable age, rank upon rank of thick trunks shooting up into infinity. Sometimes it seems as if they are entirely separate from each other, at others as if they were all extrusions of the same thing. The forest floor was covered with leaves so densely that it seemed like there were no individual leaves at all but only a carpet of moleskin, covered with a fine and shifting mist.

“Which way did he go?” Vinaldi asked, rubbing his hand across his face. “Not that it makes much difference.”

“That way,” I said, joining him. “I think I can still see the clothes, out in the distance.” I couldn’t, but we needed some impetus. To stand still in The Gap is to stop swimming for a shark. You sink to the bottom, and can’t start moving again.

We started off quickly, both of us giving the vehicle a backward glance after a few yards, as if we knew that leaving it would commit us to being here. The truck was gone, which didn’t surprise me. You can’t carry large objects across all in one go. The vehicles used in the war—which were in any event few and far between—all had to be ferried across piecemeal and assembled in The Gap; even the machines which ultimately enabled us to be sideslipped back again.

“Are you Rapt yet?” Vinaldi asked.

“No, but it’s coming,” I said.

“Good. It had better. Because I’m getting The Fear.”

“Perhaps we’d better run.”

“You know something? I think you could be right.”

We started trotting then, hopefully in the direction Ghuaji had gone, but I was already none too sure. For now the forest seemed quiet; as if ignoring us, but we both knew that wouldn’t last. Leaves started running beside us then, like children playing. Vinaldi kicked out at them, but I stopped him.

“Little fuckers,” he said.

“Better them than the trees.”

We ran, faster and faster, as The Fear came. Its coming was like a return to everything you thought you’d left behind. Not just our memories, but everyone’s, until we were no longer really following Ghuaji but just fleeing from everyone and everything. Men, dead and wounded, spread in pieces around the floor and their blood not lying still yet. Children, jerking spastically toward us. None of this was here now, but it had been, and The Gap remembered. The Gap was full of ghosts, of the thousands whose bodies had disappeared before anyone had a chance to grieve or offer thanks.

Vinaldi’s face flashed white beside me, our breaths labored and ragged; both of us had been smoking far too long to enjoy this kind of shit. The feeling of having a hand squeezed round my temples grew stronger and stronger as The Fear froze into my bones, and still we ran.

“I can’t stay in here long,” Vinaldi panted. “I can’t do this for very long at all.”

“Me, neither,” I said, as terror found yet more speed in our legs and we sprinted between the trees, a trail of leaves following us enthusiastically, pretending they couldn’t keep up but not getting left behind. The bark on the trees sniggered at us, but that was all right. It couldn’t move quickly enough to do any real damage.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, and then suddenly the light went out Vinaldi moaned beside me and we found ourselves in a huge bush, slicing against needles and spines. We kicked and thrashed our way through it, but the bush got thicker and thicker, and the worst part was that I knew that if we ever got through it then the other side would be even less fun.

We found ourselves in the middle, face-to-face, unable to move or to see each other’s eyes. All we could hear was each other’s breathing, the sound sinister and loud. Vinaldi wanted to kill me, I knew. He wanted to reach out and pull the eyes from my head and chew them while he clawed the skin from my face. I wanted to do the same to him, but then suddenly the bush was no longer there, and the light was back—but it was yellow now, curdled and old.

Vinaldi stared at me, stricken. “This Rapt isn’t strong enough, Jack. It isn’t helping at all. I was going to—”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s all we’ve got.”

“This is a mistake. We shouldn’t have come back.” “What the fuck’s that?”

Vinaldi whirled to follow my gaze, and I realized: It was Ghuaji’s jacket The bush we’d clawed through was now several yards away and a bloodstained fatigue jacket was hung across it The cotton started unraveling itself, and the dried blood revivified in midair to form a small hanging droplet A twig from a nearby tree reached out and greedily sucked it up.

Then Vinaldi grabbed my arm and pointed behind me.

Ghuaji’s remaining clothes were standing fifty yards away, facing us. The clothes turned slowly, as if on a revolving pedestal, and then quickly glided away into the gloom.

We ran after them through more trees, more shadows, until there were so many leaves around us that it was like falling into a tunnel of dryness. And finally the Rapt kicked in with a vengeance, and for a while we didn’t know where we were, or what we were doing, or who we were chasing after. For a little while, I don’t know how long, we were just two shadows in motion toward nothing, and it was exactly like it had been back then.

I don’t think I could describe the war in The Gap reliably, not a single tree or village or death, despite the fact that I still see them in dreams and probably always will. I see the ferns and leaves, the blue light which sifted between the trees; I see the little towns, nestled amidst them like fairy-tale villages. But that’s not the way it really was. Part of being there at all was a knowledge that we weren’t really seeing what things were like, however hard we looked. Somehow the reality of it was always just round the corner, or hidden under a layer of light. We couldn’t trust the people, we couldn’t trust the land, and in the end we couldn’t even trust ourselves. We were like baffled, terrified children alone in a dark multi-story parking garage full of sadists.

Partly it was the drugs. Eight out of ten people were off their face all the time. It was encouraged. It meant you coped better with The Fear. The other two out of ten were either drunk or crazy.

I realized this within minutes of being sideslipped into The Gap, and made a pact with myself. I was going to do this thing straight, scared though I was. From the moment you set foot in The Gap you knew something was wrong, and every breath you took confirmed that knowledge and made it a part of your very metabolism. Fear ran through people like blood. Whether you were looking at someone huddled shaking into the roots of a tree, or standing proud with shoulders back and gun spitting, you were looking at someone who was mortally afraid. As I stood in the base camp on that first day and saw the shells of men around me, I hoped to God that I had slipped into some dream and would wake up very soon. “This can’t be the way it is,” I said to myself, already shaking. “They can’t all be like this, and even if they are I’m not going to join them. If I’m going to be this scared, I need to know what I’m doing.”

Within hours a horrified dread began to fill every extremity of my body, slowly flowing toward my core. It was like the “Oh no,” moment, the moment when you realize that you’ve been caught doing something bad, when you’ve made a mistake that will have disastrous consequences, or when you hear someone close to you has died. For a moment, your mind becomes cold liquid, and a calm denial is the only thing you can feel.

That’s the way it stayed. The feeling didn’t pass. It just kept growing. That’s why my resolution lasted four days. I got respect for that, of a grudging kind. Four days was a long time to hold out, and it set me apart from some of the other men. One of the things men will fight hardest to hide from each other is fear. You just don’t show it. In The Gap it was different. Fear couldn’t be hidden, and so all the time you were surrounded by the most childlike, vulnerable, desperate part of everybody else. There were people in The Gap, and that’s whom we were supposed to be fighting; but they were the very least of our problems. The children, dead but with hydraulic frames nailed through their bones so they could scamper poison-laden toward us; the blankets of fire which appeared from your pockets and swept up to incinerate your skin; these were fears, but nothing like The Fear of The Gap itself, which was all of this and the promise of everything more.

In the end, I recognized that I was endangering the rest of the men in my unit. I was simply too terrified all the time. It felt as if each individual cell in my body were cold; as if someone were constantly running a killing knife over the hairs on the back of my neck; as if I were lying asleep, the plank of my back exposed and bare and waiting for an ax which would surely come. The fourth day I was there I followed a couple of the guys to the tent where it all happened. I’d never taken drugs at that time. I was frightened of doing it. I was frightened of not doing it. I was frightened of everything.

What Rapt did was intensify reality to the point of blindness. It pushed everything up into the stratosphere, made the light behind the leaves even darker, made height so tall it disappeared, warmth so hot it became cold. It made everything so intense you could only repress it. Every hour was a series of blackouts, of forget-tings. You’d find yourself half a mile down the track and have no recollection of having got there. You’d look at some guy you’d been talking to and realize you had no idea what the conversation was about. You’d look down at yourself and realize you were holding a man’s head by the hair, and that you’d blown it off the body with repeated rounds from your gun, and you had no idea of how it had all happened.

The mind pushed it away, blanked it in real time minute by minute, but all the while there was this voice which knew what was going on. However much Rapt you took, this voice drip-fed the truth to you second by second like a string of filthy lies told to himself by a psychopathic schizophrenic. So what did you do? You took more Rapt to shut the voice up.

You were there only three quarters of the time. The rest you were somewhere else; fucked up into oblivion by the cocktail of The Gap and heavy Rapt. We called it being “Gone Away,” and it was the only way you could get out of The Gap. You came to recognize a look in the eyes of other people, the look that said they’d just come back from being Gone Away. You envied them those moments of peace, but at the same time you were frightened of what Going Away might mean.

We didn’t get much instruction. We got guns. Some of the guys had been there a little longer, lieutenants and stuff, but that just meant they were even more fucked up than the rest of us. It was a war fought on the ground, behind trees and under bushes. There were gunships, but they were strange and experimental and shaped like fish, seldom used except for the brass to hide in. All we had was our basic intelligence, and maybe that should have been enough. An eight-man unit among themselves ought to have been able to figure out how to fight—or at least, how to hide effectively—but you’ve got to remember that we were out of our heads the whole fucking time.

Rapt’s effects are not just intense on a dose-by-dose basis: They are also cumulative. After a couple of weeks Rapt remaps your neural paths to the point where you don’t know where the hell you are—and we were on it for over two years. We’d be tramping through darkness, not knowing where we were or what to do next, and then suddenly we’d see this big clump of bushes and someone would say, “Okay, let’s go through that bush.”

“What bush?” someone else would ask, confused.

“That bush.”

“What fucking bush? We’re surrounded by the fuckers.”

“That bush, man: the one you’re almost standing in.”

Relieved: “Oh yeah. That bush. Okay.”

“Wow. Look at it. That’s some bush.”

“It’s beautiful. Look at those leaves.”

“Great leaves.”

Then suddenly: “I don’t like it.”

“Like what?”

“The bush, man. It’s giving me The Fear.”

“It’s just a bush. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, man. It’s giving me the fucking Fear.”

“Okay. Forget the bush.”

“I can’t forget it. It’s right there in front, of me, man—”

“Not that bush. The other one.”

“Fuck—that’s even worse.”

“Shit. You’re right.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ll go round it.”

And so we’d go around the bush, and get caught, and get the shit kicked out of us and half of us would die.

Getting around a bush in one piece isn’t so fucking hard. We should have been able to work that kind of thing out—but we couldn’t. Running like hell was a very big part of the tactics out there.

It was a war fought against demons, by men who had become demons themselves. Maybe that’s the biggest thing I took away from it. The fact that anyone, your comrade, your friend, your brother, can in the right circumstances become something you don’t want to believe exists. Once you’ve seen it’s possible, you never look at anyone the same again. And The Gap itself, what did we do to it? It can’t always have been that way. Or maybe it was, and it was just the fact we have the wrong kind of minds, applying consciousness to things that should have stayed buried.

This isn’t making any real sense, isn’t some polished account. I can’t do anything about that, because I can’t remember it with any more cohesion. I guess I could go back over what I’ve done and try to order it, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be true to the way it was. Cohesion, order, chronology; The Gap was the place where you learned those three words meant nothing at all. This was a place where one guy I knew was Gone Away for three days once: three entire days. We could tell he was Gone Away, and we put up with it. You generally could. It was part of every day, and you got used to it. But three days…

When the guy came back, he was different. Being Gone Away wasn’t like sleep, or unconsciousness. You were still awake, but you were somewhere else. Short stretches were okay—I don’t think it did too much harm. But three days—that changed him. This guy used to sometimes say things about it, try to talk it out. But he couldn’t. Wherever he’d been was buried too deep. He sometimes talked like it was a whole other place, as if while his body had been with us, shivering in the trees or cutting the faces off villagers, his soul had been somewhere else, somewhere that was different but no better. I don’t know about that, but I instinctively recognized there was an element of truth in it. About a third of the men around me at any one time would be Gone Away, flicking on and off in ten- or twenty-minute stretches, and it was like marching with a bunch of fucking zombies. Jesus, I used to think, these guys are my friends, the people on my side, and it’s like a sponsored walk with the lobotomized dead.

Most people reacted to Rapt about the same, but some went really weird on it. There would be soldiers who regressed when they were Rapt, started running about like terrible children. Some of these guys regressed in a way that made you think what they were regressing to was the childhood of something that wasn’t entirely human. Or maybe it was human, but humanity of a different evolution. It was as if there had once been two tribes, identical in appearance, but subtly different at every emotional and psychological level. Maybe between the trees in The Gap there wandered the childhoods of Gap people, lost but still alive. Maybe they got into some of the men.

As soon as we saw that a guy was prone to react that way we tried to turn him into a drinker instead. It was just too disturbing to see them being like that. We couldn’t deal with it.

Problem was, all any of this did was hide it. Not all of it, just enough. It didn’t go away. All that fear is still inside us, and even now we’re slowly using it up. People try to hide it different ways, by being strong, being weak, being a cop or being a gangster. But everyone feels it. Everyone is still afraid.

When the first surge of Rapt planed out into lucidity Vinaldi and I stopped running, our chests suddenly filled with liquid fire. I reeled off into the bushes and vomited uncontrollably, my body revolting against the exertion and trying to make it clear it wasn’t having any more of it. Bodies are great, and I wouldn’t go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they’re so disappointing. If we mistreated them as badly as we do our minds then everyone would be dead, and yet there they go, complaining all the time. Someone needs to get all our bodies, sit them down, and give them a good talking-to.

All I could think of as I hurled up my guts was a hope that I wasn’t losing any of the Rapt this way. I knew I was going to need it, and was already thinking of the remaining two packets. What I had was all we’d got, but it was already all I could do not to just shoot it up there and then.

Meanwhile Vinaldi slumped with his hands on his knees, sucking air in like he was in danger of imploding. I guess he did time in a health club or something; compared to me he was fucking Superman. I could feel my body looking on enviously, wishing I treated it that well. I hate fit people. They’re so undermining.

When we’d recovered sufficiently we looked around, slowly turning in a circle. All we could still see, for 360 degrees, was forest—except that the second time we went round, a stream had appeared. (That was normal; either there are more than 360 degrees in a circle in The Gap, or things just don’t work that way.) We realized then that our feet were wet, and thus we’d probably come across that very stream. A large group of leaves was standing on the other side, unable to come across. Though they didn’t have eyes—obviously, because they were just leaves—we could tell they were watching us. Also, that if we tried to go back that way they would stop us.

So we kept turning, and saw that what was behind us hadn’t been what we’d originally thought. It wasn’t simply more forest. In front of us, about half a mile away down a slight incline, there appeared to be a village.

“How did we get here?” Vinaldi asked.

“Fuck knows. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t tell who I was. I’d forgotten you existed.”

“I don’t want to go down there,” I said suddenly.

Vinaldi nodded. “Me, neither. But we’ve got to.”

“No, we don’t. We could go somewhere else. Maybe that’s not the place. Or maybe the clothes led us and it’s a trap.”

“Jack, it doesn’t matter if it is or not,” Vinaldi said. “I can’t stay out here much longer. I don’t have the Bright Eyes anymore, remember?”

It hit me then just how much courage he had. Your eyes were operated on the day before you were sidelined into The Gap. There was something about certain types of light in The Gap’s forest—though not the villages—that caused human eyes to burn out from the inside; so a chemical was laser-implanted in a thin layer over your retinas, and this seemed to prevent the light from damaging them. Back in the real world, this chemical caused a slight reflection in certain lighting conditions, hence the “Bright Eyes” nickname. Vinaldi had spent the last—Christ—two hours, I found by looking at my watch, in the forest without protection. He was either inordinately brave or an idiot.

“I’d forgotten,” I said.

Legs aching from the run, we tramped toward the village. For the time being, the light in the forest was both safe and almost attractive, as if someone had installed small yellow mood-lights behind every tenth tree. Like all settlements in The Gap, the village looked insignificant against the infinite spread of the forest, but also seemed to pre-date it. Even from this distance we could see the trunks which shot up through the thatched roofs of some of the houses, so thick that it could barely have been worth living in the remains of the shelter they provided. Nobody knows why things are like this, because nobody ever managed to talk to a local for long enough to find out. Before the first sentence was over one or the other of you would be dead. The problem with the villagers was twofold; firstly, their implacable ferocity, and secondly the fact that they weren’t visible all the time. They were easier to see in the dark, but by then you were generally seconds from death. The children were more visible, and seemed to be less angry at us, but they were often used by the villagers to carry mines. For years after I was sideslipped out, at the end—or abandonment—of the war, I couldn’t see a child without being scared out of my wits. It was only when Angela arrived in my life that their ghosts were laid to rest, and it was only when she and Henna died that I understood how much they had protected me from.

“Are you okay?” Vinaldi asked, after a while.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

There were about thirty dwellings, arranged in a rough circle around a central area, with two paths bisecting at approximate right angles. The huts were lit by orange light that slipped and flowed around them, like a golden tide. Sometimes, I knew from experience, this light would coalesce into the birds I’d seen with Nearly and Suej in New Richmond. These birds were brain-damaged and appalling but they always seemed happy, exploding into being like liquid flames. After a chaotic few moments they’d disappear piecemeal, like smoke drifting into a dark sky. The birds only lived in the villages, which were otherwise deserted. None of the villagers lived in the villages, and it seemed that they never had.

“So,” I asked, when we were standing a few yards from the edge of the settlement. “What’s the plan?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Go in there and see if we can find anything, I guess.”

Not a very detailed plan of attack. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to hold the second Rapt wave off and keep my head in one piece. “Together?”

“Yes of fucking course together,” he snapped. “Or do you want to go see if you can find some small dark room at the top of some stairs and wander in there by yourself?”

“You don’t think tactically it would make more sense to split up?”

“No, I fucking don’t.”

So we went together, shotguns held at port arms, keeping watch on opposite sides of the path. As we entered the village we stared hard at the huts we passed, searching for any sign of movement within. The huts looked polished and perfect, as always, as if fresh-minted from imaginary materials. You could see the fine detail of each piece of straw in the thatch, the little bumps in the white mud of the exterior walls.

We decided against doing a search of every hut-partly to speed our first pass through the village, mainly because we were frightened. Doing a recce with The Fear is like wandering blindfolded into a room you know is papered with razor blades.

By the time we reached the center, our faces were dripping with perspiration and my finger was moist against the trigger of the shotgun. We were wired very tight, our time off from the Rapt running out. We paused there, listening carefully. There was nothing to hear, and nothing to see except tree trunks and huts.

“Vinaldi,” I said, “we’ve got to hurry. The Rapt’s going to come on again soon.”

He considered this, nodded, and then pointed up the path. “I’ll go through to the other side. You start the circles. If you see anything, shout.”

He crept across the opening and onto the other section of the path, warily looking all around him. I headed off at an angle into the clusters of huts, peering through windows and round corners, seeing nothing except tendrils of orange light. The huts themselves were antiseptically empty, sterile as if stamped from molds. In one, I saw a small collection of leaves in the corner, looking as if they were having a meeting, but nothing more interesting than that. The leaf meetings never seemed to amount to very much. I think it was just a kind of play for them.

When I’d finished the first quarter I crossed the path we came in on and went over to the opposite side. I caught a glimpse of Vinaldi, now at the far end of the village and heading back toward the center.

I was checking yet another hut when I heard a sudden sound from behind me. I whirled around, trigger all but pulled, and saw a small flock of the orange birds fountaining up out of nothing into flight. They chittered and guffawed happily before disappearing with a shudder of air. Then everything was quiet again.

Well, not everything. When the last of the flapping noises died away I heard something the other side of the village. A human utterance of some kind. My first thought was that Vinaldi might have found something and was calling out to me, so I abandoned the current hut and ran in a crouch back toward the central path.

By the time I stepped onto it the sound had faded, and Vinaldi was nowhere to be seen. I debated calling out to him, then realized that if it hadn’t been Vinaldi, and there was anyone else here, I should probably keep my mouth shut. I retreated slowly back to the center of the village, eyes smarting at being open so wide for so long, my ears feeling as if they were swiveling on stalks.

Then I heard something that was definitely a shout, and stopped dead. The noise came from the far corner of the village, and any words contained in it were indistinguishable.

It was very bad timing for me to have to make a decision. My fingers were beginning to feel very long, my mind extremely vague. At any moment I could be Gone Away and suddenly I had to think.

There were two options. The first, go forward, threading my way through the huts until I saw what was going on. Downside: if Vinaldi wasn’t calling for me because he’d found something, I’d walk straight into the trap which Yhandim had undoubtedly set. With sudden clarity, the idea of going into a village struck me as irredeemably stupid. Why else would we be here unless we’d followed the clothes? Yes, we had to find out where Yhandim’s camp was—but not at the expense of walking straight into it.

So I took a second option, and quickly retreated out of the village. When I was at the perimeter I turned right, keeping my back to the forest, and ran round the edge of the houses, checking the spaces between buildings and trees. It was colder outside the village, much colder. Another night was coming. Night isn’t really night in The Gap. It is simply a period of indeterminate length when it will be darker and even less fun to be there.

Then I saw a figure, on the other side of the village—standing before one of the huts. It looked like Vinaldi, but he wasn’t moving. I was relieved, but only momentarily. There was something strange about his posture, as if he was holding his hands up in the air. As I tried to work out what he was doing, and wondered whether to shout, the second Rapt rush really hit home and suddenly things became difficult and strange. I teetered on the edge of being Gone Away for a moment but managed to hold it off.

I moved very close to the wall of the nearest hut and slid around it, blinking in the way which sometimes helps. Something was very wrong. Vinaldi’s hands were in the air because they had been tied to the hut, and though I couldn’t see any blood, his head was drooping.

Run, my mind said. Just turn around and run.

I crept forward another couple of yards, blinking my eyes rapidly against the coming darkness. Vinaldi was still alive; his head was jerking slightly. Either he was trying to clear it, or he was reeling from Rapt rush. Almost certainly both—my mind was already about as clear as sewage and getting more tangled all the time. I couldn’t see anyone nearby, and I briefly considered simply running toward him and trying to get him free. Then something made me turn my head and look down the path toward the center of the village.

There was nothing there. But the clearing looked ruffled as though seen through a heat haze. Whichever way I turned my head, the haze stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly too, like a bad quality film print, but the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard and blinked, but after I stopped seeing stars the effect was still there. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something was hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so colored as to make up an image of that patch of the path.

I realized what I was seeing just an instant before the image settled enough for my eyes to tell me. It was Yhandim and Ghuaji, and they were running along the path straight at me. They’d been taken up by The Gap enough to slip into it almost like natives. Ghuaji’s injuries weren’t holding him up any, and Yhandim looked like he’d never been injured in his life. He probably hadn’t. People like Yhandim didn’t get injured: The traffic’s all the other way.

Both looked like a condensed pack of wild animals, bludgeoned into a human state and howling with happy lust.

I did what I’d been trained to do. I ran like hell.