A Long Time Ago . . .

It was like a hive of hornets burrowed into his wrist, making his whole arm buzz. Poire’s implant screamed at him to slow down. To stop and breathe.

Not to mention the blood dripping down his face where a chunk of falling stone had grazed his scalp.

But his cultivar refused to let go of him, refused to let him stop and catch his breath, even though his lungs were on fire, and each bounding step sent daggers of pain shooting up his thighs. His head wound burned. Spots formed in the edges of his vision.

Xiaoyun, the only cultivar who ever tried with Poire, dragged him along. Her fingernails dug into Poire’s skin, cutting crescents of blood into the pale brown of his wrist. All he wanted to do was collapse against a wall and gasp for breath.

The ceiling of the Conclave was cracking into pieces and the air was thick with dust, but Xiaoyun didn’t stop.

When Poire asked, “Where is everyone else?” she responded only with one word:

“Gone.”

Where? Poire wondered. And what about the other Conclaves?

But Xiaoyun gave him no time to think. She looked exhausted—like the adults always did—but she had centuries of conditioning, and her legs were longer. Poire, at sixteen years old, was barely a newborn. Barely had the strength to keep up.

The walls were vibrating, which was wrong. The floors, too. And the lights in all the hallways were an emergency blue, bathing everything in a deep ocean glow. Bright white signs appeared on the walls, outlining their evacuation route.

So why was Xiaoyun taking them the wrong way? Back into the Conclave?

They burst out into that cavernous space. High above, numerous pieces of the artificial sun were flickering, all out of rhythm with each other, so the shadows of the towers danced over the walls and the flat city circle that surrounded the rising spiral plaza.

Carved into the walls of the cavern, the houses and offices and terraced parks began to crumble and crack away. Gravity ripped glass and concrete and lush foliage all the same, tearing down the high places around the cavern. Smashing the homes of all the people Poire had ever known against the Conclave’s floor.

The high cavern ceiling shuddered, and Poire only kept his feet because of Xiaoyun.

How could this happen? From what Poire had learned in his classes, they were nowhere near a fault line. And the planetary architects had revived the planet’s core long before Poire was born.

The sound was deafening. With each shuddering heave, more of the cavern walls crumbled, and chunks of rock and reinforced concrete exploded on the ground, spraying the air with gravel and splinters of stone. One huge crack had carved its way through the steps leading up to the infirmary, splitting each step in half.

Xiaoyun dragged Poire behind her as she took the steps two at a time. They slammed against the smooth concrete wall of the spiral plaza, where Poire’s cultivar finally let go of him. He collapsed against the cold surface, sucking down the air. His arm still stung where her fingernails had bitten into his skin, and his wrist, smeared with blood, was vibrating like mad, throwing words into his mind: Emergency! Evacuate immediately! High overhead, the metal braces that held up the sun made a low, dangerous groan.

“Open it!” Xiaoyun slammed her fist on the thick glass of a door. “Open it!”

The door chimed, saying one word over and over again: “Error. Error.”

“Override!” she screamed.

A red light flashed, but the doors did part, and Xiaoyun pulled Poire inside before the doors could change their mind.

A medical construct was resting in front of the main desk. Its body was slumped down, all four of its arms tucked into its vaguely humanoid torso. The contoured carbon fiber mask of its face was sterile and white and motionless. Its eyes, blank.

“Wake up. Wake up!”

The assistant’s head jerked up. Its eyes glowed red, then orange, then white as it moved through its waking states.

“Cultivar . . . Xiaoyun,” its mechanical voice clicked. Unusually slow and slurred. “How may I . . . help . . . today?”

Xiaoyun grabbed Poire and thrust him forward. “Help him.”

The medical construct’s gaze fell on him, eyes blinding white. Not blinking. Far too focused on Poire. “Help . . .” It echoed her, as if it had never heard the word before. “Help . . .”

Poire looked back at Xiaoyun, but she looked just as confused.

“What’s wrong with it?” Poire heard himself saying. His words came out like honey, like he was living through a dream. Or maybe that was only the warm trickle of blood running down his temple, his cheek.

The construct rolled around the desk. Two of its arms unfolded from its body, and its four-fingered grippers twitched hesitantly. The construct reached for Poire, and he could hear those metal fingers clamping at the air. Too hard.

“Help,” it said.

“Xiaoyun?” Poire backed into her. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Get back outside,” she said, pulling Poire back to the door, never taking her eyes from the construct. Her face tight with fear. “Get back outside now.”

“Don’t . . . move . . .”

“Outside!” she shouted, shoving him outside.

They were running again, across the spiral plaza. Xiaoyun only stopped to tear a strip of cloth from her shirt and press it to Poire’s head.

“What was wrong with the construct?” he asked, but she wouldn’t answer.

High above, a flock of repair drones was desperately, pointlessly trying to reinforce the cavern walls while the whole city shook.

They ran past a construct that had been smashed by falling debris. Cal, its name had been. Watcher Cal, who had never said no to playing with Poire and the others, back when they still wanted to do things like that.

Another construct had lost its head and was limping in a circle. Something huge dislodged from the ceiling. One of the sun’s lanterns. It sang as it fell, spinning through the air before smashing onto the limping machine and exploding. Xiaoyun covered Poire’s body with her own. She collapsed against him with a strangled gasp as glass shards shattered against her. Tears streamed down her face, and glass blades as large as Poire’s hand stuck out of the skin of her back.

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“Go!” she shouted at him.

The air felt as thick as water. His fingers were numb, like they belonged to someone else and he was only borrowing them. He saw himself crawl to her side, and he heard himself say, “Don’t move!” as he started to pull the glittering shards out of her skin. “Stay still.”

Each one elicited a cry of pain from Xiaoyun. She tried to push him away, saying, “Get to the cold chambers. Now!”

But the pain made her weak.

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Nanite,” she said. She begged.

Poire pulled on the satchel tied to her waist. The one all cultivars wore. Four nanite syringes were still intact, despite what they had been through.

“How many?” he asked, holding the satchel open.

Xiaoyun plunged her hand into the satchel, grabbed them all, and started jamming the syringes into her skin.

Far across the cavern, something metal screeched against something else. Poire turned around, but the other half of the cavern was growing dark as all the lights went out.

Xiaoyun struggled to stand. Through the new tears in her suit, he could see the blood clotting her wounds. White threads of pseudoskin crawled over the torn flesh, trying to stitch her cuts back together. But as she moved, the threads snapped and were split open.

Poire tried to tell her, but she growled at him through gritted teeth, “Go. I’m right behind you.”

She pushed Poire onward, and together they stumbled across the city circle.

Behind them, one of the office high-rises began to lean, twisting and turning as it fell in slow motion down the plaza. As its foundations ripped out of that wide spiral structure, it took a chunk of the First Trees with it. Glassy tree trunks cracked and shattered as they were lifted by their roots, their crystal boughs rising almost as high as the director’s spire.

How many afternoons had he spent reading and playing games under those branches?

Roots tore free of the plaza’s foundation, and trees snapped at their trunks, smashing down the spiral ramp and rolling out into the circle. A hundred different alarms screamed like birds of every color, the cacophony echoing in circles around the Conclave’s cavern.

They seemed to fly through the emergency-lit tunnels that led to Xiaoyun’s lab. He could feel the rumbling of the rock above and below them, and it made his legs feel weak and out of step.

Xiaoyun stopped at the monitor mounted on the wall. She waved away the dozens of alerts and emergency signals and summoned the view of the caldera on the surface above.

A smoldering wedge had blackened the caldera, turning hundreds of acres of painfully cultivated forest and wildlife into ash. It had blasted out through the caldera’s stone cliff and had even vaporized one of the towers.

Another tower was leaning heavily over a newly formed ledge. The basin of the caldera had cracked, as if something huge had exploded underneath the ground, turning the whole basin into three giant steps of land. Herds of animals ran through the trees. Flocks of birds wheeled overhead in fluttering clouds. And high above it all, the dome itself was flickering. Dying.

“How?” Xiaoyun said. “How did it find us?”

“What is it?” Poire asked. But he knew she wouldn’t tell him. They never told him anything.

“We needed more time,” she said. And then she looked down at him with a strange look in her eyes. Like he was the most important thing in the world to her. He almost believed it, too.

Suddenly, Poire felt the urge to hug her. To tell her it would be OK. Just like she used to tell him, before he gave up. He hated the thought the moment it arose and shoved it back down.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re almost there.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

It must’ve been something in his tone, though Poire didn’t mean for it to sound like he was arguing. Either way, she whirled on him. Her eyes, normally so calm and focused, were wide and wild.

“This is not the time, Poire. Please.”

He swallowed the thoughts that came to his lips and let her drag him through the doors and airlocks and hallways lined with blank, error-ridden screens. Deeper and deeper into the lab, where half the lights were flickering and the other half had gone out. The air was so cold he could see his breath in front of him.

The very last room at the end of the hall refused to open for her. She screamed and cursed at it as she tried frantically to claw it open with her fingers. Finally, she took a few steps back and stared at the door.

She’s in the admin console, Poire thought. But Xiaoyun wasn’t supposed to do that. She was only a cultivar . . .

The ceiling above rumbled. He thought he heard an explosion in the distance, but this deep in the Conclave, it was hard to hear anything.

The door slid open.

A low ceiling. Cold chambers lined one wall. Each had its own core, and each core had two backups.

“Get in the suit,” she said, pointing at the lockers on the other wall.

He wanted to protest. They always made him strip for the tests, and he didn’t want to do that now. But her face brooked no argument, so he grabbed a suit out of the locker, turned around, and tried to ignore the sting of shame as he took off his clothes and stepped into the formfitting fabric.

By the time he was done pulling the last of that stiff-yet-flexible fabric over his arms and up his neck, Xiaoyun had the cold chamber primed. Frost formed on the glass, and the hiss of invisible gasses filled the cramped compartment.

She held out a hand, and he took it. Her fingers were like ice, and her hands were shaking. And when he stepped inside, she clung to him longer than she needed to. Like she didn’t want to let go.

But, with a sharp intake of breath, she did. Her jaw was clenched as she hooked up the dozens of wires to his skin, to his suit, and to the chamber itself. Double-checked the syringe alignment so they would all enter at the same time. That part wasn’t necessary, Poire knew. It would work either way. But she was doing it so he wouldn’t have to feel a dozen separate pinpricks.

“How long will we be under?” Poire thought to ask as she flipped the final switch. The hissing of gas increased, and he felt the chill begin to flood his veins.

Instead of answering, she reached out and stroked his face. Now, her fingers felt hot as the blood in his veins was traded out for something colder.

“Xiaoyun?” he said, feeling the panic surge in his chest. Rising faster than the chill could take him under. “You’re coming too, right?”

He could see his own blood draining into the vials of the cold chamber. Flash frozen, so it would be ready to transfer back into him when he woke up.

“Don’t worry, sweet one. Remember everything I taught you. And don’t ever give up. Hope is all we ever have.”

“No!” he said, and he sounded so childish. He didn’t care. “Xiaoyun, don’t leave me!”

“Be brave, Poire,” she choked. Shook her head.

The dark part of his mind—the part that had been growing, drinking in his every thought over the last few months and years—was glad he was going to sleep.

Isn’t this what you wanted?

To leave?

For everything, to just go away?

No, he thought. His lips were too heavy to move. Xiaoyun, stay with me.

Please.

The last thing he remembered, before falling asleep, was looking into Xiaoyun’s dark, worried eyes. And the way her voice broke when she said, “It’s all up to you now, Poire.”

***

Poire woke three times.

The first time, it was to the sound of a single, wailing alarm: Low power. Low power. The cut on his head burned with a white-hot fire.

How long had it been? It felt like minutes since he had fallen asleep. Hours, maybe.

The glass of his chamber was frosted over, and he could just barely make out the room beyond. A mountain of dirt and cavern gravel and boulders had caved in through the ceiling and blocked the hallway.

There was a chiming sound, so clear it had to have come from his own cold chamber. A voice said: “Connecting to emergency reserves.” Clouds of gas erupted from nozzles inside the cramped cold chamber. His thoughts dulled. The blissful oblivion of sleep rose up to meet him . . .

There.

His eyes shot open.

It was her.

She was lying under the rubble, her head bent too far to the left, so her eyes were facing his chamber. But she had no eyes. No skin at all. He could recognize her only by the shape of her hair, because something had eaten her face down to the bone.

Poire fell asleep screaming.

***

The second time he woke, he was shivering and covered in sweat. There was frozen blood on his face. Something was very wrong with him, and with the air. It felt like a hundred wooden nails were digging into his back, and he was freezing, and his whole body was maddeningly itchy. But his body wouldn’t move.

Where am I? Where is . . . He remembered nothing.

He knew only that he was dying.

A voice floated into his mind, unbidden. There is a plan, it said.

He tried to focus on his wrist implant. Tried to summon the last of his energy and send up an emergency signal. Poire felt the familiar surge of energy riding through his body.

Only . . .

Only there was no answer.

And when the surging energy failed to connect, it ran out. His wrist didn’t respond, nor did anything else.

Poire collapsed once more into darkness.

***

The last time he woke, Poire found himself face-to-face with a bird.

No, not a bird.

It was a creature that looked a lot like a bird, but it was huge. Taller than he was. And it had a humanoid body, clothed in leather and iron buckles and crude linen, thoroughly soiled with dirt and grime. Blue-black feathers covered every inch of its skin. Ridged feathers carved the outline of its face, and layers of wing feathers ran down from its shoulders to the tips of its near-human fingers.

The question tumbled out of Poire’s mouth before he could think:

“What are you?”

And to his immense surprise, the bird-thing opened its beak and answered, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”