“Where?”
“Go look at the Forerunner ruins. Be inspired. And Prone can show you where we’re growing the irukan.”
Why was she doing this? Jul had asked himself that question a hundred times a day and none of the answers convinced him. She was far too compliant, far too soon. And that’s the same face that I present to her. But what if that’s what she wants? What if she’s observing me for some reason; what if this is exactly what she wants me to do? But that didn’t matter. He’d taken a vital step toward getting out of Trevelyan.
He could waste the rest of his life asking himself endless questions and taking no action. It was time to act. He set off across the grass, unsteady and uncomfortably aware of the Huragok trailing a few paces behind him, but he kept going through the gap between the buildings and out into open land. He passed humans in pairs and groups, some of them wearing baggy single-piece garments in various drab colors with rank markings he didn’t understand, others in uniforms with gold trim that were more familiar. They looked at him with expressions that he’d learned to recognize— loathing, suspicion, dread—and some that he hadn’t. But none of them seemed startled or afraid. He wasn’t the victor here, the conqueror, the invader: he was their prisoner, a curiosity at best and an object of contempt at worst.
When he final y stopped, his legs were shaking. He turned to look back on the human settlement and noted again how rapidly it had spread.
< You do not know where you are going,> Prone said. < Do you want to see the Forerunner buildings? The nearest is a kilometer from here.
The irukan crop is much closer. > “Show me that first, then.”
Prone did no more than lead him in the right direction. Huragok general y spoke when spoken to and volunteered nothing. But why would they?
They were just machines. Jul could see the irukan now, a long, broad strip of yel ow-green leaf topped with white spikes of seed heads that stretched over the brow of a smal hil . That in itself was incredible. The crop took two seasons to mature, but here it was, growing and ripening in what could only have been days. It took longer than that to germinate. He remembered playing in the fields around Bekan as a child, digging up the seeds from the furrows while the Grunts who were stil busy sowing it made angry gestures at him.
“How did they achieve that?” he asked. “How did they make it grow this fast?”
< Many techniques, > Prone said. < And we created a bubble for them.> Jul struggled with the word bubble. “A glass house? A plant shelter?”
< Slipspace. A time out of this time. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster. > No Huragok he’d ever come across could manipulate time. That made these creatures even more dangerous as a weapon for the humans to use. Jul couldn’t yet imagine al the ways that could be misused, but he was certain that it would be. He walked through the crop, half expecting to find that it was somehow artificial, but the leaves smel ed strongly when he accidental y trod on them. When he reached the top of the hil he looked down on another familiar sight that shouldn’t have been here in this outrageous lie of a world: colos, wandering around in pens with high fences that seemed to be woven loosely from strands of metal. The pens had concrete floors, and the animals nibbled at irukan plants piled in a mesh trough.
It took him a few moments to work out what he was actual y looking at. In one pen, the colos appeared strong and healthy, with thick, glossy coats. In the other, they looked thin and listless. Some of them were stretched out on the floor, flanks heaving. He wasn’t sure why the humans had separated the flocks.
“Do the humans know how to take care of these animals?” Jul asked. He didn’t, but any fool could tel what a sick colo looked like. “What’s wrong with the ones in that pen?”
< They are unwell, > Prone said. < The others are not. > Prone clearly had a talent for being annoyingly enigmatic. Jul would have to get more answers from Magnusson the next time she visited. He wondered if the colos were infected, and whether the same sickness was causing his symptoms. He carried on past the pens and Prone speeded up to head him off.
< Wrong direction. > The Huragok was remarkably insistent. < The nearest Forerunner buildings are in the other direction. You are too weak to walk to the others. > Jul wanted nothing more than to curl up in a dark corner and sleep, but he was relatively free now and he was determined to make the most of it.
“Take me to the nearest ruins, then.”
< They are not ruins. > Perhaps it was reverence. The word might have sounded disrespectful to the Huragok, and Jul knew just how sacred even the most derelict heap of crumbling stone was to the monks back home. Interfering with those relics could stil mean death. He fol owed Prone in silence, getting closer to the elegant towers that he’d seen from a distance, until he could pick out the shapes of the gold stone blocks and the smooth curves. The buildings looked as if they’d been constructed yesterday. They were perfect.
“So they’re not ruins,” he said. There were many remains of the Forerunners that were in excel ent condition, but none like this. “What are they?
What did they do?”
< They still function, > Prone said.
“Function?”
< Function, > Prone said, and didn’t elaborate.
NES’ALUN KEEP, ACROLI, EIGHTY KILOMETERS FROM ONTOM “What are you?” Elar demanded. More females clustered around her, al armed and al staring at Phil ips as if they were sizing him up for cuts of meat. “And how can you speak our language?”
Phil ips had no strategy to fal back on except harmlessness. He could see youngsters creeping into the hal to check what their mothers were doing. With any luck, the females wouldn’t open fire with kids around.
“My name’s Evan Phil ips,” he said. Now came the big gamble. Whose side was this keep on, if any? He prepped for some creative embroidery.
“I’m … a language scholar. The Arbiter gave me permission to visit sacred sites to study the inscriptions. But I got lost.”
The females loomed over him. Some of the kids were as tal as he was. But it was the plasma pistols that worried him most.
“How, Efanphilliss?” Elar said.
Phil ips waited for a chance to play the arum card. Maybe one of the kids would have one. “How did I get lost?”
“Yes. Nobody strays here by accident.”
“I did. I stepped through a Forerunner portal in the temple at Ontom.”
It had far more effect than he bargained for. Elar leaned over to stare into his eyes. It was that awful moment when you felt an animal’s breath and didn’t know if it was going to lick you or sink its teeth into your face. “Not possible. No monk does this. No human ever could.”
Dengo butted in. “He did, my lady. I saw him. He just popped up in the holy ruins. Out of nowhere.”