The End of the Line

little one keep going?"

  "She'll have to," Soma said grimly.

  "Do you know what she'll become?"

  "I wish I did," Soma replied. "I can't see it in her yet. Or in Edeline."

  "It's bound to be one of the known variants," he said. "Isn't it? So far that's been the way. Everyone who's undergone the change has turned into one of the flavors. Unless there's a new chef in the kitchen, perhaps?"

  "I said I can't tell," Soma snapped, moving away from him. This time she was telling the truth. As a Keeper she was supposed to know. After all, that was her role, her job. There was a time and a place for every thing and every one, and she was supposed to make sure that each was kept where it belonged. Any strays were returned to their flock. Any disorder was set back straight. But now, if "they" couldn't even keep the sun up in the sky, and she couldn't tell what a changeling would become, how could anyone expect anything anymore?

  She returned to Ember and helped the child to her feet.

  "We have to keep going," Soma said. "Red Cliff can carry you if you need that."

  Red Cliff nodded and held out his arms, but Ember looked away.

  "I'll make it on my own," she said, and started walking again. She found that Soma was right. The worst did seem to be over. Her feet ached and her legs were stabbed with pain, but she could move them, so she did. Edeline kept close and remained so focused on Ember that she didn't even notice her own initial changes, which were indeed minor compared to her friend's. Edeline was merely aging, and though at the same rate, time itself is vastly different for a youth than for an adult.

  Soma kept her eyes on the horizon, which was bringing the distant mountains closer with every step. Now they were in former farming country, and the remains of barns and homesteads were visible, sprinkled alongside the tracks, which were now raised on berms, elevated above the ditches and the scraggly skeletons of ancient fences and ruined dams. She did not know where they were going, and though she frequently prodded Red Cliff to consult the yellow book, it too told them nothing. Meanwhile, Zed was curiously silent and unresponsive as he took the lead and strode along before them. For several hours they walked along. The air was still, the day was warm, and there were no signs of machines in the sky or any other creatures on the ground.

  Seven

  An all-black machine the shape and size of a shoebox came roaring out of the sky with a whoosh and hovered in front of Edeline, blocking her progress. She stepped to the left and it matched her move, and again the same to the right. Its top remained at eye level with her, its sound changing to a purring and whirring as it opened and extended a long, narrow drawer towards her. On the shelf sat a mechanical squirrel, gibbering and twitching its tail. Edeline shook her head in confusion, and the shelf retracted just as quickly as it had emerged. Another drawer opened, above and to the left of the previous one, and made its offering, this time a loudly ticking wristwatch. Edeline waved it away with a gesture, and then a third, lower drawer protruded, this one holding a self-shuffling deck of cards. Edeline hesitated, watching in fascination as the deck cut itself, shuffled and collapsed several times in succession.

  Ember, who had been standing there, holding her head in the palms of her hand, suddenly leaped at the machine and barely grazed it with her fingers as it deftly evaded her with a last-second maneuver. Ember tumbled to the ground in disgust and dismay. At that moment, Zed grabbed it from behind and held it firmly in both hands. The machine revved and roared and tried to lift itself off into the air, managing to extend Zed's arms over his head and bringing his feet to its toes, but with an extra effort he pulled it back down to his chest and squeezed as hard as he could. The machine cracked and broke, emitting a streaming cloud of stinky brown smoke. Zed dropped it on the ground and stomped on it repeatedly, until the machine was nothing but a flattened pile of parts.

  "Why did you do that?" Soma nearly yelled at him. "We could have gotten something out of it. Now look at the thing!"

  "There was nothing in it," Zed retorted. "See? It was empty!"

  "But all of those things," Edeline started to say, but he interrupted her.

  "Manifested," he explained. "That's how they do. It's how I do. It's how it's done. Visualize and manifest."

  "It's like old-fashioned printing," Red Cliff put in. "I read about it once."

  "Imprinting," Zed corrected him. "And you read it wrong, but that doesn't surprise me. You people know nothing. Nothing!"

  Zed kicked at the broken box and resumed his march towards the mountains. The others followed along.

  "He's going through a phase," Red Cliff explained. "Adolescence, you see. I read about that too."

  Edeline glanced at Ember, who seemed on the brink, already, of that development herself. She had grown more than a foot since the morning, and her body was bursting out in all sorts of curves and shapes previously unimaginable in the perpetual child. Ember was acutely aware of all that, and extremely embarrassed. She couldn't believe she had missed grabbing the machine. It was true that she did not know where it was intending to go, but as a Savior she'd been the foremost expert in the forest at stopping and catching things. Here she had plenty of excuses, but the knowledge only burned inside her, the growing certainty that she would never again be who she knew herself so thoroughly to be. And if she was not herself, then who was she? How was she to even know? She had no time to think beyond this immediate haze. She was no longer herself. She was turning into something new and different, something undoubtedly worse, and she had no idea what that was. It didn't enter her mind that this transformation, so rapid and so unsettling, might also be hurtling her into unforeseeable dangers.

  Edeline was very much aware of this. She had already begun to deal with these issues in the years before her arrest and exile, as a presumably aging woman. She had seen herself, or imagined herself, entering the stage of menopause, turning fifty, mourning the passing of her chances at motherhood. She and her husband had put off having children for one reason or another until finally it was too late for either of them. She had not realized, until her capture and subsequent sterilization, that she had actually remained quite fertile at her permanent physical age of thirty-two all those nearly twenty years since she had chronologically turned thirty two. She had filed away those thoughts and griefs during her time in captivity, but now that her body and mind were en route once again towards oblivion, they came rushing back, and this time with added severity. We are aging rapidly, she said to herself, and at this rate, how much time do we, do I, really have left? Two weeks? Three? A month? And now looking at Ember she doubted even those calculations. It seemed to her that Ember had aged at least four years since breakfast. She was beginning to understand why Soma was in such a hurry.

  Soma was not interested in Zed's attitude or Ember's growing pains or Edeline's advancing sense of self-pity. She could feel all of that in their minds, as well as Red Cliff's cluelessness and her own doubts and confusion. She could not guess where the entrance to the underground was, if there even was an underground, or an entrance into it. She knew every inch of this territory and did not know of any such thing. There were no caves or caverns, no sinkholes or mudslides, nothing but long abandoned farms and ranches. As she walked, she scanned the skies for any signs of mechanical revenge, which she was certain was coming. They did not have to wait long. A series of flat, triangular shapes, folded like paper airplanes but with sharp, serrated edges and beady eyes appeared and came swooping down on them with a soft buzzing sound. Soma looked about her for any kind of implement, a stick or a rock or anything with which to defend herself and her party.

  She need not have bothered. From the front of the pack Zed came running back to join the group, armed with a stout rod of rebar. He set to the swarm with a fury, wheeling himself around in a blur and smashing each one out of the air with a series of ferocious blows. The tiny air force had no chance. Zed attacked with precision and power. After the assault he set about crunching them all under foot and kicking them off the rai
ls while the others stood and watched, astonished.

  "Better luck next time!" he shouted at the sky, flinging his bar to the ground and setting off once again.

  "I don't even want to know," Ember grumbled as they regrouped and continued on their way.

  "He knows!" Soma blurted out in sudden realization. "He can read them, can't he?" she asked Red Cliff, who only shrugged in response.

  "But he doesn't want to," she said. "We need them to fix things, and to do that we need to communicate with them, but only he can, and he won't. He just wants to destroy them. What are we going to do?"

  "Hey," Red Cliff interrupted, "Don't I know her?"

  Soma glanced at him sharply, about to rebuke him for his ridiculous non-sequitur, when she saw the woman he was speaking about. She was standing alone in the field to their right underneath an overgrown dogwood tree. She was tall and slender, with long light hair that must have been golden at one time but was now faded flax. Her lean face did look familiar, as did her ankle-length, shoulder-less sky-blue dress.

  "She does look familiar," Edeline put in, immediately realizing how stupid that sounded, coming as it did from someone who'd been in exile from the world for centuries. How could anyone at all look familiar to her, she wondered.

  "She's meant to," Soma chided them. "She's a Celebrity. You see them all over. It's one of the templates. They just hang around, waiting to be recognized, but they're nobody, really, and never were anybody."

  "Your people have some weird ideas," Ember said.

  "It's all in the name of Progress," Red Cliff told her. "You know. Practice makes Perfect. Upward and Onward. Eyes on the Prize and all that."

  "Do you think there will be more attacks?" Edeline asked, and Soma laughed.

  "Maybe, but I wouldn't worry about it. Zed seems to be on top of it."

  "Should we be afraid of him?"

  "I'm not," Ember said. "I think he's kind of cute," and as soon as she said it, she gritted her teeth and nearly slapped herself in the face. She could only hope that no one was paying attention. They were, but they ignored it anyway.

  "I honestly don't know," Soma said.

  "Let's see what the yellow book has to say about it," Red Cliff added, and pulled it out of his pocket. The book flipped right open to an empty page, and stayed there. It also remained empty.

  "Useful," Soma said, shaking her head.

  "I don't understand," said Red Cliff. "It's never like that."

  "Nothing's ever like this," said Soma. "Or like that," she added, pointing up to the sky, where they could see, now, in the middle of the day, the moon hanging up there, visibly twirling on its wobbly axis.

  Eight

  As advertised, Ember's outfit kept pace with her physical changes, but not entirely without error. At various points throughout the afternoon and into the night, the automatically self-adjusting clothing either lagged or raced ahead in anticipation, rendering her alternately squeezed and lost inside them.

  "So much for form-fitting," she complained to Edeline, who restrained a chuckle and answered,

  "Well, they're fitting some kind of form, just not your own."

  "I don't even know what my own is anymore," Ember scowled. She had had the most miserable day. It didn't help that Zed kept popping up at the most inconvenient times, offering her various food items the sight of which made her gag. She couldn't conceive of eating any of the offerings, which included burnt sausages, slimy cheeses, dry crackers and sticky melon. Zed was always proud to demonstrate his "manifesting" talents, but it never occurred to him to ask his guests exactly what they might prefer, instead showering them with exotic creations from his own imagination. Edeline