The Sentry gestured—one flip of the number two hand. It’s a lefty, Valya thought. And said, “It was a simple gesture. It’s either yes—”

“Or no,” Dale said.

“Let’s assume yes,” Zack said. He was slowly handing the pliers back to Makali. Then, after again establishing eye contact with the Sentry, he moved Makali into position with the pliers.

“Okay, doc,” he told her. “Do your thing. Just move slowly.”

Valya could see that Makali’s hands were trembling. But her body language was completely resolute, like a high diver on a platform.

She took two slow, almost bridelike steps, which put her within reach of the Sentry and its shard. Then, like a mime, she slowly unfolded her hand and the pliers, and locked the nose onto the shard.

At that moment, Zack turned to the Sentry, clutching his left hand with his right, as if the left were injured, and making a growling sound.

Then he opened the hands and smiled, as if to say, It’ll all be over in a second.

And he told Makali, “Proceed. And everybody be prepared to jump back.”

Makali made a first, tentative tug, with no results, not even a grunt from the Sentry.

“He’s the size of an NFL lineman,” Zack said. “You’re going to have to pull harder than that.”

“I have no leverage,” Makali said. “It’s too high—”

“Just do it.”

Another tug. Nothing.

“Goddammit,” Makali said. But she kept her right hand on the pliers, using her left to wipe sweat from her eyes.

The Sentry made a gesture and a sound. This was unlike its early communications: the gesture used the lower working hand, and the sound was more high-pitched.

“It’s telling you to go ahead,” Valya said, unable to stop herself. How can you be sure of that?

“What if he bleeds out?”

“That’s a risk it will have to take,” Dale said.

As Valya watched, Makali put more and steadier pressure on the pliers, moving it ever so slightly from side to side.

And the shard began to move.

Valya could see the Sentry shudder, likely with pain.

In a few seconds, the bloody shard was out, dropping to the floor.

Makali was rooted where she stood, in shock at what she had wrought. Zack gently edged her aside and examined the wound. “Some bleeding,” he said. “Doesn’t look infected, though I’m not sure I would know it.”

The Sentry seemed to have its own idea about how to treat the injury. It used both upper hands to hammer at the covering of the nearest intact cell. Breaking through, it withdrew a handful of yellow substance that it swiftly transferred to the wound, which was now within reach.

Then it turned away and began shambling deeper into the Beehive.

“What, not even a thank you, masked man?” Dale said.

“It made some gestures,” Valya said, not entirely untruthfully; the creature had flapped its good lower left hand several times in what seemed to be movement unrelated to scooping and placing the goo. She chose to interpret that as Thank you, or even You can go now. She said, “It may not have a cultural history of gratitude. Even some human cultures are like that.”

“What next?” Makali said. She was busy trying to clean the bloodied pliers on her pants leg, then replacing the tool in the kit—all with trembling hands.

“I don’t know about you guys,” Zack said, “but I’m getting hungry.”

“And thirsty,” Dale said.

“I think we follow our friend and see if he has a cultural history of hospitality.”

XAVIER

Xavier Toutant doubted he would ever be as comfortable in the Keanu habitat as he had been in Houston—even though he hated Houston. Life here was too raw, too unfamiliar, and too complicated. He missed Momma and his friends, he missed television, he missed having fun.

He was having no fun here. None.

But the one thing in Keanu’s favor…there was no real night. No spooky wolf hours. Xavier had never liked the dark. Nothing good had ever happened to him much after the sun went down.

The lights in the Keanu sky never dimmed. It never got much brighter than twilight, but it never got much darker.

He loved that. It made him daring. He set off for the Beehive, on his own, without having to ask permission—without expecting to see anyone dogging his path. Should he be stopped, he had prepared an answer to the question, “Where do you think you’re going?” And it was, “To see if we’re going to have chickens or ducks.” He wasn’t doing any cooking, because there wasn’t any cooking to do yet, but Mr. Drake and Mr. Weldon knew that he had been a cook and wanted to cook again.

He even had a motive that he would keep to himself, which was this: He had gotten by for a couple of days trading those candy bars. But he was down to his last two, and when they were gone, he would need new currency.

He couldn’t get close to the machines on the second floor of the Temple, but he could explore the Beehive. Surely there would be something of use here.

Not that he expected to be stopped and questioned.

Whether it was having more and fresher food in their bellies, or cumulative exhaustion, the HBs turned in early and en masse that night. The only exceptions were Vikram Nayar’s Temple team; veterans of projects in the IT world, they seemed eager to work all night unlocking secrets of the Temple.

Xavier wished them all the luck in the world. He was grateful that they’d figured out how to get some food out of the place, and even a few utensils.

They’d made a lot of progress in one day. Who knew what would be spilling out of the Temple over the next week or two months?

They might even build a house or twenty!

They could even build a whole town…complete with a farm, of sorts. Maybe a barn, too.

Because Xavier was seeing and hearing about animals emerging from the Beehive.

Xavier had seen the dog, of course. And then a cow, which some of the Houston people had claimed and were trying to feed.

And toward the end of this day, as operations and experiments in the Temple continued, he had seen birds flying against the strange ceiling of the habitat. He hadn’t been close, and the lighting was strange, but they looked like sea birds. Gulls.

That was all he needed. There was some weird shit going on in this Beehive place, and he wanted to see it for himself.

It wasn’t really very far, no worse than walking to Le Roi’s from home the time his truck broke down. And substantially less dangerous: no drunken cowboys gunning past him in their vehicles.

All he had to do was walk.

The whole trip took less than twenty minutes. Actually, he had a clue that he was approaching the Beehive before he could see it…there were muddy tracks everywhere, most of them leading out and spreading.

Xavier was no outdoorsman. He had never been hunting or camping or fishing in his life. So he wasn’t sure exactly what kind of tracks he was seeing, but even to his untrained eye there appeared to be at least half a dozen animals…and a couple of them with big hooves or paws or whatever the hell you called them.

And they diverged, too, some of them going up-habitat, back toward the vesicle port…some of them down-habitat.

Some unwary HB was in for a hell of a surprise, because whatever these animals were, they were sure to be hungry.

That thought made him nervous, because he realized the animals might be eating each other. Xavier was used to dealing with chickens and lobsters, so the thought of sundered animal flesh wasn’t itself a problem. But he didn’t look forward to the sight of a cow’s head ripped from its body, or a pile of entrails. No, thank you.

With tracks came animal shit. Lots of it, and fairly fresh, from the looks of it.

Suddenly the idea of exploring the Beehive was much less attractive.

The trail of tracks and shit led him right to the main opening, which looked like a cave from some old movie, one where you can easily see that the “rocks” are papier-mâché or rubber.