People caught in front of the wonder stared, and then when it came close, everybody turned, trying to leap out of the way.

“That’s all there is,” Karlan shouted. “Caught in some kind of cyst high in the stomach, all alone.”

A single child would still be important.

Two of the coronas’ older children came forwards, intercepting the ball, and List stayed at his son’s side.

King stopped the humming and the roll with one bare foot.

A sphere was part of the object, but there was more than that. One of the sphere’s faces was adorned with cylinders—fourteen cylinders—and that made it look less pretty and perfect than it would have looked otherwise.

“Do you know this thing?” King began.

Diamond said, “Maybe,” and bent low.

“I know this thing,” King said.

What Diamond recognized was the shape that made no sense other than looking distinctly familiar. Did he once have a toy that resembled this object? None came to mind, and the more he tried to remember toys, the less likely that felt.

But the object was definitely an object.

Not a child, no.

King played his toes across the top of the sphere.

Stomach juices clung to the round surface. Kneeling, Diamond put a hand against the grayness and pulled away the acids and a scrap of corona flesh. The sphere was wider than his forearm was long, but shorter than his full arm. It had weight but not as much as he might have guessed. Then a memory found him and took hold, a voice from some deep past—a human voice, female and familiar—and he heard her telling someone, “The one in the middle. That’s the trigger.”

“I know this thing,” King repeated.

“Yes,” Diamond said.

“I don’t know the language, but I’m remembering a voice.”

“A human voice,” Diamond said.

“No,” said King. “It was like my voice. It was beautiful.”

List stood close to them, and Meeker had joined him. To nobody in particular, Archon asked, “Is it some kind of machine?”

“A weapon,” the general suggested.

Instinct kept Diamond silent, and maybe it was the same for King.

“Any ideas, son?”

King didn’t answer his father’s questions. Saying nothing, he bent his legs until his knees were planted against the floor.

Diamond couldn’t remember his brother ever holding this pose.

“The middle one,” King whispered.

Diamond gave the ball a half-spin. Fourteen cylinders were pointed at their faces, offering no advice. But for the first time in the boy’s life, his stomach felt sick, as if razors were bouncing in his middle, and the pain and accompanying dread grew worse when Diamond obeyed some imprecise, presumably ancient instruction, his right index finger slipping inside that middle cylinder.

The cylinder was smooth as a gun barrel, and it ended with a hard flat surface that did nothing.

He touched bottom and nothing happened, not to the ball or to them, and that felt like a wonderful stroke of luck. Like a monkey who leaps from one branch without knowing if another branch is below: Diamond had taken a gigantic chance, and he had survived.

List and Meeker were talking to Karlan and the other slayers, demanding that everyone climb back inside, to hunt through the stomach again.

With his smallest finger, King reached into the center cylinder.

Again, nothing happened.

But the ball remained a miracle. The gray surface was as perfect and smooth as any substance made by any human. All of time had been spent inside a beast’s erosive belly, yet the sphere’s mirror-like shine was spellbinding.

Diamond and King stared at their own reflections.

With a flat hand, King wiped away more acids, and he laughed at the distorted image of himself.

Then a third face joined their reflections. She was a plain-faced woman wearing a colonel’s uniform, and what made her remarkable was the smile that was very much like their smiles. Whatever this mystery was, it thrilled her beyond all measure.

King turned to look at the officer.

“May I?” she said.

Against every instinct and all of her endless fears, Quest had sneaked into this facility. She came forwards with the chaos, and now she was kneeling between them, not caring who might notice. Her hand and just her hand had ceased to be human. It resembled the complicated limb of an insect, and her longest finger started to enter the cylinder, not quite touching bottom when she stopped herself.

“No,” she said.

People began noticing the colonel kneeling with the boys. Bystanders were talking, and Seldom was poking Elata with an elbow, saying, “Look, look.”

“No,” Quest said once again, and she pulled her hand away, the finger hovering in the air.

One authentic general shouted.

“The sister’s here!” she cried out.

And then it was King whose hand jumped ahead, grabbing what wasn’t a wrist and shoving two smaller fingers into that center cylinder.

One last time, she said, “No.”

Then she touched bottom, probably for no longer than a quick heartbeat, and an army of mirrors had nothing to reflect, and the huge building was plunged into darkness.

Startled, the world stopped talking.

And then a smart voice—Seldom’s voice—shouted out, “It’s out, it’s gone. The sun is gone.”

FIVE

This was a harder birth than the last birth.

Maybe in some remote past, one of them suffered more terribly. And the most miserable infancy could always be longer and perhaps, perhaps more painful. But all of that was conjecture, not memory. Memory gave them a stick with lines, a measuring rod to set beside their present burdens. The only other birth that they could remember involved the papio feeding them easy meals and simple conversations and some days filled with kindness, or at least the absence of outright malevolence. But nobody in this place pretended to be their parent. What they brought from their former life, knowledge about machines and science, human languages and human politics, offered less than nothing in this new existence. Existence was filled with endless, wrenching demands. The only goal was survival. Between every day’s beginning and end, there were moments and sometimes long intervals when survival seemed unlikely, and the despair only worsened when night descended.

Even something as simple as one small escape was impossible.

For days and days and days, they were pinned inside a cavity—a slick-walled chamber empty of everything but the eight of them.

At first, they were barely joined. Flesh that was happy in cold realms and a thin atmosphere had been shredded, and then it was seared. The present climate was a furnace in darkness and even worse when the sun washed over the world. The toxic atmosphere was thicker than water, and it never quit pressing against the cooked meat and eight hapless brains. To lay at the bottom of this hole, unable to heal and unable to die, was a fate that made the bravest, most secure among them think the impossible:

This was deserved.

Just punishments were being delivered to the wicked.

Even the worst among them—Divers—was ready to accept that nothing would ever change. More brutal days were coming, and what remained of the body would keep baking and mummifying, leaving them to suffer endlessly inside a carcass discarded by some vengeful, unimaginative Fate.

Tritian was best suited for this furnace. But without food, without energy, his abilities went to waste.

Eyes were made, and nothing good was seen.

Various ears were woven, and there was nothing to hear but slow massive winds and little animals squeaking and the shredded remains of great voices—corona voices, everyone agreed.

“Something edible, something sweet, will come close,” they told each other. “And we’ll catch it and eat it and grow again.”

Nothing came.