A thousand human voices were close enough to be heard. Quest listened to citizens on the District’s wild border, and she eavesdropped on foresters and hunters perched in closer places. Every one of them was agitated, angry, and terrified, and they couldn’t reveal their deepest feelings quickly enough.

Half of those voices talked about the papio.

Half of that half saw no reason to give the enemy warning or measured decency. The counterattack had to be immediate, without limits. Justice demanded murder on a matching scale, which was ten or twenty or fifty thousand dead, and they wanted nothing else and many wanted to help with the killing.

“Damn all of the papio,” they said.

That was when Quest finally twisted a portion of her eyes and ears, fixing them on the distant reef.

Watching the tree-walkers was always easier than studying the papio. The wilderness trees grew thin and high at its margins, and the reef-humans had better eyes than their cousins had. Worse still, Quest could see very little besides limbs and leaves, and she expected to hear nothing but wilderness sounds. That’s what came to her at first. A hundred thousand trees were calmly swaying in the wind. But then a whisper arrived, strained through wood and cricket song, and she pivoted almost all of her ears, aiming for the inhabited coral.

A rough rattling noise emerged, like a giant insect shivering itself warm.

Then a second rattle found her.

And suddenly she counted five rattles, with vaguer sounds coming from up and down the reef. Powerful jet engines were laboring but not moving. Fuel was being spent for reasons she couldn’t imagine, and she waited for the papio wings to launch. But some invisible signal was given or an established timetable was being followed. Inside the same moment, every engine dropped into silence.

Clinging to her fragile perch, Quest wondered how fast she could strip away her new flesh, and where she could hide before night.

SIX

Father closed the office door while Good claimed the top of the Archon’s desk. A wealth of important papers stood in a stack, ready to be shredded into a workable nest, but the monkey squatted at the desk’s edge, defecating into the round trash basket, and then he closed his eyes as if deep in sleep.

Diamond thought he should put the mess somewhere else.

But he did nothing.

Father slowly lowered himself into one of the guest chairs, and Diamond sat beside him. The Archon’s chair was behind the desk, very tall and made from black leather, steady use leaving the faint impression of the woman’s shoulders and head.

Father took a deep breath.

The boy studied the empty chair.

“I never imagined this,” said Father. “That anyone would want to do this . . . whatever this is . . . ”

The Archon wasn’t with them, yet Diamond could see her plainly.

That was important.

Why was it important?

“Look at me, Diamond.”

The boy didn’t want to be seen. He was waiting for his face to find a worthy expression—some sorrowful grin or wild grief or simple crazy terror. Any expression would be better than the rigid, unfeeling mask plastered over his features now. But too many feelings were roiling inside him, too many wounds. Maybe the invulnerable brain had been injured and needed to heal. But the brain was harder than his flesh and his bone, and maybe the wounds would never heal. That’s what Diamond was hoping, because awful days like these should leave scars that never went away.

Father put a hand on his hand.

Diamond turned toward him.

The soft old face was wet under the eyes. The scar seemed to be the biggest wrinkle. Father sighed, and with another man’s voice, he said, “I want you to know.”

The voice was too high, too thin.

Diamond smelled fresh turds and his father’s sweat and his own sweat, which was saltier than anyone else’s. A full recitation passed before he asked, “What do you want me to know?”

“How thrilled I am that you’re alive.”

A set of broad windows looked across a slice of forest that hadn’t fallen yet. The air was teeming with screeching homeless birds. Commuter blimps and private airships were coming from far-flung parts of the District, wanting to help or at least hoping to measure the catastrophe. A much larger airship maneuvered in the distance—an elegant long machine woven around a skeleton of corona bones, made silver from the many corona scales fixed to its hull.

Father kept talking. “That’s what your mother would want,” he said. “First in her mind would be your survival.”

Diamond looked at the chair and the left-behind impressions again.

“Mother isn’t gone,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Father said. “It’s early. Ships and refugees are scattered. We can’t say anything for certain.”

Diamond meant something else, but he did a poor job saying so.

Suddenly, with both hands, someone struck the closed door.

The boy jumped, but not Father.

“Yes,” Merit said without turning. “What is it?”

Tar`ro looked in. “The Happenstance is ready.”

“All right.”

“We can climb on board whenever we’re ready.”

“Thank you, my friend.”

The guard nodded, watching both faces. Then he said, “It looks like a very short day. The sun’s dimming fast.”

A lot of trees had fallen and burned, and the coronas’ realm always thrived when that fierce air was seasoned with ash.

“We won’t be much longer,” Father said.

Tar`ro nodded, left.

The military airship had dropped from view. Diamond watched the birds, except he wasn’t seeing them. His eyes were open yet in some odd fashion blind. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, softly and then hard, and opening them again, he found his father sitting in the Archon’s tall chair, hiding every trace of the little woman.

“I was counting on them putting us inside somebody’s office,” Father said.

Diamond looked at the walls. Each was adorned with pictures and plaques and certificates full of words that he didn’t have the patience to read.

“They’d leave me with a working call-line,” the man added.

Prima enjoyed five working lines to the world, which was a huge number. Maybe only the Archon of Archons had more. Father lifted the receiver and touched several glowing buttons. A ring ended with a buzzing voice, and when the voice quit, Father said, “This is Merit. Now I want you to listen to me.”

Older children had always helped care for the youngsters.

That was the human way.

Adults weren’t suited to the demands of little ones. Somebody needed to feed the creatures, and they had to be bathed and clothed. Small transgressions demanded punishment. Someone needed to act as a diplomat when young friendships were tested. But there was a subtle, far greater blessing in this tedium. The caretakers had no choice but talk to these tiny, uncivilized beings. Every day, instructions and clear warnings had to be given, moral laws invoked, and the same laws had to be defended from evil and doubt and lazy blood. Old stories were recited from memory, and even if the little ones were filthy loud brats with the attention spans of roaches, old stories had a habit of coming alive for the speakers. Suddenly these weren’t strings of memorized words, but they were Truth and Authority, and this was why noses were wiped and asses were spanked every day: the partly grown caretakers were making themselves human.

Papio children had always helped raise the Eight.

At first local boys and girls were gathered up and sworn to secrecy. They helped feed the odd mouths and clean up the nasty messes while the doctor and various experts failed to make contact with the Eight.

But one caretaker made it his mission to stand before the swollen, helpless monster. Day after day, he would hold up a simple object or body part, showing it to whatever looked most like an eye. He named the object, repeating the word a thousand times, and then he listened to the best mouth, ignoring the mutters and groans, waiting for that clumsy first word.