He ran for some time before he noticed that he was crying. Never, on the long pursuits the Family had endured on Snowglade, had he ever felt alone. Now the sour desperation of his predicament descended on him and he could not stop the anguish bubbling up in him. No Quath, no Family, just bare empty flight.

What would Killeen think? He made himself stop, willing the hardness into himself until the tears quit. He had to uphold the Bishop way. Even here, even alone. Maybe especially here.

He came to a bare stony territory. Would he be too exposed here? Dirty-gray clouds hugged the ground and then lifted suddenly, as if some giant had snatched them away. But there were none of the airborne forms that hovered half-seen like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. So he went on.

Something came over a distant peak and vectored in on him. He shot at it and missed and it burned his right side in an instant. His second shot got off as he went down. It caught the thing. A quick, buzzing fireball. Something tiny, tumbling. It crashed down, a sound like the air ripping apart.

He had shat his pants. That made him disgusted with himself but his right arm was more important.

The pain made his hands tremble. He got his right side up and running again with some repair work. His arm was sore but would move again.

He found running water nearby and got cleaned up. Humbling work. In an abstract way he was surprised he had been so scared. All fear, he realized, later seems somewhat ludicrous.

By the time he could limp over to where the thing had gone down there was just a hole in the ground. He had been damn lucky to wing the thing and knew it.

He licked his lips, feeling the fear again. If he kept going this way one of the seekers would track him for sure, bring down a whole flock the next time.

He remembered Quath’s little lesson about the sums and how in this geometry, Lanes were like those pairs of numbers. Each pair summed to a hundred, and rearranging them endlessly kept the grand total constant. The esty stayed intact.

And the total did not have to be a hundred or a thousand or a million. The Lanes could number a million. Or a billion. Or some other word offered by his chattering Isaac Aspect, big words ending in -ion that just said that it was bigger than any person could ever know.

So he was not surprised when time wore on and he kept moving and saw no one. He might never meet a human again. The Lanes could snake on for an uncountable, twisty forever.

The trick was to find a way out of this particular place. A way the mechs could not track easily. How? Just running harder wasn’t enough.

Puzzles thickened in his head. Quath had said that gravity was esty, curved. Mass did that. Planets held you to them by curving space-time, which humans felt as a clear, strong force. Yeasay, fine.

But Isaac said that esty curvature generated further curvature. So gravity could make more of itself, conjuring up more from less. Something had knitted this esty so that it held firm. It even prospered here on the lip of the abyss, kissing the Eater of Everything.

“Anything you understand, you can use,” Toby muttered to himself as he trotted. He remembered this was a saying of his grandfather Abraham, and wondered where in this place old Abraham might be.

“Abraham, he would’ve done something with this stuff,” he said, voice frail against the whispery musics of the landscape.

No place to run, not literally anyway. And he was getting tired.

So he tried to shape the timestone. Logic said it was impossible but logic wasn’t doing too well here lately, was it?

His weaponry had no effect, but after laser-cutting the stuff glowed. He tried microwaves, sonics, even a nano-reamer he still carried from Snowglade days. Nothing worked.

Next he used the whole spectrum. No response. He hit it with pulsed infrared. For the barest instant a thin grin split the stone.

Again. This time it lasted longer and he jammed his boot in and shoved. It gave, then started crushing his boot. He yanked free and the stuff slammed shut.

Next time he was more careful. First, he found a place where he felt nauseous. Dimpling perspectives, watery light, refractions of sound and space. Where the Lanes intersected, gravity twisted.

Second, he cut and heated it. He jabbed, pried, ran through variations of weaponry. Sweaty work. He cut his hand, scorched an arm. Nothing came right the first time. But it seemed that he was slicing deeper into the timestone. The fatigue got to him and he had to stop and rest. Sweat trickled into his eyes and then he knew it wasn’t sweat.

Tears again. He was impatient with himself this time. Killeen would snort and look the other way. Besen would be sympathetic, and that would be even worse.

“If they get you, know what they’ll do?” Saying it out loud helped. “They’ll suck out all you know. Use it against Besen and Killeen and ever’body.”

His voice was stern and that helped, too. He realized how much he missed that simple thing, the sound of humanity, a voice not his own. So damn screwed up you’re talking to yourself, another part of him said, but he pushed that thought away. Anything that made him feel better helped, and the hell with analyzing.

Back to work.

Progress was slow. He found a rippling ridgeline with esty-fog rolling over it in strands of orange light. He tried the cutting again. A broad line cracked the stone. Through it he caught a whiff of something vile and poisonous, pale green vapors—and kicked at the stone to close it, fast. Hard as the esty was to open, acoustic tremors could zip it shut again. The stuff had a kind of surface tension.

After that he learned to sense the dimples and fluxes in the esty. He could slit one open for a quick look, but it slammed back tight.

Which was lucky, most of the time. Some passageways led to Lanes of vacuum. Others to stony, chilling landscapes. A few to howling, dusty tornadoes.

His systems warned him of openings that brimmed with searing radiation. He closed up fast, but one time something hot and fluid shot out and darted away before the seam shut. It cut a deep streak across the sky.

Once he saw a whole city through a momentary slit. Its streets turned and looped around each other. So did the oblong buildings, and traffic of slender tubes teemed in and out of the porous walls. The things inside the tubes looked like boiling white stones. They seemed to take some interest in him and he felt a wave of sudden, solid fear. He let the portal crash shut.

After a few dozen times he had learned the feel of it, a kind of craft. For days he simply fooled and tinkered and forgot about what was probably following him. If he was to ever find the Family or Abraham, he had to master the skills here.

The spots where the esty seemed pliable kept moving, restless loci. He was half-nauseous as he worked the stone but that was the price. Finding the moment to strike, the angle, the spectrum—it became more like hunting than craftwork, intuitions unspoken.

Most Lanes seemed hostile to human life. Not all. He slipped through one that seemed pleasant, the first time he had tried to wriggle his way in.

It worked, barely. He lost some skin and suffered frostbite in his fingers. But he got through into a valley of fractured timestone. At least it was more interesting than where he had been.

What’s more, experience taught him that the timestone lied. Many times he sat eating whatever he had gathered and blending it in with his rations, and marveled at the formal, clean-lined shapes of distant ranges. They were elegant, serene, pointed. Then later he met them close up and knew them for what they were—rough, unforgiving.

Torsions pulled at him in the broken slides he struggled across, along the jagged ledges he pulled himself over. Torques played along the narrow and shifting shelves he crawled along, afraid to look down or up because those directions were fickle and flickering.