“Think this’s better?” Jocelyn asked quietly. She displayed her hair, now washed. Killeen realized he had dozed off for a while.

“Looks different, yeasay. Fine.”

He could never think of anything to say to her these days. She was finger-curling her hair into a tide of tight whorls that seemed to rush away from her high forehead. Cermo-the-Slow carefully combed her side panels down from the crown. Jocelyn had already parted and smoothed Cermo’s bushy blond growth, which sloped over his ears with streamers of white and yellow. A blue elastic gathered his thick tufts into a firm knot at the base of his skull.

Killeen dreamily squatted, watching Cermo groom Jocelyn. A life of running had given all the Family legs which could squat for days, ready to move instantly. It had also given them helmets for protection, which in turn messed their hair. In the years when humanity dwelled in the Citadel, those who went out to forage among the slowly encroaching mechworld had been treated to a ceremonial cleansing upon their return. This ritual expanded from a mere efficient scrub into a prolonged bath and hairdressing. Those brave enough to venture forth deserved a marker, and their hair became their badge. At each return they would sculpt it differently, whether men or women, affecting elaborate confections. They wore lustrous locks lightly bound by a jeweled circlet, or thick slabs parted laterally, or two narrow strips with a blank band between; this last was termed a reverse Mohawk, though no one could recall now what the proper name meant.

Killeen liked his hair done as finely as any. It was long, with rumpled currents working into unmanageable snarls at his neck. Undoing the damage of the march would take patience.

He decided that this was not the right moment to ask Jocelyn. He had paid little attention to her of late, had little feeling for her beyond the simple, automatic brotherhood he gave any other of the Family. They had slept together—fitfully, as all things were now—for years. But a hundred days ago the Family had decided in Whole Council to numb the sex centers of each member.

It was a necessary move, even overdue. Killeen had voted for it himself. They could not squander the energy, psychic and physical alike, which men and women expended on each other. It was the firmest measure of their desperation. Sex was a great bonding. But alertness and single-minded energy rewarded the hunted with survival. The Family had learned this sorely.

There was far more to the transcending magic between men and women than the chip-controlled sexcen. He felt this whenever he spoke to Jocelyn. Old resonances rang in him, coiling pressures unfurled.

But it was never with Jocelyn the way it had been with Veronica. He knew now that it never would be. That had passed from his life.

Still, they could share the pleasures of grooming. They moved continually, every frag of packmass weighing on the tip-edge of survival, and hair had become their sole remaining mirror of self pride. They combed and slicked and pigmented themselves, against the raw rub of their world. Plucking beauty from a tangled, smelly mat brought some small refuge.

The sweetyeast had finished its work. Cermo had dropped a pinch of primer into vats as soon as the Family entered. Long ago, the mechs had converted their organic proteins, made the molecules helix in the sense opposite to what humans could digest. Cermo’s precious primer—a dwindling legacy of the Citadel—coiled the helix back, to human use.

Cermo and Killeen popped the release valve on a big vat and portioned bowls of froth out to the eager Family. To force the valve, Killeen used the leg strut he had taken from the Mantis. It seemed right to use a trophy as a pilfer tool.

When Killeen felt the sugary sap working in him, bringing an emberburn of interest, he lurched to his feet again and went to pace through the Trough. Its long, inky corridors reeked of coarse full grain, of buttery soup, or ripe tastes unnameable.

It could have been a thousand years since a Crafter or Stalker came here, seeking food. Yet the Trough murmured and cooked on. Its repair displays still offered themselves, articulated arms yawning for the embrace of a mech. Electrical auras buzzed, trying to entice vagrant machines with indecipherable crackling promises of renewed energies. The worn or damaged mechs who wandered into a Trough might know only dimly what they needed, or that they needed anything at all. The Trough seduced them with sensuous lubrication, with fresh clip-in components, with rich mechwealth humans could tap only fractionally.

Killeen found a huge cavern in which blue-green lichen hung in strands, fluttering in the passing almond-rich breeze. Trompers liked those, he knew. A mere tongue-lick would kill a fullgrown man.

In a side passage were stacks of grease-paste. Some said mechs ate the slimy nuggets, while others thought it was a lubricant. Killeen slashed open cases, watching it shower out, cursing under his breath. If humans starved, so would mechs.

Another cavern offered great mossy black slabs. Snouts used those to replace living polybind joints. Killeen’s father had shown him all these things, knew their function. But now the Family could use only what it could carry.

“Dad?”

Killeen was startled. “Naysay!” he called softly, swiftly. “Bear on my spark.”

“Why?” came Toby’s stillsoft voice, all electrical.

“Naysay!”

Toby came flitting through the pools of shadow, between vast vats of fuming vapors. The boy automatically moved to take advantage of light’s inky confusions, as twelve hard years had taught him.

Toby reached his father and gazed up at him in the amber halflight. His face was unmarked by fear, dark eyes open to a world of endless new adventure. “Why be so quiet?”

“If there’re defense mechs, they’d hide far back in here.”

“Jazz! You think there might be?”

Killeen didn’t, really, but anything that made the boy cautious was useful. “Suresay, I would.”

“I naysaw any,” Toby said breathlessly. As did all members of the Family, they grasped and patted each other in the dark, hands speaking, trusting the human press of flesh over all other signatures.

“They carry cutters. Slice you spinewise in the dark.” He cuffed Toby slightly, grinning.

“I cut them.”

“Noway nosay.”

“I will.”

“With what?”

“This.”

Toby produced a forked circuit-choker. It had long prongs that could wriggle into any mech’s input hole. Some said the senstive tips were living-tech, organic.

“Where’d you get that?”

Toby smiled impishly. His bright eyes danced merrily as he read his Dad’s puzzlement. “Junkpile.”

“Where?” Killeen tried not to let his concern show.

“C’mon.”

Toby was starved for playmates. In the years since Calamity, the Family had been forced to wander, never spending more than a few days in a single place. Any longer and some silent alarm might bring Lancers or worse.

So the boys and girls of the Family had never known permanence, never paused anyplace to build a play fort or learn the intricacies of shared, invented games. Watching Toby bound away into the veined halfdusk, Killeen wondered if Toby needed games at all. To him their long flight from the Calamity was like a play of endless pursuit. Life was a game.

Toby had seen dozens die, but with the effortless immortality of the young could shrug it off. The Family’s blighted history was still only a talked-about backdrop, weightless. And Toby was too young to understand the Aspects, though he knew that in some way the dead still lived through them. That was apparently enough.

Ahead, Toby disappeared down a gloomy passage. Killeen had to stoop to follow, his nose filling with the musk of moldering grease.

“Here,” Toby whispered.

Killeen felt a chill steal over him as he poked at the pile of debris. Carbs, axles, sprocket drives, plugs and caps and tanks. Parts he recognized without understanding.