“Is that the sun?” she asked.

“Depends on what you mean by sun,” Pahtun said. He had fixed his gaze on the ground. “It’s certainly

no longer the sun wemade.”

Tiadba asked her second question—on behalf of her visitor. “ Where are the stars?”

“Long gone,” Pahtun answered.

All their lives they had been protected by the warm, limiting light of the ceil, hardly varying through its pleasant, soothing cycles of wake and sleep—but no more. What lay beyond the walls and above the city was majestic but cruel, self-involved, producing not light but something that the transparent faces of their helmets had to translatefor any sense to come of it. The Chaos.

“Wait for it,” Pahtun warned again, studying the ground. Tiadba had no idea what they were waiting for now. How could it get any stranger, any more challenging?

Something reached down, even though they were still within the border of the real—reached down and tried to casually flick them away, like brushing letterbugs off a table. Four of the marchers screamed at once, then fell and rolled into a shallow valley between the foundation’s ripples, trying to hide. Khren and Nico crumpled to their knees and clung, leaving Tiadba alone beside the trainer, the only one still looking up.

The sky—what had once been the sky—seemed to know that it was being watched. It tried to reach into her eyes, plunge through her mind, subvert everything that defined her as a breed—as an observer, a thinker, a separate being.

It refuses to be understood—it will certainly not be mastered.Tiadba slowly lowered her gaze to the uneven, fractured ground, then blinked, of her own will. Somehow she had fought off what lay above the Kalpa, fought it to a standoff. Pahtun looked upon this young female breed with new respect. He took some small satisfaction in their distress, and professional interest in their slow recovery.

“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “No way to prepare you. No way at all.”

They neared the outer rank of generators—high, narrow monuments sliding back and forth slowly along the perimeter—pale, shining, and indistinct, like towering glass giants surrounded by fog. Shapes buried inside these obelisks moved with slow deliberation, as if tracking outside forces. Between the generators lay a misty darkness broken by a maze of low walls, barely knee-high to a breed. Tiadba could not believe those walls would keep out anything that really wanted to get in. Pahtun and the escorts accompanied the nine breeds over the last five miles to the inner wall. Distance still meant something here, sixty miles out from the training camp in the flood channel. They had learned to level their gaze upon the dark gray horizon and not look up unless they had to.

“There used to be seven bions to the Kalpa, and twelve cities on the Earth,” Pahtun told them, his voice clear in their helmets. He walked ahead on the hard surface, crazed with cracks and crevices, his boots raising puffs from fine dust that had somehow streamed into tiny dunes. The dust lay over the ancient foundation like fine ash—perhaps it was ash. “The reality generators worked for millions of years to protect all the bions. Then—war. The Chaos took the spoils. Now there are only three bions—and soon, perhaps just two, or one. You might find the rest of that story in your books, young breeds. How the Ashurs and Devas and Eidolons fought among themselves, and the cities were sacrificed to their godlike stupidity.”

“What’s a ‘god’?” Khren asked. Nico, Shewel, and Denbord walked on Tiadba’s left, Khren and Macht on her right. Perf, as always, straggled behind with Frinna and Herza. Nobody answered. “Just thought a Tall One might know,” Khren murmured. Tiadba felt no hunger, no pain—hardly felt the exertion of walking for long miles over the ancient, dead surface. She was beginning to feel beyond all real pain or care, all emotions except for curiosity, which never failed her. If Jebrassy were here, she knew he would be as curious as she, and as eager to see what lay beyond the border of the real.

Their only hope for freedom, they had once believed, lay outside the Kalpa, far from the stifle of history and tradition. The books, their trainer, the sky itself, such as it was—all told a different story. They were once again being used. As they had always suspected, they were just tools, means to an end. Still, Pahtun seemed concerned for their welfare. Now that the training was almost over, his gruffness had tempered to patient instruction about last-minute details. He repeated himself often, and this irritated Tiadba, but when she looked at the other breeds, she understood the necessity. Especially for Herza and Frinna, who never asked questions. They needed the stories told over and over for a reason. How could they possibly survive in the Chaos?

“The middle lands are most difficult,” Pahtun said for the hundredth time. “The zone of lies is called that for a reason—intrusions can happen at any moment. You must cross quickly. Should the Chaos launch an assault through the sector you are crossing, the battle between the Kalpa’s generators and the intrusion will create intense whirlpools of fractured time and space, almost invisible and deadly. Get caught in one and you will never reach the border of the real. Your suits will not become fully active in this region. Listen to them—they will tell you when an intrusion and its effects are near, and whether your perceptions, or your decisions, are being clouded.”

Their own spoken words reached each other directly, right in their ears—but the way the armor communicated was difficult to get used to. It only rarely used audible words. Much of the time they simply “knew better.” Tiadba was not sure whether she resented this subtlety. It could certainly prove useful beyond the gates and the border of the real—though Pahtun and the other escorts had warned them that the suits could not know everything.

Pahtun said, “Don’t underestimate your instincts—you are observers, made of ancient matter, and observers are primary even out in the Chaos. The Typhon is envious of your senses. This is the first principle—out there, to look, to perceive, is to be hated. Later, when you’ve acquired direct experience of the Chaos, you will learn to rely more and more on your own judgment, above all things. But at first, and certainly in the zone of lies, rely upon your suits.”

“How can something inside the borders be worse than what’s outside?” Nico asked.

“Not worse—just treacherous,” Khren said. “Like being bitten by a tame pede. You don’t expect it.”

“Oh,” Nico said.

“A meadow pede bit me once, when I stepped on its tail,” Shewel said.

“Pedes are all tail,” Perf said.

“This one was all bite. Nearly lost a toe. Still hurts when I walk a long ways.” Shewel’s skin shone pale behind his golden faceplate.

Pahtun slowed enough that Tiadba could catch up with him, then tuned his voice to her helmet alone.

“Some marchers think they’ve been betrayed,” he said. “They think the Kalpa sends them out into the Chaos to die, or worse—for no reason. Doesn’t matter what trainers tell them. Maybe it’s the books they find back in the Tiers. Bad start, that sort of thinking.”

She didn’t know how to respond, so she stared straight ahead.

“What’s most startling to the trainers is that even when the marchers start off badly, if they make it across the zone of lies, they seem to do well—as far as they can be tracked from the Broken Tower. It’s true, young breed—you were made for the Chaos.”

“But none come back,” she said.

“Maybe they get where they’re going and it’s better there—for breeds. If I could, I would join your march and go see. Do you believe me when I say that?”

He seemed to care about her answer. She did believe him, but did not want to give him the satisfaction of saying so. After all, his kind had let the cities die, let the Chaos advance, let the intrusions in—and had taken Jebrassy from her, and she could not guess why.