There was no ceremony surrounding Noman’s departure. One minute he was in the hovering sonie and chatting with Daeman, Hannah, and Tom who were standing beside it, and the next second the sonie had tilted almost vertically, its forcefield pressing Noman into the mat, and then it shot skyward like a flechette, disappearing into the low, gray clouds in seconds.

Ada felt cheated. She’d wanted her last words with the friend she’d once known as Odysseus.

The vote to allow Noman to borrow the sonie had been decided by one vote. The last vote—the deciding vote—had been cast by a man named Elian, the bald leader of the six Hughes Town refugees who had come in with Hannah and Noman on the skyraft, not even one of the Ardis survivors.

The Ardis people who had voted against losing the sonie were furious. There were demands for a recount. Flechette rifles actually had been raised in anger, along with shouting voices.

Ada had stepped into the middle of the melee and announced in a loud, calm voice that the issue had been decided. Noman was to be allowed to borrow the sonie but would return it as soon as possible. In the meantime, they would have the sky-raft that Noman and Hannah had cobbled together in the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—the sonie could carry only six; the sky-raft could haul up to fourteen people at a time if they had to make a run for the island. This matter was settled.

The flechette rifles had been lowered, but the grumbling continued. Old friends of Ada’s refused to meet her gaze in the hours afterward and she knew that she’d used up the last of her capital as leader of the Ardis survivors.

Now Noman and the sonie were gone and Ada had never felt lonelier. She touched her slightly bulging belly and thought, Little person, son or daughter of Harman, if this was a mistake that endangers you, I shall be sorry to the last second of my life.

“Ada?” said Daeman. “Can I have a word in private with you?”

They walked out beyond the north palisade to where Hannah had once kept her scaffolded hearth working. Daeman told her about his meeting with the post-human who called herself Moira. He described how she looked exactly like a young Savi and how she was invisible to the rest of them as she stood near him during the meeting and the vote.

Ada shook her head slowly. “None of that makes any sense, Daeman. Why would a post-human appear in Savi’s body—stay invisible to the rest of us? How could she? Why would she?”

“I don’t know,” said Daeman.

“Did she have anything else to say?”

“She promised—before the meeting—to tell me something about Harman after the meeting if she could attend.”

“And?” said Ada. She felt her heart pounding so wildly that it might have been the child stirring within her, as eager as she to hear the news.

“All the Moira-ghost said afterward was ‘Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’ ” said Daeman.

Ada made him repeat that twice and said, “That makes no sense either.”

“I know,” said Daeman. He looked crestfallen, shoulders slumped. “I tried to make her explain but then she was… gone. Just disappeared.”

She stared hard at him. “Are you sure this happened, Daeman? We’ve all been working too hard, sleeping too little, worrying too much. Are you sure this Moira-ghost was real?”

Daeman stared hard back at her, his gaze as angrily defensive as hers was angrily doubtful, but he said nothing else.

“Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,” muttered Ada. She looked around. People were going about their early afternoon chores, but the work groups had now broken themselves into clusters of those who had voted the same. Neither side was speaking to the bald man Elian. Ada fought off the urge to sob.

Neither Noman nor the sonie returned that day. Nor the next. Nor the next.

On the third day, Ada went up in the wobbly sky-raft with Hannah at the controls, accompanying Daeman’s hunting party out beyond the circle of voynix and trying to get an estimate of how many of the headless, carapaced killers were out there. It was a beautiful morning—no clouds at all, a blue sky and warmer winds promising spring—and she could easily see that the number of voynix pressing into their two-mile radius from the Pit had grown.

“It’s hard for me to guess,” Ada whispered to Daeman although they were a thousand feet above the monsters. “There must be three or four hundred just visible in that meadow. We never had to count large numbers of things growing up. What do you think? Fifteen thousand in the whole encircling mass? More?”

“More, I think,” Daeman said calmly. “I think there are thirty to forty thousand of the things surrounding us now.”

“Don’t they ever get tired of standing there?” asked Ada. “Don’t they have to eat? Drink?”

“Evidently not,” said Daeman. “Back when we thought they were servant-machines, I never saw one eat or drink or get tired, did you?”

Ada said nothing. Those times seemed too remote to think about, even though they had ended less than a year earlier.

“Fifty thousand,” muttered Daeman. “Perhaps there are fifty thousand here now, and more faxing in every day.”

Hannah flew them farther west to find game and fresh meat.

On the fourth day, the Setebos baby in the Pit had grown to the size of a yearling calf—one of their yearling calves, now all slaughtered by voynix, of course, but a calf that was only a pulsating gray brain with a score of pink hands on its belly, yellow eyes, pulsating orifices, and more three-fingered hands leaping out on gray stalks.

Mommy, Mommy, whispered the thing in Ada’s mind, in all their minds. It’s time for me to come out now. This pit is too small and I am too hungry to stay here any longer.

It was early evening, less than an hour from twilight and another long, dark winter night. The group gathered near the Pit. Men and women still tended to stand near only those who had voted as they had on the loan of the sonie. Everyone now carried a flechette weapon, although crossbows were kept close to hand in reserve.

Casman, Kaman, Greogi, and Edide stood over the Pit with their rifles aimed at the large thing in the hole. Others gathered close.

“Hannah,” said Ada, “is the sky-raft fully provisioned?”

“Yes,” said the younger woman. “All of the first trip crates are aboard and still room for ten people on the first trip. We can get fourteen people aboard on every trip after that.”

“And what time are you down to in rehearsing the trip to the island and the unpacking of the crates?” asked Ada.

“Forty-two minutes,” said Laman, rubbing the stumps of his missing fingers on his right hand. “Thirty-five minutes with just people. It takes a few minutes to get people aboard or off.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Ada.

Hannah stepped closer to the fire they kept burning near the Pit.

“Ada, the trip to the island takes fifteen minutes each way. The machine can’t fly any faster.”

“The sonie would have been there in less than a minute,” said Loes, one of the angriest of the Ardis survivors. “We could all have been delivered there in less than ten minutes.”

“We don’t have the sonie now,” Ada said. She heard the lack of affect in her own voice. Without meaning to, she glanced to the southwest, down toward the river and the island, but also toward the woods where fifty to sixty thousand voynix waited.

Noman had been right. Even if the entire colony of humans here escaped to the island, the voynix would be on them there in hours—perhaps minutes. Even though the Ardis faxnode was still nonfunctioning—they kept two people there at the pavilion day and night to keep testing it—the voynix were faxing. Somehow, they were faxing. There was nowhere on earth, Ada realized, that they would be free of the killers.