“Of course.” But he gritted his teeth as he got up.

They’d walked a short distance when Nate spoke again. His voice was deliberately casual, as it always was when something was important to him. “Say, do you think there’s any chance we can get back home?”

“I don’t know,” Jill answered, just as casually. She picked up her pace so she wouldn’t have to see the look on his face.

The second sun was almost mid-sky when they saw the City. At first it looked like a mirage, unsubstantial as dust swirling above the desert floor. Their steps quickened—his, then hers—but they said nothing, each wanting to spare the other false hopes. Step by step, the phantom took form.

The outline of the City stretched for miles. Nothing led up to it; it was simply there, in the middle of the flat desert plain. There were no freeways leading in or out, no traffic on the streets inside the City or in the air above. There was a low wall around the perimeter that appeared to be made of polished red rock. A break in the wall led onto a smooth, paved street. There was no gate where the road met the sand; it simply terminated in a straight edge at the desert. Inside and outside: two sides of a coin.

The mass of the City was made up of buildings—white high-tech boxes as nondescript as children’s blocks. They were all exactly the same shade of white, and there was nothing to distinguish one from another except a variance in height and width. Windows were small and few, dark and blank as shark’s eyes. The street grid had an extreme orderliness, as if someone had neatly lined up the buildings, row upon row, with a ruler and plumb line.

The City looked manufactured; it did not look human.

They stopped at the perimeter. Jill had to work to achieve the kind of wariness she knew was appropriate. She had the strangest sense that the City was, simultaneously, both perfectly normal and dismissably unbelievable. Unbelievable because she’d been sure the insects in the desert would be the highest form of life on this planet; it seemed too dry and barren to have created a higher species. Unbelievable, too, in its surreal flatness. Yet there was also something about the City that seemed familiar—familiar enough to get under her guard. And that was dangerous.

“Look at this, Jill. It’s as if the red sand had suddenly risen up and… hardened in a tremendous heat.”

She tore her eyes away from the buildings. Nate was trailing his hand along the red perimeter wall. The top of it varied in height from two to four feet, in an irregular, wavy form that was at odds with the straight, orderly lines of the City. As her fingers brushed off its dusting of sand she saw that the wall wasn’t rock at all but red glass.

“You’re right. I think it is hardened sand. That’s weird.”

Nate went over to the break in the wall, where the street met the desert and abruptly ended. He dug his toe into the sand and then tapped. She didn’t need to see it to know that he’d encountered that hard, glassy surface a few inches down, as if the wall had been there, too, and had been cut away.

“It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz,” Nate said thoughtfully.

“Nate!” Jill cried in warning.

A round metal sphere hurtled toward them, flying down the street of the City. It was two feet in diameter, completely silver, and smooth except for a rectangular opening in one side. It stopped in front of Nate, its opening tilting up and down, regarding him head to foot. He froze.

“Don’t move,” Jill said in a low voice.

“Don’t worry,” Nate muttered.

The sphere flew with a zip over to Jill and “sensed” her as well, then zoomed off, disappearing back into the buildings.

“A sentry?” Nate suggested, letting out a relieved breath. “A camera?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe it’s gone to sound the alarm.”

Jill and Nate looked at each other. He looked wary at least. He looked scared. “I really don’t like this place, Jill. Maybe we should get out of here.”

“They’ll have water,” she said.

“Yeah.” The look on his face admitted defeat.

Jill’s mouth dredged up saliva at the thought. She shaded her eyes and regarded the City. But it wasn’t water that engendered the kernel of excitement in her belly, small and hard, that created that sense of attraction, of destiny. It was as if the City were calling her, as if she were home.

14.4. Thirty-Seventy Aharon Handalman

To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.

—Satan in Paradise Lost, by John Milton, 1667

They were carrying him up crude steps. Aharon could see the pitted stone through the coarse weave of the blanket that covered him, slung as he was like an anchor over a monstrous freak’s back. There was no breath and no room to take it in; his soft stomach was crushed against the thing’s shoulder even as he shivered violently from a bone-deep chill. God help him, he was about to pass out from the pain! Maybe that would be a mercy.

Doors opened and he was dimly aware that they’d entered a large room. Through the blanket he got blurry glimpses of stone benches and hairy, brutal figures. The room was full of beasts, growling and frothing. His heart slammed in his chest. He could smell them, these… creatures: smell sweat and, and musk, and some other stink—dark and earthy and pungent as the dead. On top of his terror, the revolting smell was enough to make him sick. He retched, halfheartedly; then the floor rose up to meet him as he was dumped, head cracking on hard stone. The blanket was yanked off. Aharon cringed as howls and animal screams rose in the room.

He didn’t want to—god, he didn’t want to do this!—but he looked; he made himself look. He still prayed for something, anything, that could allow him to believe that this was not real, that it was all a horrible dream, anything that would let him deny everything that had happened since he’d arrived in this terrible place.

He’d awoken, he had no idea how many hours ago, under a tree in a frozen wilderness of sharp, pitiless rocks and sparse, rubbery grass. He was freezing to death in the dark, and the dark went on and on. At first he’d thought he was dead because of the dark and because of the way he was pinned to the ground. There were a few awful minutes when he was sure he was in his grave. But the frigid wind blew over him, shattering that nightmare. He was definitely not underground.

Next he thought he had been wounded, paralyzed by a bullet, and left to die in the woods of Auschwitz. But when the daylight finally came—dim and insubstantial as watered milk—he saw that he was not in Auschwitz. He might have been on the surface of the moon for all the life around him. There was just that one tree, black and twisted, towering overhead, and rocks, painful rocks. After hours of lying there helpless, growing so cold that his limbs went numb, he’d been picked up by these… these demonic things. They’d shoved him into a cart and jolted him for miles before reaching a crude, nightmarish town—a place so awful, hung with things, bloody things, that were so disgusting that he’d kept his eyes squeezed shut even under the blanket. Now he was surrounded by these animals. He made himself really look at them, because the truth could be no worse than the terror.

They were like nothing on Earth, but then, he had accepted that fact some time ago. They were loathsome, unclean things—short in height but muscled with great slabs of meat, their necks as thick as their square heads. Their faces bore the hair of beasts even on their temples and noses, making them look like animals. But their bodies were covered with the primitive robes of men. Their hands were wide and their short, thick fingers bowed like an ape’s. Strong. Hideous. Demons.

Weapon loosing demons.