Then what I have already told you happened, happened.

Now I wil tel you the rest.

Chapter Three

THE HUTS STOOD on a flat stretch of dirt and dry grass. A few hundred meters away was a tree line, not any sort of trees I recognized, but definitely trees. Beyond those trees, stretching far toward the horizon-wal and some distance up the thick part of the band, was a beautiful old city. It reminded me of Marontik, but it might have been even older. The young female told me that none of the People lived there now, nor had they lived there for some time.

Forerunners had come to take away most of the People, and soon the rest decided the city was no longer a safe place.

I asked her if the Palace of Pain was in this city. She said it was not, but the city held many bad memories.

I leaned on the girl’s shoulder, turned unsteadily—and saw that the trees continued in patches for kilometer after kilometer along the other side of the band, for as far as the eye could see . . . grassland and forest curving up into a blue obscurity—haze, clouds.

The young woman’s hand felt warm and dry and not very soft.

That told me she was a worker, as my mother had been. We stood under the blue-purple sky, and she watched me as I turned again and again, studying the great sky bridge, caught between fear and marvel, trying to understand.

Old memories stirring.

You’ve seen a Halo, haven’t you? Perhaps you’ve visited one. It was taking me some time to convince myself it was al real, and then, to orient myself. “How long have you been here?” I asked her.

“Ever since I can remember. But Gamelpar talks about the time before we came here.”

“Who’s Gamelpar?”

She bit her lip, as if she had spoken too soon. “An old man. The others don’t like him, because he won’t give them permission to mate with me. They threw him out and now he lives away from the huts, out in the trees.”

“What if they try—you know—without his permission?” I asked, irritated by the prospect, but genuinely curious. Sometimes females won’t talk about being taken against their wil.

“I hurt them. They stop,” she said, flashing long, horny fingernails.

I believed her. “Has he told you where the People lived before they came here?”

“He says the sun was yelow. Then, when he was a baby, the People were taken inside. They lived inside wals and under ceilings.

He says those People were brought here before I was born.”

“Were they carried inside a star boat?”

“I don’t know about that. The Forerunners never explain. They rarely speak to us.”

Turning around, I studied again the other side of the curve. Far up that side of the curve, the grassland and forest ran up against a border of blocky lines, beyond which stretched austere grayness, which faded into that universal bluish obscurity but emerged again far, far up and away, along that perfect bridge looping up, up, and around, growing thinner and now very dark, just a finger-width wide—I held up my finger at arm’s length, while the female watched with half-curious annoyance. Again, I nearly fel over, dizzy and feeling a little sick.

“We’re near the edge,” I said.

“The edge of what?”

“A Halo. It’s like a giant hoop. Ever play hoop sticks?” I showed how with my hands.

She hadn’t.

“Wel, the hoop spins and keeps everyone pressed to the inside.”

She did not seem impressed. I myself was not sure if that indeed was what stuck the dirt, and us, safely on the surface. “We’re on the inside, near that wal.” I pointed. “The wal keeps al the air and dirt from slopping into space.”

None of this was important to her. She wanted to live somewhere else but had never known anything but here. “You think you’re smart,” she said, only a touch judgmental.

I shook my head. “If I was smart, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be back on Erde-Tyrene, keeping my sisters out of trouble, working with Riser. . . .”

“Your brother?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Short felow. Human, but not like me or you.”

“You aren’t one of us, either,” she informed me with a sniff. “The People have beautiful black skins and flat, broad noses. You do not.”

Irritated, I was about to tel her that some Forerunners had black skins but decided that hardly mattered and shrugged it off.

Chapter Four

ON OUR SECOND outing, we stopped by a pile of rocks and the girl found a ready supply both of water from a spring and scorpions, which she revealed by lifting a rock. I remembered scorpions on Erde-Tyrene, but these were bigger, as wide as my hand, and black —substantial, and angry at being disturbed. She taught me how to prepare and eat them. First you caught them by their segmented stinging tails. She was good at that, but it took me a while to catch on. Then you puled off the tail and ate the rest, or if you were bold, popped the claws and body into your mouth, then plucked the tail and tossed it aside, stil twitching. Those scorpions tasted bitter and sweet at the same time—and then greasy-grassy. They didn’t realy taste like anything else I knew. The texture—wel, you get used to anything when you’re hungry. We ate a fair number of them and sat back and looked up at the blue-purple sky.

“You can see it’s a big ring,” I said, leaning against a boulder. “A ring just floating in space.”

“Obviously,” she said. “I’m not a fool. That,” she said primly, folowing my finger, “is toward the center of the ring, and the other side. The stars are there, and there.” She pointed to either side of the arching bridge. “Sky is cupped in the ring like water in a trough.”

We thought this over for a while, stil resting.

“You know my name. Are you alowed to tel me yours?”

“My borrowing name, the name you can use, is Vinnevra. It was my mother’s name when she was a girl.”

“Vinnevra. Good. When wil you tel me your true name?”

She looked away and scowled. Best not to ask.

I was thinking about the ring and the shadows and what happened when the sun went behind the bridge and a big glow shot out to either side. I could see that. I could even begin to understand it. In my old memory—stil coming together, slowly and cautiously —it was known as a corona, and it was made of ionized gases and rarefied winds blowing and glowing away from the nearby star that was the blue sun.

“Are there other rivers, springs, sources of water out there?”

“How should I know?” she said. “This place isn’t real. It’s made to support animals, though, and us. Why else would they put juicy scorpions out here? That means there might be more water.”

More impressive by the moment! “Let’s walk,” I suggested.

“And leave al these scorpions uneaten?”

She scrambled for some more crawling breakfast. I left my share for her and walked around the rock pile, studying the flat distance that led directly to the near wal.

“If I had Forerunner armor,” I said, “I would know al these words, in any language. A blue lady would explain anything I ask her to explain.”

“Talking to yourself means the gods wil tease your ears when you sleep,” Vinnevra said, coming up quietly behind me. She wiped scorpion juice from her lips and taunted me with one last twitching tail.

“Ai! Careful!” I said, dodging.

She threw the tail aside. “They’re like bee stingers,” she said.

“And yes. That means there are bees here, and maybe honey.”

Then she set out across the sand, dirt, and grass, which looked real enough, but of course wasn’t, because the Forerunners had made this ring as a kind of corral, to hold animals such as ourselves. And it cupped the sky—a stil river of air on the inside. How humbling, I thought, but I don’t think my face looked humble and abject. It probably looked angry.

“Stop grumbling,” she said. “Be pleasant. I’l take back my name and stitch your lips shut with dragon fly thread.”

I wondered if she was beginning to like me. On Erde-Tyrene, she would already be married and have many children—or serve the Lifeshaper in her temple, like my sisters.

“Do you know why the sky is blue?” I asked, walking beside her.

“No,” she said.

I tried to explain. She pretended not to be interested. She did not have to pretend hard. We talked like this, back and forth, and I don’t remember most of what we said, so I suppose it wasn’t important, but it was pleasant enough.

I could not avoid noticing that the angle of the sun had changed a little. The Halo was spinning with a slight wobble. Twisting.

Whatever you cal it when the hoop . . .

Precesses. Like a top.

The old memories stirred violently. My brain seemed to leap with the excitement of someone else, watching and thinking inside me. I saw diagrams, felt numbers flood through my thoughts, felt the hoop, the Halo, spinning on more than one axis. . . . What old human that came from, I had no idea, but I saw clearly that based on engineering and physics, a Halo would not be able to precess very quickly. Perhaps the Halo was slowing down, like a hoop roling along. . . . When it starts to slow, it wobbles. I didn’t like that idea at al. Again, everything seemed to move under me, a sickening sensation but not real, not yet. Stil, I felt il. I dropped to my haunches, then sat.

I hadn’t earned any of this knowledge. Once more, I was haunted by the dead. Somebody else had died so that this knowledge would be left inside of me. I hated it—so superior, so ful of understanding. I hated feeling weak and stupid and sick.

“I need to go back inside,” I said. “Please.”

Vinnevra took me back into the hut, away from the crazy sky.

Except for us, the hut was empty. I was no longer much of a curiosity.

I sat on the edge of the platform of dried mud-brick. The young female sat beside me and leaned forward. “It’s been five days since you arrived. I’ve been watching over you ever since, to see if you’d live or die. . . . Giving you water. Trying to get you to eat.” She stretched out her arms and waggled her hands, then yawned. “I’m exhausted.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She seemed to be trying to decide something. Her manners and a certain shyness would not alow her to just stare. “You lived inside .

. . on Erde-Tyrene?”

“No. There’s a sky, ground, sun . . . dirt and grass and trees, too. But not like this.”

“I know. We don’t like it here, and not just because they take us away.”

Forerunner treachery . . .

I shook my head to clear away that strange, powerful voice. But the existence of that voice, and its insight, was starting to make a kind of sense. We had been told—and I stil felt the truth of it—that the Lifeshaper had made us into her own little living libraries, her own colections of human warrior memory.

I recaled that Bornstelar was being haunted by a ghost of the living Didact, even before we parted ways. Al of us—even he— were subject to deep layers of Lifeshaper geas.

Even though it looked as if I had falen out of somebody’s pockets, I might stil be under the control of the Master Builder. It made sense that if Riser and I had value, he would move us to one of his giant weapons, then return later to scour our brains and finish his work.

But there was no Riser. And no Bornstelar, of course.

I had an awful thought, and as I looked at the woman, my face must have changed, because she reached out to softly pat my cheek.

“Was the little felow with me when I came here?” I asked. “The cha manush? Did you bury him?”

“No,” she said. “Only you. And Forerunners.”

“Forerunners?”

She nodded. “The night of fire, you al leaped through the sky like faling torches. You landed here, in a jar. You lived. They did not. We puled you out of the broken jar and carried you inside.

You were wearing that.” She pointed to the armor, stil curled up on one side of the hut.

“Some sort of capsule,” I said, but the word didn’t mean much to her. Perhaps I had just been tossed aside. Perhaps I did not have any value after al. The people here were being treated like cattle, not valuable resources. Nothing was certain. What could any of us do? More than at any time before, my confusion flared into anger. I hated the Forerunners even more intensely than when I had seen the destruction of Charum Hakkor. . . .

And remembered the final battle.

I got up and paced around in the hut’s cooler shade, then kicked the armor with my toe. No response. I stuck one foot inside the chest cavity, but it refused to climb up around me. No little blue spirit appeared in my head.

Vinnevra gave me a doubtful look.

“I’m al right,” I said.

“You want to go outside again?”

“Yes,” I said.

This time, under the crazy sky, my feet felt stable enough, but my eyes would not stop rising to that great, awful bridge. I stil wasn’t clear what information any of these humans could provide. They seemed mostly cowed, disorganized, beaten down—abused and then forgotten. That had made them desperate and mean. This Halo was not the place where I wished to end my life.

“We should leave,” I said. “We should leave this vilage, the grassland, this place.” I swung my arm out beyond the tree line.

“Maybe out there we can find a way to escape.”

“What about your friend, the little one?”

“If he’s here—I’l find him, then escape.” Truly, I longed to start looking for Riser. He would know what to do. I was focusing my last hopes on the little cha manush who had saved me once before.

“If we go too far, they’l come looking and find us,” Vinnevra said. “That’s what they’ve done before. Besides, there’s not much food out there.”

“How do you know that?”

She shrugged.