his bow and did slay the beast. With his sword he struck a goodly blow and thus the beast was slain. Theron’s words were words like fix and repair and assemble and he knew the depths those words contained, how they were the stories of things: how you couldn’t fix a thing without understanding what it was for, and how it was meant to work, and the sophistication of the mind that had created it; how repairing was not a task to be checked off a list but an act of devotion, a moment of communion between one human being and the world. How assembling was a miracle as deep and beautiful as the stars. The conception of a thing that did not exist, the drawing of a path toward existence. Think of gold, mined in streams and rivers and veins beneath the earth’s surface. Think of cogs, and the perfect distance between the teeth. Think of one gem, perfectly cut. One piece of metal. One idea. One machine.
Fix. Repair. Assemble.
As he followed his father and brother through the woods, unfriendly smirking courtiers all around them, words like hunt and kill and death seemed simpler. Putting a fire out was less miraculous than starting one. Watching clockwork wind down was less incredible than winding it up. Firing an arrow was an action Theron understood; the bow was a machine like any other, one that channeled the strength of the arm, magnified by the force of the pull, into the tiny point at the head of the arrow. Everything else—the fletching, the balance of the projectile—was refinement. Making sure the arrowhead hit exactly where it would be most efficient. One of the big veins in the throat, probably. Or the heart. Or through the eye to the brain.
He thought he could fire the arrow, hit the target. When they saw the deer in the clearing, the eye was too small, so it would have to be the heart or the vein. He admired the way the deer’s legs were put together, built for fleetness and silence. He saw in an instant how the tendons and muscles were connected. He found these things beautiful, like the horses they rode, like anything that was designed to do a thing as perfectly as possible. He had time to consider that the horses were bred the way they were, but the world had created the deer on its own. He had time to marvel.
Then his father raised his bow, and his black-fletched arrow flew.
It struck far from any vital target, in the big muscle of the deer’s hind flank, and at first he thought the shot was bad. But from the smirking courtiers he heard a murmur of approval. “Excellent shot, Lord Elban,” one said, even as the deer bolted and the hunting party—horses and men and fearsome grizzled hounds that stood almost to Theron’s shoulder—took up the chase. Theron was confused. It hadn’t been an excellent shot. It had been inefficient and wasteful.
His horse was well-bred and well-trained and needed no instruction from him. “Just hang on,” Gavin had muttered when the horses were led in front of them and Theron had gulped at the size of them, and as the horses gave chase to the wounded deer, just hang on was exactly what Theron did. He’d had daydreams—childish fantasies, he now understood—that while riding he would draw his bow and fire, but there was no question of loosing his grip on the pommel long enough to reach into the quiver that hung over his back for an arrow, let alone setting the bow and firing it, let alone in motion. Just hang on. Ahead of him, he could see that Gavin wasn’t just hanging on. Gavin rode the machine that was his horse as if he had been designed for it, as if they were two machines working toward one goal. He even had time to glance quickly back toward Theron, to make sure he was just hanging on. It had always been that way. If the human body was a machine, Theron knew his own had been poorly built from half-functional parts. Even now his lungs were tight and he had no peripheral vision, around the lenses of his glasses. Gavin was the perfected model, the very best plans and the very best parts. Theron was built from what was left over.
But his mind was quicker than Gavin’s, his fingers more nimble, and ever since realizing the difference between them—ever since realizing