had been told not to go near the edge of the great rock column, but was anyway being watched by a scout missile. Turminder Xuss had, in addition, given the boy its oldest and least capable knife missile to play with because the weapon was articulated; its stubby sections snicked and turned in the child’s hands. He was making delighted, cooing noises. So far, the knife missile had suffered this treatment without complaint.
“I have no idea,” Anaplian admitted.
“Release him into the wild?” the drone suggested. “Send him back to the city?”
“No,” Anaplian said, sighing. “He keeps asking when Mummy’s going to wake up,” she added, voice barely above a whisper.
“You have introduced a Special Circumstances apprenticeship scheme on your own initiative,” the drone suggested.
Anaplian ignored this. “We’ll look for somewhere safe to leave him, find a family that can raise him,” she told the machine. She was sitting on her haunches, her coat spread around her.
“You should have left him where he was,” the drone said above the still strong wind, lowering the tone of its voice and slowing its delivery as it tried to sound reasonable rather than sarcastic.
“I know. That didn’t feel like an option at the time.”
“Your seatrider tells me you – how shall I put this? – appeared to the attackers and defenders of the city like some demented if largely ineffectual angel before you swooped in and carried little Toark away.”
Anaplian glared at the seatrider, not that the obedient but utterly unintelligent machine would have had any choice but to surrender its memories to the drone when it had been asked.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked Xuss.
She’d asked to be left alone for the day to watch the fall of the city. It had been her fault, after all; it had come about due to actions she had taken and indeed helped plan, and though it was by no means what had been desired, its sacking represented a risk that she, amongst others, had judged worth taking. It was demonstrably not the worst that might have happened, but it was still an abomination, an atrocity, and she had had a hand in it. That had been enough for her to feel that she could not just ignore it, that she needed to bear witness to such horror. The next time – if there was a next time, if she wasn’t thrown out for her irrational, overly sentimental actions – she would weigh the potential for massacre a deal more heavily.
“We have been summoned,” the machine said. “We need to get to the Quonber; Jerle Batra awaits.” Its fields flashed a frosty blue. “I brought the module.”
Anaplian looked confused. “That was quick.”
“Not to slap your wrist for disturbing the war or rescuing adorable waifs. The summons pre-dates such eccentricities.”
“Batra wants to see me personally?” Anaplian frowned.
“I know. Not like him.” It dipped left-right in its equivalent of a shrug. “It.”
Anaplian rose, dusting her hands. “Let’s go then.” She called to the boy, who was still trying to twist the uncomplaining knife missile apart. The module shimmered into view at the cliff edge.
“Do you know what his name means?” the drone asked as the child came walking shyly towards them.
“No,” the woman said. She lifted her head a little. She thought she’d caught a hint of the smell of distant burning.
“‘Toark’,” the drone said as the boy came up to them, politely handing back the knife missile. “In what they call the Old Tongue—”
“Lady, when does my mother wake?” the boy asked.
Anaplian gave what she was sure was a not particularly convincing smile. “I can’t tell you,” she admitted. She held out one hand to guide the child into the module’s softly gleaming interior.
“It means ‘Lucky’,” the drone finished.
The module trajectoried itself from the warm winds of the desert through thinning gases into space, then fell back into the atmosphere half a world away before Toark had finished marvelling at how clean he had become, and how quickly. Anaplian had told him to stand still, close his eyes and ignore any tickling sensation, then plonked a blob of cleaner gel on his head. It torused down over him, unrolling like liquid and making him squirm when a couple of smaller circles formed round his fingers and rolled back up to his armpits and back down. She’d cleaned his little loincloth with another blob but he wanted that gone and chose a sort of baggy shirt from a holo-display instead. He was most impressed when this