“Then there was the Great Parachuting Lesson, considered by my fellows to be one of our best gags. I mounted my victim in a bar off base and dismounted in midair, just when he ought to have opened his chute. He was a little disoriented at first, I’m afraid, and as a result broke his legs.

“The four people I killed could have matched both of those for cruelty. In fact, any Horseman could have. Every sane community kills vermin and rabid animals.”

She jerked to her feet and strode to the other side of the room. I hadn’t noticed until then how small an area the lamp illuminated; she was an arrangement of light and dark near the door. Then the arrangement moved, and I knew her hands had gone up to her face.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. Her words were blurred, as if by her fingers. “I told you I’d developed a distaste, which was understating it a bit. I’m not proud of those incidents, and I apologize for telling them as if I am. Or for telling them at all. They’re over half a century old.”

She was not going to get to it, the thing I was afraid of. I didn’t have to worry about it. So I was alarmed when I found myself saying, “And what was I supposed to be for?”

I heard her take a steadying breath, and saw her hands come down. “Did you know you had something to do with us?”

“Not at first. Never mind.”

She stood very still; then she came back into the light in a few strides and squatted beside me, looking into my face. “You didn’t know, did you? Until tonight, when I said so?”

“Everything in the damned bunker said ‘Property of U.S. Government’ on it,” I said bitterly. “I figured they just hadn’t gotten around to stenciling me. And I didn’t think anything hidden that well had been meant to do anybody any good.”

“You were meant to do us some.”

“That’s not much consolation for having been hatched full-grown out of a box.”

Her black eyes widened, and she said, “Would you rather not have been hatched at all?” I stared down at her, silenced.

She rose again and began to pace the room, in and out of the darkness. “I think the most elementary purpose of the chevaux was to reassure everyone else. Regular forces pointed out — and rightly, too — that if any of us were wounded or threatened with death, we were likely just to steal the nearest available body. Those of our friends and allies, for instance. The solution was to have untenanted and highly desirable bodies available as a bribe to keep us from devouring our own side. So they grew the chevaux.”

I repeated, a little numb, “Grew them.”

“Well, of course. Did you think you were made of bicycle parts? The chevaux were organic; hence, grown. Brought to maturity and then held until needed, probably in those boxes.”