A presence existed in the ground below the duck, shadowed the duck from below and gave it power. They had never glimpsed this something, only felt it, like a curse.

“The duck is on our side here,” Moss said.

“You sound uncertain,” Chen said, other arm extended like the weapon it was, ready to inflict his mark upon the duck.

“It is at least neutral,” Moss conceded, but she still did not sound sure.

Which concerned Chen, concerned Grayson.

In the past, Moss had always known and was always right, they had discovered. When the duck appeared smooth in Moss’s mind, the duck would not hurt them. When the duck appeared rough there, the duck would hurt them. That was the only way she could explain it.

To Grayson the duck before them manifested as a tiny sun aswarm with rippling maggots of cascading light. Her special eye could not analyze it or penetrate that blinding aura, could not thus break down the elements of the duck. Could not say whether it was a pillar of salt or a cauldron of flesh. No percentages scrolled across her vision.

This was itself relief from the sight she could not now turn off, something gone faulty, the world so much incoming data that it was no data at all, and she must always recuse herself, tamp and withdraw when she could, for her sanity.

But Grayson welcomed the duck with the broken wing because it reminded her that even something broken could have a use. That nothing should be wasted. And that what might appear broken might in fact be whole.

“Then the foxes first,” Grayson said. “We parlay with the foxes.”

The ritual. If ever broken, what else might break?

The three picked up their equipment and as one they advanced across the sands into the City. While they felt as one the weight of the duck’s skeptical eye, recording all.

Their shadows were long and dangerous, flickered and seemed to catch fire as the light faded, and still they trudged forward, inexorable as any three people who had loved one another fiercely and seen nothing but the best in one another. Across so many years, and now with nothing left to lose.

They had failed in the last City, and the one before that, and the one before that. Sometimes that failure pushed the needle farther. Sometimes that failure changed not a thing.

But perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.

ii.

they needed no fire
for the fire burned
within all of them

Chen could see bits and pieces of the future, “but only in equations.” A frequent lament. Numbers could attack the flesh, the will, but rarely built it up. Morale for them never lay in the numbers. He made poetry out of his premonitions, his equations, because they’d proven useless to him as fact, because he was never sure whether he was actually seeing the past. A past.