She drifted. She imagined she must have slept at some point, but her eyes happened to be open on two occasions when botflies passed quietly overhead, dark ellipses backlit by a brightness too faint for naked eyes. Each time she tensed, ready to flee into the ocean, but the drones took no notice of her.

No initiative, she reflected. They don't see anything they're not programmed to look for. Or perhaps their senses weren't as finely-tuned as she'd feared. Perhaps they just couldn't see her implants; maybe her aura was too faint, or too far away. Maybe botflies didn't see as deeply into the EM spectrum as she'd feared.

I was all alone, that first time, she thought. The whole beach was closed off. I bet that's it. They pay attention to trespassers…

So did Amitav, evidently. That was shaping up to be a problem.

*

He appeared at the cycler the next morning with a dead botfly in his arms. It looked a bit like a turtle shell she'd once seen in a museum, except for the vents and instruments studding the ventral surface. It was split along its equatorial seam; black smudges lined the breach.

"Can you fix this?" Amitav asked. "Any of it?"

Clarke shook her head. "Don't know anything about botflies." She lifted the carapace anyway. Inside, burned electronics nested under a layer of soot.

She ran one thumb along a small pebbled convexity, felt the compound lenses of a visual cluster beneath the grime. Some of the tech was vaguely familiar, but…

"No," she said, setting it on the sand. "Sorry."

Amitav shrugged and sat, cross-legged. "I did not expect so," he said. "But one can always hope, and you seem to have such familiarity with machines yourself…"

She smiled faintly, freshly aware of the implants crowding her thorax.

"I expect you will be going to the fence," Amitav said after a moment. "Your people will let you through when they see you are one of them."

She looked to the east. Off in the distance, the border towers rose from a fog of human bodies and trampled scrub. She'd heard about the high-voltage lines and the razorwire strung between them. She'd heard other things, too, about refugees so driven by their own desperation they'd climbed seven or eight meters before the juice and their own cumulative dismemberment had killed them off. Their lacerated remains were left rotting on the wires, the story went—whether as an act of deterrence or simple neglect was unclear.

Clarke knew it was all just alligator tales. Nobody over thirteen believed such bullshit, and the people here—for all their numbers —didn't seem motivated enough to hold a garage sale, much less storm the battlements. What was the word Amitav had used?

Docile.

In a way it was a shame, though. She'd never actually been to the fences. It might have been interesting to check them out.

Being dead had all sorts of little drawbacks.