“Where the Emir of Restoring and Balancing sits on its throne?” Saleh had dreamed of visiting that island, too.

“There is a market there for antiques amongst both digitals and humans,” Elias told him. “You will come?”

“I . . .”

Saleh saw himself reflected in the other’s goggles: small, human, afraid.

But Elias extended his hand to Saleh. His hand was warm in Saleh’s grip.

“Yes,” Saleh said.

“Good,” Elias said simply. They rose together from the woven mat.

“Tell me,” Elias said, smiling. “Have you ever met an elephant?”

Saleh shook his head. He was smiling, too.

“Then let me take you,” Elias said. “They’d love to meet you, you know.”

And together, the two boys left the khan, hand in hand, and wandered off into the enclave of the Green Caravanserai; where a herd of elephants was playing in the mud.

3. The Webster

The Green Caravanserai made its slow way across the Sinai and its passing went not unnoticed by the denizens of the desert. Saleh grew accustomed to the rhythmic movement of the great robotic khans as they reconfigured and adapted to whatever terrain they were traversing.

His dreams were filled with stars: the great river of the Milky Way as seen from the desert, and the fireflies of spaceships and habitats in low earth orbit that shone just overhead.

In his dreams he was up there: floating, free.

He longed for freedom.

He wasn’t sure what it was.

The caravaners were kind but they were different to his tribe and he seldom understood them. They foraged in the desert, and he understood that, but they were not a family as he knew it before, not tied by blood. They were a disparate collection, people from all ends of the Earth and the Up and Out and even from the Drift. Their language was mostly non-verbal, a sort of pidgin sign language mixed with Silbo, the whistling language of La Gomera, and Saleh spoke it haltingly, struggling for words and articulation.

He was not one of them. Each day that passed took him farther from his home, his former life. Each day that passed took him closer to some port where he would take his leave, some market where he could sell the one item of value he had. Somewhere he could begin his own dreams, try to remake himself in some other image.

That fixed certainty—arrival, departure—stood between him and the caravaners. He was a passenger, nothing more. They were kind but distant. What brought each of them into the company of the Green Caravanserai he didn’t know. They kept their stories tightly to themselves. Once you joined, Elias told him, you left your old life behind for good, like a memory plucked out of your mind and erased. You never spoke of it again.