The day had suddenly popped open with a burst of sunshine, clearing the clouds and mist, the temperature perfect. People milled about everywhere he looked—on their way to the farms, the shops, the mill, the warehouse, the fishery—most of them too busy to take note of a young man on his day off, half-running toward the beach. But Mr. Jerry gave a wave, his giant eyebrows like combed wool, and a few yurts down Ms. Ariana gave a wink—harmless from a woman who was one of the first people born on the island, only a year after the Flat Trans. Her silvery hair and wrinkled eyes always made Isaac think of the grandma in the tale of Red Riding Hood.

“What’s the rush, boy?” she called out, standing at the edge of her little lawn. She held in her hands the Daily Memo that his friend Sadina passed out every morning. “There a fire I don’t know about?”

“Got some work to do at the Forge,” Isaac responded, slowing down enough to give her a little smart-ass curtsy and a flourishing wave of the arm. “What’re you up to today? Got another date with Old Man Frypan?”

She let out a hoot and a holler. “Don’t he wish! That cheap bastard wouldn’t know how to court a melon.”

Isaac exaggerated a laugh and then revved up to a full jog, offering a last farewell wave.

“Run, boy!” she yelled. “Run like the wind!”

He loved that old woman.

The Orphan stood straight and rigid behind the parapet of the fortress wall, his rifle resting upon his shoulder, its barrel aimed at the cloudy sky. As he had for the last eleven years, he stared at the endless fields that served as a waterless moat around his homeland. It was a dead land, all life and vegetation killed with poison so that nothing might obstruct the view of the Orphans. The waste lay dull and gray, like a cemetery without tombstones, as vast as the ocean.

The Orphan had no name.

Thirty feet away, to the north, stood another statue with no name, her shoulders square, her head shaved, her body sheathed in an artillery suit. A literal human missile. To the south, thirty feet away, there was another Orphan. This one didn’t stand, however. This one sat upon a turret of metal, a machine of such firepower that it could destroy the entire wall upon which it rested. That Orphan had no name.