A rounded arm lies in the stream, the water bulging around it. The dog stands attentively beside me. Jil Punkinflake says something I don’t catch, facing away from me and still advancing toward the arm, then repeats it over his shoulder.

“It doesn’t look real,” he says.

They both bend and loom in, faces first. Jil Punkinflake picks up the arm, and then stands, holding it by the elbow.

“It’s fake,” he says in a loud voice, looking back at us.

Thrushchurl, grinning or squinting, looks to us and echoes his words. “It’s fake.”

Jil Punkinflake shows me the arm. The flesh is spongy stuff over a hard core, neatly sectioned at the shoulder, with a white bulb of bone protruding. The bulb has four identical, deep grooves cut into it. I turn the hand over and examine it. The slender, womanly fingers close on mine and hold me with gentle pressure, frigid from the icy water of the stream that still trembles in droplets on the blue milk skin. The sensation shakes me. There’s something frighteningly enticing about it, and at the same time I want to drop the arm or fling it away from me.

Silichieh begins looking at its articulations.

Ahead, Makemin’s voice, flat and strict.

“Come on. Leave it.”

“I think they used to put artificial people near crossroads markers,” Silichieh says, and his voice seems to plummet in strength during the brief journey from his diaphragm to his mouth. “We should look for markers.”

Makemin nods and turns into dark fog. Scouts are sent probing around in the silence ahead. The road here is vague in the shallow breadth of a dip between hills and it isn’t entirely clear which way in the fog to go.

Hooting from one of the scouts, an asylum man. Silichieh dashes forward to examine a small shrine that stands above a V in the ground as thin and meager as a fold in a linen top sheet—the fork in the road, it seems. The shrine is a metal cage on a squat, undulating pillar of the same material, about three feet high. The cage is square, with flat bars, and topped with an acute dome. Inside the cage a polished steel ball rolls back and forth in a groove with pinched-up sides, making a grating stone scraping sound. Why hadn’t we heard that? Makemin bids me look for writing. I find none. Silichieh is fascinated by the movement of the ball. He thinks it is not perennial, but starts when someone approaches, and that its movement or sound are articulate in some way. Drawing a knife from the pocket of his sweater, Silichieh tries to probe at the ball, but his knife point stops with a click in between the slats. He taps there twice.

“Glass—so clear I couldn’t see it at all,” he says.