Harry shrugged, then started patting his pockets. “I’ve lost me phone,” he muttered. “Mind you, wouldn’t be much use for tryin’ to get ’old of your grandad, anyway. Just cannot persuade ’im to carry one. I mean, ’e’s fanatical about it. Those things mark the end of civilization was ’is exact quote last time I tried.”

Alex wandered to the felled tree where Zia had dumped his possessions and lifted his own pulverized phone. Smashed beyond repair. Prying it open, he managed to pull the SIM card free from inside. It looked okay. He pocketed it along with the other items, then stood massaging the tension knotting his neck.

His eyes drifted until they stuck on a small gray shape nearby. Another dead flier. But this one had a purple-and-black ribbon tied around it. The machine he had briefly controlled. The sense-memory of operating it—of being it—hit him. He had done that. Just like them. With his interestingly shaped mind.

He crossed over and picked it up. It seemed undamaged. He pushed the panel open. His hair was still in there.

“Alex, what’re you doing?” Harry’s concerned voice came from behind him. “Careful with that.”

“It’s all right, Harry,” Alex said, trying to convince himself. Some deep instinct compelled him to remove Zia’s ribbon from the machine. Searching the ground, he found a pebble and stuck the strip of cloth under it, before stamping the stone down into the soft earth.

He studied the flier. It couldn’t hurt to try again. Could it? He had to try to find out where they were, and then how to find his grandfather. It probably wouldn’t work, anyway. He hefted the machine and closed his eyes and sought to remember how to build the bridge.

“Alex?”

He sensed Harry’s anxiousness. He put that into the mix, along with his own simmering fears. Before long, he heard the little thrum and whirr.

“Alex!”

He ignored Harry’s alarmed cry. Ignored everything. It was getting easier. He felt the robot rise, him rising with it. Green-gray-brown flared in his mind: glimpses of trees, a momentary sight of himself standing there, eyes closed, Harry behind him, staring in dismay.

Up, he thought. He tried to send up across the bridge. The flier responded, climbed higher. Alex tilted his head, and the flier banked, as he knew it would. The landscape spread below like a map. He saw himself down there with Harry beside the black spot of the well. He circled. No sign of Zia. He moved off, fast now, flying over the ruined farmhouse, a huge brown field, the woods.

His flickering vision was vague one moment, sharp the next. Beyond the trees stretched another rutted field. He flew higher, scanning the landscape. There, the hills rising, the Kandel itself. Not far. He turned in the air, trying to orient himself.