I heard myself say, “My name is Allison Pearl.”

“We read your internal tags. You can’t lie.”

“Allison,” I insisted. “Pearl.”

“Call yourself whatever you want.”

I put my disobedient hand into the bowl of food and cupped it to my mouth. It was a globby green muck that tasted like mown grass, and I lost about half of every handful, but my body accepted it hungrily. Digger Choi stuck around until I was finished, then took the bowl. I was still hungry. Digger Choi refused my request for seconds.

“Is this how you treat your prisoners?”

“We don’t take prisoners.”

“What am I, then?”

“A hostage.”

“You think I’m that valuable?”

“You might be. If not, it will be simple enough to kill you.”

*   *   *

Because I could move my body again, the Farmers took the precaution of tying my arms behind me. They left me like that all night—in some ways it was worse that being paralyzed. And in the morning they pulled me out of the cart and frog-marched me to another one, identical in all ways except that it contained Turk Findley.

During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.

There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines … weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.

The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.