So we were escorted to an enclosed balcony a single level below the landing docks, still high above the city, and we stood there like two grimy and slightly bloodstained scarecrows, gazing out at the island of Vox and the far sea shimmering under the small Equatorian moon. Smoke rose from the fields where the Farmers were dying (or had, by this time, surely died), but it trailed abaft of us and the sky ahead was starry and clear. The warplanes were already circling back to their bases.

Allison spoke to the nearest soldier in our escort, then translated her questions and his answers for me. Did the soldier think Vox would actually achieve a transit to Earth? Yes, he was certain of it; the prophecies were being fulfilled; the Uptaken were among us. What about the Uptaken who had already been taken to Vox Core when the city was bombed? Bad luck, the soldier said. Bad luck that a missile had penetrated the Voxish defenses, bad luck that the strike had damaged Vox Core’s essential infrastructure—and very bad luck that the rescued Uptaken had been situated so close to ground zero.

It wasn’t clear to me how many “others” had been collected in the Equatorian desert, but I believed that would have included the hybrid boy Isaac Dvali, possibly his mother, maybe a few unlucky civilians who happened to be nearby. Had the missile killed them all?

“All but one,” Allison translated.

“Who’s the survivor?”

More translation.

“The youngest one.”

The boy, then. Isaac.

“But he was badly hurt,” Allison added. “He’s only barely alive.”

“And that’s enough to get the attention of the Hypotheticals? You think they’ll really open a closed Arch and carry us to Earth just because they recognize one injured boy and a confused ex-sailor?”

It was a question she didn’t have to answer. The answer came out of the sky in a blush of green light.

3.

It had been night on the Equatorian ocean. It was daylight on Earth.

The transition was as sudden and as unnervingly simple as it had been the first time I rode a rusty freighter from Sumatra to Equatoria. I felt a little heavier—Earth is a slightly more massive planet than Equatoria—but it was a sensation no more alarming than the feeling you get in a rising elevator. The other changes were less subtle.

We blinked at murky daylight. Beyond the shores of Vox, the sea was flat and oily to every horizon. The sky was a nasty-looking shade of green.

“God, no,” Allison whispered.

The soldiers gawked.

“Poison,” she said. “It’s all poison…”

The war sirens stopped wailing. In the silence the Voxish soldiers stood with abstracted expressions, as if they were listening to voices I couldn’t hear—and probably that’s what they were doing, consulting their Network or their superiors.