22: Plessuan

Hew solders a voice into the armor — microphone in the helmet, an aerial he's moderately proud of — and Albert delivers the collective's one commandment to its new pair of wings: you see for us, we think for you, nobody is alone in this arrangement. Sarah punches through the cloud deck with a whoop the whole camp hears, hangs at the top of the sky, and for one entire minute forgets to be anyone. Then a huddle of fur-clad strangers wanders into camp with news several days stale and secondhand: a girl who talked like a city, a small one who talked like a grandmother, a tall one the fire seemed to like — walking north at the missiles. An old man who has never owned a map lifts his arm and points through the trees, through the ridge, through everything, at the place itself. And the crack of Sarah's going rolls back off the ridges like small thunder, carrying Albert's eyes away with her — out of counsel, out of the collective, out of reach. A valley to the north sits on hot springs, warm all winter, fog standing between two mountains like a curtain. Behind the curtain: terraced fields, a steaming river, tidy roofs — and through them, out of them, something sleek and dead black that has grown among the houses like knives in a drawer of spoons, and six fields of silos with their mouths shut, pointed at the sky. The two guides look down at the transformation of everything they have ever known, say the name of their home like a word over a grave, and then walk straight down into it — while the boy behind them discovers what it means that they aren't running, and what "now that we have you, we'll be safe" might actually mean, and how it feels when the machines send wires instead of bullets. Because they don't take prisoners. Which means somebody down there wants him alive. And is expecting him. And at the front step of the largest structure in the valley, hard enough to ring the earth like a bell, the second bearer of the gear comes down standing out of her own sound, lifts her face to the black doors, and says the last two words of the episode.