The Four Horsemen of Elk Heel Farm

That summer the four horsemen began to stalk the land, and Rourke saw them sometimes on the distant horizon, black and sharp as letters in a language she did not know:

The first time she saw them she could not believe her eyes; but it happened again and again. When she next went to town, a month later, she slipped free in Dewey’s general store while her cousin Maryalice was paying for their things, and she went to find the oldsters who always sat outside on plastic chairs and had no fear of the sun and knew all and saw all.

“Oh yes,” said one old woman, squinting at Rourke. “Yes, they’re real.”

“Really real? Like from the end times real?” Rourke said breathlessly.

“Certainly real.”

“Like I could hit them real? I could kill them?”

“You don’t kill ’em, little girl,” said an old man, and he leaned back in his chair, which Rourke now realized was a blue plastic feed barrel cut and flameshaped to look like a throne. “They kill you.”

“Nobody’s killing anybody,” said Maryalice, coming around the corner. “Rourke, come get these bags.”

“But they’re wrecking everything,” Rourke said. “I saw them. You can see all the dust coming up where they go—they’re ripping things up, killing plants. What if they come to our farm?”

The oldsters nodded. Fingers rasped across bristly chins: Hmm, hmm, concerning.

“We’re going home,” Maryalice said.

Rourke took the heaviest bags from her cousin, and loaded them neatly into the trailers of their trikes, and she waved to the oldsters as she left; she had wanted to give them something, a small gift, to thank them for reassuring her that she was seeing true things, but Maryalice said not to.

“Everything you say is a different kind of no,” Rourke said.

“Well, when you’re a grown-up, maybe somebody will leave you a rotten little kid to look after, and then you can say yes all the time to her,“ Maryalice said pleasantly. “Come on. There’s a storm on the way.”

There was, too—a real barnburster. Rourke and Maryalice trotted around the farmyard unclogging downspouts and unblocking drains, bringing in the few things that might rust, checking the barn and the chicken coop for leaks or flooding, clearing the screens on the rain tanks, making sure no water touched the stored hay or bags of feed.

When they finally came into the house, it was barely past six, but as dark from the clouds as if it were the middle of the night; Maryalice checked the house battery and sighed, her delicate face not angry but disappointed. “Ten percent,” she said. “Did you leave anything on when we left the house?”

“No,” Rourke said automatically, then felt the blood rush to her stomach, her chest, her face at last, remembering. “… Yes. The cellar lights. I was down there for jam, and—“

She burst into tears, startling them both, and as she raised a hand to slap herself, Maryalice dove across the table to grab her wrist.

“Hey, hey. Hey. I thought you stopped doing that.”

“I’m sorry,” Rourke sobbed. “I don’t know what—“

“You’re eleven,” Maryalice said. “That’s what. Hey, it’s all right.”

“But now we’ll have to eat in the dark and there’s no sun and we can’t have—“

“We can play pretend,” Maryalice said. “Like in the old days.”

Rourke wanted to protest that she was far too old to play ‘camping in the house,’ but then she had certainly believed herself to be too old to cry over a mistake, especially one as small as this; tomorrow, even if it was cloudy, the battery would recharge as usual, and it would be like nothing happened. She waited with her chest heaving until she could talk again. “I could go get some wood,” she said. “Dry wood from the shed. And some candles.”

“You could do that.”

Rourke turned in the doorway as she put her coat on, and saw Maryalice leaning over the unlit stove, her hands on either side of it, as if she might faint without its support—saw also, for just a second, the past, or a past, where the slender woman in the faded jeans was her own mother, long dead, or Rourke’s mother, dead the same winter, and not Maryalice at all. Like a ghost tired of haunting the house. So tired, but nowhere else to go. A tiredness that Rourke had always taken to be patience, even goodness, and would have gone on believing if she had not turned around just then.

She regretted it at once, and rushed out the door with her coat flapping, running for the woodshed.

They opened a window to vent the worst of the woodsmoke and Maryalice warmed up yesterday’s bread and a pot of barley soup; they ate by candlelight, listening to the rain slacken and then ease into silence. Late summer and the sun not due down for hours.

“What do you think they are really?” Rourke said as they picked through a bowl of mostly-good raspberries for dessert.

“What?”

“The horsemen.” Rourke shook a tiny green worm out of a raspberry, then dropped the berry into the cup of clean water next to the bowl. “I don’t think they’re really coming to say it’s the end of the world.”

“I think you should stop thinking about them,” Maryalice said.

“I have a theory.”

“I bet you do.”

“I think it’s like—remember those motorbike guys that came through last year?” Rourke concentrated on the blue-checked tablecloth, not looking up at her cousin’s face. “And they came to Dewey’s to charge up. And then—“

“Yes, I definitely remember that part,” Maryalice said, because about a dozen of the locals had been hearing the stories of whatall the bikers had been doing for months by that point, and had put out the word to set up a pretty big mob—what the oldsters called a disciplinary committee—to sort them out when they arrived. The committee had killed eight of the ten bikers, set the two youngest loose, and busted the bikes up for parts. Some of the bikes, re-engineered and welded back together, were an honest-to-goodness tractor now, and had plowed several families’ fields in the spring.

“I think it’s four guys,“ Rourke said. “And they figured out a way to… hide inside those things, those metal horse things—like that big dragon costume we made for the school play last year. Except instead of cardboard they used tin sheeting or feed tanks or something. And now they’re going around scaring people and tearing up crops and wrecking fences and they’re gonna do worse. People always do.”

“Could be.”

“So I’m gonna hide out at the De—“

“No you’re not,” Maryalice said flatly. “Nope. First, I can’t run this place alone, and if you think ‘going after the four horsemen of the apocalypse’ is a get-out-of-work excuse, you’re wrong. And second, if they are like those bikers, they’ll kill you. Or worse.”

“But what if they come to the farm? We have to do something before that. It’s like when that coyote killed half our chickens last year. If we—“

“No.” Maryalice got up and took their soup bowls to the sink. “You’ve got responsibilities, Rourke. You can’t act like a little kid any more. I need you. The farm needs you.”

She meant it, too, as Rourke discovered the next morning; she had crept out of bed, listening to her cousin’s long, sleeping breaths from the open door of her bedroom, and whispered light-footed down the stairs, and into the garage—where Maryalice had, at some point between dishes and lights-out, locked Rourke’s trike to her own, and secured them both around one of the big metal support beams. Rourke’s crochet-decorated lock lay open on the floor, keyless.

Maryalice would have taken both keys, Rourke knew, and strung them on the lanyard she wore under her shirt. Sneaky. No other way to get to town but walk, and that was a good twenty-five klicks.

So she went back upstairs and changed into her day-clothes and started breakfast, striving to look industrious when Maryalice finally came down. “Might go check the fences today,” Rourke said innocently.

“Good idea,” Maryalice said in the same tone. “Too bad you’ll have to walk while you’re doing it, huh?”

“Dang.”

“Yep. Have fun. Pack a big lunch.”

Elk Heel Farm was not at all shaped how Rourke imagined a real elk heel; their parcel of land was as flat as a mattress, humped here and there the way a sheet might pucker on a corner. The flatness made the place possible to farm between the two of them—to move the sheep and the cows by themselves, to walk the gravelled ways around the chicken coops, stable, and barns. With feet and trikes it was just about manageable. In the old days, when everyone had had the big machines, it would have been easier still—no awful slopes to topple tractors or balers or harvesters, only endless fields of billowing green.

But there were no machines now. You grew food to eat so that you had the energy to grow more food. “It’s a living,” Maryalice always said, which Rourke thought was silly. Everything was a living.

It was warm and humid; the grass roared with mosquitoes, who shied away with a little wail of despair as Rourke stalked along the fences with her repeller clipped to one overall strap. Everything smelled of summer, of wet, of green, of sky. For the sake of appearances (doing my job, Maryalice), she sometimes yanked on a strand of wire or kicked a fencepost. She thought about space stations gliding high above them, invisible in this the sunbright day, and wondered how they were farming. No machines, of course, because there wasn’t room. Everything by hand, just like her and Maryalice.

She allowed herself to feel smug about it, then crested the highest ridge of the farm and stopped dead.

Because there, right there in the greenness—her greenness, her farm, her family’s farm—was one of the horsemen. The lopsided, rusty structure was not more than fifty yards away, though the man hidden inside was not facing her, as far as she could tell; there was no opening on her side to see through, just facets and angles of metal. It was much bigger than she had expected from seeing them run about on the horizon; it was like one of the barns, bigger than a barn actually, because it was hunched over. When it straightened up she knew it would tower over her.

Her fear felt sharp yet distant, as if it were in motion but had not reached her yet: an instinctive terror of Something is bigger than me and Something this big can hurt me, a memory from a long human past as prey.

Then, overtaking it, came the anger as she realized what it was doing: exactly as she had told Maryalice, the thing was scrabbling at the soil, tearing out the halfgrown barley plants at the root, tossing them into a limp pile where their vivid green was already starting to fade into yellow. And she reminded herself that the anger was okay: it wasn’t the shell but the man in there, some shit-disturber, antisocial vandal, a criminal actually, and Rourke might have been frightened by the size of his shell but the creature inside, like a snail, was soft and mortal.

Rourke was not afraid of one man and if anything the size of his shelter told her he was small and soft; the biggest, hardest villains out here had nothing protecting them at all except their ordinary clothes. Those were the ones you had to watch out for.

She had her everyday knife on her, the little one incapable of much more than cutting twine or whittling toys, but it was better than nothing, and she marched up to the uneven metal shelter with the knife held at her side, not quite a threat yet. “Hey!” she shouted. “You get your ass out of there! Now!”

The entire structure turned slowly, a clump of barley pinched in one of its limbs—not made to look like a hand but a long set of metal claws, absurdly thin against its bulky frame.

“You’re trespassing!” Rourke pointed at the barley with her knife hand, forgetting in her rage the rest of her hastily-prepared speech. “This is our farm, and that’s ours! What the hell do you think you’re doing?“ That was two swears; back home Maryalice would have made some noises about words we don’t say in the house, but that probably (Rourke reasoned) made them okay to say outside.

Greenish paint the colour of the just-dying barley flecked the rusty exterior of the shelter, no patch bigger than Rourke’s hand. It had eight legs—not a horse at all—terminating not in wheels but individual triangular treads, like a snowmobile. And it stank of rot, the solvent smell of an un-turned compost pile not allowed access to the sun and air. Rourke thought of the man inside, this mean, cowardly man who had no greater purpose in life than to go around wrecking people’s land, how he must be slovenly too, keeping his food scraps and trash inside the operator compartment…

“I said come out of there!” Rourke repeated. The structure did not move: no door, no hatch, no hint of motion within where someone might be reaching for a weapon. This was not particularly reassuring, and she was debating between climbing up the thing and looking for an exterior handle, versus just going back to the farm to tell Maryalice, when the ground began to tremble.

Of course no coward travels alone, and she should have known that, but it was too late to run now. The other horsemen—not horsemen—came trundling over the fields willy-nilly, not taking the roads between the gridded crops but arrowing straight at Rourke, and not one of the four alike. One rust-red and sepia all over, with two impossibly heavy-looking weapons trembling at its shoulders, or where the shoulders would be on a crab; one virtually skeletal, all ribs and struts of probably carbon-fiber, since it had not rusted, only accumulated strings of weeds and dirt; and one all black, glossy, smaller than the others, constructed out of what she could not imagine, for it seemed as clean and new as a brick of fresh glass extruded from the recycler.

Rourke let her knife arm drop to her side, waiting for the order to put it down. Now would they climb down, now would they show what kind of men they were, four of them against a little girl? Or would they stay in their jumble of salvaged junk and attack her from there? The all-over rust one still held its guns up, each barrel as wide across as a rain barrel. What would that fire? No, better to not think about it. She waited, heart pounding. She could still run, of course; but then she would never know. Never see their faces, never get the chance for one good, clean swing at them.

Because how dare you touch the soil. How dare you touch the barley. I planted those seeds with my own drill when the snow was barely gone. They are mine. 

It’s more than a living. It’s not like Maryalice says.

She tilted her chin up, waiting for the fight, as they completed their encirclement and parked around her, one at each of the cardinal points. Still plenty of room to run between them. No. No. The green one was still facing her, and then in the tense silence there came the first noise they had made outside of the impact of their mechanical steps and treads and wheels: a faint beep, just at the edge of her hearing. Then another, then more, a steady liquid trickle of them, like the call of a morning lark. Red lights no bigger than a match-head flickered on, synchronized as if they were throwing a lit cigarette from limb to limb, claw to claw, pincer to pincer.

The beeping petered out. She stopped turning to track the lights and went still again. An alarm? A preamble to the attack? A battle song? If it was, it was a pretty bad one.

At last one of them spoke—not the voice of a man, not even the voice of a human, the crackle more like a voice on the radio but the intonation all wrong, emphasis placed incorrectly on the syllables. “Query?” said the green structure.

Rourke waited a few seconds to see if there would be more, then said, “What?”

The red lights flashed again, one to the next to the next. Eventually the red one said, “Task stream?”

“… Pardon?”

“Existing task stream?” said the ribs-and-bones carbon fiber one, cautiously.

Rourke shook her head, dizzy. It was like seeing a mammoth heave itself out of the ground—no, not even that, because the mammoth had not evolved to become a mammoth on purpose. These had been built once, had been intended for a purpose once—and then been abandoned when so much else had. Now they were Pestilence and Famine, War and Death. Death, she could not help but notice, had not spoken. But once upon a time, they had not been that at all. There was no man crouched within, there was only, for reasons she could not fathom, four rogue creatures roaming the land trying to fill a need for which they had long ago been discarded as unfit. “You’re farming machines,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Correct.”

“Correct.”

“Task stream?”

She rubbed her temples. “What happened?” she said. None of them replied this time; the damp wind stirred, lightly, the strings of cobweb and sticky dust in Famine’s carapace. “Query,” she said, more loudly.

“Query?” said Pestilence, shifting its weight like a dog cocking its head to listen to a command.

“Query, uh…” She looked down at the little pile of torn-out plants again and gritted her teeth. She’d read about this in a robot novel, but that had been last year. “Exit current location. Return to point of dispatch.”

“Point of dispatch not located,” said War. “Offline as of six thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight days prior to current date.”

“Can you please put your guns down?” Rourke demanded.

“Query unclear.”

“How do I get all of you to leave?” she said, her voice cracking. Silence again. “All right,” she muttered. “I’m starting to see why people stopped using you things.”

Rich people had used them, she knew that much—only the rich had enough money to own single-use devices, like having a dedicated potato masher in the kitchen drawer rather than just using a fork. A tractor was a fork—you could use it for everything—and that meant it was sort of low-status, not like the frivolous luxury of a dedicated machine programmed to only do one thing, with the artificial intelligence of a not-particularly well-trained mule. To keep them in line had required digital reins, also of great expense and frivolity, and Rourke could easily imagine how these four had gotten free—accidentally, slipping their unreal harnesses and breaking down the real fences to roam the land after their point of dispatch had stopped responding to them.

She glanced around at the fields surrounding them, the deep ruts of wheel and tread they had left through the crops, and felt again a surge of anger. Clean this up! she wanted to shout, and thought of Maryalice—with a little start of surprise. Maryalice would not shout or rage or curse, perhaps out of some nobility of character that Rourke lacked but also because she was too tired. And she was tired because of Rourke herself, of course, but also the farm, of keeping the farm going with just the two of them. They could never have afforded these machines new; now, long past their useful lives, the four were worse than useless.

But if they could be fixed, where was the guilt in using them?

That wouldn’t sound very good when she explained it to Maryalice, she knew, but maybe if she could work through their logic strings bit by bit and at least nudge them back into reasonable behaviour… “The folks at Dewey’s aren’t going to believe this,” she said. “Okay, come on. We probably have a couple hours before I get in trouble, but this is for sure gonna take more than one day. And in the meantime don’t you dare touch any of the plants. No tasks in task stream. Confirm?”

“Confirm.”

“Confirm.”

“Confirm.”

She looked expectantly at the one she had been thinking of as Death. It still had not spoken; still the single red light shone high up in its boxy, faceted structure. It was barely the size of the wooden shed where she and Maryalice kept their garden tools. She could not imagine what it had been designed for. It had no treads, only a multitude of feet ending in round pads; it had no limbs she could see, nothing that could grapple or lift; it had no guns, like War, and its paint, if it was painted, showed no scratches or dirt. It looked as if it had been made yesterday.

But it had come with the others and was linked, it seemed, through the same set of little red lights; they knew one another, were traveling together, rode light and high on the horizon in a set of four, not three. Perhaps that was the Maryalice of the group, she thought; perhaps that was the one too tired to do anything else. Probably she would never know, if it never spoke to her. “Come on,” she said again.

Maryalice was waiting for her at the door.

For a while they looked at each other in the long summer sunset, and Rourke thought she’d melt into the ground with what felt a lot like embarrassment and a lot like guilt but mostly the profound irritation of having been caught at something—again—when there was simply no possible way of being caught. This had happened to her often enough at school, mostly involving notes, that she was quite familiar with the sensation. But it was still awful, and it still tied her guts in knots.

“Fences all right?” Maryalice said.

“Yep, yep. Uh.” Rourke squirmed under the weight of her cousin’s expressionless face. “Okay fine,“ she said after an unbearable pause. “They’re, um, not from the Bible.”

Clearly this was far enough away from whatever Maryalice had been picturing—perhaps some confession about boys, or sneaking down to town or something—that when Maryalice started to laugh, Rourke did too, uncertainly, because her stomach still hurt. “Wow,” Maryalice said when she was able to straighten up. “Okay, okay. This is going to be good, whatever it is.”

“And it’s not really stealing,” Rourke added firmly. “Because they were abandoned. So it’s really more like recycling.”

“It. It’s more like recycling. Got it. You’re not stealing, it’s not theft. And now you’re going to explain the rest, right?”

“…Kind of?” Rourke turned and whistled as best she could, not wanting to put her dirt-covered fingers in her mouth.

The four horsemen lumbered out from behind the barn, oddly delicate and contrite in their postures now, like enormous cats. Damp soil caked their carapaces, black in the failing light; the small red lights ringing their sensory towers blinked irregularly, giving an illusion of the eyes they did not have. Maryalice took a large step backwards into the house, then re-emerged, mouth open. She was no longer smiling.

Rourke said, “So I kind of climbed up on one of them—“

“Not the one with the guns.”

“No, no. That one.” She pointed at Famine, already nearly invisible in the gathering dark. “Um, because it’s sort of like a ladder and… anyway, they were built about eighty years ago, and I don’t know when they were last used—they don’t know either—but I think they wandered out of some kind of warehouse or something much later. They’re… they’re trying to, um, to farm, basically. But their code is all ballsed-up—”

“Rourke.”

“Okay so Famine can help plow and harvest, as far as I can tell, and then like Pestilence looks for garbage and stuff and can probably help dredge the stream in the spring, and War—is sort of a mess but I think it wants to fight weeds and bugs but it can’t remember which ones it’s supposed to kill—“

“And the guns?”

“For targeted spraying, I think. But its tank has been empty for a long, long time and I keep trying to explain no one’s making that stuff any more so it’s just going to stay empty. But I don’t think it understands, because there’s definitely code to say Refill later but apparently there’s nothing that lets it think Refill never.”

There was a long pause after Rourke ran down, and she felt the obvious question hanging in the air between them like a cold mist, touching both their faces in turn. What about that one? was the question, but she had not yet discovered what the one she called Death was meant to do in the old days, because it did not do anything now. It merely walked around after the others, watching them and ignoring Rourke.

As they stood there, not looking at one another now, the outside lights on the house came on—a soft orange, calibrated long ago to slightly disorient intruders or trespassers by messing with their depth perception. It got Rourke every now and then when she ventured out after dark. She wondered if the new farmhands would be affected by it, and only then, coming out of her momentary inattention, realized that Maryalice was shaking her head.

“We have to get rid of them,” she said quietly. “Buddy, no, come on. You’ve been having fun out there with your new toys. I get that. And maybe I haven’t been the best…” She trailed off, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, making her seem much smaller than she was. “But whatever needs changing around here, it’s not them. They’ll just bring trouble. People will come and… when they see those things, you don’t even know what’ll happen.”

“You don’t know either,” Rourke said, startling herself with her own vehemence. For a second she wanted to take it back; then she forged ahead. The machines waited, silent, blinking. “They could help us with the farm. You said we needed the help!”

“Not like this. Why do you think people stopped using them?”

“Because they were too expensive.”

“Because they went wrong, Rourke. They stopped helping and they started destroying. They were tracked down and deactivated. Most of them were melted down after parts were recovered for recycling. Do you understand? Even if you think you’ve got these ones… domesticated,” she said, after a pause to grope for a better word, “in one afternoon, they’re not going to stay that way. They’re not tame. They’re not horses, they’re not chickens, they’re not people. They’re…everything that was left behind for a reason. Okay?”

“But we need them!”

“We don’t.”

Because it seemed that nothing could be reasonably decided at night, Rourke shooed the farm machines back into the barn and begged her cousin to reconsider in the morning. She assumed it would take forever to get to sleep but instead, worn out from a day’s walking and climbing, fell asleep at once and woke groggily to her alarm just as the sky was beginning to lighten.

Through her window, down in the grassless clearing just in front of the house, she saw the circle of red lights blinking one to another, like the secret language of fireflies. Not domesticated, she thought in Maryalice’s voice. They didn’t stay in the barn like I told them. Then she thought of people, people coming and finding them, and how would they feel? Not curious and acquisitive, like her. No. More like when the bikers came to town, like that. And this would be even less trouble than that, because these machines were not driven by men whose fate you would then have to think about for the rest of your life.

For just a second she tried to coerce herself into thinking that wouldn’t be so bad—if that was happening now, if she was seeing just the first seconds of a disciplinary committee that would melt down the horsemen and turn them into something else, at least they would still be in the community, sort of, kind of, though she might never hear their grating voices again or try to correct their pronunciation (a thankless task). Then the second passed and she bolted downstairs.

But there was no one else out there—only the four, beeping softly at one another, speaking with their red lights. “You were supposed to stay in the barn till I came to get you!” she whispered, walking gingerly through the night-chilled mud, glancing back at the house. Maryalice’s room was lit, a pink rectangle against the deep blue sky, but no shadows moved behind the curtains.

“Factory reset condition fail,” a small, gritty voice replied.

Rourke squinted. “Death?” she said. “Oh, uh. Repeat notification?”

“Factory reset condition fail,” Death said, remaining motionless. “User query: terminate processes of near-field eligible units?”

Rourke shook her head, shivering. She had named it Death because the others seemed to be spoken for, and because she had wanted one name for each of the horsemen; but she had been right without knowing it, and they had all been traveling with the machine that had been built to shut down the other machines. She thought of them together in the barn, the smallest one in effortful silence and perhaps for the first time in years trying to remember what it was supposed to do—and it had, to some extent.

But it wanted her to hit the approval trigger that once would have been automatic. Maryalice would be happier, she knew. Or no. Not happy. Relieved. Like watching a twister slink down, sending up its fountain of debris, but veering away before it hit the house. Something that came in from the outside and could have destroyed everything, but didn’t, and the decision made well out of both of their hands. Like her mother’s death. Like Maryalice’s mother too.

Death was offering to do that, trying to do what it remembered. Not to create and nurture new life, like the others, but to end their chaos when they did it wrong. “I get it,” Rourke said quietly. “No, I really do, like, I get it. But no. No. We’ll figure something out. No.” Their red lights blinked, speaking to one another, not to her. Behind her, the door scraped open, and she saw Maryalice’s indistinct shadow on the dark mud, lined with light. She didn’t turn.

Rourke said, loudly, “No. Termination not approved.”

One of them beeped—she was not sure which, they were standing so closely together—but there was no other response.

Maryalice said, “You better hope it asks again.”

Rourke turned this time and returned to the front door, wincing as she tried to wipe her feet clean enough on the bristly doormat to get inside without tracking in half the yard. Maryalice stepped aside, her lips a thin line, as Rourke shut the door behind them.

“It probably will,” Rourke said, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. She had rushed outside in just her t-shirt and boxers. “Like, it can only do what the program tells it to do. I just thought… that’s why I can’t let it, right?”

“What’s why?”

“I don’t know.” Rourke struggled briefly as Maryalice took off her own housecoat and draped it loosely around Rourke’s shoulders, not bothering to get her arms through it. Then she clutched the coat around herself, eyes filling with tears. “Because we’re people. We can make a million choices aside from one and zero. We get to say what we do if something shows up out of the old days and it’s a monster. And if people come for them, well, they get to say too. And maybe people will want to use them on their farms instead of breaking them apart. We don’t know.”

“But you’ll have to find out,” Maryalice said, sounding resigned. “I don’t want that for you, kid. What if they come and they bust those things up right in front of you?”

“What if they don’t?”

Maryalice sighed. “Well,” she said. “I guess they won’t take food out of the animals’ mouths, anyway. And you did stop them from wrecking the place up, you said. Let’s get some breakfast.”

Rourke lunged at her and hugged her, not quite certain of the impulse; they were not the hugging type, never had been, but she allowed herself the few moments of surprise, the rigid body under her hands, the warmth and familiar smell of her, and then let go. “We’ll find out,” she said breathlessly. “We’ll find out what they’ll do. Right?”

“Right. Now put some slippers on. You’re going to be scrubbing the floor later, by the way. Your new pals can’t help with that, I’m afraid.”

Maryalice went down the hallway to the kitchen, and Rourke, impulsively, turned back to the window next to the door—yes, they were still out there, all of them, glinting as the sun came up, not destroying anything. Pestilence raised one of its grapplers—empty of yesterday’s seedlings—and Rourke waved back.