Thresholder

“I have a request,” Perry said to Dirk the next time he saw him.

“I know, I know,” said Dirk. “It’s one of the reasons I went to Calamus. There were people I wanted to talk to about it.” He looked around the town. The workers were in the midst of constructing the dome from materials brought in by airship. The airship itself was now being used like a crane to get the various pieces into place. “Not out in the open though.”

“Sure,” Perry said. “If you’d like, you can step into my office.” He opened the shelfspace just a fraction, so he could see it but no one else would be able to. He couldn’t put them both into it without causing a stir and all kinds of questions, but it was more secure than any place Dirk could possibly take them.

Five minutes later, after ducking into a gap between buildings, they were inside the shelfspace.

“Why’s it smell like that?” Dirk asked as he looked around.

“Flooding,” Perry said. “Mette thinks we can bathe the place in a special kind of lantern light, but I don’t really want effluence in an enclosed space.”

Dirk nodded. He seemed like he was trying to be nonchalant about being in the shelfspace, and to his credit, he was mostly succeeding. Perry didn't know if it had occurred to him that he was essentially trapped in here, but Dirk could play it cool when it came to danger, especially with more than a dozen clones of himself running around out there.

“It’s a big ask,” said Dirk with a sigh. “You know it’s a big ask, you said as much. I have the authority, but strict authority isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’m worried about the sword that’s going to fall on my head if I let you do this and it all goes wrong.”

“My request wasn’t about that,” Perry said.

“It’s not?” asked Dirk, raising an eyebrow.

“I mean, I haven’t been pushing because I figured you were trying to come to terms in your own way,” said Perry. “I figured that was why you left for Calamus. You have other things on your plate. I understand. I’m giving you a deadline of two more days, then you have to give me an answer.” It was an arbitrary amount of time, but Perry felt like if he didn’t set a deadline, Dirk would punt forever, or possibly just wait until it was urgent. “But my request, the thing I wanted to talk to you about that we couldn’t just as well have talked about elsewhere, isn’t about that.”

“What’s the request?” asked Dirk with a frown.

“I need to know everything you know about Fenilor the Gilded,” said Perry.

He was watching Dirk closely, wanting to see whether some kind of secret was going to slip out on his face. Stoicism would have said a lot, as would shock, but there was just confusion.

“Why?” Dirk asked. “What’s it to you?”

“Information first, then I might tell you,” said Perry.

Dirk considered this. He mostly seemed happy not to be having a conversation about clones. “He was a founding member of the Golden Revolution,” said Dirk. “If you’ve read any books about the culture, you’ll have probably run across a few quotes by him. He didn’t write as much as Memmik, and it didn’t all hold up as well as he might have wanted, but he’s a part of the history, and you’ll find a few statues of him around, mostly because we needed someone to make statues of to replace all the ones we melted down.”

“What happened to him?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know,” said Dirk. “He probably cocooned up and the new version of him didn’t want anything to do with what he’d had going on. Look, if you want to find out about historical figures, people who did their best work before I was even born, there’s a book library in Calamus, it’s got a lot of stuff gathered from the noble houses and private collectors, and it’s open to the public, one of the first they’ve established. There are bound to be books there on Fenilor, but they’re going to be books that are from the perspective of the monarchists. There are more coming by ship, a contribution from other countries, but I’m not sure they would prioritize history.”

“I already went to the library,” said Perry.

“When?” asked Dirk with a frown. “I have reports, you were here the whole time I was gone.” He’d been away for two days.

“The city is only thirty miles away,” said Perry. “If I run as fast as I can, I can make the trip in twenty minutes.”

Dirk stared at him. “It took me a day on horseback.”

“Yeah, if you had asked me, I could have stuffed you in here and run you over,” said Perry, gesturing at the surroundings. “It would have saved a lot of your time, and you could have read a book.”

“So why are you grilling me, if you’ve already gone to the library?” asked Dirk. “Why are you asking me at all? Fenilor stopped being important fifty years ago.” He paused, then leaned forward slightly. “Didn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “Have you ever heard of fights between two individuals with powers that couldn’t be explained, or could only be explained by Implements? It would have been sometime over the last sixty years, maybe a few times.”

“You’re looking for other thresholders,” said Dirk as though he understood. “Fenilor though? He has a whole history. He had friends and allies. And then, as elves do, he stopped being part of the picture.”

“Publically, at least,” said Perry. “I did read the books.” He had flipped through them and gotten Marchand to give a summary, anyway. There were too many to read all of them, given how much duplication of information there was and how much the books were wrapped up in things that Perry didn’t care about. He’d had time though, and had read what he could, then offloaded the work.

The books had placed Fenilor as an important figure, but not one above many others, not the person who bankrolled the revolution, nor their strongest orator, nor their architect or engineer, but a man who worked tirelessly and vocally in favor of a new way of doing things. There was nothing about him being an impeccable warrior, or having Implements, or powers, or anything like that.

“I’m sorry, I’m very well-versed in the theories that the common people have, but this is a new one for me,” said Dirk. “You think that … what, that Fenilor has stayed behind the scenes orchestrating things? He’d have gone through two reformings by now, he’d be a different person twice over.”

“I don’t think anything,” said Perry, which wasn’t true. “I’m asking questions. But since you seem to have no idea what’s going on, I’m going to assume you’re not covering for anyone. I guess I can tell you, because he told me. There’s a man claiming to be Fenilor, carrying Implements. He came here, to this town, looking for me, and spoke to me. He’s a thresholder.”

Dirk shook his head. “No. For so many reasons, no. I mean, the reformation thing, that’s the biggest.”

“Elves don’t work the same around the multiverse,” said Perry. “So far as I’ve seen, pointed ears and a slender build are one of the hallmarks, but reformation isn’t. There are other elves who live for thousands of years. He could be one of them. The real question I have is if he is a thresholder, and he’s had to continuously fight other thresholders … how? How’d he make it through something like a dozen fights without losing his head? More curiously, how’d he keep it out of the public record? Any incidents you can think of, times there was an earthquake or a city caught on fire and they never figured out what happened? Or maybe not at that level, maybe a fight that broke out and a hundred people died in a flash?”

“You want a full report on every fight or disaster that’s happened anywhere in the world for the last seventy years or so?” asked Dirk. “You’re insane.”

With computers and proper recordkeeping, it would have been simple. Marchand could have combed it down to a reasonable number, and could probably be trusted to flag any that were suspicious. But of course this wasn’t a world where people wrote every little thing down, and as much as they loved their literacy and libraries, the keeping of records had been something that often took a backseat.

“I’m trying to work with what I have,” said Perry. “And you’re not giving me much.”

“You said that your people came to some unfortunate world, fought a lot, then left once there was a victor,” said Dirk.

“Yeah, well,” said Perry. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“So he’s in violation of the contract?” asked Dirk.

“There’s no contract,” said Perry. “It’s just … how it is. But Fenilor didn’t go through the portal like he was supposed to, he camped out, and when you camp out, what apparently happens is that people just keep coming. Maybe. So I’m hoping that you can think of something that would suddenly make sense if that was the case.”

Dirk shifted to one side and spent a moment thinking. His eyes were all over the shelfspace, taking it in, surely making notes for later. “Nothing,” he said.

“Think harder,” said Perry. “Come on, some kind of fight, some kind of rumor about Fenilor, some secret project that might actually be a different secret project. Private installations. That sort of thing.”

“Are you trying to damage the culture?” asked Dirk. “A culture needs its heroes, its founders, some kind of mythology, and ours is only sixty years old. I’m not saying that it can’t be true because it would damage us, I’m saying … it seems more likely that you’re trying to damage us than that it’s true.”

“Or,” said Perry slowly. “That someone came to be claiming to be Fenilor, and that was their goal. But I’m not going to spread it around, except to you and maybe Moss. If it were true, would he be above the law?”

“No,” said Dirk. “That’s not the culture.”

Perry wasn’t sure that was true. It was true, if you needed the culture to be self-consistent, but that wasn’t something that the culture actually required of itself.

“Though,” said Dirk slowly. “How would you do it?”

“Do what?” asked Perry.

“What you said about Fenilor, about the fights. You know that you’re going to fight someone, and you don’t want it to be a public spectacle,” said Dirk. “You know about how often it’s going to happen, but you don’t know the specifics. You know they’ll have some kind of power to rival your own, but not what it will be. How do you keep it all a secret, and how do you win?”

“I don’t know if this would work, but one way might be to sequester yourself,” said Perry. “That was why I was asking about installations. If I were Fenilor, and I didn’t need to tend to this cultural machine that I had set up —”

“It’s not like that,” said Dirk. “He was a founder, not the founder. It never would have worked if it had been an elf telling everybody what to do.”

“Fine,” said Perry. “Jesus, I thought you were a cynic about it.”

“Pragmatists and cynics are often confused with each other by morons,” said Dirk.

“Anyway, assuming that I can step out of the limelight and only check in every now and then, what I do is I set up a place where I’m cut off from the world,” said Perry. “I find some island somewhere with as much as I need in the way of basic amenities, and I make it known that no one is supposed to go to that island. I leave everything I love totally defenseless while doing the island retreat thing, but in theory, the Grand Spell is only pointing at me, trying to get a conflict going, and if I don’t have a way to hear about some tragedy in the distance, that tragedy isn’t going to happen. The portal would be forced to open up next to me, away from everyone else. Then I would start fighting right away, trying to make sure it never spilled out anywhere else.”

“Hence secret facilities,” said Dirk. “If a random island wouldn’t suffice.”

“It’s one of the reasons, yeah,” said Perry. “Though … how you win, or get by without losing your life, I don’t know.” He clucked his tongue. “The cloning technology is three years old?”

“Just about,” said Dirk. “Less, if we’re talking about the stable version.”

“Three years old … to your knowledge,” said Perry.

“Feh,” said Dirk. “Look, I might not know absolutely every single secret to have ever been kept by every Command Authority or symboulion across the whole entire world, but there’s no way that they’ve been able to clone people for the last sixty years. Perry, I know the guys who invented it, talked with them about the practicalities, sat in committees where we discussed it — you’d need a giant conspiracy, way too many people involved.”

“And you’d need a lot of personnel to manage it,” said Perry. He smirked. “Some kind of … clone army?”

“It’s not that, but nice try,” said Dirk.

Perry sighed. “If you think of anything that can help me, let me know,” said Perry.

“I have no idea what help I could give you,” said Dirk. “But sure, if I can help, I’ll help.”

“You could help by getting me a clone,” said Perry.

Dirk laughed. “I knew we’d make our way back around to that. Look, give me … a week.”

“It’s been a week already,” said Perry. “Two days.”

“You’re working on making a mask,” said Dirk. “Your wife is working on a lantern, your girlfriend has made her own little workshop, there’s time. No rush.”

“Nima’s not my girlfriend,” said Perry.

“Fine, the elf whose bedroom you go into with great regularity,” snorted Dirk.

“That implication, that’s not the culture,” said Perry, pointing a finger. “And what does it matter whether she’s an elf?”

“Come on,” said Dirk with a roll of his eyes. “Alright, maybe you’re staying faithful to a woman I know isn’t actually your wife, but do you really think it doesn’t matter? Elves have a higher sex drive, they’re more free with their bodies, that’s just a simple observation. Nima hasn’t gotten with anyone here, but —”

“She’s not like that,” said Perry. He felt a chill in his spine. He didn’t like having a confrontation like this, and normally he’d just brush it off, but Nima had complained that too many of the men she’d met — even in Kerry Coast — had assumed that she’d want to lay with them, and to hear it from Dirk, who should know better, rankled.

Dirk’s face changed, becoming less jovial, more professional. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know,” said Perry. It still rankled. “She’s not from this world. She’s had a hard enough time here.” He didn’t see eye to eye with Nima, and there was a decent chance he was going to have to kill her, but this world had in many ways been a bad roll of the dice for her. She was also in over her head, which he was sympathetic to.

Dirk held up his hands. “Elves from different worlds are different. Chaste, I guess, where she’s from. I wasn’t thinking.”

Perry’s lips were thin. He didn’t actually think that elves were chaste where Nima was from, they were often courtesans to the angels, and beyond that, he didn’t really know. Maybe they slept around a lot.

“Two days on the cloning thing, you’ll give me that?” asked Dirk.

“I will,” nodded Perry. He felt the warm glow of victory flow through him.

“And I’ll see if there’s anything rattling around in my skull about Fenilor,” said Dirk. “No promises.” He looked around. “I was going to make my exit, but I guess I need you for that.”

Perry stepped to the central place where the overlap happened, opened a coin-sized hole to check to make sure no one was around, then let Dirk out.

“Hey, just so you know,” said Perry as he exited the shelfspace too. “I’m probably going to Thirlwell soon.”

“You are?” asked Dirk with a raised eyebrow.

Perry nodded. “Fenilor is going there sooner or later. Third Fervor is probably already there, given there haven’t been any more attacks. So I need to be there too, just in case.”

“And the other guy? He’d stay here?” asked Dirk.

“That depends on how he comes out,” said Perry.

~~~~

Mette made the world’s first radio. She demonstrated it for Moss in the privacy of a field, and he seemed stunned by it, and also very skeptical.

“It emits these ‘radio waves’?” he asked. “And you’re certain they’re safe?”

“I’m less certain than I was two years ago,” said Mette. “Because nothing makes sense. But yes, they’re safe, I have hundreds of scientific studies that say as much.”

“On hand?” he asked.

“Sort of,” said Mette with a look at Perry.

“And it’s powered by lightning bolts,” said Moss, poking at the wires with a thick forefinger.

“They’re not dangerous,” said Mette. She gave Perry another look. “They’re not that dangerous. They could give you a shock, but that’s about it.” The radio transmitter was powered by a lead acid battery. The lead had to be procured from elsewhere, but the acid had been one of the things that her lanterns could make.

Moss had been impressed by what she could do with a lantern, not necessarily that it could be done, but that it could be done so fast, without consulting the tables and formulas or really seeming to do anything with pencil, paper, or a slide rule. She did everything with ease, perfectly and swiftly, as though it had all snapped together in her head. Perry remembered Cosme and Wesley on a large lawn outside a manor poring through books together and trying to get a bulky radio working, and the difference was night and day.

Mette seemed a little uncomfortable that everyone was wowed by what she’d done. Personally, Perry would have taken a lot of pleasure in flexing his muscles, but she was treating the praise like it was pressing on her.

“This will let Perry communicate from a distance?” asked Dirk. He had his arms crossed.

“Yes,” said Mette. “We could build a much bigger transmitter with a better power source, and that would let us talk to him in Thirlwell.”

“But to talk back, he’d also need a transmitter of this size?” asked Dirk.

“We have solutions to that,” said Mette. “Though it would be helped a lot by having a high altitude airship to serve as a repeater.”

“And what’s a repeater?” asked Moss.

Mette visibly resisted the urge to sigh. “It takes the signal in and retransmits it. We’re twenty miles from the coast, then another thirty miles across the water, then another ten to the center of Menishmire. That’s doable with an oversized transmitter, one mounted high on a building here, but an airship makes more sense to me, especially since there should be one stationed there already.”

“There is,” said Dirk. “Bringing it back, getting it outfitted … gods, this is going to make everything so much easier. We could just radio the ship, if every ship had one.”

“If it’s safe,” said Moss with a skeptical look. “And if it passes committee. We can’t just equip every airship with these before testing, and not without careful consideration of the impacts.”

Dirk groaned. “Fine, that’s the culture.” He always seemed to say it with regret. “Are we good for this one single use?”

“Not really, no,” said Moss. He rubbed his beard. “Recall that with the lanterns, they rushed ahead, setting aside their ignorance of the impacts and costs. Effluence was discovered early, and they forged ahead, thinking that it wasn’t so bad, that it was a problem they would solve, that the costs were surely worth the benefits, even without actually knowing the costs. And once the solution was found, it was deemed too costly, too disruptive, too finicky, an affront to tradition.”

“Once you start using radio, you’re not going to stop using radio,” said Mette. “You’ll never go back to signal flags.”

“Er,” said Perry. “You’ll actually probably use radio and signal flags.” Mette waved the objection away as though what he said wasn’t worth saying, but Perry was pretty sure that airports on Earth still had people on the ground waving flags and lights around in addition to the radios.

“Regardless, I’ll make the trek soon, call in one of the patrol airships, and get it fitted,” said Dirk. “Mette, you can have all the people you need for whatever you want to give us.”

“I need those people for the dome,” said Moss.

“The dome comes second,” said Dirk. “I want this mess cleaned up as soon as possible, and if getting Perry to Thirlwell and in communication with us is workable, it needs to happen.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Perry, tonight is the night.”

“For what?” asked Perry.

“You know,” said Dirk.

“How many?” asked Perry.

“Just the one. So we know what we’re working with,” said Dirk.

Perry nodded and kept the smile off his face.

~~~~

The device really did require a lot of blood, which was drawn through a large needle that made Perry go a little pale. He stayed stoic though, and the hole it had made in his skin healed readily, requiring not so much as a bandage.

“For the record, I’m against this,” said Moss.

There were five of them, everyone who was conclusively in on the secret, which included Dirk, Moss, his assistant Mardoc, and Mette. Nima had been left out in the cold on this one, along with everything that Perry knew about Fenilor. He’d made sure that she was working in her room before coming to the warehouse.

“It’ll be fine,” said Perry.

“Your biology, your powers, we have no idea how they’ll interact,” said Moss.

“Noted,” said Perry. His part in this was over, the blood having been drawn. In theory, his clone would pop out in half an hour, and he wouldn’t even necessarily need to be there for it. There was something like childbirth about it, and he was feeling nervous, because Moss was right.

They went ahead with it anyhow. The discussion had been relatively short, and they weren’t even fully briefed on everything that was involved. Perry wasn’t sure how they would react if he told them he could turn into a werewolf, and they had no clue about Marchand.

After everything had been set up, there was just a lot of waiting around to do. Mette sat next to him on one of the chairs that had been brought in, and after some time, slipped her hand in his. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, but he accepted it.

The biggest question was whether the clone would come out as a werewolf. He wasn’t even really sure whether being a werewolf was genetic, and even if it was, he didn’t think that the cloning machine worked off genetics. As Mette had pointed out, if it was genetics, then the clones wouldn’t have memory. Moss wasn’t entirely sure how it worked either, and neither were the scientists that had discovered it, given that it had originally been thought to be a transportation device. There was something in a person’s blood, something that contained the essence of them, at least as this world’s magic saw things, and with the right projection and enough strong fuels, you could bring it out. If the machine had been clear, the process inside would surely have been grotesque. Moss’s private opinion was that once they understood it better, it might be used as a healing device, given that creating a whole body from scratch was surely not as difficult as putting a body back together.

“All that time not wanting children,” said Mette.

“Really, really not the same,” said Perry.

“It’s sort of the same,” said Mette. “If you squint.”

“Mmm,” said Perry.

“I hope our little guy comes out healthy,” said Mette. She was smiling at Perry.

“Might actually tell us something about what a real baby would be like,” said Perry.

Mette’s eyes went wide. “Meaning …”

“No, not — I’m still not interested in, uh,” said Perry. “I mean, it’s a dangerous life. And in my homeworld we don’t do things like we do them in your homeworld. A father and mother are supposed to be a part of a child’s life.”

Mette frowned. “Inefficient, if you’re not pooling resources.”

Perry let the subject drop. Her own children were now in the care of others, and had been for most of their lives, save for right after the birth. It wasn’t that he kept forgetting what she’d left behind, it was that there were so many landmines out there, so many turns of phrase that he wasn’t reading right before he said them. He hadn’t thought the issue of clones would bring it back around to children, but it was clearly a subject that was ever present in Mette’s mind. Perry thought now that having sex with her had been a mistake, but what was he going to do? Stop having sex with her?

They talked idly after that, with no more landmines, until eventually Moss moved to the machine and opened it up.

Dirk had exited the machine rather smoothly, but the creature inside scrambled out in a panic. Perry had never had much claustrophobia, but there had been a point in the last world where he’d been in a tight cave with bugs crawling all over the outside of his armor, and that was an experience that hadn’t yet left him.

The clone slipped to the floor and was then up on his feet in a moment, unsteady like a baby deer before finding his footing. He wiped the pink goop from his face and looked around, clearly ready to fight someone.

“Are you okay?” asked Perry.

The clone blinked twice. “Fine,” he said, then threw up into a bucket that Moss had held out for him.

It had been some time since Perry had taken a hard look in the mirror, but the clone would have been intimidating if he weren’t naked and vomiting. Once he was finished, Dirk handed him a towel, and the clone wiped the goo off him, then got dressed in some clothes that had been piled next to the machine.

It was only then that the clone met Perry’s eyes.

“It was a failure,” the clone said.

“How so?” asked Perry.

“I’m weak. Powerless.” The clone sagged slightly. “I can remember the techniques, but I can’t feel the energy, can’t execute any of it.” He dropped into the Moon Stance, and gave a passable kick, but Perry could immediately see that there was no energy behind it. “I’d need to get into moonlight to be sure, but I don’t think I could transform either.”

“We can fix that one,” said Perry.

“Transform?” asked Dirk, looking between the two of them.

“Bring out the sword,” said the clone. “I want to see whether it responds to me.”

Perry was reluctant, but he did as he was asked. He pulled the sword from shelfspace and held it out to the clone, who took it from him. The clone almost immediately lifted himself up from the ground, then landed with a sigh of relief.

“Test of wills?” asked the clone. He held out the sword with it held gently in his fingers.

Perry held his own hand out, and lightly tugged the sword to him. He felt it catch, and it stayed between the two of them as the clone dropped his fingers. They were working together, each pulling it in their own direction, letting up to not pull too hard.

“Well, at least the sword seems to think I’m me,” said the clone.

“We’ll figure something out,” said Perry.

It wasn’t what he had hoped for. He had wanted someone to go into combat with, someone to double his firepower, a secret weapon to bust out when the time was right, but it wasn’t going to be that way. Without the second sphere, there was no way the clone could dodge a bullet, and he definitely couldn’t tank one. Being a werewolf would give him healing, but that opened a different can of worms. It had taken Perry time to learn how to control himself under the light of a moon, a considerable amount of time, several transformations, and the help of the second sphere. Perry was confident in his ability to handle a werewolf in combat, but babysitting a werewolf so it didn’t kill and eat civilians wasn’t something he particularly thought would be worth it.

Without powers, Perry’s clone was just a guy.

It was clear to Perry only now that he’d been hoping for an equal, someone who knew everything that he knew, who had all the same experiences, the same feelings, who understood the references. Perry had thought about the ways that it might go wrong, and in his mind it hadn’t felt so bad. There was a good chance that they’d only be colleagues, not actually friends, given the power difference between them. The clone wouldn’t be an equal, he would always be the inferior of the two of them, and there would always be a power imbalance between them.

Perry wondered if the clone was having his own mirrored thoughts. They would be thoughts of being inferior, always to one side, valuable in his own way but not actually the leader of the two of them.

Perry owned Marchand. The clone did not. Perry’s very soul, or something like it, was linked to March, his meridians still flowing toward the armor. He’d investigated it on the airship, and the connection even crossed the boundary of the shelfspace. There was some aspect of it that had infected Marchand’s cognition, even if Perry didn’t understand what was going on at a base level. Marchand had become his own person, rather than the automaton he’d been. And as a result, the clone would always be subordinate to the original Perry, even when it came to their robot butler and war machine.

“I’ll be leaving tonight,” said Perry after a moment. “I won’t go all the way to Thirlwell, but I’ll go close enough to see it from a distance, to get some measure of the place. Better for the two of us not to be in one place at the same time. I’ll wait on the radio for any actual action, it’ll be purely scouting.” Even as he said it, it felt like a lie. The best way to scout was to blanket the city with nanites to network with each other and start capturing conversations for analysis.

“Separation is a good policy in general, I feel,” said Dirk. He was watching the two of them with interest. “Perry,” he looked from Perry to the clone. “Perries, I’m looking into that matter you mentioned, and I have threads that I’m pulling, but don’t press on it, and don’t pull your own threads, especially if you’re in Thirlwell.”

“I’m just going to scout,” said Perry. “I’ll be up in the clouds, nearly invisible.” Dirk didn’t seem to like that, but he nodded all the same, and he was the ranking authority, insofar as there was a ranking authority.

“You’re leaving tonight?” asked Mette.

“I’ll still be around,” said Perry, nodding to the clone. “You get that radio working, I won’t do anything but move silently through the city until I hear from you.”

“A few minutes ago you weren’t going to go into the city,” said Moss.

“I’m trying to work through plans,” said Perry. “If he had all my power, I think we would stay here and train a bit, then go together, but given that he doesn’t, it makes more sense for me to press ahead. We want to milk as much strength as we can, while staying apprised of what the enemy is doing. There are things he can work on, ways he can help from a distance.”

“No tooth?” asked the clone.

“You’d be a danger,” said Perry. He grit his teeth slightly as he said it. The clone surely knew better than to mention it out loud, and had surely come to the same conclusions.

The clone nodded with an ‘it was worth a shot’ look on his face.

“More secrets,” said Dirk. “I’m not surprised. You have the goal in sight? Wrap up your conflicts and let this world deal with its own problems?”

“You don’t need to tell me five times,” said Perry.

“This was a gesture of goodwill,” said Dirk, pointing at the machine rather than the clone. “I’m hoping it wasn’t a mistake.”

“Goodwill accepted,” said Perry. “Remember that other matter. Keep looking.”

“I will,” said Dirk. “I don’t expect to find much.”

“There’s one other thing,” said Perry. He pointed at the clone. “He’s Kestrel.”

“Seems like that’s going to be awkward for everyone else,” said Dirk. “Seems like it’s going to be hard to remember, given you look the same. It’s why we don’t do it that way.”

“We decided it beforehand,” said Perry. He’d thought they would be twins, partners. There had always been the risk that it wouldn’t happen. He just hadn’t known how he’d feel about it, or how he’d deal with it. By running away, he guessed, to be alone with his thoughts, or better, to have something to distract himself with.

He strode out the door and lifted up into the air, flying into the night sky.