When the chant has slowed almost to stillness, she feels herself rise upward, out of her body, past the trees and the floating banners. Above her the stars flare close and huge, cold as the northern ice below them. And there again is the errant one, the low small sphere pacing its round. Not a meteor, then. It is in part this thing that calls to her, though she cannot tell why. Nor does it hold her long. Across the snow fields she hears again the wolf pack racing under the waning moon, calling to each other in the chase. Calling to her, Tshunka Wakan Winan of the Lakota people, to run with them.

She follows the baying as she slides along the air, miles slipping away under her with a thought. When she finds them, they are a string of dark shadows, moving over the snow in great leaping bounds from north to south across a rise. As she descends, she feels the beginning of the change come over her. Her spine reconfigures itself, hips and shoulders twisting beneath its line. Eyes and ears become almost unbearably keen. She hears each padded footfall as it breaks the crust of the snow, sees each hair in the feathery ruff of each wolf as they streak toward her, never breaking stride.

As the big male in the lead passes by her, she swings into the line after him. She feels her spine coil and release with each plunge into the snow, feels the power as muscles of hip and thigh lift her free of it again and into the air. Yellow eyes gleam like fireflies around her; the breath of a dozen mouths streams behind her in a plume. It is only gradually that she becomes aware that there is something strange in this running. There is no crashing of underbrush as escaping prey flees before them; her nose catches no scent of elk or deer or antelope.

She senses amusement from the pack leader at her discovery, and something that, had it been a human word, would have been, “Wait.”

A mile further along, she picks up the scent—wolf-like but not, with faint but still perceptible overtones of human. Dog. Male. A ripple of tension runs through the lower-ranking members of the pack behind her, but she senses nothing of threat or fear in the lead male. Instead there is purpose, and the feeling of a task almost completed.

When they come upon him at last he is stretched out along a fallen log in a larch-pine clearing, front paws straight out in front of him, the brush of his tail draped elegantly to one side, facing forward with ears erect. Almost, she thinks, as if he has been waiting for them. And almost—almost he is familiar to her. A big dog, almost as large as the alpha wolf, with silver fur on face and flank, legs and belly, marked with a black saddle and a four-pointed black star between his eyes.

The pack comes to a halt, and the stranger descends to meet them. He sniffs noses with the leader, and they stalk around each other stiff-legged for a moment, tails straight up, hackles rising. Then the dog steps back, lowering his head to make submission. The ritual repeats itself down the line. Then the pack wheels and sets off south again, running under the moon toward the frozen lake and the small band of humans encamped there.

When Koda’s spirit comes again into her body, her muscles are sore, and she is painfully hungry. Sound asleep on the rock beside her is a large silver and black German Shepherd. Levering herself up, she grabs him by the scruff of the neck and gives him a shake. “C’mon, boy,” she says. “Let’s go find something to eat.”

2

Walking up to the retinal sensor, Kirsten experiences a feeling of terror unknown in her life before this time. If she fails this one simple test, she will be killed outright. No second chances, no recriminations. Dead. As a doornail, as her father has been known to say on occasion. Her analytical mind could never quite make sense of that particular idiom before, but now it seems painfully clear.

Taking hold of a deep breath, Kirsten steps in front of the sensor and prays her contacts will do their job.

The wait seems interminable and she has time to see various scenes of her life flash through her mind in all their Technicolor glory. She hears a soft hum, and has only time enough to think I’m a dead woman before the gate slides noiselessly open and she steps through, unencumbered and still very much alive.

She fights to keep her face, and body, completely without expression as her eyes trail over what she first takes to be scattered hillocks in the snow. It is only on further, seemingly casual, inspection that she notices those hillocks are actually snow-covered bodies, left to die, and freeze, where they have fallen.

Don’t start, K. Don’t stare. You’re an emotionless android. Remember that, or you’ll be joining your frozen friends here.

Thus fortified, she begins the trek across the wide expanse of grounds toward the large, low-slung and windowless building directly ahead. It looks more like a bomb shelter than a business, but given that the facility is, for the most part, a fully self contained unit, and further given that the androids that operated there wouldn’t appreciate an outside view, Kirsten supposes it all makes sense.

A second retinal scanner awaits her at the main entrance to the building, and she isn’t nearly as petrified to step before it. A half-second later, a small beep tells her she’s been processed and her identity accepted. The door hisses open and she slips easily through.

The normalcy of the scene boggles her. For one heart-stopping moment, it seems as if the events of the recent past have been swept clean, like the cobwebs of a nightmare upon full awakening. She could be walking into her own lab, nodding pleasant good mornings to her employees as they bustle by, intent on one task or another. If she looks hard enough, wishes hard enough, she can almost see Peterson, her gangly, nerdish assistant, start toward her in his peculiar, shuffling gait, steaming cup of strong black coffee in one freckled hand.

It is a dangerous mind trap when there is no hope, and Kirsten only manages to scramble out when she notices the shining silver bands around the necks of what she now recognizes to be androids.

A hard bite to the inside of her cheek jerks her back into reality. With only a slight hitch in her step, she continues forward with all the poise and confidence she can manage. The first of the wireless messages tickles her implants with its stream of incoming data, and within seconds, the building’s entire layout is completely known to her, as if she’d been drawn a map. She finds herself surprised by the low hum of verbal communication between the droids, never having figured that, in the absence of humans, the droids would still resort to speaking to one another aloud. There isn’t much conversation, to be sure, more like the low hive-drone one would hear in the waiting room of a dentist’s office, but it is there nonetheless. It’s very presence is something she’ll have to carefully consider. Help or hindrance, she doesn’t know.

Passing into a long down-slanting hallway, she peers off to the left, where a bank of polarized windows gives her a view into one of what she knows is many “clean rooms” where the droids and their component parts are assembled.

She pauses a moment to wonder at the perfect, robotic efficiency of the androids as they assemble their fellows. There’s not a wasted movement, not a second’s hesitation as they go about their work with a single-minded focus which nothing can interrupt. She can’t help but feel a bit of professional envy as she looks on. The scientist in her admires the extreme proficiency even as the human in her screams out its rage.

With a quick jerk of her head, she draws her eyes away from the scene and continues her walk through the hall. Several more doors, each guarded by the ever-present retinal sensor, bar her way, but she passes each test and is admitted further and further into the true nerve center of the facility.

She passes few androids this deep, and those she does pass don’t give her so much a look as she walks by. She’s been accepted, simple as that, and she suppresses a smirk only by the strongest of will, knowing their efficiency in such matters may, if she is supremely lucky, ultimately be their undoing.

Finally, she reaches her destination. The door slides open and she steps in.

At last, an island of humanity in a sea of androids. The small room smells of stale smoke, stale coffee, stale sweat, and stale food, and she can’t ever remember savoring a scent more than she does at this very moment in time.

Her gaze is caught by a framed picture on the desk, facing outward. A family of four smiles for the camera, their expressions innocent and carefree, their family bond evident beyond their similar looks. The two girls, obviously twins, bear identical gap-toothed grins. Where are they now? Kirsten wonders, drawn to the photo in a way she can’t understand. Dead, most likely. Killed, indirectly, by the very person who likely shot the picture. Their father, the man who sat in this very room controlling this mini empire that churns out death by the hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands. She wonders if he ever understood the irony she sees now, staring into the sweet, innocent eyes of these two girls who will never grow up to have girls of their own.

She shakes her head to dispel the thought, knowing if she freezes now, she’s dead, with the rest of humanity likely following in short order.

Walking over to the battle-scarred desk, she lays her laptop atop it, then slowly circles the room, examining it from every angle by the light of the harsh overhead fluorescents. Bank upon bank of softly humming CPUs, stacked from the cool tiled floor to nearly the ceiling, take up three of the four walls. The front wall is a massive bank of monitors, each tuned to a different part of the facility. Each screen shows the androids hard at work, never wavering from the task of creating others of their kind. Never wavering, never pausing, never stopping; they are relentless in pursuit of their preprogrammed goal.