Controlled Paradise

Chapter 21: The Six-Legged One

Bullet lived off seeing what others didn't. Today he saw who had raised the beams.

The warriors parted on the ridge. They let the guests forward — so they would see. The team came up onto the crest, and the world below opened.

Down in the valley between the mountains lay no village. No camp. A city.

Wooden architecture — many-tiered, intricate. Pagodas with curved roofs, terraces, bridges over turquoise water. Waterfalls ran through the city itself. Thousands of horned dwellers below — and over it all, two pale moons.

The team froze. Even Max — for half a second.

"God," Sofia said through tears.

Marsi took off his helmet. Looked down. For the first time all day, no joke.

"Boys. This isn't a tribe. This is a COUNTRY."

Bullet didn't look at the beauty the way the rest did. He looked the way he always did — in parts. And one part didn't add up.

The beams.

Some of the load-bearing logs on the lower tiers were wrong. Too big. Too long. Too thick. Bullet saw the tree they'd been cut from — and the people who lived in these houses. Lean, tall, strong. But not that strong. Not one of these horned people — not ten of them together — could raise a log like that to the third tier.

Something much bigger had helped build this.

Bullet didn't like questions he had no answer to. He lay down on the crest — his body found its rest on its own — and put his optics on the lower tier, where a few dwellers worked at an unfinished terrace.

And the answer came slowly out from behind a building.

"Boss," Bullet said over the channel. Calm. As always. "Look at the lower tier. All of you. Zoom in."

The whole team turned their lenses. Twelve zooms met on a single point.

Out from behind a pagoda, led on plain ropes by two calm men of the tribe, came a beast.

The size of a house. Six legs that struck the ground with a weight that shook the dust. A broad, flat back. Bone-plated skin, gray-green, flecked with the same metallic sparks as everything alive here. Its head low, with the gentle eyes of a draft animal that feared no one — and that no one feared. On its back, a harness bearing that same enormous log.

The men said something to it, quietly. The beast stopped beneath the terrace. And without effort it raised the log a hundred men couldn't lift — up to where the builders' hands took it.

"That's who builds their cathedrals," Bullet said.

For a few seconds no one spoke on the channel. The whole team watched the six-legged giant calmly set a beam the weight of a truck into place.

"I'm in love," Marsi said at last, reverent. "Boss. I want one. Imagine what I'd do with him on Earth. I'd move a house. I'd move TWO houses."

"It's a draft animal, Marsi," Olena said. "Like an ox. Gentle."

"Gentle." Marsi was quiet a moment. Bullet could hear the single thought working in that silence — the one Marsi always reached faster than anyone. "Wait. Doctor Voronina. If THIS is the gentle livestock they keep in the yard…"

"Then what."

"Then what lives in the forest they're grazing it away from?"

Silence.

"Because I'll tell you this." Marsi put his helmet back on, and his voice was almost serious under the joke — which is what made the joke perfect. "If there's something out in that pretty dark forest bigger than THIS — I am never going in. Not for metal. Not for orders. Not for all of you put together. I'm a city man. I'll stand right here, by the livestock."

Bullet lowered his optics. The corner of his mouth lifted — a millimeter, because he allowed himself no more. Marsi could say something stupid in a way that held the one smart thing everyone was thinking and not saying. Somewhere in that forest there really could be something bigger. And no one laughed all the way through.

The city met them with life. Thousands of horned dwellers stopped and looked at the strangers — without fear, with curiosity. A child of about five ran up to Riko, touched his knee guard, laughed, and fled back to its mother.

Bullet didn't go into the crowd. He found the highest point with his eyes — the roof of a temple tower over the city — and went there. Away from people. Where he was himself.

He climbed up. Set out his optics. He didn't look through the scope — he watched with his eyes. From here he held the whole city in his hand: exits, heights, lines, bridges, gates. He counted them the way Max had taught him — not from distrust, but from love for the ones he had to keep safe from up here.

Footsteps behind him. Bullet didn't turn sharply — he'd heard them long before.

A warrior of the tribe came up onto the roof. Alone. A long bow across his back, and that particular calm in his movements that Bullet would know blind. The warrior saw Bullet. Bullet saw the warrior. Two lone snipers recognized each other without a word.

The warrior sat at the other end of the roof. Looked out at the valley too. They didn't speak. Two men like that were always easier with distance than with a crowd. They sat apart, each at his own edge, guarding a city that thought it had nothing to guard against.

"Boss," Bullet said quietly. "There's another one up here on the roof. Like me."

"Threat?"

"No." Bullet looked at the warrior. The warrior looked at him. "Colleague."

Below, Max walked the terraces, coordinating, checking the perimeter. On the channel, to Bullet alone:

"Bullet. Beautiful?"

Bullet ran his eyes over the city. The water catching the sun. Children on the bridges. Towers standing on beams the builders couldn't have raised themselves.

"Very," he said.

"Then be twice as alert." Max's voice didn't change. "A city that's never been at war doesn't know where death comes from."

Bullet looked west, at the dark line of forest beyond the lights and the waterfalls. Where the six-legged livestock had come from gentle — and where, as Marsi had just said aloud, something might live that had made these giants skittish.

"Always, boss."

And he stayed on the roof — above the most beautiful city he had ever seen, beside a silent colleague from another world, looking where no one else looked. Because the rest were looking at the beauty.