Hector was gone, but he couldn't be far. His grandfather had talked to Fintan about seemings. In the light of day, they didn’t last long unless you put a whole lot of effort into their creation. The more the seeming did, the more effort it took to create.

  Judging by Fintan’s mercurial results, Hector’s seeming was amazing. Not only did it look perfectly like him, it actually moved with the wagon, attached by a hand on the side.

  Clyde pranced around uselessly, but Fintan closed his eyes. He could feel Hector out there. It was a bit like when he had an implant, and he knew someone was around the corner. In the Union, the devices let him talk to people from a distance, but he always knew who was calling as if he could read their eimai shortly before the net returned the public account of their identity.

  RuTing leapt from the wagon, looking for Hector. No one was paying attention to Fintan. He Stepped.

  He didn’t need to physically move when he did it, but it was easier when he did. One moment he was on the back of the wagon, and the next, he was in the woods directly behind Hector.

  The brash thief had lost his equine body. Fintan wasn’t surprised. Hector was a poor centaur. Before he knew Fintan was there. Fintan reached around his neck and grabbed him by the throat. He hauled Hector backward and put his poniard on Hector’s neck.

  It was just like killing an animal. I’m not killing anyone. He knew that for certain. His grandfather had trained the basic rules of the afterlife into him, but his knees still shook. Killing and death was not the way of The Peace. It was not the Union. It was so against his nature to hurt a person, he didn’t know if he could do it.

  “You have some Skills, after all,” Hector said. His voice was muffled by Fintan’s hand on his throat. “I surrender.” He held Fintan’s pouch and jingled it near his head. “You will find all your gilders in here.”

  Fintan grabbed the pouch, releasing Hector’s neck. Hector spun around, but he didn’t look like he wanted to fight. He massaged his neck and fingered the small cut that disappeared almost immediately. Fintan judged they weren’t that far from Clyde, maybe fifty paces, and judging how Hector kept his voice low, he didn’t want the big centaur to find him.

  Fintan looked in the bag while he kept his poniard ready. It was a poor blade for anything other than a kill strike. It didn’t even have a sharp edge. He didn’t get an exact count, but he thought all his gilders were in the bag. Skills had limits, and he suspected that Hector had to be close to make his gilder disappearing act work. Actually dissolving the metal was almost as much work as manifesting it. Hector wasn’t recreating the gilders. He was just moving them. Otherwise, he’d have no reason to steal. There was mist enough for everyone.

  To be on the safe side, Fintan edged back a few feet, keeping the poniard ready. For all Hector knew, Fintan could reappear behind him again. He liked to think of the poniard as a painless dispatch tool, but the pain of having steel shoved into your brain while awake was probably considerable.

  “That’s a lot of gilders for a Union man,” Hector said. “If you trade a few more, I’ll disappear.”

  “Or I call Clyde,” Fintan replied. The big Centaur looked capable of a killing rage. Fintan didn’t want to be around when that happened. Clyde might turn on him next. He didn’t like the way humans were corralled in the centaur village, and he didn’t plan on staying here longer than necessary. His grandfather told him the afterlife was lawless, with a few good towns scattered here and there. Finding good information meant a town, but he didn’t think he could find anything useful with the centaurs. They seemed to have only one purpose: making more centaurs.

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  “If you wanted to do that, you would have already.”

  Hector had a very knowing look about him, and he expressed it in his intonation.

  “Why were you in the centaur village? Is there even another herd?”

  “There are herds of centaurs all over the afterlife. As to why, well, it was a liaison. She took it upon herself to return to the portals.”

  “The portals are one way,” Fintan said. Everybody knew that.

  “Yes, they are,” Hector said with a smile.

  There would be only one reason to return: to meet someone. Or find recruits.

  “There are few gilders by the portals and a whole lot of wasted time,” Hector said. He rubbed the fingers of his right hand together and admired his fingernails. Fintan caught the meaning immediately. Hector wanted to be paid.

  “It won’t go well for you if Clyde catches you. He might even take you back to the village. I don’t think they’ll welcome a false centaur twice.”

  “That might look bad for the Head Mare,” Hector agreed, “but she knows how to deal with insubordination. I’ve always found it important to keep friends in high places.”

  Touche. The archaic term was as good as any. Hector didn’t know how easy it was for Fintan to produce gilders. He could replenish the bag in two months. He pulled out one gilder. Like all gilders, it was silicon-pressed gold.

  “Why do you want it so badly?” he asked. His grandfather told them they were for trade, but Fintan suspected more.

  “You honestly don’t know?” Hector said. “With a bag in hand. That explains it, of course.”

  He didn’t say more. Fintan flipped him a gilder, and in midair, it disappeared soundlessly and reappeared in Hector’s hand.

  “With enough time, you can escape any prison,” Hector said. He studied the gilder. “Do you know why?”

  “Because people are intelligent. We aren’t animals. We can think and reason.”

  Hector shook his head.

  “That’s a good Union answer. There are so few of you in the afterlife. Most people come in worshipping different gods. Even animals can escape from a prison eventually. It’s not because we can think. It's because all things break and wear down. They are made out of materials and built with rules.”

  “The afterlife is made of ideas,” Fintan said. “Ideas don’t age.”

  “They are replaced with other ideas,” Hector said. “Like this. The gilder came after the Catastrophe, replacing other currencies. The AI chips were worthless except for the tiny atoms of gold inside. A material almost completely destroyed it was so fought after.”

  “You can’t eat gold. Chips were plentiful, so we traded with them. They didn’t have any other use.”

  “But they were useful. A Union man would know what’s inside.”

  “Transistors,” Fintan replied. “The AI chips were artificial neurons. It’s basic education.”

  Hector put the gilder to his forehead, and it dissolved into his brain. The thief smiled. The run from the wagon and Fintan’s attack had left Hector tired and sweaty, but when the chip merged with his brain, he became restored. The rush of his solidity bent the forest grass around him.

  “The next level,” he said. “With every level, you become more real, and the prison becomes more of an illusion. Where you start matters, but everyone ends in one of two places.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the drink or ascended to the realm of the gods,” Hector said. “The Adversary lives on a mountain where the mists are so strong they create a vortex draining all the land around it dry. I can tell you will make it there eventually. You have allies, although they didn’t prepare you well. Perhaps there will come a time when we are allied.”

  Fintan wasn’t about to tell Hector about his grandfather. If the thief had a code Fintan wasn’t going to test it today. They were effectively at a stalemate. Eventually, Hector would come up with another story to charge him gilders. Fintan took one more in his hand. He could feel RuTing not that far away. He held up the gilder and tossed it to the side, just out of what he guessed was Hector’s range.

  The thief wasn’t too magnanimous to dive for a gilder. When his eyes were off Fintan, he Stepped.

  He appeared behind RuTing. She didn’t know about his Skill, and he didn’t know her well, so he preferred to keep it that way.

  She whirled around in a circle, and he huffed and gasped as if he’d run behind her.

  “There’s no sign of Hector. I think he escaped.”

  “Clyde is gone,” RuTing said. “I think we should keep going so he doesn’t double back and find us. Hector won’t be happy until he has all of our gilders.”

  “That’s true,” Fintan agreed. He had a plan for those gilders, and he suspected Hector knew they wouldn’t be around to steal the next time he found Fintan. If ever.