It was over a year after Old Wick died before Tora made her way back into the old house on the square. When the old woman’s time came, she knew it was her duty to take her place, but she was only 15 and the two hadn’t been getting along at all.

She was in the room when Mrs. Caron administered the herbs and watched the fight leave her. Not the first death she’d seen, but this felt like family. They may have quarreled, but she loved the old woman like her own mother. Maybe more, though she had been taught that love was uncountable and immeasurable.

The card was pulled out of Old Wick’s head, right from behind the ear. It was slim and fragile looking, like the woman herself, so she assumed it must be much stronger. Tora hadn’t had a port put in yet, so she took the card and kept it on her at all times.

Mr. Moon was to be summoned. As the village’s main connection with the outside world, he would be the one who could get it done the most safely. But no one ever knew where he was.

Today, Mr. Moon had returned. He was piloting a vehicle that Tora had only seen vids of, a motorcycle. It didn’t look like it had had the best life, but it was working. The noise was enough to draw out the entire village.

He didn’t stop in the square but instead went straight to the cemetery. He didn’t even get of the vehicle until he was in front of the wood plank marking Old Wick’s resting place. Tora found him there just staring at grave marker.

"It was peaceful, at the end." The man, in a beaten leather coat, said nothing. "before that, there were weeks of compete gibberish while she lost control of the card." Moon still kept silent but now he at least looked at her. "She wept like a child for a lot of it. I learned some interesting things that she hadn’t shared before, father."

"I’m sorry I couldn’t get here before now. The message only got to me a month ago." There was clear pain in his voice, and it made Tora uncomfortable. She knew Mr. Moon, as she still thought of him, as a whirl of action, and here he was grieving. That was new. It wasn’t right for him.

Without someone in control of the card, there weren’t a lot of ways for the news to get to him, so they had to rely on short-range Morse code. The idea that someone within the walls might find out was perhaps worse than the idea he wouldn’t know for so long.

"Come into the village. We can have a small meal and remember her."

The stew that Mrs. Miller prepared for them was mostly potatoes and carrots. The sheep herds that year were not doing well,  so they were keeping them from the slaughterhouse to make sure they had breeding stock for the next year.

Mr.  Moon was sopping up his gravy with the dark bread that Mrs. Miller made hundreds of loaves of each week.  She was in charge of the village kitchen and fed the over 2000 people in the village three times a day. Tora would never tell Mrs.  Miller,  but she didn’t really like the bread and only took some out of respect. Mr. Moon didn’t seem to have any such issues with it.

The early afternoon sun was coming in the windows of Old Wick’s house.  Tora supposed it really was supposed to be her house now,  but the Library felt much more like home to her now. She had been living there since before Old Wick took ill,  setting up a cot in the stacks and poring through the old books.  Reading wasn’t done for pleasure by most of the villagers,  but Tora was usually found with her nose deep in a dusty tome.

"Where have you been?" Tora asked her father. She had known that Mr. Moon was her father for about five years now,  since the last time he had been through the village, though she hadn’t brought it up to him at the time.

"I suppose I’m going to have to stop censoring myself around you now." His eyes were watery,  but tears weren’t falling.  "If you’re going to be filling Old Wick’s shoes, you’re going to have to get used to what I do."

"She never really did get into that with me," Tora said.  It was one of the many things that Old Wick left out of their conversations.

"I’m a spy. I live both out here and inside the walls.  I will say,  I have a clear idea of which I prefer. But that’s where I’ve been for the last several months. When I disappear from here,  that’s where I go. I find out what I need to about the political situation inside the walls, and let Old Wick know whether we need to be worried about anything.

"Every few years,  the Insiders want to purge the Outsiders and they usually don’t have a lot of trouble doing it. They have superior weapons and we have shot guns for hunting. So usually avoiding a purge means pulling up roots and moving to another abandoned village before they can level it."

"Why?" Tora asked.  "It doesn’t make any sense.  It’s not like we’re a threat to them."

"You would be surprised what they say about us Inside.  We’ve been lucky here,  we haven’t had a purge in over 100 years. I was just outside of Seattle. There’s a village there that has had to move four times in the last 20 years."

"I need to get the port."

"Yes,  I know.  We’re going to have to leave the village to get it done.  How far outside the village have you gone?"

"Old Wick used to take me down to the river,  but that’s as far as we made it.  She wasn’t able to walk very far.  The shepherds roam farther than I have."

"That’s changing right now.  In fact,  we have to get you on the road tonight.  We’ve got a number of stops we need to make before the surgeon’s.  Pack lightly,  since we’ll be on the bike."

"You say that you have to tell me everything but you end up not telling me anything.  I’m the voice of this village,  but I have no idea what to say about anything. I’ve been hiding since before Old Wick died,  and I don’t know what I’ m supposed to do.

"She knew what she was doing because she was a billion years old and was always the one doing it.  I’m 16. I have a card that doesn’t connect to anything,  electric machines that I can’t tell anyone about,  and I’m about to get a hole drilled in my head.  Somewhere.  For Wick’s sake,  don’t speak to me in riddles."

Mr. Moon looked up from his stew,  for the first time it seemed like he actually saw Tora. Saw the dirty hands and the short brown hair that she almost definitely cut herself with a kitchen knife.  Saw the anger and the pain that she did her level best to keep from everyone lest she become a hindrance.

"You’re right.  You deserve better from me. I’m sorry I haven’t been here,  and I’m sorry that I didn’t come when Old Wick started to decline. It’s not like I didn’t know that her mind was failing.  That was my weakness.  If she was like a grandmother to you,  she was a mother to me,  teaching me how to interact with the Insiders. It was more than that,  though.  She taught me how to see the signs about--Dammit. There’s so much that I can tell you,  but until you have the card installed,  you won’t understand it. And no,  I don’t think you’re stupid. There’s just a lot to it."

"Then we’d better get started, because right now I’m riding a wave of annoyance that’s overtaking my abject terror."

Within ten minutes of them getting on the bike,  Tora realized that it was pointless to try and have any sort of conversation with her father.  The noise was keeping her from falling asleep,  which was probably a good thing,  since she wasn’t feeling particularly safe riding behind him.  The braid that she’d put her hair into was completely destroyed by the wind,  so it kept whipping in all directions.  She made a mental note to cut it off when they stopped for the night.

Assuming that they would be stopping at some point.  They were going into the West,  and Tora knew that there was a wall out here somewhere.  It was one of the pressure tubes that the Insiders used to get from one city to another,  and the foundations for them went a hundred feet into the ground. She assumed that her father knew how to get through it,  but it was still a concern.

It was early evening,  and the sky was pale and clear.  It was going to be a cold night out in the open,  so she was glad to have the thick sheepskin coat on.  Tora was still angry at her father.  He always had a way of swooping in when it was least convenient and turning everything upside down.  And this time,  showing up so much later than he should have,  by his own admission,  without any satisfying answers as to why.

The daylight had gone completely,  and the moon and stars were the only light now.  Tora wasn’t sure how her father could see the path ahead of them,  but she figured it was probably another secret of his. She knew that foxes and coyotes out and probably bears as well as larger cats and feral dogs.  Hopefully,  the ungodly amount of noise the motorcycle made was keeping them away.

When she was very small,  Tora was found playing with a Coyote. She didn’t remember exactly what happened,  but she had gotten out of the nursery and when they found her,  she was covered in mud and the Coyote was on its back with his belly exposed to her like a dog.

The thing that Tora remembered most about it was that it was the first time Old Wick had actually spoken with her.  She didnt’ remember what they talked about, but her mother was there with them and she remembered being fascinated by the wrinkles on the old woman’s cheeks and the sound of her voice.

As Tora learned later,  that wasn’t the first time that Old Wick showed interest in her.  Sometimes it seemed like she was being groomed from birth to take over for her. Or perhaps before birth,  given what her mother had told her about Old Wick encouraging her mother and father to spend time together.

From her first days in the house,  Tora was reading anything that she could actually hold open,  whether she understood the words or not.  There was one book,  though,  that when she tried to read it, the words disappeared from the pages before she could focus on them. The one word she managed to catch was Magisterium. She didn’t know what it meant, and when she asked Wick about it, she deflected to asking about the book instead.

Tora hadn’t found the book since, though she knew it was in the house. Nothing ever left the house except Tora herself,  and she had the feeling that would change once she had the port installed.

Tora’s train of thought was stopped by the bike slowing down and eventually stopping. The engine gave a sputter as her father turned off the motor.

"We’re coming up to a tube.  It’s the Hudson Valley Tube,  and we’re going to have to go under it."

"How? Don’t they go a hundred feet down into the ground?"

"That,  they do.  But they need to be maintained,  and that is where we get in. But we’re going to need to walk this next mile.  They have sensors that can pick up the sort of vibrations the bike would make if we’re on it,  and we don’t want that attention."

They both grabbed a handlebar and started pushing the motorcycle forward.  "Won’t there be locks or guards or something?"

"Locks,  yes.  Of a sort. But they don’t bother with guards along the tube because there’s too much of it to guard in person.  They use cameras and sensors to fill in the gaps.  But cameras and sensors can be fooled. Guards,  too,  if it comes to that."

"You’re going to need a change of clothes."

It was the first thing her father had said to her since they first hit the tube,  and she didn’t know why,  but it bothered her that he hadn’t really spoken to her in a long time.  No more than a few words following their supper,  after he said that he’d tell her everything she needed to know, and she hadn’t known what to ask.

Tora picked up the tablet and looked at it.  It was as though she had previously been color blind and now could see the full spectrum.  It wasn’t that the shape of things had changed,  but the depth had increased. There was so much more information available to her.  She was glad they had her in a plain white room.

The place behind her ear where the port was was a bit tender,  which she had expected.  It didn’t really hurt, but she had a constant feeling like something was there, like a June bug had landed there. She imagined she would get used to it like the people who wear specs did.

She looked down at the white surgical gown she was wearing. She assumed someone had changed her out of the one from the actual surgery, since they had to insert a thing down each of her arms that connected to the processor and the card. She didn’t get all of it, but she knew that soon she would have that knowledge right off the top of her head.

Old Wick knew everything almost immediately , and when she didn’t, she would always touch the thing that she was curious about. The act of touching seemed to be very important when the woman learned something new.

Tora looked at her hands. There were only the smallest indications that anything had been done. A line up the side of each finger, a tender spot in the pad of her hand. Tender spots on her armpits where the neuro was threaded in. She had had plenty of cuts before, but never healed like this. There was something to be said for the medicine Inside.

Next to the tablet on the table was the card itself. It was a three inch long, 1/8 inch wide gold tube with a black cap on one end. The gold was not just the color, but the metal. Gold is the best option for electronics that need to be in use for a long time, like this. Old Wick had this card from the time she was 18, and Tora wasn’t sure how long it had been used before then.

She picked up the card and located the port. She pushed it in and it slid easily into place. As it snapped in, Tora let out a scream. The torrent of information that was coming at her was blinding. She wanted desperately to yank the card out of her head, just stop the flood. She held her arm out to the wall, and as soon as her hand touched it, she knew her exact position, the composition of the wall, and the name given to the shade of white (Absence of Colour).

This actually helped her, she found, as she could focus on that information, make it so nothing else was trying to get her attention. She touched her arm, and she could see the wires running up the inside. She also saw words, but they were indistinct, like in a dream where it’s really important to know something.

A tone played from a speaker, followed by a soft voice. "Visitor incoming," it said. The door opened and her father entered.

"How’s the port working?"

"It’s a little exhausting," she said, and grabbed his hand. Nothing. There was a void in the information in the shape of her father. "I don’t... How are you doing that?"

There’s a reason I can get in and out like I do, Tora remembered him saying. This was it. "You don’t exist."

"Everything in this world is information. I have made myself disappear."

"Is it dangerous for you to be traveling with me?"

"Every time I come back in it’s dangerous. This is no worse than any other time."

"How is it possible?"

"That’s a question for another time. We have to get moving."