They had said the City of Angels was vast, but it took seeing it to believe it. It was truly a wonder of the world. How could so much humanity exist in a single place? It defied all imagining.

It wasn't a sea of urbanization. It was an ocean. Homes spread in carefully arranged blocks for miles across the plain below me. They had grown across the ground like a carpet of moss, climbing the hills to the north, wiping away any signs of nature or even her skeleton. Beyond, the ocean stretched. I was a son of Boston, I knew the sea. But there was something different about this ocean. Palm trees burst from the ordered symmetry of the streets like clumps of scutch grass refusing to quit a barren plain.

In the far distance, the Tower stood, rising from an upsurge of construction that dominated the plains around it. It was not arranged as the cities in the East were. This was no walled town that had overgrown its walls as so many did in the region I had come to know. This central protrusion of carved stone and poured concrete, of sheer bastion and hewn parapet, was no castle. It was a citadel. The seat of power that governed not just this overwhelming monstrosity of people, but the cities that lay miles away in every direction, far beyond the horizon.

From Seattle to Phoenix and Las Vegas, this citadel called itself master, and they called themselves vassals. I knew there had been a time when that reach extended further. I knew, as little as I understood the affairs of the world, that its hold had weakened as it had weakened and broken on the further stretches of the Empire.

It was a cycle oft repeated, seemingly never broken. Empires rose, conquered, grew. More than once it had seemed the whole world was destined to be leashed to one master. Thrax had scorched his way across the continent on tides of the Burghsmen. Tex Achilles had thundered across plain, valley, and mountain, tying city after city to his constitution. Joel Montagnion had won endless battles and Griid-crowns, promising that the world would become a single entity under the banner of the City of Angels.

But each had fallen. Each structure eventually crumbled. The Fallings continued. The Choosings continued. Wars never really stopped. It almost seemed sad. Had just one of those great conquerors been able to finish the task they had set out upon — and set it in stone — maybe things would be different now. There was inherent evil to the conquering. But there was unavoidable good in finishing the conquest.

I deposited my Griid-train at the edge of the town. Well-maintained roads ran through the eternity of homes and businesses like the veins of a leaf. The train didn't need me to guide it. The Field was no use.

It was evening, the sun before me, not quite touching the vast blue ocean, but already setting it on dazzling fire.

I left my train and returned on the path I had come, grasping the Footfield and shooting away many times faster than was possible when guiding a train. I skirted the city, moving north. Zeb had told me where to find the house of my alleged mother. My eyes kept returning to those hills that rose to the north, searching the tiny dots of the houses that rested there, as though I could identify the home in question.

Beyond the city, the landscape was farmland. Pastures and orange trees and vineyards. It would be the products of those orchards that would weigh down the train I was destined to guide the next morning.

In the farmland there were still occasional settlements. The structure was different to the lands surrounding Boston. Near Boston, the landscape was alive with villages that served as hubs of the infrastructure that worked the land. Here, there were individual ranch houses — not big enough to support the workforces needed to tend the vast breadbasket that fed the city. But the city itself, so incongruously close despite the unbuilt-up surrounds I ran through, housed a workforce that could achieve anything.

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I flowed around the city and up the slopes that approached the hills. I sought a place where I could disappear. I was a Griidlord. I was unmistakable. Even now, eyes would be on me from those ranches and from the city below, watching the comet that streaked across the landscape. I needed a chance to disappear.

When I neared the edge of the housing estates that grew from the hills, I found an orange grove. I released the Footfield and let my momentum carry me inside the refuge of the trees.

I opened a fold in the thigh of my suit and removed the cloak I had stowed there. I let the helm of my suit fold back, then the armor from my neck, hands, and forearms. I pulled the cloak over my body and inspected myself. As Racquel had done in Prussia, I pulled the form of my suit back enough that the only parts of my body that remained exposed from the cloak were normal human flesh. My suit was bulkier than Racquel's, and the disguise was not quite as good. I did what I could to convince my suit to slim and slither back, easing the protrusions of shoulder pads and bulky plates. When I was finished, what remained looked like nothing more than a traveler to an unfocused eye. A focused eye might well see more.

I found myself looking down at my bare hands. I had melted the gauntlets away at times with Racquel, but aside from those moments, I had not seen my own human hands since I'd donned the suit. In my urgent stolen hours with Racquel, I'd been far too distracted to look at my hands. I'd had other things to look at and occupy myself with.

I turned my hand over, looking at the knuckles in the sunlight filtering through the squat orange trees. I turned it back and gazed at my palm. It was alien to me. It was as though I didn't recognize my own skin. It was almost as though my mind had replaced the identity of my flesh with that of the suit.

I shook my head, freed myself from the occupation. I looked to the western edge of the orange grove. There lay my goal. There was the destination I had chosen instead of remaining in Boston in the days after Lauren's death.

I left the grove and walked across the farmland. It would have been strangely pleasant to make this walk at another time. That day, the human pace and quiet space only cast my mind deeper into reflection on the horrors that had just passed in my life. I dwelled on how I had seized the chance to escape.

I had chosen the disguise to afford me some privacy. I could have managed the matter far quicker as a Griidlord, but in the poor neighborhood I was about to enter, the Griidlord would have been robbed of all privacy. As a nameless traveler, I was less visible.

The groves gave way to small pastures where cattle wandered. There were a few cobbled-together chicken coops on the pasture at the edge of the settlement, and beyond them ran crude streets.

I wandered from the fields to the dirt streets and continued, looking for signs and street names, checking the note Zeb had handed me. The neighborhood was shoddy, poor, neglected. It was as run-down as the poorest streets in Boston. But here, the poverty stretched seemingly endlessly as I walked.

It was strange to pass people. An old woman looked up from tomato plants in her garden, eyeing me suspiciously. A cluster of youths, boisterous and cackling, nearly brushed past me. I was forced to step aside to avoid them bumping into me and feeling the suit beneath my cloak. It was strange to walk like this, without the awe, the worship, that common folk cast on a Griidlord.

I would have thought I would enjoy the normalcy again. But it felt dishonest. It felt like going back to a place I no longer wanted to be.

I found a sign with the street name I sought and turned uphill. As I walked, I felt the excitement pulsing up within me. There was something familiar about this place—the street, the dirt road, the beaten hovels. The flashes of memory I'd been experiencing since the Choosing slammed into me, punching my mind's eye, screaming at me to recognize the scape I was walking through.

And I did recognize it. It thrilled and disturbed me to realize I was walking in the same steps I had in those flashes of memory.

I had been here as a child. I had sat in a kitchen in one of these houses, at the battered table. I had played on a street—maybe this street—with my friends, with the hare-lipped boy. I had seen my father giving my mother flowers here.

My feet seemed to do the final work. I was almost startled to find they had stopped.

I looked up—and another memory assaulted me. But this was no flashback. This memory was corporeal and before me.

I was standing before the house I had once called home.

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