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The embers dwindle in the small hours and mist cocoons his location. In the gray predawn the air currents shift to create a gap above. Stars glitter through. From this vantage point he can see a black expanse rising in the east like a void that fills him with dread. It’s as if something had wedged a blade into the earth, taller than the mountains of his dreams.

The mist coils back over and try as he may he can’t unravel the knots tightening his gut.

He lies awake until morning.

His eyes are gritty and his mind is full of tainted memories. He hikes until the mist clears to reveal a plateau littered with rocks. There is a broad cliff with wispy waterfalls at the end of the plateau. At the top of the cliff, the land slopes back into crumpled terrain covered by a sprawling favella. There are green pastures and animals in pens on the outskirts of the town and mirrored dishes that reflect harsh sunlight and create spots across his vision. Above the favella the land steepens to the ominous blade peak he had seen during the night.

He sees movement out along the plateau. A pack of wild dogs is chasing a girl dressed in black. She carries a bow and quiver of arrows slung over her back. She clubs one of the dogs across the snout with her bow but another one manages to get in close and mauls her ankle.

Glen races forward and waves his arms and claps his hands.

Hoy!

The pack turns as one. They sniff the air and growl and bare yellow fangs. Glen pulls out the knife. Every instinct tells him to run but he holds steady as the dogs lope toward him. The first one is taken clean but its momentum snaps the knife from his grip. He rolls to one side as the second dog clamps its jaws onto his alloy arm. Up this close Glen can see that most of the animal’s fur has transformed to metallic spikes. He kicks the dog hard with as much power as he can muster. Once. Twice. The thing falls dead without a sound, its head and ribs crushed.

He spins around ready for another attack but the girl takes down the three remaining dogs with arrows. He watches through the silky lens of adrenalin as she limps up to him. She’s older by a good three winters, has an air of confidence he hasn’t got in this strange country. Her hair is dark and plaited and her face is hawkish and her legs are long beneath the black leather. She is by far the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

Thank you, friend, she says. What’s your name?

Glen.

I’m Rose.

He’s not sure what to say at the way her pale eyes rummage into his soul as if seeking some immediate truth.

Better get that wound checked, she says.

He realises his shirt is all torn. The alloy along his forearm is punctured and oozing blood laced with black.

Ditto, he says pointing to her torn trousers where her natural ankle is raw and bleeding freely. The rest of her alluring white calf is exposed but unscathed.

He looks away.

She laughs. Come on, we should leave. There are worse things up here than mad dogs and lost boys. She winks at him.

Glen retrieves his knife and Rose retrieves her arrows.

He points at the strange looking peak.. What kind of mountain is that?

It’s not a mountain.

She leads him to the foot of the cliff where a manmade staircase takes them up around the waterfalls. About half way up they find a cave. The roar of the water is like a balm and stops his thoughts from spinning. He fills their canteens while Rose cleans the bites on her ankle. She lets him apply a bandage. He’s self conscious with her closeness and the way her soft skin glows in the faint light. He shies away when she reaches to his wounded arm.

What’s the matter?

Nothing.

She grabs his sleeve and yanks it up and gasps. You’re a healer, she says, brushing her palm across the unblemished alloy.

He shrugs and pulls his sleeve down. If that’s what you call it, he says. Some days it feels lighter and stronger than flesh. Sometimes it feels like a phantom limb and it makes me think I might become a ghost that was once human. Maybe that’s what the angels are. Fully cybernetic. No need to eat or drink. No need to claw every day to survive.

Her look is serious. You wouldn’t be the first to think like that.

He shrugs again.

What about your legs? You smashed that dog pretty hard.

I was born with them. They feel different to the new parts. He taps the alloy beneath his trousers, knowing now he would never have made it across the land bridge with natural legs.

She holds his hand. You should consider yourself lucky.

Why? I hate knowing this plague in my veins kills everyone around me sooner or later.

I’m sorry, she says. We’ve all lost family.

Now he feels bad.

There’s no need to look so gloomy, she says and stands tentatively on her ankle. Come with me.

They pack their gear and he follows her out of the cave and on up the stairs to the top of the cliff. After a short march across grassy knolls below the favella, they come to a narrow ledge jutting over open sky. Rose crawls out onto the ledge and waves for Glen to follow. He approaches cautiously and peers over the ledge. Wind billows up from two kilometers of open air and thumps into his lungs and he whoops out loud. Rose smiles and he notices the telltale sign of emerging mutation along her neckline. A pattern of veins like a tattoo scrolling from her ear lobe to her shoulder and down along the top of her chest and beneath the drawstrings of her leather top. He knows she has noticed him. She points to the scenery far below. There are green fields laced with silver. Farmsteads and lanes crisscross the landscape. The ocean curves away to the west and south.

My home was down there, she says. All these lands were once beneath the ocean they used to call the Pacific.

The name sounds strange to Glen. He follows her gaze to his left along the southern face of the blade peak. She was right; it’s not a mountain at all but a wedge of land rammed upwards with incredible force. Whatever caused it is out of sight on the eastern face, but Glen can see its impossibly long shadow angling across the farmlands. He works it through in his head, begins to picture something long and straight-edged jutting out of the earth at a shallow angle.

The mutations are worse the closer you get to it, Rose says.

So you don’t know what it is?

No, she says. There’s so much knowledge lost. Some people call it the splinter. I heard an angel once call it the star bridge before he died. Others just call it home.

He feels suddenly nauseated and rolls on his back and closes his eyes. The sun is pale and strangely distant and doesn’t warm his skin.

The favella is surprisingly clean. A patchwork quilt of shanties and corrugated sheets and steel salvaged from the industrial epoch. There is technology here. Shining solar dishes provide power to the township and a dam and pipes capture the rainwater off the peak. There’s an orchard with fruit trees and a stockyard with some cattle and sheep. A modest trade of breads and leather and pottery exists. Glen meets new friends and is welcomed as one of their own, but before long he knows this is a ghost town. The mutations are mostly advanced and horrific, though there are a few like him and Rose who have yet to manifest abnormalities.

On the sunny days he forages with her along the highlands where the wild fruits and grains are threaded with delicate traces of silver. He moves into her shanty and accumulates things that might be useful for the journey ahead including a spike hammer and a tent and a thick woolen jacket. Despite the desire to keep moving forward he still finds himself settling into a disturbingly comfortable routine. Rose calls him a real homemaker, but he shrugs it off until one day in the middle of his sixteenth winter, as they lay talking before the open fire, she takes his hand and presses it to her breast. He stirs and is suddenly forgetful of the world. From then on the days turn into weeks in the warmth of their shanty as storms churn down the coast that used to be called Queensland.

The alloy spreads across Glen’s skin during the winter. His left arm is transformed and his spine feels supple and stronger. The mechanical rhythm in his breathing seems to smooth out considerably and he wonders whether it’s the thin air or something else going on inside.

On a chill day when the rain drums on the corrugated roof and forms copper-colored stains in the mud, he makes his way to the evangelist. Much of the township’s solar power feeds to the hut and when Glen steps inside he has to hold his sleeve to his nose. The hut is filled with the pungent smell of weeping sores and metallic growths covering the evangelist’s chubby limbs. Bundles of cables form a throne of sorts, connecting monitors on the evangelist’s limbs to stacked boxes that work some old magic of computation. Tubes full of blood and other fluids lead into pumps and devices that whir softly in the background. Shelves around the hut are covered with charts and baroque mechanical devices and instruments.

The evangelist’s breath wheezes in and out through a mask. There are broken cities to the south, he says between the click of his respirator. Sydney. Melbourne.

Glen had heard the legends. Is that where the equipment comes from?

Some of it. But that’s not the real reason why you’re here, is it?

No, Glen says glancing at the throne of cables. Is there a cure?

Ah, the evangelist says. I’ve been trying for years to figure that one out. But I’ve since come to the conclusion that it’s the wrong question.

What do you mean?

There is no cure. I’ll give you that for free. Besides, a cure would assume we are dealing with a disease.

Glen frowns, now uneasy with the conversation.

The evangelist smiles and coughs up phlegm. Oh, come now, there’s no need to be coy. I think you already knew it or at least suspected the truth is not always so simple. I’ll never be an angel but that won’t stop me trying to control the spread of this wondrous thing in my veins. Then I’ll be like you.

Glen chooses his next words carefully. You know about my abilities?

You’ve done well to hide it this long but that doesn’t stop the rumour mongers. Your secret is safe with me but at some point . . .

What’s the price?

The evangelist clasps his sweaty hands together. Cables move as he moves. The pumps stir more fluids. A sample of your blood, he says.

Glen turns and walks to the door. Before I leave. I’ll give you some before I leave.

The evangelist points to some equipment on a bench. Take those. You’ll need them. But then again, maybe you won’t.

Glen picks up a breathing apparatus and goggles. There’s also a small instrument on a wrist band. He turns it over in his hands. The technology seems crude and angular against the sleek lines of his alloy skin.

What is it?

An altimeter.

At the onset of spring when the orchard trees are in blossom, Glen sees an angel fall from the sky. It bounces once before his unbelieving eyes and impales on a concrete fence post. Shining silver wings twist and snap. Slick natural innards dangle out of its body cavity onto the mud. Its slender alloy limbs twitch once then hang limp. Its face is sprayed with blood and the jaw is crushed up close to vacant cybernetic eyes.

Onlookers crowd around within minutes. One man heavily burdened with metallic tumors steps up cautiously and rubs his hands in the angel’s blood. The crowd turns manic and shuffles forward to touch the angel. Glen is caught up in the frenzy and a woman with gleaming horns rupturing from her head grabs him and pushes him towards the angel. He resists and slips in the mud and is soon forgotten as more people arrive at the scene.

Then the sound of children running down the street causes everyone to stop and turn their heads. The young ones were kept hidden during the long winter with their shining hooves and tails and extra limbs. Now they shuffle towards the dead angel, ushered by teary-eyed parents.

Young faces smeared.

Red palm prints everywhere.

A kindergarten crime scene watched over by adults babbling in an old language that doesn’t belong in this epoch.

Prayer.

Glen runs to the orchard and pukes under a gnarled plum tree.

Glen hugs Rose once. The growths on her neck look like bronze mushrooms in the early summer light. The sun rises over the blade peak, stoking the fire he has held in check these long months. He adjusts his extra large backpack and his utility belt.

I’m sorry, he says.

Why?

I . . . I’m not sure. It feels like I’m letting you down.

She laughs in the same way she had on the day they met. You’d be letting me down if you stay. Letting all the others down. Everyone wants to know the mystery but very few have the means.

Haven’t you tried? He doesn’t know why he never asked her.

Ha, me? No, I know my limits. She points to the blade peak. I’ve only ever reached the summit. That’s not very far, he says.

It was far enough for me.

I’ll come back.

She kisses him on the lips. No you won’t, she says, and walks down to the favella and doesn’t look back.

It takes him a day to reach the summit. His breath curls out in long plumes. The sky is blue and cloudless and the view on the other side makes him fall to one knee. It had been a shadow haunting his dreams these months but now the splinter juts from the earth below and angles up to the sky like a glossy black crystal stretching out forever. Layers of storm detritus crust its lower lengths and ice fields mottle the higher reaches. Further still the ice fades to black. The structure is about a kilometer wide with an angled peak. But the length? The length is incalculable. Fifty kilometers? More.

The voice of the evangelist stirs in his memory. It should collapse under its own weight.

I don’t know what that means, was all Glen could say at the time.

He clambers down off the blade peak where the earth is broken and dotted with treacherous crevices, but he finds his way safely onto the northern slope of the splinter. There are tracts of land here where the detritus is compacted hard. The going is slow but the ground seems stable enough. Some sparse trees have seeded in tangled groves to provide crude shelter along the way.