‘There’s two kinds of currency in this world, my boy. Glamour, and the dead.’

And I picked the dead.

I never realised how true the Colonel’s words would be. Oh, I believed in them, sure – but believing in something and knowing it to be true are very different things.

The Migration was long. It was work; it was ridiculous; it could be fun; it was sometimes fatal. But most of all it was long.

‘What about her?’

‘Hmm, maybe.’

‘What about … her?’

‘Her? Are you kidding?’

‘Alright what about her?’

‘Who?’

Pshappa pointed through the Ethe to a girl some way ahead. ‘That one.’

‘Pshappa, what the hell does it matter?’

‘I want to know!’

‘Alright yes, I would do her!’

‘How much?’

‘What?’

‘Well, a lot, or just like, a little bit? Would you do it really hard, or soft and slow?’

‘Errr…’

‘Or maybe just as a functional thing before saying “eurgh god you’re ugly, on yer way love” ?’

‘Pshappa you are one dirty fucking bear. And for the record, that one, I would do very hard.’

‘Ha! I knew it! I’ve got your type nailed down mate.’

‘What about that one?’

‘Her?’

‘No her.’

‘Her? Czioc mate, I’d crush her, she’s tiny!’

‘And?’

     ‘Well yeah alright, she’s got a nice face. So long as I didn’t have to do any medical stuff afterwards, mind.’

Czioc grinned back at his friend. They walked with the motley crowds – mostly men and women, but mantrels were visible and the odd bear and centaur trundled past. The pair of them were overtaken by some, usually strident youngsters who either weren’t used to Migration or hadn’t been worn down by it yet; and they overtook others, usually older people who ambled along at their own pace, or sometimes struggled wearily as they neared their life’s end.

Or didn’t. Age was a funny thing. There were only two certainties: children didn’t die, that was pretty certain, and Czioc knew mantrels didn’t last quite as long as normal people. But beyond that … some people lived long, some didn’t. Czioc had met friends who’d lived messy, filthy lives until they could barely move with old age, and he’d watched young men and women in prime strength just fold up as though they were going to sleep. Pshappa frequently mentioned, when drunk, a woman he’d met who’d lasted so long on Migration they’d given her a house of her very own, where she’d lived and outlasted several hundred committees and a few natural features as well. (In turn, Czioc frequently wondered if this woman was a fictitious account of Pshappa’s own mother, but he never stopped the bear telling the story.)

Three certainties. Political leaders didn’t die nearly so fast.

I like the one in red.

Shit. It was back.

What do you mean? he thought guardedly.

That girl to the left, in the red dress with the blue trim. She’s hot.

I am not talking to you about sexy girls, said Czioc firmly in his head. Not you, not any dead person.

Oh come come, don’t deny me one of life’s simple pleasures.

Ha ha, very funny. The ghost’s voice might have been brittle, dry and lifeless, but Czioc had learnt when it was cracking a joke.

Thanks. But really, I think you underestimate sex. It’s much more about the mind than the body.

Oh really.

Sure it is. When I was alive, I thought it was just physical juices needing an outlet, or an inlet you might say. There was a pause. You know, with girls.

I got the joke.

Just checking.

‘You alright mate?’ The large, fuzzy face of Pshappa peered down at him. ‘Seem a bit anxious. It’s only been half a day!’

‘I’m fine,’ replied Czioc, his neck muscles twitching. He fought the urge to constantly look over his shoulder to see who was talking to him.

Your friend’s pretty hot too. Big, strong. Four arms. Nice.

You’re weird.

I’m dead, too.

They rested that night in the lee of a wooded hill; at dusk, golems had herded them all into a secure area – both to keep things out, and keep them in. Tiny lights sparkled in strange shapes high above, the parties and clubs and carnivals of cities he’d never see. Czioc worked out it was roughly Zha-Eastwards if you drew a straight line up in the air to the cavern wall opposite. They were heading generally South-Tak-East towards the next stop, a couple of days in a quiet town apparently. Other groups sat around nearby in the darkness.

Pshappa had lit a small fire, god alone knew how, or why – the depths of winter has passed, it wasn’t even cold any more. In return Czioc had, as always, created beds out of the ground using the Ethe; shaping things like soil and rock was easy, but he had a knack of summoning bubbles up to the surface to make it soft and comfortable. Together they could sleep just about anywhere.

Czioc had a new friend; an older woman had come up to them, chatting away and claiming to be cold, and now sat by the fire to his right. Even in the poor light of the fire he could tell she was, thankfully, not his type – he hadn’t the effort for any extra-curricular activities, even if he dared – but she seemed completely taken by him, making eye contact and suggestive looks. She talked about something or other – places she’d been, or some story about a golem or something – but Czioc hardly listened, resting his tired body at full stretch and catching up with old friends across the Ethe.

‘Where’s your big friend got to?’ she asked, inbetween her chatter.

Czioc barely even noticed, already engrossed in two conversations at once. ‘He’s off over there,’ he waved his hand, ‘doing something unspeakable with a girl half his size.’ Sex wasn’t approved of whilst on Migration, particularly on the more tiring routes, but as long as you didn’t disturb the golems they generally didn’t mind. Czioc wondered where Pshappa got the energy.

He spoke to long-lost drinking companions and comrades from former travelling days, who were now on some other branch or arm of the Migration, and made bets about who would reach the end of this route first. He didn’t expect to see them in the flesh again, but who did? You met people, you had fun, you moved on.

Noksalika Chuunim!

Except Noksalika.

He’d met her on long-term leave at one of her video shoots; he still couldn’t remember how he’d wrangled that from Colonel Trimasth, despite scouring his Ethe records for some clues that might get him another six months’ leave. He’d been part of some geeky Ethezine that covered music and board games (board games!). The city’s resident group had invited him on a night out, some guy mentioning some music video shoot in a little club he knew. So they’d got drunk and drugged themselves up and turned up to find a dark, dingy club full of camouflage-netting and other people also drunk and drugged up. But there she was, the centre of attention, all ankle boots and blue lipstick. It was hard to tell what was filming and what was party – the music and sexual choreography just seemed like a normal good time … but he remembered being proud he could tell she was drunk, no matter how hard she tried acting sober.

Were they innocent times? Or was he just more innocent at that time? He suspected it was him; people had been drinking and fucking and talking rubbish on drugs for centuries before now. Images ran through his mind of a technological society that had found a groove and stuck to it, a vast society stuck in stasis, untouched like some pagan village on some undiscovered island full of superstition and malaria. Superstition, malaria and great parties, that is.

He’d become aware of her talking becoming a low mumbling, but he was too absorbed in conversation (the finer philosophies of feminism in sport, and whether or not a shark would win in a fight with a tiger), when she suddenly collapsed forwards into the fire.

‘Shit are you okay?’ he rushed up and dragged her back, flapping at her flaming hair with his hands. He threw some of the loose soil he’d made for his bed over her. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes stayed closed. He checked her on the Ethe, and found all processes had stopped.

She was dead.

Oh well, he thought. This is what we’re here for.

He felt much more comfortable now she was dead, instead of trying to pull him. This was awful, he knew, but still true. He was a fan of sex (and very often too), but right here, right now, he felt far more familiar with this.

He laid her out on her back and spent the next ten minutes removing her clothes. She wasn’t wearing much so it was pretty straightforward; her colourful furry boots seemed to take the longest. This would be difficult – the body hadn’t had time to loosen and soften. Czioc in particular had trouble with freshly dead people. But he was damned if he was sleeping next to a corpse all night.

Kneeling down behind her head, he logged her details on the Ethe, linking her now-frozen files to his core records. He ran his fingers and the backs of his hands over her skin; over her navel, her breasts, the delicate stretch of her neck. Over her ears. He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, a couple of times more … slowing his heart rate down. He stripped off himself, and they were both completely naked. He pulled her up onto his thighs, cradling her head against his belly.

He whispered a prayer, kept his eyes shut, and took her into himself.

The power of the Ethe welling up inside made his skin split with a thousand tiny cracks down his front. Some kind of electricity flashed between their bodies and her skin softened, becoming warm, and began to slide into him.

This was something only they could do under strict licence as collectors; nobody else could make the Ethe work this way, or was even allowed to try.

First the shoulders, then her arms and her chest, and the rest following. He kept himself in his own dark little space in his mind, calm against the sore prickling sensation in his swelling flesh. He breathed deeply through his nose. Finally the soles of her feet were swallowed up, the skin of his stomach breaking through them, and all that was left was her head. He breathed in, straightened his back, and slowly her head melted into his chest, skull, brain, throat, eyes, skin.

His glowing skin closed up, cutting off curls of singed hair which fell on his knees. His swollen body pulsed, he breathed furiously through his nostrils; his internal system pushed the black bead from inside her head up through his chest and neck.

Ah, I see I’ve got a visitor! Somebody new to chat to.

Czioc collapsed sideways to the floor and rolled over. Shut up.

Haha, just kidding. I can’t talk to any of these guys, they’re long gone.

But Czioc was already asleep.

The state of the Ethe affected your dreams. Czioc knew this, but didn’t really think about it when the girl with the red dress woke him up. She had one finger over her lips and the other hand over his mouth; he made a muffled protest, but stopped when he saw the devilish look in her eyes, sparking with the embers from the fire.

She took her hand from her mouth and stroked his genitals, which were already excited, his penis already hard, and lowered herself down onto him. After the cracking soreness from the evening just a few hours ago, Czioc felt a wonderful glow spread from his penis across his body as her wetness covered him and she rocked back and forth.

He sat up, still with her hand over his mouth. He looked at her narrow, smoky eyes and her razor sharp features, and pulled her hips towards him.

Then her hand strengthened like a vice over his jaw, over his face. And her mouth opened two feet wide.

She lunged and tore out his shoulder with huge mutant teeth; he felt hardly any pain from the shock, but saw a gaping hole and blood and bone where there should have been his right shoulder, his arm hanging limp by some strands of muscle, the fingers still gripping the dress by her left hip. He desperately tried to scream but couldn’t as she lunged forward again, her body still bouncing now but with some horrible giant jaws where her head had been…

In the corners of his eyes, he could see the dark trees were actually shapes, dark shapes of men, cheering, booing, goading her on.

…He felt the teeth rip through his face, and he could see with only one eye, and felt warm blood flow down over his chest to their sex organs still thrusting together…

Czioc yelled, and Pshappa woke with a sudden start.

‘What what what is it?’ His voice was hoarse with lack of sleep. Everything swam blurrily in the grey dawn light. He saw Czioc lurch up off the floor, wide-eyed and shaking.

Czioc lay there panting with drops of sweat on his face. ‘I … I …’

‘What is it, you twat?’ Pshappa liked to use swearwords in times of trouble to shake people out of shock. Most of the time it worked, too. Other people looked up groggily, frowning, cursing in croaky whispers.

‘Dream,’ Czioc said, looking around himself, dazed.

‘What about?’

‘Was, was having sex with some girl…’ Czioc thought back, and saw the face of the girl in red, the one pointed out by the dead voice in his head the day before. ‘…and, and she ate me.’

Pshappa chuckled. ‘I had a girl eat me last night. Certainly wasn’t a dream though!’

Czioc shook his head. ‘She ate me alive.’

‘Oh.’

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then the golems rounded them up and got them on the move again.

They trekked on through rivers and across fields, watched by the farmers and horses that farmed the land. Pshappa engaged them in conversation over the Ethe, even shouting greetings once or twice. Czioc ignored them, and found their silent figures eerie. He held himself in a numb little void as they travelled. He was still a little fuzzy from the collection of the dead woman, as he normally was, and his skin felt raw all down his torso and thighs.

Something had happened during the night. He knew this because no-one was hassling him about his poem. The public chitter chatter had been dropping a little over the last twenty-four hours, but now … no-one was asking him, no-one was bugging him, nobody wanted to know. He was curious at first, almost disappointed. Then he heard the whispering.

It wasn’t anything particular, more like a distant swarm of locusts. They could both hear it from afar on the Ethe; everyone around could hear it. Forty, fifty thousand miles to the South … something dark was happening. Something big.

‘Pshappa,’ he whispered quietly through the air, as they waded through another river at waist height. He had a quick look around him. Travellers were certainly quieter than normal. ‘What’s going on?’

Pshappa didn’t turn either, slowly moving his broad hairy legs through the cold waters. ‘Don’t know. Doesn’t look good though eh.’

The buzzing continued, far away. A new buzz had started, those of people guardedly chatting on the Ethe about what it could be. There was an element of worry, the usual gossip, the usual semi-conspiratorial opinions of any gathered crowd. But there it was, underneath, a constant humming.