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  The two almost-Tallests emerged from an alleyway, staggering. The red-eyed one, although by no means stable himself, was having to support his brethren by the shoulders. Teir was consistently tripping over his two white-booted feet and his head was hanging, antennae curled down around the sides of his head. He muttered a little, unintelligibly.

  Both Irkens had slight brown smears on their hands and on their lips, although Teir, in the insanity that had followed tasting the first piece, had managed to get a streak of it across nearly half of his face as well.

  They met the wall of a building. Legs shaking too much to stand and head throbbing too much to argue, Sorun released his grip on Teir and collapsed beside it. Teir managed to cling to the wall for a few seconds before dropping as well.

  He spouted curses while hugging his head.

  "Those are pretty strong words," Sorun mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck. The tingling was starting to subside, and his vision was returning to normal. Almost. Things were still blurry around the edges. "Gori says words like that are a hanging offense."

  "People don't get hanged anymore," Teir said irritably.

  "Okay, so it's an incineration offense."

  Silence fell over them. The street lamps hummed alone in a silent, damp and dirty city. Sorun found himself wondering again about why there were no people about. Cities, he had thought, were alive at every time of day or night.

  But the thinking was leading nowhere. He didn't know enough to figure anything out.

  He looked hazily up at the sky. It was a murky brown.

  "What time is it?" he asked, mostly wondering aloud for anyone to hear, but there was only one to hear.

  "Dunno," Teir mumbled, seeming far away.

  "The nurses always knew what time it was. I mean, always. And the only clock was in the library and they didn't keep rushing over to the library when they needed to know the time."

  "One day when I was in there, one of the drones was changing some of the numbers on the clock," Teir said airily, "and when I asked what he was doing, he said 'I'm fixing it.' He had some way of knowing that the only clock in the whole schoolhouse wasn't showing the right time..."

  "How does everyone know what time it is?" Sorun asked, voice more forceful than it had been before. He hunched forward. "It can't just be us that don't know. What would be the point?"

  Teir was growing annoyed. All he cared right now was that it was nighttime. Glancing over at his red-eyed brethren, he was about to suggest Sorun very promptly shut up, but what he saw struck him with an idea. An idea that quickly manifested into an entire theory, complete with the outrage that it hadn't been thought of before.

  "The utility packs. How come this never occured to me before?"

  "What?" Sorun lifted his head and turned.

  "Damn it! All this time and it never...! We were never told how to use these things!" Sorun's antennae rose incredulously. Teir continued, "All the nurses use them. Gori keeps her taser in hers, Gesh has his capsule of pills in his, and it even chimes when he's supposed to take one." The violet-eyed boy glared accusingly at the circular dead weight mounted on Sorun's back. "And I'll bet it's how they all keep time."

  He edged closer to Sorun on his knees, and nudged the latter away from the wall so he had better access to the boy's backpod. With only the slightest moment of hesitation, during which the part of Teir's mind containing the folder labeled "morals" flickered to life and quickly gave it up to go have a drink, Teir reached out with a spindly hand and touched the middle circle on his companion's pack, which opened.

  Sorun's antennae curled forward in terror. He tried to twist out of range of Teir's arm, flailing one of his own to bat Teir away. "What on Irk are you doing?!"

  Teir stared at him, nonplussed. "I didn't think you'd mind."

  "Mind? This is my utility pack!"

  "So? We don't even know what it does."

  Sorun hesitated. Teir was, once again, stating something that should have not only occured to him but been in the forefront of his mind. And he was right. All Sorun had on his side was the ranting threats of the nurses, screaming about cutting off his backpod if he was bad. They'd never gone beyond that in their threatening, as if just the suggestion was enough to have the mind fill in the details. Sorun had deducted after a while that whatever happened if he lost his utility pack, he wouldn't like it.

  "Besides," said his companion, "it'd be hard to reach into our own packs. If we do it this way, it'll be easier."

  Realization of this was slow to sink into Sorun. Once it did, he nodded. Hesitantly. He moved back into his former position to allow Teir to continue. He sensed vaguely, with seemingly numbed antennae, Teir rising on his knees over him and pushing back the length of the overcoat covering his left arm. This arm's hand dove into Sorun's open utility pack.

  And kept going.

  Sorun felt Teir's arm shifting around the opening as the hand felt around inside, but it wasn't until Teir's arm up to the shoulder was inside the pack did he seem to notice the inconsistency there.

  Teir was the first to point it out. "How big is this thing?!"

  I, thought Sorun, should be focusing on that too. Instead I'm just feeling... invaded.

  Frustrated, the purple-eyed Irken began withdrawing his arm. "It must work on some sort of extradimensional principle. I remember something about that from the science lessons. Inside's bigger than the container. Apparently another plane can be tapped for storage purposes. Provided you can set up an access gateway to the proper dimensional frequency and have the right technology for a call-back feature, you can store as much as you want in it-- as long as it's not living. But the way Sut explained it, I thought it was just theoretical..."

  "And this sort of thing is on our backs?!" Sorun nearly shrieked.

  "Yes, surprisingly, even with storage containers on their backs the Irken people at large have yet to launch into a full-scale civil war. Quit being an idiot, will you?" Teir waved his hand over the opening and the black cover reformed over it.

  "But they have unlimited capacity! You could store whole war machines in there--"

  "Yeah, piece by piece. You can't get anything in that's bigger than the gateway, Sorun."

  "...Oh. Well... Makes sense."

  "I think the timekeeper would be in the top compartment, above this middle one," said Teir, tapping a small gray section differently colored from the rest, on the top of the utility pack, nearest to Sorun's neck. It didn't open, and Teir noticed that it did, in fact, need to be unscrewed to open at all. Something definitely up with that. "I'm not sure, but I think most of the nurses paused for a second before they announced the time. Try... asking for the time."

  "What's the time?" Sorun said obediently.

  "Not aloud, you dimwit. In your head."

  Recovering from that latest insult, Sorun tried out Teir's suggestion. What is the time? he thought in his head. There was, to be expected, absolutely no response.

  His antennae lowered in frustration. What is the time? he demanded.

  Nothing.

  Was Teir wrong, or was he just doing this the wrong way? Maybe if he simplified...

  Present time, he thought instructively. A small beep came Sorun's pack. Only Teir noticed it.

  The answer came: 0238. Sorun's eyes had gone the widest they had in his entire life, which was quite large and very painful.

  "Good goddess," he murmured.

  "SORUN!!" Teir shrieked, aghast.

  "Sorry, sorry!"

  "You can get arrested for using a word like that! Where'd you learn something like that, anyway?" Teir received a mumbled answer. "What was that?"

  "Library," Sorun said darkly, glaring insurrectionally at Teir. "And the time now is two-thirty-eight ay-em. That's what we were hoping to hear, isn't it? The time?"

  Forgetting his previous anger, Teir grinned and leaned forward hopefully. "So it works like I thought, then?"

  "Yeah, except you don't ask, you order."

  "Eh?"

  "You'll figure it out," Sorun said casually, glad to be quicker on the uptake of something than Teir for once.

  His brethren, one eyelid lowered, glared at him suspiciously. Then Teir gave it up and looked back at the backpod. "You want to see what's in the other compartments?"

  "Oh, you're asking now..." Sorun rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure."

  Undaunted, Teir leaned forward and, selecting at random, inspected one of the two circles on the right side of the pack. It opened, and a mechanical arm popped out, bearing something in its claw-like grip.

  "Oh shit!" shrieked the violet-eyed Irken, falling back on to his behind.

  "What? What is it?!" Sorun cried, twisting around vainly to see what had frightened the other boy. After a while Sorun figured that trying to move his entire upper body to see something that attached to it was stupid --characteristically so-- and placed a hand firmly on the pavement and twisted his head around over his should. "AAH!"

  It was a gun. Neither boy had had much experience with guns. They were seen briefly on the telescreens and usually in the hands of soldiers, that had the guns seem at once very safe and very dangerous. Sut had spoken very little of guns, and a lot of the knowledge either boy possessed of it consisted mostly of the pre-birth knowledge fed directly into their brains and burrowed unretrievably deep there.

  Nevertheless, for two whose lives were spent in an enclosed environment where even considering the presence of a breach in safety was a breach in safety, it was the single most dangerous thing that had ever been so close to them-- Gori's taser excepted, of course. Even Teir in tantrum mode couldn't compare to a firearm, when it was all said and done.

  Very, very slowly, with all the caution usually given to the explosive expert who is placing an awful lot of hope on the slight chance he'll survive trying to disarm the next bomb, Sorun reached around with his left arm and grabbed the handgun by the barrel. The claw-arm released its grip and retreated back into its compartment, leaving Sorun alone to with the thing rigidly in his grasp.

  Both Irkens were aware they hadn't been breathing for all this time. They exhaled, but it was far from a sigh of relief. It was, after all, still a gun.

  "Why would they...?" Sorun began weakly.

  "Every person needs to defend himself, I guess..."

  Sorun turned the thing over and over in his hand. It was very cold, and strangely heavy for its size. The gun's handle and lower part of the barrel were a faint pinkish-white, with alternating magenta and violet for everywhere else. It bore very stylistic curves, suggesting that the means of 'how' had long ago been perfected and the manufacturers could afford a few liberties with the design.

  Sorun's hand curled tightly around the handle before he even realized it. His antennae told him something was coming, and hadn't considered informing the brain until it was through with his hand. Sorun snapped his head up, looking at the pavement corner beyond them.

  There was a slight whirring noise. A dark yellow shadow was cast upon the sidewalk as the sound grew louder. Sorun climbed to his feet. Glancing uncertainly between the shadow and his brethren, Teir got up as well.

  Out from behind the building whizzed a small, floating orb, a magenta glass lens set into one side and a small antenna sticking straight up from the top. The imperial crest was printed neatly on the side to the left of its lens.

  "What is it?" Teir hissed, staring fixedly at it as it neared. It didn't appear to notice them, but how could one tell?

  "I think it's some sort of patrolling robot thing," Sorun replied.

  Teir's eyebrows lowered irritably. "Patrol bot, you mean?" Sorun shot Teir a dirty look he didn't catch. "Er... it's looking at us, isn't it?"

  "At you, which I think is the crucial point..."

  Turning around in the air and facing Teir at eye level, the hovering robotic orb's lens flickered a brighter shade. Although there was no voicebox either Irken could detect, it spoke, in a deep yet tinny stilted voice. "You are in violation of curfew. State name and rank."

  Teir's antennae perked up. "Hey, it's Robot Arm's voice--"

  "State name and rank," the orb repeated, seeming more forceful.

  Floundering, Teir stammered, "I-I don't--"

  "COMMENCING RETINA SCAN."

  Out of the sides of the robot orb shot a pair of spindly metallic arms. These raced out with startling speed and grasped with tiny claws the sides of Teir's head, and slammed him against the wall. One of the arms then pulled the lids of his left eye back as far as they would go. The magenta lens of the patrol robot glittered and emitted a thin red beam of light that met Teir's eye.

  Teir was wimpering, trying to move himself out of the way.

  "Let him go!" Sorun roared, reaching toward one of the robotic arms. His gloved hand swiped at thin air as the arms retracted back into the robot's body, the scan finished.

  "Data processed. Retina not valid. Conclusion: threat. Commencing removal." A slot under the robot's antenna popped up and aside, and a small arm bearing a small but accurate-looking laser gun emerged, sight on the middle of Teir's forehead.

  "Invalid?!" Teir demanded, too outraged to move. "I'll have you know I'm--" Teir stopped. "I'm gonna die, aren't I?"

  Sorun threw his right arm up, clasped his gun with both hands, and fired.

  Through the smoke billowing from its side, the robot orb cracked with blue electricity. The whirring from its hover thruster ceased, and the bot fell to the pavement with a dull clank.

  Eyes wild, Teir squeaked, "You just fired that gun."

  "Yes," said Sorun weakly, letting the arm with the blaster drop to his side.

  "You just fired that gun!"

  "I know!" the crimson Irken snapped. His eyes fell. "Quasars..."

  Another five patrol bots rounded the corner.

  Sorun snapped his head up in horror. He mouthed several words as he began to back away, finger again nearing the trigger, but the only one that became voiced was "Run!"