Mei Fluffington counted the pack twice before they left the drainage pipe. Six dogs. All accounted for, all stinking of pepper and fish guts. That was the price of moving through Grubspire's forbidden sectors without being tracked by scent. Mei was a shih tzu with matted bangs and a limp from an old wire snare, and Mei was leading them to a wall the smallest pup swore he could smell clean air behind. Nobody in the pack had ever smelled clean air. That was the problem worth walking into. The forbidden sectors had no checkpoints. That was why Mei used them. On the standard routes, a machine read every passing body and logged it, and last winter a machine had pulled Bram out of the line and Bram had not come back. Mei still remembered the sound of his collar tag on the grate. Since then, the pack rolled in garbage before every move and rubbed crushed pepper into their paws. It worked on dogs. It worked on people. Mei did not know yet what it did not work on, only that something was still behind them. Pip, the smallest, pushed his fox-face against Mei's shoulder. His fur smelled like rotten cabbage, which was good. "I can find it again," he whispered. "The clean smell. I know I can." Mei licked the top of his head once and did not answer. Mei did not know a safe route through this sector. Mei had never been this deep. One wrong alley and the patrols would fold around them like a hand closing. They crossed under a collapsed billboard and came out into a lot full of dead machines. A low car sat on flat tires, its blue lights long dead, its paint still bright as a bruise. Past the car, a small round ship squatted on bent legs, its hatch peeled open like a can. Inside the hatch, half-buried in wiring, was a suit. A helmet with an orange visor. Gloves. A chest panel with dials. Someone had climbed in there to die, or to hide, and had done neither for long. Mei climbed up and put a paw on the helmet. The visor was cracked but the glass caught light from the sector above. Mei tilted the helmet until the reflection showed the alley behind them, then the alley ahead, then a narrow gap between two service walls that Mei had not seen from the ground. No patrol lamps in the gap. No wire. A clear line running toward the far wall Pip had told them about. Mei jumped down and nosed Pip toward the gap. "That way," Mei said. "Stay behind me. Stay quiet." The pack moved. Behind them, in the lot with the dead car and the broken ship, something shifted that was not wind, and it began, at its own pace, to follow.