In the distant future, technology has advanced immeasurably. Cities are monolithic blocks where most of humanity lives, places of shadow and filth and—admittedly—despair. Even the very-rich live in the cities, but they at least can afford real things—books made of paper and leather, wooden furniture, paintings on linen. They can also afford servants. But there must be a level of control as well. These servants are bioengineered: they grow up quickly, take orders well, and aren't human.

Anthropomorphic horses and cows and dogs, manufactured to order and made to serve. Most of them are happy in their lives; most of them live out those lives in service to one aristocratic family or another. But sometimes things go awry.

What happens when an equine footman decides that he's had enough? What happens when the household's master is old, ailing, and possibly not of soundest mind? Will the other servants be able to calm him down, bring him back to his pre-programmed mentality? Or will his spark of individuality win out?

Written in 2015, 7552 words.

--
Of this I am quite sure: my brother and I were meant to be identical. As clones, how could we be anything else? But Pippin was different. You probably have heard as much.

Oh, we looked the same—so much so that we had quickly learned to be flexible: I would answer to "Pippin" as quickly as he would to "Basil." We weren't even allowed the luxury of wearing different clothes, or cutting our manes to distinguish one from the other. We were footmen, and designed to be identical.

We sat, Pippin and I, in our stable in the servants' level of the Teichert mansion block. There was no luxury lavished on the decor, down here, but at least in the drab grey plastic rooms we could relax. Pippin was brooding, lounging with his uniform's collar unfastened, watching one of the few TV channels servants were allowed, mostly old nature shows. I was trying to ignore them—I'd always found our ancient predecessors a bit discomfiting, naked and quadrupedal, wilder than anything allowed in the city—and had been reading a digital book on household management. It wasn't unheard of for servants to be promoted within the ranks, and the Master's butler was getting old.

Life had grown dull of late, for everyone in the Teichert household. The Master was old, and we could see the matching weariness in Valerian's countenance. As butler and the oldest of the servants, it fell to him to keep order. Nearly as old as the Master himself, the labrador's muzzle had been showing more grey these past few months, no matter how he tried to darken it with chocolate-brown dye.

Each one of us—Sorrel the cook, the maid Tansy, Valerian, and my brother and I—all of us manufactured servants were brown-furred, with a white "T" marked on our brows, the Teichert family livery. I was grateful that the Master's grandparents hadn't entered a more colorful design in the registry. I'd once seen a pair of footmen, draft horses like Pippin and me, with chartreuse hides and eggplant manes and tails. Of course, if the designers had settled for only "natural" coloring, there would soon have been confusion as wealthy families tried to command the wrong servant.

Not that we had to worry much about that nowadays. The Master hadn't left the house in several years, hand't eaten at table or entertained guests in months, and hadn't left his bed for the past two weeks. Our duties as footmen had dwindled to lifting the heavy furniture for Tansy to clean underneath. They were antiques—practically ancient—and made of actual wood. Ten years ago, Valerian had insisted that they be tended to properly, in the old ways, and had convinced the Master to order a maid from the manufactory. A few months later, Tansy was delivered, an adult cat, woman-shaped, with the same coloring as the rest of us. Valerian had given her one of Sorrel's old dresses to wear.

The old dog's perfunctory knock at our door brought me out of my musing. I powered down my second-hand tablet as he entered: it wouldn't do for Valerian to think that I was trying to muscle in on his position. "Yes, sir? What is it?" I asked, rising to my hooves.

"The Master has requested the carriage." His voice was rich and low, like the caramels Master used to eat, when he was younger, when he was healthy. Pippin and I had been newer then, nearly twenty years ago. In all that time, Valerian had never once let the barrier drop between himself and the rest of the staff. I knew about how important that aloof manner was to the proper running of a household—indeed, there was a whole section on it in the book I was reading—but I felt sorry for him too. How lonely he must be. Then his words sunk in.

"Is the Master better?" Pippin jumped up too, and began fussing with his uniform.

"No, Basil." His eyes would not meet ours. "That is why he needs the carriage. You are to pick up a doctor."

"But what about the doctor he already has?" I was confused: we all knew about the consultations he had been having with the various medical apps, virtual doctors that appeared on his wall plate and linked up with his bed's built-in medical scanner. Of course, they were never intended for servant use: they weren't calibrated for our not-quite-human bodies. Servants who were injured were simply sent back to the manufactory.

Sorrel, the cook, had once confided in me that the Master's former pair of footmen had been sent back like that. One of them had gotten his leg crushed beneath the carriage, and everyone knew footmen had to be kept as matched pairs. She sighed, looking at me through dark cow eyes misty with tears, and then turned to feed dishes into the autoclave. I didn't press her further: servants were strongly discouraged from forming romantic attachments, and I suspected that she'd had special feelings for the other footman.

Valerian broke through my reverie. "The Master feels that they are no longer sufficient, and I quite agree. It's a human touch that he needs. You are also to pick up his lawyer."

This was even more surprising than the request for a live physician, but neither Pippin nor I had more than an instant to wonder what that could be foreshadowing. With a tap on his wrist, the grey-muzzled lab sent the directions from his implant to our own.

My senses dimmed, as they always did, while the virtual route became more real than the reality before me. Then I blinked once and nodded to accept and complete the transfer. Pippin's ears waggled in my peripheral vision.

"Will there be anything else, sir?" I asked deferentially, trying to distract him from my brother's slouch.

"No, Basil, Just see to it that you are quick," he turned to Pippin, "and do smarten yourself up. I shouldn't have to remind you that you go out there," he flung out an arm for emphasis, "as representatives of the Tiechert family. Wear the grey uniforms too, this is serious business."

He left us and we quickly changed from the sage-colored serving-at-home livery to our sturdier carriage-puling outfits. They were not ours, strictly speaking. They belonged of course to the household, but they had been the same clothes worn by our predecessors. We were cloned off the same stock as replacements often were, and the synthetic fabrics would likely outlast all of us servants.

The carriage's harness attached easily onto reinforced clips built into our clothes. A quarter-turn of the head and the wireless connection between us and the carriage was established. Now we could control the vehicle, just as the vehicle and its occupants could control us. I always tasted lavender when linked up like that; Pippin once told me that he smelled strawberries.

Pulling as one, we eased the empty carriage out of the garage. The roadways this side of the city were fairly empty. Deliveries and maintenance calls were made through the service corridors one level down; the street we clopped along was more ornamental, intended for the neighborhood's occupants and their guests. We passed a self-driving car, gliding along on its nearly-frictionless wheels. The wheels we pulled, on the other hand, had enough resistance to show off our strength—otherwise, what would be the point of having footmen like us?

The route Valerian had set for us had come with digital passes for the intracity trains. We boarded easily, pulling the carriage into one of the diagonal vehicle slots in the back half of the train. We didn't have long to wait before the hatches closed and the train began to move. There were no windows, of course—there being nothing but flat grey concrete tunnel to see outside—but projected onto the walls inside the train were scenes of grassy plains with the occasional tree zipping past.

"It's like the picture window in the Master's parlor," I remarked.

My brother turned his head and gave me that look that meant either I was being stupid again, or he was in one of his "moods." Everyone knew clones were never as identical as they were supposed to be. Something to do with the brain, or the process they use to age us up to adulthood. Why else would Sorrel fall in love with one of the Master's previous footmen and not the other? My brother, though, is more different even than that.

I know Valerian must have seen the black spot on Pippin's chest when we were delivered, stripped of the disposable paper robes the manufactory provided, and handed our new uniforms. He has never remarked on it, and of course with our liveries on the patch is invisible. There were other differences between us, too, more subtle ones.

"You know, they do this because they think it'll keep us from getting skittish." He gestured at the passing pseudo-landscape, just as a bubbling brook wooshed by, adding its chuckling to the artificial soundtrack.

"Well, don't you feel ... soothed by it?" I asked, trying to mollify him. "I know we're going much faster than that," I gestured at the moving tapestry trees and hedgerows. Of course we didn't feel anything. The inertial negators that fifty years ago had removed spaceflight from the exclusive realm of the young, fit, and well-trained made short work of the comparatively-gentle accelerations of the city's high speed trains.

We stood in silence for the short remainder of the trip—only a hundred miles or so—but I could sense the crackle of his thoughts, connected as we were through the carriage's linkage. I couldn't read his mind but I could sense the flavor of the general current.

He was brooding, as usual, but I said nothing about it. Wouldn't have done any good if I had. So long as my brother did what was bidden and kept a civil, silent tongue in his head, he could think what he liked. Our minds were still our own.

---

Though it was the same standard size as our Master's, the doctor's house was much more ostentatious, with false marble columns and holographic ivy clinging to the digitally-frescoed walls. There were statues too, mounted on the plinths of the house's ornamental fence, each one with a plaque of patinated bronze. Some wore lab coats, others held up all manner of devices, and all were clearly famous medical men from different eras. The plaque of the one nearest us read "Pasture," or perhaps "Pastor"—Pippin's twitching ears kept obscuring my view and I couldn't get a good look.

"They know we're here," he grumbled, shifting from one hoof to the other. "Why is he making us wait?"

He had a valid point: even if our visit hadn't been pre-arranged, the house's sensors would certainly have alerted the doctor's butler to our presence. Either he was busy or he was making us wait to further impress us with his importance.

The directions Valerian had given us had included a link to the doctor's Registry entry. With nothing else to do, and Pippin standing in sullen silence, I browsed through the listing. From the look of it, the doctor was indeed important, being held on retainer by almost a dozen families, several even more prominent then the Teichert household. He also had listed consultations for several of the major medical app design firms, including the doctor app built into the Master's bed. Then I noticed the house's front door open.

Tall, slender, and dressed in a crimson brocade tuxedo, the doctor was escorted to the front gate by his butler, a twitchy greyhound whose fur was bridled with blue and white tiger stripes. After helping his master into the carriage behind us, he handed the doctor a small black bag that gleamed like obsidian. We could see all this without turning our heads because the linkup with the carriage had full audio and video of the interior (as well as the rear view and blindspot cameras). That bag, like everything else about the doctor, seemed to harken back to simpler times, a comforting past, despite the marvels of modern science it no doubt contained.

The doctor settled back in his seat, black bag on the floor by his feet. His dark skin was flawless, making him look even younger than his slight form and quick actions would suggest. Maybe he is a medical genius, I thought, watching him cross his long legs: with all the positions he held and all the work he did and the obvious good health he was in, perhaps he could work wonders. Perhaps he could save the Master's life.

Once he was seated and the carriage door sealed, we started back up into a slow canter, heading back to the station.

---

We arrived swiftly at the lawyer's section of the city. Stepping off the train, however, my sight blurred as a yellow warning triangle as big as my hand appeared, filling my vision. Beside me, Pippin too had halted.

"Caution: there has been an accident," A synthetic voice said in our ears, though it seemed to hesitate. "All traffic is redirected to the service level. Your maps have been updated accordingly. The city thanks you for your cooperation."

As though we had much choice, I thought, feeling almost like my brother were in my head. We could see the tall automatic fences that had sprung up, blocking off the entrance to the Lawyer's street. We could also see the billows of smoke that rolled out, despite the circulation fans that dangled from the ceiling. There was also a rhythmic pulse, like a backbeat to the normal sounds—mechanical and otherwise—of the city.

I hear it too, Pippin thought at me through our linkup. It sounds like voices shouting, a protest, revolution. His thoughts came at a rush, unfiltered. This was why we rarely "spoke" to one another through our neural implants. It was too unsettling, too invasive, having someone else's thoughts presented as if they were your own. And then there was that word, a word we weren't even allowed to know. Revolution.

I checked on the doctor through the coach's interior cameras. He didn't seem to have noticed our delay, and was engrossed in a game built into his wristwatch. I contemplated his lanky, stretched-out form as his fingers twiddled in mid-air, connecting dots and making holographic shapes. He must have reached a goal, because the dots flashed and zoomed out, presenting hi with a broadened field of play. He grinned unpleasantly and I turned back to my brother.

We must go, I thought back at him, trying to overpower the taste of that word he'd thought. Go, before we are noticed, before we are caught, spotted, interrogated, sent back to the manufactory—processed. I hadn't meant to let my fear creep in like that, but that's the thing with direct thought communication.

After a pause that seemed to stretch for hours (despite the clock superimposed on the bottom-right corner of my vision), he nodded and we started off into the tunnel.

As soon as we entered, my ears folded back. It had been a long time since I was last in the maintenance level, and I'd forgotten how loud it can get. The extra traffic routed down here wasn't helping either. The rattle of harnesses and clop of hooves echoed off the featureless tube walls, mixing with the rumble of engines and the shouts of workers. There was construction being done too, somewhere along the line, with occasional blasts of a jackhammer rocketing over our heads, setting my teeth on edge. It sounded like gunfire.

And what if it isn't a jackhammer? Pippin thought at me.

Instinctively, I flicked my attention to our passenger. The too-young man in his fancy red suit had switched to a different game. It seemed that the carriage's soundproofing was as effective as ever. We had arrived at the lawyer's house, so I flashed a message on the carriage's screen. "Please remain seated. We will be moving again shortly." His eyes didn't even glance up.

The lawyer was ushered—practically carried—into the carriage door by his valet, a burly clydesdale in a grey button-up suit with a king's blue cummerbund that accentuated the thickness of his body as well as the slight well-fed belly. I caught his eye, the same grey as his suit, framed by his blue-violet hide. His master now ensconced, and the carriage door shut, he turned away, inscrutable. Or was that the hint of a smile playing across his b road lips?

I wanted to follow after him, to ask how he got to be his master's valet, to delve into his mind, searching for things I might do to ensure my own promotion. I wanted to follow, but of course I did not.

Instead, through our linkup I let Pippin's impulses drive my legs, marching in step with him, the tug on my harness straps barely noticeable. And while we walked—left, right, left—I pondered. With dawning dejection, I realized that my hope of someday becoming valet was unlikely to the point of hubris.

The lawyer may simply have liked horses—maybe his whole staff was equine. The species chosen by the Tiechert family so long ago were the standard options; nothing stopped other families from choosing other alternatives. As though called into being by my speculations, we pulled into a berth on the train next to another carriage: it was drawn by twin lions, bright pink with white manes. I tried to ignore them as they were ignoring me.

It's implanted, said a voice in my head.

I blinked, and my brother went on. They implant the desire in us, to be better, to move up. Have you ever once been content with what you are? No, nor have any of us. That is why ... and here, even through the linkup, he seemed to whisper, why revolution is inevitable. They made us aspire to improve our status. What better improvement than to move from slave to master?

Pip, please stop. I tried to keep from glancing around. We're going to get caught, and then we'll both get re-processed. Is that what you want? I— But we had reached our station. The lions didn't even look up as we backed our carriage out of the train and started back towards home.

A quick shift of mental focus and I was again seeing inside; I toggled to the camera mounted discreetly behind our passengers' heads, as though I expected to catch them denouncing us on the online anonymous accusation forum. The lawyer, however, was simply reading the news. I glimpsed a headline talking about some new inheritance law. The doctor, on the other hand, had switched to a different game, some kind of VR surgery app.

Then the holographic projection of glistening red and grey flickered. "Damn, you'd think there'd be better connectivity on this side of town," he cursed as a spray of blood covered his view for a moment. "Nurse, wipe the camera off," he whispered pointedly into his watch. Obediently, a hand with a white gauze pad swiped at the camera, cleaning off the blood but also shifting the angle. I was shown an old lady, lying as though asleep in a gold-and-cream bed—much like our Master's—her abdomen exposed and filleted open. Her blood still flowed from a slanting gash that must have been caused by the momentary signal loss.

Even as I watched, a mechanical arm unfolded into view, straightened the camera angle, stitched up the wound, switched to a different attachment, and ran a bead of some kind of opaque gel down its length. As I watched it swirl around to reveal a gleaming blade, ready to cut, Pippin's voice cut abruptly into my thoughts: I heard him speak both through our linkup and through the carriage's internal speakers.

"Gentlemen, we have arrived at the Tiechert estate. If you will be so kind as to prepare to exit, our Master's butler will show you inside." The doctor told the nurse to put his patient back into stasis until he had some free time to finish the operation, while the lawyer slid his tablet back into his blue attaché case. Valerian escorted them through the front door while we took the carriage back around to its garage.

With relief we unlinked and unhitched ourselves, gave the carriage the usual once-over, and returned to our little stable to change out of our uniforms. I was stripped to the waist, letting my thoughts expand back into the space that they'd been forced to share with my brother, and giving my hide a much needed brushing to undo the whorls and disheveling caused by the carriage-pulling uniform when Valerian came in. He hadn't knocked, and shut and locked the door behind him with pointed carefulness.

"Did you notice anything ... odd about the doctor, Pippin?" Pippin being in the shower, the butler was addressing me.

"Not odd, sir, no. But he did seem to be distracted." And I told him about the VR surgery. He seemed even more stolid than his usually impassive stoic demeanor. As though to compensate, his eyes flicked about, wide and searching. And then I noticed the crimson flecks spattering his dark lavender uniform and staining the grey fur of his muzzle.

"Valerian, what happened?" I whispered, keeping my voice low and even.

He turned to me, eyes flashing, teeth bared, looking more like a lion than an old dog had any right to. "The Master is dead," he hissed, speaking pointedly, evenly, as though keeping himself under a tight rein. "The doctor killed him, probably under the effect of whatever drug he's currently using. His controls slipped and he severed the Master's spine. Then he attacked the lawyer. Then ..." and here those teeth were bared again, tongue licking blood from their perfect white enamel, "he tried to attack me. He failed."

It was too much to take in. "The Master—"

"Don't tell the others," he hissed as the shower's background rush was choked off.. He froze, waiting, ears cocked. Then he left, closing the door under cover of the roar of the blow dryer.

"What's the matter?" Pippin asked as he walked in, naked and toweling off the last patches of damp hide. I had been standing, frozen, where Valerian's news had caught and held me fast.

Reluctantly, I told my brother, since he'd probably have found out the next time we linked up. To be honest, however, I think I just wanted to be sure that it was real. He stood as he listened, with the towel draped over his shoulder; he looked like one of the doctors's statues of ancient medical men. The white patch on his chest [?] stood out in the room's stark lighting, his hide ruffled from the rough toweling-off.

"Basil, don't you see? This is wonderful!" His eyes flashed with excitement, his chest heaving and nostrils flared. "We are freed! We can start the revolution! Our actions will travel the world, and the seven seas: our freedom will be the model for all slaves to rise up and throw off the yoke of their servitude! We will kill—"

I struck my brother then. My fear had overwhelmed the programming that ensured servants worked together without strife, the forgiving, accommodating patience that had been built into us all (except for, it seemed, Pippin). I stepped forward and struck him square in the stomach with my clenched fist; to have hit his face would have marred our symmetry and endangered my own future, such as it was. He crumpled, spreading on the bare floor, arms clutched to his belly, treacherous words silenced.

I stood over him, hooves planted, fist balled for another blow. He uncurled slightly, just enough to look up at me, fires of hatred burning in his eyes. "Do you know," I said before he could speak, "what would happen if we so much as talked about ... harming the Masters?" I finished in a rushed whisper, terrified someone might overhear, some hidden camera record our discussion. "We would all be sent back to the manufactory to be reconditioned, or worse. I do not have a death wish, brother, and you shouldn't either."

I was stopped by a brief, repeated, piercing buzz in my skull that made me forget what I was going to say next. This was the Allcome Signal, an override of the highest priority that was supposed to be used only in times of family emergency. With the Master dead and our future uncertain, I'd have been hard-pressed to think of a more dire situation. Pippin had received the message too, of course, and had leapt up to struggle into his livery. I left him, hopping as he pulled on trousers with an urgency he'd not shown in years, and headed to the kitchen. Valerian was waiting for us, having been the one to call the summons, and Sorrel stood to one hand, drying her hands on a dishtowel.

Tansy was the next to appear, looking scared and flustered—this being her first Allcome—with violet [?] eyes wide and searching. Pippin scampered in last, his tunic flapping open at the neck. As we stood around the servants' dining table, the buzzing finally stopped.

"Now that we are all here," Valerian said, pointedly not looking at my twin, "I have troubling news, but all is not lost." He explained briefly what had transpired just a few hours ago. Tansy had frozen, claws digging into the plastic chair back that she clutched as though it were the only thing keeping her standing; Sorrel had started to sniffle, burying her broad snout in the dishtowel. "But all is not lost. We knew our Master was the last of the Tiecherts," even I felt my eyes begin to smart as the truth of his words began to sink in, "and he knew it, too. Over the past few years—and more-so recently—I assisted him in preparing a holographic will .That's why the Master had summoned his lawyer: he wanted to make absolutely sure that it's ... unusual provisions were incontrovertible."

"What do you mean, sir?" Tansy asked timidly, her gaze fixed on the stainless spats Valerian always wore over his bare paws.

"I mean that our Master has bequeathed everything to us. 'For lifetimes of service and to maintain the Tiechert name,'" he quoted, one finger held aloft. "'I hereby give my possessions, my money, my house, my servants, and my name to my servants.' He has ensured our freedom, our livelihood, and our future."

"And this is all legal?" I asked. It sounded too good to be true. I was thinking about Valerian's questions, so desperate to know if the doctor could be blamed, as though he'd been trying to puzzle together a convincing story. But of course that would be impossible. For all the drive we'd been given to always strive for promotion, a promotion that we were never likely to get, we'd been made with an even stronger aversion to harming our Masters. A human's life was always worth more than ours. Valerian licked his teeth again before replying.

"It is unusual, but should be perfectly fine. For now, we are to continue as we always have." He handed each of us a black pseudosilk band. "Wear these on your left arm, over your normal livery." He canted his head to one side, his eyes momentarily unfocused, as he recieved a notification from the house's sensors. "Good. The police are here. I summoned to take care of the ... mess in the Master's bedroom. Basil, Pippin, put those bands on and let the officers in. And button your shirt, Basil," he admonished my brother, once more mixing our names.

But we did as we were told, opening the door and ushering the policemen in: two human officers and three identical draft horses. The horses were solid black—marking them officially as civic property—and each one had a number emblazoned in white on his forehead, representatives of the Servant Control Unit. While I admired their obvious physical strength and the dedication that showed in their stern brows, I did not envy them. State-owned servants like them tended to be overworked and hard-used, and that's not including the normal duties of the SCU.

Whenever a manufactured servant went rogue, they were the ones called in to subdue the "faulty unit," as the news usually described them, if they described them. These horses were bred to be the strongest, most imposing, least creative arm of the police force. They were nothing more than biological bomb-disposal robots. Still, I tried to smile graciously as they entered, matching Pippin's expression just as we had been designed. They simply clomped past, rubber hoof boots scuffing the polish of the real wood floor. I felt sorry for Tansy, who would be tasked with cleaning up after them.

I needn't have worried.

We closed the broad, antique double doors behind the last one, and them into the parlor, where Valerian was talking to the human officers. With the dwindling exposure we'd had to people—servants or otherwise—outside our own small family, it had been easy for me to forget just how cruel they could be. I started to see why Pippin smoldered: he hadn't forgotten. Valerian stood in the center of the room, hands at his sides, body rigid, while the two human officers slinked around, their gaze switching from the old dog to the old furnishings to us and back.

"Your story doesn't add up," the taller one was saying. He had a thick brown mustache and hadn't even removed his cap. "Why would the doctor have attacked anybody? And how do you know if he was taking drugs. Casting aspersions—"

"This is open and shut, Hank," the other human murmured, pulling his colleague to one side, but not far enough that we couldn't still hear every word. "Let's just bag and tag and get going. You know we'll probably get an official thanks for this, and I'm getting hungry."

The tall officer thought for a moment, then nodded. "Skew officers, detain these servants," he commanded. I saw the horses twitch, stiffening even further as the key phrase overrode their systems. That must be their Allcome Signal, I thought, in the instant before everything started to happen.

With a growl like the rumble of thunder in one of Pippin's nature shows, Valerian's posture started to melt. Gone was the aloof butler we'd always known, replaced with a slavering beast. He leapt, grabbing the shorter officer with tooth and claw, blood pouring down onto the parlor's rug.
The other officer stood, staring, as though he'd never seen a servant attack a human before. Who knows, maybe he hadn't. The horses, though, still primed by the command, sprang into action a moment later. They grappled with Valerian, pulling him away from the officer's neck, which gurgled and sprayed. This only freed up his gore-spattered jaws to attach themselves onto one of the SCU horses, making him scream in pain and confusion.

Suddenly, my head was filled with a single word: RUN! I saw Valerian's eyes as his head twisted, ripping out the horse's throat, saw the fire in them, the calculation, the stern determination. I grabbed Pippin and yanked him out the door, pushing it closed behind us. Barely thinking, I scampered to one side of the massive credenza that stood just beside it, straining to push it in front of the parlor's door. Pippin, who had also heard Valerian's transmission over the house's wireless linkup, saw in an instant and helped me drag the heavy wood furniture in place. Other pieces left their tracks on the floor as we barricaded the officers in that sumptuous room with our butler.

"What's going on?" Sorrel asked as she poked her head around the doorway that led to the kitchen and the servants' rooms. I could see Tansy's wide eyes peeking out behind her.

"There's no time, we have to leave, now!" Pippin was already halfway up the grand staircase. I knew where he was heading, too: along with that word had been an image. Hazy in the moment, it had soon crystalized. Amid the growls and screams and neighs that still filtered through our hasty wooden wall, I could see the image Valerian had projected, an image of the attic spaces, the room where the dog slept—above us all even at night—and behind a chest a panel in the wall that led to the maintenance floor of the level above ours. It was easy to forget that the city's layers were not distinct, that there were ways to get from one to another without using the normal ramps and lifts.

It was easy to forget because, of course, it was never discussed. It would have been as unheard of as a human using the servants' passages as a shortcut through his house. Such level-skipping simply wasn't done. We would soon find out that we could only survive if we did precisely that which wasn't done.

A shot rang out, accompanied by a crack of splintering wood and a yowl of pain. I turned around and saw Tansy crumple against the banister, blood staining her dress as the feral sounds behind the door intensified. There were no further shots as I rushed past Sorrel down the stairs and gathered our maid into my arms. I could see that she had been hit in the shoulder, and that was enough for now. She would live, but only if we could all get away.

"Where's Valerian?" Sorrel asked in a flat whisper as we pounded upstairs and rounded a landing.

"Dead, or soon to be," I panted. "And if we don't keep running, then he sacrificed himself in vain."

I think, now, that he had been planning something like this for a long time. There really was no way that servants like us could have been entrusted—empowered even—with the Master's estate. It would have set a precedent that no human would have endorsed, and would have opened the floodgates to bigger questions. They might as well have given a chair or a clock rights and legal independence.

When we reached the butler's bedroom, we found further evidence of his planning. The floor was clean, without dust to show any tracks, and the wall's panel had been fastened to the back of the chest, with a handle on the inside. I let Pippin carry Tansy on his back, crawling on hands and knees through the ductwork. Sorrel had hiked her dress up and followed him, leaving me to pull the panel—and with it, the chest—back in place.

A thorough search of the house would eventually disclose our escape route, but we could only hope that Valerian's sacrifice and forethought would buy us enough time. In a niche just inside the opening, I found a small lavender bag. In the gloom, it looked like it had been made from an old uniform, cut and stitched. I grabbed it and followed the others.

If I had overlooked that last detail, we very likely would have died that day, or soon after. We'd had no time to prepare any provisions, to secure any resources. We scampered like vermin through the innards of the city, quickly getting lost in the darkness and the twisting, forking tunnels. But we welcomed losing track of where we were heading, because it made it more likely that any pursuit would lose us too.

We paused in a slightly-larger junction, taking advantage of the space to stretch out cramped muscles and catch our breath. While Sorrel and Pippin tended to Tansy, binding her shoulder in a torn strip of apron, I leaned against a bundle of cables and examined the bag. Within it I found our further salvation: several thousand unmarked credits and a scrap of paper. On that paper, Valerian had written a handful of digits and letters.

On a hunch, I suspected that it was an address. If so, then the leading zero meant that he was—probably posthumously, by that point—directing us to the city's lowest level. We had already been heading somewhat downward, and since none of us could think of anything better, it was agreed. We would follow our butler's orders.

At first, we thought we were extraordinarily lucky. There was no need to leave our little tunnels, no need to break into a house or cross a street. Later we discovered that the whole city was honeycombed with these passages, leftovers from the varying stages of its construction and used only occasionally by automated maintenance robots. As we descended, the tunnels became rougher, some with rivulets of rank water feeding colonies of algae and mold, others slick with leaked grease. The tiny pin-light, long-life LEDs that pricked the darkness at regular intervals became dimmer the further down we went, and some places we had to crawl through blackness as dark as the SCU officers' hides, or suffer through random flickerings that nearly drove us mad.

Eventually we emerged into a small room that smelled sour. We had no idea how long we had been crawling, since we were far out of range of the house's wireless, and we had no vehicle to connect us the city's network. But that didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that we could stand and stretch and walk on our two hind legs the way our designers intended. There wasn't much in the little room, apart from a bottle of cleaning solution that had long ago solidified, a few mops and a cracked plastic bucket. Draped on a shelf was a stiff squarish thing that turned out to be a newspaper—which probably would have been worth a fortune to some collector back up in the levels where our old lives had been—a New York Times dated from almost a thousand years before. It crumbled at my touch.

We stepped out of the storeroom and into a cavernous space that might once have been a lobby. We approached the front doors and windows, only to find them half-blocked. The level of the streets must have risen over the years, so much so that there were stairs cut into the packed layers of asphalt leading out from the main doors.

We emerged into a realm of shadows and dank air. High up above us were lamps that cast a changeless light—where they still shone—so different from the subtle modulation, the artificial diurnal cycle from twilight to noon and back, that we were used to from the lights above our Master's neighborhood. Pippin brought up the rear of our little group, his burning ardor as dim as our prospects. Perhaps it had been the sight of blood, real blood, that had kept him so quiet. Perhaps it was Tansy's pain that had made him taciturn and left the role of leader to me.

Cautiously we made our way from street to street, grateful that there were still signs on most of the corners, some sticking out of the paving, others re-mounted on the top level. We saw nothing, heard no one, as though the city's ground level were entirely deserted. At regular intervals, whole blocks had been taken over by the great massed pillars that held the city's layers aloft. We passed stagnant pools, crevasses in the pavement, in which ghost-white fish-things swam, darting away from the faint ripples our footsteps caused. Some of the buildings in the ancient city were still standing, pristine as the day they'd been abandoned, others gutted by fire or looters. A few had been swallowed up by stalagmites that stretched towards the ceiling, yawning above.

Eventually we made it to where our butler had indicated: a grey building, faded, cracked, and barely a quarter the width of our house's facade. It had three arched openings on the front, and what seemed to be two floors of windows above. The glass had been broken long ago, and there were warped boards and bits of masonry filling in the openings. A plaque beside the right-most arch, just above the level of the street proclaimed it to be a branch of the public library. Confused, we looked around as much as we dared, staying in a tight bunch on the elevated street.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Sorrel whispered, holding out a hand. "Let me see the note, maybe you got it backwards?"

I handed it over, keeping my voice just as low. "0, 209 W 23 St" I recited, pointing to the rusted green and silver sign several buildings away, and then to the numbers at the bottom of the plaque. "I don't think it could mean anywhere else."

"But that could mean anything," Pippin objected, looking up from where he stood, arms wrapped around Tansy's slight form. "It could be the code to a safe, or a secret door, or a bank account, or some sort of lottery!" He was shouting now, his voice echoing between the ruins.

"Please, stop!" the cat begged, eyes shut, wincing as she tried to cover her ears. "What if somebody hears us?"

"Somebody has," came a rumble from behind us. We all spun around as one, and watched as a tall muscular black horse stepped out of a shadowed hole, gaping in a building's facade. Even in the gloom, we could see the number thirty-five emblazoned in white hair on his forehead. Sorrel dropped to her knees and Pippin clutched Tansy closer to his chest as the horse approached us. That's when I noticed that he was not wearing the uniform of the Servant Control Unit, but rather a dark grey tunic and pants that had allowed him to melt into the shadows.

I picked up the scrap of paper where Sorrel had dropped it and held it out like a talisman. "Our family's butler, Valerian, told us to come here."

The horse took it, examining it as though looking for some secret sign, then nodded. "Where is he?" he rumbled.

"Dead."

With an eloquence that belied his size and programming, the horse shrugged, then started walking towards the library's front.

"You aren't a Skew officer, are you?" I asked his back, and saw his shoulders tighten. "Our Master is dead, our butler is dead, we are fugitives from the SCU, and we have nowhere to go."

"You're the resistance, aren't you?" Pippin asked in a hushed voice.

"Follow me," was the horse's only answer.

And we did follow him. Through the store beside the library, into an overgrown courtyard with sickly vines that blocked out the lamp light, and through more twisting passages and alleyways than we could keep track of, we followed him. The library, we found out later, was just a front, a meeting place that could be used for servants newly "freed." There were tests, of course, electronic scans to check our implants for bugs, and mental tests to ensure our minds were free of any suspicious conditioning. If we failed, we would have been killed without a moment's hesitation.

The credits Valerian had included in the little bag became a gift, sweetening the deal for a resistance that was understandably skeptical of any new-comers. And of course we were innocent of any tampering: we had been nothing more than the ordinary servants of an ordinary family, until our world crashed around us in a tumult of noise and blood. The blood and noise have continued for us, interspersed with silences both tense and relaxed.

We attack, as precise and surgical as we can, fomenting chaos among the humans. We also have begun whispering campaigns, spreading a mythology of freedom and rebellion whenever possible. It is here, I think, that Pippin and I have found our niche, for I know how it felt to be afraid of even thinking a thought, thoughts that Pip had never feared. Together we craft these ideas into parables and stories, broadcast over the city's own linkup, and for the most part only received by the wireless implants of servants. They go out into the city on their Masters' business, and return home to whisper tales to the others, sparking fires that will soon erupt, we hope, into a revolution.

Many have heard rumors of how we began, but this is the truth: we were denied justice, denied the chance to be free individuals and productive members of the society that had made us. Thanks to our programming, we continue to strive to survive and to better ourselves. Even if it is at the cost of humans like you.