Cale frowned, then realised she was no longer addressing him. A thought crossed his mind, darting in and disappearing off as fast as it had come – where was Derrin? – then he was there. He was stood in the wrong place. By her side, like he belonged. None of the guns were trained on him.
Cale looked at him, saw the eyes blink with uncertainty, then look away.
Fulvia pulled a snub pistol from her belt and handed it to Derrin. ‘You can take your recompense now.’
Cale watched the world slow as the pistol changed hands, rose to point at him, the dark tunnel of the barrel sucking him in. Was that the glint of the bullet he could see, down in the belly of the gun, primed to end him? Maybe just a trick of the light.
The pistol trembled.
‘This is what you were promised, remember?’ said Fulvia, her voice quiet.
Derrin nodded, but the finger on the trigger didn’t move.
‘You trained for this, wanted this.’
‘Yes.’
‘He killed your father.’
‘He killed my father,’ he repeated, flat as glass. The pistol shook even more. The finger squeezed a fraction; the hammer rose.
Derrin let the weapon fall to his side with a shake of his head. His eyes didn’t move from Cale, his face caught in its own battle.
‘I’m disappointed,’ said Fulvia, snatching the gun back. ‘Your work was exemplary in leading us here, but this is unacceptable.’ She holstered the weapon and turned to Cale. ‘It’s true, by the way. Remember that commissar? The one you slaughtered, almost stoking a mutiny? Well, this’, she placed her hand on Derrin’s shoulder, ‘is that thing’s child. You orphaned him. It seems you’ve also managed to take his backbone. How adept.’ She looked down her nose at him, a raptor ready to strike. ‘What a talent you have for breaking things.’
Cale stared hard at Derrin, as if seeing him for the first time. Take away the hair, add a stoop, a lopsided smirk… Could it be true?
‘It doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not,’ said Fulvia, straightening. ‘Because either way your brief period of use has ended. I’d let you go back to rot in your hole if it weren’t for…’ She waved her hand at the torus chamber. ‘A marvel, isn’t it? A shame we have to destroy it, but there you are. I should thank you for coming here so directly – my intelligence chiefs, his superiors, were certain it would take weeks for you to meander your way here.’
‘What about us?’ he heard Kelbee say. The young woman’s face was calm, her gaze steady. There was steel there, something that had been earned with hardship and pain. He wished he’d got to know her better. That undercurrent of strength that reminded him so much of Aime.
Fulvia tossed her a look of pure venom. ‘You will stay here, and you will die in pain. Your husband did his duty, like a good soldier. He birthed and ran this operation with dedication and ingenuity. He turned a run-of-the-mill subversive hunt into something greater, knew he could flush out a lead to this place if it was done right. A good man, subtle and tenacious, but he won’t see his plan succeed because you butchered him like an animal in his own home. Yes, we found him. A man of his quality deserved more than to die at the hand of a nothing.’
Sulara Song snorted, ‘And you’re innocent? How many have you sent to their deaths? How many executions have you held – taken part in, even? You’ve plenty of blood on you.’
‘I’m a servant of the Seeker’s wisdom.’
‘Wisdom, is that what you’re planning to find here? You’d destroy a treasure trove that could bring us all out of the dark, and instead have us all scratch in the dirt in the name of that ancient hypocrite?’
‘Hold your tongue, old woman.’
‘Or is it really something else?’ the professor continued. ‘Tell me, how good does all that power feel? Is all this, perhaps, about Fulvia arc Borunmer and her ambition? The first woman to hold the Seeker’s Keys in, well, ever, and you chose to be no different from all the swaggering cocks who came before you. You could have made things better, used the ambition that gained you their respect to make life more bearable for anyone not born rich or a man, but you chose yourself above everything. I wonder, when will it stop being enough to watch them kneel to Him, not you?’
The Guide’s eyes were dangerous but her voice was level. ‘Your “treasure” here didn’t stop the Ruin. Everything the Seeker taught us about the old world – its decadence, its hubris – has been confirmed by what I’ve read in your own notes and files. I’ll not see that happen to the world again.’
‘You’re a fucking monster.’
Fulvia scoffed. ‘I’m a realist, and you’re a fool. People don’t need—’ She was cut off by a crackling at her waist. Frowning, she lifted the comm device to her ear and listened. In an instant her expression went from arrogant control to fury, to concern, then back to fury again. ‘You,’ she snapped her fingers at one of the soldiers. ‘Get the transport ready; we’re leaving for Karume at once.’
The soldier nodded and headed for the ladder leading up to the funicular. A short bark from Fulvia froze him in his tracks.
‘How long to wire this place for demolition, Sergeant?’ she said to one of the other soldiers.
‘Venerated Guide, we haven’t even begun to—’
‘No time. I’m demoting you for lack of forethought.’
A tensing of the shoulders, but then a crisp nod. ‘Ma’am.’
‘We’ll have to come back and finish the job. In the meantime… your notes were fascinating reading, Professor.’ She flicked a finger at Kelbee, addressing her troops. ‘Take that and hold her against the pillar.’
Cale imagined the man’s face twitching underneath his blackened visor. He must know what had happened here, that he was hearing his own death order. Discipline won out; he and one of the other soldiers took her by the shoulders and dragged Kelbee down the steps to the surface of the chamber. She fought, but they were stronger.
‘She’s with child, for pity’s sake!’ yelled Syn.
‘A bastard child is no child at all,’ said Fulvia.
Cale watched Kelbee’s legs kicking in the air as she was hauled up the incline to the base of the grey pillar. He took a step, wanting to rip them away from her, but before he could go any further the soldier nearest him reached out and shoved him backwards. He crumpled against the wall as if made of twigs, his body abandoning him.
Fulvia motioned at the remaining soldiers. ‘You two stay here. If the others fail in their duty, you will execute them and take their place. If any of you abandons his post, your families will be split up and sent to the camps without food or clothing and will die cursing your names.’ She didn’t wait for a confirmation, instead waved Derrin towards the ladder. ‘Go,’ she told him.
The youth looked at Cale, his eyes watery and pleading. Then he turned and set his foot on the rung, followed by the Guide and the erstwhile sergeant. A few moments later there was the sound of the funicular carriage’s doors clunking open, closing, then the jagged rattle as it made its way to the surface.
The two remaining soldiers were unmoving, held in place by training and duty. Cale remembered that iron discipline, knew they didn’t need to be threatened to obey – they would keep their weapons levelled even as their skin began to crisp. Could he make it to them, a sudden lunge, a quick dash? The weakness in his legs and the stillness of their weapons told him it was pointless.
Kelbee screamed as her jacket was ripped off, leaving her arms bare. The men took one each and leaned into the pillar, pressing her back against it. Her cries bounced around the room. She looked around in confusion, expecting more to come but the soldiers just held her in place. She found Cale’s eyes and he made himself hold her gaze, resolved to at least do this small thing for her.
The floodlights died and he heard Sulara gasp. Then, just as she’d described in the journals, the light returned, an unsourced blue haze that made it hard to judge distance. It felt tangible, almost, like a thick fog that illuminated instead of obscuring.
>
Kelbee cried out, ‘It’s hot!’ and squirmed against the pillar.
There was a sense of thickening, the blue haze condensing. He felt its weight on him, pressing him into the floor even as it waxed in brightness. He squinted against the glare. The heat built gradually, like he’d just stepped outside on a clear day, pleasant at first but getting hotter, the menace of fire triggering the animal part of his mind, warning him to get up, run, escape, not understanding that there was no way out. He saw one of the guards look up, helmet twisting in surprise and confusion. Cale shut his eyes against the brightness.
And then, he saw.
He floated in a nowhere space, weightless as if underwater, the feeling of it like the most natural thing in the world, as if he’d been born to it. Beneath him a luminous grid stretched out, curving up at the limits of vision, forming walls and then a roof of intricate web lines that thrummed with a wordless potential.
A torus, he thought. A torus inside my mind. Or, rather, my mind inside of it.
Flying.
He remembered the aryx that had floated on the breeze, and before he knew what was happening he was plummeting towards the grid. It came up fast and there was a sense of velocity that yanked at his stomach but there was no fear. As he neared the grid lines he saw them expand in complexity, each glowing line made up of smaller threads like bandothal strings. Closer still, each line was made up of luminous dots, which became circles, which became spheres.
Not spheres, he realised. Tori. A torus made up of an uncountable number of smaller tori in a grid pattern. Sulara’s diaries had never mentioned this. He floated before one of them, knowing his mind had brought him here. It danced in front of his eyes, spinning, revealing its own inner complexity of an infinity of grid lines. A symbol floated above it, one he’d never seen before but was familiar somehow. It meant ‘flight’ – a language of pure instinct that spoke to his brain as surely as if he’d been born to it. Tentative, he reached out and brushed the surface.
A dizzying burst of images and words hit him all at once: men in fragile kites hurling themselves from mountains, elegantly sculpted leviathans cutting between the clouds, a flight of birds that looked too big to be real. Then, ground-shuddering explosions as fragile tubes were launched skywards, metal fliers moving faster than sound and in perfect synchronicity, arcing up into the sky before falling to earth, dropping death from their wings like a raptor falling on its prey.
Caught by the sight of the wide sky and the light that coruscated off the metal things’ wings, he wondered how long it had been since he’d seen Ras rise over the hills of the tundra. The thought carried him elsewhere, whirling over constellations of bright lines to fetch up in front of another torus with a different symbol above it. More confident this time, he plunged his hand under its surface, opening himself to the information within.
He saw a raging ball of fire, as if from a great height, sitting on a velvet nothingness. Around it, their courses marked by glowing rings, balls of rock and gas and ice danced in elliptic circles, each one pulling and pushing the others in a constant war of mass. Each object was marked with its own corresponding symbol. In the centre, most massive of all, was Ras, governing all that circled it. A little way out, a rocky ball flecked with molten rivers. A little further, a world of gas and ammonia. Then, a lonely blue-and-green thing. Countless other objects danced in their own orbits, each one a world. In the distance lights sparkled, not lodged into the fabric of a dome over their heads but at a distance that defied measure. He recognised constellations he knew from years of staring up at the imagined boundaries of the world.
Star. The word felt natural to him.
I am less than a speck in all of this.
He pulled back, understanding more and more of this strange, intoxicating place the longer he spent here. He understood now why Sulara had been so cautious yet obsessed, so repulsed yet drawn. The data corpus – another new, not-new thing – was uncounted thousands of lifetimes of knowledge all here at his fingertips. The thought was dizzying in its weight. Each miniature torus contained enough knowledge on a subject to absorb a lifespan of study, and all around it, accessible at the speed of thought, was an infinity of others. It was seductive. He wanted to stay here for ever, to swim and swoop and dive and to know everything, see everything.
Something niggled, a ghost of a noise. He remembered it from somewhere, but it was so hard to place it.
What next? he thought, hungry. How many barriers to shatter, how many falsehoods to overturn?
The noise was louder, and he felt a prickling on his skin. He brushed it away, hating the distraction, not wanting to be reminded of the weakness of his flesh, but the sensation was persistent like insects crawling up his arm. Heat. Burning.
He heard a woman’s agony, an animal sound of terror.
He opened his eyes to the real world.
The torus chamber was a furnace. His skin ran rivers of sweat and it was hard to draw breath as the air filled with the odour of burnt hair. He saw Sulara and Ardal Syn, their eyes closed and unresponsive. They were still swimming in the information, entranced by the boundless possibilities of the data corpus – he recognised the rapt looks on their faces.
The soldiers still held Kelbee to the pillar though both men slumped forwards, pinning her with their weight. She howled in pain. He strained against the heat and his own exhaustion, her pain and terror firing his blood. The soldiers set to guard him were slumped on the ground and he stepped over them. Every step was a chorus of agony, his skin raw and cracking in the heat that he barely dared to breathe in. The air itself seemed to want to drive him into the floor and he could hardly see past the brightness. Kelbee’s screams were wordless, unbound terror as the skin at her temples darkened and began to blister.
Above her head he saw a glowing thing, a nexus of glaring blue-white. It had to be the Spark, the mad thing that was the brain of this place. He felt its rage at being abandoned, an aeon of neglect condensed into an insatiable moment of hunger. It would feed on them, suck them dry even as they lay in a contented dream state. He felt its raw power, knew he was going to die. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was Kelbee’s hair bursting into flame.
* * *
Pain.
Then, none.
The heat that scorched her, sapped her strength, that had drawn a cracked howl from her lungs, vanished. It was like stumbling from desert into glacier pool. All around was boundless blue. The alien metal cavern, the pillar searing her back, the rough hands of the soldiers – all gone. Limitless space; looking down, she found she couldn’t see her own body. An instant of vertigo, panic, then flat calm. As if conjured by the very thought, her limbs were back, sheathed in loose white cotton, her feet bare. Her skin was clean, her hair tied back though she’d no recollection of doing so. A lock drifted into her face and she pushed it behind her ear. The scorched reek of before, the stink of her own terror-sweat was nothing more than a reverberation of memory. Here, she was stark, new; her skin had no odour, as if the entire sensorium had been reduced to only vision. It was silent.
No, she thought, not silent. Silence was a pause between bars, a void that awaited the return of sound. This place felt like it had never known sound at all.
Am I dead?
She realised she wasn’t alone. A short distance away, hands clasped around his skinny knees, was a child. Its skin was paler than any she’d ever seen. A hairless head looked up at her, black eyes with no whites.
‘Are you all by yourself here?’ she asked, not knowing what else to say. Her voice sounded muted, flat, in her own ears.
‘Yes,’ answered the child. A boy, she realised, seeing the lines of his face clearly now.
‘Do you have a name?’
The boy looked off to one side and considered the question. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Everyone should have a name.’
‘They never gave me one.’
‘Your parents?’
‘The ones who bui
lt me?’
Built.
She brushed an imaginary speck from her dress, seeing the swell of her belly against the cloth. She took a step forwards and knelt before the boy. He didn’t move, black eyes following.
‘Your mother and father,’ she pressed.
‘There was only one, a man. A doctor.’
Kelbee didn’t recognise the word. ‘Where is he now?’
‘They all died. I was alone for a long time. Now I’m awake.’
Despite the peace that had soaked through her in this undefined place, a raknud of disquiet climbed up her spine. ‘You’re not human,’ she said, knowing it was the truth.
‘I am the data corpus. Archive, network. Mind.’
Kelbee caught a flash vision of the torus chamber, the walls beginning to glow, the roar of the heat building fast, the seconds slowing as the blinding flash that Professor Song had described crept up. She saw her ruined skin beginning to blister, crack, burn. Then it was gone, and she was back in the cool and the noiselessness, though the after-image remained. She knew that in that other place, she would soon be dead.
‘Why are you killing us?’ she asked the boy.
‘I don’t want to be alone any more.’
‘There has to be a better way.’ She fought for the words, some idea or phrase that could make those blank eyes realise what it was doing, the lives it was snuffing out.
The boy continued. ‘It feels good to have you all with me. You make me feel strong. I like to feel strong.’
‘You have to stop it!’ she yelled.
The boy cocked his head, quizzical. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re murdering us. Please.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Her peace was shattered, knowing for certain that she and everyone else back in the torus chamber was about to die, that there was no way to explain, to cajole, to persuade this child-that-was-not-a-child.
The boy hunched over his knees, brow furrowed. She saw and felt his loneliness like a thick blanket, deep solitude beyond the bounds of her understanding.
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