The blank mask regarded her, emotionless.
‘You haven’t done anything, mixie. That’s the point.’
Without another word, Jem turned on her heel and melted into the darkness.
‘You told them what?’ Kes glared at Lari across the vidlink.
‘I had to explain where we were yesterday, on the lifts. There was a problem with the logs and they knew we’d done something. And they already knew you were involved, so—’
‘Shi, Lari! You told them I was your girlfriend!’
‘I had to tell them something. I couldn’t tell them about Gr—’
‘Not over the com! Are you stupid?’
‘Well, we need to talk about this.’
‘Fine. Come over and we’ll talk.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’re such a baby. Fine, then. I’ll come to you. Meet me in your common.’
‘You don’t get it, Kes. I can’t come over, even if I wanted to. And you can’t come here, either. That’s why I’m calling. We’ve both had our maglift access suspended.’
‘What!’
‘The security guy, Jenx, suspended our clearance.’
‘You’re joking, right?’
Lari sighed. ‘I wish I was.’
‘Shi!’ Kes swore again and the link went dead. When Lari tried to reconnect, he got no reply.
‘C’mon, Kes, answer,’ he muttered as the vidlink timed itself out without any response.
After five minutes, he was about to give up when it chimed and Kes was back, her eyes bright with fury.
‘Okay, genius, so you were right. We can’t use the maglifts.’
‘Where’d you—’
‘I went downstairs and checked. As soon as I waved in I got an “access refused” message. Good work, Lari. You’ve got us both stuck in our domes. So what now, boyfriend?’
‘Dunno. I guess we wait until they lift the ban.’
‘Damn it, Lari. Why’d you go and tell them about the interface? Couldn’t you have told them something else?’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Anything.’
‘They already knew. Jenx had our lift times there on his flashpad.’
‘That’s a load of rubbish, Lari. He put one over you. I know how those data systems work and there’s no way they could have traced us.’
‘Well, they did, Kes. That guy knew what time we left your dome, to the minute.’
‘That doesn’t mean he knew about us accessing the user interface. You didn’t have to tell him that.’
‘What should I have said, then? That the lift system was faulty? I tried that and the guy didn’t buy it for a second. Face it, Kes, he knew. You must have missed something when you delogged the trip.’
‘We shouldn’t be talking about this over the com.’
‘How then?’
Suddenly all the fight seemed to go out of his friend. She slumped in her chair.
‘I don’t get it, Lari. Why were you out on the common when those explosions happened anyway?’
‘I was getting away from DGAP for a while. Having a break.’ It wasn’t a complete lie.
‘A break from doing nothing?’
‘From Janil.’
Kes snorted and said nothing, and Lari, uncomfortable with the strained silence, tried to make things better.
‘Listen, Kes, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t want to get you banned, I just—’
‘Whatever, Lari.’ Kes stifled a yawn. ‘I’m going to try to get back to sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow – provided they haven’t removed our com access by then also.’
‘Fine, Kes. Goodnight.’
‘Bye, Lari.’
The line went dead, and Lari pushed his terminal away and leaned back in his chair. By now it was well into fourth shift and every part of his body screamed at him to sleep. He didn’t give in to it though. Instead, he crossed to the clearcrete window and stared out across the slumbering skycity. Most of the domes were darkened, little more than silvery shapes reflecting the gleam of the moon. Atop each one, masts and com arrays blinked with red and white beacons, the flash patterns identifying a particular dome. Down below were the lower layers and the underworld, a murky cauldron from which smoke and steam bubbled upwards, lit by the dull red glow of fires and the occasional searchlight. Above it all, the moon was high, approaching the zenith of its nightly ascent and preparing to slide down once more towards the horizon.
‘It’s spectacular, isn’t it, Larinan?’ His father stood in the doorway. Lari hadn’t heard him approach. ‘I remember my father used to say that Port City by night was one of the most beautiful sights on the planet, though he’d never been anywhere else, so I’m not sure what he was using as his basis for comparison.’
Lari didn’t reply and Dernan Mann walked slowly across the room to stand beside him.
‘The sad thing is that I barely notice it any more.’
‘The view?’
‘And everything it entails. The people. The achievement.’
‘Achievement?’
‘Think about it, Larinan. Think how long we’ve managed to sustain ourselves in here. We’ve preserved our culture, our lives. Protected ourselves from a world that seemed more and more bent on our destruction. That’s what the view out there represents.’
‘But we haven’t. It’s all doomed anyway.’
‘Doomed only to change, Larinan. That’s why we need your help with the girl. It’s what you were born for. If we can change, we can survive this. Perhaps not as we are now, but in some way.’ Lari felt his father’s hand resting on his shoulder, his fingers warm through the thin material of Lari’s nightshirt. ‘I know you’re angry with me and your mother, Larinan. And you have every right to be. I would be too, in your situation. But right now, I – no, we, everyone out there’ – he nodded out through the clearcrete at the vista beyond – ‘need you to put that anger aside, to deal with it somehow and help your brother and me attempt to move the human race into its next form.’
‘I didn’t ask for this.’
‘Do you think I don’t understand that, Larinan? When you were born, I thought I was indulging your mother’s nightmare fantasy. Now I find that I’m being made to face up to my own flaws, and in the worst possible way. None of us asked for this, Lari. Not you, not me, not even your brother. But here we are, anyway. This afternoon when I thought you were dead, for the first time I realised what it truly feels like to have no hope at all.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t want to feel like that again, Larinan. Ever. But you, Janil and I are probably the only three people in this whole city, the whole world, who have any chance of preserving that last grain of hope.’
‘And the girl.’
‘Yes. Her too.’ Dernan Mann stood there for a moment longer, holding his son’s shoulder. Then he let go and turned to leave.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, Larinan?’
‘You still haven’t asked me about this afternoon.’
His father stood framed in the doorway, considering his son.
‘Honestly, Larinan, I’m not sure what to believe about this afternoon. I know I don’t trust Jenx, but I also know he’s a good enough investigator not to show his hand without some solid basis for suspicion. Clearly he thinks you had some involvement in the explosions—’
‘But I—’
‘Let me finish. If he’s wrong about you – and that’s what I want to believe – there should be no need for you to explain yourself, especially not to your own father.’
Lari was certain he heard a note of doubt in his father’s voice, despite his words.
‘And if I was involved?’
His father thought for a long time before answering.
‘In that case I want to know nothing about it.’
‘You wouldn’t care?’
‘That’s not it at all, Larinan. I’d care a great deal. But this thing we’re all caught up in … this is probably the only thing I can think of that’s bigger, more important, tha
n family. This is about humanity, Larinan, and I simply wouldn’t want to know anything that could put me in a position where I have to jeopardise what your mother and Janil and I have been working towards all these years. I’m sorry about what happened today, Larinan. All of it. Now try and get some sleep.’
The door slid shut behind him, leaving Lari with only the sleeping city for company. He stared at it, then turned away. He should go to bed, he knew, and let his body recover from the traumas of the day.
But, as much as his aching limbs might be craving sleep, his mind wasn’t. ‘What dreams may come?’ he muttered. He’d learnt that in school, from some ancient text. He couldn’t remember which one, couldn’t even remember the context, but that tiny fragment of it made some sort of sense to him just then. He knew that if he slept he’d dream about the white room and the explosions and the twisted, blackened shape of the dying girl on the common, and about Kes.
Slowly, silently, Lari crept downstairs. The common was silent and deserted. Lit only by a couple of low-power night lamps, most of the dome’s interior was cast into deep shadow. A scattering of stars, their light stilled by the filtering properties of the dome, glowed in the sky. The dome’s com array stretched up from the highest point of the curve and atop that, every few seconds, Dome 3327 North’s beacons blinked into the unobserved darkness.
He had to pass the hub on his way across to the service-level entry, and as he did he scanned across the allocation plate, just out of curiosity. The scanner emitted a low buzz that echoed around the empty common.
Access refused. The words flashed briefly across the readout screen, and then it went dark again.
‘Shi.’ He put no real vehemence into the curse. He was too tired for that.
It was a relief to descend to the maintenance level. The winking green LED indicators chattered quietly in the gloom with reassuring familiarity, just as they always did.
Approaching the hatchway, Lari hesitated before scanning over the reader. What if losing the use of the maglifts meant he’d also lost access here? Taking a deep breath, he waved his left wrist across the plate, and the light above the hatchway flicked green and the square door slid silently back.
A breeze, dusty and dry and without the filtered, metallic taste of dome air, slipped in through the open hatch, and Lari breathed it in deeply, filling his lungs before stepping out onto that narrow, vertiginous balcony.
The wind was strong. He’d never noticed before how little the conditions outside managed to penetrate the dome. From his bedroom upstairs, looking through the clearcrete, you’d have thought the evening calm and quiet.
Outside, the wind whipped around the dome with a soft moan, almost as if the hard, unnatural walls, so unexpected this high in the air, were causing it physical pain. Suddenly, Lari wanted to feel that wind square on his face, to lean right into it.
Slowly he followed the balcony around the circumference of the dome. As always, he was amazed by the stars. They were so much more alive seen from out here.
‘Why in the sky did we cut ourselves off from this?’ he wondered.
On the far side he stopped. The wind was strongest here, coming straight from the west. It whipped through his hair and raised a tremble of gooseflesh across the bare skin of his arms. Closing his eyes, Lari breathed it in deeply again, tasting it. As well as the dustiness, there was something else about it, something he’d never noticed before – a sort of dry saltiness. He fancied he could almost feel it sticking to his skin and it felt so real, so alive, that he couldn’t help himself, he wanted more. He pulled his nightshirt over his head and the wind caught it immediately, whipping it away from his grasp and off into the night, down into the dizzying abyss of darkness.
Lari laughed. That’d be a surprise for some shiftie or low-level worker to discover stuck to the outside of their dome in the morning.
His skin prickled with the sensation of cool, dry air rushing over it, and in his imagination his mother was there beside him leaning out too, both of them craning forward into that wild, alien wind. He could hear her speaking almost as though she were actually there.
Imagine, Lari, imagine how far that wind has come? Imagine the things it has seen. The things it is going to see …
And despite himself, Lari did imagine it. He pictured this same breeze, in all its wild freedom, slithering past Port City, across the empty landscape behind him, on and on until it came up against the Darklands perimeter wall. Even that monumental structure wouldn’t mean anything to the wind. It would just pile up and pour over, into the Darklands, washing and scouring those dead, contaminated lands and the few poor souls who still scratched out their existence there, and then onwards …
Abruptly the exhilaration lost its power, and suddenly all Lari felt was cold and tired. He eased back off the rail and scurried around to the hatchway, craving only the comfort of his bed and the welcoming blankness of sleep.
She wakes as if from a long sleep. She stretches her arms and legs and yawns …
Stretches …
Yawns …
She can move!
Slowly, carefully lest it stop again, she extends one arm and wiggles her fingers. Her muscles don’t seem to be working the way they used to, they jerk and spasm and she feels slightly disconnected, but she can move.
Slowly, hesitantly, almost scared in case her sudden freedom is lost again, she draws her legs up towards her chest, curling into a tight knot.
Her skin is tingling, her eyes watering with the brightness, and she closes them to shut out the light.
And her head pounds – not the constant aching pulse of the skyfire pressing at her, but a more solid, tangible, real pounding which starts at the top of her neck and thunders up through her skull, pressing against the back of her eyes and drawing nausea from the pit of her stomach.
‘Jani …’
Even her throat aches and her voice is scratchy and faint and hoarse.
Slowly she opens her eyes again.
The room is white. She knew that. And round. She knew that too.
But now she’s back in her body again, her aching, cramping body, and the room seems somehow smaller, somehow harder. Through the walls she can still feel the skyfire, can hear it too – a constant, low hum and a faint smell, an odd, artificial odour which irritates the back of her nose and makes her gorge rise in her throat again.
She is curled on a stand of some sort, raised from the floor and topped with something soft. Even in her visions she couldn’t have imagined anything so smooth. When she presses her fingers into it, it gives under them, but as soon as she pulls them away it springs right back to its old shape, as though untouched.
She shields her eyes against the light and squints upwards into it.
They’re up there, she knows. Watching. Observing her.
Nightpeople.
And somewhere here is her mother.
‘Jani…’
With a quiet hiss, a section of the wall slides aside …
Finally the lab was quiet. His father had commed that he was taking Lari directly home, and outside things in Port North Central seemed to be settling down again. His nose still throbbed, but at last the other science teams had gone, leaving Janil alone in the lab, alone with only the quiet click and hum of the various pieces of apparatus running their scans and comparative measurements, alone with the dimmed lighting and the gentle tick of the monitoring device that kept constant track of conditions in the exposure chamber, alone with the figures that scrolled across his display as he selected the results of yet another series of tests.
This was how he liked it.
If only, Janil thought, this was how things could remain.
That was a false hope, of course. Everything was going to be different from now on, Janil knew that. Between the discovery of 45698F, the rapid acceleration of the entropy scenario, and his father’s forcing of his copygen brother into Janil’s comfortable world, Janil felt almost as though the sky was falling, and him with it, too fast
and too far …
On the far side of the lab, one of the machines emitted a low alert tone and its readout flashed red.
‘Shi!’
Hurrying across, Janil studied the figures for a moment, before cursing again.
‘For sky’s sake! Where’re the bloody differences, then?’
The figures were a perfect match. Again. No variation between the Darklands girl and the control subject, even at a subcellular level. It had been the same story with every test and every scan. Nothing. The harder Janil looked, the more the girl seemed to be wired exactly the same as everyone else.
But she couldn’t be. Just looking at her proved that. Somewhere, at some level, Janil knew there was a key, some miniscule variation that held the whole picture together. He had to find it. He had to find the drop that started the cascade.
‘Might as well search for a shiftie in the Prelature,’ he muttered. ‘I’d have as much chance.’
Sighing, he massaged his temples in slow circles. There was no way. No way in the sky …
‘Doctor Mann?’
Janil nearly hit the ceiling. He hadn’t heard anyone enter. He jerked his head up to find the Prelate standing just inside the door, Jenx behind her.
‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘I … No, it’s fine. Please, come in. My father isn’t here at the moment, I’m afraid, but—’
‘We didn’t come to talk to him. I’m here to speak to you, if you have a few minutes.’
Janil caught the Prelate’s slightly startled expression as she became aware of his damaged nose. She didn’t mention it, though.
‘Of course. I … Would you like to sit down?’
‘No, thank you.’ She peered curiously around the lab as she spoke. ‘I prefer to remain on my feet. At my age I find it’s much easier than getting up and down constantly. Do you know, in all my visits to DGAP I’ve never once seen this part of the facility.’
‘Would you like to look around? I’d be happy to show you …’
‘No. It’s quite all right. I’d like to see the girl though, if that’s possible.’
‘Of course.’ Janil crossed to the obs room airlock and scanned it open. ‘This way, please.’
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