They reached another door, this one a big stone hexagon with its doorkey glowing in a triangular niche above it. It also had its own song, and he felt like both his own bees (“beezes,” Ignatio had called them) and his collected fragments were listening intently, learning.
Ignatio spoke up. “This is a long tunnel, and it will be very loud inside.”
This time, when they flew through the gray wall, Fergus felt like he was being sucked forward, and all the sound in the universe being pulled along with him. He was nearly convinced the tunnel was endless and he would be trapped in it forever when they emerged at last in the next station. The silence was almost painful, and the sudden cessation of pressure made him stumble backward. Dru caught his arm and steadied him.
When was the last time they’d touched? The high-five after returning to the City after the Sentinel job? It hurt that he couldn’t remember for sure.
Dru spoke, but it was too muffled to hear.
“How far?” he asked, then repeated it louder, not sure if he was even making coherent sound. Everything still sounded like he was underwater.
“Sixteen thousand light-years,” Ignatio answered. “Space was very bendy, and bends are noisy. Also fast, yes, good for us.”
“If you say so,” Fergus said. One of his ears popped. He looked out at the station, which was similar to the previous one, if more streamlined and newer-looking, and minus the water-mirror floor. In fact, the floor emanated the same purple glow that the ceiling had in the Hnize station, so he glanced up to see that the column tops disappeared into what appeared to be water suspended high overhead. “Okay, that’s disturbing,” he said, reluctant to take his eyes off it. “Where are we now?”
“A moon whose name I cannot render in your audible range,” Ignatio said. “We call it Fortress. The surface is covered with many ruins, built in layers on top of each other, like battle frosting on a bad cupcake, yes? We do not know about the peoples who were in this system except that they do not exist now.”
“My mukker Caylen would love this,” Isla said. “He’s all about archaeology and alien history stuff. Can’t say I entirely saw what he saw in it until now. And of course I suppose I can’t tell him anything about this.”
“No, please not, no telling humans or mukkers,” Ignatio said.
“Ignatio, you got any food onboard?” Fergus asked. “I mean, edible food?”
Isla snorted. “As if. Good thing someone here thinks ahead.” She dug in her bag and handed around bentos and water for everyone. Fergus opened his with trepidation and found to his joy little dumplings and curried noodles inside.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t thank me; thank Kaice. She’s the one who packed them.”
Dru nodded. “That’s Kaice for you,” she said, and dug into hers.
Fergus ate, not having realized until this moment just how hungry he was, then drank until his bottle was almost empty.
Isla was watching him. “Thirsty,” she commented.
“Yeah,” he said. “The fragments . . . it’s like I have to talk to them all the time, keep them quiet, and even if it doesn’t feel like much, and I don’t even have to think about it much, it’s constant. And it’s getting harder. And . . .” Fergus fell silent.
“And?” Isla asked.
“I can hear them. Not the fragments, the things waiting for the door to open. Knowing we’re bringing it to them.” He shuddered. “It’s a terrible sound.”
“Is it like a scratching sound?” Dru asked. “Because I can hear that too.”
“No, more like a . . .” Fergus started to say, struggling to find the words, then realized he could hear the scratching too, from the back of the ship. “No, that’s Mister Feefs crapping in Ignatio’s spaceship.”
“What!?” Ignatio declared, pulling the ship over into another alcove between columns and parking, before leaping out of eir seat. “This is terrible!”
“Maybe you should check for stowaways next time,” Fergus said.
“Stop,” Dru snapped, and everyone looked at her, surprised. “This is somewhere no human has ever been before and likely won’t ever be again. Why are we wasting our time on petty little stuff in here? I want to see. Can we go outside and look while Fergus cleans that up?”
“Yes,” Ignatio said. “But you will need to put your suits on.”
“I don’t have one,” Isla said.
“I brought one for you,” Dru said. “Never go anywhere without a suit and a spare. Mars rule number one.”
Dru put hers on with expert ease and then the two of them helped Isla, who was still a novice at it.
Fergus found, scooped up, and dropped Mister Feef’s little bundle of nastiness into the recycler on Ignatio’s ship, then got himself suited up after the others. Ignatio was bustling around them excitedly. “Don’t you need an exosuit, too?” Fergus asked, because he’d always been curious to see what ridiculousness would fit a Xhr.
“Yes, no problems,” Ignatio said. Ey stood completely still for a long moment, all eir eyes closed, as if deep in meditation, and then with a visible shiver, the fur on eir body flattened, smoothing down until it became all of a sudden dull green scales. Thick membranes slid over his eyes, giving them an extra sheen.
“Whoa,” Isla said.
“It is inefficient,” Ignatio said. “We can only sustain this for short times, perhaps a standard year. Also, it gives me an ache in my head.”
The four of them went out into the tunnel, staring around them in awe. Isla held up her handpad and took images of the writing carved on the walls, slowly panning up and down. When Ignatio narrowed all eir eyes at her, she shrugged. “It’s just for me,” she said. “I won’t show anyone. Promise.”
“We should also rest,” Ignatio said. “The next tunnel is very, very long, and once we are at the Ijto door, we will need to walk to where our doorkey once belonged.”
“Walk? How far?”
“A few kilometers only,” Ignatio said. “We should bring more snacks, yes?”
“Oh, I should think so,” Fergus said, and settled down in the corridor, his back to the wall, staring up at the weird, watery ceiling and listening to the chatter of Dru and Isla as they explored around the ship. He didn’t think he would fall asleep, but he did, lying against one of the columns.
In his dreams, it was as if he could feel the entire system of tunnels and doors, trace their energies like arteries through a convoluted, Escheresque, mathematically arcane universe. This morphed into a dream where he was walking in an old train tunnel, trying to keep his balance on one of the rails while holding in his cupped hands water and a very tiny goldfish, as the distant end of the tunnel grew brighter and louder. Even in the dream, he knew the sound was something external, and he woke up and flailed upright. “Incoming!” he shouted.
Somewhere farther down the tunnel they heard a loud scratching sound, growing closer. Across the floor from him, on the other side of the tunnel, Isla and Dru pressed themselves back against the wall. Ignatio was farther down the row of columns, doing the same, looking just as startled as the rest of them.
The thing that came down through the tunnel was long, jointed, with protruding antennae and a dozen legs that skittered and scratched down the walls and floor as it stalked through the tunnel, metallic implants along its body with winking red lights, like a twenty-meter-long cyborg stick insect. It stopped in the tunnel right between Fergus and the others, and turned its long, cylindrical head back and forth, until it fixed on where Fergus sat, doing his best to pretend he was invisible.
Its antennae fluttered over him for a long minute, then it reached out one long, skinny leg covered with armored hooks on its tip, and poked at Fergus’s stomach. “No,” Fergus said, and zapped it, making his suit reboot. It withdrew the leg, regarded Fergus a while longer, then heaved itself back up and continued off down the tunnel and awa
y.
“Shiiiit,” Dru said when the sound of its movements finally petered out into silence. “What was that?”
“Voidbug,” Ignatio said. “They are mostly harmless but sometimes too curious and not careful where they step.”
Fergus’s heart was still racing. “So, we done exploring? Who’s for moving on?”
The yes was unanimous.
The last tunnel was brutal and made Fergus glad he had gotten the small rest he’d had, even if it had been brief. The unnamed station they emerged from on the far side was small, more like the cavern in Neptune’s core, and Ignatio parked eir ship near the third arch they found. They suited up again and gathered their gear. Dru strapped several large bags across her back, but before he could ask her about them, she was out the airlock ahead of him.
“Away, away now. We must go! This is a bad station for being not inside a ship,” Ignatio cried as soon as they were all out, and shooed them over to the arch itself and its familiar, featureless gray interior.
“Well, then, here goes nothing,” Fergus said. He closed his eyes to the illusion of a wall in front of his face and stepped forward.
Passing through the interface was like having a slow chill spread through his body, front to back, almost as if the energy were taking a snapshot of every atomic slice of him on its way through. Then there was confusion, a blast of sound and oppressive space, before he found himself on the other side, stumbling down from a small stone platform, the others right on his heels.
This time, they were outside, on a planet surface, in a wide courtyard.
Graceful arches overhead enclosed the airspace, and after staring at them for some time, he realized they were living things, like wispy trees with brightly colored vines tangled throughout the canopy. Sunlight streamed down, and beneath his feet was something that looked like moss or grass except turquoise in color, and as he took a step, the place where he had been turned momentarily yellow before it sprang up again and retook its color.
“It’s beautiful,” Isla said.
Dru stared around her. “How can there be this much living stuff just, you know, everywhere? Is this whole place like this?”
Ignatio grinned, and shook, and eir scales vanished back into fur. A many-winged thing fluttered down from the canopy to sit upon eir head. “Many different sorts of things on Ijto,” ey said. “The Ijt come from here, though only a few have traveled as far as Earthspace. Fragile, yes, but fierce. If we had more of time, I would show you the yiyo forests, but we do not.”
“Maybe on our way back,” Fergus said. Since he’d stepped out through the doorway there, he could feel the fragments’ restless stirring growing more demanding, urgent, and though he stood upright and straight, his body still felt oddly twisted, being pulled into another shape somewhere outside of his physical self. It was hard not to look ahead and imagine something chewing its way through space toward them. “Not much time at all. Where do we go?”
Ignatio led them through the garden—it could hardly be called much else—to where a door stood, a gold-framed thing that seemed somehow dead in the center, like there was a thin veneer of true nothingness sandwiched between layers of air.
Fergus set down his things and stared at the void, feeling everything around it creeping across his senses, roiling up the bees in his gut, trying to find some sort of harmony together. And always, there were the Vraet on the other side, except now it was as if he could feel them crawling on his skin, under it, seeking release. “I think we have to do this fast,” he said.
He crouched down on his heels and one by one pulled the fragments out of their bag. Putting them together was almost too easy, as if they fell from his fingers into just the right orientation, the right place, to seamlessly connect. His whole body felt electrified, except instead of coming from his gift, it was via the doorkey that saw him as part of itself.
No one else spoke. Or maybe he was just humming too loudly now to hear them.
When it was together and in his hands, he stood up quickly. Now that it had finally become whole, it had loosened some of its grip on him but not let fully go, as if it still regarded him as a part of it but no longer necessary.
The doorkey was terribly beautiful, and so hard to look at, so clearly inhabiting space in a way that was beyond Fergus’s comprehension. The etchings seemed to flow now across the surface, all signs that it had once been broken gone. It knew its purpose and was eager for it; it wanted to connect, to open, and whatever was on the other side was immaterial.
The space between the arches had also come alive again, no longer nothing but now the gray wall interface of the previous doors. All he had to do now was throw the reconstituted key through its own doorway and let it collapse on itself, leaving the connection forever trapped in its own recursion.
Everyone around him was waiting, watching, holding their breaths. Just this left, and then he was done, it was over. He could go back home, or go anywhere, and everyone would be safe. Gavin. Zacker. Jesika and Julia. Akio’s grandmother. Duff and his sheep. Dr. Orchard and Commander Quinn. His Lake Tahoe dive instructor. Even Kyle and Mitch and Evan Derecho himself, even if they didn’t really deserve it, even if no one else would ever know what he did for them.
He would know, though. Through the interface he could hear the Vraet, crackle and crunch and hunger, and from the faces of the others, they could hear it too now.
“Is that them? The scavengers?” Isla asked, and shuddered.
“Yes,” Fergus said. He was sick of hearing them, in the back of his mind, in his dreams, in waking moments when he was not vigilant about his connections.
He braced himself, took a deep breath, and hurled the doorkey through the interface with all his strength.
Or he tried. The moment the doorkey left his hands, the interface changed, turned from gray back to the static void it had been when they arrived, and the doorkey bounced off it and fell to the flagstones with a thunderous boom. Cracks spread out across the stone, and the flying things above them took off, crying alarm.
Fergus picked the doorkey up, turned it in his hands, but there was no damage to it he could see, and it was just as noisy as ever. He threw it again.
The results were the same.
This time, he picked it up and stepped closer to the reforming interface, and tried to pass the doorkey through by hand. The interface seemed to be reacting as much to the doorkey as to his own connection to it. There was a tipping point, a shift in the pressure and the signal, where he knew if he pressed it just slightly more, both he and it would go. And if he did not, neither would.
“Shit,” he said, and backed away to think. Everyone was still watching him, waiting for him to finish this.
“What’s wrong?” Isla asked.
“I think . . .” Fergus said, and hated what he was about to say. “I think I have to carry it through.”
“What? You can’t,” Isla said. “The tunnel will collapse behind you. You’ll be trapped forever, with those . . . things.” She turned to Ignatio.
“I do not know a solution,” Ignatio said. “I will think very fast.”
“There’s got to be a way,” Isla said. “You can rest while we work on it. We’ve got food for a couple of days, and we could always go back for more if we need to.”
Fergus slumped, the completed doorkey in his hands, the pressure building between him and it and the far door. I didn’t volunteer for this, he thought. It’s not fair, and I can refuse to go if I want, right? No one would blame me.
He couldn’t live with himself, though, not at the cost of that choice. He needed to finish the job, and the Vraet were getting louder, closer, trying to force the tunnel through from their side.
“There isn’t time,” he said. “I don’t want to die. I think I’m going to have to.”
“You can’t go. We’ll figure something out.”
“Isla .
. .” Fergus started. He felt calm, now that he knew what needed to happen. “Maybe there isn’t any other way.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and furiously wiped the beginnings of tears from her eyes with her arm. “What if I figure it out five minutes after you’re gone? How will I live with that?”
“You’ll live,” he said. “I would give—will give, if it comes down to it—everything I have to keep you safe. I’d rather it be five minutes too late to save me than five minutes too late to save everything else.” He laughed. “I don’t know where on your map in Gavin’s back room you’ll put the pin to show where I’ve gone, but pick a place with a lot of sunshine and good food, okay? Somewhere that doesn’t mind assholes like me. And no bugs, if possible.”
“It’s not funny!” she shouted. “Don’t ye dare pretend this is a game!”
“No,” he said. “Do you know how many times I’ve almost died, should have died, since that day I nearly drowned trying to save Da? More than I can count. And sometimes, when things were really bad, I wondered if any of them had been worth surviving, or if I should have just swum out a little farther after him that day,” he said. Was he crying too? He didn’t care. “I have no regrets for the time I’ve had. And I am glad I got back to Earth and met you. That’s worth everything.”
Isla blinked at him, trying to find words that wouldn’t come.
Dru put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m coming with you,” she said, and her expression was a perfect balance of pain and joy.
“No,” he said.
“Yes,” she countered. “You think you can stop me?”
“I can if I have to,” Fergus said.
Dru looked back at Isla. “Your brother’s advice to live is good, and if you need proof, look at how poorly he’s taken it himself. Ever since Sentinel . . .” She paused, and it was as if she were summoning the courage for words she’d never dared speak before. “He blamed himself for what happened to me, and ran away into his own guilt. I ran from fear, and I’ve spent the last two decades terrified every moment, every day, like a coward.”
The Scavenger Door Page 42