by Peter Clines
Veek glanced down. “No sand worms?”
“Just give me a bike.”
Nate and Roger lowered the bicycles down to Tim. Nate hopped down, then Veek, and finally Roger. Nate threw one leg over his bike and pointed to the northeast.
“I’m thinking if we head straight up to the ridge it does two things,” he said. “One, it’s a smoother, easier ride up to the hills than cutting across this depression. Two, it also lets us take a look at whatever’s over there before we reach the tower.”
“Normally I’d say being up higher makes us more visible,” said Tim, “but it’s not like there’s anywhere else we could find cover.” He gazed out at the wasteland with its occasional lone tree or half-buried boulder. “If the squales come back, we’re screwed.”
“Even if they don’t go after us, we’ll just get thrown around until we break something,” said Veek. “It’ll be like getting caught outside in a hurricane.”
Xela crouched on top of the small ledge with her hurt leg out straight. She and Roger exchanged whispers. He slapped the pistol on his waist and went to pull it out.
“Roger,” Tim growled, “don’t screw around with your weapon.”
Roger’s hand jumped away from the pistol. “Sorry.”
Tim had returned to his apartment and come back with a small arsenal. Each of them wore a black, blocky pistol clipped to their belts, and Tim’s were strapped to his thighs. Upstairs, Clive had a Mossberg shotgun for watching Andrew. Tim had explained it was loaded with beanbags, so Clive shouldn’t hesitate at all if he needed to shoot.
After all he’d learned about Tim in the past few hours, Nate felt a little uncomfortable with that explanation.
Xela waved them over to the ledge. “Be careful,” she said. “There’s something weird about this place.”
“You’re very perceptive,” said Veek. “What gave it away?”
“Bitch,” Xela said. “I’m serious. I think it’d be real easy to get lost here. The lines aren’t right.”
Nate looked at her. “The what?”
“The lines,” she repeated. “The vanishing points. None of them match up.”
Tim nodded. “I noticed that but I couldn’t figure out what it was.”
“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Roger.
“Vanishing points, baby,” said Xela. “You know how things look smaller and closer together the farther away they are? Like how the sides of a straight road look like they come together and disappear at the horizon. That’s the vanishing point.”
“Okay, right,” said Roger with a nod. “Sooooo...?”
She looked out at the wasteland and gestured at the hills. “The lines, the angles, the vanishing points...none of it matches up here,” she said. “It’s tough to be sure because there’s so few reference points, but it looks like the perspectives are all wrong.”
“How’s that even possible?” asked Veek. “I mean, I think I understand how you could mess it up in a picture, but how can you do it in the real world?”
Xela shrugged. “I don’t know. Other-dimensional geometry or something. Everything still seems okay in the building.” She tipped her head at the ridge. “Just keep it in mind while you’re out there.” She gave Roger another kiss before heaving herself back to her feet.
They kicked off and headed across the hill toward the ridge.
* * *
They rode for fifteen minutes or so. The only noise was the whirr of bicycle chains, the occasional clicking of gears, and their own breaths as they pedaled across the sand.
“It’s quiet,” Tim remarked.
“Too quiet?” asked Nate. He thought of the silent machine in the walls of the Kavach building.
“Yeah, actually,” Tim said. “You get used to operating with certain noise levels. There’s nothing here.”
“We’re in the middle of a desert,” said Veek.
“I’ve been in the desert before,” said Tim. “Some nasty ones. You’d be amazed how many sounds there still are. Wind blowing, sand shifting. Plus you can hear for miles, so there’s always something. But not here. Here there’s nothing.”
“I feel wind,” said Roger.
“You feel the air on your face because we’re moving. Not the same thing. Trust me, the only sounds out here are the ones we’re making.”
“Something else calling attention to us,” said Nate.
“Oh, yeah,” Tim said. “Not to mention the sand’s just loose enough for us all to leave tracks.” He shot a glance over his shoulder at the four trails tracing back to the building.
After a few more minutes Veek rolled her bike closer to Tim. “The tower’s not moving much,” she said. “I mean relative to us. That means it’s close to the ridge, right?”
“I know what you mean,” Tim said. “Parallax-wise, yeah. But remember what Xela was saying about how perspectives were tricky here? That might not mean anything.”
Veek nodded on her bike. She looked ahead at Nate and gasped. “Shit.”
Nate had leaped half a mile ahead. He straddled his bike and looked back at them, both feet on the ground. He waved to them.
“How’d he get so far ahead?” gaped Veek.
Tim shook his head. “Alien geometry, remember?”
She looked behind them. Roger’s tire had almost been clipping hers. Now he was a good hundred yards behind them. She saw him mouth the words what the fuck before he leaned forward on his handlebars. Or maybe he hadn’t mouthed it. The Kavach building was a speck on the horizon behind him.
“Look out!” yelled Tim. His voice sounded distant. She brought her head back around and caught a glimpse of him a few dozen feet away. Before she could get her eyes back to the front she crashed into Nate and knocked both of them over.
Nate grunted. His bike pinned one of his legs, and Veek pinned the bike. She tried to twist off him and he winced. “Easy,” he said.
“Sorry.”
Roger skidded to a stop inches from them. “Shit,” he said. “Wham, here you are.”
“Wham being the operative word,” said Nate. He bit his lip as Veek shifted her weight. Roger helped her up and Nate untangled himself from the bikes.
Tim coasted up. “Sorry,” he said. “I wanted to stop you but all of a sudden you were too far away. You okay?”
“A couple bruises, maybe,” Nate said. “That’s it. I got lucky and fell in some sand.”
Veek snorted out a laugh and Roger grinned. Nate dusted himself off and they all smiled.
Tim tipped his head to Roger. “What did it look like to you? What happened?”
Roger shrugged. “Was weird,” he said. “Wasn’t like you guys sped up or anything. Just one second you were five feet in front of me, the next second you were five hundred. Like a movie skipping ahead because they edited stuff out.”
Veek tilted her head. “What about when you almost hit us?”
“Same thing. You were way over there and then you were right in front of me again, down on the ground.”
“So,” Nate said, “we shouldn’t get too separated.”
“We weren’t separated,” said Roger. “Like Xela said, all the lines are messed up.”
“Just before this,” said Tim, “I was trying to tell Veek, I think the distances are off. We’ve been riding for twenty-five minutes, yes?”
Veek pulled out her phone, glanced at it, and sighed. “Sure, okay.”
Tim pointed. “We should be close to the ridge by now. It was only two miles away, tops. But it doesn’t look much closer than it did from the building.”
Nate leaned over to Veek. “Phone’s dead?”
“Fried,” she said with a nod. “Just gibberish on the screen.”
He glanced over her shoulder at the green squiggles. “Is that Arabic?”
“Don’t think so.” She shrugged. “Might be Thai and Arabic mixed together. Some default languages in the phone all spewing out at the same time.”
“Looks kind of like the Matrix.”
Nate looked at the ridge. “Tough to say. For all we know, if we have another one of those...I don’t know, ripples? Distortions? If there’s another one of those we could be there in a few seconds. Or it might take us the rest of the day.”
“Or the rest of the week,” said Tim. He pulled his bag off his shoulder and rummaged around in it.
Roger looked over his shoulder. The building was a mile away now. They could still make out most of the big details on it. “What if the same thing happens going back? Could take us a couple days to get home.”
“Or no time at all,” said Veek. “Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
“Damn right,” said Roger.
Tim pulled out a coil of cotton rope. He tied one end to the handlebars of his bicycle, pulled out a few lengths of rope, then did a quick hitch on Nate’s handlebars. A few more quick lengths and he moved to Veek’s bike.
“Okay,” said Nate. “Here’s what I’m thinking. We spend another hour heading for the ridge. If we don’t make it, that’s it. It’s more important we get back to the building.”
“Agreed,” said Tim.
“And we’re going off Tim’s sense of time,” Nate added, “because we don’t have anything else that works. If he says it’s been an hour, it’s been an hour. We all agreed?”
Veek and Roger nodded. Tim tied the end of the rope to Roger’s bicycle. “We’ve got ten feet between us,” he said. “If it’s just a perspective thing, nothing will happen. If we’re actually moving somehow, we’ll know through the rope. Make sense?”
“Let’s try not to panic over any of it,” said Nate. “Xela thought it might happen and it did. If we rush around, we’re just going to get each other hurt.” He rubbed his knee for emphasis.
Five minutes later they had another shift. Veek blinked and Tim vanished from the front of the line. Her eyes adjusted and saw him a mile down along the sand dune. Another blink and Nate joined him there.
Veek touched the rope connecting her bike to Nate’s. It still had slack in it, just enough that she could hook her finger over it and feel it give when she tugged. The woven strands of cotton were still loose. She tried to follow the rope out to the other bicycle but it made her eyes hurt. She shook her head and the two men were in front of her again.
Nate glanced back at her. “You, too?”
She nodded.
“But we’re all okay,” he said. “It just looks weird. It doesn’t hurt us.”
“Not yet, anyway,” muttered Tim.
Seventy Two
Xela flipped through Veek’s printouts and found a new schematic. Her eyes flitted from the picture to the bank of controls. She traced a line across the diagram with her finger, then followed it through the air with her eyes.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” she admitted to Clive.
He glanced at her. “Maybe you should’ve said that before everyone left.”
“No one else knows anything, either,” she said. “At least I’ve got a symbol key. There’s just so much of this stuff, y’know? I get lost before I can figure out anything big.”
“Maybe I can help,” said Debbie. The side of her face was purple where Andrew had smacked her. She walked around the couch, where Mandy still sat in a near-fetal ball. “I know some basic electronics from undergrad courses.”
“I don’t think there’s anything basic about this, hon,” said Clive.
“It’s better than nothing,” Xela said. “I’m not even sure these are the diagrams of the control room. They might have something to do with the generators.”
Debbie shook her head. “Too many switches,” she said. “It’s this room.”
Xela spread a few diagrams across the arm of the couch. “Wow,” Debbie said after a moment. “There really is a lot of it.”
“Yup,” said Xela. “But I’m sure an artist and a biochemist can figure it out.”
* * *
The bicyclists went through another shift. This one made everyone seem claustrophobically close even though the ropes had no slack. Roger didn’t deal well with it.
The next shift made them all seem miles away. It was like an extreme form of tunnel vision. Nate held his arm out in front of him and his fingernails vanished in the distance.
Their hour was almost up when they reached the ridge.
Veek looked back and saw the Kavach Building. It was a mile or so away. The ridge hadn’t looked much higher than the roof, but she looked down on the building from here. She wondered if it was another trick of the world.
Nate looked at the crowned tower. From this position it was clear the tower was beyond the ridge, not on it. The skewed perspectives made it hard to be sure of size, especially since there was nothing around the tower to judge off.
“It’s not glossy,” said Nate. “It’s kind of...hazy.”
“Yeah,” Roger said. “What’s up with that?”
“Could be smoke,” said Tim as he untied the bikes.
“Might just be the lighting,” said Veek.
Nate shook his head. “If that’s it, where’s the light coming from?” He swung himself off the bicycle and set it on the ground.
Tim put a hand on Nate’s shoulder and pushed down. “Stay low,” he said. “If there’s something over there, you don’t want to be a silhouette against the sky.”
They dropped to their hands and knees and shuffled up the last bit of the ridge. Nate felt a small drift of sand gather in his shirt against his stomach. He didn’t picture it as sand, but as little squares of coarse glass, the remnants of a very tiny broken windshield. It felt too dry. He wondered if it would start to suck moisture from his skin. He tried not to think about it getting into his pants and reaching his crotch.
Their heads came up over the edge. They had a clear view of the tower.
“Fuck me,” whispered Roger.
Seventy Three
“I think we’re doing this all wrong,” Xela said. She looked at Andrew. He sat with his eyes closed and his chin tucked against his throat. His lips moved silently. “He doesn’t know anything about electronics, either. He just came in here and attacked the controls.”
attacked the canvas
She pictured herself starting a painting. Her brush reached out and touched the center of the canvas.
“Okay,” said Xela. “Aesthetics and ergonomics. We all try to do things the easy way. It’s how we’re built.”
Clive and Debbie exchanged a glance. Debbie shrugged. “Okay,” she said.
Xela glanced down at the praying man again and balanced herself in front of the control panel on her good leg. “You said he was standing about here. Andrew and I are the same height. So if I was going to flip a random switch—”
She held out her hand. It came to rest just below shoulder height.
“—I’d probably go for something right in this area.” Xela leaned in and studied the dusty switches. They were broad, steel pins with square tips. Some of them had crumbling rubber sleeves on them.
“All of them did something,” said Debbie. “Andrew did most of it, but they all changed at least one.”
Xela’s head went up and down along the panel. She glanced at Debbie. “Do you guys have a flashlight handy?”
“I think so.”
Clive nodded. “Check the tool chest. Should be a mini-mag in the top drawer, on the left side.”
Debbie found the flashlight and tossed it to Xela. Xela played the beam across the panel. Then she pushed her head close to the controls and looked down the row of switches. A century of dust and grit was piled up on most of the switches.
A third of them gleamed in the flashlight beam.
“Okay,” she said with another glance at Andrew. “He knew he didn’t have a lot of time. Somebody could walk by, hear all the ruckus, maybe call the police. The quickest, easiest thing to do would be just to flip switches right? And it’s not ergonomic to push them up. H
e’d push all of them down.”
Debbie nodded. “Gotcha. Makes sense.”
Xela pointed at the row of controls, careful not to touch them. “The squale blew off the dust bunnies, but a bunch of these switches have all the dust wiped off. You can see it when the light hits them. They’re clean. There’s even streaks on a few of them, like oil from someone’s finger.”
They glanced at Andrew. His head was down, but his lips had stopped moving. Clive raised the shotgun back up to Andrew’s head.
“And this knob,” Xela said, shining the light on it, “there’s dust under it, but not on top. It’s almost a full one-eighty from where it was before.”
“Are you sure?” asked Clive.
“Pretty damned sure,” said Xela. She took a cautious step away from the control panel. “It might take a little time, but I think I can figure out where everything was before dickless there turned the machine off. Do you have some paper? Even just a legal pad or something?”
“Sure,” Debbie said. “I’ve got printer paper, too.”
“Perfect. And a sharp pencil.”
* * *
The ground beyond the ridge dropped away. It was a massive crater, or maybe an excavation. It had to be at least half a mile deep. The far side blurred into the horizon.
At the center of it, reaching up to the sky, was the tower. It was hazy because it was so far away.
The tower was an obelisk of some sort, like a six-sided Washington Monument, and it was covered with engraved swirls and patterns. The top was a familiar arrangement of prongs and horizontal bars. Each of them had to be fifty or sixty feet thick to be visible from here, like the massive towers that held up freeways.
It took Nate a moment, then it struck him the whole thing looked like a gigantic jewelry setting for a ring.
He tried to guess how tall the tower was, but there was nothing near it to use for scale. Piled around its base were smaller obelisks and buildings and halls, like a sprawling castle or a small city. As far as Nate could see there were no windows. One archway near the edge of the complex looked small in comparison, but it could’ve been a hundred feet tall.