by Monte Cook
“You go first,” he says. “I’ll set the plate back up behind us.”
She slides in. Slithers. It reminds her of snakes she’s seen between stones. Except that snakes are not all feet and boots at the far end. They don’t get their pantleg hem stuck like she does now. She tugs. The sound of her pantleg ripping is the sound of exhaustion and lack of care, and she knows it as soon as she hears it.
“Watch the bolt on the right,” she says. “It’s catchy.”
He comes through, settles the circle back into the wall. The walls on this side are lined with reflective material too. She can see herself, slightly warped and twisted. Quenn too. He looks thinner in the sendback.
“Something’s not right,” Quenn says. “This wall. This door.”
He stands in one place and slowly spins around, as if trying to reorient himself after a fall. “I can’t put my finger on it,” he says. “But something’s different.”
“Different how?” she asks. She’s memorized almost the entire floorplan based on Quenn’s map. This seems exactly like he’d told her, what her mind has written down as being right.
“All of the doors and entries and everything are correct,” he says. “But I feel like I’m standing sideways. Or upside down. Can you feel that?”
She can’t. She says as much. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. But you’d better say it fast because we need to go.”
“I think we’re in the wrong spot,” he says. “The triangle took us somewhere else.”
“How?” she says. It’s a silly question, and unnecessary, with a million answers. She’s come to learn that doorways rarely go where they’re supposed to. The how, or even why, doesn’t matter. It’s the what’s next that does.
“Rillent must have had it changed.”
Quenn’s scrolling a finger over his map. The soft press of his finger. The nervous exhale. Too fast. It’s no good telling him to calm, she doesn’t think. It won’t help. She holds her calming sounds silent on her tongue.
“I see us,” he says. “We went up instead of down. We’re right where we expected to be, but much higher.”
“How far up?” She hears something in the walls. The click-click of a machine, maybe, off in the distance.
“Four levels.”
Four levels higher than they expected. That puts them a level below Rillent’s chambers. They were supposed to start on the lowest level – get Quenn off toward the trenches to prepare the rescuees – and then she would come up here alone. Skist and skist and skist.
“All right, we need to get you back down through the–”
“Hold,” he says. A pause. “Someone’s coming.”
She hears it too but doesn’t want to. “No,” she says, her voice lowering with each word. “They can’t be. Every two hours. Every two chimes. We’re right on time.”
“Right time. Wrong floor.”
Here are footsteps. Hurried, little mouse footprints. Click-click. Not scary on their own. Except that they’re coming this way, and someone seeing them, anyone seeing them, right now, is going to break the whole thing down.
They could go back through the triangle. But that would take them down to where they started again. Maybe. Probably.
“Backup plan,” she says. Contingencies for contingencies. Although she hadn’t planned on using these so soon. “We disguise up, go down through the inside. Walk right past them.”
The disguises might not last long enough to get Quenn out. So there’s that original plan scrapped. They’ll have to come up with something else.
“Trenchers shouldn’t really be up here,” he says.
“Neither should we.”
“Fair,” he agrees.
“Uniforms first,” she says. She twists the threads at the side of her outfit, turning it from the no-name color into something specific. Quenn does the same. Her breath catches. He looks so much like he did the night that they rescued him.
“I never thought I’d willingly put one of these on again,” he says. “Or even anything that looked like it.”
She lifts her head and the wall sends her reflection back at her. She sees herself so rarely. Still, this doesn’t look like her.
The black trencher’s uniform suits her poorly. Too big around the middle. Too short in the legs. Deliberately so. Perfectly so. It makes her look already like someone else.
The silver mortar powder on her shoulders seems too purposeful to be believed. Not random enough. She knows that’s just because she can remember Nitar putting it on, attempting to spread it as if it were random and gained over time.
Her hair is pulled back so tight it changes the shape of her eyes.
No matter. It’s going to get weirder before it goes back to normal.
Once again into her pocket of dwindling cyphers to find the visage changer. Quenn uses his as she’s searching, and his cypher is already doing its work, transforming him into something very much less Quenn and very much more an old man.
He’s looking at the map in his hand. She doesn’t think he’s looked up into the mirror-plate yet.
She’d forgotten this was a needle. “Skist.”
“Need me to…?”
Rather than answer, she jabs herself in the cheek with the injector. Plunges. Hisses swearwords under her breath in an order she’s never used before. She might have even repeated one or two. She might have also said Delgha’s name more than once, and not to thank her. She tries to keep her voice low, so no one can possibly hear her cursing.
Her right eye starts to twitch and water. Her face feels like someone’s trying to shape it like clay. With a broadsword.
“Ready,” she says, when she can feel her lips – someone else’s lips – again. But it isn’t true, and even the word knows it. It falls from the new shape of her mouth like a piece of forgotten bread.
She goes forward anyway, but refuses to look at her new face in the mirror. She is who she is, and her outside matters to her not in the slightest. She shapes her new body, created by the fit of clothes and the feel of her face, into the movement of someone beaten down by time and effort. Submissive and broken. It’s not that hard to put herself there. She’s been there. Different circumstances, but close enough for body empathy.
“Behind me,” Quenn says. She starts to protest, and then settles back behind him. He’s right, of course. It’s not Rillent who’s coming – she can tell by the footsteps – but she’s more recognizable, even with her face out of whack. Plus, Quenn knows where he’s going, and she doesn’t. That’s the worst time to try to lead.
The footsteps come closer. Or they move closer to them or both. There’s the sense of impending collision, of every corner being the corner where they will turn it and run into their own discovery.
When it happens, Aviend has a shock of recognition – I know her – but she doesn’t, not really. She does recognize the small, thinned out woman in gold and purple, though the hair has gone white and the face has more yearlines written on it than it once did. One of the other members of Ovinale’s former clave. A friend of her mother, once. Sulb? Suila? She can’t remember the woman’s name, only her once-loud laughter, a sound that had filled the hall.
The woman carries a handled box with the seal of Ovinale on it. Surely an artifact of the clave’s holdings, once. Now Rillent’s.
Aviend feels a fierce anger rise in her. By what right, Rillent? By what right, this once-friend of her mother’s? The woman’s eyes swing toward the two of them as they approach, and in them, Aviend sees not loyalty. But obedience. Fear. Defeat. This woman – Sulab, it comes to her, suddenly – is not a believer in Rillent. She’s trying to stay alive, as are they all. For so many years, though. Carrying Rillent’s things. His plans. Aviend lets the weight of her heart stop her breath for a moment.
Should she tell Sulab? Reveal herself and their plans? Give her hope, and a chance to escape?
No. If only because doing so would put the woman at greater risk. If Rillent were to find out that she h
eld their secret, he would certainly do her harm.
As they near to pass, Aviend ducks her head. Outward deference. Inward hidden features. The woman inhales her breath, sending Aviend’s heart fluttering to her throat, sure they’ve been recognized. She shifts the box – the sound was merely an exhale of the weight she carries – and they pass without so much as a word.
Quenn’s eyes – even though they’re not his eyes anymore under the disguise – say he thought they were caught out for sure. Hers likely say the same.
Silence ahead of them. Quenn motions with his fingers. A left-then-right jab and two fingers. Two more hallways and they will be out of this mess. They cross into the first one, then second, and then pause before the oval opening in the wall.
“Downshaft?” she whispers. When he nods, she holds out the invisibility cypher to him. Her original way out, long ago. Now his. The contingency for the contingency. Already being used.
He doesn’t say no or try to talk her out of it. He pockets it with the deftness of someone who understands and adapts. It’s one of the reasons she likes him.
They’ll split here instead. She’ll find the control room and flip the switch. Quenn will head to the trenches and get everyone ready. Then, she’ll distract. He’ll rescue. It’s not as good of a plan as the original, but it will do.
“Stars guide you,” he says.
“Guide us all.”
Everything was the same, except that it definitely wasn’t. It didn’t take long before he no longer thought of Aviend as his-world Aviend and before he no longer thought of Nuvinae as something aged and undead.
Niev, on the other hand, that was tougher. Her mother’s eyes. Her grandmother’s softly regal bearing. He didn’t see anything of himself in there. But he chose not to look too hard. Was seeing himself or not seeing himself the worse of those answers? Neither seemed good, and so he was thankful that everything was moving quickly enough that he didn’t have to try to process any of that. Not yet.
He thought he had everything in hand, mostly, until Niev said, “Oh, and you have to meet Fall,” and there was the varjellen coming through the hall draped in the same cloth as the others. The same green-and-white ribbon. Fear and confusion mingled, twisted, made Kyre want to punch or run or both.
“Iadace,” the varjellen said, ducking its head slightly, the magenta and violet crest shivering in the movement.
“Fall lets me help him fix the numenera,” Niev said in a low voice. “But don’t tell. ‘Cause he’s not supposed to.”
The varjellen cleared its throat, and Kyre saw the glance between the three other adults in the room. Whatever secrets the girl thought she was keeping, it was clear that she wasn’t.
But that wasn’t what held his attention. It was Faleineir. Fall, Niev had said. Kyre kept searching those yellow eyes for ire or anger. For hidden ruthlessness. He found none. What had Rillent done?
“I assume you have a plan,” Nuvinae said to him. “You usually do.”
“You were expecting me?”
“It seemed like a possibility. Even before we got your message.”
“I’m surprised the Arch on your side didn’t see that as well,” here-Aviend said.
He didn’t reply, but she reacted as though he did. “Oh,” she said. “May she walk.” Hands to elbows. A soft nod.
“We should go,” Nuvinae said. Ever the leader, even though she must have known, too, what he was saying. Her own demise, elsewhere.
Then it was the four of them walking back across the field that he’d just left. Such peace. Such beauty. There was no Rillent in this world, at least no Rillent who had come to Ovinale. And there was, currently, although he could not bear to ask for details, no Kyre. Other than himself.
But there was a tunnel. That was the important part. Even this world’s Kyre had been unable to resist the draw of the kubrics.
Nuvinae filled him in on the way to the tunnel’s entrance. He was glad it was her telling him the story. He didn’t know if he could stand to hear this story coming from Aviend’s mouth, to look at her eyes while she told it.
“We’ve known for a while that someone was doing something with the kubrics’ energies,” Nuvinae said. “They would flicker on and off, or hum. Sometimes you would hear people talking. One voice in particular. Orating almost, near nightfall.”
“The ghosts?” Kyre said.
She shook her head. “We’ve always had ghosts. As I’m sure you have too.”
He’d wondered if they would have ghosts too. As the barrier thinned, it thinned from both directions. He nodded, thinking about his longlost friends from childhood. They’d turned out to be humans after all. Not friends, necessarily, but allies at least. Distant ones.
“This was different. Bigger, brighter. Of course, we assumed it was someone here using the kubrics. Because, well, why would we assume otherwise?”
Nuvinae laughed then, a sound of rue and hindsight mingled into knowledge. “Even when Delgha and Lyeg…” A pause, asking if he knew of whom she spoke, and when he nodded, she went on. “…created a device that let us detect that the tampering was coming from… somewhere else. I’m not sure I believed it for the longest time. It was clear they were using some kind of bridge. A conduit that reached through the barriers. We didn’t tie it all together with the ghosts until, well, until your message.”
He could hear Aviend and Niev walking behind them. The girl spoke softly to her mother, a voice that was becoming familiar enough to take root in his heart and slowly spread.
“I know very well who was… tampering. Do you know a man named Rillent?”
She thought for a moment and shook her head no. The whole gesture seemed so alien to him. To have to contemplate whether she’d ever heard of the man. The man who killed her. The man who Kyre thought about every day. “Another Aeon Priest, who came here years back?”
“I don’t think so.”
“So it’s one of our own who’s doing this?”
Kyre nodded.
“And you know enough about the kubrics to know what he’s capable of if his plans succeed?”
He wondered if they could have learned more, faster, if they’d still had Nuvinae in their world. If they could have studied the kubrics safely without Rillent involved. “We do now.” He paused to think about what he wanted to tell her. “We’re not the only ones in danger now.”
She just nodded. He wasn’t surprised she’d known.
“We halted the digging and closed up the tunnels as soon as we realized what power they held,” Arch Nuvinae said. “It seemed far riskier than what we might have gotten from it.”
She didn’t mean to make him feel awkward or guilty, but there it was anyway. That return to the sense that he’d been the one to make this happen.
“No,” Aviend said from behind him. Ghostfell, even this Aviend could read his mind. He didn’t know where to put that. “You are the one who halted it.”
He glanced back at this-Aviend, who was looking straight at him, her head canted to one side. She didn’t have a half smile, but a full-on brilliant one. He wondered if that openness was the result of never having had Rillent in your head. What had this-Kyre been like, he wondered. Less closed off, maybe. More willing to say what he loved without fear of losing it? He hoped so.
Niev let go of her mother’s hand and bowed down to pluck a wolflily and add it to her growing bouquet. The three of them watched her in silence.
“Heartblooms,” Aviend said. “Do you have those in your… Stere?”
Heartblooms. Not wolflilies. Because there were no wolf dens, no mass dead, no need for a name that covered up destruction and decay. Here, a thing could hold hope and promise in its name. He wanted that for his world too.
“Not yet,” he said.
They stopped along the woods, near where the boys had been playing. Rocks littered the ground, resting on newly bent leaves. This time, Niev was quiet, holding her mother’s hand instead of his.
The metal door in the dirt was h
idden beneath leaves and stones. Put there deliberately, then made to look like it wasn’t. All the stones, he noticed, were larger than good throwing size. Whoever built this knew about the baddest boys and their game. He wondered if it was him, and thought it probably was.
A moment later, he had an answer.
“You’ll need to open it,” this-Aviend said. “It was made by… for you.”
Kyre knelt in the dirt for the second time today. The fingerprint key – a small black square in the metal – opened for him without hesitation. He heard a sound, the small hiccup that comes at the back of the throat when you’re not ready for it, and knew it was Aviend-not-Aviend.
“I’m sorry,” he said, although he was not entirely sure what he was sorrier for. Being here, alive, or his other self being dead.
He knew he couldn’t ask them to come with him. Not into the tunnel. Not into his world. So he declined their offer of help and entered the tunnel alone, a glowglobe that Nuvinae had activated following behind him like a bobbing balloon. There were stairs down, and he took them, careful and slow, leaving the light of the world behind him with each new step.
Quenn was on his own now. Just like Kyre. Just like herself.
Aviend has no trouble finding the room she needs. That, at least, is exactly where both Kyre and Quenn said it should be. She sees no one, hears no one, and is inside the room so quickly that she senses a trap. But none springs.
The device is in the center of the room, as if it’s the room’s reason for being. She notices that Rillent stands in the center of spaces too. Neither of these things surprise her.
On the device is the orange stem. Of course it has to be that. She steps closer, arms at her sides. No. It’s not the exact same. Brown instead of green. Shaped differently enough to be a sibling. Close enough that her feet cannot be charmed forward, close enough that her arm has no interest in rising.