by Sarah Zettel
“I speak for her!” he shouted as he approached.
Jay entered the tiny circle of flickering light and saw Cor on her knees with her hands in front of her eyes. A soldier with Bondless tattoos on his hands and a craggy face that Jay didn’t recognize held his metal-studded club over her head.
“What in the sight of the Nameless is all this?” Cor demanded as Jay waved the soldier aside. “An invasion?”
“Hardly.” A fresh wind hit him and Jay shivered. “The Vitae have got that show to themselves.” He brushed the soldier back. The man gave Jay the barest possible salute and tramped off into the darkness.
“I noticed.” Cor stood and picked up her handlight. She seemed oblivious to the cold. “We had word. They’ve started giving orders that the Notouch be rounded up.” She clipped her light onto her belt.
“So you found Stone in the Wall’s relatives?” For a moment, eagerness was stronger than the cold.
“Yeah, I found them.” Cor stretched her hands out to the fire and let the light shine between her fingers. “I thought you were going to King Silver for letters of authority, not for a small army.” She nodded toward the cluster of a dozen tents.
“Cor…” Jay began angrily. He stopped and gripped his temper. “We need protection in case we run into First City troops. They’re working for the Vitae now.”
Cor watched the fire between her fingers.
“Cor.” Jay moved closer. “Where’re the Notouch?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I sent them running.”
Jay’s heart thudded once, hard, against his ribs. “You what?”
“I told them to grab their gear and run like the wind.” She rubbed her hands together. “And not to tell me where they would go.”
“Cor, the Vitae are rounding up Notouch!” Jay shouted. “They know something! We have to find…”
“We have to get out of here!” Cor screamed up at him to be heard over the wild night wind. “We have to get out of here and leave these people alone!”
“They aren’t people!”
Cor didn’t even flinch. “I don’t think they’d agree with you.”
Jay took a deep breath, trying to get control of himself again. It was too much. He had come all this way, he had worked all this time, and now he was so close. He was too close.
“Cor,” he said, hoping she couldn’t hear the tremor in his voice over the sound of the wind and the crackle of the fire, “you’re not thinking straight. If the Vitae find out how this place works, they will rule the Quarter Galaxy.”
“And if the Family finds out how this place works, then what?” Cor shook her head and Jay saw the rock-hard resistance behind her eyes. The fire struck sparks in them. “No. No matter who gets hold of them, they’re never going to be left alone again. The only thing they can do is keep running and fighting us all off.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “With the number of birth defects they’ve got, I doubt the whole place has more than four generations left anyway. Then it’s over with, but they’re at least not being bred into slavery.”
Jay felt the world tilt under his feet. Anger rushed through him, faster than the wind through the reeds, and all of it focused on the woman in front of him, calmly facing him down as if he were no more than a Bonded, or a total fool.
“Then why in all this hell did you come here?” he croaked. “Why didn’t you stay with your Notouch?”
Her chin shifted left, then right. “I wanted to see if you’d be willing to leave. I didn’t want you and Lu hanging around making things hard…harder.” Her green eyes were honest and a little ashamed. “I wanted you to know I’m willing to get you both offworld, but if you decide to keep going on the assignment, then, as of now, you’ve got no pilot and you’d better watch your back, because I’ll be on it.”
The night was suddenly crystal clear to Jay. The fire didn’t even flicker. Cor’s headcloth didn’t stir. He could hear her breathing, even over the rush of blood in his ears.
“And you really don’t know where the Notouch have gone?” he said coolly.
She shook her head. “No. I really don’t.”
Jay lashed out. His fist caught her in the throat and knocked her backward. She choked as she fell. He grabbed hold of her shoulders and flipped her onto her stomach. Her spine was stiff and knobbly under his knees. He pressed all his weight against her back. Her neck muscles corded against his palms as he forced her face into the mud. She clawed at him, raking great long scratches down his hands. She screamed to the ground. Jay held on until her hands fell into the weeds and he felt her neck go limp.
He stood. He thought he would be shaking, but he wasn’t. He was perfectly calm. Cor was nothing but a crooked shadow in the grass. In a moment he’d call the watch back to toss her into the swamp.
Jay fished his translator disk out of his ear and tucked it into its slot in his torque and waited.
“Jahidh? Be quick,” came Kelat’s voice.
“I need you to do a satellite scan of the area about twenty kilometers around this transmission point.” Jay kept looking at Cor’s body, noting how it didn’t move. “Stone in the Wall’s relatives are on the run and I need to know where they’ve gone.”
“It won’t be easy,” said Kelat. “But I’ll make it my work.”
Kelat closed the line and Jay disengaged his disk from the torque.
Do you know, Kelat, he thought toward the canyon wall, you’ve just described this whole fool Reclamation.
Jay whistled and waved to a quartet of silhouettes that he was fairly sure were soldiers. He’d have to tell Heart. He’d have to tell them all that they’d been betrayed. He’d have to, if they were to keep going, and they had to keep going.
Because now there was absolutely nothing else to do.
It was four hours past dark before the transport was towered from the tether’s end. Avir had to order Ivale to come with her and she was ready to swear that if there had not been a host of Beholden to see, he would have balked at the assignment
Sealed in pressure suits, Avir, Ivale, and Nal walked down the steps to meet the transport. Darkness and the accompanying cold cleared the streets of even the most lost of the artifacts.
From the outside, the transport was little more than a computerized box with thick, heavy tires that could grip and climb even the Home Ground’s chaotic terrain. As they approached, a door in the side lifted away, letting loose a flood of clear light.
Nice dressing, thought Avir as she squinted up the ramp that was lowering and tried to find her footing. She wasn’t sure how she felt about a security team leader with a sense of the dramatic.
The door closed behind them and Avir’s eyes adjusted to the light. It was a standard transport: drive boards in the front, seating for a dozen passengers down the middle, comm terminals at the rear, and storage lockers lining the walls. Eight of the seats were filled with the security team; males and females with brown or pinkish skins and all as bald as Ambassadors. The team leader got out of the pilot’s chair as soon as Avir walked up the ramp, but did not make obeisance until her eyes had had a chance to adjust.
The name he handed her was Security Chief Panair of the Hundredth Core. Avir accepted it with a nod. She didn’t trust her voice. It felt too good to be between soundproofed walls breathing air that was free of any kind of reek.
Security Chief Panair was not one to waste time. He accepted her silence as she had accepted his name and returned to his station. He snapped the seat restraints across his waist and passed his hands over the controls. The hum of the engines heightened its pitch.
Avir took the farthest seat on the empty row. Ivale stood aside to let Nal sit next to her. Avir wished she was free to roll her eyes. Ivale was being positively childish.
The transport lurched forward and Avir tried to resign herself to a long, dull trip. Outside the windows, the night brought down lashings of rain and ice carried on a wind that shook the transport. Panair kept his eyes on the boards, Avir noticed. De
spite his bright running lights, he was navigating more by the satellite transmission on the terminals than by line of sight.
The journey wore on. The transport lurched and rattled through a landscape that could barely be seen, and Ivale’s silence began to wear on Avir’s nerves. Nal was using the seat’s terminal, absorbed in his own work, but Ivale just sat with his eyes kept rigidly forward, watching the blobs of shadow that passed through the transport’s lights so quickly that it was often difficult to tell if they were trees or mere stones.
Avir sat back and tried to feel sympathy for him. This was not what any of them had been chosen for. They were supposed to convert a series of buildings for use by the Vitae and begin researches on the artifacts. They were not a boarding party, even if the team surrounding them were.
Panair swung the transport to the left and they lurched up a steep incline. The lights showed up nothing but rocks, boulders, and mud.
“Approaching the Unifier shelter,” Panair announced.
Avir looked out the window automatically, but there was nothing there except stone and shadow. The terminal on Panair’s board showed a smooth-sided dome, glowing with incandescent light and heat in the infrared spectrum.
Avir felt her beating heart rise until it filled her throat.
The white dome drifted into view. The transport ground to a halt and the door lifted itself open. The security team leapt out and dived straight for the dome’s entrance, leaving Avir, Ivale, and Nal trailing, a little stunned, in their wake.
“What…!” shouted a man’s voice inside the dome.
Avir stepped under the canopy over the entranceway but couldn’t see anything through the open door except piles of camp equipment and Panair’s back.
“Stand still and be identified,” barked Panair.
“All right, all right, I’m standing. Look, here I am.”
Avir stepped sideways, squeezing between the wall and a stack of storage crates. Panair, dart gun out and ready, faced a bony, brown-bearded man with a hand lamp and a tool belt raised up over his head. Behind him, incongruously, a fire burned in an empty crate. Next to it, an artifact lay on a pallet of blankets, staring at the ceiling. Its mouth moved constantly, but it made no sound, nor was it paying any attention to what was going on around it.
Avir, forgetting dignity and propriety, hurried to the artifact’s side. She knelt and unsealed her glove. She touched its skin. It was clammy and goose bumps prickled its dusky surface. Its eyes were glazed over and flickered back and forth, seeing something, but nothing that was in the room. Nal knelt beside her and also touched the artifact. He measured its pulse and fever with his expert hands and his mouth tightened.
“What did you do here?” Avir demanded of the bony man.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Who in the backwaters are you lot?”
In answer, Ivale removed his helmet. The man saw Ivale’s bald head and the neck of his scarlet rappings.
“Vitae,” the Unifier croaked. “Jay…”
“You will be questioned about him before long,” Avir stood. “But first you will explain what has happened to this artifact?”
The Unifier cast about as if he needed to try to identify what she was talking about. “Broken Trail?” he said finally. “I…” His gaze slid sideways to the security team. Two stood beside the door. Two more stood on either side of the dome and one had stationed herself beside the open hatchway in the floor. Avir wondered for a moment if the Unifier was going to make some escape gesture. She hoped not. If they had to dart him, it would be hours before they got any information at all.
But he didn’t. He just sighed so heavily that his bony shoulders heaved. “It would be easier to show you.” He tilted his head to indicate the trapdoor.
“Do so,” ordered Avir, and she switched to the Proper tongue. “Bio-tech, tend the artifact. Stabilize her if you can.”
“You hold my name,” said Nal absently. He was busy fumbling in his tool belt for analysis patches.
Panair climbed down the rope ladder first, followed by one of his Beholden. After a long moment, he shouted, “Clear!”
“Go,” Avir said to the Unifier.
With another resigned sigh, he fastened his tool belt around his waist and climbed down the ladder like it was something he’d been doing all his life.
Avir envied his poise as she herself descended. The ladder wriggled and wobbled under her weight. She was very glad to see the Unifier didn’t dare to grin at her when she stood beside him. Avir was not surprised to see the string of lights that led down the corridor and glinted off curved walls of translucent silicate that held back drifting shadows.
This was Avir’s first chance to see the shadowy containers up close. She leaned toward the wall, pressing her hands against the smooth, cool surface. She watched the blobs that moved with a fluid grace and random pattern. She swallowed hard. It was as if they stood in a vein the Ancestors had sunk into the world and were now surrounded by the blood the Vitae had sworn by for all their centuries.
Ivale and six of the security team descended the ladder, one by one. Panair waited until the last of them were down before he gestured for the Unifier to lead them onward.
The shadowed corridor was one continuous archway extending toward a second drop. The Unifier took them down another rope ladder and down a second corridor toward a brightly lit arch. Shadows drifted silently past them and Avir felt them like a weight sliding across her skin.
The archway opened into a chamber. Avir’s gaze slid over the more ordinary ruins—the empty tables and rotted chairs. It caught for a moment on the banks of empty sockets and gleaming stones. Then it swept the room, trying to take in everything at once. She saw tanks of gelatinous matter bulging from the walls. Bundles of capillary-like tubes pressed against the chamber’s walls. Blobs and nodules of silicate, all seamless, held viscous liquids that rippled like the shadows in the corridor did. Star-shaped patterns pressed against the skin of what could have been a table. Nerves. The liquid pulsed in the smooth bank of empty sockets against the far wall as if controlled by a heartbeat.
There was no question of it in Avir’s mind. This place was alive.
Avir felt her own breathing become shallow. “How big is this place?” she asked, not caring about the hushed tone the Unifier couldn’t possibly miss.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve mapped out about ten square kilometers’ worth of tunnels. Not that it’s done that much good.” There was a smirk in his voice. “Half the stuff back of the walls and tanks didn’t even show up until we’d had the lights on twenty-four hours. And you should see what’s down there.” He nodded to a second archway.
“Ivale, see what you can find out about this place,” she said, already halfway to the other arch and barely aware that the two Security Beholden had closed ranks to follow her.
Avir knew she was letting herself get distracted. Exploration should wait until they had the proper personnel, but she kept right on going. There was no light, except what was at their backs. One of the Beholden raised a hand lamp to light her way.
Ahead, the corridor curved. A burst of red light flashed off the smooth, clear walls. It flashed again, and again. Avir’s steps quickened. The footsteps of the Security Beholden echoed as they marched behind her.
She rounded the curve and the pulse of light hit her right in the eyes. Dazzled, she dropped her gaze and raised her hand. She saw the reflection of another flash on her own boots. The shadows under the surface of the corridor roiled as if in response. The intensity of the light faded as her faceplate darkened.
At last, Avir could look up again. She stood less than a meter from a cavernous opening. The corridor came out near its ceiling, but the floor, if existent, was invisible. The far wall was likewise lost in shadow. From darkness to darkness stretched more of the Ancestors’ veins. Avir knew they must be enormous, but the cavern around them made them look like silken threads. They crossed each other and spread out again at every angle. It
was a geometrician’s dream. It was the work of a thousand spiders over a thousand years. The ruby light flashed down the threads like bottled lightning. A single strand flashed on the edge of her line of sight. A dozen lit up right in front of her. Ten meters below, five, now ten, now twenty, horizontal strands pulsed with light and then blacked out all at once. Pulses of light raced up and down the verticals, chasing each other through the network of threads.
Peripherally, she noticed a platform in front of her, obviously made for movement into the vast network. Flat balconies and bubbles that could have enclosed rooms were supported by the threads. This was a complex. People, the Ancestors or the artifacts, traveled into the heart of this gigantic web of light and…did what?
“There is yet more work in the heart of the Ancestors. May those hearts be revealed to me. May my eyes see the wonder of the work…” It took Avir a moment to realize her voice was reciting the Second Grace. She closed her mouth but her eyes couldn’t stop straining to measure and define the impossible wonder spun out in light and glass in front of her.
Then her heart began to thud heavily against her rib cage. It was too much. It was too big and too incomprehensible. As precisely as she could manage, she turned around and shouldered her way between the Security Beholden. The ruby light pulsed and flickered against the corridor’s curved walls, each beat raising the level of unreasoned panic inside her. She didn’t dare run, but she didn’t know how she’d hold herself to a walk.
They were in a hollow world. A hollow world with veins and nerves, and who could know what else. But it lived. She knew that with an utter certainty. Like the artifacts that grubbed on its surface searching for their lost function, it lived.
Avir almost gasped with relief when she crossed the thresholds into the first chamber again.
The Unifier grinned at her. “Something else, isn’t it? And I’ll tell you what, those lights? They weren’t there when we got here. That didn’t start up until we got Broken Trail down here.”