“Code override. Code override.”
Kyra steeled herself. “Yes, I overrode the code,” she said defiantly. “I need to go to Kunlun Shan.”
Nothing answered; had she really expected it to? She sat down on one of the seats melded to the floor. It moved beneath her, adjusting to her weight, and she recoiled in distaste. She remembered what Felda had said about the Hubs being one vast mind, as if they were alive. As if the walls of the chamber were the skin of a womb, the Transport corridor the inside of a throat.
Okay, stop. She was being fanciful. The chamber began to spin, and she closed her eyes to meditate.
It was then that the whispering started. Tiny, incomprehensible voices in her ears, her hair, her skin. Kyra jerked to her feet in alarm, almost losing her balance, and flailed at the air with her hands.
“Stop,” she stuttered, but the voices did not stop. They rose in pitch, acquiring an edge of insistence, as if to say, Know us. Understand us. Like ghosts they gathered about her, thick with want. She dropped to her knees and pressed her palms against her ears. But the voices were inside her skull and there was no getting away from them, their anger and their pain.
Abandoned. That’s how they felt. And— We will show you, they whispered.
The spinning slowed and stopped. For a while, Kyra could not make herself get up. However terrifying the Transport Chamber, it was a familiar place, unchanging in appearance. What lay beyond the door was unknown. And after what had just happened, she had not the slightest hope she would emerge in the time and place she was seeking.
At last she stood and went to the door. It was that, or give in to despair and rail against herself, against Felda, and most of all against the makers of the Transport system, who had built something that would outlast them all in years, but not in sanity.
Kyra left the chamber, stepping into a short, dark passage. There were no doors save the one she had emerged from, and a door at the end of the passage, which she presumed led outside. A Hub with a single Transport door—perhaps a door that shifted every time it was used. She offered up a brief and fervent prayer to the Goddess and pushed it open before she lost her courage.
The heat struck her face like a blow, and she flinched. She stepped out onto a bleak, bare hillside, taking care not to let the door close behind her. Nothing grew, nothing lived for as far as the eye could see. The sun shone in a blue-white sky, but something was wrong with it; the sun appeared bigger, fiercer than it should. The air was dry and difficult to breathe. Even the Empty Place at the height of the noonday sun was pleasant compared to this.
Dark spots danced in front of her eyes. Her throat and skin burned, and she retreated into the blessed coolness of the Transport corridor, shaking.
She fumbled for the waterskin in her bag. After a few reviving sips, she returned to the Transport Chamber, feeling light-headed, the sun still burning the backs of her eyelids. She had spent less than a minute outside. A few minutes more would have killed her. What was this place? It was nowhere she recognized; not even the Barrens at the western edge of Asiana were this lifeless.
It is the future. The voices were a cold caress in her ear. The horror of it sank into her.
“How many years?” she asked, her heart in her mouth. But no answer was forthcoming. She hoped this future was far enough away that the people of Asiana had found another planet to call home by then. Or perhaps they had learned to live in underground cities.
The chamber began to spin again. Avoiding the seats, Kyra sat on the floor. She steeled herself for the invasive voices, but they did not return. Perhaps they were done with her, and the door would open to the present-day Kunlun Shan this time.
But it did not. When Kyra emerged for a second time from the tiny Hub, green grass covered the hillside. The sun looked quite ordinary, and a cool wind rustled her hair. But she was not alone. Climbing up the hill were a dozen men and women clad in bright saffron robes. Now and then they stopped to talk and laugh or pick a flower. Some carried baskets; others carried pitchers. A picnic of some sort? Their destination appeared to be a red and gold pagoda on top of the hill.
Who were they? When was this? Kyra longed to run up the hill after them and ask. But part of her doubted they would be able to see and hear her, and another part was terrified that if she let the door close behind her, it wouldn’t open again for her blade. And that would be the end of Kyra Veer, the youngest Markswoman of Asiana. Perhaps she’d live out her days with the saffron-robed men and women. At least they seemed like a cheerful bunch.
She was debating whether to call out to them when the sky darkened. At first Kyra thought it was a thundercloud. But the men and women froze, their faces like stone as they gazed upward. She raised her eyes to see what had troubled them and almost screamed.
A vast rectangular structure blotted out half the sky; it was charcoal gray, covered with runes of some sort, the underside studded with cylindrical pods. That was all she had time to see before one of the pods dropped out of the sky and tore off half the hillside. The men and women who had just seconds ago been laughing and talking with each other disappeared in the fireball.
The explosion threw Kyra back inside the Hub. The door slammed shut before the fire could reach her. She lay stunned for several minutes, her ears ringing, her head feeling as if it would burst. The violence had happened so quickly she could not process it. One moment those poor people had been walking up the hill for a picnic; the next moment they were obliterated by a machine worse than twenty death-sticks. How sick must a mind be to design a weapon like that?
Kyra tried to stand and could not. She felt dizzy and disoriented. After a while she managed to sit up. She made herself drink some water and wiped her face, which was sticky with soot and tears. She crawled away from the door on her hands and knees.
You have seen the past, whispered the voices as she entered the Transport Chamber, but they didn’t have to. She already knew. She had caught a glimpse of the Great War that had consumed Asiana all those centuries ago. Despite their technological marvels, her ancestors had lacked the most basic feelings of decency and compassion. They had treated their fellow human beings like a diseased herd to be culled.
Why show her this? And what horror would the Hub inflict on her next?
But when she stumbled out of the Transport door the third time, she found herself back in the long, smooth corridor of the Deccan Hub. Back where she had started. Fury built in her until she thought she would burst. After all that it had put her through, the chamber had spat her out at her starting point.
“You useless piece of junk!” she cried. “Take that.” She kicked the Transport door again and again, until her foot felt as though it would break. Stupid, childish behavior, but it gave her some satisfaction, as if she were punishing the Hub instead of her own foot.
“Kyra?” came a disbelieving voice. “Is that you?”
She whirled, her stomach clenching.
Rustan. Standing before her, disheveled and wide-eyed, his face ghostly in the bluish light of the corridor. A hallucination spun by the Hub to punish her for her insolence, her temerity? Not this, please. This I cannot bear.
“Kyra,” he said again, and held his arms out. She ran into them, half laughing, half weeping. Whatever the Hub had done to her, she forgave it in that one, perfect moment when she stepped into the circle of his arms and he wrapped them around her, as if he would hold her forever.
Chapter 20
Time Outside Time
How long did they stand in the dim, cool Transport corridor, holding each other? Later, Kyra would think of it as a time outside time, immeasurable and precious. She rubbed her cheek against his, rough with stubble, and inhaled the jagged scent of him, a confusing blend of desert and mountain, anger and serenity, sweat and grief. When Rustan bent his lips to hers, the kiss was already there, like a word waiting to be said. Sweeter, wilder than all her fantasies of him. She tightened her arms around him, afraid that he would break the contact and step awa
y from her.
But he didn’t. He pulled her head back and traced his lips on her throat, turning her insides to liquid, obliterating all her fear, all her reason. She gasped and twisted against him, forgetting everything except her need, the loneliness she had kept in check these long, dark months. He stroked her blade, and she felt it through the scabbard, more intimate than a caress on her skin.
“I’ve missed you so much,” he whispered into her hair.
“I’ve missed you too,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest. “Don’t you dare leave me again.”
He made a small sound of protest. “You’re the one who left. You’re the one who nearly died.” She heard the ache in his voice, the ghost of the pain he had suffered when she was stabbed by Tamsyn’s blade.
He traced his thumb against the nape of her neck, giving her goose bumps. “Are you well now?” he asked. “Does your wound still hurt?”
“No,” she lied, but the exhaustion and trauma of what she had been through caught up with her then, and her knees buckled, as if in the presence of Rustan, her body could finally relax and let go. He caught hold of her, concern tightening his face.
“I’m all right,” she muttered, leaning against the wall, pushing him away. Her legs felt like Tarshana’s noodles. “Just need to rest a bit. Been a long day.”
“You do that,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”
She lay down on the corridor, using her bag as a pillow. Rustan sat beside her, looking as though he needed to lie down more than she did. She gripped his hand, as if he might try to run away, and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. I’m here, he thought at her, and raised her hand to his lips. Rest easy, my love.
She smiled and, watching him, drifted off to sleep. A while later, she woke in a panic that he was gone. But he was still there, his long body stretched out next to hers, one arm thrown across his head, breathing the deep, even breath of sleep. She exhaled in relief. Still here. Still with me.
She slipped an arm around him, feeling the rise and fall of his chest, the hard muscles beneath his Marksman’s robe. He stirred but continued sleeping, and she smiled, feeling such a rush of tenderness that it was difficult to breathe. Rustan—her friend, her teacher, her lover, her other half. Did not the Goddess herself have a male twin?
But thinking of the Goddess reminded Kyra of her Order and the mission she was on.
She closed her eyes, wanting to prolong the moment of stillness before action, the moment of togetherness that no one would be able to take away from her, no matter what came after.
Slowly, bit by bit, she separated herself from him. It was a painful awakening. She remembered who she was and why she was there. The strangeness of it came to her then, the glowing slots on the Transport doors, how Rustan had been there at the precise moment when she emerged from the chamber. How all Transport corridors looked much the same, and this was not the Deccan Hub at all, but somewhere else. Or somewhen.
She jerked upright, heart thudding.
Next to her, Rustan stirred. “You all right?” he asked, his voice still heavy with sleep. He caressed her back with his fingertips, and she suppressed a tiny sound of pleasure. What she wanted most was to lie back beside him and touch him the way he was touching her, to make him feel the way he made her feel.
But not here. Not now. Glad of the darkness that concealed the flush on her face, she said, keeping her voice light, “Just wondering where we are, and what you are doing here.” She would not show him her discomfiture.
But he saw it anyway. He sat up and stretched. “I was on my way to Kashgar, back to my Order,” he said. “The Deccan Hub was the closest. What’s the matter?”
Kyra waved a hand. “The Deccan Hub is the most heavily trafficked in the subcontinent. We’ve been here for hours and not seen another living soul.” She paused. How much to tell him? Hubs with minds of their own—he would think she was crazy.
But Rustan did not seem to think anything was amiss. “Hours?” he said. He reached for his blade—Shirin Mam’s blade—and slung it around his neck. “I have to get to Barkav as soon as possible. Take a look at this.”
He withdrew a sheaf of parchments from his knapsack. Kyra unsheathed her blade and whispered the word of power to set it alight. She studied the parchments in the glow of her katari, her alarm growing as Rustan described how he had infiltrated the Tau camp and set their forge on fire.
“You did this on your own?” Kyra was stunned. “You could have been killed.”
He bowed his head. “Somebody did die,” he said. “I was too late to save him.”
And it dawned on Kyra whom he was talking about, and why he smelled of grief and anger. “Ishtul,” she said.
His head jerked up, and he raked her face with his eyes. “What do you know of it?” he demanded.
It was hard, telling him what Kai Tau had done. But she saw from his bleak, flat expression that he already knew, that the only surprise for him was the fact that Kai Tau had sent the severed head of the blademaster to her and not to the Order of Khur.
“He means to force my hand,” she concluded. “But I’ll not go up against him until I am ready.”
Rustan frowned. “There is no way to be ready for kalashiks. Those bullets can pierce anything.”
“Except kalishium,” she said, and was gratified to see a look of astonishment on his face. She plunged ahead and told him of her plan to use a secret kalishium hoard to build armor and shields. She left out the bit about Menadin, making it sound as if it was her own idea. She didn’t want to withhold the truth from him, but somehow it didn’t feel right, telling him about the wyr-wolf. It was not her secret to share.
Rustan folded his arms. “There is no more kalishium in Asiana,” he said. “Where is this hoard that you are so convinced exists?”
“It does exist,” said Kyra, nettled. “I just have to find it. It hides in a monastery cave in the Kunlun Shan Range.”
“And how do you know that?” Rustan’s voice had gone soft and dangerous.
Kyra was bewildered. She had thought Rustan would applaud her idea. In truth, she had hoped he would offer to join her, to help her look for the kalishium—forgetting, for the moment, that this was something she needed to do on her own. But Rustan was acting as if she had done something wrong.
“I just know,” she said. “I dreamed of it,” she added.
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “It is disrespectful, both to yourself and to me.”
“Fine. Somebody told me, okay?” She tried to keep the defensiveness from her voice. “I can’t tell you who—it’s not for me to tell. I just know that I have to—prove myself, in some way. And that a door to Kunlun Shan exists, right here in this Hub.”
“You will never find the monastery,” said Rustan, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself.
“Then help me,” she said, a plea in her voice. “Come with me to Kunlun Shan. Once I find the kalishium, we can return to Khur together and ask Astinsai to forge it.” She slipped her arms around his neck, but he was stiff, unyielding. “What is wrong?” she whispered.
He relaxed and touched his forehead to hers. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Not yet. And I will go with you. Of course I will.”
Kyra should have felt reassured by his words. Yet she could not shake the feeling that he did not mean to help at all.
Chapter 21
The Beast in the Forest
The third time Kyra tried the door to Kunlun Shan, it worked like an ordinary door in an ordinary Hub. Perhaps the fact that Rustan was with her made a difference. Or perhaps, having shown her the past and the future, it was content to lead her into the present.
They stepped out of a door embedded in the trunk of an enormous tree into a dense, wild forest of oak and pine. Kyra inhaled the sharp, fresh scent with gratitude. It was good to be outdoors again. Birds chittered, and the undergrowth rustled. A shaft of late-afternoon sunlight caught Rustan’s face, his expression trapped between astonish
ment and some other emotion she could not identify. Anger? Regret?
No, that was not possible. Why would he be angry? And what was there to regret? Not the moments of tenderness they had shared in the Hub, surely. She was imagining things. Although now that they were out of the Hub, everything that had occurred inside it seemed distant and dreamlike, as if it had happened to someone else. Rustan stood so close to her, yet she could not have reached out and touched him. This thought cut her to the quick, but she hardened herself. He had distanced himself from her for some reason; she wouldn’t make herself vulnerable again.
“The forest at the base of Kunlun Shan.” Rustan traced the edge of the door with the palm of one hand. Now that it had closed, the door was hard to distinguish from the bark of the tree. All that was left was a faint rectangular outline and a tiny slot.
“Told you,” said Kyra, trying to sound confident, as if this was exactly what she had expected. She had explained to him Felda’s pyramid of codes and shown him the one to override this particular door. What she hadn’t mentioned was her growing suspicion that the codes were not a one-way device to unlock the doors of recalcitrant Hubs, but more like a conversation—a conversation with an entity that was no longer quite sane. And how was it even possible to stay sane if you could look into both the past and the future? If you were doomed to survive until the last days of the Earth before it was swallowed up by the sun?
“Yes, you did tell me,” said Rustan. “You were right about the door. You are right about the stash of kalishium too. But I pray you do not find it.” He stepped toward her and grasped her arm. “Trust me. Turn back now before it is too late.”
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