“I don’t know.”
The interface in its little white box sat on a low table by Gebre’s side. Te hadn’t let it out of ter sight, hadn’t put it in the truck – it would be the last thing te did, and perhaps after, I thought, te might take Grace. Perhaps that was why te still clung to it. The interface, the archive – these were the things still keeping ter alive, and it seemed to me that despite everything, Gebre didn’t want to die.
Te crept to the door. Te was not comfortable creeping – an elder academic who’d spent ter whole life marching into rooms with a declaration of “I am here, now listen!”, te tried ter first few steps on tiptoe, then clearly decided it was too undignified and absurd for words, so merely shuffled to the open door.
Stuck ter head outside.
The wind whispered down the great wide corridor, stone designed to sing, a low hum whispering of the growing storm outside, the press of thickening air against the building’s fat black walls.
Listened.
In the archive behind us, a voice, tinny, still played through a discarded headset. In the corridor: a change of note, a soft rising in pitch of the breeze, a sudden tickle of cooler, damper air as somewhere further up the throat of the mountain, a door opened. A drop as it closed again.
“Perhaps…” murmured Gebre, but I clicked my tongue twice, motioned for quiet.
A figure appeared at the top of the corridor.
The distance made them small, hard to fully pin down. Just a lone stranger – perhaps an archivist, perhaps one of the dawn-singers moving towards us. But Gebre’s eyebrows furrowed – te did not instinctively recognise their form – and I saw the glint of an exoskeleton, made of far more moving parts than the grudging mechanical aid I wore. Braces were twisted and woven in a liquidmetal around arm and leg, culminating in a crown of silver barbs where a control interface pierced through skin and bone directly into the skull of the user. There was stuttering quality to their steps, a motion as if now they were here; and now they were not, but a few paces further on without having seemed to lift a toe. Now they were far off; now they were closer, a stop-start dancing down the great belly of the cliff towards us.
I had seen displacement fields before, but not for a long, long time.
Then the figure lurched forward, raising a metal object in their fist. I grabbed Gebre by the waist and hauled ter back through the door.
The snap-pop of something striking the wall where our heads had been arrived a razored moment before the bigger, grandervroomof the sound, wall sizzling in a hot blackened splat where the projectile had struck. The bullet was little more than a pellet, accelerated to such speeds that it burned the air it passed through, ripped craters through rock, the heat of its impact singeing my skin and the boom of the shock wave a hard punch to the chest. I looked for a door control, and Gebre was already there, slamming ter palm into a panel and sealing it with a heavy scraping of bolts sliding through stone, before turning to me, eyes wide as the moon, shoulders rising and falling, breathless. “Who was that?” te hissed. “Who was that?”
“Shine. They are Shine. There’ll be more than one. The door won’t stop them for long; is there another way out?”
“How are they here?How are they here?”
“I don’t know. Gebre, is there another way out?”
For a moment te just stared at me, too many questions, too much impossibility playing on ter mind to process my words. Indignation, too – this was ter sanctum, ter sacred place, the place where perhaps te had intended to die, and now there was an intruder in it, someone disrupting ter final plan, the plan te had been making since almost the day te was born. I caught ter arm,pressed my hand against the white box te still clutched to ter chest, and something – not about the solidity of me, but the solidity ofit, of this thing with meaning – brought ter back. “Yes,” te blurted. “There’s another way out.”
I clicked my tongue, and followed.
Behind us, like thick caramel drooping in the heat, the door began to melt.
Different corridors, not meant for public consumption. Narrower, winding ways, utterly anonymous, branching off to specialist rooms for radio-imaging, quantum probing, restoration, staff toilets. I knew we were going deeper into the Institute, hated how loud our footsteps were as we clattered along, tried not to look back, didn’t see anyone else as we descended. Down here the sticky damp of previous storms was a cold, slithering presence, pools of water splashing beneath our feet where the ocean had leached into the building, the shuddering of the storm outside whistling through open vents and tiny fissures in stone as if it were a great tentacled thing hungry to prise its way inside.
“There’s a door to the cliff path two floors down,” Gebre whispered – we were both whispering now, even though the world was shaking in the gloom, shadows and dusk in this twisted maze. “You can take it to the outside, climb up it, circle back round to the van.”
I looked back, saw no one behind us, clicked in agreement. The lights down here were on low power, pools of thin grey, their efforts nothing next to the encroaching dark, the familiar touch of it, the familiar place where possibility and imagination blurred. There was safety there, in that dark, a terrifying, murderous kind of safety, and the thought of it nearly choked me.
A sound behind, cutting through the rising shriek of the compressed air of the storm – heavy footsteps, moving not quite right, a slip-side of armour in displacement field, a jagged twist in a shadow behind us that vanished as soon as it was seen.
Gebre shoved open a door into a wider, greyer space – a hall without windows but lit from above with still-burning white lights, each one picking out a statue of the great, the good and the merely potent of Adjumiri history. Dragged the door shut behind us, fumbled at controls, for locks and overrides that would not keep us safe. I heard bolts slide across, then te was pulling me along, through passages laid out between the faces of the glorious dead. Illuminated boxes of text flashed up at the feet of each figure we passed, explaining – this person here, they were a great scientist, one of the first to categorise the post-terraforming evolutionary development of greater and lesser fauna in the northern seas. And this one – they were a pioneering explorer who helped establish the first colony on nearby Hadda, but who in later life it was discovered had been stealing from the Assembly and exploited vulnerable people with cruel barbarities. Too late, by then – the statue had been cast, the crystal lattice grown, and the Adjumiris were always opposed to smashing their history, however ugly it might be. Perhaps even then the astronomers had been whispering:All this, it will burn. It will all burn, even the shame.
Soft music played from one, rising a little as we approached – a composer’s final tune, written on the island where they went to die. A snatch of a voice captured from another, a thousand years old, the only recording still in existence of the peacemaker who helped end the Vega War, declaring: “We went to war to fight for what is ours, and in the process we destroyed each other and ourselves. Our cause was just, but justice was the first to die.”
Gebre strode ahead, a little more confident now – or perhaps no, perhaps ter fear had reached that place where there was no point scuttling, no point darting from statue to statue, because what difference would it make? A stranger with a gun, half seen, would come or they would not; Gebre could not control this outcome, so why care? I struggled along breathless behind, my exoskeleton hissing with the sudden drain on its miniature power supply as it tried to keep my back from buckling with this sudden excursion.
Gebre was already at the door on the far side of the room, the one that led back out to public spaces, waiting for me to catch up, when the first statue erupted in a shower of marble-grown crystal and bio-resin. I dived for cover behind its still-smoking plinth, covering my head and eyes as a detritus of shattered mineral rained down around us, the stink of burning polymer acrid in the ringing echo of the blast. Gebre lunged behind another plinth to my right, the door open at ter back, and as the world twinkled and jingled with gleaming shards and a voice proclaimed the history of the now-blasted figure whose smoking feet were all that remained of their legacy, I peered out.
This time, I could see more – much more – of our pursuer, caught in a cone of light. His hair was silver-white, his face almost boyish, whether from actual youth or bio-enhancements, I couldn’t tell. He wore a dark grey combat suit beneath his military-grade exoskeleton, hints of the body-tight fabric peeking through the medley of arm braces, neck braces, back braces that carried his weight. A tube ran to his nose, pumping gas at the right ratio for his lungs, plus, I suspected, a few other chemicals besides. A pistol was strapped to one gleaming hip, a knife to the other, and he held a squat-nosed hand cannon whose end was still glowing from the heat of its most recent discharge. He didn’t run, though the suit that supported him was more than capable of a burst of speed; simply walked, weapon-first, down the corridor, in no rush, without fear, and he was Shine Corpsec, of my world, of my people, come all this way just to kill us all.
The door he’d entered through was a liquid pool of rapidly resolidifying metal and mineral, the air above it shimmering with heat. Behind us: a way out, another door, Gebre on one side, me on the other. Our attacker had a clear line of fire towards it; the moment we moved, he would pull the trigger. I pressed my back against the plinth, listened to thethump-thump-thumpof his mech-supported boots as he approached, looked across at Gebre, touched the place on my chest where te still held the white box, the box thatcontained something that gave ter meaning, and before te could object, I broke left, running as fast as my heavy body could away from the door.
The soldier fired. I felt something bite into my shoulder, knock against my chest as another statue ruptured, this one raining crispy black clay and eye-stinging dust as it exploded above my head, but I kept on scurrying, away from Gebre, away from the interface, not daring to look back.
