Not like an ele-tube. That’s at least enclosed around the passengers. This wasn’t. If she moved, she would touch the walls.
"How does it move?" she asked.
"Pressure and current," he said. "The Collective has used this passage for generations."
"Generations," she repeated, trying to comprehend. The tech was old, he said, but also so different from anything available. She had so many questions. "How long has this place existed?"
"Longer than I have been alive." He said it without inflection, which was not an answer, but she filed it rather than pushing. There would be time to push later. Assuming she survived whatever this was.
The chamber lurched once, softly, and then they were moving — not dropping anymore but traveling horizontally, fast enough that she felt it in her chest. Through what, she couldn't see. There were no windows. Just the dark and the pressure and Edi-Veen standing beside her, perfectly still, as if he did this every day.
He probably did.
Then the walls fell away. And his world, the Framula secret home spread before her.
She couldn’t manage neutrality. She didn’t bother trying. Her gasps said it all
She stepped forward, or at least tried to. Edi-Veen stopped her, or she would have slammed into the curved barrier that had surrounded them.
Enormous and impossible and completely invisible from above, their community had been built into the ocean floor like something the rock had grown rather than something anyone had made. Ancient ruins formed the bones of it, stone structures so old their edges had softened, their surfaces colonized by the dark of the deep. Over and around and through them, bubble-like pressurized domes had been constructed, dozens of them, stacked and connected, glowing from within with the same soft pink light she'd woken up in. She could see figures moving inside some of them. Living, breathing people, going about whatever it was they went about, far beneath a world that had no idea they were there.
The transport slid along the outer edge of it, and she turned to keep looking as long as she could.
She was a journalist. She was professionally trained to observe without reacting. She was very aware that the Fraluma standing beside her was watching her face.
She didn't manage neutral. She didn't even try.
"How," she said, and then couldn't finish the question because she wasn't sure which one to ask first.
How long?
How many?
How is it possible that nobody knows?
Who built this and when and why didn't they burn the world down to protect it?
Or did they?
"It has always been here," Edi-Veen said. Something in his voice had shifted — not warmer, exactly, but less contained, the way a person's voice changed when they spoke about something they loved without meaning to show it. "The ruins predate our creation. We did not build this place. We found it. We made it ours."
She looked at him. He was watching his home as it slid past them, and his face had the same quality as his voice — not open, but less closed. As if the sight of it did something to his discipline that he hadn't entirely armored against.
She looked away before he could notice her noticing.
The light changed. The darkness of the deep softened to a deep blue, then a lighter one, and she realized they were rising, angling upward through the water toward the surface. Trevort's twin suns made the upper water luminous — a diffuse silver-gold that came from everywhere at once and gave the ocean above them the quality of a lit ceiling.
She had lived on this planet her entire life. She had never seen it from here.
The chamber sealed around them again as they approached the surface, and the transition back was more abrupt than the descent — a solid clunk, a pressure shift, a moment of total darkness. Then the circle rose, and she was standing in a room she knew.
The warehouse smelled of old plasteele and disuse, which was exactly how it always smelled.
She'd been here a dozen times. Met sources in the far corner, behind the decommissioned freight panels. Stood in this exact spot waiting for Amir to show up late, as he always did. She knew the pattern of water stains on the ceiling and the way the secondary door stuck in humid weather and the particular echo the space made when it was empty.
She had never once looked at the floor and wondered what was under it.
"You use this building," she said. It wasn't a question.
