I had been dreaming about Kichlan. And in my dreams, he was alive.
My eyes opened slowly. Lad stood on the other side of the tube. He watched me.
I wanted to tell him I had dreamed of his brother. He would like that. Did he dream about Kichlan too?
But the darkness still held me. So I could only meet Lad’s eyes, just for that moment, before mine closed again.
But in the darkness, I dreamed of Kichlan. In my dreams, he was alive.
And that was better than nothing.
“
Please just sit in the wheelchair, Tanyana,” Aladio said, red in the face, exasperated but obviously trying to hide it. He gestured again to the hideous chair with its lime green cushions and large metal wheels, as though that would possibly help his argument. “It’s for your own good.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was not the Lad I knew. Not the man who had sacrificed himself to save me from Aleksey
’s vicious twin blades, and not the ghost who had reprogrammed my suit and liberated me from the control of the puppet men. It hurt every time I saw him, looking so much the same. So I had to keep reminding myself, in the face of my memories and my guilt—this was not Lad. This was
Aladio
.
“
I can walk,” I said, throat grinding, sore and always thirsty. It hurt to speak, but there was no way I would keep silent. “I will walk.”
He shoved the chair.
“You’re being obstinate just for the sake of it now!”
I gritted my teeth.
“And you can stop treating me like a child whenever you like.”
Apparently I
’d been out of the tube for two days. It was impossible to tell, because I’d been kept in this room since then and it had no windows. I wasn’t certain windows would help, either. Did a world of nothingness even have a sun?
Lad—no,
Aladio
—was the only person I’d seen. He didn’t come to keep me company, he didn’t come to talk, and sometimes he couldn’t even look me in the eye. Instead, he came to test the integrity of my silex bonds. He couldn’t even bring himself to touch me, and when he had no choice—when the silex splintered and he had to patch it with tubes full of viscous liquid—he wore thick, white gloves.
I glanced down at the strange band of crystal around my wrist, and the light inside it brightened. This
silex
was delicate stuff. It looked like ice-shavings. Thick around my wrists, ankles, waist and neck—in fact, anywhere the suit had been drilled into my bones. A fine layer coated most of my body, like a dusting of sugar or the crust of a shallow pond. It itched against my skin and made disturbing creaking noises when I moved.
Aladio took a deep breath, and when he faced me he was calm again, his expression false and all too patient.
“And that’s very good, Tanyana. Very good. You are healing very well.”
I hated that look on his face and that too-sweet tone of voice. It was all so wrong.
“But you know you need to be careful. If you’re too rough on your silex bonds the Flare inside you will eat you all up, and it would destroy all of us at the same time. So be a good girl and sit in the wheelchair, or you’ll have to go back in the tube. Do you want that, Tanyana? Do you want to go back in the tube?”
It made me sick. But my neck hurt, and my piecemeal body felt so fragile—divided by light and held together with little more than glass. So I gave in. I sat in the wheelchair and let Aladio fuss over me.
“I don’t understand,” I said, quietly, as he wheeled me around to face the door. “What is a
Flare
? What have you done to me? Where is everybody else?”
He tapped symbols glowing on a glass panel riveted into the wall beside the door. Something like a pion lock, I
’d decided, but it required a code. I’d studied those symbols for bells. Not only because that door was the only way to escape, but because they reminded me too strongly of the symbols that had bobbed and glowed on the bands of my suit. The same symbols the ancient Unbound had used to write books with, the ones we’d found glowing inside the Keeper’s Mountain.
That had to mean I
’d come to the right place. There were programmers here, people who could—I hoped—help me defeat the puppet men.
I swallowed against crystal and a faintly warm, burning sensation.
“Where are you taking me?”
Aladio hesitated.
“To someone who can save you,” he answered. “I hope.”
My dim, hazy reflection wavered in the door
’s smooth steel as it slid open. My eyes were red, irritated and always vaguely itchy. The skin around the edge of my mouth and nose was dry and cracked. They’d shaved my head, and it emphasised the pale ridges of my old scars, now running beside protruding patterns in silex. I was grateful there were no real mirrors here, and I could not see myself in detail.
He wheeled me out into corridors of white tiles and blue paint. There was something loose in the left wheel and it rattled, incessant, grating. The floor was a kind of strange, spongy polymer that squeaked beneath us and was coloured to look like stone. I tried to memorise the way he was taking me, the number of silver doors we passed, the corners we took, left or right. But it all looked the same, and I lost track.
Finally, we stopped at a set of large silver doors. More tapping, and they slid open. I noticed a larger symbol shining in red above the panel on the wall, and I recognised it instantly—
debris
.
“
Wait.” I clutched at the top of the wheels but could barely grip them, let alone slow myself down. “What is this place?” Memories of my suiting, of the puppet men with their needles sent shivers of panic rattling through my crystal.
“
Calm down or I will have to strap you to the arm rests!”
We entered a long, narrow and dimly lit room. It was cold. The clothes they had given me were thin cotton shirt and pants, and slipper-like shoes I did not bother to wear. I had not needed anything warmer until now.
Lidless coffins of solid crystal lined the walls. So similar to the one we’d found in the mountain room, but some of these held bodies. A woman, young, dressed in a white robe. The skin of her neck and hands was so pale it was almost blue. She appeared to breathe, but long breaths ever so slow. They steamed out from beneath a silex mask, condensing in the cold air. The end of her coffin was capped with a silver cone. A prism spun at the very tip. About the size of a clenched fist, it scattered light across the room. Tiny mirrors dotted the ceiling and the walls. They caught this light, reflected it, and sent it to a giant shard of crystal floating in the centre of the room.
Aladio parked me in front of the giant shard. Almost as tall as the ceiling, with a sharply tapered top and bottom, it rotated slowly. Light rippled inside it, the same light that rippled inside of me.
“What is that?” I whispered, and leaned forward to touch gentle fingertips to its smooth, warm surface.
Aladio paused. He glanced over his shoulder. He bent to fiddle with the left wheel.
I turned my hand, wrist close to the giant crystal, and watched the way our rainbow of lights entangled. “Lad, please.”
He shuddered.
“Don’t call me that,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “My name is Aladio.”
“
Lad
,” I said again, insistent, and shoved my wrist at him. “Explain this to me. Why am I here, and not dead? Why am I glowing the way that crystal thing is glowing? What have you done with my baby?
What is going on
?”
“
Just—just calm yourself. Don’t do anything that might weaken your silex bonds. Just—sit, quietly—and fuck, woman, don’t call me that. No one calls me that anymore.” Lad stood, placed a hand on the crystal. “Not for a long time.”
I tried to do what he said. Deep breaths. I rested my hands in my lap.
“There,” I said. “I’m calm. Now it’s your turn. Explain this to me.”
He shook his head.
“Not my job. Just had to bring you here. Because you seem to like me. Because, when I’m around, your silex holds. Don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense.” Finally, he met my gaze. “Nothing about you makes sense.”
“
Other’s darkness, don’t I know it.”
“
Other
? Why do you keep saying that?”
I shrugged, and winced at a cracking somewhere in my shoulder.
“It’s a curse. You know, something you say to add…emphasis to a situation.” I’d never heard Lad swear, although he’d seemed to enjoy it when other people did.
Aladio bent to inspect my neck and upper back.
“A curse, truly?” His gloved fingers, as they pressed the skin around my silex, were gentle. And warm. “How odd.”
“
La—Aladio, please. Why have you brought me in here?”
“
This room has a direct connection to the veil,” said a voice behind me. “This is where we upload programmers to monitor the Guardian program. And this is how we will send you home.”
I twisted in my chair. A small group of men and women entered the room, all wearing crisp white robes. Most were tapping at bright symbols on the clear class panels they carried—like pion slides, just larger—one was empty handed, and smiled at me. An older man, head shaved like mine, his face lined with age rather than scarring. There was silex embedded in his temples. Only small crystal shards, about the size and shape of a fingerprint, each shining with a different coloured light.
Aladio turned me around to face him. The man crouched, and held out a hand. “I’m sorry for the belated welcome, Tanyana,” he said. “I am the Specialist, head programmer of Fulcrum. I apologise for your treatment, but we needed to stabilise the Pionic Flare within you before we could do anything else.”
“
Head programmer?” I took a deep breath. I had to concentrate. No more panic, no more weakness. I was here for a reason. “Good. You’re just the person I want to see.” I took his hand. He touched me gingerly.
“
Am I?” He lifted his eyebrows and sat back a little, dusting off the silex I had left on his palm.
I started to nod, felt something crack and ease at the back of my neck, and stopped.
“Yes. I need your help.” The door behind him opened, and more people came through, this time pushing something on wheels. I ignored them, and held the Specialist’s gaze. “You see, back on my world, the doors are opening, and the puppet men—creatures that you created!—have undone the Keeper so there’s no one to close them. If we don’t stop them, then both of our worlds will be destroyed.”
The Specialist looked at me like I was speaking another language. He glanced up at Aladio before patting my knee, gently.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand you. I wish I did. You can’t know just how much I wish I could help you, and talk to you, learn about your world and find out just how you managed to cross over into ours. This has never happened, not in all our history, and it shouldn’t even be possible—” He paused, and sighed, shaking his head. “But we just don’t have time. Tanyana, we’re going to send you home. Now.”
He stood, and gestured to Aladio. I found myself wheeled deeper into the room.
“Wait!” I cried after him. “Home? But I need your help!”
This time we stopped at a single glass coffin in the centre of the room. Thin, transparent wires trailed their way from a large prism at its top, pulsing with light and leading directly to the giant glowing crystal. Was this what the coffin in the mountain would have looked like, long ago? So bright instead of dark, pulsing rather than quiet, almost a living thing rather than a dusty tool.
“Now, don’t struggle,” Aladio said. Before I even knew what was happening he lifted me from my chair and laid me in the cold, hard bed. This close, I realised there were flecks of gold threading through the crystal so tight around me. I recognised that too—I’d seen rubble of the same material in the ruins of the underground Unbound street.
“
What—” it was hard to talk. “What are you doing?”
The Specialist leaned into view.
“This is for your own good. Aladio, calm her down.”
Aladio crouched beside me.
“Really, it’s for the best,” he said.
Cold seeped up from the coffin and wound itself through me. I had to focus so hard just to move my arm and clutch at Aladio
’s sleeve.
“
Lad,” I gasped. “Lad, don’t let them. Lad, please.”
He pulled back, expression hard.
“I told you not to call me that.”
“
You have to listen to me!” The light within me surged with my effort, and it was warm. It dissolved the clutching cold and held the numbness at bay. I wrapped both hands around the edges of the coffin and slowly, ever so slowly, pulled myself upright. “I came all this way, I risked so much, so you would help me! My world, your world, both our worlds are under threat. There are these…these things… I call them the puppet men. I don’t think they have a real name. They are trying to bring down the veil.”
I managed to sit up. The Specialist stood between my coffin and the giant crystal, surrounded by large, floating screens covered in bright symbols. His fingers danced across them, the silex in his skull flickered to the same rhythm as his hands. All around me was so much light. It gathered in the crystal, it shone in hard, steady beams from the mirrors in the walls, filling the room with a complicated pattern, a labyrinthine mesh of colour. The other programmers stood at regular intervals around us, each with their own group of smaller, floating screens.
The Specialist frowned at me. “Bring down the veil? No one in their right mind would want to do that.”