Armed attackers were entering the tunnel up ahead, but she gestured and the quickstone wall slammed down on them, burying them. Then she was running past and a new opening was growing in front of her, and when she leapt through she was in the Oraculum, where the proto-Oracles were thrashing on their couches – only Mandia was upright, struggling to stand – and the staff were gone, either fled or helping the fighters outside: graser fire caused the air to crackle in the surrounding corridors.
Kenna grabbed Mandia.
The others were helpless, but Kenna had to accept her current limitations, and save the one she could. She hauled Mandia into another, newly opened servitor tunnel, commanded the entrance to flow shut, and pulled Mandia into a staggering run. When they had made enough distance horizontally, Kenna stopped, holding Mandia upright – the girl was wheezing, wet with sweat and trembling – and commanded the floor to melt.
At this point the Palace was five levels deep, but where they stood was above internal walls, five metres thick or more, in the lower levels. They sank downwards – in a bubble of air for Mandia’s sake – until they were all the way through and below the Palace, coming into a corridor in the Secundum Stratum.
By chance it was deserted for the moment: a polished marble-like corridor with clean lines, not too different from the style of the Primum Stratum where the Palace was situated, except that here the surroundings were solid, not quickstone, with little in the way of inbuilt systems.
I’ll need disguise.
So much for planning in advance. Leaving Mandia slumped against the wall, Kenna jogged along the corridor, knowing she had to do something fast: she was a woman formed entirely of crystal and there was no way she could blend in while looking like this.
Here.
It was a store fronted by vitreous membrane that was currently hard and opaque, not open for business, and it came to Kenna that this must be one of those areas where everything was brightly lit all the time, and people chose sleep-wake cycles to suit themselves individually, unlike the communal-consent approach which was the most common alternative.
The membrane liquefied and Kenna stepped through, leaving it softened because she was going to exit through it very shortly. There were clothing racks – the store was dark but she could see well enough – and she found leggings, pulled them on, then smart-boots that wrapped around her feet and calves, tightening themselves in place. Then a dark tunic with long sleeves, and when she pulled it on, the sleeves lengthened to cover her transparent hands all the way to the fingertips, and morphed to form integral gloves. Finally a full-length hooded cloak.
A small payment pad rested on a shelf, requesting recompense for the garments that the customer was purchasing. Kenna had no time to decipher its protocols – there had been nothing like this in the Palace – so she reached out and crushed it into powder instead.
No alarms followed.
Good enough.
When she went back out, there was still no one in sight, but voices drifted from around a long curve in the corridor: easy conversation, a light laugh, and total ignorance of the violence taking place in the Primum Stratum above. Kenna slipped away in the opposite direction, pulling her hood low, and returned to Mandia, who was now sitting on the floor, back against the wall, staring blankly.
Once more Kenna pulled Mandia upright, and supported her as they walked, coming out into a larger thoroughfare where people did not quite stare at them – this was a polite place – as they headed for a large, platinum-inlaid disc on the floor. Ruby lights winked at their approach, and Kenna pressed Mandia’s palm against a horizontal pad atop a waist-high stalk, a metre from the disc – which began to rotate and separate into a complex affair of blade-like segments that clacked and clattered, then dropped to form a helical staircase. The rotation stopped as the treads snapped into place.
Kenna kept one arm around Mandia’s waist as they descended. Once down and clear of the treads, the whole assemblage reversed procedure, pulling upwards and turning as the disc reformed and locked into place – except that Kenna and Mandia were now below it: a circle on the ceiling of the Tertium Stratum, and one that would not grant access without specific authorisation.
Descent was straightforward; only upward movement required authorisation.
Fifteen more descents, and they were in a region of raw tunnels lit – and given habitable atmosphere – by ceiling fluorofungus, where dwelling-tunnels featured rows of hollowed-out al-coves that served as homes, and dumb-fabric hangings served as doors and interior walls, and the people were on the whole kind to each other, because this was a community strong in the face of poverty, where working together meant survival.
It was a good place to find a hospice, run by older folk with steady eyes and plain speech, who would not turn away the young girl-woman left at their door by a silent, hooded figure – her clothes far too rich for this stratum – who slipped away without greeting anyone. They helped Mandia inside with kindness.
Kenna moved on.
Other people were beginning to follow her, made suspicious by her clothing and lack of speech, so when the tunnel curved and her pursuers were out of sight, she broke into a run, moving fast and easily now, until she came to a high chamber formed of natural, raw rock in which a lava pool glowed and bubbled.
Dead end.
I will not fight them.
Let them wonder at her disappearance. She stared at the lava pool.
This will be fine.
With a neat motion, she dived into the molten lava and swam downwards through the hot, viscous liquid rock, not caring as her garments burnt away and the heat grew stronger, because this was freedom and wonderful. Something brushed against her – she felt angular flukes – and knew it for the one of the little studied native forms that lived inside the magma, and drew inspiration from the ease with which it moved here.
This world will be good enough.
Give it a millennium or two, she thought as she swam, and then she would move on. There was no hurry.
It would take time to become the person she needed to be.
THIRTY-SEVEN
EARTH, 1972 AD
Alone in her flat, Gavriela lay one slightly arthritic hand upon a project notebook and said to no one at alclass="underline" ‘I always thought it would be the death of me.’ But here she was, sixty-four years old and mostly healthy, mostly retired, mostly enjoying life. A label on the notebook’s front cover explained the project’s name:
High
Energy
Interstellar
Meson
Detection,
Amplification &
Lensing
Lattice
It rarely spooked her these days, the thought that she had written out an identical description during wartime Oxford, scribbling in her personal notebook while asleep, something she had never done before or since. When Charles, her department head at Imperial, had first suggested she take over the meson research team and showed her the name of a project that Lucas Krause had proposed, he had actually been concerned for her health because of the blood draining from her face. But she had recovered and accepted the job, and nothing had come of it save for a wealth of readings concerning the behaviour of mesons from cosmic rays.
Their decay-time was affected by relativistic distortion, because their velocities were so high, providing one more validation of Einstein’s work: her hero, who had once played her nine discordant notes upon his violin, as an indication that they had more in common than a love of physics.