“Then why do you hide her? Eh, Nasrani—”
He grabbed the man’s arm. Nasrani felt the metal claws beneath the thin sheath of leather, their grip tightening until he gasped and then moaned. A dark stain spread across his sleeve.
“I must see her.” Nasrani whimpered. The rasa’s touch was cold and foul as an open grave. “I need her to find the others, to see if any of the other units survived. I need them to track someone, someone Outside. Take me to her now —”
He shoved Nasrani from him. The man fell to his knees, groaning and trying to stanch the blood soaking his robe. “Yes,” he gasped. “I’ll take you, of course I’ll take you…”
The rasa nodded and extended his hand to help the man to his feet. “We will go then,” said the Aviator Imperator. His shadow filled the narrow doorway. “To the Undercity; to find the Mother of Angels.”
“Zalophus—oh, Zalophus, please —”
At the end of the zeuglodon’s tank the gynander stood, panting. She had run all the way here, past the first shift of biotechs and vivisectors on their way to the Chambers of Mercy, past the white masked guards who hurried from the gravator as she rushed past them on her way down to Dominations. They all seemed too intent on their own business to notice her; news of Shiyung’s murder had just reached the Orsinate’s security staff. For the moment she was safe.
It was all too much, as though Ceryl’s dream had grown to envelope the city and all within it; and Reive was in it, too, she could not escape no matter how quickly she fled. Only here did she feel she might somehow outrun it, that huge green serpent coiling about the domes and squeezing them until she could feel the floor beneath her buckling, the very walls bulging in upon her until she thought she would scream—
But that was just her heart pounding, her chest straining so that it felt as though stones bashed her insides. She stopped, panting, then began running again; because if she waited more than a moment, the Wave would overtake her.
Now Reive was in the main vivarium chamber, where biotechs padded on their morning rounds, drawing blood and brain tissue from the palingenic dolphins, checking the stress monitors on the gentle manatees, who wept like women when their calves were taken from them. A few of the workers eyed her curiously, but it was too early in the shift, there was too much to be done, to worry about a white-faced morphodite running aimlessly among the tanks.
“Oh, Zalophus, hurry, please—”
Her teeth chattered and she skipped from foot to foot like a child playing. “ Zalophus! ” she wailed.
An explosion; then a small island reared from the dark green surface. A single huge black eye stared at her, and teeth like a row of shinbones clashed as his voice boomed and filled the chamber.
“Oh, happy day, child of the morning, you have come to play with me?” Zalophus rolled onto his back, his huge fins splashing at the water so that a wave rolled over the side and soaked Reive.
“Zalophus,” she gasped, spluttering. “Oh, Zalophus, you must help us—”
“Of course,” the great whale crooned, “come here and I will sing to you, little thing, I will tell you about my sisters, and the icelands where they are waiting for us—”
“No, Zalophus! We need you, you must tell us where we can go to hide!”
Zalophus righted himself and stared at her with huge rolling eyes. “You have brought another siren,” he said hopefully. “That is so nice, sirens make such sweet companions.”
Reive shook her head, shivering. “No, we haven’t. Zalophus, they will kill us, they think we murdered the margravine.”
Zalophus snapped his jaw. “A margravine would be just as nice.”
“No! She’s not here, they—” Reive wrung her hands. “Zalophus, you know all the levels here, you’ve been beneath the domes. Tell us where we can go, where they won’t find us. Tell us, please—we will come back, we will sneak here at night and bring you whatever you want—”
Across the cavernous chamber a woman taking blood from a rorqual looked up and stared at Reive. Zalophus rolled over to shrewdly regard the gynander with his other eye. After a moment he said, “One of the margravines had a baby once. I heard them talking about it. A monster, a heteroclite. She sent it to the Chambers of Mercy; but the vivisectors did not kill it, they said it would bring ill luck. I remember, I heard them talking. I think you must be that monster. Come closer to me so that I can see you better.”
The gynander ignored him, then lowering her voice she took a step toward the tank. “Zalophus, the Aviator Imperator has gone mad. None of us will be safe, not even you. If you tell us of a safe place to hide for now we will find a way to free you—tomorrow, at Æstival Tide. We will find a way, we promise.”
Water raced down the zeuglodon’s snout as he raised his head to stare at her. “There is a way, little thing,” he groaned, a sound like crumbling stone. A summer smell filled the air. “Last night I dreamed of the other one, the little man they killed to make me. He told me that the world Outside is closer now, closer than it ever has been before. When I woke I sounded to the deepest depths and it is true, heteroclite child: the world is waking and moving in its sleep.”
Reive shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said desperately. “We have no time for your stories now, you must tell us of a way to escape.”
“Come with me.” Zalophus rose until his head hung above the dark water, a green-whorled sun blotting out the false daylight. “Come with me, little thing, and I will show you the new world. There is a crack where the water valves run into the Undercity. Each day it is widening. Soon it will be big enough for me to enter, and then I will find them, then my sisters will come to meet me—”
“There is no way out! You have no sisters!” Reive shouted. The woman bending over the rorqual looked over in alarm. “They have been dead for a million years! I hope you starve here—”
She turned and ran from the vivarium. The zeuglodon watched her leave, then rolled onto his back, sending another wave rushing from the tank onto the concrete floor. A moment later he disappeared, sounding the depths of his prison to where the chink in the walls was widening, and warm water poured in through a black mouth opening onto the world.
In a chamber on the vivarium level, Âziz Orsina sat gazing at the body of her sister Shiyung. Tubes and wires ran from the corpse to a series of vats and monitors, alembics and computers controlled by the Architects’ rehabilitation nexus. It would be days before Shiyung could be restored as a rasa, certainly not until after Æstival Tide. Âziz wondered what effect this would have on the lower levels. Shiyung had always been the favorite of the moujiks and the biotechs, as much for her prettiness and childish enthusiasms as for her occasional sallies down to visit the toilers in the refineries and the vivariums. It didn’t matter that Shiyung never did anything besides smile and share an occasional pappadam with carefully selected drones. The others, the rest of the work force, would see her in person and later that evening on the ’files and puppet shows. They would see her, forehead daubed with blue and black to show solidarity with the Church of Christ Cadillac, smiling as she ate fermented beans with the refineries’ human supervisors, the rasas in pale ranks behind her, and still later they would watch as, her lovely white face flushed with excitement, she torched the pyres for the public burnings.
How would they react to Shiyung as a rasa?
Âziz nibbled her fingernail and pushed her hair from her face. Beside her the biotechnician she’d chosen for the project watched nervously, making a great show of adjusting and readjusting the levels in the chemical bath that lapped at Shiyung’s pale form.