“My father,” Hobi said, dazed. He stepped toward the nemosyne, abruptly stopped. The floor shook ominously beneath him, and eddies of fine dust cascaded down from the broken ceiling. He froze, gazing desperately at the nemosyne only a few feet away.
“I can’t move.” His voice cracked; dust in his throat made it hurt to speak. “It will all come down—my father did this, he programmed the Architects to destroy the city—”
“How do you know this?”
“I overheard them.” He was practically babbling now. “A few days ago—in his study. They said there was a—a breach, somewhere down here. I didn’t understand…. He was indoctrinating the program, he ordered them to do this—”
The nemosyne stared at him, her emerald eyes serene. Pale blue light pulsed about her hand as she raised it and reached for him. “I will go with you, Hobi. Let us leave this place now.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “Go? We can’t go —it’s falling to pieces around us—”
A distant explosion. The room shook again, and one of the rasas whispered a name. Nefertity looked down at the broken creature, then back at Hobi, her hand still extended toward him. “We can leave the city,” she insisted gently. “Perhaps we will find the others of my kind, Outside.”
Hobi swallowed, shut his eyes, and breathed deeply. He thought of the tunnel that had brought him here, the overpowering smell of brackish water. He remembered how only a day before he had dreamed of this, madly: to find the nemosyne again and leave Araboth, venture Outside and die there if needs be.
“Hobi.” Nefertity’s voice was soft. He opened his eyes to see her in front of him, her crystalline hand upon his shoulder. “Hobi, it’s time.”
And at that word time he heard it again—the same sweet high chiming that had rung in his ears the first time he saw her. He nodded dumbly, glancing around until he saw the door at the far end of the room, the entrance to the tunnel. Part of the wall had collapsed beside it, the door itself hung open; but he could see the faint green glow of phosphorescence inside, hear the distant purling of water.
“That way,” he croaked. He began to pick his way through the rubble, stepping over an unmoving rasa and averting his eyes from the sight of the Titanium Children crushed and splintered into arrows of golden glass. Beside him Nefertity walked in a nimbus of azure light, her hand upon his shoulder firm and cool. Once the floor shifted beneath them, sliding so suddenly that Hobi cried out and nearly fell. But the nemosyne caught him, and as in a dream he walked the last few steps until they stood within the doorway.
Nefertity’s hand slipped from him and her voice came soft in his ear. “Do you know the way?”
Hobi shook his head. “No. But I think the tunnel leads out—at least once it did, it was a sewage tunnel. I think it might lead to the sea.”
“Ah.” She stepped before him into the gloom.
For a moment the boy remained, and gazed back into the room: the banners torn and furled about broken beams, the pale, nearly luminous bodies half-buried beneath the rubble, and Nasrani’s ancient toys shattered where they had been sleeping.
“No known remedy,” the Anodyne Physician murmured. In the darkness a rasa whispered, and something moved, slithering across the floor. Hobi bit his lip, and turned to where Nefertity waited for him.
“This way?” she asked.
He nodded: there was no other way to go.
They walked in the eerie darkness, Hobi running his hand against the damp wall and Nefertity gliding noiselessly beside him. Her aura deepened from azure to cobalt and then faded to a pale sapphire, barely enough light to see by; but her adamant heart shone brilliantly, a golden orb flashing in the darkness. The tunnel pressed close around them, dank and cold. Hobi’s feet slipped through shallow water, and he heard water rushing very near to them, as though an adjoining tunnel served as a conduit or sluiceway. Other sounds echoed from far away: soft roars and crashes, sudden cracks and booms. And always the sound of water, seeming to grow louder now, as though the sluiceway had opened onto a river. Hobi hugged his hands in his armpits, shivering, his jaw clenched, but after they had been traveling a little while he relaxed. He was cold, true, his feet nearly numb from sloshing through chilly stagnant water; and he had seen what no one else in Araboth had, the breach in Angels that would send the whole thing crashing down in a day or two.
But oddly enough he was no longer afraid. He almost felt elated, if it hadn’t been that his feet were damn near frozen he might have run down the narrow passageway instead of slogging through the muck.
“You are tired,” Nefertity said. They had come to where the passage opened onto the larger tunnel. Hobi leaned against the archway, panting.
“Tired?” He looked up into those huge depthless eyes, the silvery whorls and deltas of her face. Suddenly he grinned. “No, I’m not tired—just trying to figure out which way to go.”
She nodded. Splinters of gold and green flecked the air about her face, and without thinking Hobi reached to touch her cheek. It grew warm beneath his fingertips. When he drew his hand back the imprint of his fingers remained, azure petals glowing against her quicksilver skin, then slowly faded.
How can she be so beautiful? he thought. His chest felt tight with a longing so intense it made him dizzy. Something warm brushed his forehead. He blinked, saw the nemosyne staring at him, her eyes wide, reflecting nothing, her voice sweet and heartless as a bird’s.
“Do you know the way?”
He started to say no, then stopped and nodded.
“Down there,” he said, and pointed away from the direction he had first come with the rasa. “I don’t know where it goes, but that way leads back to the Undercity, the gravator—” They started to walk once more.
For a long time they went without talking. The sound of rushing water grew louder, the water splashing about their feet rose higher, until it reached the tops of Hobi’s knees. Around Nefertity the water glowed. When Hobi looked down he could see tiny shapes darting about her legs, tiny black fish like feathers streaming through the water as they followed her. He could no longer hear the boom and crash of the Undercity’s foundation shifting. He could no longer hear anything but water. It didn’t seem quite so dark. Algae and fungi still blotched the curved walls above the waterline but did not glow, only covered the ancient tile like a dark stain. The air was warmer here, too. It flowed through invisible vents and stirred Hobi’s long hair matted on his neck, and carried with it the overwhelming reek of the sea.
And, absurdly, as that smell grew stronger, he grew more frightened. A few feet in front of him Nefertity moved effortlessly, the water streaming from her silvery thighs. As though sensing his fear she turned to look back. Hobi coughed, wiping his face with his wet sleeve and trying to compose himself. He asked, “What was she like? The woman who made you?”
The nemosyne waited until he caught up with her. “She did not make me. Others made me; she programmed me. She was my archivist.”
“Loretta?”
She nodded. The water had grown shallow again, and the nemosyne stooped to gaze into it, where a black mass pooled like ink around her glittering feet. She dipped her hand into the water and brought it up full of tiny wriggling shapes, let them slide between her fingers back into the shallows. “They will die if they keep following me,” she said, gazing ahead. “Up there the water stops—”
Hobi squinted and sloshed on. Nefertity followed.
“Loretta Riding,” she said after a minute. “She was a Sister, a member of the American Catholic Church.” She tilted her head toward Hobi. “You know who they are?”