“Hobi.”
He looked back, startled. He had forgotten the nemosyne, forgotten where he was. An awful vertigo as he tried to focus on her amid all that gold and blue; then, amazingly, he found that he could do it. He could look at her, he could even walk back, dizzy but no longer nauseated.
“Hobi, look at the horizon.”
He looked behind him. He hadn’t noticed before the jagged green shapes spurting everywhere opposite the sea. Trees, he realized, trees and bushes. But then Nefertity took his hand and pulled him, gently, toward her.
“No, not there—the other way, the horizon, see? That line at the end of the ocean.”
He turned obediently and looked where she pointed. At the rim of the world, above the unbroken line of blue and turquoise water, seethed a blurry darkness, immense as the sea itself. The whitish sky ended abruptly where it met this livid wall. He remembered looking through ’files in his father’s library, hearing one of his friends describe a trompe l’oeil garden he had once visited on the vivarium level, and what he saw shimmering there.
Mountains, he thought in amazement. He turned to Nefertity. “Mountains!”
She shook her head. “No. Clouds, Hobi, it’s a storm—”
“Clouds?”
It was the first time he had ever spoken the word aloud, and he said it again, staring at the line of black and gray advancing steadily above the waves.
Clouds. A storm. Just as the moujiks had always predicted. Ucalegon, Prince of Storms. The Wave will take you.
Suddenly he laughed, laughed until he had to stoop, holding his ribs as the air swam about him, white and gold and green. He laughed so long and so hard that Nefertity’s eyes darkened from jade to emerald, and her body glowed in alarm as she plucked his sleeve and called out to him fruitlessly. Finally she grabbed his arm and started dragging him down the beach, the two of them stumbling through the sand. And still Hobi turned to stare back at the ocean and what loomed above it, that cinereous wall more massive than the domes, more massive than anything he could ever have imagined; he stared at it and laughed on and on and on, and the gulls banked above them, keening in the wind.
When they reached the edge of the beach he finally calmed down. Here trailers of greenery laced the sand, vines overgrown with flat yellow flowers that smelled sweet and whose hearts hid creamy spiders like pearls. Hobi took off his boots and socks, wincing at how hot it was. After a few minutes he pulled them back on again, swearing as he picked sand-spurs from his soles. Nothing grew on the stretch of sand between Araboth and the sea, but where the sand ended the jungle began. He had never before seen anything like this tangle of jade and brown and yellow, moving in the stiff wind, and the bursts of crimson and iridescent blue exploding from it as they approached.
“Those are birds,” Nefertity explained. She sounded rueful. “If I were a zoological unit, I would know their names.”
Hobi nodded. Already he recalled his other self—the self that had nearly been incapable of leaving the tunnel, the self that had crouched retching upon the sand—as he recalled his mother; someone precious but irredeemably lost. The air was so choked with smells that breathing was like eating—great gulps of roses and brine, a scent like carrion that turned out to be the fragrance of trumpet-shaped blossoms twining round a tree; the smell of the tree itself, heady with leaves and the spiciness of its decaying bark. He slashed at a branch with his hand, sending up a cloud of black and golden wings like sparks. Butterflies, he knew that from the vivariums. Birds and butterflies, and a dead crab’s leg. He would have rushed headlong into the thicket if Nefertity hadn’t stopped him.
“Higher ground, Hobi.”
He turned to her, aggravated. “How do you know all this? ‘Higher ground,’ ‘It’s a storm’?”
Her wide eyes gazed at him unblinkingly. The soft whir of circuitry echoed the waves behind them. “Loretta. Before our exile I went with her when she traveled, and she always spoke to me. And I know from my programmed histories. If we are where you say we are, that is a part of the country that was plagued with hurricanes long ago. After the Shining of the Second Ascension the weather patterns changed, and it was besieged by tidal waves.”
She pointed, far above them and inland, where a shadow rose in an uneven cusp against the blue sky. “There—that is high ground. We should try to go there. If we walk along the shore we may find a path inland, or running water. The woods here are too overgrown for us to pass through safely.”
Hobi fell silent, nodding, and trudged after her along the strand. His first ecstatic joy was fading. Hunger and thirst made his head ache. The sun beat down on him like a block of stone. Bits of old stories came back to him, of ghouls that lived Outside, the remnants of men who had been stricken by the mutagenic rains. The thought made him hurry behind Nefertity.
Once, he stopped and looked back down the beach. It seemed they had been walking for hours, but the gleaming curves of the domes seemed no more distant than they had before. Only the shape of the shoreline had changed, and the dark silhouette of the storm clouds. They filled most of the sky above the ocean now. The wind blew stiffly in from the sea. Great sheets of sand tore past him, tearing at his mouth and eyes and seeming to burn through his clothes.
He raised his hands to shield his face as he looked out to sea. The waves had grown bigger. They smashed against the beach, sending up plumes of froth and a dark spray of sand and broken shells. The wind had a different smell now, too. Different from the cleansing scent of the ocean, almost stagnant, as though from somewhere far away the clouds had sucked up fetid pools and carried them here. Even the air seemed heavy and moist. Hobi spat to get the taste of salt and grit from his mouth. The sun bulged from the clouds, luminous, faintly green. When he turned back to follow Nefertity he saw that the jungle of trees and cactus growing along the shore glowed with an eerie yellow light. Shells crunched beneath his feet. The bigger conches cast strange shadows across the sand, and his steps disturbed small things that raced to burrow into the scar.
It must have been several hours since they first peered Outside. The tor that was their destination no longer seemed so far away. Overhead the gulls had grown all but silent, wheeling fretfully and occasionally diving into the waves. From the trees came a constant rush of wings. He looked up to see dark shapes arrowing against the sky, heading inland. Once or twice he halted and tried to make out some sound from the direction of Araboth, but there was nothing, only the pounding waves, and the wind stinging his ears.
When he looked up he saw that Nefertity had stopped to wait for him. The ground at her feet was brighter than it was elsewhere. As he approached he saw that water poured in a narrow stream from the woods down to the sea. He ran the last few yards, stumbling to his knees in the shallow water and drinking greedily. Then he lay on his back, letting the stream pour over him until his clothes were soaked and his sunburned face soothed. He stood, flinging back his long hair so that it hung heavy and wet on his neck.
“We can follow this,” Nefertity said. She pointed to where the woods opened up on either side of the stream, vine-hung trees and rosebushes giving way to cactus and small gnarled trees covered with papery, dull-orange flowers. “It might lead us up to that hill. At least we will be inland when the storm hits. If we hurry.”
He glanced back at the domes of Araboth. They reflected the darkening sky, the sun a white blister on the curved surface. He knew now that he would never go back. Something inside of him had broken, a connection that had once tethered him to his parents, his dead mother and mad father, but now was gone. He felt fairly certain that he would die out here, and sooner rather than later; but if what the nemosyne said was true, if the city really was crumbling, then he would have died anyway. At least now he had seen the city from Outside, a sight only the Aviators had ever glimpsed from their Gryphons; and he had walked with a nemosyne, a creation from the First Days, and heard her speak with the voice of a woman centuries dead. Not even Shiyung Orsina had ever done all these things; not even Nasrani. His exhaustion eased somewhat at the thought. He started walking up the middle of the streambed, the wind sending his damp clothes flapping against his feverish body.