When she finally reached the plant-house ring, it was deserted. The plant-house lamps were lit, but no night growers cast shadows on the walls. The first pipe loomed about fifty meters beyond the plant houses, faintly illuminated by the domes. Its angled top end cut a sharp silhouette against the dark gray of the night sky. Vanja halted by the outer edge of the plant-house ring. Snatches of song drifted through the streets behind her, along with cries of anger, drunkenness, or fear. The breeze coming in from the tundra smelled of wet grass and old vehicles. The sight of the impossibly huge pipes made it hard to breathe, hard to take the first step. Instinct shrieked at her to run before it was too late, run and go to ground, hide in a faraway corner, under a bed, in Nina’s arms, be quiet and invisible until the pipes moved elsewhere. But there were no safe places anymore. The only way was onward. She forced her feet forward, step by step, toward the pipe that led down to the machine.
When she finally found the right spot, she had come out on the other side of fear. Her skin felt stretched and prickly, her legs soft and unsteady, but it was like looking out a window. She was inside, her body and the tundra outside. The low opening was still there. The ladder was still attached to the inside. Resting her hand on the edge, she realized she hadn’t brought a flashlight. She would have to do this in the dark. Terror came creeping back.
“It’s only my body doing this,” Vanja whispered to herself. “It’s not me. It’s only my body.” She swung a leg over the rim.
The weak light from above faded almost immediately. When she finally set her foot on firm ground, the darkness was complete, aside from the colorful trails and blotches her brain created to fill the absence of light. The vibration was stronger here, the noise clear and suddenly complex; it wasn’t a single buzzing, but the sound of many small parts working in unison. She wasn’t alone in the tunnel. Something else was in there with her. Vanja stood still, waiting while bile rose in her throat. Nothing happened. There was only the awareness of a vast presence. She walked slowly toward the sound, sticking closely to the rough wall.
Her left foot hit the door with a crash that made her crouch against the wall and shield her head with her arms. In the echo that followed, she thought she could hear small, quick footsteps down the tunnel. She reached up and fumbled for the handle. It allowed itself to be pushed down. She slunk in through the opening and closed the door as quickly as she could without making a racket.
On the other side, the greenish-white lichen that dotted the ceiling beat the darkness into retreat and illuminated the staircase. Vanja sat on the steps until she no longer had to struggle to breathe, then continued down, to the door that waited at the bottom. When she opened it, the noise suddenly swelled to a deafening roar.
The air was damp and heavy with a stench of salt and sewage that stuck to the roof of her mouth. The machine working in the middle of the room seemed to have grown. The wheel had cut a deep furrow in the chamber’s ceiling. Shards and chipped stone littered the ground around the engine, which looked more rounded somehow. Someone was standing in front of the machine, watching Vanja.
Vanja’s eyes slipped when she tried to focus on whoever it was. It was a person, but what features or coloring or shape they had was impossible to tell. It was neither, indeterminate, not entirely there. Vanja had to avert her eyes. At the edge of her vision, she could see the shape approach. Looking indirectly seemed fruitfuclass="underline" she could make out an eye, hands that weren’t entirely hands, skin, but everything kept flowing and shifting. She knew who it had to be and took a deep and shaky breath.
“Are you Berols’ Anna?”
The figure paused. “Are you Berols’ Anna?” Its voice vibrated through Vanja’s chest. “Are you?”
“Are you?”
Laughter. “Are you are you?”
It came closer. Heat radiated from its mass. Something soft touched Vanja’s cheek, tracing the contours of her face. “Are you?” It no longer sounded like mimicry. A short pause. “Yes. Also.”
“Did you build the machine? And the tunnels? And the pipes? What does the machine do?” Vanja asked.
“Everyone built. We and you. The machine is ours.” The thing caressing Vanja’s face suddenly pinched her cheek. “You thought it. We thought it.”
Vanja tried to focus on Berols’ Anna’s shape again, only to be rewarded with a twinge of pain between her eyes. “Are you happy?” she asked. “Are you a happy commune?”
Berols’ Anna laughed again. “The word… the language. Is too small. Yes. We are everything. But you”—a soft touch against her cheek again—“you are not.”
“Happy? Or too small?”
Warmth twined itself around Vanja’s body. A heavy scent of something like blood crowded out the stench of sewage. The heat made her fear dissipate. “Yes,” Berols’ Anna murmured above her. “Wan-ja. Your shell is too small.”
Vanja grasped what felt like an arm. It was solid, yet not. It buzzed with restrained energy. “Can you come and save us? In Amatka?”
“Let us in,” Berols’ Anna crooned.
“But how?”
“Remove the names. Set the words free. Just a little more. Burn a little more.”
“Like the library.”
“Yes. A little more.”
“Then you’ll come?”
“Then we’ll come. You’ll be everything. You’ll all be everything.”
Berols’ Anna grazed Vanja’s cheek and raised her chin. Vanja opened her eyes and looked into Berols’ Anna’s face, and it suddenly snapped into focus.
The night after Lars had told her about the lights in the sky above the old world, Vanja had had a dream. The gray veil that enshrouded the sky had cracked and blown away. Against a deep black background, gigantic spheres, glowing in colors Vanja had never seen before, slowly moved through the heavens with a sound that shook the earth. The ground fell away beneath her. She hung suspended in the void, inconceivably small amid the glory of the spheres.
That same feeling returned when she looked into Berols’ Anna’s eyes. It blew everything else away.
Vanja didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d climbed down the shaft, but it was still late evening or night when she came back up. The pipes rising into the sky no longer terrified her. They belonged to Amatka. All around her was the low creaking of new pipes pushing out of the ground.
The streets were empty. From some houses noise as if from a party or a fight could be heard. The scrap boxes outside the buildings had been knocked over. From one of them a large puddle of gloop had leaked onto the pavement. Somewhere to the east was Nina, swept up in the hysteria.
The door to the commune office was open. Windows were lit here and there in the building, especially on the top floor where the committee was at work. The reception was dark, but when Vanja turned on a desk lamp, it became apparent that someone had been there at some point during the evening. Papers and logs were in disarray, and the door to the archive stood ajar. Downstairs, the sort of inventory lists that were plastered throughout the colony lay scattered on the floor. The door to the secure archive was still closed and locked. It would never open without a key. Vanja stuck her hand into the pocket of her anorak, fingering the coagulated piece of gloop.
There were plenty of marking pens in the reception. Once back down in the archive, Vanja closed the door behind her, took the spoon-shaped lump from her pocket, and wrote KEY on the shaft. “Key, key, key, key, key,” she whispered.