She took a deep breath and tentatively stepped out to stand on a glass floor, above a canyon of immeasurable depth, its walls the hulls of Virga and Aethyr. Far below her feet, tiny pinpricks glittered in their uncountable thousands.
She let the sight of them fill her eyes, and murmured, "I may never get another chance to see stars, you know. How could I explain to my grandchildren that I missed my last chance?"
"Or they may become commonplace for you," said the doll.
She sent it a sharp look. Would she ever leave Virga again, once she made it back? It was doubtful, but anything had become possible for her--which was the problem. Her future was a frightening blank, and the closer she got to delivering the emissary's message to her people, the larger that uncertainty loomed.
She plucked the doll from her shoulder and set it on the floor. "I'd like to be alone for a while, if you don't mind." She made a shooing motion, back in the direction of Complication Hall.
It looked around itself, then said, "Are you not worried by what Minister Loll said? He threatened you."
"Did he? I don't think so." Loll's next-to-last words to her had been "I'm giving you one last chance to see reason, Leal! Say you'll at least listen to what John Tarvey has to say. You can't deny that he's offering us a kind of hope that your 'emissary' never has!" He'd made to grab her arm, and Leal had pulled back; but she'd never felt physically threatened by him.
"Loll relies on others to do his violence. Himself, he wouldn't hurt a fly. No, I'll be all right, I just need some time to think. Tomorrow--tomorrow we return to Virga, and then things will get ... busy." She made the shooing motion again, and with obvious reluctance, the doll walked away.
Leal knelt and gazed for a while at the quiet stars. She tried to fill her eyes and her mind with them, yet her thoughts kept circling around to that blank in her future. She could not picture a future where she was happy.
She hated the weight of responsibility that lay on her shoulders. Of all her people, only Leal had visited the emissary's realm. She'd spent several weeks there and learned much about the weird and chaotic reality that reigned beyond Virga's walls. Except for Loll, her human companions were ordinary airmen caught up in an adventure they'd never sought. Harper and the others had literally been cast without warning from the familiar airs of Virga onto the plains of Aethyr. None had even guessed that Virga--the five-thousand-mile-diameter bubble that they mostly just called "the world"--had a Siamese sister, that the two worlds were joined like two soap bubbles floating through space. Leal had found a door in the wall between the two bubbles; alone, she had traveled from Virga to Aethyr and beyond. She had chosen to do so. She had seen stars. The others had not.
The emissary's people were eloquent, and their arguments convincing. The emissary itself ... was not so good with human language. When they returned to Virga, it would lose its mind, as it had when it first visited there. The responsibility for delivering its message to all the nations of Virga lay entirely on Leal's shoulders. And that was terribly unfair.
The silence here was so perfect that she heard the scuffing footsteps from a good hundred feet away. Suddenly certain that the emissary had been right and Loll was after her, Leal straightened and looked for shelter or escape. If she ran, the other would hear her footsteps, too, and anyway, running was impractical in this gravity. There were places to hide, though, so she hunkered down behind one of the room's buttresses. There were stars below her feet and at her back, but the buttress itself was of solid metal, so it should hide her.
Keir Chen entered the gallery. He was only really visible as a silhouette, but she didn't know anyone else who walked around in a swarm of glowing bugs. He didn't glance at the starscape or pause in stepping from white floor to glass. Then he disappeared through an exit in the glass wall that Leal hadn't spotted earlier.
He had been friendly toward her; he was no threat. The temptation to follow him was too great, so, she did.
Chen could somehow see through his dragonflies, so Leal hung well back. Everybody had assured her that the wild city was empty; Keir's people spent almost all their time in and around Complication Hall. So where was Chen going?
The reason she hadn't spotted the passage he was taking now was because it was a simple glass tube that arced out into the darkness for an indeterminate distance. Born as she'd been in a world of freefall, Leal had no trouble with the illusion that she was walking on air (or, she knew, in empty space). There was none of the sense of crushing cold that you felt at the walls of Virga or on the slopes of Aethyr; at least here, Brink had remembered to insulate its chambers. Keir Chen walked on darkness a few hundred feet ahead, and Leal padded steadily behind him.
Once she glanced back, and saw that they had left the icicle-like hanging towers of Brink far behind. This corridor was some kind of road connecting the metropoloid to another location, one that lay well outside Aethyr's walls. The road crossed a kind of cavity between the curving shells of Aethyr and Virga--and though she'd never thought about it, she realized she'd assumed that the space between the two worlds would be empty. Yet in the distance, starlight gave ghostly outlines to complicated silvery shapes, some of which must be miles long. Dozens of widely separated objects, like pieces of a shattered city, seemed to be swooping down and under her with grand, almost imperceptible slowness. This was an illusion: It was Aethyr, and of course her corridor and Leal herself, that was turning. Those glittering mountains were fixed perfectly still in space, apparently attached to neither world and so sovereign in some way.
The glass tube Chen was leading her through hung from almost invisible cables that were suspended from somewhere overhead. Leal could see other mechanisms way up there, where the worlds converged to finally touch.
She was so distracted by these sights that it took her a few seconds to notice the dragonfly that was buzzing a foot from her nose.
Should she run? She didn't think Chen or his people were any threat--but if he were dangerous, there was no way she could have evaded his dragonflies here. His physical body stood fifty feet away, a black-on-black figure now turned toward her.
"I was curious," she said. The dragonfly didn't reply, and Chen didn't move, so Leal swept her arm to indicate the wonders encircling them. "It's so strange. There's all this stuff out here! And we were taught that the space beyond Virga's walls was just empty. What are all these things?"
The dragonfly began drifting away in the direction of Chen. That was an obvious invitation, so Leal followed it. "No idea what they are," said Chen. "An armada, I suspect, awaiting its orders to invade Virga."
"Oh!" After everything she'd recently seen, Leal should have come to that conclusion herself. She knew there were things outside her world struggling to get in. But to actually see them was suddenly, profoundly upsetting. "Do they know we're here?"
"I hope not."
"And this road..." He hadn't resumed walking, now that she was standing beside him. She looked ahead to where the glass angles of floor and wall converged, miles away. Something was there, a vague hulk hinted at by starlight.
Keir said, "What if I told you that it runs to Virga?"
"What?" She stared at him. He appeared completely serious.
"I'd say you're lying," she said after a moment's thought. "This world rotates. Virga doesn't. The only place you could make a door between the two would be, well, where the door we're trying to get to is--at the axle, where the two worlds are attached."
Even as she said this she realized it wasn't necessarily true. Her city, Sere, was composed of a dozen giant iron-and-brass wheels, each one a mile or more across. You could board a flea car on the rim of one and be tossed to the rim of the next in line--handed off by the giants, one by one, until you reached the farthest wheel. Maybe some similar mechanism joined Virga and Aethyr.