The railcar simply stopped.
And the lights died.
“Please tell me this is normal,” Rachel said.
“Did your voices tell you about this?” Zhao said to Yvonne.
Yvonne’s body language was all the answer Pav needed. She slowly pushed up against the wall behind her, shaking her head slowly. Trying to tune in? Pav wondered.
Cowboy got to his four feet.
The only light was from the screen of the Slate.
“Can anyone hear ventilation?” Zhao said.
“We’re still breathing,” Yvonne said. She worked her way to the open side of the car and looked out. “Hey, I see something ahead of us.”
And she clambered down and out.
Cowboy followed her as if commanded.
“Well,” Zhao said, “do as our Revenants do.”
They were a hundred meters short of an opening. With Yvonne eagerly leading the way, Cowboy dogging her heels, Pav, Rachel, and Zhao followed.
“Is your Wi-Fi working again?” Pav called. He had the Slate slung over his shoulder again. He wished he had his own Wi-Fi—or some way to contact Nayar and the others in the human habitat. They must believe them all dead by now.
Suddenly the lights and power returned. As one, the humans and the dog all looked back at the railcar, which was making lively sounds again. “Is that going to move?” Zhao said.
“Let’s not find out,” Yvonne said. “Besides, we’ve arrived.”
The transition was quick…up a set of broad, slightly too-tall steps (Pav had to help Rachel), across an aged and faded tile surface, then through another tunnel much like the one that first gave them access to the human habitat.
The interior of the control habitat was so bright it hurt Pav’s eyes. Blinking, he was able to see a brilliant, gridlike set of structures stretching to the far side of the habitat…which appeared to be smaller than the human one. It was like looking at a circuit board the size of a city…from the inside.
“You know, Yvonne,” Zhao said behind Pav, “I’m very glad you have that guidance in your head. I can’t imagine what task we’re supposed to be accomplishing…or where we would start.”
“So where do we go?” Rachel said. She was sounding more and more impatient.
Yvonne looked from side to side. “We’re meeting someone.”
“Who?” Zhao said.
Yvonne smiled. “Our guide, okay? Things are a bit confused. There should be a Beehive somewhere along here…. Everyone split up and see if you can find—”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Pav said. “We split up and we’ll never find each other again.”
“We don’t split up and we may never find the thing we’re supposed to meet.”
“Fine,” Zhao said. “Rachel and the dog and I will take this direction, along the wall. A hundred meters, and then we return to this place. You and Pav do the same the other direction. If we don’t find our mystery alien, we do another search.”
Rachel was about to protest, but Yvonne simply said, “Back in a few.” And took off.
As Pav hurried to catch up, he wondered why Zhao had teamed them the way he had. An adult in each team, probably. It would have made more sense to put Rachel with Yvonne, but Pav could tell that Zhao didn’t like him. He really didn’t seem to like Indians, period.
Suddenly the lights in the habitat died, leaving them in the most total darkness Pav had ever experienced. The drone of machines, the whisper of wind or airflow…sounds Pav hadn’t consciously noted, those were gone, too.
“Uh, here we go again?”
“My voices just went silent, too,” Yvonne said.
“What do we do?”
“Well, the last time the power went out—” Before she finished the statement, the lights and power resumed, though not without a disturbing shower of sparks and arcing from somewhere nearby.
“Yvonne, is this place falling apart?” Pav had a tough time thinking of a millennium-old alien starship as needing maintenance…but on further consideration, why not?
“There,” she said.
A giant creature, easily twice the size of a human being, like some kind of ancient knight, but with four arms, sat on the bench like an old man in a park.
She sent Pav back to the rendezvous point to meet Rachel and Zhao. “We found him.”
“Found what?” Zhao said.
“An Architect.”
For a young man who never expected to ever meet an alien creature, two in one day was almost too many for Pav. Even so, trying to be calm and grown-up…Pav thought Yvonne and the Architect seemed like an unhappy couple. The alien was still slumped, almost immobile, its two legs sticking out like logs, its four arms limp like spaghetti…while Yvonne stood directly in front of him. She looked like a pilgrim making an offering to a badly designed stone god.
Zhao approached Yvonne, speaking so softly that Pav and Rachel, left behind, couldn’t hear. Cowboy simply flopped on the ground, happier than he’d been in a while, apparently willing to see what these creatures got up to.
Only now did Pav notice that the Architect was partly covered in the same coating as the earlier Revenants. “I think he’s just come back from the dead,” he whispered to Rachel.
“That’s not good.”
“Why?”
“Because all the Revenants take a while to boot up.”
That had certainly been the case with Yvonne. And, judging from the Architect, here, too.
Yvonne turned away from the alien and walked toward Pav and Rachel. “God, this is so frustrating.”
“What’s wrong?” Pav said, suddenly alarmed. “Isn’t he the one you’ve been hearing in your head all along?”
“No! At least, I don’t think so. I think he was just reborn like me.”
“My dad said my mother could speak directly to her Architect.”
“I can speak to him,” Yvonne said. “I’m just not getting much back.”
“How much speaking did you do when you were just…alive again?” Pav said, looking at Rachel, as if to say, Shouldn’t we ask this?
Yvonne frowned. “Good point. But we don’t have all the time in the world.” She tapped her head. “My Wi-Fi was pretty clear on that.”
“Yvonne, come back here!” Zhao said. “Bring Rachel, too!”
Zhao had stayed with the Architect, essentially keeping the giant alien company. As he and the others approached, Pav saw Zhao stand on tiptoes to touch one of the Architect’s “hands”—which flexed, then folded up, as if the alien were doing a curl.
“What the hell are you doing?” Yvonne said.
“Just testing our friend,” Zhao said. “He seems to be in distress.”
“Noted,” Yvonne said. “Now what?”
Zhao pointed at Rachel. “I heard her talk about her mother. And it occurs to me that the Architect might know about her and about Zack Stewart, too—”
The mention of Zack’s name caused the Architect to stir and stand up to its complete, towering height. For Pav it was like watching a building being erected…and took a considerable amount of time. They’re slow, he realized.
“He’s trying to tell me something,” Yvonne said. She put her hands to her head and groaned. “God, it’s just so…noisy!”
Zhao put his hands on Yvonne’s shoulders, rubbing them like a trainer with a boxer. “Relax, find the message…he obviously wants to communicate with us. You just have to allow it.”
Yvonne’s tortured expression suddenly relaxed. To Pav, it was as if the woman had just found the right channel on a radio. “He says, ‘I am the Builders or the Designers or Architects.’ Plural.”
“Is there more than one of them in there?” Pav said. The creature was big enough to hold multiple personalities.
“It says, ‘We have no time for debates or education.’” Yvonne looked at Rachel. “‘We knew your parent.’”
“Which one?” Rachel said. “My mother? My father?”
“‘Both!’ and he’s quite emphatic about that.” She closed her eyes for a moment. There were tears now. “He just gave me a blast of imagery and…God, emotion about your mother. God, Rachel, I’m so sorry…I had no idea.”