Finn stared, blank. The Sapient snapped, "It's the only way out! The ship will fall and rise and tumble forever! We have to drive her in there!"
He pointed. Finn saw a dark cube. It jutted out from the beaten metal, a hollow opening of darkness. It looked tiny; their chance of entering it remote.
"Sapphique landed on a cube." Gildas had to hold on to him. "That has to be it!"
Finn glanced at Keiro. Doubt dickered between them. As Attia came up the hatchway and slid toward them, Finn knew his oathbrother thought the old man was crazy, consumed with his quest. And yet what choice did they have?
Keiro shrugged. Reckless, he spun the wheel and headed the ship straight at the Wall. In the headlights the cube waited, a black enigma.
CLAUDIA COULD not speak. Her astonishment, her dismay were too great. She saw animals.
Lions.
She counted them numbly; six, seven ... three cubs. A pride. That was the word, wasn't it...? "They can't possibly be real," she murmured.
Behind her, Jared sighed. "But they are."
Lions. Alive, prowling, one roaring, the rest snoozing in an enclosure of grass, a few trees, a lake where water birds waded.
She drew back, stared at the microscope, looked again.
One of the cubs scratched another; they rolled and fought. A lioness yawned and lay down, paws flat.
Claudia turned. She looked at Jared through the mothy lamplight and he looked back, and for a moment there was nothing to be said, only thoughts she didn't dare to think, implications she was too horrified to follow through.
Finally she said, "How small?"
"Incredibly small." He bit the ends of his long dark hair. "Miniaturized to about a millionth of a nanometer ... Infinitesimal."
"They don't... How do they stay ...?"
"It's a gravity box. Self-adjusting. I thought the technique was lost. It seems to be an entire zoo. There are elephants, zebra ..." His voice trailed off; he shook his head. "Perhaps it was the prototype ... trying it first on animals. Who knows?"
"So this means ..." She struggled to say it. "That Incarceron ..."
"We've been looking for a huge building, an underground labyrinth. A world." He stared ahead into the darkness. "How blind we've been, Claudia! In the library of the Academy there are records that propose that such things—trans-dimensional changes—were once possible. All that knowledge was lost in the War. Or so we thought."
She got up; she couldn't sit still. The thought of the lions tinier than an atom of her skin, the grass they lay on even smaller, the minute ants they crushed with their paws, the fleas on their fur ... it was too difficult to take in. But for them the world was normal. And for Finn ...?
She walked in nettles, not noticing. Made herself say, "Incarceron is tiny."
"I rear so."
"The Portal..."
"A process of entering. Every atom of the body collapsed." He glanced up and she saw how ill he looked. "Do you see? They made a Prison to hold everything they feared and diminished it so that its Warden could hold it in the palm of his hand. What an answer to the problems of an overcrowded system, Claudia. What a way to dismiss a world's troubles. And it explains much. The spatial anomaly. And there might be a time difference too, a very tiny one."
She went back to the microscope and watched the lions roll and play. "So this is why no one can come out." She looked up. "Is it reversible, Master?"
"How do I know? Without examining every—" He stopped dead. "You realize we have seen the Portal, the gateway? In your father's study there was a chair."
She leaned back against the table. "The light fixture. The ceiling slots."
It was terrifying. She had to walk again, pace up and down, think about it hard. Then she said, "I have something to tell you too. He knows. He knows we have the Key."
Without looking at him, not wanting to see the fear in his eyes, she told him about her father's anger, his demands. By the time she had finished, she found herself crouched beside him in the lamplight, her voice down to a whisper. "I won't give the Key back. I have to get Finn out."
He was silent, the coat collar high around his neck. "It's not possible," he said bleakly.
"There must be some way ..."
"Oh, Claudia." Her tutor's voice was soft and bitter. "How can there be?"
Voices. Someone laughing, loud.
Instantly she leaped up, blew the lamps out. Jared seemed too dispirited to care. In the dark they waited, listening to the revelers' drunken shouts, a badly sung ballad fading away through the orchard. Claudia felt her heart thudding so loudly in the hush, it almost hurt. Faint bells chimed eleven in the clock towers and stables of the
Palace. In one hour her wedding day would dawn. She would not give up. Not yet.
"Now that we know about the Portal and what it does ... could you operate it?"
"Possibly. But there's no way back."
"I could try." She said it quickly. "Go in and look for him. What have I got here? A lifetime with Caspar ..."
"No." He sat up and faced her. "Can you even begin to imagine life in there? A hell of violence and brutality? And here— if the wedding doesn't happen, the Steel Wolves will strike at once. There will be a terrible bloodshed." He reached over and took her hands. "I hope I've taught you always to face facts."
"Master—"
"You have to go through with the wedding. That's all that's left. There is no way back for
Giles."
She wanted to pull away, but he wouldn't let her. She hadn't known he was so strong.
"Giles is lost to us. Even if he's alive."
She slid her hands down and held his, tight with misery. "I don't know if I can," she whispered.
"I know. But you're brave."
"I'll be so alone. They're sending you away."
His fingers were cool. "I told you. You have far too much to learn." In the darkness he smiled his rare smile. "I'm going nowhere, Claudia."
THEY COULDN'Tdo it. The ship wouldn't hold steady, even with all of them hauling at the wheel. Her sails were rags, her rope trailed everywhere, her rails were smashed, and still she yawed and zigzagged, the anchor swinging and the bow oscillating toward the cube, away from it, above, below. "It's impossible," Keiro growled.
"No." Gildas seemed lit with joy. "We can do it. Keep strong." He gripped the wheel and stared ahead.
Suddenly the ship dropped. The headlights picked out the cube's opening; as they closed on it, Finn saw it was filmed across with a strange viscosity like the surface of a bubble.
Rainbows of iridescence glimmered on it.
"Giant snails," Keiro muttered. Even now he was able to joke, Finn thought.
Nearer, nearer. Now the ship was so close, they could see the reflection of her lights, swollen and distorted. So close that the bowsprit touched the film, indented it, pierced it so that it popped with soft abruptness, vanishing into a faint puff of sweet air.
Gradually, fighting the upstream, the ship slewed into the dark cube. The buffeting slowed.
Vast shadows overwhelmed the headlights.
Finn stared up at the square of blackness. As it opened as if to swallow him, he felt that he was very tiny, was an ant crawling into a fold of cloth, a picnic cloth laid on the grass far away and long ago, where a birthday cake with seven candles lay half eaten, and a little girl with brown curly hair was handing him a golden plate, so politely.
He smiled at her and took it.
The ship cracked. The mast splintered, toppled, wood showering around them. Attia fell against him, scrabbling after a crystal glitter that slid from his shirt. "Get the Key," she yelled.