“What is?” Pilip indicated its panel. Marcus, after giving Aryl a worried look, went back to his.
“Aryl?”
Feeling numb, she looked at a closer image of the Oud shore. The device had found a tall narrow building of stone, a tower, with still-dark earth piled haphazardly around its base as though it had thrust through the soil overnight. Light glinted at her from the upper level. Windows like the strangers? “Looks like yours,” she commented.
“No.” The image slid along the coast. There were more of the towers. Many more. “What is?”
Not theirs? “Oud,” she guessed. She could only imagine one reason for new towers with windows overlooking the Lake of Fire. “To watch you.”
“These also watch.” Janex said something to Pilip and the image flickered, then changed to show the lush growth of a more familiar shore.
“Tikitik,” Aryl identified, nodding to herself. Osst grazed in the shallows. Tall figures moved among the shadowy buttresses. “They’re waiting for me. I have to go back.” She indicated herself, then that shore.
“No!” Marcus looked shocked and said several things in his words before catching himself. “Saw, Aryl. Look!” He did something to switch the image. It became a strangely lit vision of the osst struggling in its pool of blood, her clinging to the gourds. Her mouth was wide open; she hadn’t remembered screaming.
Aryl closed her eyes, waving at him to get rid of it.
“Back, no,” he said firmly. “Aryl, stay. Safe.”
Stay?
She looked at the Om’ray-who-wasn’t, this Marcus Bowman, and took a deep, steadying breath. Kindness or suspicion or something unique to Humans? Any created a problem she hadn’t anticipated. Thought Traveler wouldn’t wait forever. Tikitik plotted and planned—she’d seen that for herself. Traveler would have seen her rescued by the strangers. That was part of its plan, but the longer they delayed her return, the more likely it was the Tikitik would realize she’d managed to communicate with them—that Aryl herself was now part of whatever game they were playing.
It wasn’t, she told herself with significant pity, at all fair.
Before she could think of an argument, Marcus spoke again, this almost a whisper. “Aryl. Look.”
What now? She turned to the panel, already hating the thing.
Another view of the past. She and Joyn, on the sun-kissed branch, launching their fiches into the open air. They looked almost in the sky themselves, she thought longingly.
That image flickered into another. Aryl held herself still as the machine showed her its version of the worst moment of her life. The wings in the M’hir, beautiful and wild; the webbing and its riders, the flash of arm and hook. She was there, holding to newly-bare stalks, staring up with wonder in her face.
Costa. There was Costa . . . with her.
A blur of black and white as the wastryls attacked . . . a brilliance that overwhelmed the panel and made her flinch . . .
Then nothing at all.
“They fell,” Aryl finished, because they had no way to see what she could, and always would, see. “They fell with the wreckage of your device, burning, impaled on stalks. The luckiest died on the way down. The rest fell into the waters of the Lay and were eaten alive. My brother—” Her hands flattened over the blank panel, obscuring it. “We lost those we loved.” Her eyes found Marcus. “Can you understand me?” Could he? “You harmed Yena. My people may all die because of your machine. Was it worth it, Seeker? Did you find what you were after?”
The Human’s soft hand reached toward her face. Aryl drew slightly away, then stopped to permit the touch, let it brush her wet cheek. As she held his brown, too-normal eyes with hers, she willed him to understand, to move past the barrier of words despite his solitary mind. She didn’t use Power, not deliberately, hoping there was something else in her that could reach him through that fleeting contact of finger to tear.
Marcus paled, his eyes dilated despite the bright sun pouring through the clouds. “Sorry,” he said after a moment, his throat working. More of his words, replies from Janex, Pilip. She let them talk, waiting. Then, “Sorry, all. No harm mean. Accident. Aryl, safe. Please.”
If words were all they had, Aryl thought, these were good ones. Point of fact, she doubted these three would swat a biter. Well, maybe the other two would, after arguing the matter, but not Marcus. She’d felt his thoughts, even if she hadn’t understood them. There’d been compassion as well as curiosity.
“Why did you send your machine to the Harvest?” Aryl asked then. “What do you seek?”
Marcus nodded back. “See!”
Not the panel, she complained to herself.
It wasn’t. Instead, Marcus asked something of Pilip and the circle on which they all stood startled her by turning underfoot. It came to a smooth stop once Aryl and Marcus were opposite the still-hovering device.
As if that had been a signal, the device plunged into the water. Startled, she leaned forward to watch the splash settle into froth. The others didn’t appear worried.
Once the ripples calmed, the Lake of Fire’s clear water allowed her to follow the descent to the limit of sunlight. She thought she’d lose the device there, but it began to give off its own light. She watched that light grow smaller and smaller with every heartbeat, like a fich tossed from the top of a rastis.
No rastis was this tall, she reminded herself, wondering what that meant about the depths beneath this platform.
“See what is,” Janex offered. “Here.”
It could still send an image? Of course. That smooth clear casing protected it. Aryl joined Marcus in front of the panel, this time eagerly.
What was the underwater world like? At first, she was disappointed. The panel’s image had a lot in common with a mist-bound window at home, revealing nothing but diffused light. It could have been worse, she consoled herself. The Tikitik put their dead into the lake—what if their bodies were floating around, uneaten?
“Is there nothing alive?” she asked, after a moment more of this.
The Carasian had left its panel to stand behind her. “Life, no,” it rumbled. “Wait.”
Wait? For what? Aryl eased her weight from one foot to the other, impatient with standing still.
When the image changed, she froze. “What is that?” “That” was a curved shape, touched into reality by the device’s light. The curve led to another, and another. A straight line crossed behind. Another, no, three more, rose behind that. More shapes, all perfect, free of silt or debris, extending in every direction. At this improbable depth, beyond sunlight, the still-clear water of the Lake of Fire revealed its secret.
Aryl had lived her life high in the canopy. She understood the tricks perspective could play with the eye and realized at once what she saw was immense.
And what she saw had been made.
“Who built this?” she demanded, wrenching her eyes away. “You?”
“No.” Marcus gazed at the panel. His hand hovered nearby, as if wanting to stroke what it showed. “Old, this. Oldest.”
“Who would live underwater?”
“Lake, new,” stated Pilip. She hadn’t noticed the Trant nearby until it spoke. “Land, once.”
Aryl started to laugh, then realized the strangers were serious. For all their amazing devices, perhaps they were not well educated. “The world is as it has always been,” she informed them. “The Agreement means it cannot change.”
Marcus frowned at her. “Worlds, change always.”
Not world. Worlds.
It was true, then, she thought, feeling as though the strangers’ solid platform moved with the water after all.
“ ‘Agreement.’ What is?” This from Janex.
Those from other worlds—if she let herself believe, for now, in other worlds—were patently outside the Agreement, which named only the three races of this one. “Tikitik, Oud, and Om’ray share the world,” she explained, as much to herself as them. “This world. Cersi. That is the Agreement.”