Li could just imagine. Nguyen would have pumped McCuen for every spin of data he had without his even realizing he’d been squeezed dry. She would have had him hypnotized, wrapped around her finger from that first riveting streamspace glance. But that was Nguyen’s job, of course. You could bet your life on her doing it right—and on her being there to bail you out when it really counted. As long as you delivered. As long as you were loyal. As long as it was in the Secretariat’s best interests to bail you out.
“What about Gould?” she asked, brushing Cohen’s nagging questions aside. “Any progress there?”
“That’s why Nguyen moved up the troop landings. To keep Korchow on schedule. To make sure we get this wrapped up before Gould gets to Freetown. She says to keep cooperating for now and just bide your time. I’m supposed to go down with you. Stay with you through the whole thing. I’m supposed to tell you that Korchow’s planning to turn on you. They think he’ll try to kill you when he has his data.”
That wasn’t exactly news, though Korchow seemed too pragmatic to kill anyone as long as he thought he could still wring a little more information out of them under threat of blackmail.
“And she says not to worry about Alba either,” McCuen added. “It’s taken care of.”
Li stared at McCuen, shocked, but he didn’t seem to have any idea of the enormity of what he’d just said. “So when do we make our move?” she asked when she had gotten her composure back.
“As soon as live field run’s over. You and me.”
“And Cohen.”
McCuen blinked. “What?”
“You and me and Cohen. The AI.”
“Oh. The AI. Of course.” Had she imagined it, or was there the slightest hint of hesitation there?
“And what are we supposed to do with Korchow?”
“Improvise.”
Li felt the slim hardness of her Beretta at her waist. She looked at McCuen. He looked away.
What had Nguyen really told him? Was he holding out on her, or was it just the nerves any new operative went through on a first covert mission? Could she afford to turn down an ally with a strong back and a steady trigger hand? She sure as hell didn’t want to be down in the pit with no one but Bella to back her up. Assuming Bella would back her up.
“Right,” she said after a pause she knew had lasted a few beats too long. “We’ll play it Nguyen’s way. You up to it?”
McCuen nodded.
“Then put on your game face and let’s get out there.”
Mirce moved through the mine with the surefootedness of a pit dog. Her deceptively slow stride ate up ground at a pace that seemed totally unaffected by the steep grades and rough shale layers. She wasted nothing. Every step was thought out, every flick of her pale eyes was calculated. Her gestures, her breath, her steadily pumping muscles all embodied a chillingly elegant syllogism: wasted motion was wasted air; wasted air was wasted time; and miners who ran out of time in a gas-logged mine died.
She made them take regular breaks “for safety reasons.” During the breaks, when everyone but McCuen took their masks off for a few brief minutes of unobstructed breathing, Mirce began to talk to Li.
She talked about her work, her new husband, her new children. Quietly. Not naming names. Not touching on the past. Just talking. She talked only during the breaks at first; then Li fell in next to her and she spoke while they walked, the blurred and impersonal voice that filtered through her rebreather oddly mismatched with the intimate daily details she was telling Li. She asked nothing about Li’s life. From little ends and pieces she let drop, Li realized that she knew a lot. But it was all just the same stuff anyone who’d been watching the spins would know. Nothing personal. Nothing dangerous.
As Mirce talked, Li realized that it wasn’t a bridge she was building between them with her words, but a wall. Whatever common ground the two of them might once have traveled, Mirce seemed to be saying, Li’s life was now a foreign country from which no road led back to Compson’s World. They’d chosen, back in that past Li no longer remembered. A father’s life for a few doctor’s visits. Li’s old future for a new, better future. And Mirce lived in a world where there was no room for regrets or refunds.
By the time Mirce left them at the stairs down to the Trinidad, Li knew she was right. There was no going home. From the moment she’d stepped into that chop shop, there’d been no home to go back to.
She felt the glory hole long before they reached it. The condensates had been sleeping the last time she’d been there, she realized, dreaming fitfully. Now they were wide-awake.
Quantum currents licked through the dark mine, searching, scanning, questioning. You feel them too? Cohen asked.
She didn’t have to wonder why he asked; she could feel him, feel the havoc the crystals were wreaking on his all-too-fragile networks. As if whoever controlled them were looking for something. Or someone.
We won’t have to worry about setting up Korchow’s link, Cohen said before she could finish fitting words to the thought. They’ve already done it for us.
He had locked down all his systems in a last-ditch effort to hold off the condensates’ assault, and she was amazed for a moment that he could even speak over the intraface. But then he wasn’t speaking, was he? The link between them had gone beyond speaking. And when she answered him, she was just thinking to herself, thinking to the part of Cohen that was her.
What do we do?she thought, and the answer was there before she knew she had asked the question.
We let them in.
Then there was just light facing off against darkness and a confused sensation of Cohen pushing her behind him with the hopeless bravado of a child trying to protect another smaller child.
It was like waiting for a tsunami to hit. The wave loomed, crested, crashed down on them. Then they were inside it, and its boiling undertow was sucking at their knees and ankles, threatening to topple them, leaving them soaked to the skin and in danger of losing their footing on the shifting sands beneath them.
The crystals probed more gently after the first assault. They moved in probability sets, long spiraling quantum operations as incomprehensibly elegant as the sinuous columns that filled Sharifi’s notebooks. But there was something behind the equations. A single presence. A presence as much bigger than Cohen as Cohen had been bigger than the semisentient on Alba. Li felt it thinking, seeking, considering. And most of all she felt its ominous fascination with Cohen. With the intricate manyness of this strange new not-animal. With what he was. With what he could be used for.
It’s the mine, Cohen thought. It wants to know us. Taste us.
But it was more than knowing that it wanted. More than tasting.
“Do you hear it?” Bella cried, oblivious to the life-and-death battle being waged along the intraface. “Don’t you hear it? They’re singing!”
Heat. Darkness. A dizzying flash of leaving, of arriving. Then Li was standing just where she’d been standing before, looking around the glory hole.
But not the same glory hole she’d stood in with Bella and McCuen a moment ago. This one rose higher above her head. Its fan vaults were clean, unstained by smoke. Her feet stood on hard living rock, not the fire and flood’s detritus. And this glory hole was cluttered with equipment—equipment Li herself had only seen in twisted ruins.