“Dragan came through here,” I said. “It was on the recording.”
even for you. I know that you will
Dragan’s looped message stopped short as the vibrations swelled, rattling in my chest and causing dust to drift down from the bowed ceiling. It drowned out the sounds from behind us, the hissing of the torch and the sounds of the soldiers, before fading back to a steady hum. The chat window warped, and the connection dropped.
I chewed my lip. “He’s close.”
Dust rose around my feet as I pointed the flashlight and followed the footsteps into the gloom.
Chapter Twenty-Six
03:28:18 BC
Scaleflies flitted past as we moved deeper into the ruins, forming a small swarm that buzzed toward a set of heavy metal doors up ahead of us. They’d clustered over the jagged bits of glass poking from an empty window frame on the right-hand door, while trails of them buzzed in and out. A swath had been cut through the dust and grease at the base of each door as if they’d recently been opened, and the footprints stopped in front of them.
Vamp moved ahead and pulled one of the doors open, waving away the cloud of disturbed flies so I could shine my light through. The way looked clear.
The chamber on the other side had been sheared in half, the floor coming to an abrupt stop off to our left in a wall of packed dirt and stone. The ragged ends of three huge pipes jutted out there up near the ceiling, torn free from their joints during the collapse. Lime had caked around their rims where brown water condensed and dripped under the slow escape of steam.
“Sam—”
Another surge in the vibrations drowned out Vamp’s voice. They got so intense that the 3i cut out and stemmed off Dragan’s text messages, which I was kind of glad for. The pipes shook, and something above us creaked, low and ominous. I pointed the flashlight up toward the ceiling and saw spindly haan constructs creep through the exposed wiring and ductwork. Snaked in and around the old electrical system were shiny coils of filaments like I’d seen in Shangzho. Nestled in and among them were unfamiliar devices that hung like flies in a spider’s web.
The room, or what was left of it, seemed to have once been some kind of control center. The hunkered shapes of computer consoles and equipment, long dormant and speckled with mold, sat in the gloom with stools and swivel chairs at the helms. Wires hung from the damaged ceiling, while power and data cables ran from the workstations, through the grime to disappear into the rubble. The far wall of the hub was dominated by three huge rectangular windows that looked on into blackness, huge fractures marring safety glass that must have been a meter thick. I shined the flashlight around, until it swept across a soot-streaked sign mounted on one crumbling wall.
“Deepwell,” I whispered.
The echo of the humans who’d run the place lingered here—coats draped over chairs, personal photographs, and wrinkled, overlapping newspaper printouts whose edges had warped were taped up here and there—but like Shangzho it now carried that distinct haan fingerprint. Graviton plates covered a section of wall, disappearing through a dark hole in the ceiling, and black, shiny scales had formed over the floor in clusters. Scaleflies crawled over the abandoned equipment and swarmed through the air, carrying their messages to and from haan who no doubt lurked somewhere nearby.
A row of glass domes, some kind of specimen jars, covered a work surface that ran the length of the room’s far side, and I could see clouds of flies bouncing around inside. The jars were fixed to bases where pinprick indicator lights flashed, and slimy tubes trailed to a bank of haan equipment behind them.
I moved farther into the room, sweeping the flashlight over the news clippings. I peeled one of the stained photos off a soot-covered console and wiped it on my shirt. It showed an apple, floating in midair. I held it up so Vamp and Nix could see.
The apple floated in the middle of a makeshift wooden shack that had been surrounded by a sandbag enclosure where armed soldiers stood guard. Across the other side of the sandbags, people had gathered near a row of sawhorses, and through the wooden shack’s open doorway a hanging plastic tent was visible. Hazy figures stood inside.
SECURITY ERECTED AROUND “FORBIDDEN FRUIT,” the headline read. I tossed it down onto the desk and looked at the next, which showed a picture of Fangwenzhe, shining brightly above the Hangfei skyline.
“New star…” The date on the article put it fifty years or so ago. I blew dust from the paper, trying to make out the writing underneath.
“…no explanation for the sudden appearance of a previously uncharted star closer than any recorded… astronomers are unable to explain…”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. I looked at Vamp, the paper still dangling from my fingers.
Fangwenzhe had always been there. Stars didn’t just come and go. They didn’t just appear from out of nowhere. It wasn’t possible. Even if it somehow had, people would know. Astronomers…
“What are you in here for?”
“Telling the truth.”
“Sam, we’ve got to move.”
“He knew,” I said. “That guy, Jin, back in the prison. It’s why he was there.”
Vamp tried to take the paper and I snatched it away. I folded it and slipped it into my pocket.
“Sam, which way?”
I looked around the room, trying to think back to the images on the video recording. They’d had to climb before they arrived in this room. They’d scrambled up a collapsed section of floor…
“There.” I pointed toward the corner where the tiles sank, sloping down to a big fracture that had opened up into a large open space below. Electric light flickered down there, casting jerky shadows.
Vamp leaned over the edge and peered down. “Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
When I turned back to him, the flashlight swept back around and passed through a large, open section of wall to his right, where a human face stared back at me from the shadows.
“Shit!” I yelped, nearly dropping the light. Vamp and Nix both turned as I steadied the beam.
The face belonged to a Pan-Slav man. He looked like he might be dead, but he wasn’t shriveled like the other bodies. His skin looked fresh, if ashen. He sat with his knees up by his chin and wrapped in some kind of black membrane that had him stuck to the wall. His eyes stared back at me, blind and unfocused, while his mouth hung open.
He wasn’t alone. As I moved the light through the room, I saw there were more in there like him, men and women all wrapped in the same kind of wet, leathery cocoon.
“Holy shit,” Vamp said under his breath.
I looked over and followed his light to a series of jagged, broken tiles along the edge of a giant sinkhole. Beyond the edge a great, yawning pit in the floor dropped down out of sight, but from where we stood I could make out what looked like spines, or huge, thick bristles ringing the interior. The ceiling had a similar hole directly above it.
“She has them in stasis,” Nix said. “Storing them for later use.”
Through the crumbled wall next to it, electric lights flashed from an array of equipment and live monitors that displayed crowded columns of haan text. The room had been some kind of laboratory, with a big metal work surface surrounded by broken-down equipment. A light shone down onto the metal tray that trailed clusters of disconnected tubes and wires.