“Sandara,” she said, flinching, surprised by his tone. She realized he read her hesitation, so she asked him again sternly, “Gillabrian, tell me, what are you doing here?”
“Hiding from the prophet, what else?” he exclaimed, grimacing in pain, needles of numbness running through his tortured arms like burning phosphorus.
“Incidentally, I run the Games Registry,” she replied gravely, as if the function meant something important in the virtual world. “That’s why I was alerted when you entered this island illegally. I hope you realize that after Baila’s nice hologram of your… tail, I checked the city’s records. I know you’re not Ropolitan, and you can’t just be here. How did you get into the city?”
Under the unrelenting squeezing of the AIs, he couldn’t think anymore—now, when he needed more than ever to weight his words. The grah female appeared utterly indifferent to his suffering. Indifference—no, more like revulsion—was an entirely expected thing from a grah. They never displayed any sign of pain, no matter how great was their suffering. That was why in the old times, the grahs weren’t taken prisoner, and they didn’t take prisoners, either. There was no point in torturing them because they never betrayed their kin. They ended up being fed for free—an inconceivable generosity, considering the frugal resources of their frozen world…
In a desperate effort, he tried to ignore the torture by calling the harmonics of the pathkeeper’s aromas in his olfactory memory. The process began slowly at first, but then it caught speed. He sensed his pulse accelerating like the cold tide of the morning while he mechanically repeated to himself: “Pain is a detail at the edge of my kyi… I’ll let it pass through me… It won’t taint my shadow…”
As soon as he smelled the keeper’s path, he felt his ability to withstand pain growing like the billows on Gondarra’s shoreline during the worst rage of the vardannes.
Sandara was naturally curious about how he entered the city. Again, the same question he couldn’t answer. Yet, something was telling him he might have a better chance with her than with the jure.
He understood her caution that made her call him on his full name. However, he didn’t smell the kind of reaction that a tarji would have shown to a repulsive tainted by Arghail’s breath. She wasn’t affected by the tarjis’ fervor, he thought. After all, the grahs knew best what it meant to be repulsive.
Gill had the feeling he could see the lights of her synapses blinking frantically, trying to understand the implications of his presence in the mining city. He didn’t believe she deceived him like Urdun, pretending to be surprised by his presence in the virtual world. Yet Ugo was the city’s jure, and the Ropolitans were supposed to obey his orders…
He decided to tell her a brief version of the truth, hoping that the smell-kyi would guide his instinct to find out if Sandara would betray him to the icy shadow. It was a huge risk, but he had already started the avalanche. At this point, he could only hope that he had picked the right knot…
“I ran out of Alixxor hidden on a troop transport and sneaked into Ropolis in the middle of the assault. I was captured by your soldiers and taken to the jure.”
“Ugo!” her voice was undoubtedly loaded with the tonalities of an undisguised disgust.
“Ugo locked me in a cave with an old Antyran called Urdun,” he continued, encouraged by her exclamation. “I connected and woke up on a glade… I managed to run away, and now I’m chased by the jure’s shadow trying to break into my head!”
“The abomination betrays us in full view!” she exclaimed, surprised.
After a few seconds of silence, she went on with the interrogation.
“Did you see a sphere when you connected? Like the one behind me?” She pointed to the object.
“There was nothing except Urdun in the meadow on Tormalin.”
“Ahh! Tormalin, the prison island. All right… let him go,” she ordered the two brutes who held him, finally seeming to notice his grimaces. “Wait here,” she said, watching him indifferently as he rubbed his arms to restart the blood flow.
“Wait, don’t go!” he begged her. “What about me?”
“I can’t stop the game,” Sandara insisted. “Without a sphere, you can’t follow me to Rabinda, the portal island.”
“Why can’t I exit the game?” Gill tried to learn more, afraid that he was going to lose his only friendly contact in the imaginary world without having the certainty that the female would return before Ugo’s next attack.
“You can’t get out of a game unless you disconnect. But you’ll wake up in the real world,” she explained, exasperated. “I can’t find you there!”
Gill started to understand why the grah females had never been renowned for their patience.
“You don’t wake up in the real world?”
“Never from the games, and always from the other islands. But some of us, the kaura, can’t return to the shells. They would die.”
Kaura, where did he hear the word? In Urdun’s mouth, he remembered. Forbat “betrayed the kaura dead.” Again, he felt the deep waters hidden behind the words, waters he couldn’t fathom… Let’s see what Forbat has to say about this.
“Kaura are the intubated shells,” he said, voicing his reasoning. “Urdun is one of them.”
“The intubated, as you say. They can’t disconnect from the living realms, but they can do it from the games because they won’t be sent into consciousness. Even if a kaura ‘dies’ in a virtual battle, the sphere throws him back to Rabinda.”
“And how can I get my portal?”
“Not from a game or a prison island. If you set your foot on a normal island, it will appear by itself.”
“But—”
“Gillabrian, I have to go now!”
“And leave me in this place?”
“I have to warn the council, and I can’t help you from here. Why don’t you understand?”
“Of all the islands, I had to land in a game,” he said with a sigh, disheartened.
“It’s hard not to land in one. We have more games than you could possibly imagine. Ancient legends, space fleets, and innumerable oddities float on Uralia’s skies. The games are everything for us!”
“The games are everything for us!” The words so casually thrown by the grah female had the effect of increasing his revulsion toward the terrible metamorphosis he witnessed. Could it be that the Ropolitans didn’t see the hideousness into which they slowly turned with each feeding tube inserted into the “shell,” with every passing moment spent in the bixan’s grip, with the fake security given by the world of mirrors where they were masters? That, all while the real ships armed with real laser lenses and real fusion bombs gathered on their planet’s orbit, ready to launch another attack on Baila’s orders… “Smoke is smoke and stone is stone, and the first never defeated the second,” Gill thought, recalling the words of the aromary Laixan. The absurdity of the situation pained him, and he couldn’t understand what kind of insane transition could happen so insidiously to elude everyone’s nostrils.
“How can the games be everything for you?” he exploded. “You’ve thrown your bodies in stinky cellars like useless trinkets! You barely escaped Baila’s attack and rushed to get stoned again. Oh, if I saw it clearly, even in the heat of the battle, some of you were in a trance!”
“You have no right to judge us, Antyran, as long as you don’t understand our world,” she reproached him bitterly. “You’re so convinced that you can tell the real from the imaginary, that you can say which one is which? You say you saw the lower galleries, the filth and darkness in which we abandoned our shells? Then you should know we believe that Uralia is the real world, and Ropolis is the nightmare to which none of us wants to go back!”