“Ugo,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “He’s probably running to the parhontes.”
“We must stop him!” he exclaimed, pinched by Sandara’s words.
“Relax—he’s running for nothing. They’re still locked in the circle; that’s why Forbat didn’t get my message. We have more important things to do right now.” She smiled, pointing her finger behind him. “I don’t think there’s anyone to deserve a portal more than you. Step inside!”
He turned back and saw a white sphere, about three yards in diameter, waiting docile in the grass. His portal! He rushed in, surprised that it was ’slightly’ larger than what could be guessed from the outside. There were countless huge rooms built from all sorts of unbelievable minerals, crossed by blue veins and connected by arched hallways with elegant ceilings. A palace worthy of a baitar—or even greater.
“Welcome to your portal,” a suave, feminine voice said directly in his head. “Your body-print is saved now, and you’ll return here whenever you are connected. Do you want to choose the face of your avatar?
“I want my real face. Can you see it in my memory?”
“Yes,” the voice confirmed as the hologram of his mug materialized in the air. “What changes do I make?”
“It’s fine.”
He turned around to leave the portal when the voice spoke again.
“And the architecture?”
Right away, the walls of the rooms started to morph into a multitude of shapes and compositions, some familiar, others downright bizarre, all of a beauty impossible to describe in words.
“I have no time for that. Leave it like it was,” he ordered the voice in his head. She complied, and the dome returned to its initial appearance.
He rushed outside to Sandara.
“Your real face. I like it,” she said, smiling playfully.
“How do you know my real face?” he asked, surprised.
“You forgot that Baila took care of that? Everyone knows how you look.”
“And how I scratch my tail…” He sighed, remembering the shameless transmission on the holofluxes.
“Exactly!” she burst into laughter, amused by his embarrassment.
There could be no doubt: a change had happened to her, which didn’t go unnoticed by Gill, just as she didn’t miss it, either. The battle for Acanthia brought her on his side; it gained him more than an ally of circumstance… Now that she knew that he was able to confront Ugo the way he did, that she saw his true face beyond the standard mug of the flour distributors, that she guessed a shred of his desperate fight against the temples, Sandara finally understood that fate had brought in front of her a remarkable Antyran she had to appreciate, despite the fact that she was clueless about his intentions.
Gill could read in her eyes that she began to like his presence—without guessing that she was attracted to him from the first moment she saw his hologram on the fluxes or that she searched his name in secret in the games registry…
“Are we going to the parhontes?” Gill asked her.
“Let’s go! Use your portal to jump to Landolin, gate 3.”
They exited their portals at the same time, and Gill found himself in the familiar landscape he had glimpsed from the prison meadow in Tormalin. They were in a meadow on a steep hill, surrounded by lofty mountains. Right ahead, along a cobblestone path, Gill could see the dome of fire—a blazing wall, sparkling with strange iridescences like those on the wings of the licants. Looking upward, he realized the dome covered a good chunk of the island.
“Come.” Sandara took him by his arm to show him the way.
They followed the path, supporting each other without caring that they were slipping on the unstable slope. The meadow descended to a small forest in the valley, flanked by a vertical wall on the right side, and a lower, flatter peak on its left; thin trees of an unidentified species surrounded the meadow. A bunch of trails sneaked among the scaly grass dotted with wild acajaa stems, thinner and whiter than the farmed variety.
Sandara followed the steep path on their left, bordered by a clay ravine.
Gill was somewhat puzzled that they had to travel a while on foot—it would have been more logical to use their portals to jump in near the fire dome. But he didn’t ask for explanations; he had more burning questions. He couldn’t afford the luxury of believing they had truly escaped Ugo’s intricate plans, whose depth he couldn’t hope to probe without the female’s help. “I have a little surprise for you,” Ugo had threatened them in Ricopa. Knowing the jure, that could only be another nasty ploy to make Gill’s life harder than it already was…
“What is the expansion?”
“What?” she asked, startled by his question.
“Ugo said, ‘after the expansion, this place will be redecorated.’”
Sandara remained silent, looking at him in a strange way.
“I shouldn’t talk about this to a stranger.”
“I thought you had more faith in me,” he reproached her.
The female was fighting an unseen battle, which she was trying, ashamed, to conceal from Gill’s piercing gaze. The secrets of the parhontes shouldn’t be shared with an alien, especially one who might be handed over to the temples in exchange for peace—because in this way, they would give them to the enemy. On the other tail, the Antyran found a way to evade the biggest trap ever imagined by the prophet, defeated Ugo in his playground, and could prove the jure’s treason in front of the council just by his very presence! Perhaps… betraying Gill would waste their chance, maybe their only chance, of escaping alive from the jaws of the terrible alternatives they had.
She had to find out by all means…
“Gill, why did you come here?” she asked, voicing the burning question that consumed her.
“I…” he began, about to tell her of the chase in Alixxor and his escape in the carrier, but he realized her question was much deeper than that. “I didn’t do it for me!” he exclaimed in an outburst of sincerity. “Only I can save a world from oblivion, a world that Baila wants forgotten in the darkness!”
“You want to save a world from oblivion!” she murmured, looking at him, transfixed.
Sandara realized that Gill had said exactly the words she wanted more than anything to hear, words that only the omniscient gods could have seeped into his mouth… and for the first time, she dared to feel a crumble of hope that the unequal battle wouldn’t be lost after all. She didn’t think of it rationally—there was no shred of logic in that outlandish hope—but her female instinct whispered that his words were a sign that she must not abandon him to the enemy, that she had to draw him to her side, by all means. It whispered that his appearance in the middle of the crisis was no mere coincidence but a proof that the real gods existed and that they finally turned their temples, moistened with the drops of resurrection, toward the Blue Crevice… For Uralia’s world needed now, more than ever, to be rescued from darkness…
“You’re right,” she said, sighing. “I should trust you. Anyway, if we fail, the secrets of Ropolis will be of no importance anymore.”
Trying to find the right words, she continued, “You know, Gill, Ugo… has changed. He changed a lot since he died.”
“What do you mean ‘since he died’?” he exclaimed, incredulous, convinced that his hearing holes were playing tricks on him.
“It happened seven years ago. He became obsessed with the crevice. He believed that he could explore it, that he could hide our city lower than anyone might have dreamed would be possible. Hundreds of miles deep, where the enemy probes couldn’t reach. He was caught by a tidal wave… No one knows where his body lies,” she said with a shiver.
The waters of reality muddied again, and he had no way of clearing them. Suddenly, he felt betrayed by the semantics of the words so familiar at the surface but so absurd beyond their superficial meaning. One of the few certainties he believed someone could have in a world captive in the madness of change was the inevitability of death, the certainty that if someone died, he or she would stay dead forever, that death is one of those primitive classifications that should never raise problems of understanding. But on Ropolis, even this certainty didn’t exist anymore, even death was complicated…