Lise said, "We need to get our bearings before the sun sets."
Turk gave her a puzzled look—he had just finished helping Dr. Dvali assemble a rough shelter under the lee of a concrete loading pier, close (but not too close) to the digging trees—then he interpreted her frowning glances at Dvali and said, "Yeah, you're right, we'll do that." He asked Dvali to gather up any intact canned food he could find among the excavated debris while he and Lise "scouted." Dvali gave him a suspicious glare—as a Fourth he probably recognized a half-truth when he heard one—but nodded tersely and waved them away.
So he walked with Lise back along the perimeter of the tumbled mall, steering wide of the dig, and as soon as they were out of earshot Turk said, "Get our bearings?"
She confessed that she had mainly wanted to get away from Dvali, if only briefly. "And I thought we could get above these trees and have a look around."
"How do you propose to do that?"
She showed him. At the south end of the mall there was a quadrangle of intact exterior walls where a steel fire escape was bolted in place. She had noticed it earlier in the day, she said. Turk surveyed it and decided it was sturdy enough to carry their weight, and yeah, maybe it was a good idea to look around while there was still some daylight left, if they were careful. So they climbed as far as the roof and stood on a steel mesh platform above the canopy of globes, in the simple light of the fading afternoon, and marveled at what they saw.
* * * * *
The view was similar to what Lise had seen this morning from the riggers' dorm, but it extended in every direction including the west—Isaac's direction, she thought dizzily—where something monstrous had grown out of the ground.
From this place above the canopy of the Dark Forest the ruins of human structures were easy to discern. The long line of the collapsed mall lay across the body of the forest like a train wreck. The building where they had sheltered last night projected from the trees like the prow of a grounded ship, and farther off she could see the silhouettes of drill rigs and cracking towers and storage. Something was burning in the oil fields: the wind scrawled a line of black smoke across the horizon. Hypothetical growths carpeted the desert in every direction, reflecting the light of the setting sun and radiating their own, a sea of dark jewels, she thought. She wondered how much mass these things must have extracted from the ash or the ground or the air in order to grow themselves, wondered if the whole inland basin of Equatoria had been hollowed out to build them. And in the west, against the glare of the sun—
"Hold on," Turk said as a brisk wind rattled the platform, but her grip on the railing was already painfully tight.
In the west, something immense had arisen. A kind of Arch.
Lise had sailed under the Arch of the Hypothetical three times: twice as an adolescent, coming to Port Magellan with her parents (and leaving without her father), and once as an adult. That Arch, awe-inspiring as it was, had been too large to be perceived as a single thing: what you saw was the nearest leg, soaring beyond the atmosphere, or the part of it that continued to reflect sunlight in the hours after dark, a silvery blaze suspended over the sea.
What she saw now was less immense—she could see all of it at once, an inverted U against the sunset—but that only made its size more starkly obvious. It must have been twenty or fifty miles high, high enough that a haze of cloud paled its uppermost curve. But at the same time it seemed delicate, almost fragile: how did it sustain its own weight? More importantly, why was it here? What was it meant to do?
An even stronger gust of wind bounced the platform and carried Turk's matted hair into his eyes. She didn't like the expression on his face as he stared at the thing in the west. For the first time since she had known him he looked lost. Lost and a little scared.
"We shouldn't stay up here," he said. "This wind."
She agreed. The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much. She followed him down.
They rested at the foot of the stairs, back under the canopy of globes, like mice in a mushroom patch, she thought, protected from the wind. For a moment they didn't speak.
Then Turk reached into the left-hand pocket of his grimy jeans and brought out his compass, the same military-surplus compass in a battered brass case he had been carrying the day he first flew her into the mountains. He opened the case and looked at the gently swinging needle as if to confirm its alignment. Then he reached for Lise's hand and put the compass in her palm.
"What's this for?"
"I don't know if there's an edge to this fucking forest, but if there is you'll probably need a compass to find your way out."
"So? I'll just follow you. Keep it."
"I want you to have it."
"But—"
"Come on, Lise. All the time we've been together, what did I ever give you? I'd like to give you something. It would make me happy. Just take it."
Gratefully but uneasily, she closed her hand on the chilly brass case.
* * * * *
"I was thinking about Dvali," Lise said as they walked back to camp. She knew she shouldn't be saying this out loud, but the combined effect of exhaustion and the twilight glitter of the forest (not entirely dark, she had to admit) and Turk's peculiar gift had made her reckless. "About Dvali putting together his commune in the desert. Sulean Moi said there were other attempts to do the same thing, but they'd been stopped in time. Dvali must have known that, right?"
"I would guess so."
"But it seemed like he was pretty free with his information. He took a lot of people into his confidence. Including my father."
"Couldn't have been too reckless or they would have caught up with him."
"He changed his plans. That's what he told me. He was supposed to establish his compound out on the west coast, but he changed his mind after he left the university."
"He's not stupid, Lise."
"I don't think he's stupid. I think he's lying. He never intended to go to the west coast. The west coast plan was bullshit. It was designed to be bullshit."
"Maybe," Turk said. "Does it matter?"
"The story was supposed to derail anyone who came after him. But do you see what that means? Dvali knew Genomic Security was looking for him, and he must have known they would come after my father. Turk, he sat not a foot away from me and told me he knew my father was principled and loyal and wouldn't tell DGS what they wanted to know—except under extreme duress. Dvali could have warned him as soon as he heard DGS was in Port Magellan, if not before. But that's not what he wanted to do. My father disapproved of Dvali's project on moral grounds, so Dvali hung him out like a red flag."
"He couldn't have known your father would be killed."
"But he must have known it was a possibility, and he certainly would have expected him to be tortured. If it isn't murder it's the next best thing." Murder by indirection—the only kind of murder a Fourth could commit.
She didn't know what she could do with this thought, which had begun to burn like a brushfire in her mind. Could she face Dvali again? Should she tell him what she'd guessed or pretend innocence until they escaped this place? And what then? Was there any real justice for Fourths? She thought Diane Dupree might be able to answer that question, or Sulean Moi…
If they were still alive.
"Listen," Turk said.
All Lise could hear was the canopy of the Dark Forest rattling in the rising wind. She and Turk were back at the loading bays now, back where the creepy hedge of eyeball flowers had grown, but there wasn't even that maddening scratch-tap sound, because— Her eyes widened. "It stopped," Turk said. The digging had stopped.