27

 

The shuttle’s sensors pierced the clouds and rain, revealing a street-spanning infrared blob. Several dozen people, hot red on a cold blue background, clustered around the source of Niccoluccio’s signal. The shuttle’s NAI drew a yellow outline around the blotch it had identified as Niccoluccio. The two nearest men were kicking him.

That was all Habidah needed to see. Her safety harness released with a snap. She bolted out of her seat. Her demiorganics took over her sense of balance, keeping her upright – barely.

Joao and Kacienta boggled at her. The shuttle buckled in the wind. She stumbled past their couches and through the control cabin’s doors into the ventral corridor. A burst of deceleration nearly knocked her back. The distance to Niccoluccio’s signal ticked at the edge of her awareness: five hundred meters vertical, two hundred horizontal.

Habidah hadn’t heard anything from him since his first call for help. She tried again to contact Niccoluccio. Nothing. She grasped for a handhold along the folded-up boarding ramp. “Cut our camouflage and noise bafflers,” she sent.

“Have you lost it?” Joao asked.

She would have done it herself, through her demiorganics, but there was no way that she could stay on her feet and control the shuttle at the same time. “Cut the fucking camouflage and noise bafflers!”

Joao listened. The roar of the thrusters changed pitch, reverberating through the deck. The distance to Niccoluccio ticked down slower.

The ramp began extending when the shuttle was twenty meters off the ground. Cold, misty air gusted across Habidah’s cheek. She edged down the unfolding ramp, keeping a tight grip on the bulkhead. Steam billowed from the thruster exhausts. The cold stung her skin. The air roared, and whipped at her hair and clothes.

Wind jerked the shuttle away before she saw much, but infrared showed her some blotches that looked like people, running away. She spared no pity for them. She hoped they were terrified.

Fury burned in her breath.

The shuttle couldn’t land. The buildings on either side of the street didn’t offer the clearance for its wingspan. Habidah didn’t wait. She leapt off the edge of the ramp, meters in the air, and landed with a sharp pain and a roll.

The shuttle hovered overhead, fire-tinged, casting its shadow over half the block. A meteorite frozen just before impact. The thunder of its thrusters must have carried over all of Florence. It ground her bones and teeth against each other.

Niccoluccio lay in a ditch. She hardly recognized him. His face was smeared with mud, and his hair might as well have been made of it. A long cut ran across his cheek to his chin, a bruise sprouted under his eye. She scrambled to his side, crouched. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing. His pulse was erratic, and his body temperature had spiked.

More than that, his elbows were bony, his cheeks sallow. The bugs she’d planted in him now reported significant dehydration, starvation, fever. She’d set them to alert her long before it should have gotten this bad.

“Not now,” he mouthed. Habidah only heard him because he had inadvertently triggered his subvocal transmitter. “I don’t want this.”

She looked about, craned her neck to follow the shuttle. The shuttle drifted farther down the street, tilting to bring the hovering end of the boarding ramp closer. But the ramp would never reach the ground, not without knocking over some of the houses.

She lifted Niccoluccio, one hand under his knees and the other supporting his back. Again, she depended on her demiorganics to disguise the strain of his weight. He’d let some of his tonsured hair grow back out since she’d last seen him.

The ramp scythed through the air, a meter and a half off the street. Either Joao or Kacienta pushed the shuttle forward. When the ramp was about to pass her, Habidah allowed her demiorganics to take over. She crouched, and leapt onto the edge of the ramp.

Red-hot pain flashed up her calves and thighs. She’d torn muscles. Her demiorganics flashed warnings and numbed her legs. She limped halfway up the ramp, and then slid Niccoluccio to a seat, half-held, half-cradled.

The ramp’s retraction carried her and Niccoluccio the rest of the way inside. When the ramp at last shut out the wind, she sent, “Get us away from here.”

“I’m turning the stealth fields back on first,” Joao answered, pointedly.

Their ascent wasn’t smoother than the descent. She braced herself and Niccoluccio against the wall. Her demiorganics fed her some of the exterior camera feeds. The shuttle pierced the clouds. A rain-streaked gray smothered the cameras.

Kacienta came out to help Habidah finish carrying Niccoluccio to a couch. Habidah retrieved an emergency kit from under her couch. A spasm of turbulence nearly toppled her into him. She kept upright, holding onto to his couch for balance while she applied the first medical patch.

Kacienta said, “I’m getting bad déjà vu. Is this why you saved him the first time, so that he could do it all over again?”

Habidah was too busy reviewing the patch’s diagnostics. Nothing was right. The bugs she’d planted should’ve been screaming for her before his condition became this bad.

Kacienta said, “He obviously doesn’t know how to use these chances you keep giving him if you need to save him this many times.”

“He was being beaten, Kacienta,” Joao muttered.

“None of us knows what happened to him,” Habidah said, but at the same time, she saw what Kacienta did. His face caked with the dirt of several days. The patch found days-old fatigue toxins. All this had happened recently. There were no signs of malnutrition, dehydration, or starvation older than a week. His hair and fingernails were well trimmed underneath the grime. He hadn’t called her when any of this had started to happen.

Joao said, “These people kill each other all the time. Read my report from Strasbourg? Where they herded hundreds of Jews into a house and burned them alive? Terrible violence is an inherent part of their lives. We can’t save them all from it. So why do you keep interfering with this guy? What makes him more important than anyone else?”

Habidah didn’t need to look up to sense Kacienta watching her, too. They thought they already knew the answer. They were wrong. The truth was that Niccoluccio had been her breaking point.

After making sure that Niccoluccio’s condition wasn’t worsening, Habidah retired to her couch. The sky was no clearer over the field base than in Florence. The shuttle rumbled through its descent, bouncing Habidah’s legs. Her nerve blocks couldn’t cut the pain in time. She groaned, and squeezed her eyes. She was going to need a day of rest to allow her demiorganics to stitch her muscles back together.

When the shuttle landed, she scraped together enough contrition to ask Joao and Kacienta to carry Niccoluccio. She staggered down the ramp after them. When she looked up, she saw how the shuttle must have appeared to the people of Florence: a titan, a dragon, steaming and hissing. A hammer from the forge of God, about to fall.

She caught Joao looking at her. Habidah couldn’t meet his stare. She had nothing to say for herself.

 

Joao lifted Niccoluccio onto one of Feliks’ beds. He said, “I doubt you’re going to send him back again.”

“If he asks to, I will.”

“And if he doesn’t? What are you going to do with him then?”

He hadn’t asked because he expected an answer. Habidah didn’t give him one. He and Kacienta left her alone while she set to washing him. She ordered the base’s fabricators to stitch together an imitation monk’s habit. It wasn’t until she finished dressing him that she noticed his eyelids flutter.

Soon, he was staring at the ceiling lights. He had to know where he was, of course. He’d spent so many days in this office that he must have memorized every detail. Habidah stood out of sight. She gave instructions to the medical patches to soothe his blood and brain chemistry, and waited until he was fully conscious.

She said, “I hope you know that you’re safe.”

“I still don’t feel hungry,” he said.

“We’re helping you recover from the effects of starvation. It’ll be a day or two before you should eat solid food.”

He pushed his eyes back to her. “You don’t understand. I haven’t been hungry in days. I thought it was a sign, that I was doing the right thing.”

“Starving yourself?”

“I shouldn’t have left Elisa. I thought I was giving my life to God. That’s what I’ve always tried to do, to get away from myself. It works for a while, but all it does is lead me here. Or the dark.”

“The dark?” Habidah wanted, and didn’t want, to ask who Elisa was.

“Alone,” he said. “Cut off from God. Worse than Hell.”

“You’re not alone now.”

He looked back to her, eyes shimmering. Her demiorganics warned her of rapid spikes in his brain activity. “You don’t understand. All this – this world, all our words, and sensations – is just a skin over darkness. I’ve felt it. I’ve been there. It’ll swallow me eventually. All of us, probably.”

Habidah hesitated while she tried to think of the most delicate way to answer this. “I can’t tell you what you experienced while you were being beaten, but you never went anywhere. You never died. Your mind can play very strange tricks on you when it’s under duress.”

“I know when I’ve died.”

Niccoluccio told her more. After being abandoned by his brother, he’d devoted himself to gravedigging, a profession second only to nursing the sick in its risks during a time of plague.

“I saw the whole world die.” Niccoluccio’s voice was calm, detached. Good. Habidah’s caretaking of his blood chemistry was leveling him out. “After Sacro Cuore, I thought I might be the only mortal left in the world. Even after you found me, I stayed in that moment. All I heard was news of wave upon wave of death crashing upon the shores of Christendom. My brother and his cadre were going on as they always had. They were living in the world as it had been.”

Habidah said, “When you got home, nothing you saw must have seemed real.”

“Before that. I should have gotten sick long ago. In Sacro Cuore, when all my brothers were dying. I took the same risks that I did in Florence. Tending to the sick, burying the dead.”

Habidah echoed herself: “All you wanted to do was help, but you didn’t have the power.”

“The only thing I could do amounted to very little in the end.”

“Why did you call me if you didn’t want to be rescued?”

After a pause, Niccoluccio said, “I didn’t call you.”

“You did. You called me to come save you.”

“Maybe in my sleep. It doesn’t matter.” Niccoluccio reached his hand across the top of the bed. Even after she’d washed him, his fingernails still felt grubby to the touch. He asked, “Do you know often I hoped you were listening?”

She would only have been able to listen if he’d activated his transmitter deliberately. She smiled, but decided against explaining. “I’d like to think that I understand a lot about how you feel. But the need to forever be watched and judged is always going to elude me.”

“Don’t you have any higher power governing your life?”

“Oh yes. Nobody feels very reverent toward them.” After a moment’s consideration, she added, “Almost nobody.”

“Is there nothing in your other worlds to be reverent about? Ever since you told me that God is not a part of your lives, I’ve wondered.”

Habidah held his gaze for a long moment.

She asked, “When did I ever tell you we came from another world?”

Niccoluccio didn’t hide his surprise. “Months ago.”

“I never said that. Or told you that God wasn’t a part of our lives.” The nagging thought that she was missing something caught up with her again. The medical bugs should have warned her that he was starving.

Her throat itched. “How many times have we spoken over the past few months, you and I?”

Niccoluccio shrugged. “Many.”

She queried his medical bugs. Then she repeated it, but this time bounced the signal off one of her team’s communications satellites. That was how she would have gotten the data while Niccoluccio was Florence.

The results looked similar to the first. She could see all of the chemicals she’d poured into his system, but they were in subtly different proportions. They were what she might expect to see rather than what was actually there.

“And did you spend much time thinking over what we talked about?”

“Yes. You helped me find my way.”

“Find your way to where?”

He considered. “My way here, I suppose.”

She swallowed past her tightening throat. “I think you should get some rest for the time being. I’ll be back to talk more about this when you’re feeling better.”

“I feel fine now.”

“Only because our medicine has tricked you into feeling that way.”

His eyes flicked over himself, to the bruise creeping down his shoulder and the hollow curve of his stomach. If he hadn’t felt alienated from his body before, he would now. “Oh.”

Sometimes she didn’t think he was sufficiently afraid of her and her people. There was certainly a lot to fear. More than she’d known.

She squeezed his fingers, dosed him with more tranquilizers, and left the office.

 

Before the doors shut, she queried NAI to see if there had been any change in Ways and Means’ activities. The planarship had dispatched fifteen more satellites over the past two hours, but it had been doing that at odd intervals since its arrival. A shuttle had dropped toward Shangdu, probably carrying more agents. If the amalgamates were setting her up, they hadn’t done anything yet.

There was no way to tell how long she’d been receiving a false signal. And, of course, no way to tell if the information she was receiving now was accurate.

Niccoluccio said he hadn’t called her. She’d thought she’d been getting to know him. But it had been just one more way she was being manipulated.

Someone had impersonated him to warn her about the danger in which he’d put himself. If Ways and Means had, for whatever reason, just wanted her to pick him up, all it needed to do was allow the signal from his medical bugs to reach her.

It had wanted her to come, but only at a specific time. When Niccoluccio was at his weakest and most vulnerable.

She called Kacienta and Joao into the field base’s conference room.

The room felt a lot emptier without Feliks. Kacienta raised her eyebrow, waiting for Habidah to speak first. “I think I’ve made an awful mistake,” Habidah said.

“No shit,” Kacienta said, dryly.

“I’ve let us all be set up.” Habidah glanced at the ceiling. There was never any way to tell if the amalgamates were listening. She’d already given away that she knew, though, when she’d queried the bugs in Niccoluccio’s system.

She told them what she knew so far: “Niccoluccio claims he never called for a rescue. He also said we’ve had several conversations that I don’t remember. I don’t think I’ve spoken to the real Niccoluccio since he left us.”

“I don’t understand,” Joao said. “Why would the amalgamates care about him?”

“Osia seemed to think that she could still talk us into helping colonize this plane.”

“Never,” Kacienta said, her voice steel.

Habidah said, “Exactly. I can’t think of any other reason why it would fake Niccoluccio’s signals, though.”

Kacienta tapped her middle finger on the table. “I can’t believe the amalgamates could have manipulated you into picking him up the first time. They’re not that subtle.”

Joao suggested, “Maybe they’re taking advantage of a situation you created yourself.”

Habidah asked, “To do what?”

Neither of them answered. She told the viewwall to show her Niccoluccio. He lay with arms folded above his stomach. His chest rose and fell in languid measure.

A well of disgust pooled in the back of her throat. Niccoluccio didn’t deserve any of what the amalgamates were doing to him. Nor did Kacienta and Joao deserve anything she’d done to them, or that might happen because of her decisions. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I never should have done any of this.”

She had expected them to agree. Joao said, “I doubt Niccoluccio would think so.”

“No matter how I feel about him, he’s not that special. There are thousands of people like him on this plane. The only thing that makes him unique is his contact with me.” She was the reason why all this was happening to him. Someone had turned him, a weapon, into a tool to pry something loose from her. Her thoughts turned at once to Osia. She pressed her nails into her palm, hard.

Joao said, “He’s important to you. Important enough to get you to change your behavior. That must be why all of this is happening.”

“If Ways and Means is hoping I’ll cooperate for his sake, it’s going to be disappointed.” The idea came to her in a flash of heat: “It doesn’t make any sense for Ways and Means to be behind this.”

Joao said, “Just because the amalgamates don’t make sense, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a plan. Meloku could tell you that.”

“The last time I thought I spoke with Niccoluccio, I asked him about divine intervention. He told me how to find miracles. I can’t think of any reason why Ways and Means would want to fake that.”

Joao shrugged. “It was trying to mimic him?”

“Why not just let the real Niccoluccio talk to me if that was all?”

“We could ask Ways and Means,” Joao said. “It’s probably listening right now.”

On the viewwall, Niccoluccio shifted and stirred. His face twisted in discomfort.

Kacienta was at an angle to see it, too. “Did he fall asleep, or did you tranquilize him?”

Habidah said, “I tranqed him.” He shouldn’t have been doing that.

She queried his medical patches. There was no response.

She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. “Excuse me,” she said.

The walk to Feliks’ office wasn’t very long. With the walls displaying their normal gray, it was claustrophobic. When she reached the double doors, she nearly walked flat into them. She placed her hand on them, for a moment unsure what to do. They’d never failed to open. She told NAI to open the doors, and received no answer.

A low rumbling built underneath the floor. It reverberated from her heels to the tips of her teeth.

“Shit,” Joao transmitted, somewhere back in the conference room.

“What’s happening?” Habidah asked. “Is Ways and Means attacking?”

Joao said, “The communications gateway just opened. The aperture is ten times as large as it should be.”

“Not possible,” Habidah said. The field base was only equipped to open a pinpoint gateway. The projectors that created the gateway weren’t intended for anything larger, and the field base didn’t have the generator capacity in any case.

“There’s an immense amount of power flooding our base,” Joao said. “That’s where the rumbling is coming from. The power feeds weren’t meant to handle that much energy. They should have blasted apart by now. The aperture is up to two millimeters. Three millimeters–”

“Still not possible,” Habidah said. “NAI is lying to you.”

The rest of what she said, and anything Joao might have answered, was lost under a blast of white noise. Static flooded behind her eyes, filled her ears. All of her nerves filled with fire and ice, coexisting in the same shreds of tissue – contradictions of sensation ripping her apart.

She couldn’t think, didn’t even realize she was letting go.

 

She woke on the corridor floor. She couldn’t remember falling. Her inner ear was spinning. If she hadn’t seen the walls and ceiling, she would have thought she’d tumbled into the sky.

All she had of the past few moments was a vague sense of discontinuity. Her skin and eyes and scalp burned. She ordered her demiorganics to block the pain. Nothing. She couldn’t even be sure the thought had reached its destination. Her mind felt like it had been sectioned on Feliks’ autopsy table.

The doors to Feliks’ office opened.

 

Habidah’s awareness must have gone again. The next thing she saw was Niccoluccio beside her, trying to lift her. He didn’t have the strength. Habidah tried to speak, but she couldn’t manage it through the pain soaking every neural fiber.

He was weeping, speaking. It didn’t seem like he was speaking to her.

“Dying is one thing. I don’t want her to suffer.”

 

The next time Habidah knew anything, Niccoluccio was gone. The fires in her veins were dying but not gone. She had ash for blood. She still felt like she was plummeting. She scrabbled for purchase, but the walls were ice-smooth.

She finally fought to her feet and braced herself between the narrow walls. Her demiorganics finally dampened the pain, but they could do nothing for her sense of balance. The floor quaked as though a crevice had opened and the field base were sliding down into it. Standing, even leaning, took effort.

“Habidah,” Joao said, and even in the transmission she could hear his strain. He’d been struck down, too. “He’s gone to the communication chamber.”

Habidah turned, and, as fast as her jelly legs allowed, ran.

The doors to the communications chamber opened without a fight. She clung to the frame. She found a ruin on the other side.

The chamber’s far wall had caved in. It looked as though a catapulted stone had punched through it, leaving an open and jagged gap. Spiderweb fissures spread to the floor. A blinding white light shone through the breach, flash-frozen lightning.

Habidah’s demiorganics calmly identified the spectra while the rest of her stared. The wavelengths were that of a raw interplanar tear. The same had shone in the sky when Ways and Means had arrived.

Only that had been in dead vacuum. It hadn’t screamed. Her demiorganics had already blocked her hearing to keep the pain below her tolerance threshold.

All of the chamber’s lights had gone out, but the gateway showed her enough. She saw smashed monitors, broken chairs, and shards of metal and plastic scattered across the floor, all juddering in rhythm with the earthquake. A stream of dust poured on her shoes. A light strip dangled by its power cables, casting a manic shadow across the walls. Joao and Kacienta had beaten her here. They crouched under desks. Kacienta had clapped her hands over her bleeding ears.

The quaking traveled up Habidah’s back, clacked her teeth and ground her joints together. She tried taking a step, but a bad jolt forced her to grab for the wall. She could no more move than she could think.

The field base’s microaperture communications gateway was buried behind the broken part of the wall. It never should have been able to generate anything like what she was seeing. She shielded her eyes and peered through the gaps in her fingers. Even the amalgamates couldn’t have hidden a larger gateway so well. It could have been another interplanar gateway impinging on theirs, but why would an interloper open the gateway exactly there?

Just before she closed her fingers, she caught a glimpse of shadow, an impression of a human form.

Her heart slammed against her chest. She looked again, but even her demiorganics couldn’t discern anything through the glare and retinal shadows.

The next convulsion drove her to her knees. The floor beat on her kneecaps, drove a stake of agony through the back of her neck. Her demiorganics blocked every sound, but she swore she could hear anyway. The tear sounded like a perpetual shriek, the air of the world rushing into vacuum – but there was no wind. Pain screamed across her eardrums.

Just when she thought she couldn’t tolerate any worse, just when she was about to let go, it stopped.

The shadows that blanketed the room were so deep, and her eyes so mistreated and maladjusted, that she couldn’t see anything. She fell to the floor and kept on falling.