Cassiel lifted the flyer up and over the sleeping landscape of Docklands. Leila fiddled with the disc’s settings until it showed Cassiel and the Caretaker her avatar, sitting in a rear seat. She reached out and connected with their senses. Cassiel’s Totality tech gave everything a pin-sharp precision. The Caretaker’s sound and image gathering systems were rather more glitchy. Even the smallest objects were overlaid with a soft, rainbow halo of colours. Each sound created a slow-dying echo. It was like being ever so slightly stoned. Leila followed their gazes out over the city. The dimly lit streets curved up and away above them, tucking themselves in behind the Spine. There was no spinelight, only a soft shine rising up from a thousand streetlamps. It made the round entrance to the Wart ahead seem even darker, as black as the armour the gun kiddies had worn to go into innocent battle.
‘I wonder if that’s my home,’ said the Caretaker. ‘It doesn’t seem very homely.’
‘Bringing back any memories?’ asked Leila.
‘Not yet. But I felt a definite connection with the Shining City. Like I should get in there, you know?’
Leila nodded.
They entered the Wart. There were far fewer lights. Scattered streetlamps implied a few long, straight roads, connecting clusters of shining windows hinting at factories and office blocks. Two power plants burned out of the darkness, security lights turning the globes of their fusion chambers into glowing pearls. Cassiel banked the flyer. As they flew over one, proximity degraded it.
The fusion chamber was a rough, concrete orb, set on a pitted metal base. Pipes ran out of it and into the ground. It was such an inelegant thing, but a quarter of Station’s power came from it. Leila felt suddenly very aware that, without the energy these power plants provided, she would not exist. She’d still be present in the world as patterns of magnetism sketched across so many silicon disks, but there’d be nothing to bring those patterns to life. She felt very transient.
Cassiel noticed her discomfort. ‘Worried?’
‘I’m fine.’
The mind pointed. ‘That’s where we’re headed…’
Leila looked ahead through Cassiel’s eyes, glad to be distracted.
The Caretaker craned forwards too. ‘Very impressive,’ he said.
The pyramid loomed out of the darkness, a dense mass about a hundred metres high, clutching the curved floor of the Wart. It came to a sharp, pale tip, pointing towards the centre of the Wart. Its four triangular faces arced up from the rubble-scattered ground, leaping up at a steep angle. Each face had originally been finished with a smooth, translucent material. Some of it remained, gleaming at the pyramid’s point, but most had fallen away, revealing pitted stone.
‘The Alpha Pyramid,’ said Leila. ‘Cormac gave me a map of it. The layout’s very simple. Two ways in. An official front entrance at ground level. And a hole some urban explorer hacked into it, halfway up the rear face.’
‘We take the back way,’ replied Cassiel. A warning pinged on the flyer’s dashboard, distracting her. ‘ID query from a local security system,’ she explained.
‘That’s not good,’ said Leila. ‘Is it Deodatus?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Cassiel reassured her. ‘And the gun kiddies did a good job. We look entirely innocent. The Wart’s full of energy systems. If there’s a problem with them, no matter how minor, it needs to be checked out straight away. Just like we’re apparently doing.’
The flyer landed with a barely perceptible bump. As they climbed out, Cassiel strapped Leila’s disc to her back. It still projected her avatar, making her appear physically present to Cassiel, the Caretaker and anyone else she chose to see her. ‘What next?’ she asked.
‘Find their security perimeter,’ replied Cassiel. ‘Then I’ll get us through it.’
They set off. The going was hard. The darkness made the rough ground treacherous. Gravity shifted in intensity, sometimes crushing them down, sometimes almost vanishing. Cassiel flowed like a ghost through it all, Leila moving with her. The Caretaker found the going tough, every so often stumbling and swearing, then regaining his footing and pushing on again.
‘I should have come alone,’ Cassiel told Leila. ‘I’m built for this. Neither of you are.’
Leila snorted. ‘There’s no way that Dieter will listen to you. And the Caretaker’s better than either of us at stopping pressure men.’
The Alpha Pyramid loomed ahead of them, never seeming to get any closer, its pointed tip boring a hole in the darkness. As they started up a low incline, Leila thought she heard a soft buzzing. She strained through Cassiel’s sharp ears.
Cassiel held a hand up. ‘Stop,’ she ordered. ‘Down. Now.’ It took the Caretaker a minute to catch up. He sank to the ground, grateful for the rest.
‘Flies,’ said Leila.
‘Yes. I think it’s the perimeter. Going to take a look.’ Her soft purple light flicked out.
‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ exclaimed Leila. ‘I thought you were always purple.’
‘I’m an infiltration specialist.’ She held up a translucent arm. ‘Of course I can be invisible when I need to.’
The mind slipped Leila’s disc off her back, sank forwards and down, and then was gone, elongating and moving like a snake, keeping low. Leila watched through her eyes. The mind flowed across dark rocks to the crest of the ridge, then looked down. The pyramid stood in the depression’s centre. Cassiel opened her eyes right up to inspect it. Darkness became light. At first it seemed that her vision was glitched with static. Tiny motes danced across it. Then Leila realised.
[It’s a swarm,] she breathed. [The biggest we’ve ever seen.]
[The perimeter,] said Cassiel. The flies framed the pyramid, a living shield dancing with movement. [A half-globe, surrounding their base.] Leila felt complex software architectures rise up in Cassiel’s mind as she scanned the flies. [The communications between them are very simple. Seem to be running a basic perimeter patrol programme,] the mind said. [I’ve queried them successfully, now I’m going to try a command. Needs concentration.]
Leila found herself thrust out of her head and back into her disc. She had the disc project an image of her, sitting next to the Caretaker.
‘Hey there,’ he whispered as she shimmered into being. ‘Thought you’d be back once she started all that ninja shit.’ He’d almost got his breath back. ‘What’s she up to?’
‘Telling the flies to let us through.’
‘Cool. And how are you?’
‘Fine,’ replied Leila. ‘I’m fine.’
A moment’s silence.
‘Are you sure?’ asked the Caretaker gently. ‘You don’t sound entirely convinced.’
‘Gods,’ she sighed. ‘It’s just that – all this. Who knows what we’ll find in there. All kinds of fucked-up things. And Deodatus at the centre of it all. And it’s just the three of us…’ She tailed off.
‘That fucking pyramid,’ laughed the Caretaker. ‘Scares the shit out of me too!’
‘Seeing it in the darkness. Like a tombstone. It’s all so real, all of a sudden.’
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It always was real. You missing your brother, Cassiel cut off from her world, me losing myself. Poor Ambrose, even. All people dealing with some real, heavy shit. And you’ve done a pretty good job so far. You kept us safe from the Rose and the pressure men. You found East…’
Leila remembered the Flurrytown restaurant. ‘She found me.’
‘She wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t been out there, looking for a way to go forwards. She was it. And because you found her, we’ve got everything we needed. And once we’re in the pyramid, it’ll be just the same. Cassiel will do her thing, you’ll do yours, I’ll do mine.’ His teeth flashed a smile in the gloom. ‘And we’ll all get to where we need to be.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I know so, Leila. Have a little faith in yourself. In the two of us too, come to that.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…’
‘Oh, I know. It is hard. But it’s all going to be good, Leila.’ He wriggled in the darkness, making himself more comfortable. ‘You know,’ he mused, ‘I don’t have a past. And that means I don’t have much of a future, either. I don’t know what to expect from life, because I don’t have any reference points. So I just live in the present. Think about the moment, find the right response to it, that’s it. There are moments when I feel like I’ve found the real me.’ He paused. ‘Memory gets in the way sometimes, Leila. It’s too easy to lose yourself in it.’ A chuckle. ‘Just look at Deodatus.’
‘Yeah,’ said Leila. ‘You’re not wrong. And it’s not just him.’ Cormac had fled irrevocably into the past when he found the present too harsh to bear. And Ambrose had always been trapped there too. Cormac was lost, but perhaps she’d finally be able to help Ambrose move on when he returned as a fetch. And then there was Dieter. History had taken him from her. But his situation was a little different. He needed to find lost time again. She squeezed the pendant around her neck and imagined handing it to her brother. As soon as he touched it, he’d come back to her.
Cassiel’s voice appeared in her mind. [I’ve meshed with the flies. Written a code block to tell them we’re the same as the minds controlling them. Then they’ll let us through. Firing it now. Thirty seconds and we’re going in.]