Night fell. The flyer brought them in low and fast, snarling metres above the ground to avoid radar. It veered up and down, right and left, close-hugging the desert’s contours. Engines roared, crushing Leila and Cassiel back into their seats. Then they cut out and there was only the whistling roar of air over the flyer’s fuselage. The windows were black with deep night.
Leila’s timer read thirty-six hours.
‘Build up speed, switch to anti-gravity only. Avoid detection,’ whispered Cassiel. ‘Very effective insertion strategy.’
The craft still jinked left and right, up and down, aileron shifts accenting the air’s roar. But only momentum pulled them forwards. They were a bullet, hurtling unpowered towards their target, ready to inflict lethal damage on impact.
Seconds passed.
The aircraft shook. Deceleration threw them forwards, seat restraints crushed them. There was a sudden vertical drop. Cassiel was translucent again. The flyer’s door fell open. Webbing dropped away. The pilot waved urgently. A choir of dead faces shouted urgent commands from the control panel.
‘RUN! NOW! BUILDING TO RIGHT! COVER!’
Cassiel was out of the door, then Leila. The flyer lifted as she jumped, its turbofans howling. Dust leapt up, then the wind and the roar shrank as it turned and fled. She was surrounded by buildings. A dark mountain rose up behind them. Cassiel reached the building ahead. Leila sprinted after her.
The flyer’s boosters roared in the distances. Spotlight beams lanced down the avenue, white lines piercing the night. None of the buildings moved. The suit’s cameras flared. The flyer was already out of their reach. Leila crashed through a doorway to join Cassiel in darkness.
‘There’ll be patrols. A search. We need to keep moving,’ said the mind. ‘The suit’s retained its charge?’
‘It’s at sixty per cent.’
‘That’ll do.’ A pause. ‘Deodatus’ tower and the snowflake are north of here.’
They moved through the city like ghosts. The patrols came. Flyers skimmed between buildings. The night was a tangle of torches and searchlights. There was cover everywhere. It was easy to duck down and hide whenever needed, easy to listen out for the dry, buzzing shouts of the search parties.
Cassiel tracked the fallen minds for Leila. ‘Three, close by,’ then: ‘A pair, a block north.’ When their pursuers got too close she pulsed out confusions and they’d slip past them. ‘What I’m built for,’ she told Leila. ‘And a little help from the Caretaker. He knows all about blowing minds.’
But there were so many searchers. Cassiel could confuse small groups, but all together they formed a network too large for her to affect. Her pace slowed. Leila and Cassiel stopped moving forward. Their world grew smaller and smaller as the searchers’ net closed around them.
‘They’re everywhere,’ hissed Cassiel.
‘Can we hide in one of the buildings?’
‘We’d be trapped.’
The darkness flickered with jagged shards of torch light. Shouts buzzed out in the night. Their pursuers made no effort to hide their confidence.
‘They want us to think there’s no way out,’ said Cassiel. ‘They want us to panic.’
There was a pit beside a broken building. They flung themselves into it. A sheer wall hung above them – shattered window glass, pitted concrete, narrow columns ending in jagged breaks, storeys of empty balconies.
‘Can you climb up there?’
‘The flyers would see us. We need a distraction.’
Leila probed the suit’s systems. Menus appeared in her mind. She raced through them, thinking commands into its control centre. ‘Unhook me,’ she told Cassiel.
An instant of blurred motion and Cassiel held Leila’s disc. There was still remote control. The suit leapt out of the pit and ran. Leila saw and heard through it. She felt every lurch and stumble as it crossed the rough ground. Fallen minds shouted and gestured.
‘It’s working,’ said Cassiel. ‘Now we go up.’
A warning flashed in Leila’s mind. The disc’s wireless transmitter was weak. The suit would soon be out of range. Leila thought commands:
<RUN AT FULL SPEED>
<EVADE ALL PURSUER GROUPS>
<DISREGARD ALL DAMAGE ALERTS>
The suit acknowledged her. Then it was gone. Leila was blind and deaf. She snatched at Cassiel’s senses. They were halfway up the façade, leaping from balcony to balcony. None of the searchers had noticed them. Above, the mountain loomed up, a round mass darker than night.
Cassiel glanced back into the street. Far beneath them the suit ran, kicking up dust. Fallen minds converged on it. There was a rattle of gunfire. The suit staggered, then recovered itself. The cordon was ragged. The suit leapt for its weakest part and burst through, breaking it.
A mob of fallen minds hurtled after the suit. Flyers roared past, storeys below. Cassiel rounded the corner of the building. Leila imagined the skull, grinning endlessly as the suit ran its last. The true dead had saved them, and through them perhaps both Station and the Totality.
‘Good job,’ said Cassiel.
The street beneath was empty. Shots rang out in the distance, echoing off the skyscrapers. There was shouting. ‘Now we find Deodatus’ tower,’ said Cassiel. She clambered back down to street level and sprinted north, Leila’s disc strapped to her back. Tower blocks hid the mountain.
At first the city was a dead jumble of buildings. Order started to appear. Skyscrapers stood in circles. Girders crossed from façade to façade, uniting them. There were round, dark globes in the middle of each ring, studded with small lights.
‘I’m picking up weave overlay,’ said Cassiel. ‘Same kind of network the flies were sharing in the pyramid. All this is another outskirt of the Shining City.’
‘Shall we open it up?’ asked Leila. She nudged the cuttlefish. It reported readiness.
‘We’ll scout out Deodatus’ tower and the fallen Snowflake first.’
Darkness started to turn to light.
‘There are inhabitants too,’ said Cassiel.
‘I can’t see them,’ said Leila.
‘Listen. Large, marching groups.’ Leila tuned into Cassiel’s audio systems. A regular, shuffling footstep-tramping filled her mind. Cassiel’s path through the streets became a zig-zag. ‘Avoiding them.’
‘What are they?’
‘Groups of humans. Shepherded by minds.’
‘Looking for us?’
‘No evidence of a search pattern. They’re all moving directly away from Deodatus’ tower. Fanning out into the city.’ A pause as she listened again. ‘So many of them.’
The timer ticked down to thirty-five hours. Soon Lei’s rock would land, deleting this dead place. A great threat would vanish. But so much history and so many lives would be lost too. Sadness surprised her. Dieter’ll hate it, she thought. Then: I’ll get him out.
‘We’re approaching the tower,’ whispered Cassiel, snapping Leila out of her reverie. They’d stopped inside one of the building rings. ‘We’ll recce from up there,’ she said, pointing up at one of its tower blocks. The sky glowed softly above it.
Cassiel looked around the piazza and then towards its centre. There was another globe there. Leila saw that some of the small lights were moving. She could make out human shapes.
‘What is that?’ she wondered.
‘It’s a fusion reactor,’ said Cassiel. ‘Like the ones in the Wart. Pretty much identical design.’
‘Is there time to zoom in on the lights?’ asked Leila. ‘I’m curious. Looks like they’re attached to people.’
‘Not quite people,’ chuckled Cassiel.
A crash zoom and Leila was face to face with death. Milky eyes hung in a glistening face. Scraps of flesh clung to pale bone. There was no jawbone. The tongue was a dry leather strap, hanging down and swaying. Flies punctuated the image.
‘FUCK!’
Cassiel zoomed out a little. A rope sling held the creature to the dome. Its body had the same used-up look as its face. Torn flaps of skin fluttered off scrawny muscles and yellow bones. Organs pulsed wetly. Black specks crawled everywhere.
‘They march and they build,’ said Cassiel. ‘All under fallen mind direction. They have become Deodatus’ lieutenants, here and on Station.’
The creature’s add-ons glittered as it moved. A limp backpack hung off its shoulders. Its bony hands were wrapped round a spanner. It worked the tool in short, sharp jerks, tightening a bolt. The light was a torch strapped to its forehead. An upside down triangle glistened in its chest.
‘At least you guys get a little seniority under him. All the humans who work for him end up as sweatheads.’
‘These aren’t sweatheads. They’re something much older. Centuries, by the look of it.’
Cassiel zoomed out a little more. The reactor crawled with the dead, each bearing its own light, each working to fix one small part of a great system of cables in place. A single fallen mind squatted at its peak, overseeing them, a square absence set in its chest.
‘What are they doing?’ wondered Leila.
‘Wiring the reactor to the buildings. Wiring all the buildings together.’
‘The Caretaker said Deodatus was buying up deuterium. Must be to power all the reactors.’
‘Maybe he wants to get the buildings walking again,’ speculated Cassiel. ‘Bolting them all together makes defence and attack easier. Like circling the wagons, except this circle can move. Perhaps he’s going to celebrate the fall of Station with a little conquest down here. Going after living cities. They’re probably pretty resource rich. And there’s the Caretaker, too. He could be winding up to destroy him, at last. If he controlled the Totality, he’d probably be able to take on the air and sea powers as well.’
‘Deodatus ruling the Earth?’ Leila shuddered. ‘That’s a horrible idea.’
‘If he enslaved us and destroyed Station, he’d rule the Solar System too. So we’re going to stop him.’ Cassiel zoomed back out and looked up. ‘Let’s get climbing.’
It took her a couple of minutes to reach the top of the building. Identical windows flew past. Leila glimpsed more decaying figures through them, lying still on metal pallets.
‘The whole place is full of them,’ she said.
‘The fallen minds must be marching them out to fill the buildings. Definitely some sort of attack force.’
Leila thought about her brother. He’d talked about creating an army. ‘Gods,’ she muttered. ‘Do you think these are the sleepers Dieter’s been waking?’
‘Could be. But he thought they’d attack Station. I don’t know how this lot would ever get up there.’
Dieter had been lied to again. Good thing too, thought Leila.
‘If they did get up there, they’d cause havoc,’ mused Cassiel. ‘The Taste Refresh Festival would make it very easy for the flies to rewrite everyone’s memories.’
They reached the top of the building. ‘Done,’ said the mind, as she pulled them up on to a flat roof. ‘We’ll have a good view of Deodatus’ tower. Can plan our way in.’ Leila tried not to think of the dense mass of decayed creatures stacked up beneath them.
Cassiel stood up and turned to look out towards the tower.
It was where they’d expected it to be. It had a twin, a dirty purple spike rising up into the sky. Tiny figures marched in phalanxes across the open space between the two towers and the edge of the city. But they barely noticed them, for something impossible loomed over it all.
‘Oh,’ said Leila.
Dawn revealed the mountain. There was nothing natural about it. It was a great, hollow half circle, stretching half a kilometre to their left and right, half a kilometre above them. The sky blazed pale orange around it, making the black metal of its pitted, scorched, artificial skin seem even darker.
Fragments of frosted glass – tens, maybe hundreds of metres long – hung down from its edge, broken teeth around a broken mouth. The sun was to their left and the great arch was angled towards it, so some of its curving inner surface was lit up. It stretched back for kilometres.
Where the light touched the tube’s inner surface, a patchwork of ruined buildings was visible, clinging to its concave curve. It had once held a city that could have supported thousands. Leila thought back to Station and realised that she was looking into the twin of Homelands.
The titanic structure lay behind a crater wall of mud and rock. Leila imagined the rest of it, stretching back for kilometres, half buried in the landscape. It looked ancient. ‘It’s astonishing,’ she breathed. ‘They built two Stations. The one we live on…’
‘And this other, that fell to Earth.’