SENALL

25 Dorie steadied Adi Thakur as they left Room 1 and walked into the hallway. Adi, still weak from the solitary confinement, had lost track of the days he’d been in the Bubble, as she had.

She wondered if cameras were tracking them. No one had come in to stop her from freeing Adi, and no one entered the detention area now to throw him back in. Were the guards and Max Rydell even in the Bubble anymore? Before Adi and herself, Lorway had been the only prisoner—or, as Max liked to put it: subject. Had Rydell, under Sakson’s orders, freed Lorway as part of the protest against her? She couldn’t figure out how that would help him.

“There’s no one here,” Adi said as he swept his eyes back and forth, spotting the empty rooms.

“That’s right. You were dumped down there without knowing who was in the Bubble.”

“It’s a facility for studying Thin Men.” He looked questioningly at her. “It’s not Thin Men?”

She told him about Lorway, the only Thin Man in here, and how Dave Crowell had found out it was the real Lorway. Now she was gone.

“That’s quite a story,” Adi said.

“I found two of these in her old room. This is the first.”

She held out the singed Tarot card. Adi took it, and he didn’t know much more about Tarot than she did. She outlined Crowell’s quest to gather them all, and explained they had a role to play in helping him find his father.

“Lorway had the Death card and she had me take it to Dave. I gave it to him in your office after I stepped down as governor. Lorway never mentioned having any other cards.”

Adi rubbed his fingers on it. “It’s charred.”

“But why? That’s what I want to know.”

Adi held it closer to his face. “Burned within, and around edges. That’s a strange pattern.”

Dorie remembered something. “Dave did come here to see Lorway after I did before we left for Barnard’s. Do you think he gave her this card?”

“Why would he do that if he was collecting them?”

“Apparently only some of them were important for what they were designed for.”

“Which was what again?”

“Jumping to the Ultra universe.”

“Oh, is that all.” He grinned, but then he held up the card and added, “Could this be one that was used for that purpose?”

“To cross universes? No, no, there were a lot of cards involved, and a number of conditions needed.” She took the card back. “Do you know what card this is?”

“No. Stained glass window, five gold coins. There are cards named by their numbers, aren’t there?”

Dorie scratched her head.

“Do you think Lorway used it somehow?” Adi asked.

She’d thought about that earlier, before finding Adi. Where would one card take someone? What would trigger it? “Dave and Plenko talked about DNA coding. From the artist, but also for Dave, who would be the one to use them. So maybe. This is obviously a minor card he didn’t need, so could it have been tuned to her?”

Adi looked thoughtful. “And when they discovered she was gone?”

“They removed the bed and larger items, like her dresser. No one else was in the Bubble, so they didn’t concern themselves with a lot of the small bits.”

“And you found two cards?”

“Yes, I did.” She pulled out The Devil card and handed it to him.

“Fire and brimstone,” Adi said. “Probably a bad card. Things hellish? Bad stuff coming.

“Like death.”

“Or something leading up to it.”

“Like—an addiction.”

“RuBy?”

“Maybe.”

They walked back to Room 15 and Dorie steadied herself against the cell opening, feeling a little nausea. She still had plenty of moments when she fought the side effects of RuBy withdrawal. She felt certain if she’d found some, she’d roll a square and pop it. The uncertainty passed, and she spread her hands to indicate the refuse scattered on the floor. “I found them in that corner,” she said, pointing.

Dorie thought of herself and Terl. The Devil card could easily symbolize their own dramatic history of love and loss. She turned the card over. “What? I never noticed. There’s handwriting.” She turned the other one over, too, but only The Devil had something written on the back.

Adi came closer. “What does it say?”

She put a hand to her mouth, and it trembled against her lips. Through her fingers, she said, “Tempest Tower.”

Over the years, Adi had heard her talk plenty about the days of the first Ultra scare; Dave Crowell’s introduction to it all started when he viewed the holovid of her copy deliberately killing herself by throwing herself off the Tempest Tower in Venasaille.

Tempest Tower.

Dorie Senall plummeted one hundred floors to her gruesome death. What did it mean, written on the back of this card? Was it a reminder or a warning for Dave since most of this Tarot deck had been meant for him? Dave had all the cards he needed to make his dark passage to the Ultra universe. She wondered if he’d ever seen it and pondered its meaning—if he’d seen the message at all. If Lorway used the singed one—if it had been fixed to her own DNA—then why couldn’t a different minor card tether to someone else? Had Lorway written the note for her?

The temporary home of Dorie Senall and Terl Plenko, both Thin Men. Plenko the artist, leaving behind the mortaline sculpture of a twisted planet and its mass of tiny writing bodies struggling to be free. A sculpture that revealed the DNA of the artist and Dorie Senall.

“It’s for me,” she said. “I think it has to be for me.”

“How’s that possible?” Adi asked.

“Because Terl Plenko—the real one, my Plenko—made these Tarot cards.”

“I don’t think I’m seeing the connections.”

“Lorway escaped, and now it’s time for me. The Tempest Tower. A lost relationship. The sorrow behind that. And then there’s my copy’s suicide.”

Adi flinched. “Dorie, you’re not thinking—”

“No, of course not. It’s symbolic, right? That Dorie was trapped in her addiction in a different way. She had no choice but to jump. Have you ever read The Tempest?”

“Shakespeare.”

“Miranda has never seen any other person other than her father Prospero on her island. And then people come, and she’s amazed.”

“O brave new world, that has such people in it,” Adi said.

“Right.” Dorie clenched her teeth, feeling a resolve she hadn’t experienced in a long while. “New Venasaille is our new world, and goddamn it, I need to get back to it.”

Adi nodded in agreement and gave a proud smile. “But how?”

Dorie thought. They would need quiet, and it wasn’t going to get any quieter than it was here, with no one else around. She turned the card back to the picture side and stared at the image of Eve carrying a basket of red apples. A red-orange fire blazed behind Adam.

Red.

Abruptly, she sat down, cross-legged, and put the card on the floor in front of her. Adi sat down across from her.

“You have an idea?” he asked.

“It’s my DNA.” She held out both hands to Adi. “Look.”

He shook his head. “What am I looking at?”

She wiggled her fingers. “The sign of a true addict.”

RuBy.

Her fingers were stained red from the recent quantities of the drug forced on her. Even in the years between her last use of it and the time of her capture in Zola’s, the red on her fingertips had not gone away completely, only faded. The fresh abuse had painted them a dark red now. She could still smell the cinnamon on her fingers, even though she had not had any new squares in a while, and she’d fought through the withdrawal in the Bubble.

Still, she fought the craving for the alien drug almost every minute.

“If this works,” Adi said, “where will you go? Where did Lorway go? Will you end up in the same place? Will you end up free or back in Sakson’s hands?”

She shrugged. “I believe it might be the Tower. There’s a good reason why it might be where I travel, connected to it as I am. I tried to get it preserved as a memorial, remember? A small remaining portion of it anyway, which was just as well, because it wouldn’t have fit under the dome otherwise. Work started on the project, but never finished. And, well—” She paused, self-consciously rubbing her fingertips. “There’s something there I might need.”

“Need? Need what?”

You want some? Some of the action I’m offering you?

A leap of faith. She wondered what her copy had felt when she took her own leap off the Tempest Tower. Chance of a lifetime. Girl of adventure.

She shook her head to clear the echoes of her copy, reached out, and placed her fingers lightly on the card. What else could she do? It seemed as good an attempt as any. “You’ll have to remain completely quiet,” she said.

He nodded and waited.

“And Adi,” she said, “the card’s for me, so if it works—”

He waved her off. “I understand. You’ll come back and get me. Right, Governor Senall?”

She smiled. How she loved him and his confidence in her. She nodded vigorously. Closed her eyes. Concentrated.

Nothing happened.

Except maybe she noticed a slight tingle in her fingertips. Or she could’ve imagined it. Maybe it was because she had no RuBy and still felt the need for it. She peeked through her eyelids and moved her fingers to either side of the card. Then all the fingers, minus the thumbs, centered. Then along the borders of the images, since the first card had shown its burn marks around the outlines of the card.

There was a tingle. She opened her eyes fully. Adi gave her an encouraging look. Glancing at the card, she saw a sputter of light. Silverish, subdued, and fleeting. The tingle became a definite sensation of movement.

Surprised, she lifted her hands, her heart beating faster.

Adi frowned a little and mimicked the motion, his hands down on the floor, fingers splayed, but he put extra effort into it and grimaced in a way to show he meant he was pushing down harder.

More weight. A firmer touch.

She swallowed, then nodded. Fingers back on the card in the same position as before, she pushed down.

Light returned.

She felt the heat of the card under her fingers as the light became a white line that spread through the outlines of the card. It was working. It was working!

Lightheaded, Dorie ignored the strange vibrations that made her want to break contact. She concentrated on the fire. The chains uniting Adam and Eve lighting up now. Her head ached with pulsing throbs that seemed to match the sputters of the white light as it traced the card.

Then nausea.

Then it seemed Adi was frozen in place.

A blinding light assailed her, and she closed her eyes against it.

She didn’t open them. Couldn’t feel the card. Instead, she gave in to a peaceful calmness, as if reveling in a RuBy high. As if she were floating. Floating, but descending, as if from up on high, released from an ivory tower. There were burn marks on the tower in jagged shapes.

She slept.