32

Agata flipped over a dozen pages before realizing that her concentration had deserted her and she had no idea what she’d been looking at.

She pushed the book away across her desk. Even if she stumbled on some crucial insight that had informed Medoro’s design, what could she do with it in a day and a half? She wasn’t going to build a magical machine that could reach through solid rock and turn the messaging system to dust.

There was knocking from outside. Agata dragged herself to the door.

“Are you busy?” Serena asked.

“Not really.” Agata invited her in.

Medoro’s books were arranged around the room, stacked by subject and ordered by hastily assigned priorities.

“You’re sorting through everything already,” Serena observed. She glanced at the desk, at the open book.

“I got caught up in Principles of Photonics,” Agata explained. “Once you’ve read the first page it’s impossible to put down.”

“We should go for a walk,” Serena suggested. “Give yourself a break.”

“All right.” Agata wasn’t sure what this would be in aid of, but she followed Serena out into the corridor.

They moved along the guide rope in silence for a while, single file with Agata in front. Then Serena said quietly, “I’ve been talking to some friends about the disruption.”

“Yeah?”

“We all agreed that we have to do something.” Serena met Agata’s rear gaze. “So if you have any plans of your own, maybe we can work together.”

Agata said, “Now you tell me.”

“You have no idea what it’s been like here,” Serena replied bluntly. “They switched on the system, and suddenly we had three years of our lives laid out in front of us: three years’ worth of messages telling us exactly who we’d be. A few people were dragged kicking and screaming into whole new ways of thinking—but after the initial jolt they were just as incapable of change as the rest of us. That’s what the system does: it turns you into the kind of person who knows nothing more each day than you knew the day before.”

“But now the feed’s gone silent, and the spell is broken?”

“Half broken,” Serena replied. “There are a lot of us who want to act, but the paralysis lingers. Some people think we should march on the messaging stations and smash whatever we can—but there’s still a mindset that declares it’s impossible, because if the Council have said we won’t … we won’t.”

Agata’s spirits were rising, but she wasn’t clear herself where this new force could be applied.

“There’s already a plan to sabotage the channels,” she said. “But I don’t trust the people who set it up.” She scanned the corridor then waited until she was certain that no passerby could hear her before explaining Giacomo’s scheme. “I don’t think they care if they break open the tubes. They’re not going to err on the side of caution.” Agata stopped short of accusing the group of Medoro’s murder; she didn’t know that for sure.

Serena took a few lapses to come to terms with these revelations. She’d probably come to Agata hoping for nothing more than a technical opinion on the best place to attack the system.

“So what are you searching for in my brother’s books?” she asked finally.

“Another way to cause the shutdown.”

“And if you find one, will the saboteurs call off their plans?”

“Probably not,” Agata admitted. “Even if I could persuade Ramiro and Tarquinia, I doubt they’re in control any more.”

Serena said, “So you’re saying that these saboteurs might be the greatest threat. But what would happen if we managed to stop them?”

“Something still has to cause the disruption,” Agata replied. “A meteor, or a mob.”

“There are dozens of us ready to protect the mountain,” Serena avowed.

“But we might not be enough to cause the disruption by sheer force of numbers, let alone stage some second action against the saboteurs as well.”

They’d almost come full circle back to the apartment, but Agata couldn’t face the piles of unread books again. She wasn’t going to transform herself into Medoro in the next few bells. “We had a time-reversed camera on the Surveyor for years,” she lamented. “I could have spent all my free time experimenting on it, if I’d known how useful that would be.”

Serena was amused. “The rest of the crew might not have been too happy if you’d destroyed it.”

“After we’d left Esilio it wouldn’t have mattered. But we certainly took care of it until then.” Agata stopped and stood clutching the guide rope, thinking about the landing. “Protecting it from too much exposure.”

“You mean not pointing it at Esilio’s sun?” Serena frowned. “Though wouldn’t that have … brought it back to normal, if it had arrived burned out?”

“Protecting it from too much ordinary light as well,” Agata said. “Intense light would have damaged it: scatter from our engines, say.”

“So you want to steal the Surveyor and aim its engines at the base of the mountain?” Serena joked.

Agata said, “No. But a big enough explosion above the base should have the same effect … or twelve smaller ones might do it.”

Serena understood. “You want to repurpose the saboteurs’ bombs? Use the flash but not the bang?”

“Why not? The collectors gather light from all directions—and they can’t discriminate between ordinary light and time-reversed light. If we can shift the explosions far enough away from the surface that there’s no risk of them breaching the tubes, they could still be the cause of the disruption. They don’t even need to damage the cameras permanently—they just have to overwhelm the photonics long enough for the time-reversed light that’s in transit to be lost.” The original plan for the occulters had been to blind each channel to a single star, but the design that made that impossible rendered this new plan far less demanding: it didn’t matter where in the sky the explosions appeared. The collectors would funnel all the photons in and dazzle the cameras, regardless.

Serena said, “What if there’s a sensor that can bring down a shutter if the ambient light gets too bright? I mean, the light that’s meant to do this damage will be bouncing back and forth between the mirrors before it gets to the camera. There’ll be plenty of time for news of the danger to reach the camera by a shorter route.”

She was right, Agata realized. But it might not matter. “They can bring down a shutter to protect the camera from permanent damage … but that shutter will block the time-reversed light, too. So it will all come down to the timing: whether the flash from the explosions forces the shutter to close for so long that the signal is lost.”

Serena was quiet for a moment. “So how do we divert the saboteurs’ bombs? Go out there and physically move them?”

“Maybe,” Agata replied. “But I don’t know how we can get out undetected.”

Serena was incredulous. “You think the Council will try to stop us protecting the mountain?”

“Not as such—but if we’re going to tell them our plan, they’ll have known about it for the last three years. So why wouldn’t they have modified their own defenses at the base to take account of what we tell them about the occulters and the explosives?”

Serena said, “Because we don’t tell them. Because we’re afraid that they’d find a way to prevent the explosions from causing the disruption—which would bring us back to a meteor as the cause.” She put a hand over her eyes and massaged her temples. “Just when I’d stopped getting messages from myself, the future finds a new way to order me around.”

“Has it told you how to get into the void unseen? Or do some of your army of waking sleepers happen to be airlock guards?”

“No airlock guards,” Serena replied, “but we have technicians capable of splicing photonic cables and disabling sensors.”

“That’s not enough,” Agata said ruefully. “There’ll be people at all the airlocks, from now to the disruption.”

Serena hummed angrily. “So do you believe we’re going to do this, or do you think we’re going to cower in our rooms and wait for whatever unfolds?”

“I don’t know.” Agata hadn’t been able to bring herself to reveal what Ramiro had told her about the inscription. The only certainty they had now was the disruption; there was no promise of any kind of triumph to follow.

“Are you still working in the cooling tunnels?” Serena asked.

“No.”

“But you’re familiar with the whole system?”

“I’ve done the induction, it was fairly detailed. Why?”

Serena said, “Cooling air leaves the mountain—and there won’t be people guarding every vent. If my technician friends can disable the sensors, we can go out with the air and start looking for these bombs.”

Agata began buzzing softly. “You think they’ll let a mob of saboteurs congregate at an air vent? There are cameras in every corridor, there are people watching every move we make.”

“Maybe your moves,” Serena conceded. “The mere fact that you were on the Surveyor with the anti-messager Ramiro taints you a little. But who am I? Who are my friends? There aren’t enough people in the entire security department to watch everyone, and the software never got smart enough to take over the job. We’re not saboteurs, we’re not known dissidents. While they’re watching the usual suspects, all we have to do is avoid setting off the kind of alarms that can’t be ignored.”

In Gineto’s apartment, Vala spent a chime scrupulously copying Agata’s posture and learning to mimic her gait.

“No one would mistake our faces,” Vala admitted, “but if I hold this box of books on my shoulder to obscure my face from the camera…” She demonstrated.

Agata had carried Medoro’s real books home in more or less the same way; a second installment need not attract suspicion. She handed Vala the key to her apartment. “Happy reading.”

She waited with Serena and Gineto, practicing her imitation of Vala but hoping that no one would even be watching the camera feeds. Let them all be busy following Ramiro and Tarquinia.

Serena checked the clock on her belt. “Time to go.”

Gineto said, “Good luck.”

Agata followed Serena out of the apartment, trying to appear suitably motherly: mildly affectionate but mostly aloof. Vala had always seemed bemused that two lumps of flesh shed from her body had grown into fully functioning creatures, with no further intervention on her part. The corridor wasn’t too busy, so Serena took the adjoining rope, never concealing Agata entirely from the cameras they passed, but often obscuring part of the view. Anyone with access to the feeds would be able to reconstruct every party’s true movements easily enough, in retrospect—or long before the event, if the information was recognized as important enough to send back—so their not being caught out now would be largely contingent on their not being caught out later. From their position of ignorance success and failure seemed balanced on a knife edge, but from a cosmic point of view the two slabs of self-consistent events had been utterly distinct for at least the last three years.

As they drew nearer to the utility shaft, Agata could see a camera gazing straight down at the entrance portal. They hung back, and Serena glanced at her clock. “Where are they?” she muttered. A moment later Agata heard a group of people approaching, talking and buzzing.

“Now,” Serena whispered. They advanced together. There were a dozen people coming the other way, spread out between the two guide ropes. Some of them, politely, tried to shift ropes to let Serena and Agata pass, but they were packed too close together along both ropes for them to all fit on either one. As the impasse clumsily sorted itself out, two women who looked like mother and daughter managed to break out of the throng and move away. Agata followed Serena down into the shaft and pulled the portal cover closed behind her. If the security sensors here hadn’t been dealt with, they wouldn’t be the first ones to trigger them: the portal’s lock had been snapped a few bells before, and most of the team was meant to have come through before them.

As they descended the ladder in the red-tinged gloom, Agata could hear the muffled hiss of gas in the tunnel beside them. No one came here on regular cleaning shifts; the warm air was inimical to moss.

When they arrived at the bottom of the shaft the darkness was impenetrable. Serena said quietly, “It’s us,” and someone switched on a coherer. Agata squinted into the glare and counted two dozen and nine figures squeezed around them, already wearing their corsets, cooling bags and jetpacks. Many of them had never used the jetpacks; they should all have had one-on-one briefings earlier from their more experienced friends, but it was Agata’s job now to go through the safety checks and remind them of everything they’d forgotten.

“If you get into trouble,” she began, climbing two steps back up the ladder to make herself visible to everyone, “just draw a stop line: a straight horizontal line across your chest.” She demonstrated. “The rock will still be moving below you, but don’t let that confuse you: the pack will bring you to a halt relative to the mountain’s axis, so you won’t go flying off into the void.”

There was no time for more than the basics, but if they could retain it, it ought to keep them alive. Agata put on her own equipment.

“Does everyone understand what we need to do with the occulters?” The protocol she’d written had been copied discreetly from skin to skin, and some of the volunteers would not have received it until they’d reached this assembly point. In a perfect world they would have rehearsed the maneuver daily for a stint or two, but at least the jetpacks would handle most of the navigation.

“Can the machines drill into our bodies?” a young man asked anxiously.

“Not intentionally,” Agata assured him. “They’re not that sophisticated; they have no defensive strategies as such. The only danger is if they’re so confused that they mistake you for rock, but if you get out of their way they won’t pursue you.”

Serena passed Agata a helmet. They were aiming not to use the links; this would probably be their last chance to talk until they were back in the mountain again.

“Happy Travelers’ Day,” Serena said.

“Happy Travelers’ Day,” Agata replied. She put on her helmet and turned toward the maintenance hatch.

A succession of shutters sealed off portions of the final length of the cooling tunnel, opening in sequence to allow air to pass from chamber to chamber at ever lower pressures until it was expelled into the void. The maintenance hatch wasn’t meant to open unless the whole cycle had been stopped and all the chambers had reached the ambient pressure of the mountain’s interior, but Serena’s technician friends had managed to fake the sensor data to convince the hatch that it was safe to operate. The only catch was that it had been too complicated to try to lock it against any real part of the cycle. It would be up to each person exiting to synchronize their access with a time when the shutter below them wasn’t open to the void.

Agata pressed her helmet to the hatch and listened to the sequence of clanks and hisses until the rhythm was embedded in her mind. The last time she’d dealt with machinery in the tunnels it hadn’t ended well, but at least she’d had the timing right.

She slid the hatch open. Air blew in from behind her, but it only took a flicker for the pressure to equalize. She climbed into the tunnel and braced herself against the walls with her hands and feet. Serena closed the hatch behind her.

Agata waited in the dark, mentally composed but still viscerally terrified: there was absolutely nothing about the situation that her body found acceptable. She heard the creaking of the shutters above her and the sibilance of expanding gas drawing nearer.

A span from her head, the rotating disk of the shutter above her finally swung its aperture around to coincide with the tunnel. Agata felt the air rising up across her cooling bag, moving the opposite way to the usual cycle now that she’d wrecked the pressure gradient. But the sensors had been numbed, the anomaly would pass unnoticed.

When the shutter closed there was nothing to feel, and in the perfect darkness no way to be sure that it had happened. But then the exiting wind rustled the fabric on her limbs and starlight entered the tunnel from below. Agata didn’t look down for confirmation; she just brought her limbs together and let herself fall.

Half a dozen strides from the outlet she drew a circle on her chest and the jetpack eased her to a halt, supporting her as she followed the rotation of the Peerless. She sketched an upward arrow and ascended, until a safety handle set into the rock for maintenance workers came within reach. Wide-field cameras on the slopes monitored the space around the mountain, with their feeds analyzed automatically to detect anyone in trouble falling away into the void, but as long as the team remained close to the hull they’d be out of view.

Agata waited for Serena to emerge, and for two more of their companions to join them. They couldn’t stay to watch the whole team exit; there were only four handles, and hovering would waste too much air. Agata gestured to the others and they set off for the base.

The starlit slopes turned beneath them, the pale brown calmstone sliding past ever faster as they moved further from the axis, making their straight-line trajectories seem like giddy spirals. Agata kept watch for sudden changes in the topography ahead; the jetpacks knew the basic shape and motion of the Peerless, but they carried neither detailed surface maps nor proximity sensors. No one had ever intended the wearers to skim the slopes at high speeds, so if she slammed into an unexpected rise she’d only have her failing eyesight to blame.

The jetpack overshot the rim of the base, and the rock below her fell away, replaced by black emptiness then a sudden, shocking dawn. She could see the blazing lights of the half of the transition circle that the mountain had been blocking, just peeking above the distant horizon. Agata sketched a down-arrow and the jetpack brought her closer to the rock; the dawn ahead vanished, but she still had the other half of the circle behind her. The base was slightly convex, so however low she dropped the Peerless wouldn’t hide the entire transition circle, plunging her into complete darkness.

She looked around for the others; she could just make out Serena away to her left and another anti-saboteur to her right. The jetpacks had been programmed to take the volunteers to equally spaced points above the rim, but from here it was up to each of them to choose their path on a sweep in toward the axis.

The rock below her was a blur, moving past at more than a saunter every pause, but if she tried to match its velocity she’d be constantly using her jets to provide the necessary centripetal force—which would empty her air tank long before she got halfway to the axis. In all her training exercises with Tarquinia, in all the maneuvers she’d performed around the Surveyor, she’d never faced anything like this.

The occulters could be waiting almost anywhere; in their final flight they could cover a lot of distance quickly. She couldn’t assume that they’d all crawled close to their targets. So she had to find a compromise: she had to slow the relative motion of the rock just enough so she’d be sure to notice one of the machines sweeping by, and then try to move closer to the axis as quickly as she could, lessening the drain on the jets.

Agata turned herself around so she was facing the surface at an angle where she caught the reflection of the stars. The gray blur shimmered with color now, the texture visible if still mysterious. She sketched a double arrow to begin reducing her relative motion; the jetpack complied, though it sent a warning message through her corset, alerting her to the cost.

She waited anxiously, afraid that this unrehearsed strategy would get her nowhere, but then the transition came in an instant: suddenly, the shimmer from the rock was comprehensible. Agata could see the small bumps and concavities, the fine crevices, an endless parade of details rushing by beneath her. The occulters had been clad well enough to blend in with the stone around them from a distance, but she was only a couple of strides from the surface. If she kept her concentration, the machines ought to be unmissable.

The mountain completed each rotation in less than seven lapses; her motion was stretching that out threefold, but rather than hanging back to witness a full turn at every radius she had to trust her companions to cover their own portions of the territory. Agata wished she could have made it a mathematical certainty that no square scant would go unsearched, but before she’d been out here and seen the conditions she’d been in no position to make binding plans. All she could do now was hope that most of the team found their own workable strategies, and between the symmetry of their initial placement and the shared conditions that prompted their individual actions they’d end up executing a combined sweep without too many gaps.

She began moving steadily in toward the axis.

The change below her was so stark and it came so abruptly that Agata almost began chasing it, but she caught herself in time. The smooth black expanse of the engine’s rebounders was unmistakable, and the visual jolt of entering it was followed by near perfect homogeneity. The idea of the occulters drilling into this precious lode was shocking—and it would also be the place where their camouflage was the least effective—but Agata decided not to speed past the region. However strong the argument for the machines avoiding it, she couldn’t trust her adversaries not to exploit that presumption.

The surface became rough and gray again. Agata forced herself to readjust her expectations: her prey would show much less contrast now. The temptation to look around for her companions was growing, as much out of a longing for the support of their presence as any real fear for their safety, but with her front eyes fixed on the rock below, her rear gaze couldn’t reach beyond the blackness of the orthogonal cluster. She tried to assuage the pangs by rekindling her anger with Ramiro and Tarquinia; at least that made her feel stronger and more focused. But as the pits and cracks in the stone swept by, she thought of Azelio, who believed that all their efforts were in vain. If a meteor had always been on its way, this charade would not deflect it.

A shape with hints of regular borders passed below her and was gone. Agata raised a triangle on her chest, the preprogrammed symbol to send the jetpack in pursuit. She waited anxiously for the rock to slow, but when it halted there was nothing below her. She edged sideways, stride by stride, and then there it was fixed to the rock: an occulter with a small package dangling from it, held in place by nothing but hooks and strings.

Ramiro had given her no details, but she’d been expecting some far more robust form of attachment. She took the knife from her tool belt, grabbed hold of the package and cut the strings.

The bombs would be driven by timers alone; any kind of trigger based on location would be too unreliable to take out all twelve channels simultaneously, and navigation was the occulters’ job. Still, Agata kept the centrifugal weight on her cargo constant as she ascended from the rock, following a helix that kept the surface motionless beneath her. If everything she’d surmised was mistaken and some accelerometer was ready to cry foul, better not to take a piece of the mountain with her.

When she’d reached a decent altitude she let the jetpack kill her circular motion and spare itself the costly countervailing force. Nothing exploded. Agata was tempted, briefly, to try to prise open the stone box and take a look at the mechanism inside, but the risk of a booby trap seemed to outweigh any prospect of learning something useful.

She was still ascending slowly, in free fall now. She released her hold on the bomb then instructed the jetpack to return her to the point where she’d left off. As she watched the package shrink into the darkness, a glorious ache of hope came to her unbidden. There were only a dozen bombs: the volunteers outnumbered them more than two-to-one. If even half the other searchers were as lucky as she’d been, the job would soon be done.

Back above the rock face, Agata fought to maintain her concentration. Twice, she chased features in the stone that turned out to be nothing—perceptual illusions, or wishful thinking. It was better to pursue false alarms that to miss a single bomb, but her air supply wasn’t infinite.

Looking back toward the rim she caught a glimpse of another searcher, a lonely silhouette against the blaze of the transition circle. By now there was no way of guessing who it was, but the figure looked safe and busy. It was tempting to exchange a few words, to compare counts, to share strategies … but even in its tightest directional mode the link was only for emergencies, so Agata did nothing to stop their drift apart.

The next find was so clear that Agata cursed her stupidity as she formed the triangle; the phantoms on which she’d wasted so much air seemed inexcusable now. As the rock halted the occulter appeared almost directly below her, but she was surprised to see how different the package looked from the last one.

She moved closer. There were no strings; the bomb was secured to two posts that rose from the occulter’s arms, lifting the rigid assembly clear of the dodecahedral core that held the air jets. But how had these posts been attached, out on the slopes? Was this the occulter Tarquinia had repaired—and she’d had to perform some strange modifications in the void?

Agata was baffled, but she didn’t have time to make sense of it. She took a wrench from her tool belt and set to work; the jetpack braced her with yet more expenditure of air. She tried to turn the post itself, but it was too smooth, she could get no purchase on it. She groped around the attachment point on the arms, but there was no bolt head. The posts seemed to be glued in place.

She closed one hand around the occulter’s arm then shut off her jetpack’s airflow completely, letting herself hang down across the vertical rock face. She took a flat bar and inserted it between the machine’s arm and the rock, then began trying to prise the splayed drill bits out of the holes they’d made. But however hard she strained there was no perceivable effect; the drills were mounted too securely and the rock itself wasn’t going to crack.

If she’d had more air she could have tried taking the drill assembly apart; she’d put half of them together herself, so she should have been able to reach in and unscrew all the same bolts by touch alone. But not while she was clinging to this sheer drop. She took a high powered coherer in her free hand and began carving through the posts that held the bomb in place.

Every few lapses she had to stop and wait for the occulter to cool down; it wasn’t smart enough to use its own air to deal with this unexpected contingency, and the heat was slow to dissipate into the rock. At least her own need to be able to hold onto the frame gave her a clear signal to act; it was unlikely that any temperature she could tolerate on her skin would be high enough to trigger the explosive. When the second post was all but severed, she started up her jetpack to support her and then snapped the post by hand.

Agata moved quickly into a disposal trajectory, canceling her motion around the axis as she ascended—rising a little faster than before, now that her cargo would have less time to reach a safe distance. She released the bomb and resumed the search. She was exhausted, but she still had enough air to go farther.

More experienced now, she dared to let the rock below her blur a little, trading off perfect clarity for less costly centripetal force. Agata didn’t want to grow complacent, but the numbers were already better than she’d dared hope. While the majority of the team had barely been into the void before, five people had done maintenance work out on the hull. If those five alone had dealt with two bombs each, as she had, the job would already be completed.

The amorphous blur below her was broken by a sharp edge spinning by. Agata went in pursuit, astonished by her luck. She was beginning to pity all the searchers who must have come just as far with no result; everyone would understand that that might happen to them, but three times now she’d seen the signs that their collective effort was heading for victory, while others would still be wondering if the whole endeavor had been misconceived.

The third occulter came into view. The cargo was attached in exactly the same manner as it had been on the last one. Agata didn’t delay her assault; she grabbed one of the posts, shut off the jetpack and began applying her coherer. But as she worked, she sifted through the possibilities.

Tarquinia had not repaired the lost occulter with stone and glue. This one and the last had not picked up their cargo in any maneuver out on the slopes; the bombs had been glued into place in a workshop somewhere. But how and why would Giacomo’s people have retrieved occulters from the slopes in order to do that? The answer was that they hadn’t. They’d built occulters for themselves, and affixed the bombs before sending them out.

Agata moved her grip and began cutting through the second post. Three bombs diverted out of a dozen had seemed glorious. Three out of an unknown swarm could mean anything.

Before she severed the second post completely, she stopped to think through her choices. If she spent air carrying the bomb onto the same kind of path as the others, that would be the end of her contribution; she’d have too little air left to intervene in any other way. But if there were already enough bombs waiting above the light collectors to cause the disruption, there was no need for this one to be carefully positioned. She could simply let it fall away into the void.

Agata looked up across the rock face; she could see a glimmer from the transition circle reflected in the dome of one of the light collectors. How many other bombs had been grabbed and slowed and sent to play their part in the pyrotechnics? She should trust her fellow searchers to have caught at least half a dozen by now—all the more so given how plentiful they’d turned out to be.

She had one hand around the arm of the occulter, which remained firmly attached to the mountain. She snapped the second post and tossed the freed bomb over her shoulder, watching with her rear gaze as it tumbled down and disappeared.

But how many remained, clinging to the rock, waiting to make a final dash toward the collectors? A dozen? A gross? Agata closed her eyes and thought of letting go, falling clear of everything and losing herself in the stars.

She’d wanted a glimpse of the reunion before she died, but in the end the only thing the future had ever promised her was the cosmos meeting up with itself: every particle, every field, every wrinkle in space matching perfectly as they came full circle. The geometry that achieved that had no need to please her; it was what it was, and she’d never been more than a tiny part of it. The miracle was that she’d lived to understand its nature as well as she had. But if a meteor struck or the bombs blew the axis open, she did not want to stay and witness the carnage.

Agata opened her eyes. Her right arm was aching; she pulled herself up and managed to grab the occulter with her left hand as well, but it was too awkward maintaining both holds so she let her right arm rest completely. She checked the clock on her belt by touch; less than two chimes remained to the disruption. She wasn’t going to flee. She had no hope of finding another occulter on the rock face, but the time was approaching when the bombs could come to her.

She stared down into the transition circle, but then she caught herself and turned her gaze to the side, trying to adjust for her own rotation and the arc her adversary would need to follow as it fought to cancel its greater sideways velocity and spiral in on the target.

She waited; the stars moved by serenely.

A dark speck interrupted the blaze of the color trails. Agata didn’t wait to guess its nature; she pushed away and let herself fall. As she plummeted beside the rock face she hunted for the occulter and found it again. It was almost level with her, hewing close to the rock just a saunter away. She started her jetpack and began arresting her fall, just in time—the thing was above her now. She drew an arrow on her chest, angled in anticipation, and rose to meet the machine.

She collided with it, her arms outstretched, grabbed it and held it fast. They tumbled together and struck the rock; the mountain scraped at her shoulder, shredding fabric and skin. Agata shouted from the pain and tried to form an arrow that would lift her clear, but nothing happened. Her jetpack was gone, smashed and torn away.

The half circle of dawning stars wheeled around her. Agata looked directly at the thing in her embrace; she could feel its feeble puffs of air trying to get it back on course. All she could do was apply whatever muscular force she had left and hope that would be enough to propel it out of range.

Her left arm was useless after the blow from the mountain, but she managed to bring her legs up and brace her feet against the stone box. She watched the stars spinning, and thought her way into their cycle. Then she pushed her legs out and drove the occulter away.

The recoil slammed her against the rock. She closed her eyes as the mountain tore into her body.

A light appeared, penetrating her eyelids, filling her skull. Agata embraced the radiance and vanished.